Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  “Serafina?” Lan scooted back, trying to cover as much of herself as she could with one arm. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”

  “My lord has appointed me your handmaiden,” the dead woman said, although she didn’t sound very happy about it. She began to strip the bed, moving with brisk motions and touching the materials she took away as little as possible.

  “I don’t want a servant,” said Lan, still more asleep than awake and so baffled by this unexpected ‘gift’ that her emotions bordered on horror.

  “I am not your servant. I am his. I am merely your handmaiden.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I prepare you at his command. But you are not my mistress.” Serafina threw her a black and blameful stare over one round shoulder. “My mistress is dead. Begin your bath. I will be with you presently.”

  Bath? The last cobweb cleared. She looked and saw, instead of the waterwheel she had known deep down would not be there, the intricate screen that concealed Azrael’s bath, with the topmost curves of the lion-headed fountain visible over the top. Now and then, rebel droplets found a way to splash up on the wall, catching firelight that slowly faded as the wet spots dried.

  “Are you still sitting there?” Serafina straightened up with an armload of linens and a menacing look in her eye. “Our lord has summoned you and you will not embarrass him with this…this unseemly…” Words failed her. Pursing her lips, she threw down her linens and came around the bed. “Clean yourself,” she said, hauling Lan to her feet and giving her a shove toward the bath. “You stink of your trade.”

  The insult almost hit. She could feel the wind of its wake, but other things were more important now.

  “Summoned me?” she said. “Are the Revenants back?”

  “My lord said you would ask and that I should answer.” The words were civil enough, but just the fact that she spoke them managed to convey her disapproval for the question. “They have just passed Haven’s gate and will soon be at the palace.”

  Lan grabbed at a blanket and ran for the door.

  The dead do move fast and the handmaiden had her before she was halfway there. Lan tried and failed to break her grip and was subsequently dragged back across the bedroom in spite of her struggles, stripped of her cover and bodily flung into the water.

  She came up thrashing and sputtering, then slapped a palmful of water directly up into Serafina’s impassive face. “I don’t want a bath! Get out of my way!”

  The handmaiden did not even wipe at her face, only glowered down at her and dripped. “There is soap there beside you.”

  Lan waded toward the stairs. Serafina moved to block them.

  “I said, I don’t want a bloody bath!”

  “I do not care what you say, warmblood. I don’t care what you want. I do my lord’s will.” Serafina looked her over and shook her head, her perfectly-painted lip curling with unfeigned disgust. She headed for the wardrobe. “Use the soap.”

  She couldn’t fight and time was wasting. The drive from Haven’s gate to the palace was not a long one. Swearing, Lan sloshed over and grabbed the soap. She looked clean enough to her eyes, but she supposed she did need it, if only to get her blood moving. In addition to some understandable soreness, her entire body felt stiff and too heavy. Just tired, she thought. It had been a long night, if the night was even over.

  “What time is it?” Lan called.

  “Not yet seven.”

  “Seven what?” Lan asked impatiently. “Is it morning? Half-noon? High-noon? What?”

  Serafina came over to the screen to make certain Lan could hear her loud sigh of annoyance and then moved away again. “Morning.”

  “How long has Azrael been up?” Lan asked next, trying to guess how long she’d been sleeping.

  “I’m sure I would not know!”

  “No, of course you wouldn’t. Bloody useless, you are.” Lan climbed out of the bath and past her sniffing handmaiden to dry herself by the fire. Bending over to wring out her hair, she caught sight of some bruises on her thigh…and her arm…and her ass. And far from upsetting her, she found herself actually smiling. Like she was proud of them. When she looked up, Serafina was there in front of her, looking at them too. Her lips were pursed again.

  “You should see the other guy,” said Lan and went back to drying her hair.

