Burn All The Bodies

Coming Home

Coming HomeThe enemy came from Salvation. They came in the fall. “The Knights of the Book”. They told us we were sinners, that we had to be punished. They set fires and raised ladders, but our walls, the walls of Gabriel, were too high, and we rained down a reckoning so fierce that they were forced to pull back. Out of anger, they launched our own people into the city, the poor farmers and cobblers and merchants who couldn’t make it in before the gates closed. Their bodies looked like seabirds as they flew through the air, those clumsy types that got blown in by the storms every now and then, all legs and beak and belly. Nobody could tell if they were dead before or after they were sent flying, but they sure were when they splatted on the stones.

It didn’t take long to deal with them. We piled them up in the market square. Then it became a question of what to do about it. Some of the dead were so torn apart that it didn’t matter, but there were more than a few that could have caused problems. They’d have wiped us out in a day. Worst part was that we couldn’t send them to sea, not as long as the enemy was out there. We didn’t have any wood to spare for boats, or fabric to spare for sails, so our soldiers carted the bodies into the barracks and burned them. Soon a thick black cloud plumed over the towers.

The siege lasted for days, weeks, months. They poisoned the streams. We starved. Parents died in their homes and their children had to drag them to the barracks to be burned. Some waited too long, and the soldiers had to wipe out entire families. Toddlers wandered the alleys. The black cloud became eternal.

Gabrielites were strong. We were people of the coast. We survived typhoons and tsunami, drought and disease. We told stories of the winter when the ice fog blew in off the sea, froze people where they stood. We thought we could survive anything. But to not see the dead off properly, to not sew the sail, stitch the X, say the words—it nearly broke us. Some people threw themselves off the west wall and smashed on the rocks below, their bodies sucked away by the tide. We worried about them, hoped that the current would wash them away, tear them apart before they could come back.

Then one spring night after almost a year of siege, the Knights of the Book disappeared, just up and left in a whirl of dust. We waited a week to make sure it wasn’t a trick, but when it was clear that they weren’t coming back, we flung open the gates and celebrated. People called for a feast. I didn’t know what they planned on eating, but I didn’t want to go. I just wanted to get out of the city, away from people, away from the stink and the death, so as the preparations for the celebration advanced, I snuck out of a side gate and headed for the woods.

Of all the things I’d missed during the siege, I missed the pond the most. I always thought of it as “my pond,” but wasn’t like I was the only one who knew about it. Everybody went there. I just loved it more than most. People were kinder to me there. It was quiet and calm, and they left me alone. It was big, too, and in the winter the ice froze so thick that people could walk clear across, one side to the other like it was solid earth. The older folks said it sank clear to the other side of the world, and when I was a little girl I believed them. But one winter I cut a hole in the middle like I was going fishing and sounded it out. It was only a hundred feet deep.

Once I got there, I stripped off my dress and dove in. The water still held the winter’s frost, so I didn’t have to go too deep to cool off. I shivered through icy pockets, backstroked around the edges to warm up. When my shoulder stump began to ache, I grabbed onto one of the roots and pulled myself out. There was a spot where the water made a little corner cove, and it was shallow and warm, and the roots hollowed out like a chair. I liked to wend my good arm through them and lean back and take a nice, long soak.

Lying there in the warm little cove, I couldn’t help but notice how skinny I’d become. My ribs stuck out like a xylophone, my arm looked like a twig, and I could feel the roots burrow into the bones of my butt. After a while, the scar on my stump began to itch. It was dry and flaky, so I got out and found an aloe bush and rubbed some in the cracks and crevices. Then I got back in the water. I thought of what the Abbess used to tell me about my arm when I was a girl. She wouldn’t tell me anything else, nothing about my brother and the old man, nothing about my old home, but she couldn’t talk enough about my arm.

“That old witch didn’t care much for a clean cut,” she’d say. Over and over. “It’s a miracle you didn’t die of infection.”

“Yep, that’s me. Your miracle girl.”

