His mother was the hardest. He didn’t even think that he felt he had killed her; hadn’t even registered such a guilt, but while he carried her slight, rotting form, stiff with rigor mortis and with the skin moving disgustingly over the hardened muscles, he thought of Orley; of his hatred for the man. Aneas was too intelligent to fail to understand himself.

He placed Ghause in the widened circle of sunlight, on what had become a mound. When he laid her down, he knelt by her awhile, and then he went back and got Fitzalan.

There was something particularly terrible about handling in death a body you had lusted for in life. Ands something disconcerting and paradoxical about the corpse; it was more decomposed than his mother’s. And the head was attached. Some of Richard’s rotting skin stuck to his; fluids leached out of his friend. The smell was so bad he choked.

He got Richard to the new meadow. He took time to lay the body out, tried to close his friend’s eyes, but that proved a bad idea. His gorge rose.

He turned with a muttered prayer and went back for Anthony.

He looked at Anthony for a while, too, wondering whether he’d loved the boy or simply wanted to strike a blow at his father. Who had certainly struck back. In the extended metaphor of his mind, Anthony looked exactly as he had looked when his father had ordered the boy killed. He was not decomposed at all.

“I knew,” Aneas said aloud. “I knew what he’d do.”

He went back and got Prudentia, and the others. All in all, there were an uncountable number of trips; some he held only as shadowy forms, others had a firm reality of decay and ordure; this, too, he understood.

The strangest was the slim figure that was clearly his own. Without a wound, and no sign of rot. He paused for a long time, trying to think if there was another message here, or some new action required, but in the end, he carried his own corpse to the new green mound in the cool green woods.

And then he was done, his task complete, and he stood in sunlight. The pool was clear; potentia bubbled from the ground under his stone, and the stone was clean except for one deep mark, as if of a footprint.

Gas-a-ho came and stood with him. The tree towered over the pool again; the brambles were gone as if they’d never been. The tree was in bud.

“Nice,” the shaman said. “Some people never manage it.”

“Are they real?” Aneas asked. “The dead people?”

Gas-a-ho looked at him, and his eyes sparkled. “That’s up to you, isn’t it?” he asked. “Only you decide if other people are real.”

He took a medicine bag from around his neck and hung it on the tree.