‘Father?’ asked Nimble anxiously. ‘Are you all right? What is it?’
In answer I thrust the torch towards him. ‘Hold this, son,’ I gasped. ‘I’m going to have to go down there.’
The hole was about half as deep as I was tall. If I were to squat in it, I would just about fit, without my head coming up above ground level. As I lowered myself gingerly into it, taking care not to tread on the little pile of clothes, I thought wryly that it was about the same size as the cage the slave-dealers had kept me in.
Inside the hole the smell was overpowering. Holding my breath, and crouching awkwardly so as not to come between what I was reluctantly looking at and the torchlight, I began to pick at the clothes. They resisted being pulled about, as though they were stuck to something. I had to tug at them before they began to come up with a faint tearing sound.
I held up the blouse, sniffed it once, and then tossed it out of the hole without speaking.
With the torchlight hilly upon it, it was easy to see the bloodstains.
The skirt and mantle were in the same state, and once I had thrown them out it was easy to see why. They had been artfully arranged so as to cover what lay at the bottom of the hole, almost filling it: a bundle, wrapped in what looked like an old, rough maguey fibre blanket. The blanket’s material was thin and its edges were ragged. I could not tell what colour it had been dyed, or whether it had been dyed at all, because it was stained almost black with blood.
‘Wake Kindly up and get him in here,’ I croaked. ‘I’ll need help with this, and he’ll have to hold the torch.’
It was no easy matter getting the shrouded corpse out of the hole, particularly because the old man’s unsteady hands made the light gyrate wildly above us and set shadows whirling in a confusing dance around our heads. Eventually, however. Nimble and I managed to heave the body on to the floor of the house. Then we took it outside, for the sake of clearer air.
‘I suppose you have to unwrap it,’ Kindly said as he followed with the torch. ‘Can it wait until morning?’ He yawned loudly.
Instead of answering, I bent over the body. The blanket had not been sewn or tied, so far as I could see, but it was so thickly encrusted with dried blood that its sides might as well have been glued together with pine resin or turkey fat. Nimble and I had to tug at it so fiercely that the cloth tore in our hands, but eventually the ghastly contents were laid bare.
The torchlight suddenly disappeared, leaving us with only the feeble glow of Nimble’s fire, which had started to die down. Behind me, I heard the piece of wood the old man had been holding clattering to the ground, accompanied by the sound of violent retching.
‘I’ll put some more wood on the fire,’ Nimble said quietly. I said nothing. I swallowed hard, to force down the gorge that was rising in my own throat, and made myself look at the remains again.
The body lay on its side, with its arms folded across its chest and its legs drawn up, as if it were huddling against the cold. As the last of the wrappings came off, it seemed to relax, the legs splaying grotesquely and the torso rolling over on to its back, and it was so horribly like someone stirring in his sleep that I took a hasty step back, as though I thought it was about to wake up. However, one look at the face, at the blank, milky whiteness of the wide-open eyes and the mouth hanging slackly open, would have been enough to dispel any such idea.
‘How long were you in that pit?’ I wondered aloud. ‘Were you there before the man we found yesterday, or was he killed first?’ I judged that the body must have lain where we had found it for a few days. It stank, but its flesh seemed intact, and the stiffness had worn off.
‘I’ve lit another torch.’ When Nimble handed it to me, I looked quickly around for Lily’s father. He had withdrawn, to sit with his back against the wall of the house. I thought he looked pale, but it was hard to tell in the torchlight.
I turned back to the body, running my eyes over it briefly from head to foot. When I reached the loins I stopped with a gasp.
‘What is it, Father?’
It’s a man.
The clothes we had found in the pit had led me to expect a woman or, rather, a girl, since they were very small. However, there was no mistaking the body’s one item of clothing, a plain breechcloth, of the sort that men wore.
‘I do hope this isn’t Hare,’ I muttered, as I looked the remains over more slowly. The more I saw, however, the greater my sense of foreboding grew. His face and body were covered with dried blood, and I had no doubt that even if it were cleaned off, the shrunken, collapsed features would be unrecognizable. However, even at night, disguised by death, this was plainly very different from the other corpse that had lain here. This was no burly warrior, but a small, wiry individual who, I conceded grimly, might well have been a merchant.
‘What killed him?’ Nimble asked. ‘Suffocation, from being in that hole?’
‘Wouldn’t explain the blood. I can’t see where he’s wounded, though. We’d better turn him over.’
This proved surprisingly difficult. He kept trying to flop over on to his back again, as if he wanted to look at the stars. Eventually we managed to get him on to his side, but that was enough to tell me what I wanted
