Bone of My Bone #2
“Yes, I shall,” he snaps, and it’s a glorious thing to see his usual smug smile wiped from his evil face and the giggle scraped from his voice.
“I shall, for how else will you understand what you have gotten yourself involved with? Necromancy means bringing back someone’s soul into their body so that you may speak with it.
Resurrection means returning a soul to its body and the body to its prime state before death. ”
I laugh, though without genuine mirth. “So you are telling me your wife’s soul was bound to a rotting body, all because you did not bother to tell Satan what, exactly, you wanted?
” His mother must not have told him many fairy stories, or he’d know that you must always be precise and leave no room for loopholes when dealing with elves, fairies, and demons.
“True resurrection can only be achieved by the Lord.”
“Then why did you bother with Satan in the first place?”
“Because the Lord didn’t answer my pleas! Have you not been listening, or are you stupid?”
I glower at him. “I am not stupid, but I am bored by you. All this talking, and for what? I care not for your story. I only care about Ursula, and the skull in your hands, and the wish that was promised me.”
The necromancer looks at Ursula with disdain.
He spits on the ground next to her, and I imagine what it shall be like to pull his tongue out by the root, cut it up in little strips, fry them, and then feed them to him one by one.
It shall take a while. It’s a difficult thing, to swallow without a tongue. Mayhap he’ll choke on it.
“I am trying to tell you there is no wish,” the necromancer snaps, and it’s a joy to see him so frustrated with me.
“My wife fled from me. I tried to find her, but I had not yet learned how to divine truth with bones and teeth, and so by the time I finally discovered where she was, it was too late. People did not see a devout and godly woman, but a walking corpse, and thus something foul. A group of peasants led by a priest tried to kill her, but they could not. Only I could, for I had called her back to life.”
“Your poor wife must have suffered something horrible before they discovered that.”
The necromancer’s long fingers tense again, making tendons stand out like roots.
“I made them pay for that. Oh, how I made them pay! But yes. They decapitated her, and when they found that still did not kill her, they buried her. Not her skull, though. That, they gave to a group of pilgrims traveling to Rome so that it might be exorcised. I have to admit this plan was not entirely without merit. It’s much harder for a body to get up and make mischief without its head. ”
I am not laughing, jeering, or mocking now, for I believe he is speaking true, and it is terrible. The pain in my chest grows, and it’s as if I have a hole there, gaping, aching.
The necromancer giggles. “I see you are finally grasping what I have been trying to explain to you.”
I curl around my pain, as if it can be tamed, if only I hold it tight. Two tears fall from my eyes, dripping dimples in the raw dark earth of the saint’s grave.
No, not a saint.
Just a woman brought back from the dead against her will by a man who could not let her go.
I gasp, and it’s as if a knife is driven between my ribs. “But the skull, she is all done up like a papist saint,” I moan.
“Something can look like one thing and be another.”
“But why would anyone make her look like a saint?”
The necromancer shrugs. “They likely thought she was one. She has been with so many people, the story of how she came to be was lost. If a skull was entrusted to you, wouldn’t you think it was likely a holy relic?
Besides, the longer the dead linger here, the stronger their powers grow.
After a few decades, they know things, can spin illusions, and can influence the mind in various ways… like through dreams.”
I feel as if I’ve been dropped from a great height and all the air has been knocked out of me.
The necromancer sees, and his smile widens. “She came to you in your dreams, didn’t she? She did; I can tell. Naughty thing.” He lovingly sticks his finger in the hole where her nose used to be, as if tickling her.
“No, no! This makes no sense!” I groan. “Why would she compel Ursula and me to bring her skull here if she is just an ordinary woman who cannot die?”
“I thought that must have been obvious even to a humble peasant girl such as yourself. How would you like for your head to be in one place and your body in another?” he says, and now it’s him who is mocking me, but I care not, or at least not nearly as much as when it’s Ursula he defiles.
