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presence here as well, which might mean ill for his immortal soul. But there was too much already written up against him in Heaven for him to feel truly threatened by such a threat. Things he wouldn’t think on now, however they did plague his dreams. And anyhow, he had sided with Crosby about the funeral. The man would remember that, once he had calmed down some.
    More, though, was he worried by Crosby’s reference to his line of business. He knew it wasn’t his management of the family store the priest had been talking about. Three cases of whisky were there still within the hold of the Hesperus . He’d sold a few to the villages nearby during the winter, when the weather allowed.
    Well, be fucked with the man as well, priest or no. Be fucked with all of them. He stood for a moment looking at the Hesperus , resting at a shallow angle with its prow on the shingle. But then he turned and followed the procession up the beach behind the gravebox, keeping to the back.
    Grace was away with the other women. The afternoon sun was now lost in cloud and the light came dreary and feeble, if yet it was humid and warm. The wind brought a light rain now, though worse threatened. Harry’s worn felt hat dripped water from its narrow rim, drops bouncing off his nose to make his nostrils twitch.
    They entered the forest on a narrow path. The people were silent, their clothes a soft rustle. They walked the fifty yards inland to the clearing where stood the ceremonial house.
    The low building had no walls, only a rough-hewn plank roof and six thick supports. Effigies of the dead stood randomly about the clearing, seven feet high, their mouths open, their round faces as big as a man’storso. At its centre was a fire, its flames stroking the long-blackened timbers above. To either side were piled skulls and other human bones. It was truly a place of hellfire. Yet there was in him, as there had been before on visits here, a shortening of his breath, a certain inclination to an almost drunken felicity, but which also contained a craving—hunger even—so that he felt faintly sickened with himself, even as his eyes devoured every detail.
    Beyond the frame house, the trees were garlanded in graveboxes. The dead had been placed at every divide where boughs grew out of the main trunks, hitched up with ropes and tied off to rest among the spirits of the forest. Or some were laid in smaller houses ten feet wide and low, somewhat akin to the mausoleums of white gentry. And there were similarities, for the Island of Graves was held over for the families of chieftains; though nowadays, so his wife said, with so many dead most everyone held some sort of chiefly seat.
    The people clustered in about the fire and so many were there, even in such depleted times, that some were forced to stand outside in the mounting rain. David’s gravebox was placed near the fire on a low dais. The people inside hunkered down on the tamped earth. Harry stood off to one side with his back against a house support. He took off his hat and thumped it, then shook a little rain from his coat.
    George was on the dais with Charley Seaweed and several of the leading chieftains of the people, who were robed in finery, and some carried masks of raven and killer whale under their arms.
    The old men lining up on the dais held themselves pompous and self-important, as ever they were at such moments. He almost snorted a laugh. Yet his humour died again as quickly as it had come. This was death, whatever the rites involved and the people performing them. There was nothing good in that, excepting maybe the ending of suffering at last. But who could wish for death? There was sin in such thinking—was there not?—to wish for death prior to the utter end of all effort to remain alive?
    The rain teemed now. The people who yet remained outside huddled close together, stoic in the onslaught. He looked down on the seated figures before him. They stank of