Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages

by Неизвестный

  Adhrit looked down to see the flared hood of a cobra. His sword whipped out to cut the thing in two but missed and the snake disappeared into the high grass.

  Ekaaksh fell to the ground, moaning and clutching at his wound.

  Adhrit remembered Sankara’s words, just after they’d buried their taata: “He’ll likely come back as a bull.”

  “No,” Adhrit had said. “A cobra.”

  Adhrit forced the sorcerer’s hand away so he could see the wound. “Can you move the leg?”

  Ekaaksh whimpered. “Is it bad?”

  Adhrit ground his teeth together. He’d seen bites like this twice before. Both times the men had died. And if Ekaaksh died, then what of the vetala? He gripped the sorcerer’s shoulder. “Is there another way to stop the vetala?”

  “Save me. Carry me to town. Or else go get help.”

  “I will! But I need to know what will stop the vetala.”

  Ekaaksh just shook his head, staring up at the sky. “No, please no.”

  Adhrit slapped the sorcerer’s face. “Tell me how to stop them and I will get you help.”

  Ekaaksh’s eyes focused for a moment. “A mantra. You must repeat it till the last one is stilled.” His sobs interrupted the mantra. His trembling lips mangled the words. Adhrit forced him to repeat it, slapping him each time.

  By the time Adhrit had committed it to memory, the sorcerer’s breath came in weak rasps. Adhrit had to deny the man mercy. “Stay here,” he said, in a flat, dead voice. “I’ll get you help.”

  He ran for the banks of the river. The bridge had been taken down, the river still protected Ramyasthana. But as he reached the cemetery, he saw the vetala, as one, dropping into the banks of the Vipasa.

  He pushed himself faster as hope filled his chest. The creatures would be swept away by the rough flow of the river. He stood at its edge, breathing hard, waiting to see something. Minutes passed. The vetala must now be downstream, a plague on someone else if not washed out to sea.

  Then, like a lumbering, bloated crocodile, a pale, grey shape emerged from the water at the far side. Another followed. And another, until enough dripping vetala emerged to doom Ramyasthana.

  “No!” Adhrit dropped his sword to the ground and began stripping off gear and clothes. Even the strongest man could barely swim the Vipasa at this time of year, but he had to try. He dove into the water and the shock of its cold took the breath from him. He pushed his arms and legs to carry him forward, even as the thrust of the river washed him further downstream. He kicked and barely came up for breath. Then he inhaled a spray of water and got swirled around by the current. His head struck hard upon a cresting rock as he was carried away.

  In all things the sorcerer had been right. Alexander’s scouts returned to the main force and rumors of the vetala spread. When the conqueror tried to urge his men to move on, they revolted, and he was forced to turn around, shy of the Vipasa River.

  He was also right that the vetala were only bound while he lived. As he died, overcome by their hunger, they moved for nearby Ramyasthana. By the time Adhrit arrived there, no one was left alive. The vetala moved throughout the city, devouring the meat of the inhabitants, slick with blood and entrails. Some of the buildings burned, casualties of the fighting, no doubt. Bodies littered the ground like the petals of flowers.

  Adhrit walked among them, tears stinging his eyes, chanting the mantra that Ekaaksh had given him. As he neared the vetala, they went rigid as he continued the chant. Then they collapsed, one by one, to the ground, lifeless corpses once more. He made three circuits of the city, until he was certain that none of the vetala remained, then he stopped, his throat raw.

  Most of the dead were hard to identify, but he thought he found his brother together with his wife and children. He avoided looking at the vacated corpses. They were all just empty shells now, the souls of the people of Ramyasthana having moved on to the next step of the karmic cycle. Ramyasthana, the oasis of culture in that land, was no more. Perhaps its soul, too, waited for its next incarnation.

  Adhrit once more donned the robes of the ascetic and wandered the lands. He wore a veil so as to not inhale the tiniest of insects. He went barefoot so as not to crush anything in his path. Rather than a sword, he bore a staff that jingled, warning of his presence.

  He did not raise his hand to defend himself when men of the road beat him. If his lips were swollen with bruises or thirst, he still moved them to spread the word of what had happened at Ramyasthana and how straying from their path had doomed them. He taught to any who would listen the cycle of reincarnation and how enlightenment came only by walking the right path.

