Valley of the Dead (The Truth Behind Dante's Inferno)

by Kim Paffenroth

  “I very much doubt it,” she said. “I was alone all the time. It made me feel good not to be alone. It made me feel good to be desired, wanted, needed more than food or wine or honor. It made me feel good to be told how beautiful I was, how much more beautiful than my sister, after she’d been so high and mighty about marrying the wealthy miller. The wealthy miller who’d rather be with me than with her, who’d sneak from her bed to mine and tell me how much better I was. All that made me feel good, so what was I to do? Feel bad all the time? No. I feel bad now, but that’s just the fault of this hellish plague. It’ll probably get you too, and I doubt you’ll feel guilty when it does.”

  Dante noticed the wind was no longer howling. He turned to look toward the window and door, and saw a sick, yellowish daylight seeping in.

  “The storm has passed,” Radovan said. “We should finish her and be on our way.”

  The woman turned to him. “Is that what you want?” She leaned back, looking up at the ceiling and baring her neck to them. “Go ahead. It hardly matters to me.” She closed her eyes. “There – will that make it easier? Though I’ve known few men who needed my eyes closed before they hit me, perhaps you’re better than they were.”

  Adam raised his hand. “No, I don’t think so.” He turned to Dante. “What do you think?”

  Dante looked at the woman’s neck, still so beautiful. He listened to her pitiable wheezing, and needed no time to consider further. “She is unrepentant. Killing her would be no mercy, but a terrible crime against someone who’s done us no harm. So long as she draws breath, we can pray she will use it to utter just one word of remorse and be saved. There is always hope, and we would be the worse sinners if we took that away.”

  Adam nodded slowly. “You know much of the blessed death, brother, for one from such a sinful land.”

  “I wish there were another way to learn of it,” Dante said.

  “So do we all, but the method of learning is not our choice – only that we learn.”

  “Well, we can’t wait here for her to have a change of heart,” Radovan said, sheathing his sword. “Let’s go.”

  Adam turned toward the door. “Yes, that is true, too, unfortunately. We shall go.”

  The woman opened her eyes and tilted her head to look at Dante. She gave him a slight nod, then leaned forward, placing her left arm on the table and resting her forehead on it.

  As Radovan and Adam walked out the door to retrieve the horses, Dante sheathed his sword and watched Bogdana. The mysterious woman put down the shovel, leaning it next to the fireplace, and inexplicably walked up to the nearly-dead woman sitting at the table. Dante opened his mouth to say something of a warning to Bogdana, fearing how contagious the dead and dying were. But as he drew in a breath, he noiselessly closed his mouth, feeling somehow it would be impertinent, perhaps nearly blasphemous, to give voice to the deadly, numbing cancer of fear and mistrust during this woman’s final moments with another, live human being.

  He watched Bogdana put her hand on the other woman’s shoulder and bend down close to her. She cast a sideways glance at Dante, then turned all her attention to the woman, bending even closer, till her mouth was right by her ear. Dante saw her lips move, but he couldn’t quite hear the words. Her full, brown hair was hanging down, making it hard to see. He didn’t hear her whisper, and it seemed to him as though she ever so slightly pursed her lips and lightly kissed the woman’s ear. Then Bogdana partly straightened up and took a step back, her hands out in front of herself as she backed away, the way one would retreat from a wounded animal – or, Dante had the oddest fancy, from a statue or altar.

  She finally turned toward him. She walked past him, then stepped over the dead body in the doorway. Dante followed her out, his gaze lingering just a moment on the swaying of her skirt, before the bright, unforgiving sunlight drew his focus upward and dazzled him.

  Chapter 14

  In the third circle am I of the rain

  Eternal, maledict, and cold, and heavy;

  Its law and quality are never new.

  Dante, Inferno, 6.7-9

  They rode deeper into the valley, though the bright sunlight did not last long. The day turned overcast almost as soon as they left the dying woman’s house. It was not the violent storm of earlier in the morning, but just a solid, even blanket of clouds that hung over them, lifeless and still. The sun was now only an indistinct area of lighter grey in the oppressive mass.

