Chapters (14)
‘So you don’t fear death, do you?’ he snarled, bending her head downwards. ‘Then have a look, she-rat. That is death. That is how you die. Look, those are guts. That is blood. And that is shit. That’s what’s inside us all.’
Ciri tensed up, bent over, still gripped by his hand, and dry-retched hoarsely. Mistle was still alive, but her eyes were already misty, glazed, fishlike. Her hand, like a hawk’s talons, clenched and unclenched, clawing the mud and dung. Ciri smelled the acrid, penetrating odour of urine. Bonhart cackled.
‘That is how you’ll die, little Rat. In your own piss!’
He released her hair. Ciri collapsed onto all fours, racked by dry, choking sobs. Mistle was right beside her. Mistle’s hand, slender, delicate, soft; Mistle’s hand…
It was no longer moving.
‘He didn’t kill me. He tied my hands to the hitching post.’
Vysogota sat motionless. He had been sitting like that for a long time. He was even holding his breath. Ciri continued her tale, but her voice was becoming more and more hushed, more and more unnatural, more and more unpleasant.
‘He ordered the people who had gathered to bring him a sack of salt and a keg of vinegar. And a saw. I didn’t know… I couldn’t understand what he meant to do… I still didn’t know what he was capable of. I was tied… to the hitching post… He called some servants, ordered them to hold me by the hair… and by the eyelids. He showed them how; so I couldn’t turn my head away or close my eyes… So I had to watch what he was doing. “You have to take pains so the goods won’t go off,” he said. “So they won’t decay…” ’
Ciri’s voice cracked, stuck dryly in her throat. Vysogota, suddenly realising what he was hearing, felt the saliva well up in his mouth like a flood wave.
‘He cut off their heads,’ Ciri said dully. ‘With a saw. Giselher, Kayleigh, Asse, Reef, Iskra… And Mistle. He sawed off their heads… One after the other. In front of my eyes.’
If someone were to have quietly crept up that night to the remote cottage in the midst of the swamp with its sunken, moss-grown thatched roof, were they to have peered through the slits in the shutters, in the dimly-lit interior they would have seen a grey-bearded old man in a sheepskin coat and an ashen-haired girl with her face disfigured by a scar on her cheek. They would have seen the girl racked with sobs, choking on tears in the arms of the old man, while he tried to calm her, awkwardly and mechanically stroking and patting her trembling shoulders.
But it was not possible. No one could have seen it. The cottage was well concealed amidst the marshes. In a wilderness ever covered in mist, where no one dared to venture.