Savory had introduced me to reeve Asart, the village leader, answerable to Lord Governor Aver-Falconet. He reports to Aver-Falconet’s steward twice a year. Why was he part of this abhorrent dance? Did Hacilith know? Did the Castle know? Of course they must, I wrested from myself. I am the only one ignorant of the Cathee, because nothing like this is written in the books of Awia’s libraries.

The rest of the village left their work or emerged from their cabins silently, as if at an agreed signal. The women in short shifts and rawhide aprons, the men in their plaids and breeches, they formed a silent queue behind the stretcher.

I stared around the log cabins, and now I could more clearly see their ornamentation. The heads above the doors were real skulls! They were covered in plaster, shells set in their eye sockets, and affixed with paste all around them to the surface of the logs. Their snaggling yellow teeth showed between carefully moulded lips.

I looked to the reeve’s house. The sculptures that I had taken to be women were whole articulated skeletons re-fleshed with plaster. It had flaked off here and there; I saw brittle weathered bone underneath. Their curves and features had been shaped, but where the breasts swelled over some woman’s ancient rib-cage, projecting instead of nipples from the plaster were the hooked and open beaks of vultures.

The reeve had by now left the gate and the rest were following. I stumbled behind, some distance from the rear of the procession. I had to see where they were taking Savory. The reeve, villagers and mummers still carrying bagpipes, flutes and bones pushed between the trees on a little-worn path, in complete silence.

We were walking uphill, but I could tell no more. All the forest looked the same to me and I could scarcely see it. My eyes were stinging, I was weeping freely, and trying to see through my tears as through an awash uneven glass. Savory was a white blur as the procession wound between the close phalanxes of dark green pines on either side. The twisting brambles at the trackside scratched me, held me back, and snatched loops of thread out of the damn plaid cloak.

At length we came to a clearing, and beyond the screen of trees I glimpsed a gigantic mound, grassed-over equally with the ground. It must be man-made because it was completely circular, some ten metres across and surrounded by flat black stones propped up against its circumference. Three huge undressed rocks at the front formed a portal, one resting horizontally on two uprights, from which a tunnel lined with slabs led into its lightless depths. A single stone, standing a metre in front of the entrance, obscured the passageway from my sight. I assumed this was their crude mausoleum, like my great family tomb, in which they would lay dear Savory, but the procession did not stop.

The villagers cast glances at the knoll as they passed by, with looks on their faces almost as if it reassured them-and even the reeve’s skull mask turned towards it for an instant.

The forest was now alive with birds cawing and skitterings in the undergrowth. I took the arm of the last man in the procession, who carried his toddler son on his shoulders: ‘What’s going on? Tell me, man!’

He shook me away with an angry sneer.

A great cloud of birds burst up out of the trees ahead, cracking through twigs and branches. They separated out; kites and buzzards began to circle but the big glossy ravens dropped back down into the tree tops further on.

A terrible stench of corruption rose with them and hit me with such strength I gagged. It was the fatty smell of putrefying human flesh, which I have often encountered on the battlefield. The villagers showed no concern. I pulled my handkerchief from my trouser pocket and pressed it over my nose.

We came up to a high log palisade, but the silence and the smell told me this was not another village. Its gate had a woman’s skeleton plastered to the centre. Its eye sockets shone dully with cowry shells and all its teeth were bared between open lips. Again, its breasts were sculpted with panting beaks instead of nipples.

The Cathee entered an enclosure where the short grass was free of saplings and in the centre a great wooden scaffold stood two metres high: a platform raised on six trunks stripped clean of bark. The top of the platform was not solid, it was a criss-cross of rough-hewn timbers. Shreds hung down between them. At first I thought the shreds were fabric but they did not move with the breeze. A large strip dangled through the grating, tasselled at the end-it was a human arm and hand.

They set down the stretcher next to the platform and gathered along it, standing in ragged fashion side by side. I remained in the shadow of the gate and watched.

The reeve stood by Savory’s head. She looked so peaceful, as if she was asleep, were it not for the outrage of her nakedness. The reeve climbed a rough ladder of logs, up to the platform and appeared high above us against the sky. He crossed towards the villagers looking up, but as he did so he accidentally kicked the arm. It was mostly bone, it swung and fell off, and up stirred the rank smell of carrion. My gorge rose and I hunched over and vomited. What were they doing to my wife? I fell to my knees and heaved again and again-till it hollowed me out.

They did not hand up the whole stretcher. There were no ropes nor pulley to raise it to the top of the platform with any sort of dignity. The two bearers just picked up Savory’s body, one holding her ankles, the other her upper arms. He grappled with handfuls of her hair. Stiffness had set in and they had to turn her body as they lifted her. I saw in a flash the pink line of her sex between her legs. The masked reeve bent and seized her round the ribs, manhandled her onto the platform and laid her down.

And then he descended and walked underneath the scaffold, beckoning the villagers to join him. They huddled together, bent over, and began to pick bones and teeth from among the grass. The women folded their skirts and gathered them inside, the men cradled handfuls. Up and down they walked in methodical lines as if harvesting, and any man who found two bones still articulated, pulled them apart with a twist and a yank.

They piled all the bones on the stretcher, and in silent procession like before, they carried the stretcher out past me, though I was on my knees and coughing up bile. I shrank from them but I had to follow or in their stony blindness they would have barred me in with the dead. The first few heavy ravens were swooping down with guttural calls from the trees to feed.

I trailed some distance behind the procession to the mouth of the burial mound. They stopped by its portal, in a semi-circle. The reeve and stretcher-bearers slipped behind the stone screen and into the tunnel. They must have intended to deposit the bones in there.

I had seen enough. I spat and turned away, deranged. I ran back to the village, where I took a bow, a quiver-full of arrows and a spade. If any of the Cathee had tried to stop me I would have cleaved his head in two with it.

So they would take Savory, my Savory, and leave her to rot, feed her to vermin, then jumble her bones with everyone else’s? So they wanted to obliterate her identity until no one could recognise her remains? So they were content to forget her unique, intriguing life? What did that mean? What sort of people scrub out the honour of their ancestors? Their disrespect tore at my heart, cracked open and bleeding inside me. Savory is still a person, still my love. What is she to the Cathee? An empty vessel? No longer a woman, just an object that’s part of their past, that they will place with the rest and tidy away so life can go on? My life could not go on. My life had stopped. I thought of what we Awians do, with our glass carriages drawn by ebony-plumed horses. I thought of the vigil I kept over Mother’s lying-in-state, a drawn sword in front of me and my wings spread. How we exhibited the old bat as if she could still feel, in satin on the catafalque strewn with lilac and lavender and rue.