  After the four of them had been riding for some time, the trees gave way to another area that had been cleared for human cultivation and toil. There were no signs of people in the fields this morning. Dante noticed the ground was quite wet here, almost swampy, with puddles here and there, both in the road and fields. The water in the puddles looked oddly dark, as did the mud here. Perhaps such dark soil was good for the crops, Dante thought, more fertile – though he had trouble imagining this place full of plants and life. He gazed up at the lighter spot in the clouds, where he knew the sun was. Everything was still. Even the stagnant clouds didn’t seem to move. No birds, no sounds, no motion besides the miserable creeping of the four of them. The storm was preferable to the silent dread of this place.

  Ahead, a wall stretched across their path for quite some distance to either side. It looked to be masonry, about the height of two men.

  “What’s that?” Dante asked.

  “The settlement furthest up the valley,” Radovan replied. “It’s fairly big. The mining and lumber here are quite valuable and attract lots of people.”

  “Why do they have a wall?” Dante asked. “The last town didn’t.”

  “These people live far from civilization,” Adam said. “We have our lake to protect the monastery, but they need a wall, for beyond this town there are only wild things and savage men, even in the best of times.”

  Dante considered the situation. “Will we have to ride around it? It would slow us down a lot.”

  “We might,” Adam said. “There will be no choice if they’ve locked the gate and refuse us entry. But let us see if the gate is open, and perhaps we can go straight through. Of course, if the gate is open, then they must not be aware of the danger. We should warn them.”

  They went a bit further before Radovan raised his hand and they stopped. He pointed ahead to some reeds growing along the side of the road in the swampy ground. They rustled, though there was no wind. Dante strained to hear something more, voices or the braying of animals or the moan of the dead, but there was nothing.

  Dante followed Radovan and Adam in dismounting. This time Bogdana agreed to stay with the horses while they moved forward on foot to investigate. The three men had gotten quite close to the stand of reeds before they saw the source of the rustling. The tall stalks had been concealing four shapes: one human figure lying on the ground, with three others kneeling around it. The prone figure was a big man. He had been torn open in several places. The three kneeling figures were two boys and a woman. There was blood all over the four of them, spattered on the reeds, and more of it flew off their hands as they tore pieces from the man’s body.

  The boys were even younger than the two children Bogdana and Dante had killed at the river crossing. The woman had her back to Dante. She was kneeling near the man’s midsection, and from the motions and sounds she was making, it was clear she was pulling the man’s organs out and eating them. The two children growled at her, apparently displeased she was getting the better share of the food. She snarled back and swatted at the one boy who was struggling with the tough sinews of the man’s thigh, trying to claw out a piece of it with his fingernails. Dante watched as the other boy, near the man’s head, bent down further, placing his hands on the ground and leaning down to tear into the dead man’s neck with his teeth. As the child rose back up to a kneeling posture, he held one end of a long strip of flesh in his bloody mouth. The other end was still attached to the dead man, and the undead boy thrashed his head around like a dog would, till the morsel snapped and he sucked it into his mo
uth like pasta. As he did so, he looked right at Dante with red, rat-like eyes, though he made no move to get up or attack, but slowly chewed the ghoulish mouthful with something like a half smile.

  Dante could feel his head going light and feared he might faint. He lowered his gaze, breathing deep and feeling himself shake slightly. He longed not only for the fury of the storm, but for the previous silence, because the slurping and smacking sounds from the three undead people assailed him like cudgels hammering his head. Not just the outside of his skull, but the sounds rattled around inside, giving wet, slapping blows to his brain. He looked up to see Adam and Radovan right by him, apparently watching him to see if he were going to fall over.

  “Now we really are in hell, aren’t we?” Dante asked in a soft, dry whisper.

