Valley of the Dead (4 page)

Dante yanked the horse around and looked over his shoulder, back at the pandemonium of the square. The burning branches ignited the oil-soaked wood around the stake. The flames leaped all around the crazed woman, and her clothes were already burning, though oddly she seemed calmer than before. Dante could see the young soldier’s horse was nearly uncontrollable, panicked by the fire and the screaming crowd, and it bucked and reared back, almost throwing him.

Dante heard the crackling sound again right before one of the church steeples exploded in fiery sparks and masonry dust. With a sound like some giant piece of pottery breaking, the tower fell forward. If the town official had been just a step closer to the church, or a few steps further away, he might have been safe. But he wasn’t, and the top third of the tower fell right on him. Dante felt no inclination to contain a grim smile.

The madwoman screamed, though not in agony, but in something that chilled and disoriented Dante more, for it sounded like delight or even pleasure. “At night I see a dragon, too. It’s only a small one, though. It lives east of the town.” The flames climbed higher around her, sometimes completely obscuring Dante’s view of her. “Now can I have some apples?” She laughed as she writhed against her bonds. For a moment, she looked right into Dante’s eyes, and he was shocked to see her gaze was not filled with pain or terror, but with some manic, erotic excitement that seethed then burst forth from her – a frenzied glee as the cruelty of the crowd smashed into her innocence, like a hammer onto an anvil, and both these primal, unquenchable forces together savaged her fragile body and broken mind. Her eyes sparkled and her laughter rose above the flames and the screams from the crowd. “Don’t go near the elderberry, Mother. Sometimes there’s a pig that climbs its branches! He’s a wily one, with red eyes and sharp tusks. But don’t hurt him, Mother. He doesn’t know any better. He thinks he can fly, like he used to. Wheeee!”

The soldier’s horse reared up one more time, then he finally got control over it, pointing it right toward Dante and making it crash through the scattering remnants of the crowd. He pulled up next to Dante, panting and flushed. “Come!” he shouted. “We have to get out of here!”

The soldier rode off, but Dante couldn’t tear himself away from the horror of the dying woman and the senseless, frenzied chaos of the people dashing all about the square, some of them on fire, some trampling others under foot, some swatting and screaming as the wasps stung them over and over. And beyond the flames, he now saw other people shuffling in to the square. These people did not seem panicked, but moved slowly, stiffly, and deliberately. Although the waves of heat coming off the flames made it hard to see clearly, it looked to him as though these people entering the square were covered in blood. The one closest seemed to be missing his left arm. Dante could hear their moaning, underneath and all around the other sounds of death and pain assailing him.

Bogdana tightened her grip around Dante’s waist. “Go, go! You can’t help her! They’ve all gone mad!”

Pulling back on the reins, he closed his eyes and could barely keep from sobbing. He kicked the animal hard to get them out of there. He could hear the woman’s laughter a long time after they had left the town behind. Her eyes he would see in nightmares all his life.

Chapter
6

“These have no longer any hope of death;

And this blind life of theirs is so debased,

They envious are of every other fate.”

Dante,
Inferno
, 3.46-48

Dante’s horse galloped after the soldier. They veered to the right, circling around the town, back towards the west, away from the direction of the advancing army. There was no telling if they were already surrounded. Dante narrowed his eyes and scanned the nearest trees, expecting to be hit with an arrow or crossbow bolt at any moment, but for now nothing bad happened. He looked ahead and saw the soldier turn and glance over his shoulder at them, then the soldier kicked his horse to increase its speed. Dante tried to match him. His horse – more so than the soldier’s – would not be able to keep this pace up for long, but they had to get as far from there as quickly as possible.

Crashing through a stand of fruit trees, they finally came to the road Dante had hoped to find when they reached the town. There were more fruit trees on the other side of the road, and looking back toward the town, Dante saw people running toward them. The way they moved, they obviously were not dead.

“Help us!” the man in the lead of the crowd approaching them shouted. He held a shovel in his right hand as he ran. “You must help us get out of here!”

A woman was close behind him. “Yes, help us! We didn’t know the army was so close! We didn’t know they would do this!” She looked better dressed than most of the townspeople Dante had seen, and he noticed she had something metal in her right hand. It looked like a brass candlestick.

The soldier still had his sword out. Dante now drew his. They looked at each other and hesitated.

“Get us out of here,” Bogdana said to Dante. “They just want the horses. They’ll tear us limb from limb quicker than the dead would, just to save themselves. You know they will.”

“It doesn’t seem right,” the soldier said.

