Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  “For the other villages, yes. Not Norwood.”

  “Why?”

  Deimos paused in his work just long enough to give her a scathing stare.

  Lan fidgeted with a cold boiled potato. “How is he?”

  “He endures and remains our glorious lord.” He set the last crate down and shut the van’s doors.

  “Will you…Will you tell him I said thank you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you tell him…” But there, her voice failed her. There was only so much she could say from Norwood and she couldn’t share any of it with the people she knew were standing on the walls behind her, watching and listening.

  Deimos waited, but when Lan only stood there, he swung himself up behind the wheel of the van and started the motor.

  “How’s my garden?” she blurted.

  “He burned it,” said Deimos and drove away.

  She stopped working for the Fairchilds—just stopped, without a word of warning or even a lame excuse—and went for walks instead, ranging further and further afield in this new land without Eaters. She took a shovel with her when she walked and buried the dead when she found them. She found a little scrap in the ruins of the old towns and built herself a very sorry sort of house outside Norwood’s walls. She set traps and after some trial and error and a few hungry nights, began to catch enough small game not only to feed herself, but to trade for seedlings, which meant building a greenhouse, and even brought in a little ‘slip.

  Full Milk Moon brought Deimos back and again Lan was summoned to meet with him. She asked him how things were in Haven. He told her Haven was the shining light of his lord’s benevolent dominion. Then, somewhat to her surprise, he asked how things were in Norwood. She didn’t know what to tell him, so she said, “Better. Every day, a little more. And we’re grateful.”

  Deimos glanced over at the wall and all the hostile faces staring down, waiting for him to leave so they could bring the food in, even though the mayor and the sheriff kept most of it. “So I see.” Then he looked at her and quietly said, “When he gives the order to kill them all, I have to obey. So you’d best be gone before then.” And with that, he left, his sword gleaming in the sunlight.

  The weather warmed and the rains came on, sinking Norwood ankle-deep in mud. A few ferrymen came by, sniffing after trade, but there wasn’t much coin in salvage anymore. With the Eaters gone, anyone could do it. Lan’s wanderings brought in better than the kids in their painted vans could offer and she wasn’t quite as foreign, so they rolled on out again in just a few days.

  Just before Full Rose Moon, Mother Muggs died and Lan was able to tell Deimos they’d a funeral, a real one. That the funeral was essentially the same as it had always been—a fire, with a few people standing around to stir coals and talk about what a thieving old bitch the dear departed had been—she did not mention. Neither did she mention some of the other things she’d overheard or the growing number of strangers she’d seen in the village, but when she asked how things were in Haven, Deimos simply said the living were discontent.

  When he left, the mayor took Lan aside and asked how she’d breached Haven’s walls.

  “I didn’t,” she told him. “And you can’t.”

  “You got through.”

  “I had a ferryman who had the seal of one of the Children, but the Children are dead…and so is the ferryman who took me in. Leave it alone,” she added. “Haven is for the dead.”

  His lip curled as he looked at her. “This world is for the living. You need to decide where your loyalties lie.”

  A few days later, the guns started coming, crateloads of them, covered over by ratty blankets in the backs of ferries whose old names had been painted over in favor of new ones like The Revenger or Union Jack Attack. When Lan saw this, she marched directly to the mayor’s house, shoving her way in past Eithon and Elvie to a roomful of old men looking at maps. “They don’t die, you fucking fools!” she shouted by way of introductions. “You can shoot every gun in the world dry and it makes no difference! They’re already dead!”

  “This is the one I was telling you about,” Mayor Fairchild said and they all looked at her with the same knowing eyes.

  “You ever hear of a place called Mallowton?” she demanded and knew at once which of them had. “You never will if you haven’t yet, because there is no more Mallowton. He slaughtered them and he’ll slaughter you and then he’ll slaughter your wives and your children and your dogs! He—”

  Eithon slapped her hard enough that she staggered. Before she could right herself, a fist came out from the left and boxed her ear. Another punched into her stomach so that she folded up and then they were on her, jeering and cursing and kicking when she fell. She tried to crawl away, but they enveloped her, all fists and boots and twisted faces, until at last the light exploded behind her eyes and there was blackness.

