The Marching Dead

by Lee Battersby

  “Oh,” Drenthe said. “You understand now.”

  “He…”

  “He? He?” Drenthe turned the question into a laugh. “Your father, sonny. Your very own Master of V’Ellos. Supplier of arms, recruiter of troops.” Drenthe stepped close, thrust his face into Marius’. “Chooser of sides.”

  Marius stared past him, at the army of sacrifices his father had created.

  “What did he… what did he give them… for… for this?”

  “Oh, little Helles.” Drenthe’s jaw creaked open. Marius could see into the desiccated mouth, see the ridges of his spinal column as the sound of his laughter echoed off all the dark places in his mind. “He promised them service forever, Helles. And he promised them that they could deliver you!”

  A thousand faces turned towards him. Recognition spread across them like a lit match catching flame. Marius backed away from it, bumped into the wall of bodies behind. And something brown and roaring came barrelling into the bodies behind him, crashing through their ranks, into the space between Marius and Drenthe.

  “Marius!” Arnobew lashed out. His flail caught Drenthe on the shoulder, and crumpled. He flung it away, destroyed his mace on the dead man’s ribs and threw that away too. Finally, a bear-like swat of his arm caught Drenthe across the side of his neck and clubbed him to the ground. “Run, boy!”

  Marius wasted precious seconds gaping at his saviour. Arnobew struck out with a leg, catching the nearest corpse in the groin and doubling him over with the strength of his kick.

  “Go!”

  The crowd was beginning to re-form, recovering from its initial shock and moving to close the gap that Arnobew had created. Marius shook himself back to his senses. He swept up his sword and bludgeoned an attacker in the side of the head.

  “Arnobew! Come on!”

  Now Gerd arrived, and grabbed two dead at the back of the gap, smashing them against their compatriots, keeping the gap open. Marius plunged into it, kicking and elbowing to widen it, swiping his sword from shoulder to waist in long, slashing movements as he struggled against grasping hands. Arnobew turned towards him, and as he did so, Drenthe rose up from the floor behind him.

  “Arnobew!” Marius shouted, but his warning was too late. Drenthe whipped his sword forward and back in a lightning-quick stroke across the side of his throat. Arnobew’s hand flew up to the wound. He swung his shoulders, knocked Drenthe backwards, took another step towards Marius as the crowd closed in around him. Marius saw him stumble, saw him lift one blood-soaked hand over the sudden swell of heads, and then it was gone, and the crowd was surging once more. Gerd grabbed at Marius’ shoulder, got a handful of fabric, and pulled him past the final body, into the space beyond.

  “Arnobew!” Marius threw himself back at the throng. Faces were turning towards him, bodies drawing together to close off his escape. He battered at the nearest body, forced it to its knees. Gerd was pulling at him.

  “He’s gone, Marius. He’s gone.”

  “No! Let me go. Fuck you, let me go!”

  And then Drenthe appeared before him, popping out of the small break between bodies like a snake between broken bricks. He dove, and caught Marius’ shirt-front in fists still wet with Arnobew’s blood.

  “Run, mummy’s boy,” he shouted, laughter filling Marius’ mind. “Run now!”

  Marius ran.

  Granny had already begun to back away. Marius and Gerd swept her up by the arms and ran with her suspended between them, back down the dock towards the road that climbed the hill towards escape. They almost made it. They almost reached the last building in the row. But then its giant doors swung back, and a torrent of dead flowed out, blocking their escape.

  “Back, back!” They turned again. The first group was still advancing. Marius looked about wildly.

  “There!”

  The nearest jetty jutted out into the water a dozen feet away. Marius and Gerd made for it at a flat run. The mob closed in behind them. The jetty was narrow, the three of them barely fitting onto it side by side, the regular stanchions along its edge and the profusion of ropes across it making for a treacherous passage. Marius let go of Granny’s arm and ran ahead, scanning the boats to either side. All were tied fast, masts empty, sails firmly furled and tied down. The troops of the dead were crowding about the far end of the jetty, bunching up as the wide stone harbour gave way to the slim wooden extrusion. Marius risked a quick glance over his shoulder, saw Drenthe push his way to the front and start organising a platoon to step onto forward. They matched gazes, two enemies with nothing between them but thirty feet of walkway. Drenthe smiled, and Marius heard his voice inside his head, clear as panic.

