“God Almighty,” she said.
They weren’t sacks she lay among, but bodies. He had hidden himself in a mound of corpses. It was the heat of putrefaction that made her sweat.
Now the hillock was being taken apart by the horsemen, who were pricking each of the bodies as they were hauled from the heap, in order to distinguish living from dead. The few who still breathed were pointed out to the officer. He dismissed them all as past the point of no return; they were swiftly dispatched. Before a bayonet could pierce his hide, the sergeant rolled over and showed himself.
“I surrender,” he said. They jabbed him through the shoulder anyway. He yelled. Carys too.
Marty reached to touch her; her face was scrawled with pain. But he thought better of interfering at what was clearly a vital juncture: it might do more harm than good.
“Well, well,” said the officer, high on the horse. “You don’t look very dead to me.”
“I was practicing,” the sergeant replied. His wit earned him a second jab. To judge by the looks of the men who surrounded him, he’d be lucky to avoid a disemboweling. They were ready for some sport.
“You’re not going to die,” the officer said, patting his mount’s gleaming neck. The presence of so much decay made the thoroughbred uneasy. “We need answers to some questions first. Then you can have your place in the pit.
Behind the officer’s plumed head the sky had darkened. Even as he spoke the scene began to lose coherence, as though Mamoulian had forgotten how it went from here.
Under her lids Carys’ eyes began to twitch back and forth again. Another welter of impressions had overtaken her, each moment delineated with absolute precision, but all coming too fast for her to make any sense of.
“Carys? Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes,” she said breathlessly. “Just moments . . . living moments.”
She saw a room, a chair. Felt a kiss, a slap. Pain; relief; pain again. Questions; laughter. She couldn’t be certain, but she guessed that under pressure the sergeant was telling the enemy everything they wanted to know and more. Days passed in a heartbeat. She let them run through her fingers, sensing that the European’s dreaming head was moving with mounting velocity toward some critical event. It was best to let him lead the way; he knew better than she the significance of this descent.
The journey finished with shocking suddenness.
A sky the color of cold iron opened above her head. Snow drifted from it, a lazy fall of goosedown, which instead of warming her made her bones ache. In the claustrophobic one-room flat, with Marty sitting bare-chested and sweating opposite her, Carys’ teeth began to chatter.
The sergeant’s captors were done with their interrogation, it seemed. They had led him and five other ragged prisoners out into a small quadrangle. He looked around. This was a monastery, or had been until its occupation. One or two monks stood in the shelter of the cloister walkway and watched events in the yard unfold with philosophical gaze.
The six prisoners waited in a line while the snow fell. They were not bound. There was nowhere in this square for them to run to. The sergeant, on the end of the line, chewed his nails and tried to keep his thoughts light. They were going to die here, that was an unavoidable fact. They were not the first to be executed this afternoon. Along one wall, arranged neatly for posthumous inspection, lay five dead men. Their lopped heads had been placed, the ultimate defamation, at their groins. Open-eyed, as if startled by the killing stroke, they stared at the snow as it descended, at the windows, at the one tree that was planted in a square of soil among the stones. In summer, it surely bore fruit; birds made idiot song in it. Now, it was leafless.
“They’re going to kill us,” she said matter-of-factly.
It was all very informal. The presiding officer, a fur coat pulled around his shoulders, was standing with his hands at a blazing brazier, his back to the prisoners. The executioner was with him, his bloody sword jauntily leaned on his shoulder. A fat, lumbering man, he laughed at some joke the officer made and downed a cup of something warming before turning back to his business.