Dante nodded. He hardly liked the idea of being the decoy for such a formidable opponent, but he knew Radovan would have the better chance at striking it a fatal blow.
“You there!” Dante heard a man call from somewhere nearby. “What are you doing?”
They turned from the monster to see a live, more normal-sized man approaching them. His face was greasy and scarred, with a thin, scruffy beard. He carried a spear and wore leather armor. Adam gestured to Radovan and Dante to get their hands off their swords, then he called to the man. “Nothing. We just wanted to climb up the trail. We meant no harm.”
The man stood near them now. “Well, see that you don’t,” he said. “Or I’ll have to let Nimrod here off his leash to bash your heads in. Then I’ll have to get him back on his leash, and that could take some doing, so we don’t want that, do we?”
“Oh no. Nothing of the kind,” Adam agreed meekly.
“So, you want to go up the trail, eh? What for? I don’t call Nimrod off for just anybody. There’s no sightseeing in this valley!”
“Lord Ahriman sent for us,” Adam said without any pause. Dante cast a sideways look at him. Adam gestured to each of the four of them in turn. “A new guard, a new apothecary, a new alchemist, and a new maid and… whatever.” Dante thought it was risky, filling in too many details, but there was no turning back now.
The man leered. “I like plenty of ‘whatever,’” he said. “But she looks a bit well-used.”
“Well, her timing wasn’t perfect,” Dante agreed. “But she’s so pretty it seemed worth the trouble. I’m sure she’ll be quite enjoyable once she drops the extra baggage.”
The man snickered and let his eyes roam from Bogdana’s face to her breasts. “I suppose.” He stuck his spear in the ground. “Well, I can pull Nimrod out of your way, but it’ll take some work. I call him Nimrod because he’s so big and strong. Makes a great guard, so nobody goes up to Lord Ahriman’s unannounced. But it makes getting him out of the way a bit tricky.”
“I see,” Dante said, pretending not to get the implication.
The man was not a wily one; Dante had sized him up quickly. He was too used to people being overwhelmed by the threat of this monster, so he wasn’t prepared for any refusal or negotiation. And Dante was losing patience with greed in this part of the valley.
“I mean, it’ll take a lot of work,” the man repeated. “And the worker needs to be paid. Or the work doesn’t get done.”
Dante got out one silver coin and held it up between his thumb and forefinger. “And what if the worker works for a very important man? A man who must be obeyed and not questioned. Then the worker won’t want to delay that man’s visitors, will he, by trying to wring something extra from them?”
The man’s eyes narrowed. Dante could tell he was shamed and wanted to do something about it. Dante could also tell that getting paid this much was better than he usually did, and therefore he’d settle for it. The man took the coin.
“All right,” he grumbled, as he walked over to one of the stones to which the giant was affixed. He looked over to Dante. “Go over there.” He pointed further away.
Dante saw a third big stone with a metal loop attached to it. Dante led the other three to stand by it, as the man detached the creature’s chain. Half untethered, the giant immediately lurched toward them, but the second chain on him kept him moving in an arc without getting any closer to them, like a dog chained to a tree or post. The man with the chain then walked over to them and attached it to the rock closest to them, and the giant was trapped in a different spot, away from the trailhead.
When the creature was once more restrained, he let out another wail with his club held high. “Pape satan, aleppe!”
The man who unchained and rechained the dead man shook his head as he conducted the four travelers over to the trail. “Oh what is it now, Nimrod?” he asked. “Satan? Yes, I suppose we’ll all be seeing him soon enough. You especially, the way you’ve been acting. Now be still.” He pointed them to the chain and steps up the cliff face. “Just haul yourselves up. It’ll be colder when you get up there. It’s always colder up there, for some reason. Be on your way.”
