Read Online The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Brian McNaughton
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don’t take the lid off a sarcophagus, eat the corpse, and replace the lid.
After resealing Grandmother’s remains, I collapsed into a sandalwood chair and stared at the busts. Were the people of the previous age more stern and righteous than we are, or did their artists merely make them look that way? This pair would never have laughed at the atrocity. They wouldn’t have found my own activities amusing, either. Grandfather looked like the sort of dutiful tyrant who would have held me down, however regretfully, while the executioner performed his long task.
My eyes kept straying to the panels behind which Mother and I would lie. I had always been impatient with superstition. If I ever met a god I would apologize for disbelieving in him, but not until then. For all I cared some use could be made of tainted meat by feeding me to the dogs when I died.
Or so I had always believed that I believed. However irrationally, I shuddered to think that some larval physician would one day rummage through my corpse and try to match my liver and spleen against a diagram; and I wept for my poor, stern fool of a grandfather, who had already suffered that indignity.
I felt that some ringing declaration was in order, but all I could do was mutter, “Vengeance,” with my eyes averted from Grandfather’s fixed stare. Vengeance, indeed! If I took revenge, if I made an accusation, even if I asked a few clever questions with the utmost tact, people would talk, Mother would hear, and the truth would destroy her.
* * * *
Odd, how fresh air and open space can clear the mind in an instant. Once I was strolling downhill beneath the stars, I had the answer to the puzzle, hardly a puzzle at all. A pair of oafs had been dispatched from the Institute to collect my grandparents. The two of them had carried Grandfather off, imprudently leaving the door ajar and the second sarcophagus uncovered. After delivering the first body, lingering for a good laugh with their fellow students and perhaps a few toasts to the corpse, they had staggered back up the hill to find that some animal had beaten them to Grandmother’s remains. Having routed the dogs, the panther, whatever, they had found that Grandmother no longer met their standards of anatomical coherence, so they had resealed her coffin and the tomb behind them and gone home. No supernatural agency was needed to read the riddle, and certainly no ghouls.
It was about then that I tripped over the ghoul’s jaw.
I didn’t know what it was, of course, only an inconvenient object that had tangled my foot and sent me tumbling with a horrifyingly loud clatter of tools. I lay absolutely still for a time, my ear pressed to the ground for any hint of hurrying footsteps, before I dared rise on hands and knees to find what had tripped me.
There was no moon, but I could have counted the hairs on my hand by the radiance of Filloweela in her guise as morning star, and I instantly spotted the white bone jutting from the earth. It was half a jaw, with most of the teeth attached, and one of these was a curved lower canine as big as my thumb. It was exactly like the tusk I had taken to the Institute a few years earlier. The jaw was more massive and elongated, the huge molars looked fit for grinding stones, and there was still that bizarre fang to be accounted for: but the jaw and its dentition were like those of a man. No scientist could have mistaken it for a wild boar.
Forgetting the watchmen and the impending dawn, I took my pick from my bag and swung it with a will against the hard soil. I broke up the chunks and sifted them through my fingers, I dug to the depth of my knees in a circle wide as I was tall, but I found not so much as another tooth or sliver of bone.
Although it was by then fully light, I recklessly walked up the hill for anyone to see, for this was an open field of raised sarcophagi below the more fashionable streets of mausoleums. I gave this no thought at all as I searched for a likely spot
After resealing Grandmother’s remains, I collapsed into a sandalwood chair and stared at the busts. Were the people of the previous age more stern and righteous than we are, or did their artists merely make them look that way? This pair would never have laughed at the atrocity. They wouldn’t have found my own activities amusing, either. Grandfather looked like the sort of dutiful tyrant who would have held me down, however regretfully, while the executioner performed his long task.
My eyes kept straying to the panels behind which Mother and I would lie. I had always been impatient with superstition. If I ever met a god I would apologize for disbelieving in him, but not until then. For all I cared some use could be made of tainted meat by feeding me to the dogs when I died.
Or so I had always believed that I believed. However irrationally, I shuddered to think that some larval physician would one day rummage through my corpse and try to match my liver and spleen against a diagram; and I wept for my poor, stern fool of a grandfather, who had already suffered that indignity.
I felt that some ringing declaration was in order, but all I could do was mutter, “Vengeance,” with my eyes averted from Grandfather’s fixed stare. Vengeance, indeed! If I took revenge, if I made an accusation, even if I asked a few clever questions with the utmost tact, people would talk, Mother would hear, and the truth would destroy her.
* * * *
Odd, how fresh air and open space can clear the mind in an instant. Once I was strolling downhill beneath the stars, I had the answer to the puzzle, hardly a puzzle at all. A pair of oafs had been dispatched from the Institute to collect my grandparents. The two of them had carried Grandfather off, imprudently leaving the door ajar and the second sarcophagus uncovered. After delivering the first body, lingering for a good laugh with their fellow students and perhaps a few toasts to the corpse, they had staggered back up the hill to find that some animal had beaten them to Grandmother’s remains. Having routed the dogs, the panther, whatever, they had found that Grandmother no longer met their standards of anatomical coherence, so they had resealed her coffin and the tomb behind them and gone home. No supernatural agency was needed to read the riddle, and certainly no ghouls.
It was about then that I tripped over the ghoul’s jaw.
I didn’t know what it was, of course, only an inconvenient object that had tangled my foot and sent me tumbling with a horrifyingly loud clatter of tools. I lay absolutely still for a time, my ear pressed to the ground for any hint of hurrying footsteps, before I dared rise on hands and knees to find what had tripped me.
There was no moon, but I could have counted the hairs on my hand by the radiance of Filloweela in her guise as morning star, and I instantly spotted the white bone jutting from the earth. It was half a jaw, with most of the teeth attached, and one of these was a curved lower canine as big as my thumb. It was exactly like the tusk I had taken to the Institute a few years earlier. The jaw was more massive and elongated, the huge molars looked fit for grinding stones, and there was still that bizarre fang to be accounted for: but the jaw and its dentition were like those of a man. No scientist could have mistaken it for a wild boar.
Forgetting the watchmen and the impending dawn, I took my pick from my bag and swung it with a will against the hard soil. I broke up the chunks and sifted them through my fingers, I dug to the depth of my knees in a circle wide as I was tall, but I found not so much as another tooth or sliver of bone.
Although it was by then fully light, I recklessly walked up the hill for anyone to see, for this was an open field of raised sarcophagi below the more fashionable streets of mausoleums. I gave this no thought at all as I searched for a likely spot
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