Chapter 8

And ready are they to pass o’er the river,

Because celestial Justice spurs them on,

So that their fear is turned into desire.

Dante, Inferno, 3.124-26

It was the middle of the afternoon when they reached the banks of a broad river. The road turned and they followed the river upstream. The water looked too deep, and the current too strong, for them to cross on their own. Dante wondered if they’d be able to follow it on this bank, or whether there was a bridge somewhere, when Radovan explained there was a ferry up ahead they could use to cross.

The ferry boat was a simple one, a large raft that, at the moment, was on the other side of the river. As they got closer, he could see there was a rope across the river. He couldn’t see all the details of it this far away, but from having seen many small ferries that worked this way, he could guess the rope ran through hooks or eyelets on the boat, and by pulling on it, the ferryman could take the boat back and forth across the river. It was a simple and effective arrangement, so long as the river didn’t have a lot of boats traveling on it to snag on the rope, and so long as the traffic needing to cross the river wasn’t too great.

Radovan, Bogdana, and Dante arrived at the crossing. Looking across the river, Dante saw people on the ferry boat. They seemed to be milling around, but they were too far away for Dante to shout to them, or to see exactly what they were doing.

“What if they don’t pull the boat over to our side?” he asked. “They might be afraid of the plague, and won’t be letting more people across. Can we just follow the river up the valley without crossing it?”

“Not easily,” Radovan said. “The terrain gets very rough on this side. It’d slow us down too much, and then we wouldn’t be moving away from the army, but across its path. They’re coming straight west, as we have been. We need to keep straight up the valley as far as we can, to stay ahead of them.”

“Is there another place to cross the river?”

Radovan shook his head. “Not for a long ways. The river’s swollen this time of year, from spring rains and the snow melting up in the mountains. You have to get up higher, near the side of the valley, before the river gets narrow enough to cross. Even then, we’d be risking the horses slipping in the rushing water, maybe hurting themselves. Then we’d be on foot, and that’d be the end of it.”

Dante looked back at the people on the ferry boat. “Well, at least they seem to be pulling it toward us, so maybe we don’t have to worry about that.” He waved to the people on the boat. It seemed strange they didn’t wave back, but they did keep pulling on the rope and working their way closer to their side of the river.

The three of them dismounted to wait. Dante smelled the air. It seemed free of the oppressive scent of smoke that had been following them since yesterday. As Dante looked around, he thought this spot along the river was the closest to peaceful and alive that he had seen so far in this land. All the sounds – the water, the wind in the trees, even the occasional bird – felt normal and right. “Your country is pretty,” he said to both of his companions, trying to make small talk.

“Usually it is,” Radovan agreed. “It is a strange fate, that we deserved to have the living dead infest our land so often, polluting it, making it into a desert.”

Dante nodded and frowned. It was a strange fate, indeed. He could think of many places that deserved such horrors more. “Perhaps it is a test.”

He looked at Bogdana. She had gone off just a ways and was gathering berries off a bush, most of which she was eating as she went. Dante thought how hungry she must be. They hadn’t stopped since leaving the town, and they probably wouldn’t stop again until nightfall, but she needed to eat and rest often in her condition. She caught his eye and took a few steps over to offer some of the berries to him and Radovan.

“A test?” she said. “I don’t know if we will pass. And I’d rather not have such a test, even if I did pass it.”

“I don’t suppose any of us want such things,” Dante said as he ate some of the berries. They were the same kind she’d given him the night before. It seemed quite early in the year for berries, and to be honest, they were so tart as to be barely edible. “But we are tested, nonetheless, all the time.”

She gave him just a hint of a smile as she stepped past him to get more berries from another nearby bush. “What were you, in your country, before you were driven out?”

“I joined the apothecaries’ guild, mostly because the men in my city were required to belong to a guild, if they wanted to hold public office. In a way, I wanted to be a politician.” He looked down. “Then I tried to write books, but couldn’t.” He didn’t know what was more embarrassing: his life, explaining it to some peasant girl, or the wholly inappropriate and mostly unpleasant feeling of being instinctively attracted to her and craving her approval. He watched her without looking up.

“I think you wanted to be a monk once,” she said between mouthfuls of berries.

Dante scowled, but almost smiled in spite of it. She was right; he had thought of joining the Franciscans, to be exact. Again, there was something mostly unpleasant yet somewhat exhilarating about a woman knowing too much about him. “Well, yes, I did, once.”

“I think you did, too,” she said to Radovan.

Dante looked at the younger man, who also discreetly stole glances at the woman, though he mainly watched the approaching ferry boat. “Well, yes, I had thought of it, since I’m not the firstborn. It’s practical, sometimes, even though I suppose it’s funny to say that about that kind of life.”

“Always testing yourselves.” She almost laughed. “Or seeing life as a test. But maybe you’re right. Maybe this is our test. But I think it upsets you, because you didn’t choose it. You think the ones you chose are noble or heroic, but you think this one is evil and dirty and unfair, since you didn’t. Why not pretend you did choose it, if it makes you feel better? Or pretend all the other tests were thrust on you?” Dante thought he heard her laugh at this point.

He heard a loud snap from her direction. He quickly looked up and turned toward her. She was walking toward him, a thick section of a tree branch in her hand. Her snapping it off must have been the sound he’d heard. Her gaze was fixed on a point over his shoulder, then she lifted her chin, indicating for him to turn and look where she was looking.

Dante turned. The ferry was about two-thirds of the way across the river. Though the people on the boat were pulling the rope, Dante could now see their motions were uncoordinated and frenzied, and they were constantly bumping into each other, knocking each other down as they staggered about the raft. He could again hear the low moaning of the dead.