The Marching Dead

by Lee Battersby

  “So where does your father live, then?” Granny sneered from half a dozen steps behind him. “A gutter near a college?”

  “V’Ellos.” Marius smirked at her over his shoulder. “We’re going to V’Ellos.”

  “V’Ellos doesn’t exist.”

  Marius turned away from her, and set his face towards the invisible coast behind the mountains.

  “It does if you’re rich enough.”

  TEN

  Marius led them out of the valley and across the edge of the plains towards the coast. They travelled without resting, across land that soon flattened out into farming communities where ramshackle fences provided opportunity for Alno to trip the travellers up while they struggled to climb through tangles of hedgerows and rough-carved gates. Marius managed to liberate a clutch of horses from the cruel imprisonment of a warm barn and mounds of hay, and they kept to the back roads for the final three days of their journey. Marius gave the horses their head, luxuriating in the feel of something alive and breathing under his hand after so long in the presence of cold flesh. They rode past a dozen hamlets, each one a mirror to the last: outlying farmlets that quickly gave way to a beaten-up main road where wooden huts pressed up close around a well, a store, and perhaps a smithy and drinking hole if the villagers thought they were doing well enough.

  Alno streaked along beside them, feline muscles refusing to tire, streaking off into the long grass at a moment’s whim to torture some small animal or another for a while, returning when he felt like it to playfully swat at the horses hind legs. Each time he successfully spooked one, causing the rider to curse and spit down at him in an attempt to get him the hell away, he simply smiled his bastard cat smile and took off once more.

  The horses began to tire towards the end of the day, and Marius took care to feed them from outlying fields, where they had plenty of time to escape should an errant farmer spy them and give the alarm. He had to remind himself these were living animals that occasionally needed to stop and rest. It was too easy to fall into the rhythms of the dead, to hold that single unmodulated tone of existence that droned onwards without end. It felt good to work with something that snorted and sweated, and transmitted the warmth of its body up through his thighs into the pit of his groin.

  After three days they left the last tiny outlet of what passed for civilisation in farming country, and rode through increasingly thick groves to a wind-ravaged strip of shale beach.

  “This looks lovely,” Granny shouted over the gale, gazing around at the blasted landscape. “I can see why all the really rich people want to live here.”

  Marius ignored her and pushed his horse forward. They cantered along the beach, dull water slopping up against the shore to one side, thick lines of stunted black-barked thorn bushes to the other. After half a day’s ride he pulled them over into the lee of a sandbank and dismounted. Gerd and Granny followed his example. Marius took their reins from them, while Granny scooped Alno up into her arms and surveyed their surroundings.

  “I’ve always wanted to spend my holidays in a desolate shithole,” she said. “Now I know what I was missing.”

  “You’re supposed to spend holidays somewhere different from home,” Marius replied. He walked the horses up the slight rise into the nearest stand of bushes and let go of their reins. They stood, blinking stupidly at him until he sighed and slapped one on the rump. It skittered away from him, then turned and began to slowly pick its way through the bushes. Its companions gave Marius an “Are you sure?” stare before following. Gerd and Granny were giving him the same look. Alno was too busy licking himself.

  “What the hell did you do that for?”

  “We don’t need them anymore.” Marius walked past him and sat down on the rocks. “We’re here.”

  Gerd turned in a circle. There was nothing to indicate the presence of even a particularly desperate hermit, never mind the fabled secret hideaway of the rich. The beach was a depressing grey slice of fuck-all, with added depressing fuck-all to one side and only slightly wetter depressing fuck-all to the other. If the middle of nowhere ever got lost, it would be on this beach. It sloped along the edge of the water like a truculent child forced onto a walk by a health-obsessed aunt, terminating in a spur that rose a dozen feet above the surrounding countryside, overgrown with wild spearthorn bushes that formed a hedge thick enough to destroy any hope of light getting between them, as if to make the thought of clambering over the rise deeply off-putting. Outside of the rise, and the hedge, the three travellers looked like the most interesting thing to have happened to the beach since the dawn of time.

