She was fully aware of how wild she sounded. “The only song the harp would play,” she crooned, “was O! The dreadful wind and rain…” That was part of the magic.īesides, when the great hero Mordecai slew the poisoned worm, did he complain about his fingers hurting? No, of course not.Īt least, not where anyone could hear him and write it down. She had to splint them together with the wires, leaving bloody fingerprints across the surface of the bones. If she could find two that went together, she could bind them back to wholeness, but often the breaks were jagged. Many of the bones had been cracked open for marrow. And if he did, what kind of life do you lead where you find yourself building a harp out of corpses?įor that matter, what kind of life do you lead where you find yourself building a dog out of bones? He was probably the only person in the world who would understand what she was doing.Īssuming he even existed in the first place. She wondered about the harper in the song, and what he had thought when he was building the harp of a dead woman’s bones. The crows called to each other from the trees in solemn voices. “And strung the bones with her golden hair…” “He made harp pegs of her fingers fair,” Marra sang softly, tunelessly, under her breath. Perhaps she might have built a man out of bones, but she had no great love of men any longer. When the dogs were gone, they ate each other. When the cattle ran out and the deer were gone, they ate the horses, and when the horses were gone, they ate the dogs. They had eaten deer and they had eaten cattle.
She could track the progression of starvation backward through the layers. The charnel pit was full, but she did not need to dig too deeply. It fit alongside another long bone-not from the same animal, but close enough-and she bound them together and fit them into the framework she was creating. She picked up a bone, a long, thin one, from the legs, and wrapped the ends with wire. Marra was aware that this was not a good thing, but the odds of living long enough for infection to kill her were so small that she could not feel much concern. The tips of her fingers were becoming puffy and less nimble. The earliest cuts were no longer bleeding, but the edges had gone red and hot, with angry streaks running backward over her skin. Her fingers bled where the wire ends cut her. The pit was full of bones and her hands were full of wires. The trees were full of crows and the woods were full of madmen.
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