  When she came around, she was in the mud outside the mayor’s house, one eye swelled shut, her mouth and nose caked with blood. The smell of bread and stew wafted on the warm breeze from the cook house. She could hear laughter and talk through those bright windows, see people she’d known all her life leaned up on the wall outside, smoking pipes and watching her try to stand. She went home and they let her alone, but she stayed awake all night anyway, holding her shovel in both hands and watching the door through her one good eye.

  In the morning, Mary/Ella was gone and she guessed that was the last warning she needed. Lan packed her rucksack full of whatever food and water she had on hand, sold the rest to the twins to buy her Haven-made boots back, and left Norwood.

  “Got a taste for deadhead dick, did you, little Yank?” one of the watchboys called as she passed through the open gate. “Good riddance to you!”

  “You’re all going to die,” she told him and she didn’t look back when she said it. She didn’t look back at all.

  * * *

  She went to Eastport. She thought she’d walk the whole way, now that walking was so easy, but it was rainy and piss-awful and so once again, she only walked as far as Ashcroft and caught a ferry. The ferryman seemed grateful enough just to have a fare and let her ride for a share of her food and a little chat as they bounced down the roads, skirting wide around Haven. He asked her if it was true a rebellion was building in the north. She asked him what he’d do if it was.

  “Get as far from it as a man can,” he replied. “I seen too many pikes set on the walls of empty towns. Will he ever let us alone, do you think?”

  “He will if we will,” Lan answered, gazing out the window at the ruined world. “So, no.”

  In Eastport, she went down to the shore and sat for a good hour, just looking. The ocean was pretty in the morning light, but cold and damp and smelly. She wondered if it was all like that, all the fine places she’d seen in pictures, if the mountains were noisy and deserts too sandy and those trees you could drive through all sticky with sap. She wondered if there were no fine places after all, only problems you got used to.

  When she was done looking, she booked passage on a deep-ferry to the mainland for ten goldslip. She’d always thought it would be a fine, free thing to ride on the ocean, even if it was just the Channel. She was sick the whole way across.

  The deep-ferry lit in a French town called Anglais-en-Port, where Lan figured she’d rest up an hour or two to let her stomach settle before she moved on. She found a dockside pub with the distinctly un-pubbish name of Mal Henri’s whose hard-eyed namesake took one long look at her scarred throat, bruised arms and still-swollen eye and gruffly offered to let her draw pints in exchange for a cold pie, a mat in the back and half of whatever tips came her way. She told him she wasn’t staying, but the thought of recouping her ferry-fare and maybe a little extra was too attractive to ignore.

  So she stayed, just the night…and the night after…and the night after that. The work was light and Henri kept the louts who frequented his establishment in a kind of drunken order that did not include putting hands on ‘his’ girl. T
he nightly roaring, singing, brawling and laughter gradually became comfortable to her, even if it wasn’t home and never would be. Each night, after the chairs were up and the lamps trimmed down, she emptied her apron pockets into Henri’s huge, rough hand, and each night, he counted half fairly back to her before he took whatever was left in the house bottle and climbed the stairs to his apartment, leaving her alone with her narrow mat by the stove. When the night inevitably came that he lay his hand gently over her breast, Lan said no and he took it off again. He asked her if she’d been hurt by a man and she had to laugh, because she had been hurt, if not in the way he meant. Then she cried, because after all this time and distance, the wound just wasn’t healing. She cried and he patted her hair like a father might and said soft things in French. He told her she would always have a place with him and he would let her come to him when she was ready. She told him she wasn’t staying, but she stayed one more night.

  And one more. And one more.