  “Excuse me?”

  Marius jerked a thumb towards the spur. “Have a look.”

  Gerd and Granny clambered up the spur’s sheer wall. Marius watched them go. They cleared a gap through the spearthorn bushes amidst much swearing and blaming of each other, and slowly disappeared into the hedge’s depths. Marius waited, staring out over the grey water, losing himself in contemplation of its greasy motion. After half an hour, he heard a commotion behind him. He turned, and saw Gerd fighting his way back through the viciously barbed plants. He stood at the edge of the rise, and gazed into the distance for several minutes, absentmindedly pulling three-inch thorns from his arms and chest. Eventually he nodded slowly, and slid back down to hunker next to his older companion.

  “Ah,” he said.

  “Yep.”

  “So this whole beach…”

  “Designed to demoralise and weaken the resolve. Nobody ever bothers to push past that lot up there.”

  “Designed?”

  “Yep.”

  “Manmade?”

  “By the finest and most depressed landscape designers money can corrupt.”

  They stared back along the stretch of inhospitable rock, a thin line of black that switched back a dozen times before disappearing into the horizon. No animal moved within their sight. No bird wheeled through the sky, no fins broke the surface of the sludgy grey water. It looked for all the world like the bank of a river the dead might travel across to the underworld in some of the more imaginative afterlife cults.

  “So…”

  “This is the only approach, yes.” He waved a lazy hand at the forest to one side of them, around to the becalmed water. All this, in a thirty mile radius, designed solely to keep the riff-raff out. And by riff-raff, I mean the rest of the world. Impenetrable forests, stinking dead water, soul-destroying, filthy beach. Bereft of wildlife, edible plants, drinkable water, company, sunlight, fresh air, happy fluffy bunnies and blowjobs. Would you want to walk more than an hour past any of it, if you had a choice?”

  “Wow.” Gerd settled back onto the rocks, shifted about to make himself more comfortable. “Wow.”

  “Yep.” He called out to Granny. “May as well come down now. We’ll head over in the morning, when they can see us coming.”

  “In a minute.” Something had softened in Granny’s voice, as if her soul had awakened in a way she was completely unused to. Marius leaned back and placed his hands beneath his head. Slowly, the sun descended towards the edge of the world. After it had disappeared there was a repeat of the sounds Gerd had made clambering out of the bushes, a short slithering sound, and Granny slipped down next to the two men.

  “It’s…” she began, then: “I never expected…”

  “Apology accepted.”

  “No, but, you don’t understand–”

  Marius sighed. “Two miles down the perfect golden sand beyond the rise is V’Ellos. It’s the most beautiful sight you’ve ever seen. Like something that exists only in the mind of the most talented landscape painter in the world, and the thought of it brings him to tears because he knows he can never truly capture it on canvas so it can only live inside his mind, but there it is, right before you, in shining white stone and terracotta tile, shining under a sun you never believed could be so bright, so soft, so warming all at the same time. You never realised a town could be so perfect, so magnificent. Every town, every village
you’ve ever set foot in is like a child’s poorly remembered imagination in comparison. How could mere buildings and streets shine so perfectly, achieve such grace and beauty? It’s like buildings have souls, like they can sing and dance and paint and they’ve dressed themselves in their most beautiful outfits to present themselves at a dance of the gods. How am I going?”

  “You’re mocking me.”

  Marius glanced over at her: a tiny, bedraggled old woman who had never gone further than the limits of her backwoods hovel in life, and never had more than one meal ahead of her in all her days; suddenly understanding what could be done with time, money, and an overabundant sense of entitlement. He sighed again and admonished himself silently.

