Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  “I know,” Azrael said and oddly, he seemed to say it with genuine sympathy, but that was all he did.

  “What are we waiting for?”

  “It’s being prepared. Patience.”

  She sighed and threw herself back in her spindly little chair and watched the rain wash down. “You could at least talk to me,” she muttered.

  “No, Lan. I don’t think I can.”

  The door to the kitchen whooshed open and in came Azrael’s steward, carrying a tray with a single covered dish on it. It was the first time Lan had ever seen him actually carry anything, as opposed to flapping his hands at a servant, and he did it with such an overinflated impression of consequence that she just knew whatever was under that dome was only just this side of food. Nonetheless, she leaned forward as he set the tray before her, not only resigned but eager to eat her way through a plate of gold-dusted truffles or fish eggs on toast as long as she got to eat something.

  Azrael’s steward whisked the tray’s cover away to reveal a coffee service. Cream, sugar, plenty of flavorings, but no food, not even biscuits. Oblivious to Lan’s undisguised disappointment, the dead man laid it all out, then tucked the tray up under his arm and bowed once more to the throne. “Will that be all, my lord?”

  “It better not be,” Lan muttered, reaching for the carafe.

  “For now. Leave us.” Azrael waited for his steward to withdraw, then turned his own cup over and held it out to be filled. “If you would.”

  Lan looked at him in surprise. “I didn’t think you liked coffee.”

  “Perhaps I never had it prepared properly, by one who had the taste for it.”

  Silly thing to get tickled over, but it tickled anyway. Smiling, Lan mixed him up a cup just the way she liked it, cream and sugar with a cinnamon stick to stir it in, and passed it over. As she made one up for herself, she watched him inspect, sniff, and finally sip at it.

  “You take it quite sweet,” he remarked.

  “Sorry. Things taste wrong to me these days.” She gave her own cup a try, doing her best to mentally filter out that sour tang that was always with her now. It wasn’t the usual blend, she thought. They’d opened up the fancy beans, something flavored, although she couldn’t say with what. Whatever it was, the cinnamon was setting it off. Not in a bad way, maybe, but definitely a different way. “It’s not terrible, is it?”

  “No.” He had another swallow, as if to prove it, then promptly made himself a liar by topping off his cup and thinning out the sugar. Before she could apologize again, he said, “Talk to me.”

  “About what?”

  “Nothing. Everything. I want to hear your voice.” He had more coffee, not drinking so much as pouring it into his body, and gazed at the dead plant in the bowl before him. “I need to hear your voice.”

  Lan’s life hadn’t all been misery and toil, but neither had it provided her with oceans of fond memories. She sipped at her coffee, considering and dismissing fragments of her life.

  “Lan?”

  “My mother and I grew peaches,” she began and so it went on from there. She told him of long days working in the greenhouse, of soil and sweat and the mud it made in every crease of her body, of the way the taste of peaches changed once you’d bled for them. Talk of the greenhouse invariably turned into talk of the Goode twins, whose rows little Lan and her mother had to work before they could even start to work their own, and that led to talk of Mother Muggs, who saw them off each morning and took them in each night, and that somehow led to the Fairchilds. She told him of feeding the mayor’s livestock and scrubbing his wife’s kitchen and then, to her very vague alarm, she heard herself telling him about Eithon, he of the blue eyes and winning smile, before he turned into groping hands and stomping feet and bones wrapped in weathered clothes hanging from Norwood’s broken wall.

  That these were bad memories gradually occurred to her, but the line between good and bad had thinned and blurred considerably since starting to talk. She tried to think of better ones, but for some reason, she was having trouble pinning one down. She would start one story and somehow end on another with no memory of the chain that had led her there. Azrael asked questions whenever she lost the trail of her thoughts and kept her cup filled, but he didn’t seem to be listening to her stories as much as just her voice. The more she stumbled in the telling, getting stuck on simple words and repeating others, the quieter and more watchful he became.

