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Glinda stared at him for a moment before speaking. "You're still strange to our customs and laws," she said, "so I'll forgive you. However, in the future, remember this. No one asks a witch about her professional secrets."
"I beg your pardon," he said coolly.
"Granted. However, I don't mind telling you some things. One is that it takes an enormous amount of energy for the transportation via... how shall I name it? The word is not in the vocabulary of the people and the word itself has power. Only witches know it. This power does not come without hard payment, and it is used only when absolutely needed. I could bring those two here quickly after certain preparations. But it is not necessary.
"You, however, even if you'll take ten days to get ready and six for the trip, will have them here long before they could get here by ordinary means." Glinda stood up.
"You'll have all the blacksmiths and millwrights and labor and materials you need. You will begin at once. Be ready at four o'clock, though, to attend the funeral for the dead flier."
A half hour later, Hank met the dozen men summoned by Glinda. He spent two hours organizing them and making sure they understood exactly what he wanted. He helped them draw schematics and diagrams on paper made from rags. At fourteen o'clock, he went back to the castle. Lamblo came for him a half hour later. She wore a uniform he'd not seen before, all-black garments and a scarlet shako bearing a silver death's head emblem.
"I only put these on when I'm in the honor guard of a funeral," she said. "Sit down, Hank. I have to ask you some questions. I know the answers, but the forms have to be filled out."
He sat down. "Shoot."
"What? Oh, I see. Very well. What is your name?"
"My God! You know it!"
"That's a fu
"My name is Henry Lincoln Stover."
"Are you related to the dead man?"
"No."
He wondered what the reasons were for this interrogation. It was probably required by the government bureaucrats. Even Quadlingland had these.
"Are you a friend?"
"Of yours?"
She smiled slightly but said, "Of the dead man."
"No. I never heard of him before."
"Would you be willing to act as a bereaved?"
"You mean a mourner?"
"Yes."
Hank twisted one side of his mouth and looked sharply at her. "What is this? What do I have to do if I say yes?"
She told him.
He paled, and he said, "For God's sake! What kind of barbarism is that?"
"It's our ancient custom."
"Hell, I wouldn't do that for my Own mother!"
She shrugged and said, "Very well. The professional mourners will earn their pay."
She stood up. "Let's go."
Hank followed her. He felt uneasy, and his stomach seemed to be turning over. If he could have refused the invitation to attend the funeral, he would have done so. But then both his courage and finer sensibilities would be doubted by these people, not to mention by himself. Besides, his curiosity was driving him.
Lamblo's company met them at the north main entrance to the castle. They formed around Hank, and presently he was marching in their midst, his stride cut down so that their short legs could keep up with him. They went west on the road through the town. It was deserted. Apparently, everybody, including the animals and birds, was at the cemetery. This, like all burial places, was on the western edge of town and on a hill. West was where the souls of the dead went, the far west beyond the land of the living, somewhere out beyond the desert.
Hank had been told this late one night by Lamblo.
"There, so the priests and priestesses say, is another green land where God and His angels instruct the dead on their errors and faults. Then the dead are sent back in the form of amaizhuath (mind-lights) or fonfoz (firefoxes). They come back across the desert and possess the bodies of animals and birds and sometimes human beings or even inanimate objects." Hank had had a flash of that stormy night when he had seen the nude Glinda going through that weird ceremony or battle in the vast room of the sphinx and the shadows.
"How can they possess a body that's already possessed?"
Lamblo had said, "I don't know. They just do." She had looked very uneasy.
"What happens to the dispossessed soul?"
"It goes back to the land of God, where He and His angels explain what the soul did wrong. Then it is sent out again to the land of the living."
"Sounds like a game of musical chairs for spirits," he had said and then had had to explain what "musical chairs" meant.
"Do you believe what you've told me?" he had said. "Do you have a better explanation? Let's not talk about such things. Let's try the saitigzhuz-nyuh position."
God was called either Guth or Chuz. Hank thought that the Chuz came from Tius, and was related to the Old Norse god Tyr and Old English Tiw. An angel was anggluz, a word that had come from the Greek and indicated some early contact with Christianity. But, somehow, an angel had become confused with a slanchuzar, a semi-divine maiden something like the Old Norse Valkyrie.
The ancient confusion was also evident in the crosses on the gravestones in the cemetery. There was the simple cross, the Celtic cross, the saltire or X, and the swastika, called the thyunz-hamar, Thor's hammer, the symbol used worldwide on prehistoric and historic Earth.
Most graves had monuments, sculptures representing not only humans but many types of nonhuman life. Next to a woman's grave was a deer's.
Though he had been verbally prepared by Lamblo, he was still shocked when he saw the priests, priestesses, and the professional mourners. The holy men and women looked more like African witch doctors than anything else. They wore tall headdresses of varicolored long feathers; their faces were streaked with black and red paint, necklaces of bones and teeth flapped on bare painted chests, their naked genitals were shaven, and their legs were painted like black-and-red barberpoles. They danced like medicine men, shaking rattlegourds, ringing tiny bells, and whirling bullroarers. The mourners, men and women, were naked and gashing their naked flesh with stone knives.
He had stepped out of a quaint, even "cute," village into the Old Stone Age.
Lamblo ordered her troops to halt. Hank stopped also. The soldiers stepped aside for him, and Lamblo gestured with a sword that he should go on. Feeling numb, he walked towards the coffin, a limestone hemisphere. Its lid was off, and the charred body lay unclothed in the recess on top of the dome-shape.
Before it was a round open grave. Beyond it, Glinda sat on a marble throne, but an old black blanket protected her naked buttocks from the hard cold stone. She wore only a feathered headdress and was painted from neck to toes with alternating white-and-black stripes that spiralled around her. She held in her left hand a long wooden shepherd's staff.
Hank stopped before her and bowed, his eyes on the ground. He was embarrassed. The mourners howled, the crowd hummed like a dynamo, the gourds rattled, the bells rang, and the bullroarers roared.
"Look up!" Glinda cried. "Look up, stranger!"
Reluctantly, Hank raised his gaze. Glinda was half-smiling, and her blue eyes seemed amused. Did she know how shocked he was at this savagery and her nakedness?
"Look up, stranger!" she said, and she pointed the staff at the sky.
Hank obeyed. The sky was unclouded. What was he supposed to see, even if only symbolically? He glanced to his right and saw that everybody was also looking upward.
"Silence!" she shouted, and the wailing, humming, rattling, tinkling, and roaring ceased. But a baby held by a woman near the front of the crowd screamed.