The snowy season had come, and it was snowing now as the light began to fade. It would probably snow all night and in the morning the world would be clean again. But under the freshness, the crispness, the pristine shroud that gleamed in the rising sun, the filth and horror would still be there, waiting for the thaw and the decay of the spring to dissolve the mush and leave only bones. The old woman nodded to herself for a moment as she entertained this thought.
Bones are like icicles, she decided, but they lie horizontally on the ground and don’t hang from the branches of bare trees or from the eaves of crude circular huts. Perhaps icicles really are bones, the bones of frost monsters, stunted giants with colder lives than men. And yet the men were cooling now too, the men strewn on the