  The dress Serafina deemed worthy was high-waisted and low-cut, with a skirt that was both too tight and too long. She couldn’t run in it, and in fact could barely walk in it, since Serafina slapped her hand every time she tried to pick up her stupid skirt. It was also pink. Not sunrise-pink or ripe-peach pink, but some lackluster greyish pink Lan had never seen in nature, like a moldy rose. She had plenty of time to hate it, mincing all the way from Azrael’s chamber to the dining hall and tripping over the damn hem every few steps, especially on the stairs.

  At the doors to the dining hall, Serafina made her stop to give her some final primping, a process her new handmaiden did not conclude as much as abandon in despair. As Azrael’s steward went in to announce her, Lan received a final adjustment to her bosom and two quick slaps “for color” before Serafina retreated.

  “You aren’t coming in with me?” Lan asked.

  “My orders are to prepare you, not to wait on you,” Serafina added with a toss of her braids. “I will do no more than I am ordered. You are not my mistress.”

  And with that, she stalked off, but Azrael’s steward was already glaring at her, since it seemed she’d missed her cue to enter, so there was no time to think of scathing things she might have said. She went in.

  The breakfast meal was still being laid out. Pots of tea and coffee were all that she initially saw, but even as she walked, servants appeared with platters of morning cakes and sweetrolls, sausages and ham, fried tomatoes and mushrooms and stewed prunes. Seeing it, smelling it, reminded Lan that she hadn’t had anything apart from tea yesterday, and reminded her so well that she forgot her stupidly tight skirt and tripped on the dais stairs, banging her knee and scraping both wrists in an effort to catch herself.

  No one laughed, which meant that her voice rang out like a brass bell when she shouted, “Oh, you fucking thing!” Seizing it by its smirking hem, she ripped it right up the seam as far as her thigh, eliciting quite a few gasps from the crowd, especially considering none of them had to breathe. None of them had to wear this skirt either, she reasoned, and if it shocked them to see her flash some skin as she climbed the stairs, that was their malfunction.

  Azrael pretended to be utterly absorbed in the buttering of a heel of brown bread, but as she limped up the stairs, he said mildly, “I like it better that way.”

  “I bet you do. Where are they?”

  “In the garrison, I should imagine. Deimos will be here shortly. I left orders he was to wash before making his report.”

  “You did what?” Lan shot a hot, embarrassed glance out into the hall, counting all the heads that had turned, and made an effort to at least try and sound like she was joking when she said, “And then what? A little nap, a light tea?”

  “Would you rather have seen the blood?”

  She looked away, at the floor in front of the dais steps where Deimos would have stood. The tiles were polished to such a high shine that they already appeared to be wet. “Is there blood?” she asked, not quite as evenly as he.

  “I don’t know.” He waved a hand at the empty chair beside his throne without looking at it or her. “But I thought it wise to anticipate. Sit with me. Eat, if you can.”

  If she could? Of course she could. She was hungry. Even now, as much as she wanted to keep staring at that not-wet, not-bloody spot at the foot of the dais, her eyes were straying to the tables where the dead court pretended to eat. And it was only as she was doing that and silently berating herself for daring to be hungry when all of Norwood was maybe burnt and maybe not, that she noticed something she probably ought to have seen from the moment she walked in the room.

  The tw
in rows of tables that lined the long hall were filled with dead people, just as they had been the night before. In fact, they were so unremarkably the same people, dressed in the same finery and laughing the same laughs, that her eye had gone right over them without considering at all how really odd that was…the morning after a death. Now that she was looking, she even recognized some of Batuuli’s and Solveig’s courtiers in their usual places. Beyond them, the normally empty chairs that had surrounded Tehya were now filled with strangers. Only the imperial thrones had been removed, so that the tables where his Children once sat were now no different from any other in this end of the hall.

  His Children were not mourned. They weren’t even missed. It was as if they had never existed at all.

  “Must we do this every morning?” Azrael asked in a hard voice. “Whose wounds will you close with hunger? Whose suffering will you end? Sit, I say.”