Radovan started up the path. As Dante had suspected, it wasn’t as difficult as it looked at first, and the young man made good progress. Adam followed, with Bogdana after him, and Dante brought up the rear. About halfway up, Bogdana lost her footing and sent some rocks skittering down on Dante. He turned his head as the tiny avalanche pelted him. When it was over, he looked back up to see Bogdana peering down at him. Her foot that had slipped was still scratching the cliff face, trying to find purchase, and her face looked pale and sweaty.
“I’m fine,” he called to her. “Please don’t look down.”
The rest of the climb was thankfully uneventful and brief. Soon they were looking down on Nimrod and his handler. The latter wandered off as soon as they reached the top. Dante thought he probably only stayed that long in order to see if one of them would fall to his or her death, so he could loot the body. The former continued to stare, shaking his club and fist at them. Dante fancied he could catch more snippets of gibberish, in a tone that seemed to him both plaintive and enraged.
Chapter 38
Whereat I turned me round, and saw before me
And underfoot a lake, that from the frost
The semblance had of glass, and not of water.
Dante, Inferno, 32.22-24
Dante immediately felt how much colder it was at the top of the cliff, as strange as that seemed after such a short ascent. They again wrapped themselves in their blankets and began moving. The ground was frozen hard as stone, the frost on it crunching under their footsteps. As much as Dante had cursed the deathly stillness they had experienced on the previous plateau, here he quickly found himself longing for it, as howling, icy winds pummeled them. This assault seemed to have a special fury, for it swirled about them, constantly coming at them from a different side, rather than blowing steadily like a normal storm.
There were few trees this high up, so the wind was merciless and inescapable. After trudging for some time, they took shelter next to a boulder and a gnarled juniper tree, so they could get out of the wind and rest.
“I have never seen it this cold in the springtime,” Dante said. He rubbed his hands and face, trying to get warmth back into them. His teeth were chattering so much he could barely speak.
“It’s always colder in the mountains, and it’s still early in the spring,” Adam said. “But this does seem unnatural somehow, like a further blight and plague on this place.”
“Back there you seem to have gotten the hang of lying,” Dante said, stomping his feet before they became too numb.
“Yes, it was useful,” Adam said. “Shameful but useful. Unfortunately, it is often much easier to learn new vices than virtues, so this place corrupts everything and everyone in it.”
“Myra, that woman at the tent for the sick, did not seem wicked,” Radovan said. Dante glanced at him and was encouraged by his still noticing what little goodness could be detected in this pit.
“Yes. She was a rare and virtuous woman,” Adam agreed. “But so wounded by all the evil. We must pray she survives a bit longer, until someone can help her.”
They tightened their blankets around themselves and continued walking. Ahead of them, the ground was completely smooth and white. They had come to the edge of a frozen lake. Radovan stepped out on to the ice, and stomped on it with his foot to test it.
“Should we cross it?” he asked. “It seems solid enough.”
Adam looked to either side at the vast expanse of ice. “Yes, it’ll be much quicker than circling around it,” he replied. “We don’t have much daylight left. Let’s go.”
Once they were on the ice, it could be seen it was not perfectly smooth, but had many irregularities in it. Hunched over as he was, Dante could observe these closely. In places it looked like ripples in the water had frozen, and there were many shades of blue detectab
le in the ice. Here and there he could see what looked like strange, indistinct objects within the ice, but it was impossible to tell if these were real, or illusions made by various cracks and bubbles trapped deep underneath them. Ominous pops and groans came from underneath – sometimes right at their feet, sometimes from far away, sounding almost like thunder from a distant storm.
Although the lake was quite large, it was not wide in the direction they were moving, and they crossed it quickly. As they neared the other shore, Dante could see some motion ahead and to their right. As they got closer to it, he saw it was two human forms lying down, partly submerged in the frozen, marshy ground at the edge of the lake. Dante could barely hear their moans over the howling wind.
