Bannerless, Page 4
Carrie Vaughn
Most of the spectators had left, but a few lingered, inventing chores that brought them close to the committee house, hoeing patches that didn’t have weeds, feeding chickens that were probably used to scratching somewhere else. They looked up, watching the group’s progress. As if they could tell anything by seeing a group of people walk.
Ariana’s household, Newhome, was close by and had a couple of cottages, a barn, a windmill, and a cistern. They kept geese and chickens for eggs and meat, wove cloth, and Pasadan’s medic lived here. They also had a root cellar, which was where they’d stored the body. The doors were outside, angled up against the barn, opening to stairs that led down into a chill darkness.
“He’s in here,” Ariana said, gesturing in.
“Thanks. Your medic had a look at him?”
“Yes, briefly. Wasn’t much he could do; Sero was clearly dead. But Tull arranged to have him carried here.”
“Can you wait out here, please?” Enid said. The request sounded so reasonable, no one could say no. The committee members didn’t look happy about it, but they agreed.
Enid and Tomas both held hand lanterns, fully charged, and turned them on as they went down the steps into the cellar.
The place was small, maybe twelve feet square, typical of most underground storage spaces. Dirt floor and walls, four-by-four posts supporting the ceiling. The dry chill raised goose flesh on Enid’s arms. Foodstuffs had been cleared off the shelves on one wall, or the cellar had already been empty. A canvas sheet draped on the floor across from them clearly covered a body, just under six feet tall, lanky. The pole-and-canvas stretcher that had been used to carry the man was still underneath him. Enid passed her lantern back and forth over it but couldn’t find any details out of place. It was all very neat and clean, but the room smelled like a corpse, musty, underlay with a stomach-turning sweetness. The place was cool, not cold, so the body was rotting.
She put on leather gloves and pulled back the sheet. The edges had been tucked under the body, and it took her a moment to slip them free without jostling the corpse too badly.
“Would have been better if they left it in place,” she said.
“Not in this heat,” Tomas answered. “That they saved him at all suggests they’re not hiding anything.”
“Well, not hiding anything obvious,” she said. “I get the impression Philos and Ariana aren’t the best of friends.” Tomas gave a huff of agreement.
She revealed the body.
He was in his thirties, with pale skin, sharp features, and a dark beard of a few days’ growth. His eyelids were swollen shut; his cheeks and the rest of him were bloated, belly starting to distend with rot. They would need to cremate this one soon. The investigators got here just in time.
He wore plain homespuns, an undyed pullover shirt and drawstring trousers. Good, solid leather boots, aged, scuffed at the heels and toes. He might have worn these boots his whole adult life. His body seemed untouched, unscathed, unremarkable. His hands were calloused. He still had the dirt of his last job under his fingernails and worn into the cracks of his palms. He was a laborer.
Then there was his head. She tilted it gently; the body was far past rigor mortis and pliable. The hair on the back of his head was matted with blood and smelled sour. There’d been a lot of blood, caked as thick as a piece of felted cloth, tracking rivulets from his ears. Deep bruising darkened the back of his neck—blood had pooled inside him. Even in the cool of the cellar, flies buzzed. Gently, she prodded his skull—the back of it was cracked, like a piece of broken pottery. She winced. Whatever had happened, he’d likely died instantly. At least there was that mercy.
Now, if she could only make a guess at what had inflicted such an injury. A fall would have broken his skull in one pattern; a strike with a weapon would cause a different one. She wondered if she ought to try to perform a rudimentary autopsy. She’d never done one before. Since she wasn’t a medic, she wasn’t sure she’d even know exactly what she was looking at if she peeled back the skin. Didn’t take an autopsy to tell his skull was broken. And the body was getting ripe.
She used her hands then, feeling along his head, tracing back from his ears and down his neck, searching for patterns. She recited her findings to Tomas.
“It’s a broad wound. There’s a dent maybe two inches wide along the entire back of the skull.”
“A club, then?” Tomas asked.
“Or the edge of a table. Anything with that shape.” She prodded a little more firmly—broken bone flexed under her touch. Flesh soaked with clotted blood felt wet, thick. That might even have been his brain. Her stomach turned, and she avoided lingering any further on that thought. Being sick over this wouldn’t help her standing here.
The wound was deep; her probing fingers seemed to keep sinking into the man’s brain. It went at a slant—deeper along one edge than the other. So yes, he might have fallen against something with an edge.
“Shine the light there, would you?” she asked, scooting back as she took off her gloves. Taking out a pad and pencil from her tunic pocket, she sketched his skull and marked the shape of the wound in it, showing the radiating pattern of broken bone around it. So she would remember. Grim work.
“It looks like an accident, doesn’t it?” Tomas said.
“Except that Ariana saved the body and called for an investigation.”
“Maybe she just wanted to be sure.”
Enid didn’t like it. It would be easy to call this an accident and walk away. “We’ll see.”
She put her pad and pencil back in her pocket and slipped her gloves on again. After arranging Sero’s body neatly, smoothing away any sign that she’d examined him, she replaced the canvas cloth over him. Rested a hand on his shoulder for a moment, so that at least one person gave him a kind farewell. They should burn him by nightfall. After their next stop.
