Chapter 6

“These have no longer any hope of death;

And this blind life of theirs is so debased,

They envious are of every other fate.”

Dante, Inferno, 3.46-48

Dante’s horse galloped after the soldier. They veered to the right, circling around the town, back towards the west, away from the direction of the advancing army. There was no telling if they were already surrounded. Dante narrowed his eyes and scanned the nearest trees, expecting to be hit with an arrow or crossbow bolt at any moment, but for now nothing bad happened. He looked ahead and saw the soldier turn and glance over his shoulder at them, then the soldier kicked his horse to increase its speed. Dante tried to match him. His horse – more so than the soldier’s – would not be able to keep this pace up for long, but they had to get as far from there as quickly as possible.

Crashing through a stand of fruit trees, they finally came to the road Dante had hoped to find when they reached the town. There were more fruit trees on the other side of the road, and looking back toward the town, Dante saw people running toward them. The way they moved, they obviously were not dead.

“Help us!” the man in the lead of the crowd approaching them shouted. He held a shovel in his right hand as he ran. “You must help us get out of here!”

A woman was close behind him. “Yes, help us! We didn’t know the army was so close! We didn’t know they would do this!” She looked better dressed than most of the townspeople Dante had seen, and he noticed she had something metal in her right hand. It looked like a brass candlestick.

The soldier still had his sword out. Dante now drew his. They looked at each other and hesitated.

“Get us out of here,” Bogdana said to Dante. “They just want the horses. They’ll tear us limb from limb quicker than the dead would, just to save themselves. You know they will.”

“It doesn’t seem right,” the soldier said.

“None of this seems right,” Dante said.

The townspeople were closing in on them, the closest maybe thirty feet away, when two dead men staggered out from among the fruit trees and attacked the people as they ran. One of them grabbed the man with the shovel. He screamed as the dead man bit into his left arm, then he brought the shovel down on the back of his attacker’s skull. The dead man slumped to the ground, but the other one grabbed the man with the shovel and they fell to the ground, grappling, growling, and cursing.

The people further back in the crowd screamed and changed direction when they saw the dead, running back toward the burning town, even though that seemed a more certain death. The woman with the candlestick was still headed toward them when another dead man lunged from among the fruit trees and fell on her. She shrieked and pulled away from him, the sleeve of her blouse tearing off in his grip.

The soldier turned his horse toward her. “I can’t stand and watch this. I don’t care.” He charged off toward the fighting in the road.

Dante tried to get off his horse. It was an awkward dismount with a second person, and he landed in a heap, still holding the reins. He scrambled to his feet, and handed the reins to Bogdana. “You – get to the edge of the forest and wait for us.”

She looked down at him. “You’re a fool, but I won’t leave you. I’ll stay right here. Hurry.”

“All right.”

The soldier was next to the woman and her dead assailant. The dead man had a hold of her arm, and she kept swinging the candlestick at his head, but he was warding off the blows with his other arm, so they continued to fight. The soldier raised his sword, but the way the pair kept moving around he couldn’t strike without hitting the woman.

Dante circled around them, but he had the same problem trying to attack without hitting the woman. With a surprisingly dexterous move, the dead man got a hold of the candlestick and lunged for her forearm, sinking his teeth into it. Dante winced at the dark blood surging out of the wound, welling up around the man’s teeth and lips, and at the woman’s mortal howl of pain. He steeled himself, grabbed the dead man’s hair with his free hand, and with an animal cry, he shoved his sword into the man’s left eye. Dante was pressed up next to the injured woman and gripping the dead man’s hair. For an instant, all three of them tensed and trembled in the terrible exchange between them – the woman with agony and the horrible surge of mortality, the man with the last, feeble ebb of life, and Dante with the thrill of killing, of feeling the life spasming out of something monstrous and deadly in his grip.

Dante let go of the man, withdrawing his blade and stepping back. The twice-dead corpse fell to the ground, as the woman slumped toward the other side, clutching her arm above the wound. Dante looked over to where the other man, the one with the shovel, was getting up. He was covered in blood, having just finished the messy job of pounding the dead man’s head into the road with his shovel. His bitten left arm hung down at his side. He dragged the shovel behind him on the ground as he limped toward them. Where he wasn’t smeared with blood, his skin was deathly white. “Please help me,” he rasped. It was already starting to sound like the moan the dead made.

Dante thought he heard the woman weeping, but when he took a step toward her she looked up and snarled at him. Perhaps she had been crying, her eyes were red, but now they were full only of hatred 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.