Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  Lan was not a hero. She wasn’t even a good farmer. But after all the stories she’d heard, she thought she knew better than the boys of Norwood just what made a real hero and it wasn’t shooting the odds and bobs off the dead or charging desperate people a suck and a fuck to drive them ten miles down the road. As a child, she’d thought her mother was a hero, because she’d survived so long against the kind of odds that only heroes face, but as she’d gotten older, even her mother’s tales tarnished. In the end, she’d saved only herself, and she’d done it by leaving countless others behind to die so she could live another day. And maybe that was just what she had to do. When it came right down to it, dying right along with them was a bullshit legacy and if her mother hadn’t been willing to sacrifice others, Lan never would have been born safe in Norwood. Maybe there were no heroes.

  All the same, when Lan had set out so many months ago, with a rucksack full of peaches and the smoke of her mother’s fire still hanging in the air, she had felt that same thrill that listening to tales of her mother’s life had once sparked in her childish heart. She was on a journey. A quest. She was going to Haven, the city where the living were forbidden to go, to look Azrael himself in the face and speak for her people, for all people. She was going to save the world or die trying.

  It had started out so well. Chained in his garden of undying torture, then to his bed. Offering herself to him before being locked in a tower for refusing to accept his terms. Every moment in his company had been battle; every word, a weapon. And now look at her. No, she didn’t like the gowns she wore for him, but she wore them anyway, because he liked to see her in them and she liked to hear him tell her how beautiful she was. She seldom thought twice before buttering her bread and she had come to find that one could not only favor foods but could also refuse others just because she didn’t favor them. In his bedroom, there was no pretending she merely submitted to continue their game of wills; she anticipated his embrace, matched him heat for heat, and slept in his bed afterwards when she knew there was another as soft and warm she could call hers.

  She was not a hero. She was what he had called her from the start—his courtesan. Not a slave or a prisoner, not his dolly and not even his whore, but a courtesan. And worse, there were times when she wondered if she might not be becoming his lover, a word even more alien than hero…and she was no longer certain which she’d rather be.

  ‘Traitor’. There was another word worth exploring.

  Lan idly drew a little gibbet in the margin of her primer, then scratched it out. She was not a traitor. Everything she did, she did for the sake of the world and the living who were left in it. How she felt as she went about it was nobody’s business but her own.

  So accustomed was she to tuning out Master Wickham’s voice that she did not immediately notice it had fallen silent. “I’m listening,” she said mechanically, now drawing big, stupid flowers with big, stupid, smiling faces around the scrubbed-out gibbet. “Chrysanthemums and peonies. Sounds good.”

  No answer. She raised her head out of her primer to discover he was absent from the chair across from her and Azrael was in his place.

  She could see nothing through the mask he wore but the hard line of his mouth and the steady light of his eyes, but all the same, there was something about him that put the wind right up her, so that her first words were not a greeting, but simply, “What happened?”

  He looked away at the colored glass windows, took a deep, deep breath, and looked at her again. “We need to talk.”

  Outside, somewhere, not far, a peacock screamed its too-human scream.

  “Is it Norwood?” she asked numbly, because she could think of nothing else that would put this hot, sick stone of fear in her belly.

  “No.”

  There was no sense of relief, only a greater tension. She waited, barely breathing.

  His jaw clenched. “It was a place called Mallowton.”

  The name was and wasn’t familiar, both at once.

  He saw her uncertainty and said, “Yes, you know it. After a fashion. It was one of the settlements you bartered with me to feed each month.”

  “Was? What…What happened? Is it bad? What did they do? What did you do?” The questions came spilling out, but the last one hooked and grew suddenly large. She reached across the table and caught his stony arm. “What did you do, Azrael? What did you do?”

  “Some time ago, a ferryman attempted to bring a small group of youths into Haven. He claimed to be delivering them to Solveig, unaware that my son has been dead these many months.”

