The Marching Dead

by Lee Battersby

  “Indulge me.”

  “Right. Fine. I saw them swallow her up. I saw them grab her. I saw them…” He stopped.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I saw them…”

  Marius nodded. “But we didn’t, did we? We didn’t actually see them destroy her.”

  “I… no.” He looked at his older companion in shock. “I just…”

  “Just knew.”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “I did.”

  Marius was nodding, too. “Exactly like Keth. I just knew, too. But I didn’t actually see. I saw…” He waved his hands in little circles. “Oh, gods.” He looked up at Gerd in sudden torment. “I didn’t see.”

  “Just enough.”

  “Yes.” The two friends stared at each other. “Just enough to draw the wrong conclusions.”

  Gerd held his hands in front of his face. His fists clenched spasmodically. “The conclusions we were supposed to come to.”

  “Exactly.”

  They looked at each other, seeing their anger in the other’s features.

  “Drenthe.”

  “Drenthe.”

  “But…” Gerd frowned, suddenly uncertain. “He killed Arnobew. We saw that.”

  “Yes.” Marius nodded, “We saw that.” He squinted. Suddenly, the sun was hot. “But…” He rubbed his face. Lines of thought were warring, suppositions fighting for dominance. He closed his eyes. “Arnobew was… unexpected, maybe. Random. He’s only been following us for, what, three years? He wouldn’t have known about…” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know. I’m just piecing it together.”

  “But if you’re right…” Gerd struggled with unaccustomed thoughts. Marius could see him turning possibilities over, trying to come to terms with deviousness outside his experience. “Then… why?”

  “Why indeed?”

  They lapsed into silence. Marius clambered to his feet and scuttled back to the tiller, patting Gerd on his shoulder as he passed. He regained his place, sunk onto his haunches, and let his gaze fall onto the thin stretch of ocean between them and the shore. After a while, Gerd clambered sternward and joined him. Marius nodded towards the line of text on the tiller handle. Gerd frowned down at it.

  “What does it say?”

  “‘You’re fucked, love Dad.’”

  “Oh.” Gerd settled down next to him and draped an arm over the side of the boat. “Still, nice of him to write it on a boat. Think of how useless a piece of paper would be right about now.”

  Marius snorted and lay back, letting the boat find its own way, coaxing it along with a gentle tug on the tiller every now and again as the wind dipped or swirled, cutting the boat across the line of breeze to keep the single sail full. Gerd watched the water swooshing by underneath the hull. The sun reached its apex and began the long, slow descent towards the land. Fins cut the water ahead. Marius banked around them and watched them fall behind.

  “Ah.”

  “What?”

  Marius nodded to himself, his eyes fixed upon the receding fins.

  “He’s a slutfish.”

  “What?”

  “A slutfish.” Marius leaned forward, and pointed to the water. “Have you ever gone deep sea fishing?”

  “I live a hundred feet up the side of a mountain.”

  Marius snorted. “You don’t live anywhere.”

  “Okay, fine. I death halfway up a mountain, does that make you happy?”

  “Nothing halfway up a mountain would make me happy.”

  “You know, if I was trapped in a small boat with someone much larger than me who I’d just made angry by acting like an utter twat and getting his Granny murdered in front of his eyes, I’d probably be careful about goading him, But I guess you’re made of stronger stuff, aren’t you?”

  Marius eyed him warily. The boy showed no external signs of anger, and he was sure they’d followed the line of logic surrounding Granny’s disappearance to a moderately satisfying end. But last time he’d actually come to blows with Gerd, he’d ended up face down in a pile of pig shit with a razor sharp hoe pressed against the back of his neck. He seriously doubted it was possible to find a pile of pig shit on a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean, but Marius would lay odds that Gerd could do it. Gerd probably had some weird bumpkin pig shit location organ that normal people didn’t possess.

  “So. The slutfish.”

  “What about it?”