  Somehow, she was still there a month later, when word of the great rebellion reached port. An army ten thousand strong surrounded Haven, they said, and people cheered like that meant something. Lan heard the rumors, recognized the hopeful lies and drunken courage, and waited.

  When it happened, it happened fast. For days, there had been only talk of the siege and the inevitable victory that surely must follow where ten thousand fearless men and women pitted themselves against Evil. Then the deep-ferries stopped coming from Eastport and after a full day without word, someone drove up the coast to Old Calais and returned to say that not only had they not had any deep-ferries either, but that there was smoke over the distant shore of England. Not just over Dover, they said, but all of it, as much as could be seen.

  It was very quiet in the tavern that night. Men sat by the windows and watched the sea and drank too much in silence.

  Eleven days passed, each one like the final blow of the headsman, and in the morning, you had to get up and climb the stair to kneel at the block again.

  On the twelfth day, the deep-ferries came back, all of them, one right after the other, and even Lan’s inexpert eye could see them sitting too damn low in the water. The people who got off the boats were quiet, smudged with ash and streaked with tears, blindly staring. They answered no questions, just shuffled off along the docks and milled into the streets. Some had satchels. Some had children. Most had nothing. And after many hours, many boats, Lan saw the first faces she knew. Norwood’s faces, none of them rebels and none of them whole. Pippa without Posey. Elvie without Eithon. Little Abbey and Ivy, hand in hand, but not their mother, Danae.

  When the last boat docked, there was only one passenger and he came just far enough to let the silver trimmings of his Revenant’s uniform be seen. Deimos surveyed the crowd below him with his usual lack of expression, then drew his sword and held it up for silence. In a loud, clear voice, he called, “By order of our sovereign lord Azrael, the true and living god; Azrael the Immortal, guardian of the grave; Azrael the Invincible, ruler of all things; be it known the living are banned from the land formerly known as the United Kingdoms, hereafter to be known as the Purged Lands. Any living human found in trespass there will be put to death by impalement. Our lord is merciful. Our lord is merciful.” He sheathed his sword, started to turn away, then paused and looked back.

  The little time he and Lan gazed at each other occupied its own eternity, but as soon as he turned and went back onto the ferry, she realized it had only been a few seconds after all. The ferry chugged away. The crowd began to disperse, muttering amongst itself and giving the refugees narrow stares and a wide berth. Mal Henri tapped Lan’s arm and walked with her back to the tavern because, even if it wasn’t noon yet, people were going to want to drink.

  “If anyone asks, you’re my sister’s girl,” he was telling her in his gruff manner. “Folk remember that she had one before she went away, even if you are a bit young. And no more you speak anglais, eh? No more. Now, tu parleras française, oui?”

  “I’m not staying,” said Lan, looking back to watch the ferry grow smaller on the sea.

  “Put it from your mind, ma fillette,” he grunted, not without a kind of coarse sympathy. “You have no home now.”

  But she did and someday, she knew she’d have to go back. But not yet, she decided. She could stay one more night, just to let things settle. Maybe even longer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The moon was rising full over the broken walls when Lan returned to Norwood. The moon of mid-winter was called Cold Moon and Dead Moon and sometimes Azrael’s Moon. When she’d been little, the other kids used to scare each other by imagining a skull in the shadowed craters of its face, but of course, it was the same moon. Just a rock, spinning out there in space, oblivious to the rising tides or shivering little kids it affected on Earth. But it made a good lamp, shining bright on the thin crust of snow that lay over the land, so that Lan could walk by night as well as by day and come to the village where she’d been born.

