The stiffness had never set in.
That was usually the way with corpses. The tendons and sinews were the first to suffer the indignity of death -- the bowels expelled, the water trickled free, and the sudden looseness in the muscles rattled out a final flatulent cry. A farewell dirge, an announcement to the world that a life had ended, and the meat had been quickly set to rot.
The next was the blood. Without a heart in governance, it would cease to pump. Lifeless fluids would pool in patches of black and purple at the body's lowest points, swelling the already-tightening flesh, forming hard, dark blisters that begged for breath and air. Blood wanting for purpose, but that found none. Fermentation in the organs and their raucous juices. The knuckles would expand until they popped with gasses, the knees would crack and turn inward as skin became rawhide, and the stomach would begin to bloat, almost pregnant, as the acids and flotsam within proceeded to yield a stink, a proclamation--
This body is dead. This body must be burned.
But Jule Mitchell, a fairly new attendant in the employ at the Rememdium Edificium, never intended to burn the corpse. Not because he would not have preferred it, but because the evidence was unclear. The definitions of what he'd learned in his youthful tenures at the behest of bandages and bonesaws were suddenly blurred by this, the corpse of one Niall the spearwielder--
One, a grievous wound cleaved into her spine, so deep that the red became black. A lung beneath had been hacked almost in two, rightfully deflated. How had the boy's reluctant edge missed the vertabrae, how it had struck so true -- as if the woman had willingly readied herself for the blow -- was a wonder for only the One God to discern.
Two, the distinct absence of breath or heartbeat, of consciousness or being. No stink of feces in the bloody trousers nor the blanch patch of urine that would have guaranteed a body's last rites of function.
Three, there had been no deterioration. No rigor, no pooling, no rigidity in the limbs or atrophy of the muscles. He'd waited five hours, then ten; he'd breakfasted the next morning, then lunched, then returned to the body again to find it was still pliable, still soft.
Four, the seamstress' words: You cannot burn her. There has got to be something for her to go back to. When all is said and done, she has got to be like a cup, a cup that you're waiting to -- to fill right back up. You see? And we can just pour her right back into her skin.
He mixed the poultices. He crushed the herbs. He found a room in the Rememdium for this corpse that refused to rot, as if something, something that separated the colors of life from the finality of death had forgotten its course.
Jule Mitchell wrapped the body of the spearwielder in ribbons of fabric soaked in a dilution of molac root. To keep away the pests, the flies. To ensure the skin suffered no undue trauma. He stuffed the wound with milky leaves.
For days, there was no life. There would be no life.
What are you doing, Jule? You should just burn it -- you know the teachings, you know the rules.
But skeptical boys always made mistakes.