She could not guess what the room might have been back when humans lived here, but having spent so many recent nights in hostels, it had the look of a prison to Lan, even though it was situated high in one of the towers of Azrael’s palace and not underground, where she was accustomed to seeing prisons. The walls were bare stone, painted a deep, unrestful red. The ceiling was made of square tiles, also red. The floor had been laid with a red, patternless rug over red-painted boards. The bed, red-lacquered posts, fine red sheets, plush red blankets, red cushions. Even the chamberpot was enameled in red. The effect was that of a room soaked in blood.
The only light came through a narrow slit of a window, glassless, that admitted a welcome, if chill, breeze and allowed her to look out over the high palace wall, beyond Azrael’s patrolling guards, at the city of Haven, whose residents were just stirring—waking, if the dead slept—to go about whatever they had instead of lives. She watched for a while, but could never quite pretend it was a city like the ones in old magazines, or that it could ever go back to being one.
So yes, it was luxurious, but no, not restful and after some time attempting sleep in the soft red bed she had all to herself, Lan pulled the blankets and one cushion onto the floor and slept there instead, facing into the shadows beneath the bed where all she could see was black. She tried to make herself see pictures, the way she’d done as a child, but all she conjured up was a headache and a few indistinct blurs pulsing in the rhythm of sex.
Could she fuck him? Probably. Shapes in the dark lose power in the light; she’d had his cock in her hand and tasted its deadalive taste. She thought she could probably fuck him just fine. Could she be his dolly? That, she didn’t know.
Lan, a dollygirl. Not just a quick one now and then to buy her meals (or end the Eaters, her brain stubbornly supplied), but a true dolly. It wasn’t unheard of, even in a small village like Norwood. The mayor had a dolly for a few years, when Lan was still too young to really be aware of it. Lisah Tuttle. She had her own house and everything. Often, little Lan would hang over the top of the fence and watch her do her washing—all fine clothes and frilly knickers, and herself pinning them up with her hair in ringlets and ribbons, smiling over her shoulder at Lan until Lan’s mother hauled her away.
“What does she sell?” she’d asked once, because even then, she’d known there was barter in it somewhere. Lisah Tuttle didn’t work in the greenhouses or chase pigs around the sty. Lisah Tuttle’s hands were soft and white as curd and her shoes were always clean. Lan didn’t know what Lisah’s trade was in, but she knew, even at that young age, that she wanted it.
Her mother had looked up from the lunch they were sharing during their brief respite before they got back in the rows, cocking her head so she could aim her good eye through the dirty glass at the blur that was Lisah swishing through the streets. “Everything,” she said. “All she has.”
“Do you reckon I could sell it, too?” asked Little Lan, wistfully. “If I ever get some?”
“I won’t tell you not to,” her mother told her after a moment’s hard stare. “This isn’t the world for that. But I will say, once you start selling, you never really stop. So when the time comes, trade hard and sell in pieces. A dolly wears the nicest dresses and has the prettiest face, but when she’s done being played with, she goes up on the shelf or into the box and she doesn’t get to complain. A dolly’s owned, her whole self. Understand?”
And Little Lan had nodded, because who didn’t know what a dolly was? Most of the girls in Norwood played dollies, even though only a few had real ones with painted porcelain faces and fancy dresses with ribbons and lace. Elvie Peters had a dolly like that. Lan had a clothy with the hair drawn on, or rather, she used to have one. One of the mayor’s boys, Eithon, had snatched it away and when they were fighting for it, it had ripped up the middle between her legs, which made all the boys hoot and poke at it, so Lan had run home in tears with no dolly at all. Her mother might have scrounged up another if she’d asked, but she never did. Her reasons had something to do with the sight of those boys, jeering and stabbing their fingers at her torn dolly, but it was a queer, hot-faced reason that didn’t come with words. Anyway, she understood all about dollies and how they were owned. Lan’s dolly had been split and poked and then dropped in the mud where it had probably been picked up by one of the mayor’s dogs and carried off for a gnaw toy, and Dolly did not complain. What all this had to do with Lisah Tuttle, she had no idea, but dollies, she understood very well.
