Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  “Lan.”

  “No, that’s what this is really about, isn’t it? You won the war and winners don’t do the leaving, so fuck ‘em all, you’re staying. You hate it here,” she added, ignoring the flash of his eyes, “but they hate that you’re here even more and that’s what counts.”

  “You’re drunk, Lan.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re bloody-minded and spiteful and I’ll be sober in the morning.”

  Behind her, more sensed than seen, one of the servants set down his tray and slipped away. The others rapidly followed, actually bottlenecking at the door in their silent haste to get out ahead of the impending explosion. Azrael watched them go, then turned a brooding eye on Lan. “You’re a terrible diplomat.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, you’re a terrible…git! And you’ve got funny eyes!”

  “One would think you would do all in your power to sweeten your proposal. Instead, you harangue me with another of your demands, without, I note, releasing me from the first.” He gave her a moment with that, his eyes flaring brighter in her mutinous silence. “And you’ve no intention, have you? If I told you I would build your town tomorrow on the promise that you would never again speak of ending my hungering dead, you’d say—”

  “No, damn it!” Lan slapped the table, narrowly missing her coffee cup. “I’m showing you a chance at a real home, here! You don’t build it to shut me up, you build it because you want to build it! Because you believe in it!”

  Gone in an instant was his last pretense of calm. He tore the mask from his head with violence enough that the strap cut across his scalp and slammed it down on the table, one hand cutting upward to point at the ruin of his face. “This is what I believe in,” he snarled. “This is the home Men have made for me! I’ll not reward them with Haven while I slink away! I will burn this city and salt the ashes before I leave one brick of it standing for the living to take back!”

  “Why stop there?” she demanded. “Why not finish the job? But wait, who are you going to punish when there’s no one left to lip off to your Revenants or burn your Eaters or…build a house or plant a tree…or hold hands or have babies or just live their damn lives! Will you finally be happy once you’ve avenged yourself on the hundreds of people who ever hurt you by killing all of us?”

  “I hope so.”

  If he’d said it angrily, hatefully…if he’d shouted or cursed or thrown his cup at her…but no, he just said it, like it hardly even mattered. Her mind reeled, grasping for arguments, but found no gripping place in his indifference.

  “You want to end the world,” she said at last. “You really do. You…How could you?”

  “The world? No. Only Man. And what does it matter, one species more or less? If humanity’s history had but one voice, it would tell you the loss of this or that creature before its natural time, while tragic on a sentimental level, is nevertheless insignificant in the cosmic scheme of things. Man may perish, but the world will neither celebrate nor mourn. It will go on.” His smile thinned. “Would you like to know how?”

  “No.”

  “Animals will swell to fill the void left by Men,” he told her. “And over-swell it, perhaps. There will be other extinctions and other recoveries. The sky will clear, but those who see it will not marvel at its many colors. These ruins will collapse, burying treasures like this—” He waved at the walls. “—and this—” He picked up the spoon from her coffee tray and tossed it down again with a clatter. “—forever, but the world will go on. Years become centuries so easily when no one is there to count them. Centuries become millennia. The forests will reclaim the lands that Men have razed. Rivers will carve canyons across the scars left by his fallen cities. Mountains will rise up, trapping seas to dry under an uncaring sun and leaving the bones of whales to bleach in the newborn deserts for no one to find, no one to be inspired by thoughts of giants and dragons. And still the world will go on, and I will go on with it through ages that can only be measured by the coming and going of glaciers. The stars themselves will shift in the heavens and no one will be there to invent names for their new alignments or remember the stories of the old ones, no one but me. In time, the sun itself will begin to cool. Here on Earth, the world goes on and on as its remaining life passes through its last changes and dies away. It will be quiet. And lonely.” His mouth curved into a bitter line. “But I’ll live.”

  “Stop it,” Lan whispered through numb lips.