  As her focus eroded, she found herself telling him things she had no business telling anyone and him least of all—of crying into the warm side of the mayor’s cow on the day of the harvest ball because she knew no one would ask her, of stealing food out of the slop bucket on her way to feed the mayor’s pigs, of that first sight of her mother staggering back to the wall in her bare feet, of the sheriff and his tax—and in between, she told him how Lisah Tuttle’s hair was always clean and full of curls, of the time Mal Henri took her down to the fairgrounds in Anglais-en-Port to see the traveling show and buy her a glace (she lapsed unknowing into French when she spoke of him, and Azrael answered in kind), of Master Wickham taking her to damn near every chimney in Haven because she’d told him once she liked them.

  She stopped only to catch her breath, fragments of ten thousand stories tumbling like snow through her mind and melting into a single puddle, then suddenly said, “I’m not making any sense, am I?”

  He poured the last bit of his drink into hers and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry. If this is the last time, I don’t want you to remember me babbling like a fool for hours on end over nothing. I want you to remember me the good ways. There were good ways,” she interrupted herself anxiously, “weren’t there? It wasn’t all fighting and fucking, was it?”

  “No.”

  “I keep thinking of my mother. You know my best memory of her? The first time she took me hunting. I couldn’t have been more than ten. I remember how heavy the rifle was and how it knocked me on my ass the first time I fired it, but I hit a coney on my first shot and I hit three more before we went back. She clapped my shoulder and called me her girl. I never again saw her smile so broad as that, never in my life much less when she was looking at me. It was as good as hearing her say she loved me, which I never heard, ever. And that’s it,” Lan said, sneaking a little more cream into her coffee. “Everything she ever did with me, everything she ever said…and that’s the best memory she left me. Shooting coneys. Do you think she meant for that to happen? No. She thought she had time. Her last words to me were all about reminding me we owed Posey Goode an extra hour for some buttons and to pick up the bacon Pat Morgan promised her. If she’d known those were her last words, I’m sure they’d have been different, don’t you think? I have,” she said without giving him a chance to answer or even quite remembering there had been a question, “a golden opportunity here. I know I’m dying. I know this could be my last night. These could be my last words—”

  His eyes flickered.

  “—and what am I saying, eh? Piss and skittles, that’s what. I love you. That’s what matters. That’s what you’re supposed to remember forever and ever. I love you and I don’t want to leave. You were all my best days…and most of my worst ones, too, but that’s all right. The worst ones weren’t any worse than they might have been with anyone else, but the best ones were so much better. I love you.”

  The rain fell on the windows. Azrael seemed to be waiting for something and the more time passed without it, the more unsteady his eyelight became. At last, he raised a hand—caught between the flickering of his eyes and the guttering candles, it seemed to shake—and covered them.

  “What’s wrong?” Lan asked. “I mean…you know…what else?”

  “Why haven’t you asked me, Lan?” His voice, strained by emotion, scarcely rose above a whisper, but she felt it all the same—not in her ears, but in her bones—filling her with black light. “I know it’s wrong and I should refuse even so, but if you love me as you say, should you not want to s
tay? All this time, all these terrible days…you have not asked me.”

  “Oh.” She petted uncomfortably at one of the flowers and accidentally plucked out a petal. After trying several seconds to reattach it, she remembered that was not how flowers worked and buried it in the sand of its pot instead.

  “Lan. Please. Our time is running out and I need to know why.”

  “I didn’t want to start another fight,” she said, sighing. “I mean, this is it, isn’t it? If you don’t want me—”

  His shielding hand made a fist and dropped with a bang to the table. “How can you say that?”

  “Because you don’t. Not raised up, I mean. I know you want me alive,” she assured him, reaching out to pat his rigid arm. “It’s just the dead me you’re afraid of fucking up.”

  He dropped his gaze and stared instead at her hand on his arm.

