Lars took her silence and downcast eyes as dismissal. Once more he began to rise. Ki wished she could let him go. Her head felt as if a bowstring had been stretched between her temples. It was tight, and getting tighter, humming all the while. She longed for silence and sleep. But she had to know it all. Ki caught his loose sleeve, pulling him back down beside her. She forced him to meet her eyes.
‘Don’t stop, Lars. If you think you have explained it to me, you haven’t. You have told me how I bungled your Rite last night. I am shamed by the hurts I gave you all, however unintentional. But how have I blasphemed your religion? You say you all know what Harpies are. How they kill, how they feed. I did try not to show you that. The confusion in the images you speak – believe me, Lars, I was trying to turn us from the remembering. Do you believe I would willingly relive that, for any rite?’
After a moment, Lars began to shake his head slowly. ‘I suppose not. I can believe it when you plead ignorance. Sven was almost an outcast among us for the way he flouted our beliefs. I see he dismissed them completely when he went away with you. They meant little enough to him when he was here. He never once made tribute to the Harpies, not even after our father died. Mother felt that keenly.’
Sparks flashed in Ki’s green eyes at the mention of tribute. But still she shook her head at Lars. ‘You must go on. Begin it as if you were explaining your beliefs to a child. I begin to feel currents I had not imagined. I am heavy within with a foreboding that whatever I did last night was grievous beyond words. Speak to me as if I had never been told anything of your religion. You shall not be far wrong.’
‘It grows worse,’ Lars groaned. ‘What many saw as malice was total ignorance. If only it was to do over.’
‘It isn’t,’ Ki replied impatiently. ‘It can never be undone. So, at least let me know the fullness of what I did.’
Lars pulled at his face with a large hand. When he tipped his chin up, the sun glinted on the downy hairs beginning on his face. His beard would be like Sven’s – late in coming and silky against a woman’s face. Lars met Ki’s eyes and began abruptly.
‘In times gone by, this place was not called Harper’s Ford. Time has eroded its name to that. It was Harpy’s Ford, the only place to cross the river for many miles in either direction; there were no bridges then. Harpies knew that as well as Humans. It made their hunting easier. You have seen the platforms raised on pilings in the river, near the crossing? People wishing to cross the river undisturbed would leave offerings of dead beasts there, to buy the Harpies off their children. They and their families could cross in peace while the Harpies fed. There would be no sudden rush of wings, no childish screams above the sound of the rushing water …’ Lars’s voice trailed off. He rubbed at his eyes wearily. ‘There, Ki, see how your visions have infected me? Before last night, never would I have spoken that way of Harpies. But that was how it began. Or so they say.
‘But times pass, and simple customs become more ornate. Harpies would sometimes be waiting on the platforms when folk arrived there to leave tribute. They began to have words with one another. My people began to discover the many peculiar talents of the Harpies. It became a religion. I know you do not believe it, Ki, but they are higher beings than we. You see their cruelty and believe it debases them. But it is not cruel for a man to slaughter his heifer, nor for a Harpy to take a man. It is the order of things.’
Ki shot to her feet, but as quickly Lars shot up a hand to seize her. He held her wrist, hard but not tight. With gentle insistence he pulled her back down beside him. She could find no words, but he read all in the quiver of her mouth and her quickened breath.
‘Do not be angry, Ki. You would like to strike me for my words or, barring that, to run away from them. Bear this in mind. Sven was my brother, not only your man. And still I must say these things to you. We give the Harpies meat in tribute. In return, we get … many things. The drink last night was a secretion they provide. It makes a link between Humans, and strengthens that between Human and Harpy.’
Ki turned her head away from him. Her belly churned in disgust. She twisted her wrist slightly, and Lars released it. But he spoke on stoically.
‘After a death, especially after a good Rite of Loosening, they let us … this is so hard to explain unless one has experienced it. Let me make it more personal. If I took a lamb down to the platform and cut its throat, a Harpy would come. And while it fed I would spend time with my father. We would talk together, I could ask him advice, or speak of times we had together. The Harpy would open for me the door between the worlds. Or would have, until last night.’
Ki felt a dim presentiment.
‘You cut us off from the Harpies last night, Ki. Every person there, from that old man, a great-great-uncle, to that little girl, a cousin of several degrees. You gave us no useful memories of Sven or the children. We have no way to recall them when we go to the Harpies. They are gone to us, truly dead. My mother will never see her middle son again. I will never see my brother … Dead. Now we know what other folk mean by that word. It is a knowledge we were happier without.’
‘And?’ Ki insisted after a stretch of silence. Lars looked at her with anguish in his eyes.
‘I hate the saying of these words to you. Rufus would have come, but I stopped him. For if you must be condemned in this way, I would be the one to do it. I try to make the words come gently, to lift from you the weight of them. But it was a grievous blow you dealt last night, and now you must see the wound.
‘When I say you cut us off from the Harpies, I mean that we now must face a period of loneliness. None of us may see them at all, for a time, until meditation and atonement have purged from our souls the emotions you put there. For some of us it will take long. Others, such as the little girl, I hope, will soon forget and be healed. But until I can be sure I have cleansed my mind of your feelings I may not go to the Harpies to seek my father or my grandparents. Horror, disgust, hatred for what the Harpy does – those things would cut me off from the converse. I, perhaps, could live with that. As could Rufus and some of the others. But my mother is another matter. No one knows how often she goes to make a sacrifice and see again my father. It takes its toll on the sheep pens, and often I see the anger in Rufus’s eyes when he finds the best ewe, the plumpest lamb, gone. But we say nothing. Mother is old, and the old cling more tightly to the rituals. You can surmise what you have done to her. For the first time since my father died, he is really dead to her. Gone. She cannot summon him, cannot lean on his strength. The emotions you have placed in us for Harpies have cut us off from this magic. Last night some said, in the heat of their anger, that you had re-slain for us all our dead. That because Sven and the children are dead to you, you made all our dead truly dead for us.’
Ki raised her head wearily. There were no traces of tears on her face. All her sorrow was contained in her eyes. It seemed to Lars that no amount of tears could ever wash away the misery he saw there.
‘Can you tell me that is all?’ Ki asked dully. ‘Can there be more injury I have done to you, all unwittingly?’
‘The Rite of Loosening,’ Lars said slowly, as if the words clung to his unwilling tongue, ‘Mother sets great store by it. By the Rite the souls of the dead are freed to enter a paradise, a world of a higher order. Unloosed souls must wander this world homeless and lonely, cold and crying. Last night she wept long for Sven and the little ones, condemned to such loneliness and fear.’
‘There can be no mending this,’ Ki said.
‘The mending will be very slow,’ Lars conceded. ‘You’ve done us grievous ill.’ He took her hand, trying to take the ache from his words.
‘No mending,’ Ki repeated. ‘A wound such as this leaves a scar long after