  It felt strange, coming back this way. When Deimos had brought her here from Haven, she’d been in a van and looking at the world through a window just wasn’t the same. Walking was more personal, elevating the act to something epic—a journey, a quest. There were no more Eaters to watch for through the still hours of the night, nor were there rogue ferries or caravans of townless folk looking to prey on defenseless travelers. The roads were overgrown to a startling degree, considering it had only been a year. Likewise, the towns she passed along her way showed ages of neglect for the little time they’d been empty. Deer grazed between the broken walls of greenhouses; fields that had been plowed outside the walls for the first time in thirty years now were jungles, their first crop grown wild and gone to seed and weed; wild dogs joined her on her walk now and then, throwing off their feral instincts for half-remembered domesticity, but they all turned back after a short distance, so she came to Norwood alone.

  No one hailed her from the wall. The gate doors stood open—beaten open, by the looks of them—so Lan went in. Hers were the only footprints. There were no tire tracks, no lumpy divots in the frozen mud to show where traffic, such as it ever was here, was heaviest. The ferry lot was empty; the charging stations still stood, unsalvaged, still soaking up sun during the days and blinking out their faint green light to show they were ready to power up your batteries. The seed shed and greenhouses were burnt, but the rest of the lodges were mostly undamaged. In the stockyard, she found Sheriff Neville’s faithful hounds, lying frozen where they’d finally starved after eating the goats, the pigs, the Mayor’s feet, and each other. The other bodies, the human bodies, were nothing but skeletons held together by the rags of their clothes and the spikes that impaled them to the thatched roofs where anyone could see them. She identified Neville and his deputies by their clothes, but the rest were beyond all recognition. There weren’t many, in any case. She’d passed a dozen villages and towns in the last month since coming back to England, and they were all like this: a handful of bodies, a mere suggestion of violence, and stillness.

  There was nothing else to see here. Lan went to the cook house and down into the cold cellar. It too was untouched by scavenging hands; potatoes and turnips filled their bins, rotted black; apples had withered to the size of walnuts in the barrel; chickens slaughtered the morning of the purge still hung from the rafters, eaten down to feather and bone by the colony of wasps that had built the paper nest bulging out from the wall. She ducked under it, helped herself to a jar of peaches off the shelf and took it upstairs to eat.

  A Revenant was waiting for her when she came back into the long hall where the tables were. They looked at each other without speaking for maybe half a minute. Then Lan walked over to a bench and sat. She pulled her knife and used it to peel the wax away and pry the lid up. She scooped out the black scum from the top of the jar, flicked it onto the floor, and said, “Want some?”

  “I don’t eat.” But he did come over and sit down on the bench opposite her. He set
his unsheathed sword on the table. The curved blade caught a little moonlight through the window and threw it up into Lan’s eyes.

  “Do you know who I am?” she asked. The peaches were soft-frozen, making them tasteless and crunchy in their slush. She ate them anyway and thought with every bite how much she hated peaches.

  “Oh yes.”

  “Will you take me to Haven?”

  “As soon as you are content to leave.”

  “Out of curiosity…” Lan chopped out a last peach-slice and pushed the jar away. “How long have you been following me?”

  His head cocked. “When did you become aware?”

  “I never saw you,” she admitted. “I just had that itchy feeling. How long?”

  He smiled. “Since you landed.”

  “You’ve been tailing me all the way from Eastport? Really?” Lan managed a rueful smile of her own. “That’s just embarrassing. Why did you let me walk all the bloody way to Norwood, then?”

  “The captain thought you’d want to see it.”

  “Deimos? How thoughtful.” Although still smiling, Lan’s brows slowly knitted. “What did Azrael say?”

  The Revenant gazed at her for a long, silent time. Then he rose and picked up his sword, using it to gesture toward the door. “If you are rested?”

  “Is something wrong?” Lan asked, rising from the bench in the empty cookhouse at the heart of her abandoned village, silent now but for the rustle and knock of bone when the breeze blew through the corpses impaled to the roofs. She was very dimly aware of the contrast between these two facts, manifesting itself as the ghost of a thought—‘Perspective’—before she said, “Is Azrael all right?”

  “Our lord is eternal,” the Revenant replied, which was not exactly an answer, and he seemed to know it. “I will answer no more questions. The captain is waiting for you.”