Chapter 14

In the third circle am I of the rain

Eternal, maledict, and cold, and heavy;

Its law and quality are never new.

Dante, Inferno, 6.7-9

They rode deeper into the valley, though the bright sunlight did not last long. The day turned overcast almost as soon as they left the dying woman’s house. It was not the violent storm of earlier in the morning, but just a solid, even blanket of clouds that hung over them, lifeless and still. The sun was now only an indistinct area of lighter grey in the oppressive mass.

After the four of them had been riding for some time, the trees gave way to another area that had been cleared for human cultivation and toil. There were no signs of people in the fields this morning. Dante noticed the ground was quite wet here, almost swampy, with puddles here and there, both in the road and fields. The water in the puddles looked oddly dark, as did the mud here. Perhaps such dark soil was good for the crops, Dante thought, more fertile – though he had trouble imagining this place full of plants and life. He gazed up at the lighter spot in the clouds, where he knew the sun was. Everything was still. Even the stagnant clouds didn’t seem to move. No birds, no sounds, no motion besides the miserable creeping of the four of them. The storm was preferable to the silent dread of this place.

Ahead, a wall stretched across their path for quite some distance to either side. It looked to be masonry, about the height of two men.

“What’s that?” Dante asked.

“The settlement furthest up the valley,” Radovan replied. “It’s fairly big. The mining and lumber here are quite valuable and attract lots of people.”

“Why do they have a wall?” Dante asked. “The last town didn’t.”

“These people live far from civilization,” Adam said. “We have our lake to protect the monastery, but they need a wall, for beyond this town there are only wild things and savage men, even in the best of times.”

Dante considered the situation. “Will we have to ride around it? It would slow us down a lot.”

“We might,” Adam said. “There will be no choice if they’ve locked the gate and refuse us entry. But let us see if the gate is open, and perhaps we can go straight through. Of course, if the gate is open, then they must not be aware of the danger. We should warn them.”

They went a bit further before Radovan raised his hand and they stopped. He pointed ahead to some reeds growing along the side of the road in the swampy ground. They rustled, though there was no wind. Dante strained to hear something more, voices or the braying of animals or the moan of the dead, but there was nothing.

Dante followed Radovan and Adam in dismounting. This time Bogdana agreed to stay with the horses while they moved forward on foot to investigate. The three men had gotten quite close to the stand of reeds before they saw the source of the rustling. The tall stalks had been concealing four shapes: one human figure lying on the ground, with three others kneeling around it. The prone figure was a big man. He had been torn open in several places. The three kneeling figures were two boys and a woman. There was blood all over the four of them, spattered on the reeds, and more of it flew off their hands as they tore pieces from the man’s body.

The boys were even younger than the two children Bogdana and Dante had killed at the river crossing. The woman had her back to Dante. She was kneeling near the man’s midsection, and from the motions and sounds she was making, it was clear she was pulling the man’s organs out and eating them. The two children growled at her, apparently displeased she was getting the better share of the food. She snarled back and swatted at the one boy who was struggling with the tough sinews of the man’s thigh, trying to claw out a piece of it with his fingernails. Dante watched as the other boy, near the man’s head, bent down further, placing his hands on the ground and leaning down to tear into the dead man’s neck with his teeth. As the child rose back up to a kneeling posture, he held one end of a long strip of flesh in his bloody mouth. The other end was still attached to the dead man, and the undead boy thrashed his head around like a dog would, till the morsel snapped and he sucked it into his mouth like pasta. As he did so, he looked right at Dante with red, rat-like eyes, though he made no move to get up or attack, but slowly chewed the ghoulish mouthful with something like a half smile.

Dante could feel his head going light and feared he might faint. He lowered his gaze, breathing deep and feeling himself shake slightly. He longed not only for the fury of the storm, but for the previous silence, because the slurping and smacking sounds from the three undead people assailed him like cudgels hammering his head. Not just the outside of his skull, but the sounds rattled around inside, giving wet, slapping blows to his brain. He looked up to see Adam and Radovan right by him, apparently watching him to see if he were going to fall over.

