Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  Although the question was clearly directed at Azrael, Lan couldn’t stop a wry, “Yeah, let’s get some ice in that water. What, am I supposed to drink it warm?”

  “Unnecessary,” Azrael said, showing a thin smile through the fangs of his snarling wolf mask. “That will do. You may go.”

  The chamberlain bowed himself out with a murmured apology to Lan and they were alone.

  “I will never understand why you need all this silly shit just to eat,” Lan said, lifting the covers on the serving dishes. Bread and cake, fruit and cheese, water and wine—nothing that needed the fuss that had been laid out to receive it.

  He glanced at her, then studied her place setting, and finally reached out and took one of her spoons. “At the summit of my first ascension and after my…small vengeance for the assault I was made to suffer, I was brought before certain men…leaders of men…and we all sat down together to negotiate peace.” His mouth twisted in something that was not a smile, but pretended to be. “They set food before me. Poisoned, as it turned out, but I did not discover that until later. At the time, I knew only that I was an animal among Men. I was…filthy and bloody and naked…and I did not know how to sit at a table and eat. The poisoning was nothing compared to that.” He returned the spoon to its proper place. “I embarrassed myself then, but it was, as you would say, a long time ago and it hardly matters now.”

  Lan watched him pour the wine, fill his plate and settle back to eat, all without looking at her. After a while, she unfolded her napkin. After a little while longer, she said, “Do I embarrass you?”

  “No.”

  “We’re not much on airs in Norwood, but I always thought I was fairly mannered-up until I got here.” She looked down at the silverware framing her small stack of plates. “I don’t know what half this stuff is for. I shouldn’t even be allowed to touch it.”

  “You don’t embarrass me.”

  “I see the people in your court, the way they look at me when I’m up there with you.”

  Now he looked at her, but his face behind the mask was impossible to read.

  “I hear them laughing at me.” She shrugged one shoulder, playing with the handle of a fork, one of many. “I tell myself it doesn’t bother me, that they’re the ones making fools of themselves, them in their fancy dress and painted faces. I guess I never really stopped to wonder if I’m the fool after all. Did everyone used to eat like this? Before?”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  “Not even here, save for rare occasions.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  “Because I can.” He acknowledged the pettiness of that with a smile, then returned his attention to his meal. “But if it makes you so unhappy, you needn’t resume instruction. That you talk to me when you eat is of far greater import than what spoon you use.”

  “If it matters to you, it should matter to me,” Lan said grudgingly. “I’m your dolly, you’re not mine. And I’m not your only one, so…so I guess I should be making more of an effort.”

  He ate his dinner and watched her play with the silverware. At last, he said, “Are you waiting for me to argue?”

  “I thought this would be easier, that’s all. I thought I could be your dolly and still be me.”

  “I have a withering effect upon all my consorts,” he remarked, helping himself to a small bunch of grapes. “I wish I could tell you it won’t last.”

  “I don’t feel withered. I feel…I don’t know. Can I tell you something?”

  “If you like.”

  “I’d really like to sleep with you tonight.”

  He tipped his head back to study her, then put down his cup and laced his fingers together. “If that’s the opening bid to some greater negotiation,” he said evenly, “it’s a strong one.”

  “It’s not. It’s just the truth. I never slept with anyone before. I like it.” Far from encouraged by his impassive stare, Lan settled her nerves with a swallow of wine, then looked directly at him and said, “Can I stay? I mean, unless you were planning on bringing your other girl back.”

  “I wasn’t, no.” He considered her, tapping now and then at the table as he thought, and finally said, “I’ve no objection.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “It was a pleasant way to pass the time. If you change your mind, you know the way out.”

  She didn’t know what sort of welcome she’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this.

  “Do you want me to stay?” she asked.

  His eyes flickered. He looked away.

  “I didn’t mean that like, did you want me—”

  “Yes.”

  Lan fell silent. Azrael drummed his fingers once on the tabletop, then stood and thrust his hand out almost defiantly.

  “Yes, I want you to stay,” he told her, glaring. “Come to bed with me.”

  “Take the mask off.”

  His fingers curled toward a fist, but never closed. Jaw clenched, he reached up and undid the straps holding the snarling features over his true ones. He set it on the table and looked at her.

  Lan offered her hand.

  He took it, pulling her to her feet aggressively, although she offered no resistance. “This changes nothing,” he warned. “Where you choose to sleep weighs not at all in our negotiations. I will not pay for it, not even the smallest piece. Stay or go, I don’t…”

  She put her arms around him and awkwardly lowered her head until her cheek was pressed to his shoulder. It felt cold and hard and old, somehow, like marble.

  “…care,” he finished quietly. His hand holding hers squeezed slightly. The other rose up and lit on the small of her back, neither pulling nor caressing, but only feeling. “I don’t care.”

  “Me, neither.”

