Bellmaker v. Bhikkhu

The snow turns to a light rain.

After the Bellhop's body is dragged to the the great pile of ash of the pyre the Bellmaker wipes his calloused hands off on the sides of his trousers. The smell doesn't bother him now. He returns to the oak, waits, then turns up his collar and walks to wander along the edge of the creek to the south.

The Bhikkhu - tall, bald, wearing a red robe - walks from the road.

His robe is red but variegated, in patches. As if several smaller robes had been rent, many and uneven, and these pieces spaced at an equal distance from each other, the gaps between those pieces taken with cloth from others in the array of robes, as if layered, in dizzying fashion, to create from several smaller robes of singular cloth one large robe of many cloths, some old, some new, some weathered, and so on, forming a greater whole.

The Bellmaker, sitting atop the Archer's small cairn, hears footsteps behind him and turns. He greets the Bhikkhu with a nod. The Bhikkhu smiles, cheerful. He stands nearby. They discuss the weather and the creek, and death by water.

As they return to the oak for the guns it strikes the Bellmaker (noiselessly) that for a man confronted with a pile of dead, and a pyre of the dead, and the close prospect of death, the Bhikkhu - now blithely humming the tune from the third act of a musical - seems disturbingly undisturbed. This, to the Bellmaker, is disturbing. The thought that the Bellmaker is more disturbed by the undisturbed Bhikkhu than the dead is also, the Bellmaker reflects momentarily, disturbing in its own right. But this doesn't take him from the source of his greatest disturbance.

They select their guns and take the field, standing ten paces apart. The Bhikkhu bows.

Did you see the dead by the fence? asks the Bellmaker.

The Bhikkhu says he has.

I don't know if you saw the crows?

The Bhikkhu says he has.

And the pyre? That's where the bodies are burning.

The Bhikkhu's seen this too.

And that doesn't bother you?

The Bhikkhu laughs. Bellmaker, if all is burning, he says, it make sense that the bodies are burning too.

They raise their guns. Their guns go off.