  “I spent a couple of summers working the Perench fishing boats when I was younger–”

  “Stealing from fishermen? Do you ever reach bottom?”

  “No, actually. I wasn’t.” Marius had been working his way through several of the fleet’s daughters. Technically it wasn’t actually stealing, so much as it was keeping warm in a place known for winds that could turn a man’s gonads into ice shavings. “I was working as a freezer man on one of the larger boats, making sure the ice in the boat’s hold stayed up to level.” And making sure the booze stayed accessible once the fish started to come in. “We used to see a lot of slutfish out around the coral beds at the north end of the Barrier Line. They’re little fish, see, about this size.” He held his hands ten inches or so apart. “Not really worth the net space, and they taste like a granny’s backside.”

  “Hey!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Not your granny’s backside, obviously. I’m sure that tastes much better.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “If I could. Anyway, the point is, they’re only little fish, but they’re the most colourful fish you’ve ever seen in your life. They look like they’ve been painted by blind children, colours everywhere, no one pattern matching the next. You can see them from miles away. And the way they swim – uneven, flapping about making a hell of a stir. You watch them and it’s like they want to get eaten. Then you watch them for a bit longer and you realise just what a clever bastard of a fish it really is.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s usually in a relationship with a teether.”

  Gerd looked at him blankly. “And?”

  “Picture an explosion of teeth with a gut attached, big as your torso, never stops being hungry, got a personality about as pleasant as having a pitchfork shoved up your arse. It’s the nastiest, most vicious fish in the Barrier Sea, and even better for the slutfish, it’s got the table manners of a miner.”

  “What’s all this got to do with Drenthe?”

  “Because he’s a slutfish. See, the slutfish has a tiny mouth. It can’t eat fish in its own right. Can’t get its mouth round a body to take a decent bite. But it’s worked out a system with the teether, right? The slutfish swims around, all colourful and lopsided and just begging to be eaten. And a fish comes along, thinks ‘I’ll have a piece of that’, and sets off in pursuit.”

  “Right into the Teether.”

  “Right into the Teether. Who eats like a spastic child in a porridge factory. Bits of fish going every which way in the water, all chewed up and bitten through and just the right size for a fish with a small mouth to swallow.”

  “Symbiotic.”

  “Symwhat now?”

  Gerd sneered. “You think we don’t have books halfway up our bumpkin mountain?”

  “No.”

  “Well… we’ve got one, okay. It’s an old farming manual. Uncle Merkus bought it when he was in Hoolash one year. Talks about companion planting and how certain animals and plants get on better together. I read all about it.”

  “You read.”

  “Fine,” he admitted after a moment. “Uncle Merkus read it to us.”

  “And people wonder why there are so few farmers in the universities.”

  “Yeah, well, at least I knew the word.”

  Marius sighed. “Yes, so you did. I guess we’ll call it a draw.”

  “Okay. So, Drenthe.” Gerd screwed up his face. “You think he’s a decoy, then?”

  “I’m beginning to, yes.”

  “But why?”

  “Think about it. Every step we’ve taken, he’s
ahead of us. He started us on the road–”

  “He started you on the road. Me and Granny, we were just visiting.”

  “And do you think he didn’t know that? Do you think it’s a coincidence that all this started at the exact moment you and I saw each other for the first time in four years? Really?”

  “No. No, I guess not.”

  “No. That’s what I mean. Whenever he needs us to be somewhere, he jumps up and down and waves his arms and makes sure we notice him. And whenever we make a decision and head somewhere on our own accord, he’s been there before us, laying the ground, pushing us in the right direction, making sure we keep moving.”

  “Like Granny?” asked Gerd. “We think he killed her…”

  “When he didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Why didn’t he kill her?”

  “No, why does he want us to think he did?”