  He bent to hook an arm under her knees, lifting her into his arms as easily as if she were a child, and carried her to the bed. He told her not to speak or look at him. He told her not to try to kiss him. He told her she was beautiful. Then he lay her down and lay beside her and he said nothing more.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  He was gone when Lan woke up and that was fine, because in the morning, he was Lord Azrael and she was Lan of Norwood, and there was no way for that to end well. Anyway, what did she expect him to do, lie there all night waiting for her to wake up? He had a city to run and every reason in the world to go, even if he went about it like a feral dog chewing his leg free of a trap.

  Ass.

  Lan collected her sheet and swaddled herself up again, reasoning that the pikemen outside had already seen her in it once and might as well get another gander, but when she opened the door, Serafina was waiting on the other side. Despite all her best protests, she had to go through the whole silly business of bathing and dressing, even though Lan was clean enough in her opinion. Her opinion did not matter.

  At breakfast, Lan made a token effort to have Serafina dismissed, but Azrael would not hear it, waving away her protests that she didn’t need a handmaiden and actually laughing when she argued that bathing every day couldn’t possibly be healthy.

  “What the hell would you know about it?” she’d snapped. “Nothing kills you! I could be dying from over-bathing right now and how would you even guess?”

  So he stopped laughing (not quickly, but he did it), and solemnly asked her forgiveness, but he wasn’t the least bit sorry and he proved it immediately following breakfast, when he sent a pair of pretty dead men in to interrupt her lessons with doctoring rubbish. Lan’s heated protests that she was fine meant exactly nothing to them. Master Wickham sat on a chair and read a book while Lan was stripped to her skin and fingered from teeth to toes. The curtains were wide open the whole time and it took more than an hour because the clock in the room chimed twice. She could see people walking back and forth from the palace to the greenhouses and if any one of them had looked around, they could have seen her through the colored glass with her tits out and a thermometer up her bum.

  ‘A dolly can’t complain,’ she told
herself, every muscle locked and trembling from humiliation, staring straight over the doctors’ bent heads at the sad eyes of the lady in the colored-glass picture. ‘A dolly’s owned, every piece, and a dolly can’t complain.’

  And that held her just fine right up until the one doctor wanted her to lie down on a table and let him have a look at her works.

  “The hell I will!” she exploded, slapping at his pinchy hand when he tried to direct her backwards.

  “Our lord commands—”

  “Your lord can kiss my ass! I’m fine! Give me my clothes!”

  He did not. He simply turned and called for a guard.

  “Lan,” said Master Wickham, still seated with his back turned and a book open in his lap. “Lie down and behave. This is for your own good and it is going to happen.”

  “Balls!” she shouted, and there were a few other words said when the guards reached her, but it ended with Lan on her back on the table and four dead men holding her by the wrists and ankles while both doctors peered between her wide-open legs. They muttered to each other in doctor-speak, poking at her with their cold hands. One of them produced a medical-looking thing and stuck it up in there a little ways, giving it a little swish-around before dropping into a bottle to be ‘tested’. They stuck her with a needle and took blood out. Then they stuck her with another needle and put something in. They stood there while she lay naked and splayed and chatted an easy ten minutes about “environmental factors” and “nutritional deficiencies” before finally allowing her to be released.

  “Impress upon your student the vital importance of basic hygiene,” said one of the doctors as Lan struggled, swearing and trying not to cry, back into her too-tight dress.

  “If she’s going to wallow in the mud with pigs, she shouldn’t be surprised to pick up ascariasis,” the second doctor said with a sniff. “And if she wants to be treated for it, she’d better show some decorum when we come back.”

  Master Wickham saw them and the pikemen who had been conscripted to act as Lan’s living shackles to the door, then closed it and looked at her.

  “Bastards,” she said. She didn’t like her voice; it shook. She raked her hair into place with a hand that also shook and lurched back to her lessons chair. “I’ll show them same bloody decorum.”

  “You will,” he replied in his sternly polite way. “Because they may be going about it rather poorly, but they are in fact helping you. And they are doing so at our lord’s command, so really, there’s no stopping them.”

  “They’re not helping me. How is day-tripping up my damned gangway helping?”

  “They were examining you.”

  Lan blushed hot. “I’m clean. I’m always careful and I’m clean.”

  “Be that as it may,” Master Wickham said after a meaningful pause, “they were also looking for evidence of illness, infection, parasites, poor diet…” He spread his hands to indicate the scope of the problem, then came back to join her at the desk. “The living conditions outside Haven have created a crucible of diseases, many of which could easily lead to serious complications or even death, if they are not treated. The dead don’t get sick. Neither does our lord. I understand the examination is invasive and uncomfortable for you, but it is entirely to your benefit.”

  And maybe it was even true, but she hadn’t asked for it and she wasn’t grateful. That night, after dinner (boxed up and sent to Ashcroft), she went angry to his room. If he’d asked her what the matter was, she would have told him. He didn’t and after sex, she went back to her own room in the tower and slept angry on the floor.

  A night on the boards in the Red Room went a long way toward making her see his side of things, though. After all, she’d been the one to suggest she could be dying. Just because she hadn’t meant for him to take that seriously didn’t mean he shouldn’t. And no matter what else it might have been, it was a thorough doctoring, which was better than she’d ever had in Norwood. Moreover, it was a comfort to know she was all right, because no matter how careful a girl was or how fit a johnny looked, there were no guarantees.

