“Then take them away. Take them back to… your place.”
Marius opened his mouth to speak. An image of a blue-stained face interposed itself upon his thoughts: the Gelder. Alive, a part of a living, ongoing culture with a history, and rituals, and places of worship. Underground. He looked up at Drenthe, sharply. The other man stared straight ahead, giving him nothing.
“It’s not our place,” Marius said. “Not ours alone. We cannot simply occupy it and claim dominion.”
“But where else can you go? There are spaces that are set aside for you, that we honour as yours.” Billinor pointed outside. “Cemeteries, burial fields, and the like. Can we not declare these sovereign lands, so that you do not have to retreat so far below?”
Marius smiled sadly. “And then what? Mill around, waiting for someone to come along and give them news of the afterlife?” He indicated the battlefield. “We tried that. Didn’t go well.”
“No.”
“No.”
“Then what?”
Marius was staring at his hand as if fascinated by it. The skin was beginning to pall, to lose just the slightest edge of colour. He flexed it, watched the skin tighten over yellowing flesh.
“It’s a lie,” he said, half to himself. “We hang around, waiting for someone to tell us what to do, waiting for someone to tell us that God has a special little field of happiness just for us. And it’s a lie. Even after death, they don’t stop lying to us.”
“Helles…” Drenthe stepped forward. Marius closed his fist.
“No.” The room became deathly still. Drenthe stopped. Marius spoke, staring at his clenched fist. “There is no happy little field. There is no afterlife. A man lives, he takes his lot, and then he dies.”
“Helles–”
“Your. Majesty.”
“Mar…” Marius turned his face to Drenthe, and for the first time saw him quaver, and fail. “Your Majesty…”
“There is no God,” Marius said. “There is no reason for the dead to stick around, hoping for something that can never, ever happen.”
“Your Majesty, I must advise–”
“You have advised me for the last time, Drenthe.” Marius turned his back upon him once more. “You have advised me to this place, this…” He waved his dead hand. “This unavoidable state of being. You advised the ruin of my home and the murder of my neighbours. You have advised me to death.”
“Majesty.” Drenthe knelt into the edge of his vision. Marius. It had to be done. You had to take up your destiny. It was the only way.
Marius would not shift his head to address him. “You took my life away. My life.” He risked a glance towards Keth, turned back before the distance between them could sting too hard. “I had a destiny.”
“I’m sorry, I really am. But you know it had to be done.”
“I understand that.” Now he did turn to the dead man. “I swore when I saw what you did to the village that I would tear you into little pieces and listen to you die forever. I release us both from that vow.” Drenthe looked relieved. Marius held up a finger. “But I will not forgive you.”
Drenthe stood, looked from Marius to the little group behind him. Gerd, Keth, Granny, Fellipan: they stared back with one face, cold, unforgiving. He offered the slightest of bows, then returned his gaze to Marius.
“Your Majesty,” he said. He swung about on his heel, and left the tent without a backwards glance. Marius remained where he was, staring down at his clenched fist.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and wasn’t quite sure who he was saying it to any more. “I’m sorry for what I have to do.”
“What?” Billinor leaned forward in his chair. His advisors leaned with him, eyes fixed upon the bent figure on the other side of the table. “What do you have to do?”
Marius raised his eyes to the young King. “The mouthpiece of God,” he said. “God’s representative on earth. Tell me,” he smiled, and it was a sad, broken thing. “Do you feel God talking to you, King of Scorby?”
“I…” Billinor glanced at Denia, at the line of stiff-backed gentry surrounding him, at the figure of his mother, ignored at the back of the tent. He lowered his head. “I try,” he whispered.
“But you hear nothing, don’t you?”
Billinor paused, then, reluctantly, shook his head.
“You know why.” Gerd said. “We both do.” He reached out, and covered the young King’s hands in his. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
Marius stood. “I’m sorry, for what I’m going to leave you with, and what I have to ask you to do after we’ve left. If I might offer some advice…”
“Anything.”