  “And I reckon I’m a little afraid of it, too,” she admitted. “Maybe not for the same reasons, but I’m afraid. As much as you don’t want to look at me someday and see a mistake you made…that’s how much I don’t want to look at you and see you regretting it. Regretting me.”

  He looked away. The rain fell. The ugly plant with his blood smeared on the side dropped a leaf.

  “Well.” Lan took her hand back and morosely picked up her coffee. “It’s too late now anyway.”

  He watched her drink, his face drawn and strained.

  “I mean, look at me. You know, I really didn’t mean it when I offered that one time before. I only put it up as barter against the Eaters, because it was what I thought you wanted most.”

  “I know.”

  “But I distinctly remember thinking…thinking…” Lan frowned, groping through her memories for one that had been clear as diamonds just seconds ago. She started to have another drink and maybe the caffeine helped, because at the first sip, she suddenly found it. “Ah! Thinking it was the best time!”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean…” What did she mean? “To kill me. To raise me up. It was the best time. It was the best…” She floundered, patting mutely at her chest before she found the right word. “…me!”

  He poured her more coffee. “Tell me why.”

  Lan winced elaborately and spooned more sugar into her cup. “Well, don’t think less of me, but really, why would anyone choose to be twenty just once and sixty forever? Yeah, I know they say that age is just a state of mind, but I’ve seen old people and it looks to me like the knees got a lot to do with it, too. If my eyes went bad or I got the rheumatiz, is that my new forever? What the hell kind of prize is that, seriously? For either of us! Say I live on another fifty years before I die and you raise me up. What do you get but to look at my wrinkles and saggy bits for all eternity?”

  His answer was to touch one cracked claw to the uppermost edge of the scar that cut across his face and follow it down, over his fiery eye, along the open hole in his cheek, lightly scraping over the exposed bone of his jaw, and on down his neck until the wound closed again over his breast. “There are worse sights.”

  “You’ll heal, if you ever get the chance. But that night? That was the best I’ll ever be.” She glanced awkwardly down at herself, at the ruin of a body that was never all that fair to begin with. Serafina was right; she didn’t look half as bad as she had before the treatments, but it was a farmer’s body still, one that showed the work she’d done with it in every callus and scar. Its lines were unpolished; its color, uneven. “Look at me now,” she said, testing the firmness of her own small breast. “Just look at me now.”

  He touched a claw to her chin and brought her gaze up through swimming headspace and shadow to meet his too-bright eyes. “I see you,” he said softly. “As you were. As you are. And they are one.”

  “And isn’t that funny?” said Lan, slurring her words a little as she laughed along with them. “You’re the only one who knows what I really look like. And I’m the only one who knows what you really look like. Like…like did you know your eyes have colors?”

  His brows rose slightly and slowly furrowed. “No. What colors?”

  “Greens, mostly. Some greys and browns. A little blue. You have to look for it. Under the white. You know, people think white is no color, but in your eyes, it’s like it’s all colors. Every…possibility. I love your eyes,” she told him, nodding. “In the dark especially. I love…this.” She raised her hand, the one without the coffee in it, and cupped it as if to catch his eyelight, although he was still seated beside her and not lying behind her in the dark. She stared into her palm anyway, seeing the reflection of light that wasn’t there. “I hope it’s not dark where I’m going. Do you think…do you think…”

  “No, Lan,” he said, smoothing away tears she had not yet realized she was leaking. “You won’t be lost in the dark.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said, but was it? She couldn’t remember, so she laughed to cover the embarrassment she probably did not feel as strongly as she ought to. The sound struck her ear oddly; she knew it was shrill and ought to be jarring, but by the time it reached her ear, it had mellowed out to something that was just odd. Like the room, she decided, looking around. The candles that should be too bright, the hall that should be too big, the flowers that really should be too flowery—it had been all of these things when she first entered the room and she suspected it still was, but she couldn’t see it that way anymore. It almost felt like being drunk, only without the swimming head, or like falling asleep, except without being tired. In fact, the more she thought about it, the harder it was to think about it. She looked down into her coffee cup and laughed again. “I feel funny. What did you spike this with?”

