Free Shadow Sister by Carole Wilkinson Page B

lips trembled. “My son died, and my wife. The only survivors from my family were me, my daughter-in-law, a granddaughter and this baby. My daughter-in-law was injured, bitten by the creature.”
    “Bitten?”
    “Yes. It was as if a snake bit her. Most of the dead were crushed when the monster destroyed the houses, but it bit several of the villagers too.”
    “And you buried your dead in a cave?”
    “No. We fled and never returned.”
    “But we found bodies in a cave,” Tao said. “There were no human remains in the village.”
    “Someone else must have buried our dead. I knew we should have done it ourselves, but fear drove us from our home.”
    “Where are the other villagers?”
    “There were about twenty survivors. We tried to find a suitable place to build a new village, but nowhere on this mountain seemed far enough away from the beast. The bites festered and more died from these wounds, including my daughter-in-law. And then my granddaughter got sick. I didn’t realise she had been bitten at first, she hid it from us.” Tao saw tears in the man’s eyes. “A man is supposed to favour the boys in his family, I know, but Baoyu was my favourite. So bright, so pretty. She was five, but she always looked after me, made sure I ate well. And she loved listening to my stories. She saw the monster attack her mother, sink its teeth into her flesh. She went to help her. Tiny little thing that she was, everyone else ran. That’s when it must have bitten her too. She was the only one who saw it clearly, but she couldn’t describe it. It was beyond her child’s words.”
    The old man brushed away his tears.
    “When I realised that she had been bitten too, I saw that it had taken off the end of her finger, but it seemed to be healing. The first ones to be bitten died immediately. Others took a little longer. The beast’s venom seemed to lose its strength. Baoyu was its final victim. I hoped she would survive. But as the days passed, the wound turned purple and swollen with poison. Then it turned black and the flesh started to rot away. It left a festering hole. You could see through to the bone. She was in terrible pain.”
    The old man was stroking a worn child’s jacket.
    “And then we saw nomads. We knew of their attacks down on the plain. We had seen the city on fire several times over the years, but they had never ventured onto our mountain before. Yet there they were. The other elders said that the people of Shenchi no longer had a place in the north. I wasn’t so sure. They decided to try to find the southern city, to go far away from nomads. Only the strong could go. They wanted to leave the weak behind – an old woman whose mind had gone, my granddaughter, myself and this babe who has no mother to feed him. The old woman didn’t eat and died after a few days. I am not a hunter or a gatherer of food. I worked with metal. I made the tools for our village, though there was little ore or metal that came our way. I mostly refashioned broken things.” His mind was far away for a while, back in a time when his village existed and his family still lived.
    “The fever entered my granddaughter about a week ago. She cried out for her mother. In her child’s voice she cursed the monster. She was the one who found food for us after her mother died. I know nothing about food gathering. But even if we had food, she wouldn’t have survived. She died too. Yesterday, or was it the day before? In the end, it was a relief to see her at peace.”
    He held up the grubby jacket. “This is hers.”
    Kai pointed to a small pile of stones that Tao hadn’t noticed before. It was a burial cairn, poorly built and surrounded by a circle of freshly burnt grass where the pyre had been.
    “It is not our way to burn the bodies of our dead, but I didn’t have the strength to dig a grave. That cairn was all I could manage.”
    He looked at the sleeping baby.
    “When this babe dies, my entire family will be dead. There will be