  Still his every step away from that cemetery he had befouled pained him. He ate no meat and yet found himself salivating whenever he passed anything of flesh. Goat. Poultry. Children. The stains of his sins had not been washed away by the Vipasa or worn down by his long travels.

  One night, as he sat by the road, the dark jungle at his back, before sleep came he thought he heard the hiss of a serpent. A cobra? Or was it the memory of the last breath taken by Ekaaksh. Or of Sankara. Or Ramyasthana. Or his own? His trembling hand went to his chest to assure himself he still lived.

  After Lazarus

  Antiquity

  A Frenzy of Ravens

  Christopher M. Cevasco

  40 A.D. – Isle of Mona, Briton

  Alene and her father crossed swords in the shadows of the sacred grove. Great, midnight-hued birds gathered all around on gnarled oaks, watching, skittish from the clangor.

  “Blade up,” her father said, swinging hard toward Alene’s head. “If a Roman wretch comes upon you he’ll not care you’re still a child. You’ll have to fight like a grown warrior to stay alive.” Though a druid, he was himself as much a warrior as any of the Iceni, and Alene knew he wanted her to be the same. Now more than ever. For once she did not bother to tell him thirteen summers made her no longer a child.

  Will they ever truly come? she wondered. It was the second time these men called Romans had threatened, and just as the first time almost a hundred years before, the threat had again come to nothing. The Romans had a chief—some named him Caligula, others Imperator—and if Alene could believe the accounts, this madman called off the latest invasion while still on Gaul’s shores after first ordering his warriors to gather seashells from the strand as spoils of the conquered mere. To Alene, such behavior could only mean there had been some intervention by the goddess, Boudicca, She who warded Briton, its folk, and the Iceni above all. My prayers were answered.

  “Good,” her father grunted as she shoved his blade away with her own. “That’s enough for this morning. I must meet with your Uncle Hirelgdas and the others to talk of better warding ourselves in the years to come.”

  Whether Alene’s prayers had been answered or not, the learned mystics of the Iceni and every other people had gathered from across Briton to discuss the Romans. True fear simmered among the elders; even her grim uncle, one of the fiercest warriors alive, was afraid. Alene felt it no matter how they all tried to hide it from her. She glanced up at the ravens, whose stirrings had quieted; they sensed it too—blood on the air—and it made their black eyes sparkle.

  “I would stay a while,” Alene said, “to be with the goddess.”

  Her father nodded and strapped his sword to his hip, then planted a kiss atop her head. There was no question of which goddess she meant; he well knew her devotion to Boudicca—the great victory goddess, known as Andraste to some, as the Morrígan to others. “Don’t linger overly long. Your mother will be looking for you.”

  Alene nodded, then watched him melt into the woods, a tall, strong figure, his hair still dark and thick with but a hint of gray. Only when she was sure he was well away did she lay her own sword down on the mossy ground and turn to be about her business. Today she had resolved to give thanks in a way her father would not look well on.

  She stripped off her cloak and tunic so she stood only in a short shift. Shivering, she knel
t before the stone altar at the clearing’s western edge. Alene looked around at the trees and sent her words to the gaps between the branches. “I speak to Boudicca, She Who Has Not Fallen! I am Alene, and my people are the Iceni.” She paused, and her shivers worsened. “It shames me I was so frightened by the talk of Roman onslaught. I should have known you would ward us, as you’ve always done. I do not forget the oath I swore—to hallow myself to you if you delivered us from the wretched outlanders. So I offer myself to your gathered errand-runners. Let them drink of my lifeblood as a mark of my bond to you.”

  Alene took up a small blade she’d hidden earlier among the altar stones. She made a short, neat cut along each inner forearm. Then she lay back on the ground, arms akimbo, and let the blood flow.

  A breeze stirred the boughs, and the ravens left their perches. Flocking about Alene, they answered her call. Dark beaks pecked at the bloody soil and the open wounds with little pinching stabs. The pain stirred her from a deepening swoon, and she heard a voice—a soughing that was part cawing, part feathered rustle. The Lady does not take consecration lightly. Your life will be Hers. And your death. Is this your will?

