Nathan Snake's Arc

Chapter 11 of 13

Nathan kept the journal and anvil wrapped in the cape until the daughter's brothers finished clearing brush from the temple entrance. He'd told them to make the place look abandoned from the road but livable inside. They'd done good work. The younger brother had piled blankets into a nest against the west wall where the stones held heat from the sun. The older one sat in the center of that nest with his arms crossed and his jaw set like a man who'd stopped asking and started demanding. Nathan had seen that look before on men who'd run out of patience with half-answers. The brother pointed past the temple wall to where the ground sloped down behind the ruins. He said they'd found something Nathan needed to see and he wasn't moving until Nathan explained what it was. Nathan followed him outside to the back of the temple where the earth dipped into a shallow basin. Wooden coffins lay stacked in rows beneath a thin layer of dirt and dead grass. Thirty of them at least. The wood was old but hadn't rotted through. Someone had built them to last and buried them to hide. The older brother turned to Nathan and asked why thirty people from the deacon's family were buried in secret on land meant for the poor. His voice was steady but his hands weren't. Nathan pulled a bone from his coat pocket. It was human. Femur by the length of it. He'd found it three days back when he'd first opened the alcove and hadn't known what it meant until now. He handed it to the older brother and said the deacon's family died of fever forty years ago and the church buried them here to keep the sickness quiet. The deacon had hidden his own dead on land his aunt gave to help the living. Nathan said he'd show the council the journal and the grave both and let them decide if the deacon's family deserved to keep what they'd stolen. The older brother held the bone and nodded once. He asked if the land was still theirs to use and Nathan said yes. The dead here had no one left to speak for them but the living still did.