  “Keep running, don Hellespont. Make me work for it.”

  Marius bared his teeth, and returned his attention to the boats ahead. Drenthe sent him an image of the massed troops under his command stepping slowly, casually, onto the jetty. Thirty dead men, three abreast, taking their time, making sure of their footing. He closed it out. A few boats ahead, he saw a flash of white, and heard the snap of stiffened fabric against the breeze.

  “There! There!” He turned towards Gerd to point it out.

  And slipped.

  Gerd was too close, right on his heels. There was no chance to stop, to jump over Marius’ flailing heap of a body. He went full-length over him, letting go of Granny’s arm as he fell. She stopped running as the two companions rolled away from her, kicking at each other’s legs to disentangle themselves. Their motion took them a half dozen steps away from where she stood. It was Marius who looked up, saw Drenthe’s troops break into a run behind her. He raised a hand to point.

  “Granny! Get moving!”

  She turned to see what he was pointing at, took one step backwards in shock as the front row of minions reached her. Gerd wasted half a second rolling onto his front to push himself up. His ankle collided with Marius’ outstretched leg, and he slipped onto his face.

  And just like that, Granny was lost. Drenthe’s men reached her and dragged her into their ranks: half a dozen arms wrapped around her, and the fallen friends watched in horror as she was whipped past the front row into the depths of the mob in a silent second. Then Gerd found his feet and launched himself at them.

  “Granny!”

  He drove his shoulder into the first row of attackers, and for half a second it looked as if he would share Granny’s fate. But the wall of bodies held, and he resorted to swinging his ham hock fists at them. His attackers crumpled, then held, their bodies propped up by the unmoving screen of corpses behind them half an inch beyond his despairing grasp. And slowly, the front row began to reach forward, to grab at his clothing and pinion him against their bodies. Marius scrambled upwards, and grabbed at his arm.

  “Gerd! Come on! Gerd!”

  “Get off!” Gerd swung backwards. He caught Marius across the shoulder and knocked him backwards. Marius fell to his knee, then righted himself.

  “Granny!”

  Gerd was clearing a space. The weight of his blows were finally driving those nearest to him back a few steps. But the task was hopeless. The wall of bodies was still standing firm, and the narrow jetty gave him no room to push beyond them. All Gerd was doing was ensnaring himself in a pincer movement of his own making. Soon he’d push himself past the centre of the first row, and they would close in behind him, cutting him off. If that happened, Marius could not reach him. There was no way he could fight his way past the first line of three assailants, never mind the one behind it, or the one behind that. Gerd would simply disappear, sucked backwards towards the waiting army at the far end of the jetty, as Granny had been. Drenthe’s troops could simply evade Gerd’s blows, waiting until he was completely absorbed within their embrace before overwhelming him with sheer weight of numbers.

  “Granny! Granny!”

  Gerd was blind to it, blind to anything beyond his simple-minded assault. Marius gathered himself and, as the big man reared back to deliver another blow, he lashed out with his foot. He caught Ge
rd just behind the knee, and his young friend staggered. Marius leaped upwards, grabbed the raised fist, and pulled. Gerd tottered backwards. Marius swung him round, grabbed two fistfuls of shirt in his hands, and shook him.

  “She’s gone, boy!”

  “No!”

  Gerd tried to return to the attack, but Marius had spent the happiest six months of his life teaching wrestling techniques to the all-female Supreme Cohort of the Empress of Thylenia. He dug his knee into the bend at the top of Gerd’s leg, shifted his weight forward, then back, and spun him away from the mob.

  “We have to go,” he shouted, pushing him again. “Now!”

  The corpses pushed forward again, grabbing at Marius. He yelped, and shook Gerd one last time. “Go, go!”

  Gerd glanced at their attackers, saw the wall of bodies pressing down towards them. Marius yanked his arm, and the big man turned reluctantly away. They scurried down the jetty, Drenthe’s troops hard at their heels.

