Chapter 5

These miscreants, who never were alive,

Were naked, and were stung exceedingly

By gadflies and by hornets that were there.

Dante, Inferno, 3.64-66

Dante kept as fast a pace as he could, but they never quite got free of the smell of smoke following them up the valley, though sometimes it seemed fainter. Looking around as he rode, he saw no other signs of danger from either the living or the dead. He only spied the trees and the occasional squirrel or, in the distance, a deer. The terrain was getting steeper and more difficult as they went. Dante thought now it was more imperative they find a settlement, so they could pick up whatever road went through the village and begin to follow it. It would help them make better time.

By late morning they had reached one of the towns in the valley. It was a decent sized settlement, with a vast expanse of the forest cleared away for their crops. Looking at the larger buildings, Dante thought the valley must offer some material wealth to the people there – probably from mining, quarrying, and timber. This early in the year, the fields they rode through were bare, as well as devoid of any people. But up ahead, coming from among the buildings of the town proper, Dante could hear loud, angry voices and the general rumbling of a crowd. Thankfully, however, he did not hear the moaning of the dead

Dante held the horse back, and looked over his shoulder at Bogdana. “Do you still want to go there?” he asked. “We can skirt around the edge of the town. I’m sure we can find the road on the other side and get moving faster. It might be safer. There seems to be something going on there.”

Bogdana looked past him, then around at the empty fields, and sniffed the air. Dante was quite sure she noticed the smoke, and evaluated its proximity and danger just as carefully as he had been doing all morning. “We have to,” she concluded. “They may still not know the danger. We have to try.”

Dante nodded and urged the horse forward. They passed between some two and three-storey buildings, as they entered the town on a street leading toward a central square. People looked down on them from some of the windows, and there were people on the street. All of them either headed toward the town square, or stood about, looking down the street to see what was going on there. All were on foot, and they made room for Dante’s horse, but all eyed him suspiciously. He remembered how, years before, he had seen troops leaving the besieged castle of Caprona after a truce had been negotiated. The troops had to march between the ranks of the opposing army. Dante thought he now knew much better how they must have felt, surrounded and outnumbered.

The crowds became too thick for him to continue once they reached the edge of the square. At the corners of the square were four enormous oak trees. A white church occupied the middle of the area. To Dante, the church’s architecture looked strange but graceful in its simplicity, with a low dome in the middle, and two steeples at the front of the building. The crowd gathered around the church was agitated, restless, seething with motion punctuated by shouts. Their attention was focused on a thick, wooden pole sticking up from the ground in front of the church. A woman was tied to it, with a pile of wood all around her. The wood looked wet, and even from this distance, Dante could smell the oil they had poured on it. His heart sank, knowing death and cruelty had arrived there in advance of the army, and the horror was going to begin even before the troops arrived to slaughter everyone. Dante tried to move forward to get a better look at what was happening, while still staying close to the street they had rode in on. He was relieved to see the crowd did not close in behind them.

Besides the doomed woman and the members of the crowd, there were two other figures there that seemed to have some special role. In front of the steps of the church, near a flagpole from which a colorful banner hung limply, there was a man in a floppy, burgundy hat and a dark, leather jacket of slightly better cut and quality than the rest of the citizenry. His clothes didn’t look clerical or military, so he must have been some secular, civil authority. If not the mayor or judge of the town, he probably was at least some minor official, like a beadle or guild president or whatever equivalent these people had – one minor enough that he wouldn’t have been warned to flee already by his superiors. Dante presumed he was nominally in charge of these proceedings.

The other figure he could pick out was the only other person there on horseback, a.young man, probably just a year or two older than Bogdana. He was powerfully built, with long blonde hair. He sat astride a brown horse and kept near the woman, trying to stay between her and the crowd, sometimes shouting back at them. From his clothing, he was clearly a soldier. His long sword was out, and he was strong enough to wield it with one hand, even though it was quite large. Dante had seen others with similar weapons training to use them with two hands.

Dante tried to make out what the people were shouting, but he could not understand their speech as clearly as he did Bogdana’s. He did hear the word strigoi several times among their shouts and the crowd’s general murmur. But the thrust of the exchange became clear quickly enough.

“She’s possessed!”

“She’s brought a curse on us! Her daughter died during the last plague, and now she’s taking it out on us!”

“If we burn her, we’ll be saved!”

“Leave her alone!” the young soldier shouted back at them, waving his sword menacingly and skillfully enough that they hung back. A rock bounced off his chest, but other than that, the crowd hadn’t yet built up the recklessness for an attack. “She’s done nothing wrong! She’s just an old woman! How can you people do this? Has the plague made you all go mad?”

