Chapter 23
“Of every malice that wins hate in Heaven,
Injury is the end; and all such end
Either by force or fraud afflicteth others.”
Dante, Inferno, 11.22-24
The road sloped more steeply upward, once they passed from the fields and were back under the cover of the forest. At this point the road was little more than a dirt track, impassable to carts or wagons, forcing them to ride single file with Radovan in front, followed by Bogdana, Dante, and then Adam. The trees were less dense than they had been farther down the valley, which was probably good, since it gave them more visibility, in case the living or dead were lurking.
Looking all around, Dante couldn’t tell if he felt more uneasy out in the open, constantly exposed to the lifeless, unchanging grey sky, or if he felt more oppressed in this thin, desiccated forest, whose shadows were barely distinguishable in the weak light. He supposed it didn’t much matter. As most everyone they met seemed intent on reminding them, they’d be dead soon enough. Though Dante never fancied himself an especially virtuous or religious man, he did believe God would grant him an eternal existence somewhere better than this netherworld of dull heat, dim shadows, and occasional terrors.
They continued to climb. To the right of the trail the ground dropped off into a steep ravine running parallel to their path. If there was water at the bottom of it, it was too deep for Dante to see. All he could discern at the bottom were jagged rocks. At least the dead couldn’t jump out at them from that side of the road. He leaned away from the precipice and thought it was just like everything else he’d seen in this valley – another way to die.
Radovan pulled back on the reins and stopped, pointing to the left. Dante had to peer a moment, but finally he too saw the movement among the trees, almost at the same time as he heard the low moaning. The sound held so much less dread for him than it had just the day before, and Dante thought how one could eventually get used to anything, no matter how horrible it was at first. Not just get used to it but expect it, even long for it, as though familiar things were always comforting and desirable in some way, just because they were familiar. Once people grew used to something, even if it were something harmful and ugly, it would always be what they craved, what they would return to over and over, no matter how much pain it might cause them.
As Dante’s eyes focused, he could distinguish three dead people moving toward them between the trees. His stomach and the back of his neck turned cold and he shivered in fear – not because of the approaching dead, but because he had gotten used to them.
“Forgive me,” he whispered as he drew his sword.
Dante asked his silent God for forgiveness, not for the violence he knew would soon follow, and which he knew was as necessary as it was unavoidable. Dante asked to be forgiven for the terrible, chilling realization he had just come to: if the familiar was always craved, then the unknown was always feared and avoided – even, or especially, if the unknown object were God. And although Dante knew that one might disguise this embarrassing truth by using other words like “awe” or “reverence,” he felt quite certain that his God, unknown though He may be, would not be particularly impressed or appeased by such obfuscation. So all Dante could do was ask forgiveness for this desperate, fatal flaw of his race.
All four of them turned their horses to face the attackers, and urged the animals forward a bit, so they weren’t so close to the edge of the ravine. The three dead people were two men and a woman. All were middle aged, all bloody and torn in various places, and all had slack jaws and blank, uncomprehending stares. Dante remembered asking to be excused from killing a child earlier, yet it now seemed like it was a memory from his own childhood, something distant, irrelevant, and quaint. Now it didn’t bother him at all that it was the woman who was heading toward him, and it’d be her he’d have to kill. He wondered if it would make a difference if she were a little girl. The chill spread from his neck and stomach to his back and chest, when he realized it might not matter in the least to him. He could even calculate with great speed, based on his experiences so far, how he would have to alter his attack to cope with a smaller target. Dante was cold all over when he realized that, in his diseased mind, childhood innocence now only meant the height of his victim. He gripped his sword tighter and raised it.
Dante heard shouting on either side, and then saw more people moving among the trees. There was a group of men, perhaps a dozen, closing in on the three dead people from both sides and from behind. They must’ve been lying in wait, or tracking the dead at some distance, and chose now to attack. The dead people were confused, turning back and forth between their original targets and these new people. Dante observed the newcomers as they gathered around the dead, not yet attacking, but circling and taunting them. He thought it odd they were all armed with long sticks; not as long as Adam’s staff, but bigger than a club, maybe three or four feet long. He would have thought at least some of them would have swords, or if they were using impromptu weapons such as tools, it would make sense for some of them to have shovels, axes, or picks, as all these seemed sturdier and better able to deliver a fatal blow to the head.
With a whooping cry, the men finally fell on the dead, and their tactics made even less sense to Dante than their weapons. They pummeled the three dead people all over their bodies, rather than giving them a solid rap on the head, so as to end their suffering. Some even poked and prodded at their opponents, forcing them to stagger back under the barrage of blows. The three dead people growled in frustration and rage, raising their hands to try to defend themselves, but they were too slow and clumsy to stop many of the non-lethal blows that rained down on them from all sides. The men seemed quite practiced at their brutality, for in a few moments they had the three dead people bunched together, and were backing them toward the edge of the ravine.
The men never stopped shouting during the whole attack. Some of them even laughed and threw insults at the dead, which Dante increasingly saw more as victims, rather than their attackers or opponents. Dante acknowledged that a moment before he was ready to kill the dead woman, ready to do so without feeling guilt or remorse or even sadness. But it was something else entirely to do so while laughing the whole time. It was one thing to cease hating violence. It was quite another to love it, enjoy it, and even seek it out. And unlike his previous uncertainties, Dante was convinced the display he now saw was something he could never do himself.