  “No,” he said. “No, I’m not. It hit me the same way the first time I saw it, and I thought I lived in a pretty nice house up until then.” He remembered standing on the same rise, a short trail of caravans behind him, until his father barged past and he twisted his ankle on the shifting rocks. He recalled having the same feeling that Granny was struggling with – that no matter what he achieved in the rest of his life, he would not be worthy enough to own even a perfectly-proportioned outhouse in the meanest angelically-manicured garden below.

  “Just remember,” he said, staring up at the splash of stars beginning to emerge from the dark. “When people want to poison you, they hide it in something sweet.”

  They sat and watched the stars in silence, waiting for the morning.

  ELEVEN

  There was no town in the world quite like V’Ellos. For one thing, nobody quite knew where it was, if they even believed in its existence at all. It was always somewhere over there, or back down towards that way somewhere; or someone knew someone who met a guy at a bar one night who said he’d sailed past it in a storm and swore it roamed the world on a floating island made up of the ragged corpses of paupers.

  For another, in a world where almost every town large enough to afford one was ringed by defensive walls for the protection of its populace from marauding bandits, opposing armies, or just you, V’Ellos had not a single physical barrier to separate it from the rest of the world besides the beach on which Marius and his companions had sat. It had no need. V’Ellos was not an ordinary hamlet.

  It only contained somewhere in the region of two hundred citizens, although if eighty percent of the world’s wealth was owned by twenty percent of its people then those two hundred citizens could use the wealth of that twenty percent as toilet paper. And it really was a town without a sense of place. Only those few who earned themselves an invitation by dint of sheer wealth could find it, and they weren’t sharing.

  It was situated in a valley of such perfect dimensions that believing a god or gods of your choice had created it would belittle the efforts of the town elders who had actually designed it, and the armies of vassals who had dug, cut, paved, sculpted, and been buried beneath the reimagined earth to construct it. The valley lay somewhere between a settlement of merely enormous wealth and a region that considered itself the political powerhouse of the continent because seven kings of Scorby had happened to be whelped there. The rulers of the region had no idea how hilarious their belief was to the people of V’Ellos, who sat on their barques as they floated in their perfect bay and lit their imported cigars with flaming wads of money worth more than the surrounding region had ever produced.

  V’Ellos was founded on one very simple maxim: only people who are good enough can live there, and you’re not it.

  It was a haven for the über-rich, the kind of people who could afford to give interest-free loans to kings but wouldn’t on the basis that they didn’t deal with such riffraff.

  “I don’t get it,” Gerd said as they left the golden beach behind and approached the nominal entrance to the town, a point in the road a dozen metres or so before the first set of gardens, where the simple sand became a line of granite cobbles. To either side of them towered trees of such soaring beauty that it was difficult to remember that they existed purely to shield V’Ellos from the outside world. “Who does all the cooking? The cleaning? I mean, do they have servants? Where do they live?”

  “I don’t know.” Marius stepped up to the line of cobbles and stopped, the toes of his boots resting against the outer edge. “I left years ago. I’ve only been back twice. Once when we thought Mum was dying and wanted to see me before she went, and once later on, when she was leaving him again and I was expected to come between them again.”

  “Again?”

  He shrugged. “She was always leaving him, or coming back, or leaving him again. Especially the last couple of years.”

  “What happened?”

  Marius winced as he remembered the drawing room of the house on the hill, and a scene he’d managed to suppress for almost twenty years. His mother, curled up in her high-backed chair in the corner, a blanket pulled to her chin, her eyes wide and red where she had been crying for days, thin hair at all angles. His father, fists raised, blocking the path between his wife and young son, Marius’ glass of thirty year-old Ribellian whiskey down the front of his smoking jacket, his cheek already beginning to puff and redden where Marius had struck him. The threats that passed between them, the hatred that had finally boiled up in his father’s eyes and out into the room, poisoning whatever hope of reconciliation they might have had. Marius wheeling about and stalking out of the house, smashing every ten-thousand-riner vase he passed on the way. Then later, standing at his bedroom window, watching his mother climb into her carriage, seeing her hand raised towards him before someone else reached past her and closed the door.