  “I’m not sure. To push us a certain way? To keep us from stopping and thinking about this stuff, keep us off balance, so he can move us about where he wants us to go?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. But he’s got something in mind, and it’s us that’s going to do it for him. And you know what? It’s not just Granny.” Marius stared out over the water, seeing the fields around his home, the earth reaching up, Keth screaming and clawing at the ground… “The same goes for Keth. Both of us, we saw the one we love being taken away–”

  “And we filled in the gaps.”

  “Exactly as he knew we would.”

  “Gods.” Gerd ran his hands down his face. “We’re idiots, aren’t we?”

  Marius smiled, small and nasty. “Well, you are. Me, I’m an old fisherman from years back.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Marius leaned back and stared over his shoulder at the wake spreading out behind them. He concentrated, and let his sight pierce the water, down to the dim outline of the ocean bottom a dozen feet below them.

  “He let us escape. He wanted us to. He could have sent his troops after us. They could have walked under there, no problems. I’ve done it. But he didn’t, so why? He doesn’t really want to capture us. And he knows where we’re going. He’s told us that.”

  “How?”

  “Something he said to me when we were fighting. Called me a mummy’s boy, like he was planting the seed, like he already knew we were being herded towards my mother, and he was just making sure the thought had well and truly taken. Father first, mother next.”

  “So what do we do?”

  The wake spread out behind them, a liquid arrowhead with the boat’s bow for a hardened point, strong enough to pierce any potential future. Marius watched the water churn, the edges folding over themselves in constant motion, chaotic movement reigned in and directed towards a common purpose.

  “We do exactly what he wants us to do.”

  “But why? I mean…” Gerd spread his hands to indicate the horizon. “We’ve got a boat, we’ve got a good wind. We can go anywhere. He’s not watching us, is he? We can find a beach, and double back, and sneak into the warehouse–”

  “He’ll be gone, and so will any chance of tracking him. Besides, don’t you want to know why he’s sending us this way?”

  “Not particularly. I just want my Granny back.”

  “And to stop Scorbus invading the kingdom and bringing death to every living thing in Scorby.”

  “S’pose.”

  “Don’t worry. The two things are the same. I know why we’re going to see my mother.”

  “And?”

  “She’s got the book. The history of Scorbus’ campaigns.”

  “But why would Drenthe want us to have that?”

  “Because I don’t think he’s playing for Scorbus’ team anymore. I think he’s got something deeper going on. And I think he’s using us to put it together. Besides…” He stretched, and looked up at the sun. “I want to see my mum.”

  “But if Drenthe is one step ahead of us–”

  “Then he needs to be careful.”

  “Why?”

  Marius grabbed the tiller, swinging the boat around so that it pointed away from the sun, back towards the shore and the distant cliffs that housed his mother.

  “Because there’s a fine line between following someone because they’re leading you about, and following them because you’re stalking prey. And I’ve just crossed it.”

  FOURTEEN

  Fifteen hundred years ago, during the time of the Countless Fiefdoms, the Dorision Emperor Callusian looked upon the cliffs of Tylytene and pronounced them so sheer, so inhospitable, so completely fuck-ugly that no civilised man would entertain the thought of living near them.

  Within a year they were home to six nunneries, thirteen self-defence classes, and a secret college dedicated to teaching all those bits of common sense that get you hanged for being a witch (since the idea of a woman with common sense scares the living shit out of ninety percent of men, who generally have none to speak of). It had evolved over the centuries, responding to the mood of the times and the women who flocked there – sometimes in secret; and sometimes, as with the Witch Races in the late Bookless Ages, in numbers so vast that the tents across the cliff tops added two dozen feet to their height.

  Tylytene was sacred space, the home of secret women’s business, an oasis untroubled by men and their ridiculous ideas of war and booze and the search for the perfect bacon sandwich. Generations of nuns had carved great images into the stone, friezes a hundred feet high that heralded a simple message for those who saw them: We are the kind of people who use entire cliffs as our canvas. Do not fuck with us.