“That is not what I meant!” say I.
“Then what do you mean?”
“She warned me about you. She warned me, and when you had taken her away from us, she told Ursula how to steal her back. Why would she do that? Why would she care so much who brought her here if she is no saint, honor-bound to fulfill whatever the person who reunites her skull with her body wishes for?”
The necromancer sighs and pulls his finger out of the skull’s nose, then traces the curve of her socket.
“She doesn’t care who brings her here, as long as it isn’t me.
I suppose she is still angry with me and does not want to see me.
I can’t quite fault her for that, though I had hoped the past few centuries would have made her more amenable to me. I am her only hope, after all.”
“You are lying about all of this. You must be lying.” For if he is not, if he is speaking true and there is no wish, then Ursula has died for nothing, and she and my family are lost to me forever, and I am alone, alone, alone…
I scream.
I scream, I pull out hanks of hair, I beat my brow against the damp ground, and I scratch at my throat, arms, and the back of my hands, anything to stop these feelings inside of me, but no matter how I hurt myself, the bodily pain is a mere grain of sand on the beach of my hurt.
When I return to myself, blood is dripping from my scalp and running into my eyes, making them sting. I sob and rub at them with my knuckles, which are bleeding also.
“Poor thing,” the necromancer says, and I know not whether he speaks of me or his wife.
“I will kill you for this,” I say, but with my voice all hoarse from screaming and my face all bloodied by my own hands, I know I look pathetic rather than frightening.
“I don’t think so. But I shall tell you what will happen now, Elsebeth,” he says, and he speaks in that calm and sad voice that makes me want to rip apart his throat so I may plunge my hand inside and pull out his vocal cords until they snap.
“You are going to get up, and you are going to move away from my wife’s body so that I can collect all that remains, because I need every last bit of her for this to work. ”
“For what? To take her out of her misery?”
“No!” the necromancer says, appalled. “To bring her back to me! I know so much more now than I did when I revived her. I can bind her to a new body, a fresh one, and if that goes to rot, we shall find another body, and another, and so on.”
I look at Ursula at his feet, and I know then why he killed her when he really didn’t have to.
The necromancer follows my gaze. “Careful now, Elsebeth,” he says, voice low and dangerous. “If you value your life, you will not interfere or do anything else rash or stupid.”
“I don’t value my life if it has no Ursula in it,” I say, and then I interfere and do something else rash and stupid. I plunge my hands into the grave and grab all the bones I can, a rib and all these little shards.
I straighten, and I look into the necromancer’s demon eyes. “Does your wife still feel everything that happens to her body, I wonder? If so, I think it will be painful if I swallow some of these small bones and my stomach burns them all up, what say you?”
I can see the necromancer’s pulse in a vein on his forehead, which wriggles with every heartbeat. “That’s not a charitable thing to do, Elsebeth. Do you think Ursula would like for you to be uncharitable?”
“Take her name out of your filthy mouth, you bastard,” I say, and I place one of the little bones on my tongue. I taste the crumbs of earth clinging to it, but the bone itself seems oddly flavorless.
The necromancer’s jaw tenses. “Don’t do it.”
“Or what?” I ask, the words coming out all strange, for I have to talk around the bit of bone in my mouth. “You shall punish me slowly, like you did those who hurt your wife? Now that Ursula is dead and I am all alone, I fear neither pain nor death.”
“‘Now that Ursula is dead,’” the necromancer mimics me, and laughs in a way I’d find humiliating if I still cared about that sort of thing.
“You forget, you bold bitch, that I am a necromancer.” Without taking his eyes from my face, he squats down and touches Ursula’s forehead with a finger long and white as a twig stripped of its bark, and for that he deserves to be bound to a wooden rack and have his limbs shattered with a hammer over the course of days, and…
But I can think no more of how to punish him. I even forget the bone on my tongue and its nothing taste, for Ursula is stirring.