  “It didn’t work.”

  “Oh.” They eyed the short road ahead. “So what do we do now?”

  Marius reached into his coat and pulled out a small square of stiff card. “Now we grease the guard and make our entrance.”

  Gerd and Granny frowned at him. They had stopped at a small village at a fork in the road a day previously, waiting until nightfall so that Marius could break into the miniscule staging post and rummage around in the mailbags. Their happiness when he had emerged, waving his piece of card, had been noticeably nonexistent.

  “Watch.”

  With deliberate care Marius stepped forward onto the cobbles. A head appeared over the fence line of the nearest house.

  “Ho, yuss!”

  A figure stepped from behind the fence. A bear of a man, his frame encased in a billowing grey kaftan, his bald head skirted by a beard of heroic proportions. He marched towards them at a military clip, hobnails clanging off the stones, a sword pointed directly at Marius’ chest.

  “Identify yourself!”

  “Who the hell is that?” Gerd hissed in alarm.

  Marius grinned. “That is Mad Arnobew. Relax.” He raised a hand in greeting. “It’s me, Arnobew. Marius don Hellespont.”

  “Master Marius?” Arnobew dropped his sword and rushed forward to smother Marius in a hug. The sword hit the road without a sound. Gerd picked it up and held it out to Granny.

  “Card.”

  Granny raised her eyebrows. Arnobew released Marius.

  “Let me see you, lad.” He settled his gaze on Marius’ face, and his look of joy fell away.

  “Oh no,” he said. “Not you as well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing.” He straightened up, and resumed his soldier’s stance. “It’s good to see you again, young Master don Hellespont.”

  “Oh, cut the Master crap, you old bugger.” Marius held up his square of card. “I come bearing gifts.”

  “Ohhhhh.” Arnobew leaned forward, and grasped the edges reverentially. “Oh, Marius, she’s a beauty. Wherever did you… no, don’t tell me. I’ve got just the place for her, just the place.” He turned away, square held at arm’s length, and ran back to his post. The three travellers watched him go

  “So,” Granny said as he rounded the edge of the fence. “Can’t imagine why you call him mad.”

  “Nothing to do with that.” Marius nodd
ed them forward, and they wandered over to wait at the fence’s edge. “I’ve seen saner men than Arnobew with fetishes that would make you blush until your head exploded.”

  “Really.”

  “Really. Anyway, Arnobew’s not really mad. He’s got a bit of a delusion, that’s all. He’s just picked the wrong place to have it.”

  “And what is that, then?”

  “He’s actually the fourth or fifth richest man in V’Ellos. Trouble is, he got bored with the endless cocktail parties and cordon bleu breakfasts and began to wonder how the other half lived. Now, well…”

  He pointed around the fence. Granny and Gerd followed his finger. Halfway up the beautifully manicured lawn, between the goldfish pool and the thirty-room house with the genuine Gsenkish marble frontage, someone had built a hovel. And a midden. And a guard box. As they watched, Arnobew emerged, and patted himself down.

  “Poor, mad Arnobew,” Marius said. “Lives in V’Ellos and thinks he’s working class.”

  “Mad,” Gerd agreed, eyeing the house behind him.

  “As a porridge enema.”

  Arnobew made his way across to them. Gerd held out his cardboard sword, and he accepted it with a muttered “Thank’ee.”

  “So,” he said, clapping Marius on the shoulder, “You’ll be wanting to see your Da, me old mucker.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I’ll escort you.”

  They wheeled away. Gerd and Granny took one last, longing look at the house, and then followed him as he strode down the street towards the hill at the far end of the little town.

  “Arnobew, what did you mean when you said ‘Not you as well’?”

  “Nothing, nothing.” The shambling guard led them around a corner and up a slight incline. “I can’t say.”

  “Can’t?”

  “Can’t, certainly can’t. Not allowed.”