Chapter 24

Not foliage green, but of a dusky colour,

Not branches smooth, but gnarled and intertangled,

Not apple-trees were there, but thorns with poison.

Dante, Inferno, 13.4-6

They hadn’t gone far before Dante heard the sound of falling water, and soon after, they came to the waterfall the man had described. To their right was a trickle of water, which fell over a cliff and down into the ravine they’d been following up the valley. The stones at the top of the falls were a rusty red. Dante thought they must contain iron, or the leavings of a mine had been dumped into the stream. The water itself looked a foul pink near the banks, with a thin border of yellowish slime. The stream was small enough they easily forded it and climbed the trail on the other side.

The forest on the other side of the stream continued to get thinner as they went. They were up high enough that most of the trees were pines, and most of these appeared diseased and twisted, many of them dead. The forest floor was covered in what Dante imagined to be a millennium’s accumulation of needles, filling the whole space with a caustic, smothering scent. Both the needles on the trees and those on the ground were the color of slate. Once the sound of the waterfall had disappeared behind them, there was silence and stillness, without any breeze, without the call or movement of birds or any other animals. The whole place stung the senses in every way, either by starving, overwhelming, or seeming to deceive them.

The trail bent more or less north, so Dante looked to his left to see where the sun weakly illuminated the blanket of grey clouds filling the sky. The brighter spot in the cloud cover moved closer to the mountains in the west.

Adam must have noticed where Dante was looking, and seemed to guess his thoughts. “We will stop soon,” he said. “We should try to make it as far as we can. There are two steep ascents before the final, hidden trail to the pass. It is too late in the day to make it up the first of those, but we should get as far as we can in this forest and find a clearing to make camp. We will need to rest if we are to have the strength to overcome the final obstacles of this valley.”

Dante saw movement in the trees above them, and looked up to see dozens of vultures perched there. He did not remember such birds being as large as the ones he now saw, spreading then refolding their enormous wings. The motion set the branches swaying up and down, making the whole canopy above them an undulating mass of dark shapes. Dante could make out some of the birds’ faces, and they were horrible to behold, especially for a man with an imagination like his. In the birds’ tiny, shining eyes, he fancied he saw an inhuman intelligence to match their bestial hunger, as though the animals did not just crave dead flesh, but also understood something about death that they would never divulge to mere humans, some piece of knowledge as simple and terrible as their black eyes. Dante could even imagine such birds laughing at their eternal secret with their croaking, tortured call. He imagined the sound so vividly he did not jump like the others when the creatures screeched. More and more of the birds joined in, the sound rising till it was a frenzied cacophony of choked, grating sounds, as though something were strangling all the birds at once. As the four of them passed under the noisy, seething mass of feathers, Dante thought perhaps the former silence was preferable after all.

When they’d gotten some distance from the hideous birds, they stopped and looked back at them.

“Do you believe in omens?” Adam asked.

“Yes,” Radovan said. “Though they change nothing. We must go on anyway in life, even if we know we are doomed.”

“That’s true,” Dante answered. “Even if the signs are real, we still have free will, and our responsibilities are not changed at all. But often I wonder if the signs are true, or if they’re just superstition and they come from ignorance. Other times I’m not so sure, and I wonder if they could be a kind of revelation.”

“I don’t think superstition always comes from ignorance,” Bogdana said quietly. “Sometimes it’s a kind of knowledge, like a kind of respect. People call it ‘superstition’ when they’re arrogant and don’t want to obey, when they don’t want to have respect or follow tradition. People think they’re so smart, but they almost never are.”

Dante glanced sideways at her face. In profile, with her full cheeks and upturned nose, she looked especially girlish. Most of her hair was pulled behind her ear, but one long curl hung down next to her eye, spiraling below her jaw to end just above her right breast. Such unadorned, youthful beauty made her sober words all the more captivating to him, even if they contained a gentle reprimand.

“I think you’re right. But what does this omen mean?” he asked as he gestured at the birds.

Her smile looked a little sly to Dante, perhaps mocking, though he knew even if it were it wouldn’t bother him in the least. “You strive to know so much, and it hurts you so, whether you get an answer or not. If I said I knew what this sign means that would be more arrogant than saying it’s only superstition.”

“Just knowing it means something – without knowing what that something is – is enough for you, daughter?” Adam asked.

“Yes,” she said simply, as Radovan moved forward, and she pulled her horse in line behind his.

Adam watched her, then turned to Dante. He lowered his voice. “I see now what you meant about how women could affect you, friend. There is the clearest spark of the divine wisdom in her, like I have seen in our students who have trained at the monastery for years. Another thing I have noticed is how the wicked often see something that others do not, although they cannot understand or appreciate it. That man back at the barn, the one who mocked you, he was like that. He knew of your love for her as soon as he saw you, but I was too busy and distracted by other things to notice.”

“Yes, I suppose he did,” Dante agreed. “He knew the outer signs of love, without the substance.” He looked toward Bogdana. “I know I do not always understand her, but I do appreciate her. And I will strive to be worthy of her.”

Adam nodded. “Now I see better how such a vow is good for a man, especially in such a wretched, lonesome place as this, surrounded by every kind of ugliness and filth. It reminds him of purity, of perfection, of nobility. Otherwise he might lose hope and fall victim to all the evilness around him.”

Dante kicked his horse lightly, taking his place behind Bogdana as they resumed their march through the woods. Dante took his gaze from her small, powerful frame and looked at the trees above them. Although they were as lifeless as before, and the pine scent in his nostrils as pungently nasty as before, everything seemed somehow less threatening or maddening to him, less like an experience of real evil and pain and more like a picture of such a scene. Dante had been reminded that the reality of these things lay elsewhere, and he muttered his thanks for this small, indistinct revelation.