Marius looked down at the young boy, all dressed up in the crown and robes of a king. “Take your people back behind the wall. Don’t let them see what happens. And when they come back out to clean up the bones, let them grieve.”
“Is that all?”
Marius risked a quick glance towards Keth.
“Not all.”
Billinor followed his eyes, understood what Marius was asking.
“I will.” He stood, and held out his hand. “It has been an honour, King Marius.”
Marius took it. “It has, King Billinor. One more word?”
“Certainly.”
Marius nodded at Billinor’s advisors, then leaned over to whisper in the King’s ear.
“Fuck ’em.”
Billinor sniggered. “You are so rude.”
The young King gathered up his retinue. Marius and his friends watched them leave.
“What now?” Keth asked. “What did you apologise to him for?”
“Come on,” Marius took her hand, and began to walk down the rise towards the city walls. “It’s time to put an end to all this.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Life is nothing more than a slow descent into madness. A child is born, tabula rasa, believing only in its own existence and the warmth of its mother’s skin. Slowly it grows, taking on gender, growing into society’s expectations. It learns bigotry, it learns the class system, it learns to stop caring. And sooner or later, after repeated exposure, it develops the mental illness known as religion. Perhaps it is caught from a parent, or the master to whom the child is apprenticed; or, if truly unfortunate enough to afford schooling, a teacher. But once contracted, this mental virus burrows deeper and deeper into the victim’s psyche until it eats out all other knowledge, all other capacity for human evolution… until nothing remains but the illness itself, supporting and nourishing the host body for its own gain so that it may, in turn, be passed on to others: wives, husbands, family, children.
And then, once it has propagated itself as far as it possibly can, this illness can no longer support its host body, and the child who once was nothing but potential withers and dies. But the illness remains, hot and fetid. The body is buried, but the virus animates it, driving it downwards through the dirt until it finds its new home, underground, in the halls and passages of those it resembles: mania-driven corpses, shuffling about in the dark with no purpose other than to nourish the virus, to give hope to the religious disease, to wait for the call of God. And slowly the body dissolves, as the processes of death eat away at the flesh and the organs and the hair. Yet the disease remains, propping up the disconnected bones in a distant memory of the form they once held. The illusion of perception hangs on long after the spark of real consciousness has gone. The mania that had infected the body in life swells to fit the empty skull that once held a brain, imprinted with the sounds and thoughts and memories that filled that ball of spoiled grey meat. Until, inevitably, the disease has nothing to feed upon but itself. The skeleton slows, becomes still. The body settles down in some dank, dark corner. Centuries after the creature that once surrounded it has died, the armature of disease finally runs down and falls into immobility. The virus has eaten itself, and the body is truly, completely, dead. How long it takes depends on how deep the disease took hold, how bright the fever of religion infected the bones. I
t can take centuries. It can take a thousand years.
A thousand years after the body dies, the disease of religion can still stand that body before a King and demand final justification of its existence.
Marius don Hellespont, twice-crowned King of the Dead – once by acclaim and once by right of conquest – stood atop the walls of Scorby and stared down at the aftermath of battle. His subjects stood shoulder to shoulder, a carpet of living corpses stretching across the plains towards the mountains. A hundred thousand grey and withered faces, some no more than a few weeks old, some hundreds of years in the waiting, stared up at him. Behind him, the citizens of Scorby waited also, praying inside their silent heads that the promises in which they had trusted were true, and that the small, solitary figure on the wall was here to end their fear. Only the height of the wall separated him from the masses below. That, and the thin circle of gold perched uneasily on his head.
For one long, terrified moment, the world fell silent.
