Read Valley of the Dead for Free Online

understand she was going to die, in one of the worst ways people had devised for one another. Dante shivered; it was the same sentence placed on him in Florence, and he was about to see exactly what being burned alive was like. At least for this poor woman, death and pain were no longer objects of fear, if she could even understand what they were. He shook his head, wondering how such small graces from God found such enormous shoals of human wickedness on which to spend themselves in seeming impotence and humiliation.
    “I’ve done nothing wrong?” the woman tied to the stake called out after the young soldier spoke up in her defense. “Silly boy! I’ve been bad! My whole family’s been bad from the beginning!” Perhaps the townspeople had beaten or cajoled her into “confessing” before tying her to the stake. It was common enough in these situations. “I had two brothers! They both disappeared. I don’t know where. Sometimes I go out in the field and the ground’s wet, all wet. Nothing to be done about it.” She laughed so shrilly even her tormentors quieted down, out of surprise and perhaps a little embarrassment at what they were doing to this obviously harmless, deranged creature. “The field’s the thing, isn’t it? Everything bad always happens in our field. There’s mandrake and nightshade there and all manner of wicked, evil things. Perhaps you could bury me there, friends, and that’d be an end to all my family’s wickedness.”
    Maybe she did still know, at some level, that she was going to die – but how then could she be so cheerful about it? Dante wondered if he could get through the crowd and save her from the flames with a quick and merciful death by his sword, though he was not sure whether such “mercy” would itself be culpable. He felt sick and dizzy, and he swayed slightly at the enormity of such mundane, reflexive evil.
    “She admits it!” someone shouted. “See! She even admits it!”
    “She doesn’t know what she’s saying!” the young soldier shouted back. More rocks hit him and, this time, the woman as well. She laughed.
    “You there!” Dante heard someone shout, and he turned to see he was being addressed by the man near the church steps. “You, stranger, what are you doing here? Do you bring news? What is going on outside our town? Is the plague contained?”
    “I come from far away,” Dante answered. “But yesterday I found this woman,” he gestured at Bogdana, “as her village was being destroyed by the army and by the walking dead. You have to leave, move west, or the army will kill you all. This woman you are tormenting has nothing to do with this plague. It’s the army you need to worry about. Please just leave her and flee your town as quickly as possible.”
    “He’s lying!” someone else shouted. “The army will leave us alone, once they know we’ve killed the evil one among us. They’ll be glad we did it. Rid the land of her corruption! She admitted she and her kind have brought evil on us.”
    The crowd was now dividing its attentions between menacing the young soldier, the madwoman, and Dante. They also looked to the man by the church steps for some approval of their actions. Dante gripped his sword but didn’t draw it yet. He didn’t think he could intimidate the crowd as much as the soldier did, so he didn’t want to draw on them till there was no choice. Some of them might finally figure out escape was a better plan than their superstitions of tribal scapegoating. Then they would see the usefulness of his horse, and the advisability of killing him and Bogdana in order to get it.
    “Please, sir,” he said as diplomatically as possible to the town official. “You seem like an educated, reasonable, godly man. Please explain to these good people that I’m right, and they need to leave as quickly as possible. Killing this wretched creature will accomplish nothing.”
    The man on the church steps shook his head and shrugged. “I’m sorry.