“Now we really are in hell, aren’t we?” Dante asked in a soft, dry whisper.

Adam shook his head, though he kept an eye on the three kneeling figures. “We live our whole lives right on the edge of infernal places, right where we can see, hear, and touch them at any moment. And, more importantly, where they can touch us. You should know that. There are foretastes of blessedness, and there are foretastes of damnation. Today you will see a great many of the latter in a very short time. You would take God’s blessings, and then refuse to look upon evil? Or perhaps even resent that it exists? Are you like Job’s wife? I didn’t think you so ungrateful, brother.”

Dante slowly took in the small, spritely man, dragging his gaze up and down him. Adam had an irrepressible liveliness about him, the bright spark of reason and intellect, but at times like this it seemed to Dante it burned with a cold and comfortless brilliance. Nonetheless his words made Dante look up at the featureless sky, as he tried in this forsaken hell to think of any foretastes of blessedness.

He thought of the warmth of Beatrice’s smile, and also of the beauty of her eyes, remembering they too could at times burn as brightly, coldly, and distantly as Adam’s wisdom. He thought of the babbling laughter of his two daughters, who could make him smile more easily and comfortably than the intimidating Beatrice ever could. His children held the promise of the future, full of unquestioning love, rather than the threat of rejection or reprimand. He reached farther back in his memory than he had in a long time, retrieving an image of his mother at his bedside when he was very young and sick nearly to death. Although he knew intellectually he had been in great pain during the time he was now recollecting, all that remained now for him to contemplate was the love and devotion shining from her face, the compassion pouring from her gaze even more tangibly than the tears she shed.

He brought his gaze down and glanced over at Bogdana, who carried within herself another blessing, though it chilled Dante to recall his horrible promise to her to preserve and protect that blessing, no matter what horrors were necessary in order to do so. He nodded, and although it still made no sense that blessing and suffering should be so intertwined, he felt a little calmer and less despairing at their strange confluence.

He looked past Adam at the three dead people still feeding, still oblivious to the three living men, gorging their apparently limitless bellies and empty minds with as much blood and flesh as they could rend and tear from either the body or from each other’s greedy hands.

“Why don’t they attack us?” he asked.

Adam seemed to hear Dante’s voice was more resolute and less pained. “Why do you think?”

Dante considered them in as detached and objective a manner as he could. Although he could keep himself from shaking or weeping or running away, the nausea was unavoidable at the sight of what they were doing to another human being’s body. “They don’t realize we’re a danger, so they go on eating. They only kill in order to feed, so they won’t attack us until they’re done with their present victim.”

Adam nodded. “Exactly. They are both more and less human than we are, more and less evil. They cannot kill for pleasure, or honor, or even hate. If only all men were as they are, in this one respect. But they are so full of hunger, so completely full of emptiness, they cannot think of anything else – not even self-preservation. And their emptiness will never be full. They will never stop on their own.”

“I understand,” Dante said. “But if it would not be considered a kind of ingratitude, I would ask not to have to kill a child again, since I already helped kill two yesterday.”

“That is not ingratitude, my son. That is decency,” Adam said, and he and Radovan moved to either side, to stand behind the two children as Dante stepped forward and stood behind the woman.

They left the woman and the two boys slumped forward on the body they had been desecrating, though Dante knew the three who had been eating were far more tainted and defiled than the one they had eaten. But now at least all four of them were finally and truly dead, and death was sometimes a blessing, as Brother Adam’s strange theology would have it.

After Dante got on his horse and they moved forward, Bogdana leaned over and touched his shoulder. He could not bear to look at her, to sully her beauty by gazing on it with the same eyes that had just beheld such monstrous, revolting things. He only let himself feel her presence and sympathy through her light touch, as he looked down at the ugly, nearly black mud sucking at the horses’ hooves.