They come to see me, the villagers, by the hundreds. From more than a single village. From more than just my own. I cannot leave my family’s two-room house because the Breath of Death, the plague of plagues, will reach us soon, but also because of what our village doctor told my parents: Your dark daughter is strong as any boy, and courageous with the most temperamental of oxen, but if she leaves this village, if she goes out into the world, she will die—if not from the disease that gives a body a deadly purulence, drying it out like an animal’s skin, then from what the world has become because of it. The madness. The fear. The violence. The evil…..
The villagers, however, can come to me. They stand on the path in front of our open door. Some of these faces I know well. I grew up with them. Three I rode with in my father’s cart, full of aglio for sale, to the villages of Schio and Thiene mere weeks ago. But most of those who stare at me and call my name and even shout at me I do not know, even if I know their faces from my dream.
My parents are hiding, as always, in the room farthest from the doorway. They are making noise so that they do not have to hear again what they have heard every day for weeks: The villagers‘ request of me. What the villagers want me to tell them. My parents are afraid of what I might be, if I am more than a girl, if my being more than a girl is what the dream means.
They are afraid of what the villagers believe I am.
My dress is muddy and torn at one shoulder. It is winter and the rain has been unkind. It is muddy from milking the cows this morning, and my vest is too big for me now. I am skinnier than I once was. I have not eaten well for days, though my parents offer me food, and do love me.
I look out at the faces, at the waving arms and the feet that stamp the wet ground to keep their bodies warm.
They want me, as always, to tell them the dream I dream every night. They may have heard it before—if not from my dry lips, then from others in the village—but it is their only hope. They want to hear it again.
They believe my skin glows. They point to my face and arms and shoulder, as if they were proof.
Even if I hold my hands up to my eyes at night, in the dark, I cannot not see what they see. My skin is like the night.
But they insist I tell them.
They also believe, I know, that if I go to the crumbling castle of the seventh castle town on the road to the marble quarries, and kill the terrible creature that lives there— misbegotten child of Satan (the villagers say), abandoned long ago by its father, diseased but not dying—the plague of plagues will stop and they, unlike so many others in this valley, will be spared.
Whether I will be spared they do not say. Whether I will die trying they do not say.
I will, yes, tell it to them again. I will tell them my dream again because it is a kindness to do so, but that does not mean I can do what the dream wishes—what they wish—me to do. I simply cannot.
I stand in our doorway, my eyes burning from the cold, the pine beams separating the heaven of our hearth from the hell outside, and begin to recite the dream that never changes.
#
In my dream, there is darkness. It is night. It is the road (I tell them) to the Seven Castle Towns and their decaying castles that overlook the snow-white marble quarries high above the river Podano, whose stone the Doge’s palace on the sea always needs. There is moonlight, but not enough to guide me over the muddy mess the rains have made of the road. I must see better, so I pull up my sleeves so that my arms, as dark as the arms of some villagers near the coast, are bare, and lift my dress so that my legs are too, and indeed I have enough light now. My own body is no longer dark. It is the lamp I need to navigate the blindness of this road.
In the moonlight, in the distance, I see the crumbling castles of the seven towns on their seven hills.
As I take a step in the light that I somehow make, the first moth, a pale thing, appears, and then another. And another.
Some are as large as hawks, some as small as the tiniest flower.
They rise and dip and circle me, the velvet of their wings brushing my face and hands, their long tongues tasting me like little whips.
They do not wish to leave me, and I do not wish them to leave.
It is my light that has brought them, and that is how it should be.
You will not eat us? the velvety voices whisper.
I will not, I tell them. Your enemy is elsewhere.
And then the bats—all of them as large as the largest moths, darker than the night, and squeaking like boats at a wharf on the river—appear too.
The smallest moths are afraid, but should not be. The bats have not come for them.
A tiny voice says:
You see in the darkness by your own dark light, Emissary, just as we see by our voices. Do you wish us to follow you to the night that awaits us all in the Seventh Town?
Yes, I answer at last.
The voice does not answer, and does not need to. Their squeaking will remain above me, a companion, as I climb this slippery road.
#
When I reach the crest of the first hill, I look down at the marble quarry barely visible in the darkness below. And because I look, I nearly trip on what lies in the road. Only the glow of my own body saves me.
I step back in horror.
There will be bodies, Dark Daughter, another voice says, one I will hear again, I know. Do not stop because of them, horrible as they may be. Follow the bodies to what must be done.
The body at my feet is like a sack of dried pastinache. That is what I think at first, though it is not possible.
