Widow's Pique

Fourteen

The old man made his way slowly down the hillside, the torch casting unearthly shadows in his palsied hand, and every now and again his arthritic bones jolted painfully thanks to an unseen stone on the path, or maybe a tree root sticking up, or perhaps a fallen branch. He paused for breath. Every Zeltane he made this pilgrimage to the small spring in the valley, but with each passing year the task grew that much harder and took longer to accomplish. The old man was resigned to this, and on he pressed, his wooden clogs making little sound on the springy forest floor.

Once a huntsman with as keen an eye as any true-born Histrian, now it was left to his sons, his grandsons and his great-grandsons to bring home the venison and boar. The most his rheumy eyes could manage was the odd pheasant or hare, but more often than not these days his shot missed, and the leather jerkin that kept out the winter winds and summer rains when he was younger afforded scant protection to frozen bones and parchment-thin skin.

High in the canopy, a blackbird began to sing, always the first line of the chorus, its cadences quickly followed by a woodlark, then a wren. By the time he'd reached the bottom, the valley was a choir of songbirds, finches, tits and warblers, and the Sun God's youngest wife was already rising from her crimson bed. The old man cursed. He must set out earlier next Zeltane. He could not afford to miss the dawn. Dawn was why he came here.

Picking his way across to where a thin trickle of water seeped from the hillside, he laid down the chaplet of flowers he'd taken such care to carry down, and found comfort on the seat of a soft, mossy rock. This tiny spring was where he and his wife had first plighted their troth. A holy place that was theirs and theirs alone, and for the twelve years since her death he had made this journey to leave flowers in her memory, and here he would sit and he would talk to her, telling her the news of their children, reminding her how much he was missing her, and this year he was able to add that it would not be too many years before he was joining her in the Blessed Realm of the West.

An hour passed, maybe two, until, stiff, he stood up and cast around for a stick to ease his return up the hill.

He recognized it for what it was at once.

His eyesight might be fading and his hands less than steady, but a huntsman still recognizes a kill when he encounters one, even though the kill might be a week or two old and the scavengers of the forest had taken their fill. He could also tell what animal it was, although in this case the kill was human.

Accidents were more common than people imagined. It wasn't just travellers — bead sellers, fortune-tellers, itinerant tradesmen — who lost their footing on a slippery path and fell to their deaths. Native-born Histri perhaps in too much of a hurry, perhaps drunk, fell victim to carelessness and quite often their mount would be found with them. Although not today.

Picking over the scattered remains, the old man searched for the amulet that all Histrians wore. Unique to the wearer, this would provide identification and allow the unburied soul to be claimed by their family and interred as was their right, but the huntsman wasn't prepared for the engravings on this amulet that still encircled the half-eaten bone. Burnishing the metal band with his shirt, his first surprise was that it was gold, and he held it close to his eyes to make certain. The second was the engraving. There was no disguising the woodpecker, or the rainbow that surrounded the bird, and on either side of the totem, two snakes coiled round a staff — the unmistakable emblems of a healer.

The old man was looking at the corpse of the royal physician.