Chapter 23
Comforting the Dead
In death we become our most vicious selves; it is the task of the living to remind us of our virtues.
Jareth had thought death would be different.
The pain had not ended, for one thing. He still felt it. A burning hole through his middle. The spilling and then slow seep of his blood. The sodden fabric of his shirt dragging through the grass as he crawled towards the road and fading hope for help.
Where was that bitch farm girl who’d stabbed him? She must have caught a glimpse of the gold.
Killed for a handful of coins. What an absurd, predictable end. All his promise, all his dreams, extinguished over nothing.
The pain burned, searing through him, its fire fed by memories that replayed themselves again and again.
The golden curls bouncing on the back of his mother’s head as she left the Daisy and Drake for the last time—as she left him for the last time.
Seeing her again on the stage of The Rose, a woman transformed by wealth and adulation.
Only there by her invitation, her first and only gesture that she remembered having borne a son.
That idiot boy Damon giving him notes and suggestions, when the fool had been no more than a tumbler only a year before.
The girl. Her spray of freckles. The wooden stake she had driven through his spine.
A life ought to mean something. To have a destination, its struggles only the twists and turns on the path to earning that longed-for reward. Ought not to end suddenly, for no reason but an accidental meeting on the road.
Or perhaps that belief was only the product of the stories he had bathed in all his life. A false trust in narratives meant to hold attention and offer reassurance, rather than reveal the truth.
A scream anchored him to the present moment. A scream he knew.
Memory had become clearer to him than sight.
When he thought of his mother on that stage, it was as though he were there again, watching her curls gleam in the multicoloured lights—wonders in their own right; The Rose had an old legacy, and rumour told the First Folk themselves had built it.
He heard his mother’s voice catching in those distant, perfect rafters and rolling down to every ear in the theatre.
Smelled the sweat and perfume of the people around him, felt the plush seat, so much finer than anything he knew from the Daisy and Drake.
But the world around him had become clouded, its sounds muted, its textures vague. Only his own corpse held clarity. In a landscape like smudged, muddy watercolour it stood out with the precision and vibrancy of reality.
His killer, too, would hold that clarity.
His pain pulsed at the thought of her. Images of terrible violence flashed through his unsteady mind.
A vision of revenge, promising relief from his agony.
She deserved to suffer as he suffered. More, for what she had done was a worse crime than simple hurt.
A clipping of a rose before its blooming.
The burning of an unfinished book. Destruction of a wonder before its chance to become wondrous.
‘It’s Jareth,’ the voice that had screamed said, reminding him again that something existed other than the painful past and mourned-for future.
A figure knelt over his corpse: one that resolved slowly, like a blot of ink drying into the semblance of a girl he recognised.
With a swell of rage he thought, for a moment, she was his killer.
But no. She held a certain sharpness, but not the awful, demanding clarity he knew would mark out the origin of his pain.
He did know her, though. Siwan. Not an innocent. A girl stained by dozens of deaths—accidents, perhaps, but born from her nonetheless. His own death had its origin in fear of her.
Delivering his rage to her would not soothe him, he knew. Yet there was an impulse, and a temptation.
Other figures gradually appeared. He recognised them all, though they were little more than shadowed silhouettes.
Only one carried a name, seared into him by resentment and frustration.
The boy Damon, who thought so much of himself.
A jumped-up tumbler with pretensions to the stage, and none of the gravitas or destiny it required.
The boy had been given not only prominent roles, but the influence of authorship, which stung Jareth like nettles.
Not the same pain that dwelt at the core of him, but an offshoot of it, sharp with thorns.
‘Poor bastard,’ Damon muttered.
‘Serves him right for running off,’ another voice said.
‘No one deserves this, Spil,’ Siwan murmured gently.
One of the other figures—as broad as a barn and nearly as ugly—walked past his corpse and surveyed the path he had crawled in agonising, lurching spasms.
‘Had the same thought I did, it seems,’ the big figure said. Harwick: his name bubbled up from the murky pool of memory. A pleasant afternoon spent with a deck of cards and a bottle of fine gin, courtesy of a well-entertained innkeeper. ‘Met someone up there who didn’t want to be met, maybe.’