Any of the other sisters would have scolded me for that, called me insolent or rude, but not the Abbess. She just smiled.

“We had the devil’s time cleaning it out. Had to cut more bone to make it even. Still wasn’t enough flesh.”

“Uh huh.”

The best way to get her to stop talking about it was to ask her who brought me to Gabriel. Then she’d get all quiet and pretend like she didn’t hear. Eventually, she’d say, “The knights brought you” and that was the end of the conversation.

I looked at the mulberry colored patch on my thigh where they took off the skin to cover what was left of my arm. It was kind of like a dent. Wasn’t too big, but enough to make me look like a regular rattled soldier, even at the ripe old age of nineteen. Through the water it looked all wavy. I ran my finger along it. Poked it. The sun peaked out over the tops of the trees and warmed my face, and the rocking water made me drowsy, so I leaned back, smiling, and dozed off. When I opened my eyes there was a man standing over me.

I started to scream, but he clamped a dirty hand over my mouth.

“Hush girl.”

I bit down as hard as I could, bit until I tasted blood, just a drop, and he grimaced but didn’t let go.

“I’m tainted, girl. You’d best spit that out.”

I did. I spit and spit and spit, and when I was done he yanked me out and pinned me to the moss-covered roots. I thrashed under him and he struck me in the temple so hard that I saw stars. All I could think about was the coppery taste of his blood on my tongue. He thumped me around some more, and suddenly I remembered what the Abbess always told me about men, something that saved me so many times from the drunks in the alleys and the perverted priests.

“Kick them down there, Lily. They’ll drop like a stone.”

My left arm might have been gone and my right pinned, but both my legs were whole and free. I brought my knee up as hard as I could, right where the Abbess showed me. The knight made a sound like a whipped dog, and I shoved him over and stood up and dove for the water, but he lunged after me, grabbed my foot, and yanked me back. Then my head hit a knot on one of the roots and I blacked out.

When I was little, I used to get into fights all the time. I didn’t know what I was and wasn’t supposed to do. I wasn’t born in Gabriel. I didn’t know the rules. The thing that got me in trouble the most was that I liked to play sports with the boys. They thought it was funny, a girl with one arm trying to keep up with them. But when I started to score for my team? All hell broke loose. They’d slide tackle me, try to clothesline me. By the time I was thirteen, it got to where half the time I was ducking an attack as much as I was playing the game, even from my own teammates! It didn’t have the effect they were going for. All that ducking and running made me real good, and that only made the boys madder. Most of the time I ignored it, but this one time I scored and some skinny little jerk tackled me and shoved my face in the dirt and ran away, laughing. I’d just about had enough.

“Hey!” I cried, and popped up off the ground.

I was on him before he could even turn all the way around. Knocked him down, pinned his shoulders with my knees, and started slamming his face into the ground. I would have killed him if the Abbess hadn’t dragged me off.

I didn’t care. No way I was going to let anybody push me around like that.

Back in her room, she said, “Lily, you can’t—”

“I can’t nothing. He started it.”

“Yes, Lily, but—”

“I was just fighting back. Like the Book says, ‘An eye for an eye’.”

“Lily.”

“Every word in the Book is true. You said it. ‘An eye for an eye’. I shouldn’t be punished for fighting back.”

“I know, Lily, but it’s not just that. It’s everything else, the back talk, the strange ideas, the words you use. It’s not how we do things here. You know that.”

“You wouldn’t say that if I was a boy.”

“You’re not a boy, Lily.”

“I don’t care! Anything a boy can do, a girl has the right to do better!”

She looked at me like a spider just came out of my mouth.

“Where did you hear that?

“I-I don’t know. It just came to me. I think, maybe, my mother?”

She reached out to comfort me, but hesitated and drew back.

“Lily, you know a lot of things people around here don’t. Things you learned before.”

“When? From who? I don’t remember anybody from before.”

“It just seeped in. Like the ocean.”