She understood them even better now. Little Lan had grown up and if there were bits she’d sold over the years, at least she’d sold them dear. She was no man’s dolly and never would be.
But she couldn’t sleep.
And after all, it was a silly thing to stick to, wasn’t it? Hadn’t she come to Haven accepting—hell, expecting—to die? What sense did it make to put a higher price-tag on her body than her life?
Lan caught herself drumming her fingers on the floor and made herself stop. She’d never drummed her fingers on anything in her life. That was him, creeping into her. He didn’t get to do that. She wasn’t his dolly yet.
Or at all. Or ever.
Maybe.
Unpleasant, he’d said. It will be unpleasant, but she’d be compensated. How unpleasant, exactly? About the most oddjob thing Lan had ever agreed to was to take a cold bath and lie perfectly still so the fella could pretend she was dead while he was crawling on her. That was unpleasant, but Azrael certainly didn’t lack for dead women, if he wanted one. What did he want?
Her. For whatever reason, he wanted her. The only question was, how much was she selling?
All, she realized. For the Eaters, she’d sell it all.
So decided, she shut her eyes against the darkness and forced herself to sleep.
She dreamed in tangles, never quite knowing whether she was awake or not, but whenever she thought she was out, she found herself again in Norwood, hearing screams and choking on the smell of smoke and peaches. If there was more to the dreams than that, she didn’t know it. She never remembered her dreams anymore.
She was awakened by the heavy stride of boots on the landing outside her room and keys scraping in an old lock. As she uncurled her stiff body, the door opened to reveal one of Azrael’s guards, interchangeable with the one who had brought her here. He looked down at her without emotion, without even a hint of curiosity as to why she should be on the floor with an empty bed right next to her. “Our lord commands you join him for breakfast.”
So soon? By habit, she looked out to gauge the time from the sun’s position in the sky, but it hardly seemed to have moved. She supposed she was decided and a few hours more or less made no difference, but she wished she’d had at least a chance to sleep on it.
Pushing herself slowly into a sitting position, Lan rubbed at those of her joints that had come out the worst for being pressed to the floor, aware only of the cold and her many hurts, not the least of which was her bladder. Glancing at the chamberpot, she said, “Can you give me a minute?”
If the disdainful look he gave her was not reply enough, his cool tone as he said, “Our lord’s subjects do not chose the hour at which they obey him,” would have surely withered anyone else who had dared the question.
Lan got up. “Unless your lord doesn’t mind if his subjects piss themselves at the table, give me a damn minute.”
The guard recoiled, his pretty mouth pursing into a moue of aristocratic distaste. “Vulgar, gutter-crawling quim,” he muttered (a rather loud mutter) and slammed the door on her.
Lan used the facilities, such as they were, finger-combed her hair and shook out her clothes so they looked a little less slept in. She wished she had some way to check her reflection—a windowpane or even a polished bit of metal—but there was nothing here. In some desperation, she spat into her palm and scrubbed at her face, hoping to take away some of the grime or at least put some color in her cheeks.
When the door opened again, she was ready, althou
gh she could see by her guard’s expression her appearance was not much improved. Never mind. It was Azrael whose opinion mattered.
They descended the narrow, winding stairs in a silence broken only by her breath and the dual tromping of their boots. His were nicer and made a crisp, soldierly sound; hers, patched leather with soles made from strips of old tires, clumped along out of rhythm. Here on the cramped, dingy stairs, it wasn’t so bad, but soon they were out again in the oppressive grandeur of his palace, where her footsteps were small and awkward and even the air felt too clean for her to use.
The pikemen stationed outside the dining hall uncrossed their weapons so that her guard could open the doors, although both sneered at her a little as Lan passed. Within, the same long table, the same multitude of platters and ewers, the same silent banks of servants lining the walls, and Azrael, of course, seated in his throne.