  “I read once that the sun will someday swell and engulf this world before it burns itself out. Perhaps I will finally die with it. Or perhaps I will continue to endure…my ashes pulled eternally apart through the frozen vacuum of space, and I with no more mouth to scream…still alive.”

  “Stop it!” she shouted and had to clap both hands over her eyes suddenly to keep them from flooding. “Stop it, just stop it, just shut up and…please…stop.”

  He did. She couldn’t see what he was doing, but whatever it was, he did it quietly. With her own shuddering breath in her ears, she couldn’t hear him at all and gradually became convinced he had left. When she dared to lower her hands and look, he was still there, cup in hand, watching her.

  “So,” he said in what was almost his normal tone, “I have that to look forward to. Until then, it falls to me, as to even the least of Men, to determine how I will live. After all my years of running, hiding…dying…I have decided I would rather live in an empty world than one in which I am forever hunted. You could show me a castle in the sky, unreachable by human hands, and promise me ten thousand years of peace within its golden walls, but I am not running, Lan. Not one step more. Not one. I am here and if Men are fool enough to pursue me here, then here is where I will end them. All of them.”

  Outside, because the world had a sick sense of sympathy, it began to rain. Drops like bullets hit the windows, first one after another, then drumming down faster, filling up the vast space between them with noise.

  “I really thought I had it, you know,” Lan said at last. “I could see it, Azrael. I could see all those houses laid out in rows. Fields. Windmills. Smoke in the chimneys. Goats on the roofs. But you know…I never saw people. Not even in my own head. Not me. Not you. Deep down, I reckon I still knew you can’t start over.” She thought about it and had to laugh. “My mother used to say that. You can’t start over, you can only move on.”

  “Hm.”

  “Yeah. You would have liked her. She never had any hope either.”

  He took a breath as if he might argue, then only let it out again. He drank his wine.

  Lan contemplated her coffee cup, then killed it with a last deep swallow, banging it down arse-up on the table when she was done. “Let’s go to bed, what do you say? We can have some of that angry sex we do so well and salvage something good out of this utter bastard of a day.” She got up, staggered, and dropped into her seat again with her head spinning.

  He glanced at her, raising one eyebrow inquiringly.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Give me a sec. I can still storm out of here.”

  He waited.

  She sat.

  “All right,” she said, giving in. “Take me to bed.”

  Azrael crooked a finger and one of his pikemen stepped away from the wall.

  Lan promptly threw a fork at him. “I said you! Not your bloody deadheads! What the hell do I want to go to bed with him for?”

  “I’m not going to bed with you,” Azrael said evenly, beckoning again to the pikemen, who advanced with a distinct air of caution. “I’m angry with you, Lan.”

  “Yeah, well…there’s some old saying about going to bed angry. I don’t know how it goes, but I guess it’s supposed to be good for you or something.” She gave him a punch to the arm to get his attention. It worked. She smiled at him. “Take me to bed. If you’re still angry in the morning, we can fight over breakfast.”

  Azrael ignored her right up until the pikeman actually reached the dais. Then, with a low curse, he finished his drink, stood and picked her up.

&
nbsp; “Bring the bottle,” she mumbled, wrapping her arms around him and leaning into his neck.

  He did, tucking it between them before hupping her more securely into his arms to carry her.

  “And another bottle. For after.”

  “After you drink yourself insensible, you mean?” he muttered, but he went to the sideboard and took one.

  “Stay with me,” she said as the long dining hall warped around them, swaying in rhythm with his stride. “I don’t want to be alone tonight. Stay.”

  “Until you are sleeping.”

  “No! All night!”

  “Lan, I…” His sigh stirred her hair. “All night, then.”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise.”

  “See?” Lan said sleepily. “I’m a damn good negotiator.”