As I lean over to view it better, but without getting too close, I see skin like wrinkled leather, bones under the skin, lips pulled back over teeth in a soundless scream, eye sockets without eyes.
Do not stop, the voice shouts.
I step around the body carefully and keep walking as the velvety wings flutter around me in the darkness, touching me like dear friends, and the shrieking above me moves with me because I move, too.
#
There are more bodies, just as the voice promised. I am careful not to step on any of them, and I lose count when I have reached three dozen. Young men, old men, grandmothers, mothers and children of all ages. Each a sack of bones and skin that has begun to smell.
Their arms reach out in fear, frozen. Their mouths, teeth showing, have opened in that same fear. Their hands are claws, trying to save them. Their legs are trying to run, but cannot.
Two children lie on top of a woman. Their mother? Older sister? Aunt? A kind stranger? Both of their faces are skulls wrapped in leather, so I do not know whether they were boys or girls. Does it matter? Their clothes are as muddy as mine, and I wait a moment in the hope that it is only a dream, that they will sit up, be children again, and we will laugh at the silliness of nightmares.
They do not.
Three of the bigger moths, pale green, the velvet that trails from them like a mist in the whiter moonlight, and in my dusky one, swoop down to touch the three dead faces, to bless the sockets that once held eyes hungry for miracles, to soften the lips pulled back now in hideous surprise.
#
I walk on, and before I reach the crest of the next hill, the road begins to move under my feet. Something—no, many things—touch my scarpette, touch them again and again with hisses and whispers and flashes of silver like a witch’s beadwork.
It is a like a river, these creatures suddenly at my feet, traveling with me up this hill, too.
They are snakes, I see now. They are the vipers we all know, growing up in our villages, and I do not fear them because they, too, have been sent to help me.
I try not to step on them, but when I cannot avoid doing so, they are unbothered, as if such a small thing cannot possibly matter in a world as full of fear as this one.
#
At the crumbling wall of the first castle town, I stop. The night stops with me.
Before me, like a necklace around the town, bodies are piled higher than a man—men and women and children piled like firewood.
There is something different about these bodies, though.
The faces.
I bend down to look at the nearest face and jerk up, my heart stopping, because of what I see.
The faces are gone.
They have been chewed away.
By an animal. But what animal could do this?
Shadows far too large to be rats scurry over the bodies. Wolves? Wild dogs?
The shadows stop moving now and then, but only to burrow their heads into the corpses and make tearing sounds.
They are not wolves or dogs. Their heads are too small, their bellies too big, their tails like long scaly snakes.
It cannot be, and yet it is what I am able to see in these shadows, in this moonlight:
Rats.
Rats as big as dogs.
Their scurrying stops. The creatures, their eyes like little moons, turn to look at me and begin to step toward me.
I understand why my companions are with me.
The vipers rush past me, hundreds of them coiling and weaving like a living blanket. When they reach the shadows, they and the rats make a storm of hissing and snarling, flashing teeth, silver-scaled coils hanging on hairy flanks.
In a moment, the shadows have stopped. They have disappeared, or that is how it seems. And yet if I squint, I can see them still. They are motionless, lying on their sides, without life, and the snakes, their venom spent, have returned to the road, to my feet, as if asking for praise, which I give them gladly.
You are a blessing to me, I say, and I love you.
#
It is here, I tell the villagers, that my dream always ends.
“Your skin is like a blood moon!” one villager starts shouting even before I am finished.
“Your dream is the truth!” shouts another.
“Please,” an old woman pleads. “Hurry to that castle and do there what you were born into this world to do, Fiametta.”
I do not know her, yet she knows my name.
I look down at my hands and, in the waning daylight, finally see it:
The glow of my skin, dark as it is—the glow that others had seen for weeks. It is like moonlight shining in smoke, and yet growing brighter.
Why now? I asked. Why could I not see it before?
You know why, a voice answered. It was not time….
It was a voice from the dream, and one I would hear again.
Yes, I answer. I do….
It will be dark when I finally reach the quarry road, yet there will be, in the ever-darkening shadows, my growing light, and, somewhere, a creature who dreams of me.
—
Bruce McAllister short fiction has appeared over the years in the SFF&H magazines, “year’s best” volumes and original anthologies; and has won or been short-listed for awards like the National Endowment for the Arts, Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Shirley Jackson. His most recent novel is THE LOCUS finalist fantasy THE VILLAGE SANG TO THE SEA: A MEMOIR OF MAGIC.
