Land of the Beautiful Dead (78 page)

When it happened, it happened fast. For days, there had been only talk of the siege and the inevitable victory that surely must follow where ten thousand fearless men and women pitted themselves against Evil. Then the deep-ferries stopped coming from Eastport and after a full day without word, someone drove up the coast to Old Calais and returned to say that not only had they not had any deep-ferries either, but that there was smoke over the distant shore of England. Not just over Dover, they said, but all of it, as much as could be seen. 

It was very quiet in the tavern that night. Men sat by the windows and watched the sea and drank too much in silence.

Eleven days passed, each one like the final blow of the headsman, and in the morning, you had to get up and climb the stair to kneel at the block again.

On the twelfth day, the deep-ferries came back, all of them, one right after the other, and even Lan’s inexpert eye could see them sitting too damn low in the water. The people who got off the boats were quiet, smudged with ash and streaked with tears, blindly staring. They answered no questions, just shuffled off along the docks and milled into the streets. Some had satchels. Some had children. Most had nothing. And after many hours, many boats, Lan saw the first faces she knew. Norwood’s faces, none of them rebels and none of them whole. Pippa without Posey. Elvie without Eithon. Little Abbey and Ivy, hand in hand, but not their mother, Danae.

When the last boat docked, there was only one passenger and he came just far enough to let the silver trimmings of his Revenant’s uniform be seen. Deimos surveyed the crowd below him with his usual lack of expression, then drew his sword and held it up for silence. In a loud, clear voice, he called, “By order of our sovereign lord Azrael, the true and living god; Azrael the Immortal, guardian of the grave; Azrael the Invincible, ruler of all things; be it known the living are banned from the land formerly known as the United Kingdoms, hereafter to be known as the Purged Lands. Any living human found in trespass there will be put to death by impalement. Our lord is merciful. Our lord is merciful.”  He sheathed his sword, started to turn away, then paused and looked back.

The little time he and Lan gazed at each other occupied its own eternity, but as soon as he turned and went back onto the ferry, she realized it had only been a few seconds after all. The ferry chugged away. The crowd began to disperse, muttering amongst itself and giving the refugees narrow stares and a wide berth. Mal Henri tapped Lan’s arm and walked with her back to the tavern because, even if it wasn’t noon yet, people were going to want to drink.

“If anyone asks, you’re my sister’s girl,” he was telling her in his gruff manner. “Folk remember that she had one before she went away, even if you are a bit young. And no more you speak
anglais
, eh? No more. Now,
tu parleras française, oui?
”

“I’m not staying,” said Lan, looking back to watch the ferry grow smaller on the sea.

“Put it from your mind,
ma fillette
,” he grunted, not without a kind of coarse sympathy. “You have no home now.”

But she did and someday, she knew she’d have to go back. But not yet, she decided. She could stay one more night, just to let things settle. Maybe even longer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

T
he moon was rising full over the broken walls when Lan returned to Norwood. The moon of mid-winter was called Cold Moon and Dead Moon and sometimes Azrael’s Moon. When she’d been little, the other kids used to scare each other by imagining a skull in the shadowed craters of its face, but of course, it was the same moon. Just a rock, spinning out there in space, oblivious to the rising tides or shivering little kids it affected on Earth. But it made a good lamp, shining bright on the thin crust of snow that lay over the land, so that Lan could walk by night as well as by day and come to the village where she’d been born.

It felt strange, coming back this way. When Deimos had brought her here from Haven, she’d been in a van and looking at the world through a window just wasn’t the same. Walking was more personal, elevating the act to something epic—a journey, a quest. There were no more Eaters to watch for through the still hours of the night, nor were there rogue ferries or caravans of townless folk looking to prey on defenseless travelers. The roads were overgrown to a startling degree, considering it had only been a year. Likewise, the towns she passed along her way showed ages of neglect for the little time they’d been empty. Deer grazed between the broken walls of greenhouses; fields that had been plowed outside the walls for the first time in thirty years now were jungles, their first crop grown wild and gone to seed and weed; wild dogs joined her on her walk now and then, throwing off their feral instincts for half-remembered domesticity, but they all turned back after a short distance, so she came to Norwood alone.

No one hailed her from the wall. The gate doors stood open—beaten open, by the looks of them—so Lan went in. Hers were the only footprints. There were no tire tracks, no lumpy divots in the frozen mud to show where traffic, such as it ever was here, was heaviest. The ferry lot was empty; the charging stations still stood, unsalvaged, still soaking up sun during the days and blinking out their faint green light to show they were ready to power up your batteries. The seed shed and greenhouses were burnt, but the rest of the lodges were mostly undamaged. In the stockyard, she found Sheriff Neville’s faithful hounds, lying frozen where they’d finally starved after eating the goats, the pigs, the Mayor’s feet, and each other. The other bodies, the human bodies, were nothing but skeletons held together by the rags of their clothes and the spikes that impaled them to the thatched roofs where anyone could see them. She identified Neville and his deputies by their clothes, but the rest were beyond all recognition. There weren’t many, in any case. She’d passed a dozen villages and towns in the last month since coming back to England, and they were all like this: a handful of bodies, a mere suggestion of violence, and stillness.