  Lan took her hand back fast, as if her touch could somehow transmit her memories of her own entry into Haven.

  “My guards ordered the ferryman and his cargo into their custody and from there, into mine. We spoke.” Azrael rose and went to the window, staring through its many colors and keeping his broad back to her. “They told me of an army amassing in Mallowton. Men, guns and war machines I had thought long-lost, drawn together from dozens of settlements, united by the righteous cause of plundering Haven to its foundations. And why? Can you guess?”

  Lan’s mind whirled, her thoughts taking on less clarity but more weight. Her neck bent until all she could see was tabletop and her pencil, looking like it had been painted there. She stared at it with a growing sense of odd wonder, this artifact outside of time. No one was left in the world who made pencils. It was a marvel, in its own way, like a spoon.

  “Because I fed them,” she whispered.

  “Because I fed them,” he corrected. “And what reason could I possibly have to do that, save that I was now fattening what remained of mankind as cattle for my hungering dead? Next I would be penning and breeding them to feed my unholy hordes. You see the infallible logic of the living? Do you see how they had no choice but to strike back? The vast wealth of Haven waiting to be seized was, surely, of no weight to their considerations.” He turned his head just enough to show her the fiery glint of one eye. “Fearing to be left out of this grand adventure, these reckless youths slipped out ahead of them. Had they not, I would have had no warning until that army arrived at my gate in its fullness.”

  “Maybe not,” Lan said weakly. “People are always talking about fighting back, but it never happens.”

  “Oh, it happens, Lan. And now I know it happens whether I am their tyrannical lord or a benevolent one. So there is no hope and there will be no truce.” He turned back to face the window, muscles coiling and uncoiling as he clenched his fists. “I sent Revenants to Mallowton.”

  Lan picked up the pencil and held her breath like a stupid kid who still thought that could grant a wish.

  “There is no more Mallowton.”

  She let her breath go and snapped the pencil in her hands, letting both halves drop and roll away.

  “And I have decided…soon…there will be no more Men.”

  “Don’t,” she heard herself say. “Please.”

  “This much, I have hidden from you, with somewhat less ease or success than I had hoped, but there is no hiding what comes next.” He tipped his head back, studying the rather insipid face of the woman depicted in the glass before him. “I have ordered Deimos to assemble my full forces. Once they are armed, I will send them out to empty every human settlement so unwisely raised in my shadow. I am disposed, for your sake, to be merciful. So. There are towns along the eastern coastline with ships that routinely cross the Channel. We will take them first and sweep outward across the island. Every wall will be broken. Every ruin and settlement burnt. Those who do not resist will be safely transported to the continent. Those who do…will not.” His eyes flickered and burned out bright enough to flare on the glass before him. “One way or another, it ends. Now. And there will be peace.”

  No such thing. There would always be dogs and deer. Hawks and doves. The living and the dead.

  “Say something,” said Azrael.

  Lan stared at her empty hands. Her fingers were smudged with graphite, even though the pencil itself was gone. She
rubbed her fingers together, but that only made it worse. Somewhere in this room, the clock that kept track of useless time ticked away. Otherwise, silence.

  Azrael left the window and yanked her to her feet. “Say something!” he hissed.

  She slapped him. Her hand struck the side of his snarling wolf mask with a dull fwap. It hurt. His head turned at the impact and stayed that way. She could see tendons through the open wound at his throat flexing, but he did not move.

  She slapped him again. And again. Harder and harder each time, until her palm was stinging and her shoulder ached. He did nothing, didn’t even look at her. She wasn’t hitting him anyway. All she could hurt was herself. Lan gulped in breath, raised her shaking arm and slapped him once more, then turned around and left.

