Valley of the Dead by Kim Paffenroth Read Free Book Online Page A

and blame. “I asked you to help us,” she growled. “You’d help that miserable beggarwoman, but you let me be eaten alive? What kind of man are you?” Dante had no answer for her.
    Bogdana rode up, slipping off the horse next to him, offering the reins. The soldier turned his horse around, back toward the woods.
    “They’re bitten. There’s no hope for them,” she said quietly. “We have to go now.”
    “Yes, you’d say that, wouldn’t you?” the woman snapped at her. “Go ahead! He defended that old whore. I guess you’re his young one! It must be the kind of woman they like, where he’s from. Leave me here alone to die. I don’t care.”
    Dante sheathed his sword, mounted his horse, and pulled Bogdana up behind him. As he turned the horse toward the forest, the man with the shovel collapsed next to the woman in the road, while a projectile hit one of the buildings on this side of the town and exploded. As he rode away, Dante looked back. The two figures on the road faced away from each other, whether out of shame or pain, Dante would never know, though it seemed infinitely to increase their wretchedness in his eyes. Each of them looked completely alone, even though they were pressed up against one another.

Chapter 7

    When some among them I had recognized,
    I looked, and I beheld the shade of him
    Who made through cowardice the great refusal.
    Dante, Inferno , 3.58-60

    Surging ahead through the forest, Dante thought they might have actually slipped through the army’s lines surrounding the town, as there was no sign of anyone else, living or dead, on the road or anywhere near it. After a while, both horses slowed to a trot, and then to a walking gait they could maintain without exhausting themselves.
    The soldier dropped back till they were riding alongside one another. “What are your names?”
    “Dante.”
    “Bogdana.”
    “My name is Radovan.” Dante thought that at least the men’s names sounded as bad as the women’s. “The army and the living dead destroyed your village?”
    “Yes,” Bogdana answered. “My family is dead. This man tried to help me.”
    “I am sorry. I was in the army that did this. I thought we had to, to get rid of the dead and free our land of plague. Killing the dead is one thing – it’s bad enough, since they look just like regular people, some of them even children. But it has to be done. And I don’t think they feel it so much, when you kill them. They seem numb, no longer really human. But the villagers, pleading for their lives – I just couldn’t anymore. So I left during the night. I tried to help those people in the town, warn them, maybe have some of them escape into the mountains at least.”
    “What happened, then? Who was that poor woman?” Dante asked.
    “You saw them, how crazed they were with all their ignorance and fear. I got to their town early this morning, and they were already dragging that poor, old, madwoman around, screaming how she was to blame. And that little dandy of a deputy, vice assistant, district councilman, or whatever the hell he claimed to be, strutted around like a peacock during all of it, but he was more of a gelding, is my guess.” Dante smirked and Bogdana snickered at this. It was the closest any of them had come to laughter in some time.
    Radovan continued. “They kept looking to him to validate everything, and he kept saying he had no authority, no jurisdiction. But then he’d tell them that if he were in authority, this is how he’d go about it, and then he’d wave them away and say no, no, he didn’t mean for them to actually do it. I kept telling them to run, to give this all up, but they ignored me, except to occasionally ask some practical question, like how big was the army, or how far away it was. I’d tell them I didn’t know, more troops were arriving every day, since the plague was so bad. They were close, but it was hard to estimate how long it would take them to move. The trebuchets take a