There was nothing else to see here. Lan went to the cook house and down into the cold cellar. It too was untouched by scavenging hands; potatoes and turnips filled their bins, rotted black; apples had withered to the size of walnuts in the barrel; chickens slaughtered the morning of the purge still hung from the rafters, eaten down to feather and bone by the colony of wasps that had built the paper nest bulging out from the wall. She ducked under it, helped herself to a jar of peaches off the shelf and took it upstairs to eat.

A Revenant was waiting for her when she came back into the long hall where the tables were. They looked at each other without speaking for maybe half a minute. Then Lan walked over to a bench and sat. She pulled her knife and used it to peel the wax away and pry the lid up. She scooped out the black scum from the top of the jar, flicked it onto the floor, and said, “Want some?”

“I don’t eat.” But he did come over and sit down on the bench opposite her. He set his unsheathed sword on the table. The curved blade caught a little moonlight through the window and threw it up into Lan’s eyes.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked. The peaches were soft-frozen, making them tasteless and crunchy in their slush. She ate them anyway and thought with every bite how much she hated peaches.

“Oh yes.”

“Will you take me to Haven?”

“As soon as you are content to leave.”

“Out of curiosity…” Lan chopped out a last peach-slice and pushed the jar away. “How long have you been following me?”

His head cocked. “When did you become aware?”

“I never saw you,” she admitted. “I just had that itchy feeling. How long?”

He smiled. “Since you landed.”

“You’ve been tailing me all the way from Eastport? Really?” Lan managed a rueful smile of her own. “That’s just embarrassing. Why did you let me walk all the bloody way to Norwood, then?”

“The captain thought you’d want to see it.”

“Deimos? How thoughtful.” Although still smiling, Lan’s brows slowly knitted. “What did Azrael say?”

The Revenant gazed at her for a long, silent time. Then he rose and picked up his sword, using it to gesture toward the door. “If you are rested?”

“Is something wrong?” Lan asked, rising from the bench in the empty cookhouse at the heart of her abandoned village, silent now but for the rustle and knock of bone when the breeze blew through the corpses impaled to the roofs. She was very dimly aware of the contrast between these two facts, manifesting itself as the ghost of a thought—‘Perspective’—before she said, “Is Azrael all right?”

“Our lord is eternal,” the Revenant replied, which was not exactly an answer, and he seemed to know it. “I will answer no more questions. The captain is waiting for you.”

If he’d known about her ever since she’d landed, Deimos had been waiting two weeks already and another question more or less couldn’t make much of a delay, but Lan did not argue. She started to shoulder her rucksack, then just put it down again. There were things in it still that might be useful to another traveler, but Lan would have no more need for it in Haven and, one way or another, she doubted she’d ever leave. The thought brought no apprehension, only an impatience to be there, to slam the door on this whole past year and be back where she belonged.

“I never should have left,” she murmured, giving her rucksack a push into the middle of the table, unopened. She left it there and nodded at the dead man. “I’m ready now. Let’s go.”

* * *

The drive from Norwood to Haven was offensively short, considering how long it had taken her to ride in two years ago. The journey that had lasted two months by ferry (“You have not come a long way,” the memory of Azrael reminded her in his dry, smiling way. “You have rode a little, walked a little and waited much.”) took less than a day in the Revenant’s van. True, he drove through the night, needing no rest and taking no special care on the Eater-less roads, but the unfairness of it still rankled.

Without anything to look at or listen to except the droning of the engine, Lan drifted off and slept out most of the trip, waking only twice when the Revenant stopped to charge up at the lifeless waystations along the road. When the sun came up again, its light woke her for good, unfolding through the sickly yellow clouds to show her the blasted hills and crumbling fences that divided the land, with the dark towers of Haven peeking over the horizon. She stretched as best she could in the confines of the vehicle, then reached to roll down the window for some bracing morning air.

“I wouldn’t,” said the Revenant.

She glanced at him, then looked back at the road just in time to see the first pikes come into view.

And then all the rest of them.