  “There!” Marius pointed out the boat he had seen: a small, single-masted skiff, large enough to seat four at the most, tied up with mast open and sail already rigged. He shoved Gerd into it and threw the rope off its stanchion. The boat immediately began to slide out of its docking. A hand grabbed Marius, and he wasted precious seconds peeling it off, finger by grasping finger. Gerd was lying in the bottom of the boat, unmoving. Marius’ feet found the edge of the jetty, and he launched himself in a desperate lunge for the receding stern.

  There is a law, as immutable as all the laws of nature: if a jump is undertaken in a life or death situation, the distance to be jumped shall always be tantalisingly out of reach. The more desperate the leap, the closer, yet ultimately more unsuccessful, it shall be. The boat had travelled several feet since Marius had loosed it from its mooring. He wasn’t even close.

  The last time Marius was in the water he’d been thrown out of a canoe in the middle of the ocean and had sunk to the bottom. Then he had simply walked home. This was an advantage of being dead. Unfortunately, the memory of his underwater journey was a logical, conscious one. There was no time for his body to access it. The water hit him in his face, grabbed his clothes with slippery fingers, and pulled on his sword with desperate urgency. It slipped up his sleeves, stole his knife and sent it spinning to the sands below, invaded his nose and mouth, and pushed into his boots. Marius did what any normal person would do. He panicked, thrashing about like an octopus having a tantrum. The rope had slid from its position on the stern and now trailed through the water. Marius lunged for it, missed, lunged again. His fingers caught the loop at the end. Slowly, with abundant glubbing and coughing, he dragged himself up the side of the hull and onto the deck.

  Gerd was already there, curled up in a foetal ball. Marius flopped down next to him, spraying him with water.

  “Gerd.” He leaned over, shook his companion’s shoulder. “Gerd!”

  The boat was still slowly moving forward. Marius lurched to his knees, grabbed the tiller and threw it over. The boat began to describe a slow arc away from the jetty and out towards the middle of the bay. The wind caught the sail with a gust and pushed the little skiff forward in a sudden burst of speed. Marius flopped onto the short bench at the stern, grabbed the rudder with a firmer hand, and stared back towards the quay.

  The jetty was full of dead people. They stood in their silent ranks, filling the little wooden walkway, staring po-faced towards the boat as it slid away from them. Marius slumped in his seat, and glared at them with a frown. They could follow him, he realised. They could climb down and drop into the water, and begin striding across the flat bed of the harbour after him. If they really wanted to take him…

  He wiped water from his eyes. A slight figure pushed through the front of the line and waved.

  “Run away, Helles,” Drenthe’s voice was as clear as a bell within his mind, thick with amusement. “Fly your little boat away.”

  Marius said nothing, simply sent an image of red-hot hatred back towards his tormenter. Drenthe’s laugh overwhelmed it. “No, no,” he said. “Thank you. Thank you for the recruits. Thank you for the old lady.”

  The wind strained the sail. Marius pushed the tiller over savagely, catching it hard, driving the boat towards the headlands in futile anger. The jetty diminished behind them, the figures reduced to a single, uneven black line. As it dropped out of view, Drenthe called one last time.

  “Granny says bye-bye, young Gerd. Such a shame, when a mother figure is torn away from her son.” He laughed a final, mocking laugh. “Bye-bye…”

  The boat rocked. Marius looked forward. Gerd had found his feet, was standing over Marius, his fists clenched by his sides. Marius glanced up at his reddened, furious face.

  “Gerd…”

  Without a word, Gerd swung away and perched in the prow. He crammed his beefy frame as deeply as possible into the angle of timbers, turned his head away from Marius, into the breeze that blew his hair back from his face and forced him to close his eyes. Marius stared at him for a few moments, then slowly steered the boat out into the bay, gazing back over his shoulder at the disappearing docks. Marius wished he could summon a mouthful of spit so that he could launch it at his tormentor. Instead, he settled for projecting a last image of Drenthe being pulled apart, one limb at a time. He received a laugh in return, and a mocking voice that echoed across the space between their minds.