  But there were a million stairs in that tower.

  She went down to breakfast, not quite ready to apologize, but at least ready to be better company than she’d been the previous night, only Azrael wasn’t there. No one was, apart from some servants and some guards and Serafina, who told her to hurry up and eat because there was a car waiting to take her to something called a tailor.

  “What’s that?” Lan asked apprehensively.

  “That,” Serafina sniffed, “is your reward for being a sulky beast all evening.”

  She didn’t know what to expect, but she tried to be ready for anything, and imagining the various unpleasant things that might be waiting at the end of the short drive ruined whatever excitement there might otherwise have been in the outing. Her apprehension was ridiculously mislaid, however. A tailor turned out to be nothing more than a huge group of pinchy people who made clothes. Just clothes. Nothing else. One of them had a book of pictures—not an old one, either, but brand new—with a different dress on each page and another book with pieces of fabric and another book with samples of the dyes they could use. Lan was supposed to pick a picture of a dress she liked and a fabric she liked and a color she liked and the tailors would make a dress. Bored and baffled by just why Azrael thought she would be any good at this tailor-stuff, but determined not to repeat the episode of her one music lesson, Lan picked a number of combinations at random before the woman with all the books sharply told her that she was going to have to wear these ‘catastrophes’ and maybe she’d ought to put some thought into it.

  “What do you mean, I’m going to have to wear them?” Lan looked down at the dress book again, stunned. “These are for me?”

  “What did you think we were doing here?” Serafina snapped.

  She blushed, too embarrassed to admit she had never in her life worn something new, something made just for her and no one else. Her clothes had always been salvage, handed down from someone else who’d had it from someone even older. There were patches on the shirt she’d worn to Haven that had come from the dress her mother had worn on the boat that brought her to England. Anything better than drop-spun wool and smoke-cured hide were too expensive and new clothes were a silly thing to spend that much money on. As long as they kept a body warm, who cared what they looked like?

  She could say none of this to these people. No one here was wearing patches. All their clothes were cut from whole cloth. Their hems were straight. Their seams had never been let out. The white cloth of Serafina’s simple shift had no stains, no loose threads, no mismatched sleeves. When they tore a hole in something, they probably just threw it away.

  “Can’t I just get some trousers?” she asked hopelessly. “You can make those too, right?”

  All the pretty tailors stared at her.

  “My lord desired you to have gowns,” one of them said in a voice like spring frost.

  “He doesn’t have to wear them, does he?”

  She could see the argument made no difference to them. She shouldn’t have even bothered asking. What dolly ever had a choice about how it was dressed?

  So Lan had to go back through all the pictures and fabrics and dyes, and this time, she had to care about what she was doing. Morning gowns. Evening gowns. Gowns for going out and gowns for sitting in. Heavy winter overdresses. Light summer chemises. Several gowns at least in different colors and every possible style for every possible occasion. Then she had to stand there like a scarecrow while the tailors measured every inch of Lan’s body several times and from several angles and the one writing all the numbers down muttered over and over about the waste of time and cloth. “She’s grossly underweight,” she kept saying. “In two months, she’ll be splitting out all the seams and be right back here for more.”

  “In two months, with any luck, he’ll be done with her and she’ll be gone,” Serafina said and sniffed. “Trousers, indeed.”

  That night at dinner, A
zrael asked if she had seen the tailor and she said she had. If she showed less excitement than he’d been expecting, he did not comment. What was there to say anyway?

  She’d hoped that was the end of it, but apparently, the tailors weren’t very good at their job, because the next day, Lan was right back in the shop, naked and shivering while fabric was pinned together around her. And the next day, and the next, until it became her new normal: breakfast, a short drive, a long day being stuck with pins, then a few hours of lessons in the library before her bath, then dinner, then bed with Azrael. If her dress that night was in any condition to wear, she’d put it on and go up the thousand tower stairs to sleep on the floor in the Red Room. If it wasn’t—as it frequently wasn’t—she’d sleep in his bed, invariably waking alone the next day to start all over again.

  The first set of gowns was waiting for her after lessons before the moon turned. Ten of them, some for mornings, some for nights. Two tailors came with them and made Lan try them all on, one after the other, to make sure they fit the way they were supposed to. None of them did. After struggling to peel the third one off without popping its straining seams, one of the tailors brought out her little book and the other his measuring tape and they began loudly to compare numbers.

  Lan had no choice but to stand there with her arms up, listening.

  After they were gone, she went over to Azrael’s wardrobe and stood a long time in front of the shattered mirrors, staring into each broken piece of a stranger’s body until Serafina came over and slammed the doors. “Get in the bath,” she ordered. “I actually have a chance of getting you to dinner on time tonight and I’d like not to waste it letting you, ha, admire yourself.”

  “I’m not going to dinner. I have a headache,” said Lan, which was not true. Her head did not hurt at all, it was only too small for the thoughts that were in it.