  Adam shook his head, though he kept an eye on the three kneeling figures. “We live our whole lives right on the edge of infernal places, right where we can see, hear, and touch them at any moment. And, more importantly, where they can touch us. You should know that. There are foretastes of blessedness, and there are foretastes of damnation. Today you will see a great many of the latter in a very short time. You would take God’s blessings, and then refuse to look upon evil? Or perhaps even resent that it exists? Are you like Job’s wife? I didn’t think you so ungrateful, brother.”

  Dante slowly took in the small, spritely man, dragging his gaze up and down him. Adam had an irrepressible liveliness about him, the bright spark of reason and intellect, but at times like this it seemed to Dante it burned with a cold and comfortless brilliance. Nonetheless his words made Dante look up at the featureless sky, as he tried in this forsaken hell to think of any foretastes of blessedness.

  He thought of the warmth of Beatrice’s smile, and also of the beauty of her eyes, remembering they too could at times burn as brightly, coldly, and distantly as Adam’s wisdom. He thought of the babbling laughter of his two daughters, who could make him smile more easily and comfortably than the intimidating Beatrice ever could. His children held the promise of the future, full of unquestioning love, rather than the threat of rejection or reprimand. He reached farther back in his memory than he had in a long time, retrieving an image of his mother at his bedside when he was very young and sick nearly to death. Although he knew intellectually he had been in great pain during the time he was now recollecting, all that remained now for him to contemplate was the love and devotion shining from her face, the compassion pouring from her gaze even more tangibly than the tears she shed.

  He brought his gaze down and glanced over at Bogdana, who carried within herself another blessing, though it chilled Dante to recall his horrible promise to her to preserve and protect that blessing, no matter what horrors were necessary in order to do so. He nodded, and although it still made no sense that blessing and suffering should be so intertwined, he felt a little calmer and less despairing at their strange confluence.

  He looked past Adam at the three dead people still feeding, still oblivious to the three living men, gorging their apparently limitless bellies and empty minds with as much blood and flesh as they could rend and tear from either the body or from each other’s greedy hands.

  “Why don’t they attack us?” he asked.

  Adam seemed to hear Dante’s voice was more resolute and less pained. “Why do you think?”

  Dante considered them in as detached and objective a manner as he could. Although he could keep himself from shaking or weeping or running away, the nausea was unavoidable at the sight of what they were doing to another human being’s body. “They don’t realize we’re a danger, so they go on eating. They only kill in order to feed, so they won’t attack us until they’re done with their present victim.”

  Adam nodded. “Exactly. They are both more and less human than we are, more and less evil. They cannot kill for pleasure, or honor, or even hate. If only all men were as they are, in this one respect. But they are so full of hunger, so completely full of emptiness, they cannot think of anything else – not even self-preservation. And their emptiness will never be full. They will never stop on their own.”

  “I understand,” Dante said. “But if it would not be considered a kind of ingratitude, I would ask not to have to kill a child again, since I already helped kill two yesterday.”

  “That is not ingratitude, my son. That is decency,” Adam said, and he and Radovan moved to either side, to stand behind the two children as Dante stepped forward and stood behind the woman.

  They left the woman and the two boys slumped forward on the body they had been desecrating, though Dante knew the three who had been eating were far more tainted and defiled than the one they had eaten. But now at least all four of them were finally and truly dead, and death was sometimes a blessing, as Brother Adam’s strange theology would have it.

  After Dante got on his horse and they moved forward, Bogdana leaned over and touched his shoulder. He could not bear to look at her, to sully her beauty by gazing on it with the same eyes that had just beheld such monstrous, revolting things. He only let himself feel her presence and sympathy through her light touch, as he looked down at the ugly, nearly black mud sucking at the horses’ hooves.

  Chapter 15

  Howl the rain maketh them like unto dogs;

  One side they make a shelter for the other;

  Oft turn themselves the wretched reprobates.