  It was a joke. He didn’t smile. He said, “Adenia,” and poured the last of the coffee from the pot into her cup.

  “Oh.” She peered at the ugly plants decorating the table, but could not quite bring them all the way into focus. “Master Wickham said…said you could eat a lot of flowers, but I didn’t…” The thought slipped away. She groped for it, said, “…plant them…” then gave up and let it go. She picked up her cup, using both hands, and brought it miles through the air to her lips. She drank and winced; she’d forgotten to add cream and sugar.

  Azrael leaned toward her, steadying the cup as she tried to push it away.

  “It’s bitter,” she protested.

  “Yes.” He cupped the back of her neck, helping her to drink the rest. “It always is.”

  She wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so she laughed again. She had trouble catching her breath afterwards. She wasn’t panting or anything, it just didn’t seem that important to keep breathing, but other than that, she felt just fine. When he said, “Come here, Lan. Sit here with me,” she had no trouble at all getting up from her chair and going to his.

  She sat on his lap and he put his arms around her and pulled her close against his chest.

  “Here is where you leave me, Lan,” he whispered, stroking the smooth curve of her head the way he used to stroke her hair. “And if I were a better man, I would let you go, even where I cannot follow, to have that perfect peace I can never share. If I loved you as you surely deserve to be loved, I would bury you in some good place and set a stone above you that reads Here she lies whom God alone shall raise up. And I would grieve and go on alone.”

  The words, like the rain, dropped and slid away without ever touching her, but his face as he said them made her sad. She reached up through fathoms of thick distance and touched his cheek. He lay his hand over hers and that was okay. She smiled.

  His hand slipped up to cup her head and pull her close enough to kiss, but he didn’t. “I am not that man,” he said, his lips just brushing hers on every word. “Forgive me for what I am about to do, my Lan. Forgive me. I have been alone too long to be noble now.”

  She shut her eyes against the heat of his and nodded once, because although the words themselves floated through her largely without meaning, the sound of his voice was soothing. She thought she
might sleep now, although she wasn’t tired, so she didn’t bother to open her eyes again.

  He finally kissed her. Just once. Like the wax stamp on a royal edict, like the seal on a promise, and no more. He did not speak again, or if he did, it did not penetrate the growing darkness that filled her where her breath ought to be, but he did hold her. That much, she could still feel. He held her until she slept.

  * * *

  It seemed to Lan that she did not sleep long, but when Azrael said her name, she woke at once to find the room lit only by his eyes. The candles had burned to stumps trailing wax in ribbons all down their fine holders to the table. The rain fell on dark windows. Lan herself lay in an awkward sprawl across Azrael’s lap—her head lolling and arms dangling over one side of the throne, her left leg kicked up over the other and the right resting on the floor. Her gown’s laces had come loose (or been cut, knowing him), leaving her chest in an exposed state that was, if not indecent, certainly immodest.

  Bewildered (but not groggy, as she so often was these days when she woke up), Lan gave her bodice a tug and took a deep breath to brace herself against the exhausting effort it would take to right herself. But when she found a gripping place on Azrael’s broad shoulders, she sat up without any struggle at all. Even Azrael’s hand on her back was only a guide, not a support. She probably could have stood right away, if she wanted. Instead, she tucked her legs up and settled herself more comfortably within the confines of his throne, resting her head against his shoulder and closing her eyes again. His arms enfolded her, holding her in silence. She did not doze; she wasn’t tired.

  Outside, the rain hit the windows. Inside, Azrael’s breath blew over the naked top of her head and his heart slushed and thumped against her ear.

  “Reckon we’ve missed dinner,” Lan said at last, although it was hard to drum up much regret. Whatever appetite she’d had on entering this room was gone now. She wasn’t feeling nauseous, for a happy change, she just wasn’t hungry anymore. “Want to go to bed?”