She had noticed there weren’t many bodies in the villages. She had even thought, when she bothered to think about it at all, that those she had found were surely only those who had resisted being removed from their homes. The rebels, those who actually marched on Haven and raised weapons against the dead, would be wherever they had fallen…and here they were. The dead, the sheer number of them, defied imagining even as she looked right at them. Fifty was a number, or a hundred or a thousand, but this was beyond counting. After a certain point, trees just become a forest and one cannot see more than that. So it was now: Lan looked and saw only glimpses of what had been men and women, who were now only components of a bodiless whole.

And then they were driving through them, engulfed by a landscape of dead. The wind of their passage made a whicking sound through their dangling leg bones and made their ragged clothing snap out like banners. Their dead heads lolled, turning as if to watch them pass. Their hanging arms shifted, their fingers seemed to point. The sun itself could not be seen through the thickest drifts. They were as branches against a winter sky, interlocked, uncountable.

She could smell them, even with the windows rolled up. It was not the smell of rot—she could only imagine what that would have been like, when all these bodies were fresh—but the smell of death. Old death. Eroded. Cool. It was the smell of clothing that had been rained on and wind-dried a hundred times. It was unwashed hair, dry-rotted hide, weathered bone. It was shit and piss left to lie on the open earth. And it was everywhere, in every breath.

Azrael had done this. She’d known he would, even said he would to those she’d known wouldn’t listen, and if she’d felt anything at all as she took herself away from that doomed place, it had been only bright-burning anger around a hot coal of serves-you-right and then she’d thought of them no more until she saw the first familiar faces turn up in Anglais-en-Port. But now she saw it. Now it was here in front of her and behind her and leaning in on every side and it was not just the people of Norwood or the people of an army, but all of them. It was every person in the world and they were all dead.

The Revenant watched her as he drove. He seemed to be waiting for something, but she didn’t know what. What could she—What could anyone say about this? The horror was too big to even to choke on.

“They came to us,” he said at last.

“I know.”

“The war was over and we were content with its end. They were the ones to bring it back.”

She nodded. She knew that, too.

“What did they think would happen?” the Revenant muttered, bumping over a pike that had fallen across the road.

Lan could only shake her head. They thought they’d win, of course. Wasn’t that the point of every old book and film and fairy tale, that Mankind would prevail? Dragons, demons, aliens, superviruses…zombies…they were all the same shadow, cringing away from the light. And no matter how terrible the threat or how unstoppable it seemed or how many millions of people had to die first, there would always be survivors and if those survivors just…just
survived
long enough…well, of course they’d win. Because they deserved to. Because they were fighting for their homes and their way of life and for all humanity. Because nothing could be stronger than the human spirit.

But that was only true in stories. The Earth may be Man’s home, but it didn’t have to love them for it, and in its unflinching eyes, humans were parasites, no different and no more deserving of life than any other worm feeding on a body from within. They were not
owed
victory. That went, as it went in every war, to the one best equipped to fight. The dead couldn’t get any deader; the living could.

They came to the gate and were waved to a halt by the armed guards on watch there, both of whom executed comical double-takes when they saw Lan sitting calmly in the front seat looking back at them. One of them started to order the Revenant out, but stammered to a stop when he saw who he was arresting. The other visibly braced himself and drew his sword, aiming it directly at the Revenant’s amused face. “Traffic of the living is forbidden. You must be taken into custody, by order of Lord Azrael. Exit the vehicle.”

“I need to deal with this. Don’t move.” The Revenant got out of the van and walked a few steps away to speak with them at a distance.

Lan waited, staring fixedly at the walls ahead of her and not the bodies at her back, but she could still hear them. The sound of thousands of limbs knocking gently against their poles and the fluttering of their thousands of ragged clothes muddled together after a while. She tried to pretend she was listening to the waves hitting the shore back in Anglais-en-Port and couldn’t, quite.

The Revenant came back and started up the van’s engine as the guards opened Haven’s gate.

“All sorted out?” Lan asked. She wasn’t really worried for her life, but with the sound of corpses like an endless tide all around her, she wasn’t as confident as she might otherwise have been either.

“Those our lord trusts to keep his peace and protect his domain, he makes Revenants,” the dead man replied, driving into the city and nodding to acknowledge the salutes of the guards. “Those competent in any other skill, he puts to work. Everyone else, he sets to watch.”

“He puts people where he thinks they’ll serve him best.”

“How does it serve him to put fools on the gate?” the Revenant asked scornfully. “Even you got past them once and you don’t strike me as an expert in the art of stealth.”

Lan shrugged that off and said, “He’s bored. You don’t see that? If no one like me ever got in, he’d never have anyone to talk to but you people, and that can’t be much better than talking to himself. No offense.”

He had to think that over before he said, “I think I am offended,” in a mildly curious tone. “Although I suppose I shouldn’t be. I can’t see the fault in your logic. All I can say in rebuttal is that he didn’t make us for our conversational skills and he well could have.”