Back aboveground, back in the light, Enid asked for a washbasin and soap and scrubbed her hands and washed her gloves, flattening them and leaving them to hang on her belt. The committee waited, strained and silent.
Enid needed some time. “Ariana, might I have a cup of water? It’s a little dry down there.”
“Yes, of course, this way.”
Enid drew the woman off from the others, moving around the cottage to an outdoor pump by the cistern. She guessed Ariana might speak more openly without Philos glaring.
Ariana filled a clay cup, and Enid asked, “Why do you think it wasn’t an accident?”
The dark-haired woman bit her lip, lowered her gaze. Deciding what to say—or working up to speaking what she’d kept to herself. “No one much liked Sero. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true. He wasn’t part of any household, just lived off by himself and made do somehow. I don’t know absolutely that he didn’t just fall. But . . . it’s strange. It’s all so strange. And no one wants to talk about it. That’s mostly why—that no one will talk. And Philos has been so . . . so determined. Not that he’s ever nice, but the way he’s so set against this . . .” She heaved a frustrated breath, made an offhand shrug.
“Like he’s hiding something?” Enid suggested.
“Yes. Exactly,” she said bleakly. “You—do you think it was an accident?”
“Could have been,” Enid said honestly. “I want to look at where it happened before I decide.”
Enid finished off the cup of water and gathered the troop to move on to the next location. A few folk from the town watched, pretending not to.
“Well?” Philos demanded. “Did you find anything useful? You saw, didn’t you—he fell and hit his head. Could have happened to anyone.”
Yes, and such accidents were relatively common. A person fell from a ladder; a child fell from a tree. A man died in a storm. Accidental deaths were tragic, striking as they did like lightning, leaving survivors unprepared for the aftermath. That could be what happened here. Ariana was shocked and confused by the death, felt she must do something, that by being on the village’s committee she had some kind of re
sponsibility. So she called an investigation where none was needed, because Sero didn’t have a household looking after him and someone had to. Or she could be absolutely correct, and more was going on here.
“I have a few more questions, Philos. I’m sure you understand.”
Philos raised his hands like he wanted to argue, but Enid glanced at Tomas, who didn’t do anything at all, and the committeeman stayed quiet.
Moving down the gridded streets, they passed nicely kept cottages and workshops. The sound of a baby crying came from one house, a couple of kids laughing behind another. A productive town, then, earning banners and children, all of them cared for.
Ariana led them past all that to where a dirt path branched away from the street, leaving the grid to curve around to an isolated homestead. A small house sat up against a copse of trees and tangled undergrowth, along with a cistern and a chicken coop, weatherworn and empty. Another fifty feet along stood a shed made of rough plank board and roofed with shakes. Wasn’t much—wouldn’t stand up to a bad storm. But it would keep the sun and rain off and store tools and jobs in progress. No chimney, no windows. The double doors at the front were closed. The workshop, then, where Sero had died.
This was a man who had wanted to live alone, who hadn’t wanted neighbors. Or the neighbors hadn’t wanted him. Didn’t have a household, likely didn’t want one. It happened sometimes. Living with a household wasn’t required, but living without was . . . odd. Harder, going through the world alone. Enid got a chill, thinking about not having Sam and the others to come home to.
She tried to see the man through where he had lived. All very practical. Functional, if not particularly nice to look at. “How did Sero earn his keep, then?”
“He was a handyman, mostly,” Ariana said. “Wasn’t dead weight. Did small jobs all over the town. He did good work. It’s just that he was alone.”
“Something wrong with him,” Philos said. “He wasn’t friendly. But what can you do? Maybe he earned his keep, but he’d never earn a banner, that’s for sure.”
“Not everyone wants to,” Enid murmured.
Ariana said, “He had a power auger, from back before the Fall, and a solar battery to run it. It was his, passed down from parent to child till he got it. He took really good care of it, kept it running. Everyone asked him to work—he could do fences and foundation posts in half the time. He even went out to some of the other towns on jobs.”
That explained the neat rows of fences and fence posts everywhere in Pasadan. Sero had probably even helped with the sign along the road.
“I think he liked that machine better than people,” Philos said.
Enid couldn’t really blame Sero. A machine like that from the old days, still running, still useful? Such artifacts were becoming rarer and rarer. Things wore out. They broke, and getting the parts to fix them was tough. Such a thing was precious, and she was impressed that he’d made such good use of it.
“Who’s got the auger now?” Enid asked.
“It’ll go to community stores,” Ariana said. “Since he didn’t have a household, it belongs to everybody, now. But we left it here, until you got here.”
It wasn’t unheard of, people fighting over precious objects. Someone might have wanted to take the machine from Sero.
“He kept it in the workshop?”
“Oh, no,” Ariana said. “Something like that he kept in the house. The workshop was just a workshop.”
“Well, let’s have a look at where he died.”
The group of them walked down the second path. Enid and Tomas pulled a little ahead, and she asked him in a low voice, “Thoughts?”
