Solomon Kane Read Online Free PDF Page A

outside their scope. They were presiding over a funeral.
    Kane passed by as discreetly as he could. If he had been an emissary from the island in the lake he could at least have bestowed a blessing or offered a prayer. Instead he did his best to hide his face in the hood of his heavy robe as a women cried out with grief. The shrouded body that two men were laying on the pyre scarcely needed both of them to lift the crude stretcher. Kane raised his staff so as not to strike the earth as he trudged behind the Celtic cross that marked the junction of the roads, but the bereaved mother lifted her head to watch him. Surely just the tears that blurred her eyes made them look accusing. Kane strode onwards twenty paces before he yielded to a compulsion to glance back. The beaked headswere turned towards him, and he could have thought the inhuman eyes were observing him.
    How tainted was the land? Into what state had the world fallen during his time on the island? Little news had reached the monastery, and in any case discussion of such worldly matters was frowned upon. Kane did not slacken his pace until the crossroads were out of sight and he saw a solitary oak ahead of him, beside a track across a heath. He sat against the venerable trunk and quenched his thirst, and then he wrapped his robe about him against the chill that blanched the heath. He hoped to rest for a few minutes, but he had scarcely closed his eyes when he heard movement above him. A crow had alighted on a leafless branch.
    Whatever it was holding in its beak, the object looked torn and raw. A drop of dull red dangled from it and then spattered a fallen leaf beside Kane. He sprang to his feet and struck at the crow with his staff, but the scavenger flapped away across the heath. Kane had no more liking for the place it had marked, and he set off along the track. He appeared to be travelling west, so far as he could judge with no sight of the sun. The oak was far behind him when he saw the crow ahead.
    He had the unpleasant notion that it was the same bird, no longer perched in a tree. Structures reminiscent of the trellises in the monastery garden towered on either side of the road. Three hanged men, or as much of them as the crows had left intact, dangled from each. As Kane strode between the gibbets, refusing to be daunted, the crow flapped down from the crosspiece to settle on the shoulder of a man with half a face. While the greatest delicacies had been consumed, the nose between the empty sockets was there for the taking. The beak pecked and tore and gouged at the grisly titbit toreveal the cavity beneath.
    Kane set his gaze resolutely on the way ahead and struck the rough road again and again with his staff. The gibbets would have been in sight, if he had any reason to look back, when he heard movement behind him, growing louder. It was too large for a crow. It might have belonged to a flock of them, but he had the unwelcome fancy that the ravaged bodies of the hanged men had taken it into their minds to jig in mid-air on the gibbets, unless they were struggling to free themselves and drop to the road and scuttle on all fours or shamble after him. But the noise was made by rain, which quickly found him.
    It was almost as icy as hail, but worse. Its chill penetrated Kane’s garb at once, and soon the onslaught drenched him. The cold clung to him, reaching for his bones. The downpour cloaked the land, so that he might have been trudging along a road through a grey void, from which it only gradually emerged. Nothing was clear apart from the shaggy verges of the road and the hedges separating them from the obscured fields. The only hint of life was the activity of rain in the hedges, trickling down the pallid twigs to dangle from the icy leaves. Once Kane thought he saw a raindrop turn to ice.
    There was no shelter to be seen. Kane almost wished he had sought refuge in whatever settlement the gibbets served, but he suspected that travellers could expect no