Forest Mage

My days of travel had taught me a great deal about my new body. Limiting my food intake did not dwindle me, but I did become more lethargic, and in extreme cases very irritable. I had continued my habit of savoring food, and I fancied that I better understood now how my body had changed. Almost all that I took in as sustenance, my body retained. I produced very little waste, a fact that had been rather disconcerting to me at first. When I could not find as much food as I wished, I began to crave quantities of water, which, thankfully, had been plentiful through most of my journey.

My hunger was a constant. I had come to accept it as a companion to my life, just as some men had to deal with poor eyesight or deafness. The cramp in my gut was always there, but I had learned to master it. There were still moments when my hunger could seize my attention, as it had near the bakery that morning, and in severe cases, it could distract me until nothing would do until I had found something to put in my mouth. I had learned to set aside a bit of food against moments such as that, for when such hunger overtook me, I became almost irrational. It was a terrible thing to fear that I might slip into such a frame of mind, almost like dreading a bout of madness.

But tonight I had no such fears. I allowed myself a very hearty meal of coffee, bread, and bacon. The drippings from the bacon made a wonderful spread for the fresh bread. By the time I was finished eating, I felt more satisfied than I had in weeks. I tidied up my pan and plate; checked on my horse, which seemed as contented with his lush grazing as I had been with my meal; and then resolved to walk the perimeter of my new domain.

I returned from that walk a sobered man. Grass grew past my knees throughout most of the cemetery. The trench graves I had noted earlier betrayed the regular waves of plague that had swept through Gettys. The markers for individual graves, mostly made from slabs of wood, were rapidly losing the painted or carved epitaphs they had once held, but they retained enough information to be heart-rending. The cemetery had begun in an orderly fashion. In the oldest section, officers and their family members were grouped together, as were enlisted men. But after the first trench grave, the burying ground had become a much more egalitarian place. Infants reposed alongside captains, and humble nameless privates rested next to colonels. I had thought every grave untended. That was not so. True, wild grasses dominated the area, but here and there I would literally stumble across a marker standing sentinel above a groomed grave site. On a few, flowers grew. On one, perhaps a child’s, a simple string of wooden beads, their paint fading in the weather, festooned the marker.

When I came to the most recent section of the graveyard, the change was remarkable. Here, only a season had passed since the last wave of interments. The last mass grave was a weed-covered hummock crawling across the hillside. A row of individual graves marked the first rank of those who had fallen to the plague. A second row after the trench grave marked, perhaps, those who had lingered before they succumbed, or the natural deaths that had occurred since the last wave of plague. The markers were newer and easier to read.

To my horror, I discovered that some kind of animal had burrowed into one of the most recent graves. A mostly decomposed hand had been brought to the surface and feasted upon. It was a man’s hand by the size of it, shriveled and dark. The animal had gnawed at the fleshy palm and mostly ignored the curled fingers with their yellowed nails. I looked away from it firmly. The size of the burrow made me think the scavenger was a fairly small creature. I wondered if these were the depredations that Colonel Haren had been lamenting. If they were, then a good watchdog might be my best assistant. Jaw traps might also help me find a solution. But surely a sturdy coffin would have been the best preventive of such incursions.

I performed my first act of duty, though I will admit that it made me feel not just edgy but queasy. There were no sticks close at hand. With the toe of my boot, I nudged the hand back into the creature’s excavation wishing I had a stick to poke it farther in. Again with my boot, I scraped and kicked soil back into the hole, and finished up by firmly plugging it with several rocks of the right diameter. It did not seem a very respectful way for me to deal with it, but I judged that in this case, promptness exceeded the need for reverence. I patrolled the rest of the line of recent graves, and found three other places where wildlife was intruding on the resting places of the dead. I repeated my rock- and earth-scuffing at each site, resolving that after this, I’d always take a shovel with me when I made my daily circuit of the graveyard.

The high clouds and fresh wind of the day had thickened to dark overcast and bluster. The first heavy drops began to fall. The moisture in the air made it hard to continue ignoring the clinging smell of the place. Nothing smells quite like rotting human flesh, and my experience at Widevale had forever associated that terrible stench with my own stunning losses. It horrified me that such a foul smell carried my mind immediately to thoughts of my mother. Worse were the mental images of Elisi that came with it. Try as I might, I could not recall my elder sister at her harp or sewing, but only as that perpetually sprawled and futilely grasping corpse. The thought ambushed me that I had done no better by my family with their hasty burials than Gettys had done with theirs. It both shamed me and woke kinship in me.