Isis Read Free Page B

remains.”
     
    “I’m too old to be frightened by such fairy tales,” I said. “I know about the Maiden of Sorrow and her lover.”
     
    “Have you heard about the boy who brought back the dead warriors?” Old Marsh puffed on his pipe, and I could nearly see a little boy in the smoke that came from it.
     
    I smiled at him. “A boy did that?”
     
    “Back in those times when the Villiers were dukes and duchesses. See those rocks?”
     
    “The Tin Men,” I said, knowing this legend.
     
    “When the enemies came, sometimes they got past ’em. Sometimes they killed everyone here. But one boy lived. He put the bones inside the Tombs here and he decided to pray to the old gods of the heathens so that magic could happen. He went first to the Laughing Maiden and called up spirits, and then in the Tombs, to bring the bones to life. And he raised warriors from the times of the Romans, and they came out—all made of bones and dirt. But they raised their swords and spears and they defeated the invaders. And that boy. That boy . . .”
     
    “Summoned them?” I asked. “How?”
     
    “Oh, I shouldn’t tell you, miss. Summoning’s a terrible business. Ancient words and spells, terrible things,” Old Marsh said, his hacking cough taking him over for a moment and making me think he might fall over from the force of it. “I dread even speaking of it, miss. It’s never the dead you bring back. It’s the soul of death itself, in the bodies of the dead. The Maiden of Sorrow learned that true enough, too. This boy learned it, the hard way. He was vengeful, this child.”
     
    “Was he a Villiers?” Harvey asked.
     
    “Perhaps,” Marsh said. “But he hadn’t learned how to make the dead . . . die again. He only knew how to raise the dead, learned from an old witch from out on the moors. To send them back to the Isle of Apples, where all warriors live like kings, the dead made him promise to give them his first-born child when the boy grew up and took a wife. If he did not, they told him, they would come and drag him and his bride into the earth with them, where they would live between the living and the dead until the last of the world was finished.”
     

    “And did he give them his first born?” I asked, a bit fearful of the answer.
     
    “Of course he didn’t. Would you? He forgot about his vow. A boy he were, and none too bright. When he became a man, he married a lovely girl from Bodmir Moor. They had their first child the Christmas after they married. Only when he began to hear the scratching at the windows did he remember his promise. He went to priests for removal of this curse, but none could help. But you understand, the trick of calling up the dead is a one-way street, miss. For no one—no priest, no king, no saint—knows how to send the dead back where they came from. When the dead have been promised, the dead must be paid.
     
    “No, he did not want to give up his child. Who would? He ran to the ends of the earth with his wife and son. He did not think the bones of the Tombs here at Belerion Hall would find him across a sea. But the dead, they find paths—highways—what no living soul knows unless they been to the other side. These paths go beneath the earth, beneath the ocean itself.
     
    “Though I weren’t there, nor anyone I know, I heard—one day—when a local peddler went ’round to sell wares, he saw black marks as if fire scorched the house, yet nothing burned. And their shoes and slippers remained where they had stood before they were dragged off. The only signs that they’d had a child—a boy of seven by then—were some wooden toys off in a corner and a child’s finger, severed at the second knuckle when he had been pulled into that between-place by the warriors. Written upon the walls of the house, in the ancient language of the dead, were the words ‘Come Ye Not Here to Sleep or Slumber.’” Here, Marsh stopped and glanced over at me to see if I believed the story.