Land of the Beautiful Dead (77 page)

“Yes, my lord.”

“Get her out of here.”

Deimos held out his hand. Lan pushed herself up and took it, moving past Azrael without touching him. He did not look at her. She did not try to tell him goodbye. She left and he let her go and that was the end.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

L
an had left Norwood the day after her mother’s death, under the new Crow Moon, so it seemed only fitting that she return under another Crow Moon, this one waning and faded behind the clouds. She had Deimos drop her well back, walking the last length so no one would see her getting out of a Revenant’s van. It made no difference. Her year in Haven had marked her, on her flesh and on her soul, and although they let her in, it was never the same. She wasn’t sure she wanted it to be.

There were questions, some. Not so many about the Eaters, lying in rotting heaps around the walls where they had been howling for meat only the day before, but about Haven itself. Were there lights, like the ferrymen said? Was it really like the old cities in the pictures, all clean and full of glass? Was it true there were fields full of every kind of crop, with the dead to tend them, and empty houses, row on row, just being kept by dead maids? How many dead were there, exactly, and how many were Revenants and how many servants? Did the servants serve any master or Azrael alone? To these increasingly disturbing inquiries, Lan said less and less and finally nothing at all except that Haven was for the dead and the living were not welcome there.

“You look like you were made fairly welcome,” Sheriff Neville remarked when he heard this. His eyes crawled slow over her body. “Fairly welcome and then some.”

Mother Muggs gave her a space in the Women’s Lodge, grunting as she did so that it was her charitable nature, for she didn’t have to, not for a penniless beggar and a foreigner such as Lan. It wasn’t her old bed; that, she saw, was occupied now by the woman from Mallowton. Lan tried once to talk with her awhile, but the woman pretended not to know her. She said her name was Ella. She said she came from New Hull. And when Lan tried once, in whispers, to tell her how well Heather was kept in Haven, how she’d been seen by doctors and was getting fed and last Lan knew, was learning to play piano, the woman walked away, calling back in a too-loud voice that talk was Lan had slept up with Azrael in Haven and she didn’t truck with deadhead whores. Lan understood intellectually why she did it, but it still struck hard.

She had nothing. She sold her fine clothes, made just for her by Haven’s tailors, for a half-yield of a row of barley. She took up her old scut work for the Fairchilds, tending the mayor’s animals in the morning and washing up their kitchen at night. For a time, she had offers nearly every night to slip away behind the smoking shed for a private welcome home and maybe a good word spoke the next time her name came up. Most took her refusal with a nod and a shrug, or at worst, a low mutter about deadhead dollies. A few got mean, among them Eithon Fairchild, who’d gone and married that git Elvie, but who would not keep his hands out of her back pockets until she gave him a kick to the jewels. He threatened to have the sheriff on her for that and Lan lost her temper and threatened to have the Revenants on him. After that, she kept to herself.

One day followed another. Crow Moon winked out and Pink Moon grew. Pippa and Posey traded out the last of their winter rows for spring seedlings. Lambs were born. Pigs were bred. And peaches were always in fruit. The age-old rhythm of village life continued its steady beat, but she was not a part of it anymore. She did her work and fell into her bed with all the aches and exhaustion she remembered, but it was not the same. The harder she tried to fit herself back into her old life, the wider the gulf grew until it was insurmountable, but still she needed help to see it.

At Full Pink Moon, the Revenants came. Lan didn’t know. She was scrubbing pots in the knuckle-biting cold water behind the Fairchild’s house when the sheriff came to fetch her. “Come deal with this,” was all he said, so Lan walked out through the gate was to see what she had to deal with. What she saw was Deimos unloading the first of eight crates of food.

“What are you doing here?” she asked stupidly, because she could see the bread and fruits and cheeses.

“My lord’s will,” Deimos replied.

“I didn’t realize…” She reached out to touch a cold joint of mutton and found it not even wholly cold yet. Fresh from Haven’s kitchen, perhaps even from the imperial table. “I thought our arrangement broke when…when we did.”

“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. The 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.