  She did, but could not seem to stop staring out there and really, what was she looking for? Black veils and remembrance candles? What did the dead know of mourning? For that matter, what did she? In Norwood, grief was for young mothers and the silly girls who loved reckless boys. Funerals were fires where folk lined up with empty pails because the ash was so good at repelling slugs and snails. If the departed was someone important, there might be a word or two said the next time the village gathered, but more often, it was to argue over debts.

  Lan’s mother had died owing Mother Muggs five ‘slip for a winter blanket, the twins ten days labor for the seed in their two rows, and the sheriff…the sheriff and his rent…and that was grief in Norwood. Was that indifference any better than Haven’s?

  Lan glanced at Azrael and found him gazing back at her with eyes that knew too well what she had been thinking.

  “Yes?” he said coolly.

  “What? Nothing. Good morning.” There were a few covered serving dishes close to her. Lan rattled through them until she found some hot oats and dipped herself out a bowlful to prove how undisturbed she was. What did a dolly talk about at the table the morning after her johnny killed his kids? “How are you?”

  “What should I have done?” Azrael lifted a hand, managing nearly without any motion at all to indicate the entire room, maybe even the whole of Haven, and banged it down again. The sound made ripples of silence at the nearer tables. He raked his eyes across them and poured himself a large cup of tea. “What should I have done?” he asked again, quietly now. “I gave them no command. Lacking such, they can do only what they know to do.”

  “This is fine,” Lan said, somewhat chagrined. “This is…just fine. Cheery.”

  “Indeed. They burned my Children in my garden as if they were common offenders of my law. And then they made lemon cakes for breakfast.” Azrael took a slice and tossed it on her plate. “Here. In remembrance.”

  Lan pinched off a corner and uncertainly ate it. It was the most impossibly delicious thing she’d ever had in her life and never mind how hideously inappropriate it was in the circumstance. Sweet and tart and light and moist. It tasted like angels kissing. Like angels fucking.

  Azrael was watching her, his chin propped on one fist, idly stirring his tea to cool it. “Do you favor it?”

  “Yes!” Lan said, sounding and probably looking more appalled than pleased. “Bugger me, that’s blinding!”

  “Mm. I favor it myself. Which is why I am fairly certain it would have graced this morning’s table regardless of last night’s events.” He looked out over the room, his gaze lingering on each of his Children’s former tables in turn, before returning to his cup. “They have no memorial.”

  “I’m…sure you could—”

  “Of course I could. At a word, I could have monuments raised, processions through the streets, black horses and wreaths and the tolling of bells, but how can that honor them?” He took a small swallow of tea, grimaced, and set the cup aside. “They would not wish to be remembered as my Children.”

  Lan frowned, watching his hand stray to his stomach.

  “So that will be my memorial,” he was saying. “That I allow them to be forgotten.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I do not grieve for them. As you say, I gave up even the hope of love long ago. But I do regret, although I find even I cannot say for certain whether I more regret their deaths or the lives I gave them.”

  “No, that’s not—I mean, that’s something too,” she said lamely, “but I meant…are you all right?”

  He glanced down at himself, probing at his stomach with one hand. His thumbclaw tapped along the rings that closed his freshest wound and made them jingle together merrily. “Some pain yet, but improved.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He cocked his head inquiringly, then looked down at his tea and uttered a wordless sound of understanding. With a crooked smile, he passed her the cup and watched as she took a cautious sip. “Gentian and licorice,” he explained as she choked and fought not to spit it right back into the cup. “It helps the pain and aids healing, but I…do not favor the taste. No matter. I endure. How do you find your handmaiden?”

  “I found her, all right, but do I really have to keep her?” Lan took a huge bite of her lemon cake and let it wash her mouth clean. “I don’t need one.”

  “My concubine will be attended.”

  There was no argument in his tone, but she tried anyway. “I don’t think she likes me.”

  “She was raised to serve another.” He took a swallow of tea, baring his teeth at it like a warning afterwards. “If she becomes tiresome, tell me. She is fit for no other work and I suspect if I gave her the choice, she would choose the oblivion I gave her sisters, but she volunteered herself at my request and I will hold her to it as long as I can.”