“They might just need an outsider to come in and make the decision for them,” he said. “I feel like we’re breaking up an argument between children.”
“Yeah.”
The shed was old, rickety, with wide cracks between shrunken gray boards. A place to keep rain off and little more. From the outside, nothing looked amiss. This time, she didn’t need to tell the committee to wait outside. They held back. Lee had his hands clasped tightly together.
Enid unlatched and pulled open both sides of the double door, and Tomas followed her inside.
Exactly what she expected to see here. A table with a couple of vises attached to it sat along one wall, which was hung with hooks holding up tools, everything from hammers to wrenches to saws and snips. Surely he must have been friends with the town’s blacksmith, to have such a set of tools. A hutch under the table was filled with pieces of lumber; a second held scrap metal. With the front of the shed open, she could see the house and path from here, and also into the trees behind the homestead.
The floor was dirt. An irregular dark spot by the wall proved to be blood. The color stood out, brown and baked. There seemed to have been a lot, and it soaked into the dirt before drying into crust. Flies congregated, buzzing away when Enid approached, stepping carefully.
“Well, this is it,” she said, sighing.
“And the wall,” Tomas said, pointing.
There it was, the killing blow: a two-by-four framing the wall. The perfect match for the shape of the dent in Sero’s skull. A smear of blood marred the color, and strands of Sero’s dark hair were imbedded in the splinters. He’d hit the post, hard. Must have fallen straight into it. An investigation never got easier than this.
If he’d been just a couple of inches on either side, he would have hit the planking instead of the post, and the force of the blow would have been distributed—or the planking, old boards only lightly nailed into place and not driven in the ground, would have split. He’d have had a bad headache, maybe even a concussion, but he’d have lived, likely. Of all the terrible luck.
Enid looked around the rest of the workshop, carefully taking in every inch, putting together the rest of the story of what had happened to the man. What had he been working on? Had he slipped? Taken a bad step?
The floor was clean of debris—Sero kept a good shop here, sawdust and scrap swept away. The dirt was scuffed and marred, signs of feet dancing, tripping. Multiple feet. More than one person here. She knelt to study the impressions more closely, then stepped back to get a better idea of the whole picture. There, someone had come in through the door, discovered the body. There, those straight lines, and where the dirt looked like it had been pressed down—they’d set down the stretcher to put the body on it. There must have been quite a few people in and out here, dealing with the aftermath. A clear picture of what Sero had been doing, where he’d been standing, had been erased.
“We’ll have to talk to whoever found the body, find out what they saw,” Enid said, sighing. “Four days gone, memories aren’t going to be too sharp.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Tomas said.
She went over every inch of the place, studying tools that might have bits of hair and blood on them, anything on the walls that might tell her what happened, and made notes of what she saw. Observations, not conclusions. The bench had a couple of pieces of metal, some files, and shavings spread out on it. This must have been what Sero was working on before he died, filing down some parts, doing some kind of hand tooling. A bolt, a plate with a sleeve—hinges, he was repairing hinges. Maybe for a gate on one of those fences he’d built. Otherwise the place was neat. He kept it organized, tools all in their right places. She mentally measured the space between the bench, the marks his feet might have made while standing there, and the spot on the wall that had likely caved in his skull. Compared that to the height of the body. He would have had to take a couple of steps back first.
The basic physics of the scenario didn’t seem quite right. Why would he have needed to step back? What had he been doing, really?
When they finished inside, she walked out and around, searching the exterior walls and ground, just to be thorough. The path from the shed to the house was well traveled. Likely, whoever had found the body had come that way, as well as those who’d carried out the body—and anyone else who’d come to look.
“Tomas?” she called, nodded to the ground when he came up beside her. She measured the foot marks against her hands and made a note her in book.
“A witness?” he said.
“Yeah, maybe.” She wondered how in the world she was going to find the person who had made the tracks. Or how she could get the person—their prime witness—to just come forward.
She straightened, looking across the back of the shed, the meadow, the trees, trying to imagine the scene. Sero fell against the post. Someone had come across the body—or maybe even seen him fall—then ran.
Then she saw the blood on the wall, a brownish streak smeared on the wood, dried like ink, as if their runner had stumbled and put out a hand for balance. A runner with bloody hands.
CHAPTER FOUR • HAVEN
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Five Years After the Worst Storm
Enid was sweeping out the front room of the clinic while her mother, the on-duty medic, came in from outside, eyes bright with gossip.
“What is it?” Enid asked, pausing, resting the broom against her shoulder.
“Franie’s moving to Bronson with that guy he hooked up with. They got the okay to start a papermaking workshop.”
The most banal kind of gossip, but still Enid’s mouth opened and she made a startled noise. “Franie the reprobate ? ”
How did Franie of all people convince someone to shack up with him, much less get the go-ahead to start a household? A functional, purposeful household? Franie, who’d seemed to spend most of his childhood knocking over baskets of apples during harvests and picking fights with Enid whenever she stood up to him, who’d grown six inches in a year and put on muscle and become passionate about paper of all things.