And then a woman who resolved with almost perfect clarity.
He did not know her name, but he knew her face, knew those generous, terrible hands that had filled his with gold and set him on the path towards his death.
If not for her, he would not have felt the swell of hope that left him vulnerable.
Who can say—his killer might have taken his hospitality and parted ways with him come morning if not for the tempting gleam of gold.
This one … Lashing out at her might not heal him, but it would let him feel something other than the constant, radiating pain.
The pain burned brighter, filled him, narrowed his focus until all became echoes but his corpse and the woman standing over it, wearing guilt as a mask over her complicity. It filled his being, pulled him taut. A bowstring nocked and ready.
‘We have time to bury him,’ the woman said. She began to gather stones, placing them around his body in a rough circle. ‘This kingdom is haunted enough.’
The others stood and watched.
‘Our pursuer could be close behind,’ another voice said—Llewyn. Sound carried memory better than sight.
‘He died by violence, and in agony,’ the woman said, placing another stone. ‘If you abandon him like this, he will become a wraith.’
‘And piling some stones is enough to prevent that?’ asked Siwan.
‘Doesn’t it lessen your own hurts when another person recognises them?
’ the woman answered. ‘It comforts the dead to know they are not forgotten, that the living feel an echo of their pain. He was your friend. Would you deny him a decent burial just because he stole a few coins and fled in a panic?’
A sentiment which only stoked Jareth’s rage. How could they, the living, with their dreams not forever shattered, ‘feel an echo’ of a fraction of his pain? It was insulting. Like the scattered, obligatory applause of a tavern audience more interested in their drinks and conversation.
‘She’s right,’ another of the silhouettes said—thin and dark, and hanging on Harwick’s arm, with an expression mournful enough to be almost believable. ‘However much a bastard he was in the end, he was one of us. We owe him a proper send-off.’
Harwick grunted, and the two went off with Siwan to gather more stones. Llewyn muttered a curse and slumped to the ground, wincing and holding his side, his own hurts overruling what sympathy he might have felt for the dead. Llewyn could always be counted on not to flatter.
The boy Damon muttered something, cast about the field, selecting rocks, scratching at them with the edge of his belt knife, discarding them, until he found one that satisfied him.
He knelt over the stone and went on scratching with his knife.
Meanwhile, the woman who had doomed him with her gift of gold began drawing in the dirt while Harwick, Spil and Siwan continued gathering stones.
It was better than being left open to the elements and beasts. Better than the indignity of bloating under the sun and withering to rotten leather and bleached bone. They offered him a gesture towards dignity.
But only a gesture! A barrow of hastily piled stones would do little against a determined scavenger, nor against the seep of rain and grasping fingers of rot.
No better than half-hearted congratulations after a poor performance.
No more dignified than acting upon an improvised stage of crates and tabletops.
An ignoble end to an ignoble life, and a life that should have been so much more!
The pain burned brighter. Wrath consumed him, drove him to reach down.
A grasping hand to seize the throat of this woman who he knew, with that small part of his mind still capable of anything but anger, was not truly responsible for his death.
But who lay within reach. Whose suffering might soothe him for a moment.
Harwick placed a stone on Jareth’s body, beginning to bury him. The woman shook her head and removed the stone. ‘Only a circle,’ she said. ‘I will do the rest.’
Jareth reached down, could feel his wrath working upon the world, gathering strength, ready to rip and tear.
‘You would give him a king’s burial?’ Spil said with a note of confusion inflected with awe, surveying the spiral she had carved in the dirt.
Jareth stayed his hand.
‘Better than piled stones, no?’ the woman said. ‘I saw how the druids did it.’
There was a moment of quiet but for Damon’s scraping at the flat stone he had chosen.
‘Isn’t it blasphemy?’ Spil said at last.
‘He played a king upon the stage, where he was most alive and most himself,’ Damon said, not looking up from his work. ‘Let him be buried as one.’
Words that cracked Jareth’s heart, letting him return, for a moment, to himself. Harwick, Spil and Siwan stood aside, watching as the woman finished her drawing.