“None of this seems right,” Dante said.

The townspeople were closing in on them, the closest maybe thirty feet away, when two dead men staggered out from among the fruit trees and attacked the people as they ran. One of them grabbed the man with the shovel. He screamed as the dead man bit into his left arm, then he brought the shovel down on the back of his attacker’s skull. The dead man slumped to the ground, but the other one grabbed the man with the shovel and they fell to the ground, grappling, growling, and cursing.

The people further back in the crowd screamed and changed direction when they saw the dead, running back toward the burning town, even though that seemed a more certain death. The woman with the candlestick was still headed toward them when another dead man lunged from among the fruit trees and fell on her. She shrieked and pulled away from him, the sleeve of her blouse tearing off in his grip.

The soldier turned his horse toward her. “I can’t stand and watch this. I don’t care.” He charged off toward the fighting in the road.

Dante tried to get off his horse. It was an awkward dismount with a second person, and he landed in a heap, still holding the reins. He scrambled to his feet, and handed the reins to Bogdana. “You – get to the edge of the forest and wait for us.”

She looked down at him. “You’re a fool, but I won’t leave you. I’ll stay right here. Hurry.”

“All right.”

The soldier was next to the woman and her dead assailant. The dead man had a hold of her arm, and she kept swinging the candlestick at his head, but he was warding off the blows with his other arm, so they continued to fight. The soldier raised his sword, but the way the pair kept moving around he couldn’t strike without hitting the woman.

Dante circled around them, but he had the same problem trying to attack without hitting the woman. With a surprisingly dexterous move, the dead man got a hold of the candlestick and lunged for her forearm, sinking his teeth into it. Dante winced at the dark blood surging out of the wound, welling up around the man’s teeth and lips, and at the woman’s mortal howl of pain. He steeled himself, grabbed the dead man’s hair with his free hand, and with an animal cry, he shoved his sword into the man’s left eye. Dante was pressed up next to the injured woman and gripping the dead man’s hair. For an instant, all three of them tensed and trembled in the terrible exchange between them – the woman with agony and the horrible surge of mortality, the man with the last, feeble ebb of life, and Dante with the thrill of killing, of feeling the life spasming out of something monstrous and deadly in his grip.

Dante let go of the man, withdrawing his blade and stepping back. The twice-dead corpse fell to the ground, as the woman slumped toward the other side, clutching her arm above the wound. Dante looked over to where the other man, the one with the shovel, was getting up. He was covered in blood, having just finished the messy job of pounding the dead man’s head into the road with his shovel. His bitten left arm hung down at his side. He dragged the shovel behind him on the ground as he limped toward them. Where he wasn’t smeared with blood, his skin was deathly white. “Please help me,” he rasped. It was already starting to sound like the moan the dead made.

Dante thought he heard the woman weeping, but when he took a step toward her she looked up and snarled at him. Perhaps she had been crying, her eyes were red, but now they were full only of hatred and blame. “I asked you to help us,” she growled. “You’d help that miserable beggarwoman, but you let me be eaten alive? What kind of man are you?” Dante had no answer for her.

Bogdana rode up, slipping off the horse next to him, offering the reins. The soldier turned his horse around, back toward the woods.

“They’re bitten. There’s no hope for them,” she said quietly. “We have to go now.”

“Yes, you’d say that, wouldn’t you?” the woman snapped at her. “Go ahead! He defended that old whore. I guess you’re his young one! It must be the kind of woman they like, where he’s from. Leave me here alone to die. I don’t care.”

Dante sheathed his sword, mounted his horse, and pulled Bogdana up behind him. As he turned the horse toward the forest, the man with the shovel collapsed next to the woman in the road, while a projectile hit one of the buildings on this side of the town and exploded. As he rode away, Dante looked back. The two figures on the road faced away from each other, whether out of shame or pain, Dante would never know, though it seemed infinitely to increase their wretchedness in his eyes. Each of them looked completely alone, even though they were pressed up against one another.

Chapter
7

When some among them I had recognized,

I looked, and I beheld the shade of him

Who made through cowardice the great refusal.

Dante,
Inferno
, 3.58-60

Surging ahead through the forest, Dante thought they might have actually slipped through the army’s lines surrounding the town, as there was no sign of anyone else, living or dead, on the road or anywhere near it. After a while, both horses slowed to a trot, and then to a walking gait they could maintain without exhausting themselves.

The soldier dropped back till they were riding alongside one another. “What are your names?”

“Dante.”

“Bogdana.”