  She walked out into the hall, feeling oddly light-headed. She didn’t think, not the kind of thinking that came with words; she only knew she wanted to get away, so she walked, moving gradually faster until she was running blindly, not realizing she was running to Azrael’s chambers until she was nearly there. She ran again, this time to the narrow, unlit stairs that would have led her to the Red Room, had she climbed them. She had nowhere to go. All of Haven was one many-chambered cell and every door opened back on him—the man she slept with at night, the man who made her think of the word ‘love’ for the first time in her damn life, the man who could give the order to murder every living person in an entire village and then move on to all the rest of them.

  There was no more Mallowton. She didn’t know Mallowton, not really, but that didn’t stop her from feeling its loss. There had been a Mallowton, now there was not. She didn’t need to know the details; she’d already heard them once. Break the walls. Shatter the greenhouses. Burn every building. The only question was whether he had also given the order to burn the dead or whether he’d let them rise up afterwards to become the Eaters who howled at the walls of the next village.

  How could he do it? He had seemed to regret giving that order when it was Norwood. She could remember with clarity that was nearly pain how it had felt that night—sitting in chains at the foot of his bed with him sitting beside her, nearly touching, and how he had tried to comfort her. Had it all been her imagination?

  Of course it had. He wasn’t human. He was Azrael—Angel, Devil, Death. And she was the stupid child who had forgotten that.

  Lan found herself at a curtained window and realized she had been staring at it for some time as she drowned herself in these thoughts. She realized further that the window would have opened into the meditation garden and that it had been curtained now several days. She had noticed as much…oh, days ago, when she had first come home to find Azrael waiting for her on the palace steps with the sun shining and the yard full of screaming peacocks.

  Moving slow, like a woman in a dream, Lan walked closer and drew the curtain aside.

  The sun was nearly gone and the inner courtyard was thrown dark in shadow, but she could see them well enough, the men meditating in Azrael’s garden. One lay in the fire pit, little more than a lump at the center of a greasy funnel of smoke and red embers, providing just enough light as he burned to see the impaling poles where the others hung. Although not all of these poor souls could be dead (and perhaps none of them were), the only movement came from one of the palace guards, stirring at the pyre with his pike to expose unburnt flesh to the flames and more quickly consume the remains.

  The urge came over her to go down to them. To see their faces. To talk to them. Even as the idea grew in her, she felt sickened by it. How could it be anything but an act of cruelty to walk down to a dying man and stand before him, bathed and fed with her hair up and her clean shirt tucked into the jeans no one but her had ever worn? What possible sympathy could she show him? What was she to them but Death’s dollygirl? And worse (admitting it even in her own mind made her squirm) did she want to get any closer than this? From the window, they were only shapes; in the garden, they would be people. Did she really want to be close enough to see their suffering? To smell it?

  But she’d been smelling it, hadn’t she? She’d been smelling it so long, she didn’t smell it at all anymore, like the peacocks who weren’t always peacocks and the screams she could hear and forget as she went strolling down the wooded path to plant her flowers. Edelweiss and lotus and lilies, for peace.

  She went down.

  Two steps out past the doors, that smell—burning fat and melted hair—slid thickly down her throat and never mind how many times she smelled it, Lan’s mouth flooded with sour waters. She lurched aside, folded up like a pocketknife and out came her afternoon coffee and several slices of lemon cake. She gulped in air gone even smokier, it seemed, and puked again, just a slimy stream of lemony bile this time, and again and again, until she was empty and light-headed from the exertion.

  “Are you all right?” the pikeman called. It sounded like he was trying not to laugh and she could understand why. Hell, she’d been laughed at for her squeamishness back in Norwood, when all she’d done was avoid funeral fires…even her mother’s, where she had stood crying over the writhing body with the axe loose in her hand, useless, until Sheriff Neville took it, shoved her aside and did what family ought to have done. They’d laughed at her plenty, but not even as a child had she whooped up her guts just from the smell.

  She really had become a stranger.

  “I’m fine,” said Lan, spitting. She braced herself, taking deep breaths until she was certain there wouldn’t be a repeat performance, then turned around.