I took a deep breath, tried to calm down. And then all of the sudden, it came to me. A melody. I remembered it clearly. The smell of cinnamon, something baking. I started to hum.

The Abbess listened for a while, then she said, “What song is that? Is it a hymn?

“No,” I said. “Maybe it just seeped in. There’s words, too.”

“Will you sing it?”

I shrugged. Why not?

“Singing to an ocean, I can hear the ocean’s roar. Play for free, play for me and play a whole lot more. Singing about the good things and the sun that lights the day. I used to sing on the mountains; has the ocean lost its way?”

For a second, she looked happy. But then she frowned.

“The melody is beautiful, but the words are . . . unusual.”

“I’d say poetic.”

She suppressed a smile.

“Lily, listen. You need to be careful.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re different.”

“What’s wrong with being different? Being different is what makes the world interesting.”

She couldn’t stop the smile this time.

“I know. I know that. But as enlightened as Gabriel is, it's not ready for someone like you. Everybody’s afraid of you.”

“But I’m just a girl.” I shrugged my stump. “I only have one arm!”

“People are afraid of change, Lily. That’s what you are to them. Change.”

When I came around, it was night. The moon was about to rise. The man had built a fire and was sitting across from me, warming his hands. I could see the shadow of the bruise my teeth left. Just thinking about it made my stomach cold. The temperature had dropped since the late afternoon, and I was sore and shivering. He’d found my clothes and covered me up. My dress with the arm sewn shut, the shirt I wore over it like a shrug. My sandals sat next to the fire. The lump on my head swelled above my eyebrow, pulsing like a tumor, and my ankles were bound with rope.

“You’re a knight,” I said. “From Salvation.”

He grimaced, like he was embarrassed.

“Put your clothes on,” he said.

I sat up, holding my dress to my chest.

“Look away, please.”

At least he afforded me that little dignity. He gazed out over the pond.

“That’s the problem with you people,” he said. “You’re too close to the sea. It loosens your morals.”

I let the dress fall over my shoulders, shrugged it into place, pulled it down over my hips.

“I don’t see how nearness to water makes a person more or less sinful.”

“The salt air warms the blood.”

“Oh, so this is about heat, is it?”

“Heat is a temptation.”

“Isn’t Salvation on the Grand Prairie?” The knight studied the water. “Average low on the Grand Prairie’s seventy-eight degrees.”

“Shut up, girl.”

“That’s just during the winter. During the summer it’s over ninety.”

“I said shut up!”

I tested the rope.

“That’s an interesting knot you got there.” He grunted. “Mister, what do you want from me?”

“How do you know I want something?”

“Because if you didn’t, I’d already be dead. Or worse.”

“Maybe I’m waiting to kill you.”

“Aw. You don’t want to kill me.”

He seemed to really look at me then. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or not. I’d like to believe that he was more embarrassed than anything else. He seemed to swallow it and gestured at the pond.

“This is a beautiful place,” he said.

“I know a way it’d be a whole lot better.”

He smiled like he understood.

“I can’t let you go. Not yet.”

We sat for a little, silent. I could hear the far off roar of the ocean.

“How long have you had it?”

“It doesn’t matter. I won’t last the night.” His sword sat unsheathed on the roots. He reached out and rested his hand on the blade. “Do you know how to use this?”

“I think I can figure it out.”

His eyes fell on my stump, doubtful, and he lay back.

“Salvation’s gone, isn’t it,” I said. He nodded. “Everybody?”

“Everybody.”

I let that sink in. The whole city of Salvation wiped out; the sickness burned through them like tallow. I guess they got it wrong about who were the sinners.

I played with the rope. It was thick hemp, well-woven.

“How’d you get out?”

He seemed to not want to answer that at first. When he spoke, it was short.

“Brother Oliver. He sent us to warn you.”

“Who’s Brother Oliver?” He didn’t answer again, so I said, “You sure you got it? I knew a girl who got sick, had her black X stitched up and everything. Right when they were ready to start the ceremony, the fever broke. Now she’s going to get married. Well, she was.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“You might not have it. There’s plenty of sicknesses that look like it but aren’t it.”

