Mourner sang. That was what she did when she was not being read, and she was awake on the Mound because the Mound was where the dead were kept, and the Mound was the only place in the Hold where her trade carried its full weight.
The grass on the Garrison Mound was long and grey at this season, and the stones along its crest had been set by hands that had not thought of their own names as anything more than a line in a wage-book. Mourner sat among them in the last of the evening light with her Form turned up toward the sky, and her voice went out low over the Hold’s roofs and came back off the Caul’s flank in a long soft echo, as if the hills themselves had learned the tune and were keeping it company.
She sang the names read so far, in order.
There were a hundred and thirty-four of them. Mourner sang each one with its trade and its wage, the way the Roll gave them, and she did not add a word. That was the law of the Mound and it had been the law since the Articles were written. A name the Mound had not been given was a name the Mound did not own, and to sing it would be to take something from the Roll that was not the Mound’s to take. So she sang what the Roll had given her. Lime-burner, Aud Marr, wage paid. Sawyer…