  “You killed the other handmaidens?”

  “It would have been cruel to put them to other work.”

  “But you kept all of them?”

  Azrael tracked her pointing finger out into the hall and studied Batuuli’s and Solveig’s courtiers. “I raised them to do nothing,” he said, watching them laugh and feast and fan themselves. “They are happy enough to continue doing it in my Children’s absence. The same cannot be said for my Children’s personal servants, so I showed them the only mercy I could.”

  “But—”

  “It is not their fault I raised them to be what they are,” Azrael said quietly. “It is not their fault I regret having done so.”

  “So everyone gets what they deserve, huh?”

  “In Haven.”

  “I’m in Haven.” Lan tossed off a shrug, trying to pretend it was a joke. “What do I deserve?”

  “Me.”

  Well, she’d known it was stupid to ask. She caught the last crumbs of her cake and ate them, one by one, in silence.

  He started to drink, sighed into his cup, then set his tea down and said, staring straight ahead into the hall, “This is not how I wish to begin my day.”

  “Sorry.” And to put the full stop on that subject, Lan asked, “Is that black pudding?”

  “Possibly.” He passed the tray to let her determine for herself. “Did you sleep well?”

  “You were there. Did I?”

  He took a curiously long time to answer. “You dreamed,” he said at last. “Tea?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “I have other teas,” he said dryly. “Or do you prefer coffee even at breakfast? I’ve noticed you remain rather American in many habits. Your mother’s influence, I suppose.”

  “Influence, right.” Lan laughed through her last mouthful of cake and turned her attention, reluctantly, to her cooling bowl of cereal. “How could you tell I was dreaming?”

  “That was rather a scornful laugh.”

  She looked up from the job of drizzling honey on oats, then quickly down again, although she did not feel guilty and had no reason to. She was not blushing. It was just a little warm in here. “I loved my mother.”

  “I don’t doubt it. She was a strong woman,” he said, passing the
butter and cream as if by way of apology. “I imagine she had a strong influence on you.”

  “Sure, if by ‘influence’ you mean she did everything but brand me with her bloody lost America.” Lan scooped out a savage lump of butter and stirred it in her bowl. It didn’t want to melt. She’d let the damn cereal get too cold. “She was mad on it. I loved her, but she was.”

  “Mm.”

  “She didn’t say much, you know. So it was hard, because sometimes it seemed like everything she did say was her correcting me. ‘It’s not rubbish, it’s trash.’ ‘It’s a sweater, not a jumper.’ ‘Don’t call it a bin.’ ‘That’s a flashlight.’ ‘I’m not your Mum.’” Lan broke it off there and came back with a strained smile. “So, yeah, coffee. Thanks. Could you tell what I was dreaming? I never remember them, myself.”

  A servant twitched forward, but it was Azrael who poured. “I would not have thought your mother’s memory of her homeland to be sharp enough that she should nurture it so devotedly all the rest of her life. You say she came here as so young a child.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean, but she did. She said it was how she kept it alive. With words,” said Lan, rolling her eyes as she stirred sugar into her drink. “Hundreds of millions of people dead, and that was her whatchacallit. Her memorial. What did I dream?”

  “I suppose it made her feel less alone. I don’t imagine she met many Americans, and fewer still as the years passed. Eventually, she must have wondered if she were the last.”

  “Maybe. Why are you avoiding the question? Do I talk in my sleep or something?” she demanded, and leaned forward to teasingly whisper, “Did I say another man’s name?”

  “You wept.”

  Lan blinked, her smile fading. One hand rose toward her eyes, as if there would still be tears to wipe away, and hovered there.

  The dining hall doors swept open at that awkward moment to admit Azrael’s steward, not alone. “Deimos, my lord.”

  “Ah.” Azrael beckoned, cutting his eyes at Lan and shaking his head when she started to rise. “You have a report for me, captain?”