He swallowed, grimacing.

“Would you like to come over here and see?”

“I’m just fine where I am, thanks.”

We all knew what the first stage was supposed to look like. Purple lumps under the jaw popped up overnight, swarms of them, like insect eggs. They were tender at first, made it hard to swallow. Some people got feverish. Just as many didn’t. Everybody knew how it ended, though. Only took a day. Sometimes less. Once the bleeding started? Once they coughed it up or sneezed it out? Only a few minutes to do anything after that happened. If too many got to that stage all at once, it was all over for the rest of us. So at the first sign, we sent them to sea. Fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters. That’s what we called it in Gabriel. We didn’t kill them. They were “sent to sea”. There was a station, the Abbess said, set up a long time ago. “It’s on the ocean. They go there to heal,” she told me, and when I was little I believed her. Now I knew better. In the twelve years I’d lived in Gabriel, I’d never seen a ship return.

“Wait until I’m done,” the knight said.

“Why don’t we just get it over with now?”

He shook his head.

“It is a sin to die before I am called back.”

“The first or the second time?”

I didn’t expect his grim laughter.

“Such glibness from someone so guilty. I had a family. My wife, Siobhan. My two little babies.”

He couldn’t finish. I knew he was crying without even seeing it. He took a deep breath when the fit passed.

“Make it quick. Don’t linger. Burn my body.”

“We don’t have to do this. We could just set you out to sea.”

“Set me out to sea? What is this?”

“You don’t know?”

“Know what, girl? Tell me.”

I thought it was funny that he didn’t know about it, but then again, none of us knew too much about Salvation. We knew they followed the Book more closely than we did, and we knew they hated us, but the two places might as well have been on opposite sides of the world. So I explained it to him, our custom, and as I did I could see him grow more and more agitated. When I got to the part about the station in the ocean, he burst out laughing, and then the laughter turned into coughs. He leaned on his side and retched. I knew it was blood. When he was done, he lay onto his back.

“I’m not dumb,” I said. “I know it’s a fairy tale.”

“How long?”

“How long what?”

“How long have you been doing this?”

“As long as I can remember. Why?”

He didn’t answer for a long time. Then he said, “We were wrong to try to bring God’s wrath upon you, and we were punished. We didn’t know. We didn’t know he was going to do it Himself.”

He died choking.

I tried to sit him up so he could spit it out but he wouldn’t let me, just shook his head and pointed at his sword. When he was finally still, when his eyes were fixed on the sky, I grabbed it. I’m pretty strong for a girl, but having only one arm had its limitations, and I couldn’t pick the thing up all the way. Had to kind of rest the point right on his throat and push it down and saw it back and forth until his head was off. Then I built up a fire around him and let it do its work. I washed off in the pond, dried everything out in the sun next to it.

Right when I was getting ready to leave, the city bells started to ring. Didn’t take long for me to make it to the cliffs. There stood Gabriel, its sandstone walls tall and proud, a barrier against the sea, the wind, and the storms. The bells pealed. People lined the towers and the west wall, pointing out at the ocean. I shaded my eyes, straining to see. Around front, the gates were closing. Entire families were caught outside. They ran for safety, crying out, but it didn’t matter. When the gates finally slammed close, they fell to their knees, pounded on the iron, begging to be let in.

If you couldn’t tell before, I never was much of the churchly type. The Abbess made me go, and I listened and I thought, but I can’t ever say I really believed any of it. But standing there, looking out over the ocean, I remembered something I heard one of the priests say. Something like, “Every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall give praise, and each one of you will account yourself to Me.”

Pretty, in an angry way, I guess.

Standing there looking at the golden horizon, I think I finally understood what it meant.

There were thousands of them. Sails. Torn and tattered, all bearing the black X of disease. Every dead mother, every dead father, every dead son and daughter. Heading our way.

Coming home, at last.