  The cliffs shone white in the western sun, a beacon of purity at the edge of a land stained by blood, a lighthouse of femininity and contemplation. They were a symbol, a paradise, an unrealised ideal.

  They were also, as Gerd pointed out, really, really high.

  The little boat bobbed in the swell a hundred metres off the cliff face, far enough away that the top could be seen as a thin line of green between the blue sky and the white chalk, but close enough to see the broken rocks that littered the water below, shattering the waves as they came in and promising destruction and ruin to any boat that attempted an approach. Marius knelt on the boat’s prow and scanned the rocks while Gerd sat securely in the stern, gripping tight to the nearest rail with fingers that would have been white even if they hadn’t already been leached of all colour.

  “What now?” Gerd shouted over the thunder of the water.

  “There’s supposed to be a path up the cliff. There!” Marius pointed to a tiny seam, almost indistinguishable from the scattered lines of the precipice above. He traced it in the air, steadily rising at an extreme angle, switching back on itself until it disappeared from view a hundred feet or so above them. “There’s a safe channel through the rocks and a mooring at the base of the steps. I’ve just got to…” He sputtered as a wave thudded against the boat’s side and drenched his face in spray. “Just got to find it and work out how to follow it in.”

  “I’ve got a better idea.”

  “What?”

  “You go to hell.”

  “What?”

  Gerd risked unpeeling a hand from the railing long enough to wave it at the chaos before them. “You can go to hell if you think I’m going to do all that.”

  “It’s fine. It’ll be–”

  “I. Don’t. Like. Heights!”

  “Ah.” Marius stared towards the top of the cliff, then back at Gerd, curled against the rear seat and most deliberately not looking up from the boat floor in front of him. “That could prove somewhat of a problem.”

  “Not if you like hell.”

  “I spend time with you, don’t I?”

  Gerd’s raspberry was lost as waves crashed onto both sides of the boat simultaneously. Marius slid across the prow on his knees, grabbed the railing to stop himself going over the side, and crabbed his way back into the relative safety of the stern. He plunked down next to Gerd and watched his young
friend fail to cope with the sudden sideways movement of the boat. After half a minute of desperate retching over the side, Gerd regained his seat and looked at Marius in misery.

  “I hate not being able to vomit.”

  “Whoever thought we’d get to say that, eh?”

  “I hate you, ’n’all.”

  “I know.” He clapped Gerd on the shoulder. “Let’s get away from here, shall we? Would that help?”

  “Yes.” Gerd burped up nothing, looked as green as he could without actually changing colour, and swallowed. “Yes it would.”

  “Okay. Give me a hand.”

  Together they hauled the anchor in and stowed it, before Marius took the wheel and laboriously hauled the skiff around so that it tacked away at right angles to the cliff. Once they were out of the immediate vicinity of the rocks he gave the little boat its head and let it run across the swell with the wind that whipped across the sheer rock face, driving them a mile or more away from the now-invisible stairs and back out into deeper water. The wind died down once the giant funnel of rocks and chalk was removed, and Marius took up the slack, turning the boat so that it once again pointed towards land, bobbing gently in calmer water a couple of miles offshore.

  “So what do we do now?” Gerd had recovered some of his equilibrium. He sat straighter, exposing his neck to the breeze behind them. He tilted his head, closed his eyes, let the wind wash across him. Marius loosed the anchor again, and came to sit next to him. They sat that way for several minutes, finding their individual centres, thinking their separate thoughts. Then Marius blew out his cheeks and stared at the cliffs again, their size more manageable with distance.

  “If we can’t go up, then we need to make landfall and go across the top.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m not sure.” He stared at the distant line at the top, watching it undulate across the sky. “It looks as if it begins to tail away to the right there. We can follow it around, maybe find a beach. But we’d best get a move on. It’s nightfall in a couple of hours and I’d hoped to be at the nunnery by then. I don’t want to be on the water at night.”

  “Afraid of the dark, sweetheart?”