  “You have your moments,” he agreed, carrying her away. “Truly, you do.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  She dreamed and it was funny, because while she never remembered her dreams when sober, on this night, when she was drunker than she’d ever been in her young life, she remembered it all, every detail. It began with her as a child, walking with her mother down the road to see the sheriff. This was less a dream than a memory and it was all exactly as it was—the feel of the mud sucking at her shoes, the smell of manure and peaches and smoke, the distant howling sounds of the Eaters who were always behind the walls. Her mother brought her into the building and there were Harry and Simon, the deputies, leaning up against the wall under the framed pictures of Azrael and the sour-faced old woman who used to be the Queen. Her mother gave her a pat and went on in alone to the sheriff’s inner office, and suddenly Lan was outside again, hand in hand with her mother, going to see the sheriff.

  Over and over, she made that same walk, each time a little older. It was Hell, not the way the Jesus-folk said Hell was, all fire and demons jabbing at you, but Hell the way real folk said: knowing what was coming and never able to change it. She walked away miles on the same muddy stretch of road, opened the same door a hundred, hundred times, saw Simon and Harry change from beardless boys to men. She grew her breasts all over again under their knowing gaze, changed out her girly skirts for the thick denim jeans and leather boots of a working woman, felt calluses form on her farmer’s hands. Long after she’d actually stopped accompanying her mother on this monthly walk, she relived it, until suddenly, it stopped.

  Now she was in a kitchen and although she had never seen it before, she knew in the way of dreams that it was Azrael’s kitchen, because it was so clean and shiny. She was making a pie. She had never in her life made a pie, so she watched with some fascination as her dream-hands did all the work with skill and speed—rolling out the dough and laying it into a glass pan on the blade of a knife, making a caramel sauce from real sugar on the stove, cutting up peaches and pouring that sauce over them, thick and red as blood, weaving the top crust and crimping down the edges. Then she picked it up and it was cooked, so she put it down because she was back in the cooking lodge at Norwood and everyone was there, waiting to be fed. They dove in at once with their forks and knives, but she guessed the pie hadn’t been baked enough because it bled when they stabbed it and she could hear screaming. She had an axe in her hands, but what could she do? It was a pie.

  Back in the road, with snow blowing in her face, only it wasn’t cold. Ash then. The great, fluffy flakes that only come from a certain kind of fire. She could smell the smoke, smoke and peaches. She was walking, on her way to see the sheriff. She had five goldslip in her pocket, because her mother had died and Lan had to pay her debts. One more time, she climbed the steps to the sheriff’s building and one more time opened the door. Inside, Harry and Simon looked up from their game of cards, eternally played out beneath the disapproving faces of Azrael and the Queen. This time, for the first time, the last time, she opened the door to the sheriff’s office.

  He was sitting at his desk, writing in a book, and it was all just as it had been that day when this had really happened. The window was closed, but a pane was missing, letting in that breeze that fluttered at his dingy curtain, letting in the stink of her mother’s fire. He had a lamp burning on his desk even though it was the middle of the day and plenty light out; the glass was cracked. He was drinking black tea from an old clay cup; the handle was chipped. Everything in this room was broken. He did not look up when she came in, just said, “I’ve been waiting on you.”

  “I had to work,” Lan said, because she had to say it. It had already been said.

  “All right then. Come on over.” He scooted his chair back and indicated the place before him on the floor, under the desk. One of his dogs was under there already. It raised its shaggy head and gave her the eye.

  Lan didn’t move.

  “I haven’t got all day, have I? Your mama died in debt, little Yank.”

  “I brought money.”

  “Fine. It’s two ‘slip a night, the same as any other foreigner pays. That’s one hundred twenty for what your mama owed last month for the two of you, plus two for the mayor’s long-residence tax, and it’ll be sixty plus one again next month and the month after that.” And he slapped at his thigh in some annoyance, making the dog under his desk get up and slouch sullenly away. “I don’t have to take it this way, girl. I’m doing you a favor. Get over here.”

  And she said it again, out loud, what she had never said before this day although she’d thought it a hundred, hundred times, each time in fact that she’d had to make this walk with her mother’s hand in hers: “I could be your daughter.”