  “Yes, Lady.” Alene’s voice was a bare whisper. “I give myself fully.”

  The Lady will test you again. Temper you with hardships. More blood will be spilled, and not only your own.

  “As the Lady bids. To keep my home safe, no hardship is too great.”

  Awareness faded. The ravens abided, gathered about and atop her like a blanket, drinking their fill.

  Then something changed.

  Alene had braced herself for the pecking, and it was nothing, little worse than the cuts she’d made herself many times before. But now . . . something else entered her with each sharp pinch. Icy cold flooded her body, and some great weight—the very sky itself—pressed down on her, collapsing into her, smothering her. With it came the smell of death, of decay—a carrion smell.

  She struggled but was too weak to move, let alone send off the flock. The weight lessened, and she cried out, a sound so small she was unsure if she did so in truth or only in her mind. Then the sky’s press was back like a great wave, washing over her, receding, then coming again to pound her into the earth.

  I am lost.

  The birds scattered all at once, rising above the grove. The stench abated; warmth and life flowed back into her, chased away by hands lifting her, shaking her. Her uncle’s hands. Hirelgdas’s voice.

  “Uncle?”

  “Foolish girl!” Hirelgdas barked, and he struck Alene across the face. The sting of his knuckles woke her fully, and she could not stop the tears from flowing as she stared up at his angry eyes, at the dappled pattern of sunlight through leaves shifting across his shaved head as though the skin itself were moving. “Your father is a fool too, but I guessed you might be up to no good. By the gods, you are to lead your people one day! Remember that the next time you think to so carelessly cast your life away.”

  “I’m sorry.” It came out as a sob, and Alene was ashamed as she looked down at her forearms. The bleeding had stopped, but her arms were deeply bruised around the wounds.

  “Not yet you’re not,” he answered. “But you will be!” Then he struck her again, beating her from neck to belly with his hard fists.

  Above the sound of her own cries, Alene heard a single caw from the departing birds.

  61 A.D. – Iceni Lands, Briton

  A lingering winter wind pushed in among the hawthorn and rowan. Alene looked out from the thicket on a high, moss-covered bluff over the sea of bright spring buds and tentative leaves already crowning the forest below. Out and south she looked, toward the Trinovante lands, and a little to the west, in the direction of the Roman stronghold of Kaelcolim.

  No doubt that was the direction from which the emissaries would come—from that place the outlanders had founded like a scabby wound among Loegria’s soft hills. They had the gall to call Kaelcolim their “provincial capital,” as though Briton were no more than an insignificant afterthought to their empire over the water.

  Alene shivered, and her daughter Saraid touched her elbow. “What is it, Mother?” Saraid’s cheeks still held a child’s round fullness, but she had Alene’s high forehead over large eyes, an almost Roman nose, and pouting lips nearly the hue of spilled blood against her ivory skin. Whereas Alene’s hair was a mass of amber curls, Saraid had been gifted with the straight, dark hair of Alene’s own dead mother.

  “Nothing, dearest,” Alene answered. “It’s chilly, and I should have worn a heavier cloak.” She told herself it was that and not memories of the earlier Roman threat all those years ago . . . not memories of how frightened she’d been as a child. She rubbed absently at the old scars along her forearms and remembered too her vow that bygone day in the clearing and what happened when she woke aching and weak in her father’s roundhouse on Mona the next morning; as she lay wrapped in blankets, a vision had come to her—Boudicca surrounded by a flurry of dark, beating wings. The goddess had looked right at her with shining eyes, fierce and awful, but also familiar somehow, which had comforted her. It was a wonder she’d kept with her always, even now that she was queen of her people. So much had changed.

  “Can it be so long ago the Romans returned? After Caligula’s witlessness,” she mused, more to herself than to her daughter. “Seventeen summers gone, when I was newly wed to your father.” Prastog was an Iceni merchant, later rewarded with a client-kingship for helping Emperor Claudius’s conquering battle chiefs. Her husband had always been so quick to kneel to the outlanders, but even after all this time under the entrenched Roman governors of Briton, Queen Alene never let herself acknowledge Roman overlordship.