  “Soon, Helles,” it said, “sooner than you think. And Helles? Look under your hand.”

  Marius turned his back on the sight, and willed the little boat to cut through the swell faster. His hand rested on the wooden handle of the tiller. He glanced at it. The wood was highly polished, gleaming in the sunlight. He frowned. There appeared to be nothing special about it. It was a piece of white wood, oiled and polished, attached to the rudder stock in the traditional way. He stared at it again. White wood.

  Mindwood. The same wood as in his father’s study.

  Very slowly, Marius lifted his hand. Underneath, below the thick layer of varnish, someone had painted a short phrase. Seven words, in a hand Marius knew intimately: Bring it back when you’ve finished, boy. And underneath, his father’s signature.

  And next to it, in perfect script, freshly carved into the wood as if the man who engraved them would rather have been driving the point of the chisel into Marius’ flesh, four simple words. A final message, from father to son.

  Marius stared at the single line of writing as the boat swirled across the bay in a wide loop, driving past the sandy headlands that marked the bay’s entrance and out into the ocean proper. He drew to starboard, set the prow parallel with the forested beach, and fell back into a contemplative stupor. The boat could steer itself, he decided, and what would he care should it drift out to sea, or smash itself to pieces on the sands that passed by? There was no ocean he could not walk back from, and right now he really couldn’t care whether or not he might be battered into smithereens by hidden rocks. His whole life was hidden rocks, with everyone he knew simply waiting to push him onto them. Let them. He had nowhere left to walk back from, and no reason to wish to escape destruction. Sunlight thudded down on the unprotected boat. Marius squinted up at the sun. He didn’t feel the heat, didn’t even recognise the tightness that came with the advent of sunburn. Wind sprayed salt into his eyes, and he had not the slightest inclination to blink. In a final indignity, a lone gull shrieked overhead and dropped something wet onto the side of his head. Marius sighed and wiped at it, barely offering the smear of white crap a glance before letting his hand dangle backwards into the wash behind the stern. He watched the water sweep around his fingers, before pulling them free and turning his attention back to the sail above him as it made a loud crack in the sudden change of breeze.

  Gerd had shifted around on his perch, and sat staring at him. Marius raised an eyebrow. Gerd spoke, and Marius frowned.

  “What?”

  Gerd repeated himself. Marius shook his head.

  “What?” He pointed to the sail. “Speak
louder. Project.”

  Gerd rolled his eyes and gestured impatiently, a “come here” snap of the wrist. Marius levered himself up, ducking under the boom and scuttling forward. He stopped a foot in front of the younger man, swaying with the roll of the boat.

  “Now, what?” He leaned forward, and placed a hand on either side of the prow to steady himself. Gerd glanced at Marius’ hands, then shot a fist upwards, catching him perfectly on the chin. Marius’ legs deserted him. He crumpled backwards cracking his head against the mast footing. Then Gerd was upon him, one knee pressed into his chest, the big pig-herd’s weight crushing him into the bottom of the boat.

  “I said,” he projected with perfect clarity, “you killed my Granny, you son of a bitch!”

  Very carefully, Marius raised a single finger.

  “First,” he said in his most reasonable and not at all argumentative voice, “your Granny was already dead. And secondly…” He turned the finger so that it pointed directly at Gerd’s rage-crumpled face, then drove it straight into his eye. Gerd reared back, instinct conquering rational thought, and clapped both hands to his abused eyeball. Marius drew his hand back, and jammed the point of his elbow into the younger man’s groin. Gerd slid from his chest, and curled up around himself. Marius sat up, and looked down upon him with exasperated pity. “Secondly, why do you even do that when you know you’re dead, too? And third, we didn’t even see…” He paused, staring at the ocean beyond the boat. Gerd squinted up at him and, seeing the look upon his face, sat upright.

  “We didn’t even see what?”

  “We didn’t see it.” Marius said in a wondering tone. “We didn’t see any of it.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  Marius slowly focussed upon him. “How do you know they killed your Granny?”

  “Are you joking? I saw it. You saw it.”

  “What did you see?”

  Gerd threw his hands up in frustration. “You were right there!”