Apart from them, the hall was empty. There were no plates set before the rows of chairs where his Children and their courtiers had been the night before. The amounts and variety of foods appeared undiminished, but they were for Azrael alone, it seemed. Azrael raised his hand, palm upturned, and lazily beckoned. Until he did so, Lan had not realized she had stopped and was just standing there at the foot of one table, staring at the emptiness. Now she forced her feet to unroot and walked forever down the length of that hall to reach the chair he indicated, but she did not sit.
“Where is everyone?” she asked.
“I have elected not to provide you an audience in the hopes you will not feel so inspired to perform.” He glanced at her and resumed disinterested dissection of the meat occupying his plate. “Be seated.”
She eased into the chair. The arms were padded with some soft fabric she could not name; when she ran her hands over them, she left smudges. Seeing them, she put her hands on her knees.
Azrael gestured without bothering to look at the servant who came running to set another place at the table. “Eat. You must be hungry.”
She was, but still she tried to ignore the insistent watering of her mouth as the servant filled her platter with a meal as abundant as Azrael’s own—breads, both sweet and savory, baked in braids, rolls, loaves and even more fanciful shapes; more meat than she’d seen even in the market, some cased into sausages, some carved into slabs, some still on the bone and some whole-roasted, but all hot and gleaming with juices; bowls of every kind of cooked grain awaited her selection, surrounded by dishes of milk and cream, sculpted butters, honey and jam and even sugar. All these things the servant artfully arranged across silver platters and crystal bowls, but Lan touched none of it.
Azrael waited, watching her as he picked unhurriedly through his own breakfast, and finally said, “I take it this means you refuse my offer.”
“I’ll do it,” she said. She waited to feel something—her mother’s disapproval, maybe—but all she felt was tired. She had to wonder…had she sold all the pieces already? Was there nothing left to even care?
“So you merely refuse my table. Or is it my company—” He passed a hand over his body, putting the whole scarred horror of him on display. “—that puts you off your appetite?”
“I just don’t feel like eating.”
Her stomach growled.
Azrael scraped his thumbclaw along the rim of his cup and tapped it twice, then put it down. He laced his fingers together and leaned back in his throne. “I have nothing you want,” he said for her. “I have nothing you need. You will do only what you must, grudgingly, and I am never to forget it. Is that the way of it?”
Lan didn’t answer, but she didn’t drop her eyes either.
“I see you still believe yourself the hero of this little farce. In your mind, you stand for all your beleaguered people and especially, for those of Norwood. They starve and so you will starve, for you are one heart, however the distance. Ah, humanity, whose spirit conquers even in chains.”
“Stop making fun of me.”
“You are not in Norwood,” he told her, each word like the final cut of a headsman’s axe. He gave that a moment to sink in, then smiled. “You are in Haven, under my shadow, and you will find that my shadow stains. You abandon your noble human principles when you embrace me.”
“You can have my body,” Lan told him. “But that’s all you get.”
“No,” he replied calmly, quietly. “I will have it all, whether you give it gladly or no.”
“Do your worst,” Lan said, as trite as that was. She even laughed when she said it. “Do your very fucking worst.”
The grey skin above his mask creased as he raised one eyebrow beneath it. “All right,” he said mildly.
Lan’s bravado had enough momentum to last a few seconds more, so that she could still watch with her head high and a smile she didn’t feel frozen on her lips as he beckoned a servant to him and gave a command too quietly for her to hear, but after the servant hurried away, he only sat there, watching her watch him, and the longer she had to wait for it, the less ready she felt for whatever was coming. She made herself think of her mother—her bare feet kicking in the fire, her head lolling on her broken neck—but it didn’t shore her up like it had on her long walk to Ashcroft.
The servant returned with a tray on which was set a covered dish with a high, domed lid. She placed it before Lan.
“Eat with me,” Azrael ordered. And smiled. “We can still speak of pleasant things.”
He waited. She said nothing.
“And so we begin.” Azrael dipped his fingers in a little bowl of water, wiped them on a napkin, and gestured.
The servant removed the cover to reveal a single fruit.