  “I miss Father too,” Saraid said.

  Alene bit back tears; she had not let one fall yet and wouldn’t start now. Not on this of all days. Be strong!

  A rowan blossom rode the air until it vanished into the thicker greenery below, and Alene scowled. With her husband’s death and spring’s coming, the time to pay for past overweening had come. Word came to Alene daily as Roman siege after Roman siege drove high folk from their own homes across Iceni lands—men and women who had supported both her husband and the Emperor and done nothing to earn the like. But when Seneca and the others called in loans and the payments were unforthcoming, all was seized in the name of the latest emperor, Nero. Men and women were mowed down beneath Roman swords like so much wheat. Alene snorted. The wonted Roman answer!

  “Mother, look!”

  Alene looked where her daughter pointed, squinting toward the land’s southernmost eyemark. A glint of sun on polished bronze was her first sight of Seneca’s men just beyond the wood’s edge. The waiting is over. They’ve come.

  She rose from the natural stone seat, all at once unable to look away from an ancient ash tree downslope. It was bent and twisted into a tortured shape by the winds of untold storms but still clung to life on the stone and indeed put forth the first faltering black buds that meant it would live to see yet another summer in this quiet place. Nearby, a jackdaw’s nest filled the newly cracked and shattered trunk of a youngish oak that jutted from the ground like some mouldering hand reaching up from the grave. The oak had been too proud to bend with the same winter winds that had taken her husband from her not two months past. The Romans were a wrathful wind, sweeping across Briton, and it was now Alene’s decision how best to weather the storm. Bend as my husband did, or stand tall like an oak as so many tried before? All those latter folk were dead now or taken as thralls to the markets in Rome. The answer seemed clear.

  “Come, Saraid.” Pulling up her tunic’s thick mantle and fastening it with her best brooch worn for the delegation’s arrival, Alene strode from the bluff back below the surrounding trees. Saraid kept pace at her side, taking two steps for every one of her mother’s. As they approached the nearby hill fort’s slope, the marching Roman auxiliaries’ first ranks had already rounded the curve of the southwest road. Alene made her way up from the forest borde
ring the hill’s eastern face by hidden paths known to herself and her kin, and by the time they reached the top, the Romans were climbing the other side by way of the plainer path.

  Alene’s elder daughter stood behind the altar, ringed by several dozen worried Iceni high-men and women and looking comely as always, every bit the leader of their people she would one day be. If Brianne shared any of the others’ misgivings, she hid it well. Gods! She looks more like Prastog every day. The girl had his long, sleek jawline and high cheekbones, framed by layers of her mother’s amber curls. At fifteen, she was more a woman than Alene herself had been at that age, and if her swift headway in the hallowed crafts was any sign, she would one day surpass her mother in a priestess’s skills.

  Saraid, on the other hand, though making like headway in her studies, still had a child’s eagerness, and as she stepped up to the altar, Brianne had to put a hand on her shoulder to keep the younger girl from standing on tiptoes to get a better look at the nearing soldiers. Alene stood behind her daughters and placed a hand on each. Brianne turned and flashed Prastog’s crooked smile. “You’ve been to Boudicca’s Seat. I smell the rowan in your hair. Did you summon a Telling?”

  “No,” Saraid answered for her, soreness heavy in her words. “She said there was no time today.”

  “Hush, child,” Alene said, clucking her tongue. “I’ll not have my daughter pouting like some spoiled Roman.”

  They looked back toward the road. When the delegation’s rearmost at last came over the hill’s crest, Brianne scoffed. “So the governor sends soldiers to treat with us. More than needed as wards for Seneca’s scribae, that’s bare enough.”

  Alene squeezed her daughter’s shoulder with pride. “Yes, love. Suetonius makes sport with us.” She spat at the governor’s name and wondered if he thought to treat her in the same way as the other high-folk. She would go along with whatever renewed oaths he sought, would even bend knee before the Emperor’s men; but her forbearance had marks. “See how he sends auxiliaries taken from Briton’s own rather than the more swarthy men of the Legion from over the water. He reminds us of his overlordship. There are even some few Iceni among this group, I think.”