  Dante, Inferno, 6.19-21

  As they approached the town walls, they could see that the gates were open. Not only open, they also seemed to be abandoned. The entrance to the town was as desolate as the fields through which they had been riding. They stopped just outside the gates to survey the situation.

  “Go through?” Radovan asked.

  “It’d save us time,” Adam said. “Perhaps the people have left already.” Just then, from somewhere inside the town they heard a cheer, followed by what sounded like singing, though it was too far away to make out clearly. “Well, then there are still people here. We need to warn them. Clearly if they’re singing, with their gate open and unguarded, they must not know what’s going on.”

  They proceeded through the gate, past deserted houses and shops. Everything was in a violent disarray, with carts spilled over in the street, and various items – tools, implements, broken pottery, and glass – scattered on the ground. There were some dark brown splotches and burn marks on the ground and on many of the walls. Some of the windows were smashed, but most were boarded up. Dante caught the metallic scent of blood, and the heavy, stinging, malignant smell of smoldering embers that had been left to fester. He saw nothing move, however, and no fires raging or blood flowing, so they kept moving forward.

  The cheering sound returned, followed by laughter, then the indistinct murmuring of a crowd. All of them flinched and bristled at the sound of an animal roaring in pain or rage, but this was drowned out by laughter, so they kept going.

  They came out into a more open area, where they finally saw the crowd they had heard. Several dozen men were there, gathered around long tables. There were no women or children in sight. Most of the men were standing, though several were lolling on the ground; some of the prone figures appeared immobile. There were many barrels on the tables, along with various foods, and nearby three boars were spitted over low fires. Here the smells were slightly more savory than what had greeted Dante so far in this town. Although it was still impossible for him to consider food after what he’d just seen, even he could appreciate the sweet but heavy aroma coming from the roasting meat. It was an irresistible kind of pull to anyone’s senses, even if their minds rebelled unnaturally against it.

  But the pleasant smell was more than offset by the other, animalistic scents that came with several days of debauchery – spilled beer and wine, wasted food left to rot, and even men’s urine and vomit. Such animal detritus lay all over the ground, pounded into the dark, wet mud by hundreds of feet until all of it was mixed together into a sickening, grey slop. Those men still conscious waded through such filth ca
relessly, as they grabbed up more food or guzzled down more drink, while those who were groggy or passed out wallowed in it without shame.

  Beyond the men and tables, the ground sloped down into a large indentation, like a pit. In it there were two poles erected. They were much thicker than the stake Dante had seen the woman tied to the other day. Two bears were tied to one of these. Both of them were fairly small, but one was obviously still a cub. The other was probably its mother, judging by how it stayed close to the smaller animal and seemed to be shielding it. The rope holding the cub was tied to the one holding the mother, and the mother’s rope was tied to the pole. To the other pole a large dog was tied; it strained against its bonds, sometimes moving close to the bears to bark at them, sometimes running to the other side to menace those of the crowd who stood close to the bear pit, shouting and laughing at the tormented animals. All three animals were bloodied, with gashes on the faces and sides, and patches of fur torn from their abused bodies. The bodies of several dead dogs were scattered around the pit as well, some bent in such a way that their backs were clearly broken, some with their throats ripped out, some with their entrails hanging out, victims of the cruelty of man and the savage power of beasts.

  Some of the men closer to Dante and his companions had now noticed them. “Eh, what have we here?” one drawled, as the group of drunks staggered toward them. He was bigger than the others, with a thick, black beard and hair, and perhaps slightly less drunk than most of his companions. He leered at Bogdana. “Oooh, you brought us a lovely little mother bird, I see. I like the way you wrap your legs around that horse, darling. Care to spread them for me, before we all die? Can’t do any harm.”

  “She’s so big, I’m afraid something would grab me if I stuck it to her!” shouted another drunk, causing the crowd to roar with laughter.

  The laughter died down as Bogdana pulled back on the reins and her horse reared up, then it took two steps back. “Pigs!” she shouted. “Why do you have no sense?”