The Rites of Winter

The light continued to pour through the spy-hole as she cowered on the floor. Then, after a long time, it gradually began to fade to orange and then to red. The dimming of the light was slow, but Stella did not move. Nor did she entertain the thought of putting her eye to the spy-hole when it had died completely. Chilled to the marrow, she crawled into her bed. Dawn seemed to come quickly, and she did not know whether she had slept or not. She lay there, watching the gathering of the light and the movement of the clouds, patterns as fickle and inexorable as life itself. Beyond the wall there was no sound. The cradles of snow on the windowpanes began to melt under the sun.

At length she heard a movement next door. She waited. The door opened and footsteps receded in the corridor and down the stairs. She crept to the spy-hole and peered through. The bed was unmade and the curtains had not been drawn. She could not be sure whether the tousled white sheets were darkened with shadows or a greyish dust. She heard the crow give an enfeebled cry, and realised that she had forgotten to take him in that night. She hurried to the window. Simon was walking through the melting snow towards the city road. She opened the window and found the air possessed of all the mildness which heralded a true spring thaw. His long cloak erased his footprints in the snow as he went.

Then she saw that he had taken Thomas from the woodshed and laid him on a pile of straw under the sun. His body already looked free of its surface coating of ice; a black cloth had been tied around his face. At the bottom of the garden Simon had dug a grave.

Before the sun set she would go down and give him a decent burial.

(c) Christopher Evans 1983, 1997

This story first appeared in Lands of Never edited by Maxim Jakubowksi (Unwin Paperbacks, 1983).