  He looked at her without surprise, without disbelief. He said, “You could be the daughter of a lot of men. You’re nothing to me. You want to stay? You pay.”

  Still, she didn’t move.

  “If I’ve got to call them boys in to hold you down, they won’t be leaving until they’ve had a turn,” he told her with just a hint of annoyance. “Is that the way you want it?”

  So Lan went to him, even as every part of her not locked into the dream screamed at her just to turn around and go. She went, every step on those splintery creaking boards taking her closer to the stink of unwashed man and unwashed dog. When she reached him, he unbuckled his belt and with both of his hands so occupied, Lan picked up his chipped clay mug and smashed it into his face. He let out a yell through streams of blood and tea, then hopped up and punched her.

  In the dream, there was no pain, only a vague sensation of impact as his fist rained down. When this had all been real, there was no counting them. Within the cold clarity of the dream, she counted five blows and a kick once she fell. “Have it your own way,” he told her, his heavy boots tromping around her and away with the click-click-click of dog-paws following. “I want you out by sundown.”

  He opened the door, hitting one of the pieces of his cup. It rolled across the floor, bumping up against her hand where it lay in a cooling pool of tea.

  “Clean this mess up before you go,” the sheriff said, and left her.

  * * *

  Lan woke to the sound of a bottle rolling across the floor after being bumped by an opening door. Each component of each sound—the bump, the roll, the glass bottle, the wooden floor and the carpet that lay over it—had their own significance and their own place of honor in the wine-red throb that was Lan’s hangover.

  She dragged her eyes open just wide and just long enough to identify Serafina coming toward her, then let them slam shut again. “I am not taking your shit today,” she said, oh so carefully. She wasn’t sure if it was the words, her head or the air, but something was made of glass today and it was already good and cracked. “If you say one mean thing, I swear on my mother’s boots, I’ll have you impaled.”

  Serafina’s approaching footsteps halted.

  Lan opened her eyes again, but her handmaiden wasn’t even looking at her. With effort, Lan pushed the blanket back and followed her apprehensive gaze.

  Azrael sat before the fireplace, his hands folded over his hard stomach, star
ing back at Serafina. “That was a curious morning greeting,” he remarked.

  Bloody hell, and now she had to think.

  Lan pressed a hand to her brow to help hold her thoughts in. “That was…” she said with difficulty, “…a joke. We joke a lot, her and me. About…”

  “Impalement.”

  “Yeah. Look, I really need you to give me a pass on this,” Lan said, massaging her aching eyebrows. “I’m begging you. Because I am a piss-awful liar under the best of circumstances and these are not they.”

  “All right. Granted. Leave that.”

  Apparently, Serafina had something. She came to the bed and set it down on the edge next to Lan, then retreated. The smell of greasy sausage and strong coffee wafted up, blessed and infernal all at once.

  “I can’t eat that, I’ll die,” Lan mumbled, reaching for the coffee. She sipped a little, swished it around and spit it back into the cup, then pushed the cup to the extreme corner of the tray and collapsed back onto the pillow. “Ugh. My mouth tastes like a bunch of grapes took a shit in it. What’s the score?”

  “Five bottles, less perhaps three glasses, mine.”

  “Not bad. Where the hell am I?” she wondered, eying the pale pink walls and smirking white angel-babies adorning the corners with a fluctuating blend of amusement and disgust that died when her gaze fell on the wardrobe. There was a gown draped over its open door. A nice gown. A dolly-dress. And not one of hers. “Whose room is this?”

  “Chloe’s.”

  “Who? Wait, you mean Cassius?”

  “You ought not to call her that.”

  “You took me to her room?” Her temper surged, carried away by the war drums in her skull. “Why the hell did you do that?”

  “You insisted,” he replied calmly. “You said if you were going to be sick, you wanted to do it in her bed.”

  “Oh.” She blinked a few times, processing that. It did sound rather like something she’d say. “Was I?”