Dante knew exactly how they could do this, and unfortunately, it had nothing to do with madness or any physical plague. Corpses getting up and walking around could easily qualify as “mad” in his estimation, and he’d never heard of such a thing happening ever before, except in the Holy Scriptures, where it had been a blessed miracle brought about by God and not the horror he had seen in this alien land. But people hurting those weaker than they were, in order to make themselves feel better or more secure? One could see that every day, in every city, in every land he’d ever visited or read about. He envied the young soldier his naiveté, thinking it would be nice to see such human evil as somehow inconceivable or aberrant.

Dante studied the woman tied to the stake. Her hair wreathed her head like a cloud exploding upward – wild, unkempt, and grey. There were twigs and ribbons in it, as though she collected these and decorated herself with them. Her clothes were similarly motley, made out of different scraps and layers, with nutshells, pinecones, and even animal bones hanging off of them. Like many who had sunk into madness and destitution, her age was impossible to determine. She was filthy and haggard, but there was no telling how much of it came from age, and how much was the result of no one taking care of her, including herself. Often people like her lived out of doors, and wherever Dante was at the moment, its climate seemed harsh enough that it would take a toll on someone living without shelter. Her frame still looked strong, and she didn’t appear to be maimed or crippled. She could’ve been slightly younger than Dante, or many years older.

She didn’t seem at all afraid of what was happening, though it wasn’t because she was oblivious. On the contrary, she was very alert, looking all around and frequently breaking out into laughter or some incoherent song. Perhaps she was so far gone in madness she didn’t understand she was going to die, in one of the worst ways people had devised for one another. Dante shivered; it was the same sentence placed on him in Florence, and he was about to see exactly what being burned alive was like. At least for this poor woman, death and pain were no longer objects of fear, if she could even understand what they were. He shook his head, wondering how such small graces from God found such enormous shoals of human wickedness on which to spend themselves in seeming impotence and humiliation.

“I’ve done nothing wrong?” the woman tied to the stake called out after the young soldier spoke up in her defense. “Silly boy! I’ve been bad! My whole family’s been bad from the beginning!” Perhaps the townspeople had beaten or cajoled her into “confessing” before tying her to the stake. It was common enough in these situations. “I had two brothers! They both disappeared. I don’t know where. Sometimes I go out in the field and the ground’s wet, all wet. Nothing to be done about it.” She laughed so shrilly even her tormentors quieted down, out of surprise and perhaps a little embarrassment at what they were doing to this obviously harmless, deranged creature. “The field’s the thing, isn’t it? Everything bad always happens in our field. There’s mandrake and nightshade there and all manner of wicked, evil things. Perhaps you could bury me there, friends, and that’d be an end to all my family’s wickedness.”

Maybe she did still know, at some level, that she was going to die – but how then could she be so cheerful about it? Dante wondered if he could get through the crowd and save her from the flames with a quick and merciful death by his sword, though he was not sure whether such “mercy” would itself be culpable. He felt sick and dizzy, and he swayed slightly at the enormity of such mundane, reflexive evil.

“She admits it!” someone shouted. “See! She even admits it!”

“She doesn’t know what she’s saying!” the young soldier shouted back. More rocks hit him and, this time, the woman as well. She laughed.

“You there!” Dante heard someone shout, and he turned to see he was being addressed by the man near the church steps. “You, stranger, what are you doing here? Do you bring news? What is going on outside our town? Is the plague contained?”

“I come from far away,” Dante answered. “But yesterday I found this woman,” he gestured at Bogdana, “as her village was being destroyed by the army and by the walking dead. You have to leave, move west, or the army will kill you all. This woman you are tormenting has nothing to do with this plague. It’s the army you need to worry about. Please just leave her and flee your town as quickly as possible.”

“He’s lying!” someone else shouted. “The army will leave us alone, once they know we’ve killed the evil one among us. They’ll be glad we did it. Rid the land of her corruption! She admitted she and her kind have brought evil on us.”

The crowd was now dividing its attentions between menacing the young soldier, the madwoman, and Dante. They also looked to the man by the church steps for some approval of their actions. Dante gripped his sword but didn’t draw it yet. He didn’t think he could intimidate the crowd as much as the soldier did, so he didn’t want to draw on them till there was no choice. Some of them might finally figure out escape was a better plan than their superstitions of tribal scapegoating. Then they would see the usefulness of his horse, and the advisability of killing him and Bogdana in order to get it.

“Please, sir,” he said as diplomatically as possible to the town official. “You seem like an educated, reasonable, godly man. Please explain to these good people that I’m right, and they need to leave as quickly as possible. Killing this wretched creature will accomplish nothing.”

The man on the church steps shook his head and shrugged. “I’m sorry. I have no control over them. The mayor and the priest are gone. Perhaps they could have done something, but not me. The people have decided what they think is best to solve our town’s problems. I am powerless over them.”

“Then why are you here at all?” the soldier shouted to him. “You saw everything they did with her. They asked you if it was legal or not. How can you say now it’s not under your control?”