Lan’s heart dropped out of her. She felt it tear free, felt the hole where it had been. It was a hole about the same size as the peach she saw before her—round and ripe and just blushed with pink on one side. A Norwood peach.
“It’s a lie,” she heard herself say.
“Is it?”
“You couldn’t possibly get to Norwood and back so soon.”
“The dead travel fast. And truthfully, child, it wasn’t far.”
“I won’t eat it.”
“I think you will.”
“Well, I won’t!”
Her little shout was nothing in that great hall. She grabbed the peach and threw it. Azrael did not flinch as it flew by, missing him by a hand’s span or less.
The servant fetched it back again and placed it, bruised, on its dish.
“I think you will,” Azrael said again, softly. “If you share my bed, you share my table. If you do not share my table, you will be removed from Haven. Consider that. All your heroic ambitions ended, your mother’s bones unavenged and my hungering dead yet at large in the world, because you would not eat a peach. Is that truly such a sacrifice?” He took another peach from the bowl on his table and carved out a slice with a knife. He ate slow, savoring, and smiled when it was gone. “They are especially sweet, aren’t they?”
“You can’t make me do this!”
“Oh, I could,” he said with disturbingly quiet confidence. “But I won’t. I’ll not starve you, or have you pipe-fed, or prize your jaws apart to force its flesh between your teeth, but neither shall I wait all day for you to admit what you have already decided. When I am finished—” He carved out another slice of peach and held it up for her to see before eating it. “—so are you.”
“What did you do to Norwood?”
“I? Nothing. I was here.”
“Your Revenants. Obeying your orders.”
“Was it not you who planted the seed of my interest?” he countered. “Why should you not share in the fruits?”
“Did you kill them? Just tell me what happened!”
“What matter? The flavor is neither sweetened nor soured by counting the dead.” He ate another slice of peach. Half of it was gone now. Half, so fast. “A dry field welcomes blood as much as rain and yields as fair a harvest.”
“You’re a monster.”
“So I’m told. Eat.”
She looked at the peach, but did not touch it.
“It is in the nature of Man to see symbols in the most ordinary things,” Azrael mused, watching her. “To make relics out of objects and divine omens from natural phenomena. You see Norwood before you now, don’t you? You see people and homes and how noble it is to suffer oppression and defy tyranny…but it is just a peach. Those whose insignificant lives you wish it to encapsulate will never know what happened here at my table. What difference does it make to their misery and grief if you go hungry or not? Shall you go home to them and boast of your sacrifice here as they stand in the ruins my Revenants left them, as if your suffering was equal to theirs?”
“Just tell me if they’re dead!”
“What if they were? How does that at all alter the equation? Suppose my Revenants slaughtered all, burned the orchards, salted the earth…are you any less resolved to end my hungering dead? Or to put another way, is your determination to do so dependent upon those in Norwood celebrating your return? Because if it is,” he said with a chuckle, “I think you have rather a shock coming. The living who seek welcome in Haven are rarely held in high regard by those denied it.”
“They can think what they want.”
“They will,” he replied evenly. “And they already think you a traitor. Now, after my Revenants have followed your wake to their homes, they will know it. You will never convince them otherwise with the tale of fruit you would not eat, so all that remains is to decide how steeply you sold your integrity. For the Eaters? Or for a peach.” He carved into his diminishing peach, eying hers, as yet untouched. “You’re running out of time, child.”
Her traitor hand rose, reaching. She looked at him, hating him, hating herself. “All of it?” she asked. Her voice shook, scarcely louder than a whisper.
“A bite sufficed Eve in the garden,” he replied nonsensically. “It’s enough for me.”
Lan took the peach. It was soft in her hand, perfectly ripe. She looked at him, her dirty fingers digging furrows into its golden flesh, and bit; its juice filled her mouth, as thick as blood. She forced down a swallow and threw it back into the bowl with a shaking hand. It bounced out again and rolled off the table for the servant to chase after.
Land of the Beautiful Dead Page 7