A Matter Of Taste by Fred Saberhagen (best reads .TXT) 📗

soldier’s grave, unmarked and shallow, humble as most such are, and lonelier than most. Somehow I was to be accorded at least the minor dignity of a plain wooden coffin, the best my friends could manage, and the sounds of its construction resounded through the night.

      One at least of my mourners had come from the nearby monastery, where, as he said, only he and one other were aware as yet of the fact that my body had been saved, and my funeral preparations were quietly under way. The two who knew the secret would try to keep it, but the speaker considered it inevitable that eventually the story would spread through their ranks.

      He also mentioned that Ronay had sought shelter in the monastery for treatment of his wound. I had richly endowed this establishment, as well as several others, whilst I was still capable of breath, and when I heard this it seemed to me ungrateful of its abbot now to thus comfort and encourage my enemies.

      Shortly after the monk had spoken of Ronay, the people in attendance on my corpse had a bad few moments, when both candles inexplicably went out at once. Fortunately for their peace of mind, a fire was available—a small one in a brazier, no one wanted to keep a corpse too warm—and the darkness never became absolute. The tapers were easily relighted.

      To begin with, the butchered body was stripped of its begrimed and bloodstained garments, the borrowed ones along with whatever items of its proper clothing it still retained. Most of these being hopelessly damaged, they were taken to another room to be consigned to the fire. Parenthetically I may add that I was oddly touched, later, when I heard that a few scraps of bloodstained cloth had been retained, in the manner of holy relics, by some of the humble folk who had considered themselves happy and fortunate under my rule.

      A little later, by chance, all of the attendants were out of the room at the same time, probably getting more water and cloths. As the first two returned, they stopped abruptly, and the more timid one smothered a little outcry.

      Somehow my head, detached as it was, had in the interval of their absence rolled or shifted its position slightly. I have no good explanation of how such things can happen. The one dark eye still visible amid the mutilations was wide open, its fiery glare directed into nothingness. The bloody jaw now gaped more widely than before, the tattered lips that no longer really formed a mouth hanging in a bloody fringe around that silent, shouting grin. At least one of the breathing onlookers, to judge by a remark he muttered later, got the impression that those jaws were shouting, a great bellowing of breathless defiance.

      In fact there was scarcely a sound in the room, save for the quickened breathing of the attendants and a steady, remote dripping. Water, either inside or outside the shed. Outside rain now fell alternately with sleet, making it a dismal night altogether.

      Trembling slightly, but firmly confident in the power of their prayers to protect them against the things of night and evil, the corpse-washers examined the body again to make sure that nothing else had changed, and there was no drip of blood. No, the body of Vlad Drakulya was no longer really bleeding at any point. The raw lips of his many wounds were sealed with clots. When presently, in the continued process of washing, most of these blood clots were dislodged, there appeared beneath them the unmistakable signs of pink, fresh scarring, as if some healing process of near-miraculous rapidity had begun before death supervened. One of the attendants made some muttered comment about this; the other one told her to shut up.

      But the first woman was not finished. “Now you can see both of his eyes,” she remarked when a gory wrinkle of loosened forehead had been tugged and smoothed back into what was more or less its proper position.

      There was some difficulty about getting the eyes to stay shut; in itself this is not uncommon with corpses of a fair degree of freshness. No doubt even the observed movement of the head was not totally without precedent. The traumatized jaw muscles, or what Bogdan’s sword had left of them, might well have spasmed once again.

      “Ought we not to sew up some of these gashes? Would his face look better with stitches in it, or—

      “No time for sewing now.” The face—if the surface they were contemplating was still deserving of the name— was going to look frightful in the extreme, whatever the corpse-tenders did or did not do.

      “I suppose you’re right. No time. Wash him, clothe him decently, put him into a box and underground.” Afraid that my enemies might finally have tumbled to the trick, or that some informer might betray the substitution of another corpse, they were trying to get it all done, including the burial, before dawn.

      And now a priest—he was not the first of his calling to do so on this night—came into the presence of the body from which, all onlookers were quite certain, the soul had permanently departed. Again prayers were recited for the repose of the departed spirit. For a man of notably bad reputation, even for a prince, even in this notably wicked time and place, this one seemed to have no lack of friends who wished to help him—as soon as he was gone. Perhaps some of those who prayed for his soul were afraid not to do so. Ah, would that they had all been so brave and industrious in his defense before he ceased to breathe—but perhaps my protests, particularly at this late date, are churlish and unfair.

      Meanwhile, as we have mentioned, other hands had been at work in the hasty construction of a coffin. The torso with its limbs, garbed in some crude but decent cerements, was now laid reverently within. The coffin-makers had calculated the length to a nicety, avoiding