Two hundred paces below the abbey’s outer gate. There, the old burial road curved beneath a grove of tall red pines, stood the upper funerary shrine. It was a modest open-sided pavilion of dry-laid mountain stone where families from the valley villages had placed memorial tablets for three ages, and where Mother Renn, Seyun. Nara had paused before the final northern assault during that earlier ordeal to restore the carved cedar plaque bearing the names of Renn’s son Aven and the caravan driver Pel.
The afternoon sunlight slanted warm and golden through the pine needles, dappling the mossy roof tiles and the quiet grass behind the shrine’s low retaining wall.
Seyun laid the linen-wrapped bundle on the clean stone bench inside the shrine porch, unslung Master Orin’s iron mattock. Then he walked around to the sheltered patch of deep pine-loam under the western roof edges. Mindful of Mina’s rule against overhead swinging with his braced left shoulder, he kept his left hand tucked safely inside his sash and used short, rhythmic two-foot strokes with his right arm and hip weight. Cutting through the mat of pine needles and loosening the dark, root-scented mountain soil before scooping it out with a flat wooden trenching paddle from the road-mender’s shed.