Marius closed his eyes. There were too many: too many eyes staring at him; too many grey slits across the landscape where the dead had fallen; too many minds trying desperately to hush questions and fears and demands and pleas that he could still hear, no matter how hard they all tried. The crown burned, a thin line of heat that burrowed into his skin and would not give him release. So he closed his eyes against them all, and let his dead sight expand backwards into his skull, let it diffuse throughout his body, let the deadness of his vision fill him up until he was merely a vessel for death, a lens through which he could look and find only himself. A pillar of grey light, oblivious to the demands of flesh and the world around him.
And at the centre of his being, where the light shone most fully, his thoughts resolved themselves. He saw a grey circle bearing a single grey stone, smoke-formed twin to the crown around his head. Marius picked it up, and stared into the stone as if into the depths of a mirror. And the truth he saw within its depths caused his eyes to snap open, and allowed the world to flood back in.
“There is only me.”
“What?” Gerd was beside him, his open farm boy’s face creased with a burden of worry Marius had never seen before. Marius stared at him until recognition dawned, and he reached out to steady himself against his companion’s shoulder.
“What did you say? Marius?”
But the moment had passed, and Marius was alone in his head again. He stepped away from his friend and stood between the high points of the battlements so that the ocean of dead faces below him was fully in his view.
He raised his head, and projected. His voice echoed across the ghost plains of his mind, deeper and more resonant than it had ever been in his throat. It was the voice of a king, he realised, the sound of ultimate authority: inviolate, unarguable, to be obeyed without question. The voice of God’s representative on Earth.
“It started slowly, at first. A body in the midst of the masses suddenly falling, crashing to the ground like a vessel dropped by arms grown numb. Then another, somewhere else amongst the crowd. Then another, and another, and within moments, the army of the dead was collapsing before him as if struck by an invisible flash of thunder. In less than a minute it was dissolved. Where moments before there had been a vast army, now there was only a sea of bones and rotting flesh, a charnel field of his own making.
Too late, Marius thought of his companions. He swung around, but only one man stood behind him.
“Drenthe?”
The soldier made a strangled sound. He stalked past his King, looked down upon the destruction, wheeled to face Marius.
“You… you… fuck,” he managed; and then he, too, was gone. He collapsed from the top down, the leathery sound of his body hitting the ground interrupted only by the sound of something metal striking stone. Marius nudged his corpse over with his toe, saw the hammer that Drenthe had concealed behind his back. He pushed harder, sent the body tumbling over the edge of the wall, listened to it strike stone then land thirty feet below. He tried to find sorrow for the destruction, and discovered only emptiness. The dead below him were now only that: finally, properly, dead.
“Bloody hell.” A voice beside him whispered in awe. “What did you do?”
“Gerd?” Marius snapped back to himself in an instant. “How did… I didn’t think…” He stopped, frowned. “How did you not…?”
Gerd stared past him at the field of bones. “What happened?”
“I’m their King.” Behind him, feet scraped across stone. He and Gerd turned towards it: Granny, clambering up the last few steps to the battlements, pausing only to push the dead over the edge of the steps with her feet, and behind her, the three woman: Brys, Fellipan, and Keth.
“I’m their King,” Marius repeated. “I’m their conduit to God. When I speak, it’s not me speaking. It is God, using my voice. That’s what they’ve been taught, for centuries. That’s what they believed.”
“But you told them…”
Marius shook his head. “The King told them. The one voice they could not dispute. All that kept them going was the chance to take their place in whatever Kingdom of God they believed in. I took it away.”
“They had nothing to live for.”
“They had nothing not to stay dead for.” He frowned. “But I never thought about you. How did you not…?” He waved a hand below.
Gerd smiled. “Oh, please. I know you. When have you ever been right about anything?”
“But…”
Fellipan raised one exquisitely arched eyebrow. “I don’t believe in God.”
“You–”
“Death was a career move, remember? I’m in it for the power.”
“Right.” He turned to Granny.
“You owe me.” She stalked forward and poked him in the chest. “Fields of green and God’s right hand and peace everlasting. You don’t get rid of me until I get it, sonny.”
