“What are you thinking?” asked Sam, curiously, nervously. He had buried a body only once before, after Bondru Dharm died, and then he had been moving in a paroxysm of grief.
“I was thinking the Baidee are right in some ways,” she said. “They say only our minds are us. I think what’s so terrible about death is that we leave this behind. If when we died, we just vanished, like a spark of light, it would be better. Then we would realize better what we are. Instead, we worry about bodies. We think about bodies. I see this woman lying so still with this baby and it makes me want to cry.”
She turned toward Sam, her eyes luminous with tears. “She’s only a girl, Topman. No older than me. She and the baby should have gone out, like festival rockets, sparkling, leaving nothing behind.”
Sam was shaken by her intensity, but he said, “Then you would have nothing to bury for the God.”
“That’s so,” she sighed. “I should be grateful. Well, help me lift her down.”
They laid the still form at the bottom of the shallow grave. Saturday unbuttoned her own shirt and cut a seam at the bottom of her chemise, ripping the silk away from the filmbag inside, then ripping the filmbag itself. The fibrous stuff inside was moist and smelted of earth. Saturday knelt and put it between the woman and her child.
“You see, you were needed,” Saturday whispered to Sam as she rose. “I could not have dug the grave alone.”
“Sam, the grave-digger,” he said, somberly. “It scarcely sounds legendary. I have higher hopes for this trip than merely digging graves, Saturday Wilm.”
His tone frightened her a little, it was so full of determination. She said nothing more while they filled in the hole, breaking up the clods so they would lie smooth, putting the extra soil in the box and restoring the lid so that it looked as it had before.
“Do you often have thoughts like that?” he asked her. “About leaving bodies or vanishing like sparks?”
She thought for a moment, then nodded. “They aren’t my thoughts, I don’t think. I get them from other people. I think Ones Who do that. I say something and it comes out … it comes out as though Africa had said it, sometimes. Or China. Or someone else, Maire even.”
Sam nodded, accepting this. “Where will they build the temple?” he asked. “There’s city all around us.”
“Here,” said Saturday, indicating the churchyard. “Perhaps they will pull down the church to make room. They won’t need a church then. Perhaps they will build it on top of the graves.”
Sam hid the spade in an alley, some distance from the church. From that point, they proceeded openly, two people out for a walk. There were others out walking. They stopped at an eating house for supper, using the money they had been given in Wander. Saturday watched the few women in the place, feeding themselves under their veils, putting drinking glasses up under their veils. So much wasted motion. So much wasted effort. She thought she might be the oldest unveiled person in the room, though there were other girls who looked little younger than she.
When they came out, there was a veiled woman singing on the street corner, with passers-by casting her frightened looks.
The last winged thing came in from the sea.
It blew into Scaery on wings like foam,
footless as angels are said to be …
Sam and Saturday walked past. When they were almost at the corner, Saturday said, “Wait.”
“Wait?”
“Listen. That’s Maire’s song she’s singing.”
“Did you call,” it asked, in a voice so low
it was lost in the dusk like a blowing leaf.
“Did you call?” it begged, “out of loss or woe,
did you bring me here where no winged things go,
did you call out of sorrow or grief?”
“Mam’s song? Oh, you mean that one she talks of. The last song—what was it called?”
“ ‘The Last Winged Thing,’ Sam. Listen.”
“As you called for Peace, who came and died,
As you called for Joy, who drowned in the sea,
As you called for Love, who stayed and tried,
though Voorstod’s no place for love to be,
There were people coming, uniformed people, from down the street. The woman saw them, but she didn’t stop singing. Her voice rose passionately.
“… and now that Hope’s gone, it’s our time to go.
Kiss me, my child. Farewell my child.
Follow me, child, and we’ll go.”
The men were around her then, holding her fast, taking her away. Through the head-to-toe covering, they could hear her panting breath as they dragged her away, still singing. “We’ll go. We’ll go. We’ll go.”
“I had no idea they’d still be singing Mam’s songs,” said Sam. “She’s been gone for so many years.”
Saturday stared at him, hating him a little. Why hadn’t he said something about the woman! “Why did they take the woman away?” she cried. “Is that song forbidden? It wasn’t forbidden when Maire sang it.”
Sam shook his head. He didn’t know. He hadn’t really listened to the words. He hadn’t really seen what was going on. He had been thinking of something else.
Saturday subsided, wondering what he was thinking of.
When they returned to the tavern, they went up the back stairs and into their dirty room once more. Saturday took the coverlet into the hall and shook the dust from it. They lay down upon it, side by side, and fell asleep, not to waken until the landlord shook them roughly in the morning.
“You have to go,” he hissed at them. “You’re expected, in Cloud.”
They looked down from an upper window to see the driver, a young man with a large cap. Remembering what Maire had told them about such caps, they assumed he was one of the Faithful.
Sam tied a