He looked more closely at them, since they seemed incapable of getting up or attacking. They were two dead men, both caked with frost over most of their bodies, though in some spots there were also smears of dark, frozen mud. Where their skin was visible, it was either covered with frost or a shade of white indistinguishable from the snow. Almost all the tears and gashes in their skin were bloodless and nearly invisible, for the frost had filled those in as well.
The way the two men were lying, it looked to Dante as though they had been grappling together when they fell into the swampy ground. Then they had frozen there in mid-fight. As Dante watched, they continued to wrestle. They didn’t really seem able to lift themselves up very much, so they clawed and bit at each other’s faces and necks. The one dead man forced the other down and partly climbed on top of him. Dante could now see a gaping hole in the skull of the one on the bottom. Unlike the rest of their bodies the brain appeared bright and pink, especially shocking and livid with no other color present anywhere around them. Inside the broken skull, it looked like part of the brain was missing. The dead man who had forced the other one down now tried gnawing away at the edge of the hole, apparently trying to widen it, since it was not big enough for him to tear out any more of the brain. As he gnawed, the dead man’s one clouded eye lit on Dante, but he made no move to leave his grisly feast. His jaw just worked slowly up and down as he stared.
“I didn’t think they attacked one another,” Dante said quietly, for the wind had suddenly died down.
“The dead remember,” Adam replied. “This man must have hated that one with some special, intimate venom. A loyalty betrayed? A promise broken? A special humiliation that could only be delivered by someone he loved and trusted? Whatever it was, that hate now consumes him forever.”
The man’s teeth scraped along the skull with a small, rasping sound, like someone using a file on wood.
“So hate is stronger than love?” It was almost a whisper when Dante said it.
“Never believe that, my son,” Adam said with a note of sternness. “You know not to. You know what hate is, and you know its limits.”
Dante drew himself up more, though he still stared into the dead man’s eye. Dante stepped closer to the struggling corpses. Still they did not react to him. “Hate is a kind of love,” he said as he slowly drew back his right foot. “A twisted, stunted kind of love.” He swung his foot forward. The thing’s head jerked to one side from the blow, then turned back to resume chewing. Dante kicked it again with the same effect. “A love of pain and hurt and ugliness.” Dante stepped away from the horrible, useless things on the ground.
“Yes,” Adam said. “And for some people, it is the only love they know. As a man you must look on these pathetic creatures and pity them. But you must also scorn them and spurn their cursed life. It is the only way.” The wind picked back up, whipping their blankets around and stinging their faces with sharp needles of snow and ice. “Now let us finish this journey.”
They stepped off the surface of the lake and back on to frozen earth. Ahead to the left, Dante could see where part of the mountain had been torn away, as though a bite had been taken out of the black rock. It was a huge quarry, the wasted contents of which had been discarded to the one side in a gigantic pile of dully glistening slag. Where they were walking, the ground was covered with the black, pulverized dregs of the mine work as well. Dante picked up a rock and examined it, noticing several shards of dark red in it. Garnets? Rubies? Dante didn’t know enough about gems to tell, but if even a castoff piece like this one had so many jewels embedded in it, the ground must be richer than anywhere else on earth.
As Dante considered such untold wealth, his attention was drawn away by the clink of metal striking rock. He slipped the stone into his pocket without thinking about it, focusing on what might be a new threat. The metallic clanking seemed to be in time to a low, rhythmic chant accompanying it. An explosion shook the ground, as a huge plume of black smoke and dust shot up from the quarry. The clinking and chanting became the only sounds they heard once more.
They were close enough now to see the hundreds of men swinging their picks in the dark pit. As more and more of the miners turned to notice them, Dante saw their eyes were as dead as the stone at which they were hacking.
Chapter 39
He from before me moved and made me stop,
Saying: “Behold Dis, and behold the place
Where thou with fortitude must arm thyself.”
Dante, Inferno, 34.19-21
Radovan and Dante drew their swords. “There’s no way you can tell us we’ll prevail this time,” Radovan said, as some of the dead men dropped their tools and shuffled toward them. There were a dozen or more in the nearest crowd that noticed them, and hundreds more in the ranks behind them.