“My name is Radovan.” Dante thought that at least the men’s names sounded as bad as the women’s. “The army and the living dead destroyed your village?”

“Yes,” Bogdana answered. “My family is dead. This man tried to help me.”

“I am sorry. I was in the army that did this. I thought we had to, to get rid of the dead and free our land of plague. Killing the dead is one thing – it’s bad enough, since they look just like regular people, some of them even children. But it has to be done. And I don’t think they feel it so much, when you kill them. They seem numb, no longer really human. But the villagers, pleading for their lives – I just couldn’t anymore. So I left during the night. I tried to help those people in the town, warn them, maybe have some of them escape into the mountains at least.”

“What happened, then? Who was that poor woman?” Dante asked.

“You saw them, how crazed they were with all their ignorance and fear. I got to their town early this morning, and they were already dragging that poor, old, madwoman around, screaming how she was to blame. And that little dandy of a deputy, vice assistant, district councilman, or whatever the hell he claimed to be, strutted around like a peacock during all of it, but he was more of a gelding, is my guess.” Dante smirked and Bogdana snickered at this. It was the closest any of them had come to laughter in some time.

Radovan continued. “They kept looking to him to validate everything, and he kept saying he had no authority, no jurisdiction. But then he’d tell them that
if
he were in authority,
this
is how he’d go about it, and then he’d wave them away and say no, no, he didn’t mean for them to actually
do
it. I kept telling them to run, to give this all up, but they ignored me, except to occasionally ask some practical question, like how big was the army, or how far away it was. I’d tell them I didn’t know, more troops were arriving every day, since the plague was so bad. They were close, but it was hard to estimate how long it would take them to move. The trebuchets take a long time to pack and reassemble, and sometimes they break and have to be fixed. Never mind if the army camp is attacked by the dead and they have to fight them off before moving on to the next village. So I kept trying to reason with them, until they were actually ready to light the fire around her. That’s when I drew my sword and thought enough is enough. I’d rather fight them than let them do this. I left the army, and could be killed for it. How could I just let these people do worse than the army was doing? At least the soldiers just kill people. They don’t torture anyone.” He cast a sideways look at Dante. It was not quite as accusatory and condemning as that of the woman with the candlestick, but nearly so, and with more petulant, prideful hurt behind it. “That’s when you showed up. You might have done more, you know.”

Dante wondered how much more blame he would find in this strange land, where so far he had done little else beside try to help people. “I know. I’m sorry. Really, I am.”

“We’d all be dead if he had,” Bogdana said coldly. “And we nearly died again, just now, because you had to try to do more than you can.”

The petulance flared up into real vindictiveness now. “I wasn’t talking to you, woman.”

Dante pulled on the reins. “Don’t use that tone with her. If you want to make up for destroying her village, fine, but stop insulting her.” Even with women who rode astride a stranger’s horse, and beat men to death like they were pounding the wash on a stone next to the river, there were still rules of what things a man was not to tolerate being done or said to them.

“Oh, enough!” Bogdana said. She slid off Dante’s horse, landing awkwardly then falling. She got up and brushed herself off as she took a couple steps away from them, into the woods. “Stop it, both of you, or I’ll take my chances by myself. I really don’t need to hear which of you is more of a man, or who defends helpless women better! Stop with all your morality and honor and shame and guilt. We’re way past those, all right? Can we just agree to work together to stay alive?”

Dante was much more taken aback that a woman would refuse an offer of protecting her honor than he was that a man might insult her. But, as usual, this half-wild woman made more sense in the given situation than the rules he had been raised to follow. He glanced back to Radovan, who gazed at Bogdana, looking just as shocked as Dante had been. The soldier looked warily at him.

“I want her to stay alive,” Dante said. “If there are other people who aren’t trying to kill us, I will try to help them too, but my first obligation is to her. I promised her.”

Radovan nodded. “I will help you two survive. You have my word.” He looked at Bogdana. “I am sorry, Miss. I have hurt you enough by what I did before. I will help you now in any way I can.”

“Thank you,” she said as she let Dante help her back up on to the horse. “You two seem like good men. Don’t let all your rules get in the way of doing what’s right.”

They moved westward along the road. “I suppose we should keep heading west and try to stay ahead of the army,” Radovan said. “Get to the mountains and try to get over them. Do you have any plan other than that?”

“No,” Dante answered. “It was all we had come up with as well.”

“Sometimes simple plans are the best,” Radovan agreed. Dante thought optimism might come more naturally to him than it did to other people, and this seemed to him a good thing at the moment.