Chapter 35

Who ever could, e’en with untrammelled words,

Tell of the blood and of the wounds in full

Which now I saw, by many times narrating?

Dante, Inferno, 28.1-3

They continued on through the woods and soon emerged into an open area right at the base of the cliff. In the clearing ahead of them were several dozen wooden, X-shaped crucifixes. On all of these, men writhed in undeath, moaning and straining at their bonds. As they watched the grotesque spectacle of these cruelly tortured undead, Dante noticed another dead man on foot, approaching them. Radovan shouted a word of warning as he and Dante drew their swords, the three men positioning themselves between the monster and Bogdana. Dante saw out of the corner of his eye that she still had the hatchet, for it had suddenly appeared in her hand.

As the creature came closer, however, Dante could see it had a leather collar around its neck. Then he saw the collar was attached by a couple links of chain to an iron pole about four feet long, the other end of which was held by another man. The man holding the pole was alive and was guiding the dead man by yanking the pole one way or the other. He looked big and strong enough for the task, and was clad all over in leather, probably as a precaution against the thing he was handling.

“Easy there, Bert!” he shouted as he pulled back on the pole, jerking the dead man to a halt about six feet from them.

The dead man stayed where he was, eyeing them but not making any other aggressive movements, swaying slightly and looking more surly than vicious. He’d been tall and lean in life; he’d probably looked sullen and hungry even then. The corpse leaned forward a bit and sniffed at them. Dante could imagine a slight smile on its dry lips. He wondered what it was like to be a dead man who was treated like a living dog, and what there could possibly be in the experience worth smiling at.

“No need to go biting everyone!” the dead man’s handler said as he looked over the four newcomers. “So long as we’re sure they don’t mean any harm. Right, Bert?” The name even sounded like that of a dog. “I’m Peter. You’ve already met Bert. So what are you four about?”

They all stepped back a little. “We mean no harm,” Adam said in a placating tone. “We were told there was a passage up the cliff somewhere here, and we were looking for it. We just wish to continue on our way.”

“You have some business up there? With the boss?”

Adam cast a glance back at Dante, but he had no guidance to give; bluffing and bribery only worked when you had enough information on which to base your statements. Now they had nothing to go on and were reduced to guessing.

“The boss?” Adam said in an innocent tone, a voice that betrayed his ignorance, but hopefully also showed how harmless they were.

“Yes, Lord Ahriman. He’s in charge here. If you’re going up there, I thought it must be to see him. You don’t look like just regular folks.”

“Well, we certainly mean to give all our respect and obedience to the Lord of this place,” Adam continued. “But we have no appointment with him. We are just climbing up and over the mountains, to escape the plague of the dead. We won’t be any trouble to him.”

Peter nodded and grunted. “That’s good to hear.” He tilted his chin toward the crucified men. “You see what we do with trouble makers.”

Dante and his companions looked back to the crucifixes.

“Yes,” Adam said quietly, “we see your… retribution at work here. We are very law-abiding, I assure you. Now may we proceed on the path? Is the way up the cliff just past these… criminals?” Dante thought the revulsion in Adam’s voice sounded a bit too clearly, as he described this scene of sadism and butchery as a kind of justice, these men as criminals, when their “crime” may well have been nothing more than finding themselves in this foul, evil place.

Dante kept a close eye on Peter, who seemed not to detect anything suspicious in Adam’s tone. “Yes. It’s not far from here,” Peter said. He took a step back, dragging the dead man with him. “Go on ahead. Bert and I will walk behind you. We want to make sure you keep up a smart pace here. This place is for the locals to gawk and learn a lesson. We don’t really like strangers hanging around here too much. Strangers get ideas when they see how normal folk live. Ideas are bad.”

Short of fighting, there didn’t seem much choice but to obey, so they moved ahead. Dante brought up the rear, closest to the dead man. He could hear Adam and Radovan speaking in low voices just ahead of him.

“What is wrong, my son?” Adam asked.

“That name, Ahriman. It was the name of an evil man from our capital, a member of the ruling family,” Radovan replied. “But he was killed years ago. It’s not a very common name, so I don’t know why the lord of this place would have the same name.”

“I’m sure the lord of such an abominable place is very evil too,” Adam said. “But it can’t be the same man if he was killed.”

“He was. Everyone knows he was.”

“Then don’t worry about it,” Adam said. “We have more immediate problems.”

They walked among the victims on the X-shaped crosses, all of whom were variously mutilated beyond the wounds of crucifixion, each one with some extra gashes in its flesh, some enough to reveal their insides. Like everything else here, the sight of the ruined, defiled human form barely shook Dante any more. He could observe with detachment and only a tiny bit of curiosity that all the viscera, ripped skin, shattered bones, and torn muscle were oddly bloodless and dry. All the different parts, their operations obscure or unknown to the human mind, parts meant to be hidden from prying eyes and the ever-present sun, had now been torn loose to hang outside the mortal cages like useless scraps of leather or cloth.