“Didn’t you hear what I said?”
Granny hawked, and spat over the edge of the battlements. “Think you’d get out of it with a lie like that? Bollocks to you, boy.”
“Oh, for all the gods in the sky.” He stopped, suddenly aware of the absurdity of his curse. “Arnobew,” he said. “Oh, gods, did anyone see…?”
The others exchanged glances, but said nothing. Marius closed his eyes.
Around them, the city was beginning to come back to its senses. Sounds began to filter up from the streets below: doors scraping open, the awkward shifting of metal and leather as soldiers began to emerge from their hiding places, the low rumble of thirty thousand mouths murmuring one simple question to each other, slowly gaining in volume as the only answer to be had was “Let’s go and find out.” Marius looked around at his tiny coterie.
“I think it’s time I went.”
His companions looked at each other.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” he said. “I…” He looked at the city, at the field beyond the wall, at the two worlds that had him trapped between them. “I don’t want to be anywhere.” He nodded at a spot further down the battlements, where several grey lines crisscrossed. “Looks like people died there, and were pulled down below. Gerd, can you open one up, please?”
“Easy.” Gerd walked across, and spread his palms open above the nearest line. It opened up smoothly, a wide, dark hole leading down into the underworld.
Fellipan and Granny shared a look.
“Whore.”
“Filthy crone.”
“Come on, then.”
They disappeared down it together. Brys glanced at it, then turned and poked Marius in the chest.
“You shit.”
“What?”
She jerked a thumb over the wall. “You killed the best bloody crew I’ve had in bloody years, you selfish bugger. I’ll have to go back to living men again.”
“I am consumed with regret.”
“Yeah, well,” She smiled. “I’m getting mighty tired of breaking up with you, broke, shagged out, and without a man in the world, you bloody bug
ger.”
Gerd coughed. “I might be able to help on that score.”
Marius and Brys turned towards him in unison.
“You?” Brys eyed him up and down. “Why, I never knew you were interested.”
Gerd completely failed to blush once more. Instead, he jerked his throat back and forth for a few moments, coughed something into his hands, and wiped them down the front of his jerkin.
“Here,” he said, holding them out. Brys eyed them suspiciously. There, nestled inside, were the coins he had swallowed in V’Ellos. Brys grinned, and accepted them.
“You are a sweet boy,” she said, and planted a kiss on him that would have sucked the air right out of him if he’d been alive. “You make sure to look me up if you get bored, you hear?”
She swung about on a boot heel, tipped a wink to Marius and Keth, and sauntered down the stairs towards the nearest tavern. Gerd coughed.
“Yes. Well. I’ll just…” He pointed towards the hole. “When you’re… you know… whenever.” He scurried over, and faced away from Marius and Keth.
Reluctantly, they turned to each other. Marius looked at her from the side of his eyes.
“Keth?”
Keth hadn’t moved since she ascended the stairs. Now she stood alone, arms hugging herself, and stared past Marius at the hole behind him.
“I’m not going,” she said, then, as Marius made to move towards her with his arms opened, “Don’t.”
He stopped, the half dozen feet between them becoming an uncrossable gulf. “Why?”
“Why?” She laughed, as much to herself as at the question. “Look at us, Marius. Look at you.”
Marius gazed at his hands, still half-raised in supplication. “You told me it didn’t matter.”
“Oh, Marius. It does. It so does.” She held her own hand up in response. “Look at me, Marius. I’m alive. Don’t you understand what that means?”
“Am I that repulsive?”
“No. No.” She shook her head angrily. “You still don’t get it, do you? It means you’ve changed, Marius. Whether you feel it or not, you’re not alive anymore. You don’t think like a living person. You said it yourself. You kill thousands, and hardly notice. You push kings and soldiers about like chess pieces, you raise the dead and send them out to die again, you pull bodies up from below the waves and give them free rein to murder. You don’t do what living people do anymore.”
The Marching Dead Page 31