“Well, I did advise them on matters of the law, but I know nothing of whether or not this will solve our problems with the living dead. But if the people think it will, they’re entitled to that opinion and they may be right. Who knows what the truth is in this situation?”

“Yes! We are right. He said so.” The crowd cheered at this, and this time Dante and Bogdana were hit by stones as well.

Bogdana leaned forward. “We need to get out of here,” she whispered. “There’s nothing you can do for her. You’re just going to get us killed too.”

His stomach turned over and he flushed crimson, but he knew she was right. The crowd was turning uglier and bolder by the moment, but so far their wrath was mostly directed at the woman and the soldier. Dante and Bogdana still had a good chance at escape, if they didn’t invite more attention to themselves, or get drawn deeper into the crowded square. Dante pulled on the reins and his horse took a couple steps back. A few steps further from the square, and the crowd would be thin enough near them that Dante could yank the reins, turn the horse around, and be out of there.

The young soldier saw he was being left alone as the woman’s only defense. “No!” he shouted to Dante. “You can’t. You know this isn’t right!”

“So do they,” Dante shouted. The horse took another step back. They were almost in the clear. “It doesn’t seem to be stopping them.”

He heard the crackling he had heard at Bogdana’s village, though louder this time. Dante looked up as another one of the flaming projectiles crashed into the top of one of the four, giant oak trees. Some dried, dead leaves left from last year were still on the tree, and these ignited immediately, as the main trunk bent from the impact, then the top part of it snapped off. A flaming mass of branches fell into the crowd near the stake, together with the burning bits of the exploded projectile. The people scattered and screamed, and Dante could see something more than just the flames was tormenting them. They were waving their arms over their heads as they ran, and as some of them crashed into the other onlookers nearer Dante, he saw they were being attacked by a swarm of hornets or wasps. There must have been a nest in the tree, and the creatures were released when it fell to the ground. Thankfully, the enraged insects seemed focused on those they had first attacked, and none of them broke off their pursuit to sting Dante and Bogdana.

Dante yanked the horse around and looked over his shoulder, back at the pandemonium of the square. The burning branches ignited the oil-soaked wood around the stake. The flames leaped all around the crazed woman, and her clothes were already burning, though oddly she seemed calmer than before. Dante could see the young soldier’s horse was nearly uncontrollable, panicked by the fire and the screaming crowd, and it bucked and reared back, almost throwing him.

Dante heard the crackling sound again right before one of the church steeples exploded in fiery sparks and masonry dust. With a sound like some giant piece of pottery breaking, the tower fell forward. If the town official had been just a step closer to the church, or a few steps further away, he might have been safe. But he wasn’t, and the top third of the tower fell right on him. Dante felt no inclination to contain a grim smile.

The madwoman screamed, though not in agony, but in something that chilled and disoriented Dante more, for it sounded like delight or even pleasure. “At night I see a dragon, too. It’s only a small one, though. It lives east of the town.” The flames climbed higher around her, sometimes completely obscuring Dante’s view of her. “Now can I have some apples?” She laughed as she writhed against her bonds. For a moment, she looked right into Dante’s eyes, and he was shocked to see her gaze was not filled with pain or terror, but with some manic, erotic excitement that seethed then burst forth from her – a frenzied glee as the cruelty of the crowd smashed into her innocence, like a hammer onto an anvil, and both these primal, unquenchable forces together savaged her fragile body and broken mind. Her eyes sparkled and her laughter rose above the flames and the screams from the crowd. “Don’t go near the elderberry, Mother. Sometimes there’s a pig that climbs its branches! He’s a wily one, with red eyes and sharp tusks. But don’t hurt him, Mother. He doesn’t know any better. He thinks he can fly, like he used to. Wheeee!”

The soldier’s horse reared up one more time, then he finally got control over it, pointing it right toward Dante and making it crash through the scattering remnants of the crowd. He pulled up next to Dante, panting and flushed. “Come!” he shouted. “We have to get out of here!”

The soldier rode off, but Dante couldn’t tear himself away from the horror of the dying woman and the senseless, frenzied chaos of the people dashing all about the square, some of them on fire, some trampling others under foot, some swatting and screaming as the wasps stung them over and over. And beyond the flames, he now saw other people shuffling in to the square. These people did not seem panicked, but moved slowly, stiffly, and deliberately. Although the waves of heat coming off the flames made it hard to see clearly, it looked to him as though these people entering the square were covered in blood. The one closest seemed to be missing his left arm. Dante could hear their moaning, underneath and all around the other sounds of death and pain assailing him.

Bogdana tightened her grip around Dante’s waist. “Go, go! You can’t help her! They’ve all gone mad!”

Pulling back on the reins, he closed his eyes and could barely keep from sobbing. He kicked the animal hard to get them out of there. He could hear the woman’s laughter a long time after they had left the town behind. Her eyes he would see in nightmares all his life.