“What did these men do?” Dante asked, turning to address the man behind them.

“Trouble makers, I tell you,” Peter replied. “Rabble rousers. These are what you call your sowers of discord. I heard one of the smart fellows calling them that when he read out the charges against them. Stirred up the workers and miners to rebellion. Insurrection, mutiny – can’t have that sort of thing. Filled their heads with ideas that they shouldn’t be doing what they do, or they should demand more of a share of the profits, or they shouldn’t have to work in such dangerous conditions.”

Dante thought they had picked a most ironically appropriate form of execution for the men, considering the most famous crucified man had preached something quite similar to what he had just heard.

Peter had become quite animated in his defense of their killing field. “Like anyone has a right to all that,” he continued. “Like any of us ever get to pick what goes on around us. You just make do. That’s how me and old Bert get by.”

“Live and let live,” Dante said. He immediately cursed himself inwardly for the remark, as it seemed hard to believe it could be taken as anything other than sarcastic or ironic, though he said it in a bland, even tone.

Thankfully, Peter had reached that stage of a self-justifying rant where almost anything other than outright attack was taken as confirmation and agreement. “Yes, exactly,” he said more loudly. “Bert and me don’t bother anyone, and we expect others to do the same. And if they don’t, well, that’s their bad choice. That’s on them.”

They had come close to the most mutilated man Dante had seen yet among the crosses. His skin and hair looked darker than most of the other inhabitants of the valley, as though he had journeyed here from some land to the south – a Greek or Turk or Persian. Someone had split him open from under his chin to his crotch. He must’ve been quite alive when they did so, with blood still flowing, as his clothes and the wooden cross were soaked in his purplish gore. It looked like someone had smashed a bushel of overripe plums and smeared them all over, then let them sit in the sun to fester and cook down to a blackened tar. His insides, from his throat to his colon, had tumbled out from the horrific wound and now hung between his legs. The man’s crazed, agonized writhing set the innards swinging, brushing up against his knees as he struggled. Dante shivered to remember that he had once seen the bloated, burst carcass of a horse by the side of the road, and it had revolted and sickened him more than this display. He felt that another day here, and he would belong to this place completely. Too accustomed to darkness and screams of misery, he would be unfit to return to a place where there was sunlight and laughter.

“That’s the worst of the lot,” Peter explained. “Damn foreigner with his filthy, heathen ways. Didn’t talk right. Always had out his holy scriptures. I don’t even know what they were. Jew or Mohammedan or popish or devilish mutterings. They’re all the same. And not for normal folk. Telling the workers how God wants freedom for all people. Have you ever heard such foolishness? Have you ever seen where God wants things any different than the way they are?”

“Things are the way they are for a reason,” Dante said, satisfied this time that his irony was safely innocuous.

“That’s what I’m saying!” Peter agreed. “If God wants things different, He’ll make them that way! No sense stirring things up and upsetting people and making them act all foolish. Work’s work and business is business. God wants it that way. I mean, that’s just obvious. Good common sense, that’s what we need. And these boys here just didn’t have any.”

If the split-open man had been the most thorough and grotesque mutilation Dante had seen, the one he came on now had some sick element of whimsy to it. This dead man didn’t move on his cross at all, because his head had been severed from his neck. His left hand was nailed to the arm of the cross, along with the smashed remains of a lute, the neck of the instrument hanging mournfully down by its strings. His right hand was also suspended on the cross, but someone had tied the hairs of his head to the fingers of this hand, so that it now hung from them like a lantern. The jaw and eyes moved, though no sound came from it.

Peter laughed at this one. “Now, the boys had some fun with this one, I admit, and maybe they went a little too far. But this is what I’m talking about. People who have no common sense. This fellow here fancied himself a poet. Can you imagine? A poet? A bard? What else did he call it? A troop… troubadour? In this world?” He laughed again. “You might as well say you’re one of those philo-somethings. What are they called? Philosophicators?”

“Something like that,” Dante said. “Very foolish indeed.”

They had thankfully come to the end of the animated charnel house. Dante and his companions turned back toward their guide. Though Dante had grown disturbingly inured to the valley’s horrors, he didn’t know how much further he could go on with a dead man sniffing at his heels, and he hoped they would now be dismissed and sent on their way. Alone.

“What did you say you were again? What kind of work do you do?” Peter asked, as he jerked Bert around and away from the four travelers.

“I’m an apothecary,” Dante said without pausing. Though it was clearly a much better answer than “poet,” the man’s eyes looked as uncomprehending as Bert’s. “I make medicines.”

Peter nodded. “Now see, there’s some common sense. Something useful. You’ll see a tent up ahead, before you come to the path up the cliff. Maybe they can use your help. They have lots of sick and wounded people there. Now hurry along.”

They left that place, Dante feeling quite certain he could help no sick person, perhaps not even himself. The doctor for his wounds was as silent and inaccessible as he was powerful and knowledgeable.