  The burning man was a head and half an arm, a few ribs connected to a pelvis, and a black stump of a leg terminating just above the knee. As she watched, he turned his head, charred sockets aimed sightlessly in her direction, and reached the blunted bones of his arm toward her.

  “Do something,” Lan heard herself say sickly. “Can’t you do something?”

  The pikeman shrugged and slammed the butt of his weapon down into the burned man’s skull, releasing a plume of sparks and ash. The burned man’s jaw gaped, but he had no more lungs to scream with.

  Lan’s gorge rose right to the back of her throat, even if it was just an Eater. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve roughly enough to leave her lips feeling raw and, when she was sure there would be no more embarrassing behavior, she made herself look around. The guard who had been with her during her own night in this garden was still here, although his pike had been moved, presumably so all the raiders from Mallowton could hang together. Lan counted seven pikes, but four were empty now, with nothing but the black stain of their blood left on the wood to prove they had ever been there. The remaining three hung like scarecrows, their clothes flapping around their wasted bodies. She couldn’t tell for sure through the heavy smoke, but she thought they were dying, because if they were dead, they’d be moving more. Beside them, his chest cracked open and organs exposed to the irrigating spray of saline, was their ferryman. Her ferryman.

  She moved stupidly toward him, forgetting the boys impaled beside him, forgetting the watching pikeman, forgetting even the Eater in the fire…until its burning hand closed around her knee and pulled.

  A little earlier, this would have been the end—she would have surely fallen facedown in the pit, breathing in live embers and screaming out blood and ashes while the Eater rolled over her and ate. It still had the strength, but it no longer had the cohesion. Its fingers—long, thin sticks of charcoal with bones stuck through them—snapped off and lay twitching on the ground. Lan stepped back, but by then, the pikeman was between her and it, shoving it deeper into the hottest coals and pinning it there.

  Its head was gone. Its arms, broken. Embers glowed in the cave of its ribs. It wasn’t recognizable as a person. It wasn’t even an Eater anymore, just a writhing lump of charcoal, but it had been a boy once and so she watched it burn. The smoke burned her eyes, but it wasn’t until she turned away and found herself staring again at the pikes—the ones that were empty and the ones that weren’t—that it all blurred out of foc
us. Lan wiped at her eyes, staring in shame at the moisture on her fingertips as the pikeman smothered another laugh.

  Across the courtyard, the ferryman’s exposed lungs took in a difficult breath. His voice was a rusty whisper, a scratch across her ear, as he asked, “Are those tears for me?”

  Lan’s feet moved her closer, away from the fire and the thing that burned there. “You remember me.”

  “The one who paid…” Another breath. “…with peaches.”

  “Did you have any?” she asked inanely.

  “Sold them. Sure…they were good,” he added, as if consoling her. “But I don’t…eat.”

  Lan raised her hand, but could not bring herself to touch him, even on those few places where he seemed intact. “Can I do anything? Do you want—” She groped for something, anything, she could offer. “—a drink?”

  “You don’t have to feel…anything for me, Peaches. Ferrymen…die. That’s just…the way of it. We all say we’re going to stop…and we all get caught.” He dragged in another breath and let it out as a chuckle, almost indistinguishable from the sound of ashes blowing into the air behind her. “From the day…I walked away from him…I always knew…I’d end up stuck…or burnt.” He turned his head with effort toward the burning man. “Or both.” He turned back to her and studied her seriously. “You…look good.”

  She smiled wanly.

  “Much better…than you used to. Treating you…well?”

  She nodded, dropping her eyes, ashamed.

  “I worried…about you.” He twitched on his pole, trying to shrug. “Don’t…do that much, but you…were different.”

  “I am?” She looked at herself and blushed. “I was?”

  The ferryman frowned. “Don’t do that, Peaches. Don’t…look back. Everyone dies…every day. We raise up and…we go on and we…don’t think about who we were. The past…is dead.”