Adam moved to stand beside them and planted his staff in the ground. “Of course I can,” he said. “And we shall. You see how slowly they move in the cold. We will start running away from the quarry and straight toward the mountains, as quickly as we can. You, my daughter, move as fast as you can and get ahead of us. We will slow them down. It will give you the time you need to escape. You will have to trust your instincts to find the pass, but I know you can do it. The virtuous can find things that the wicked cannot see.”
“And us?” Dante said.
“We will prevail. I give you my word,” Adam said. “I did not say we would survive. But that is always a part of the blessed death: to die with honor and virtue, purpose and sacrifice. I know you would want that.”
“I do,” Radovan said.
“I do,” Dante said softly, as he hustled Bogdana ahead.
They trotted forward, angling diagonally away from the growing horde following them. She was moving more awkwardly than she had been, almost waddling, but it looked like she could keep up a pace faster than the frozen dead.
“You there!” Dante heard someone shout from the direction of the quarry. “You people! Stop! What are you doing?”
Dante turned to see many men running between them and the crowds of the dead. These men were alive and carrying torches, which they waved at the dead to drive them back into the quarry. Dante heard the crack of whips as well. He and his companions stopped and watched the men round up the dead and return them to their work. In just a few minutes, the clinking of picks and the steady chanting had resumed.
A group of five of the men with torches approached them. The men were all clad in leather armor and fur coats. Besides the torches, they all carried iron truncheons – thick, black, brutish weapons. Dante could also see black leather whips coiled at their belts.
“Now what did you think you were doing?” one of the men said to them. “You interrupted our work. Got them all riled up. I don’t care if you want to get eaten alive, but if they got you and went into a feeding frenzy, it’d take us the rest of today and all night to calm them back down and get them back to work. Might even have to put a few of them down, if they got too unruly. You were lucky you didn’t cause us more trouble.”
“But why don’t they attack you and eat you?” Dante asked, looking in amazement between the armed men in front of him and the dead ones swinging picks. “I don’t understand. You have them doing work.”
The man frowned and shrugged.
“Ask me how you get a bull to plow a field,” he said. “The beast’s bigger and stronger than you and could kill you at any moment. But you beat it, whip it, and get it to mind.” He smiled: a very crooked and dirty affair. “And you feed it, of course.” He pointed his truncheon at them. “That’s where you all might still come in handy, if you don’t behave. Now, no one’s answered my question!”
The speaker swung his truncheon, catching Dante’s right arm just below the shoulder. It was a backhanded blow, so it wasn’t as powerful and debilitating as it might have been, but it still drove Dante to one knee with a cry of pain. Dante raised his sword, in case he needed to ward off another blow, but Adam and Radovan stepped between him and the men with clubs.
With his left hand, Dante grabbed Radovan’s arm, keeping him from advancing. Dante pulled himself up. “No, please, it’s my fault,” he said. It was shameful, to be sniffling with his eyes full of tears, but there was nothing to be done about it, the pain was so intense. Besides, it might put off the attackers from more violence if Dante and his friends appeared weaker. “I shouldn’t have asked so many questions. It’s my fault. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, you ought to be,” the man who had struck him said. “Now answer my question.”
“We’re all sorry we caused trouble,” Adam said. “We were just trying to get further up into the mountains. We didn’t know you had the dead working here. We didn’t mean to upset them or interrupt your work.”
“Well, you should be more careful where you go wandering around,” the man continued, still stabbing the air with his truncheon for effect. “The world’s a dangerous place. And people have work to do.”
“We should take them to Lord Ahriman,” one of the other men said.
The man who addressed them first nodded. “Yes. I think you’re right, Cassian,” he said. “Let him deal with it. It’s not far. Start going the way you were headed. Go on.”
Valley of the Dead (The Truth Behind Dante's Inferno) Page 23