The three dead people had been driven to the edge of the cliff, where they stood, snarling and trying to lash out at their attackers, who kept them tottering right on the brink. One of the men, a tall man with long, brown hair and a mustache, took his stick and finally hit one of the dead men hard on the top of his head, enough to stun him and make him sway, waving his arms uselessly. The tall man then kicked him in the midsection and sent him over the cliff. He did much the same to the other dead man. The crowd cheered and guffawed at all of this. For the woman, the man put down his stick, then pulled off his leather jacket and threw it over her head. He stepped toward her, grabbing her by the shoulders and spinning her around three times. He stood at her side and clamped his hands around her throat, thereby holding the jacket so that it was tightly covering her head. Kicking her feet out from under her, he forced her down to her knees, as he knelt down with her and pressed her head into the ground. Her arms clawed weakly, but she couldn’t get any leverage. Her large backside, covered with filthy, torn skirts, stuck up in the air, the sight of which sent peals of laughter up from the crowd. Dante noticed her one shoe was missing, the bare foot black with dirt and blood.
The man who had forced this degradation on the dead woman smiled and shouted to the others. “Why, I do believe it’s this old whore’s birthday!” He bent down next to her. “How old are you, love?” Tilting his head, he raised his eyebrows and nodded, as though she were giving a response, then he turned back to his audience. “She says a lady doesn’t tell her age, and a gentleman doesn’t ask! Oh, that’ll get you some extra smacks for implying you’re a lady, or that I’m a gentle man!” The crowd roared with laughter. “So let’s just call it an even fifty, eh? Though God knows I’m probably being generous, by the looks of her! Go ahead boys, have at her!”
The men started in on her, taking turns slapping her raised buttocks. Some did so with their open hands, some with their sticks, some lightly like it was a game, some as hard as they could – so hard that the man holding her down had to struggle to keep her from being battered off the edge of the cliff. They began to chant, counting as each blow fell on her. When they reached fifty, they broke down into laughter so hysterical they were nearly incapacitated, doubled up, slapping their thighs, almost unable to catch their breath. The man who had been holding the dead woman down stood up and pulled his jacket off her. He moved around behind her as she kneeled, still facing the ravine. Dante focused on the woman’s bloody foot; he was glad he could not see her face. She stuck her arms straight out as she leaned her head back and gave a roar of the purest outrage, despair, and loneliness. Dante had seen criminals executed back in the “real” world, the normal world. No matter what their final words, there was always a tinge of regret, a hint that at some level they blamed themselves, if not for what they did then at least for being caught. Dante did not hear anything like that on this afternoon.
“Happy birthday!” the man howled. “Time to be born again!”
He took a step back then rushed forward to kick the woman between her shoulders. The blow was strong enough to send her tumbling forward over the edge. Though it hardly seemed possible, given how loudly they’d been carrying on, the laughter increased.
The man who had led the abuse picked up his stick and turned his attention to Dante and his companions. “Well, then,” he said, “you’re welcome!”
“They needed to be killed,” Adam said. “But I don’t think that was necessary.”
The man frowned. “Necessary? No, of course not. I try not to do things because they’re necessary. I do things because I like to! Don’t you do that?”
“Of course,” Adam answered. “But a man should like to do what is necessary, and no one should like to do what you just did.”
“Really? Well, I never liked doing necessary things, and I liked messing with those three a lot! How about the rest of you?” A cheer went up from the crowd. “It’s always fun to hit someone, but now it’s even better because you don’t get in trouble!”
“I can see where you would find that to be an advantage.”
“Good! Now where are you off to?”
“We’re going up the valley. We hope to escape over the pass to the other side.”
“Leave the valley? Strange. I never heard of a pass up there. Besides, what’s the point? Who would want to leave? There’s no law here. No one to tell you what to do or where to go. Just killing those things all day and having a bit of fun doing it. I like it!” He shrugged. “But, if you don’t like it here, I suppose it’s up to you. The trail continues on, and you’ll get to the top of a waterfall, at the head of the ravine. The water’s shallow there and you can cross over and continue on up the valley, though it gets steep from here on. But you shouldn’t see many more of those things around here. We’ve been killing a lot of them!”
“I’m sure you have.”
“All right, then. Let’s go find some more of them!” the man said, and he and his group faded back into the woods almost as suddenly as they had appeared.
The horses picked their way forward again, as Dante looked over the side of the cliff. This must have been a favorite spot for the men to throw dead people into the canyon. Dante could now see there were many broken bodies on the rocks down there. He still could not see any water, but there had to be plenty of blood spattered and seeping among the cruel stones.
“It is why God used a flood last time,” Adam said, noticing where Dante was gazing and apparently guessing what he was thinking. “To wash away all the blood men spilled. So much blood spilled for sport, for greed, for malice, or sometimes for nothing at all.”
Dante turned in his saddle. “And the fire you believe is coming?”
Adam nodded. “Sometimes the flames of desire cannot be extinguished with purifying water. They have raged so long and so out of control. And their lack of control means they can never return to the true source of all heat and desire. Instead they flicker and sputter here and there – dissipated, wasted, wretched. Such flames of merely human desire are still eternal, like the sun, but are such puny, infantile stars next to the real source of light. They are exactly like the dead we see walking in this terrible valley – lost, empty, hopeless.”
Dante did not know whether anyone could feel more lost and empty than he did at that moment; he was not entirely sure he even had any hope. “How much farther do we have to go?”
“You will be out of the valley tomorrow, friend. I know this is true.”
Dante turned to face forward, knowing he could not share Adam’s certainty. But did he even have hope, he wondered? He knew he had none for himself, but he did think he might still be holding on to a shred of it for the sake of the woman and child in front of him. In such a world any man could lose hope, but no man could refuse to hold on to hope for the sake of another’s beauty and goodness. It calmed and strengthened Dante considerably, when he realized his hope did not rely on his own ability or capacity to feel it, but rather on her power to elicit it from him, a power which was, to him, utterly irresistible and undeniable. If it were a source of overwhelming pain and confusion to Dante that God had suspended the rules of death, it was also a source of invincible strength and certainty that He had not suspended the laws of love.