Beyond the Burning Lands by John Christopher Page A

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    I had a feeling he would have liked me to go to him, to embrace him. I could not do it. The news had shocked me as much as it had him, but there were differences in our minds. There were things I could not help thinking of, however hard I tried to put them away.
    â€œI made a jest of it. They were my last words to her.” He squeezed his eyes shut and tears ran from their corners. “If I could but call them back!”
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    She was buried with Christian rites. There were murmurings about this, though not in Peter’s presence. At her funeral there was no Seer, no Acolytes, no solemn procession to the Seance Hall with the casket in a carriage drawn by black horses, purple garlanded, and everyone, nobility and commoners, dwarfs and polymufs, following on foot to do her reverence. Instead her coffin was taken on a simple cart, drawn by one old piebald horse, to the North Gate, and so out to the patch of ground where the Christians buried their dead. The Christians went with her, and Peter and I, but he would have no others. The ground was hard with frost: they had been forced to use low braziers to thaw it, inch by inch, so that they could dig. We stood by the grave and the priest spoke the ceremonial. A sharp wind blew along the foot of the walls, lifting a fine powder of snow, and they listened with chattering teeth. Few of them, since they were all so poor, had cloaks that would keep out the cold. Standing there, chill myself in my Captain’s topcoat, I heard but did not heed. I was full of thoughts which turned round and round in my head, dizzy and frightening.
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    This was the second time within a few years that the Prince’s Lady had died in winter, and although this time there was no ugliness of murder the gloom that settled on the palace and city was scarcely less deep. Unlike my father my brother, at the outset, looked for my company. He would spend hours talking to me of Ann, repeating over and over small things, anecdotes from the life they had shared. But whereas it had hurt me that my father withdrew into a private sorrow, strangely I did not welcome this talk, and found myself slow and awkward in response.
    Sometimes the Christian priest was with us. He was a weak-looking man, small in stature and with a stoop that at times gave him a look of one of those polymufs who carry a second back upon the first. As though in copy of the Seers his head was shaved, apart from a thin circle of hair round the base of his skull, and he wore black like the Seers also but in a garment more resembling a woman’s.
    His voice, though, was strong if his body was weak. He talked in deep tones and was never lost for words. He was always on about this god of theirs, and there were some tales that even I found worth listening to. It seems that when soldiers were sent to arrest him, one of his men very rightly drew his sword and sliced an ear off one of the guards. But the man-god rebuked his follower, saying: “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” What I could not understand was what was wrong with a sword death. Was it not a better end than dying starving in a ditch, as many of these Christians looked like doing? I thought of asking the priest that, but then thought it would only bring on another flood of words and did not.
    He consoled Peter, as Ezzard had done my father, by declaring that he and Ann would meet in a better world than this. Ezzard had been able to further the deception with the machine through which my mother’s living voice had been captured on a moving tape, to be heard again in the darkness of the Seance Hall. The priest had no such aid, but he did well enough with words.
    And I, for my part, sickened of them, and of the black atmosphere which I could do nothing to lift and which roused troubling feelings in me: even a sense, although I knew it was absurd, of guilt. I withdrew more