town of Insley didn’t like coming out to where dead bodies rotted in the ground, so they left him alone, shunning him because he tended his garden of the dead, as he thought of it.
The dead left him alone, too.
The dead left everyone alone. People only feared them out of foolish superstition. There were plenty of real things to fear, like the dangers that lived in the forested wilderness of the Dark Lands. The dead never bothered anyone.
The job of burying the dead didn’t pay well, but he had no family left and his needs were simple. Fortunately, most people were at least more than willing to pay him, even if it wasn’t much, to put their kin in the ground. It was enough to afford him a small room in town, safe at night among the townspeople, even if they averted their eyes when he passed. He knew he would always have a roof over his head, a bed, and enough to eat.
One thing about his job, even if it didn’t pay well and left him mostly alone in the world, was he knew that as long as there were the living, there would always be need of gravediggers to dispose of the newly dead.
It wasn’t that people so much objected to digging a hole themselves—it was that the dead gave them the shivers, so they didn’t want to dig a hole out in the graveyard and then have to handle the dead themselves. Gerald had long ago become numb to the dead. They meant he had steady work and they never gave him any trouble.
Most of his adult life, Gerald had had the dreary duty of burying those folks he’d thought highly of, as well as the privilege of putting people in the ground he hadn’t much cared for in life. He’d often shed a tear over the passing of the first kind. The passing of the second kind brought him a grim smile as he went about the work of shoveling dirt over them.
He never smiled too much, though, since he knew that one day he would be joining them all in the underworld. He didn’t want to give any of the souls there reason to bear a grudge against him. He tried to go about his work so as not to cause any of the living to bear a grudge against him, either.
Gerald swiped some of his limp gray hair away from his eyes as he leaned toward the small window a bit more, listening as he squinted into the distance. He noticed that all the cows in the grass fields had stopped grazing. They had even stopped chewing their cud as they all looked off in the same direction, toward the same spot to the northeast.
He found that unsettling. He stroked the stubble of his cheek as he considered it. There was not much to the northeast. The Dark Lands were desolate enough as it was with dangers not to be taken lightly, but to the northeast the Dark Lands were even less hospitable—mostly a trackless waste without any villages he knew of but one, Stroyza.
It was said that for as long as anyone knew, it had always been a wilderness and it always would be because there was terrible evil living off in that direction and anyone with any sense at all stayed away. It was general, if vague, knowledge passed down from generation to generation that there were wicked things off that way, even witch women, it was said. Everyone knew that witch women were not to be trifled with.
Most people didn’t question, or investigate. Who wanted to go poke at sleeping evil? Or witches. What was the point?
Gerald had met a few traveling merchants who had been to the distant village of Stroyza, off in that direction beyond the looming range of mountains he could see to the northwest. He’d never met anyone from Stroyza, but he had talked to the few traders who had infrequently tried their luck off that way. There wasn’t much to trade there and since the merchants returned with little of any value for the effort, it wasn’t a draw for others. Stroyza was a small village of folks who lived in their remote, cliffside village, as he’d heard tell, and they kept to themselves. It was understandable that the people there would be aloof; strangers most usually meant trouble.
It was said that some who went off to the northeast to find their fortune simply never returned. Those who did return told stories of encounters in the dark of night with beasts, cunning folk meaning them harm, and even witch women. It was not hard to imagine why some had never returned. The ones who did never went back, instead going off to other, more well known places to try to make a living.
As he watched, Gerald spotted movement at the edge of the distant woods. It was hard to tell for sure, but it seemed like it might be one of the mists that would sometimes settle down out of the mountains and drift across the flatlands. He wondered if maybe he had been wrong and it really was some kind of strange mountain thunder he was hearing and what he was seeing was a mist leading the way down the mountains out ahead of a storm.
He shook his head to himself. It wasn’t any kind of thunder he was hearing. He was just fooling himself to think it was. Whatever was making the low rumbling sound, he had never heard the likes of it before, that much was sure.
As he watched the relentlessly advancing mist, he wondered if it could be riders, a lot of riders, like maybe cavalry troops. Like everyone else in Insley he had heard stories about the recent war from some of the young men who had gone off to fight for D’Hara and came back to tell about it. They told stories about the vast armies and the thousands upon thousands of cavalry troops charging into bloody battles. He wondered if the haze could be a great many horses that were raising dust. Or maybe it was vast numbers of marching soldiers.
What such troops or cavalry would be doing this far out in the Dark Lands he couldn’t begin to guess. Horse hooves galloping across the flatlands, though, might explain the rumbling sound.
He’d seen some of Bishop Hannis Arc’s guards come through Insley in the past, but they didn’t have large numbers of men. There had never been enough to raise a cloud of dust like he was seeing, or make the ground rumble.
He realized, then, that with the ground as wet as it was, it couldn’t be dust. It was far too muddy for there to be any dust. Yet the haze he was seeing seemed to be too dirty-looking to be mist.
Whatever it was, he was beginning to pick out a broad area of dots in that dirty, foggy cloud. Dots, like maybe people.
Gerald reached down, sliding his hand along the haft of a pickax leaning up against the wall, gripping it up near the head to more easily lift the heavy end. He didn’t have any real weapons—never really needed them. Common weapons were really no good against such things as were to be feared in the Dark Lands, things such as the cunning folk or witch women. As far as anything else, well, most people, even when they were drunk, didn’t want to have an argument with a pickax.
As much as he didn’t like the idea, he headed for the door of the shed to go outside and see if he could tell what was coming his way.
Gerald used his free hand to shield his eyes from the gloomy, slate-gray sky as he stared off into the distance. In his other hand he gripped the haft of the pickax up near the head, letting the weight of it pull his arm down straight.
He had been right. It definitely was people in the distance. He could just make out the movement of them walking. But in all his life, he had never seen anything like the numbers he was seeing now. He had never even imagined that he ever would, at least not on this side of the underworld.
He knew from tales of merchants and traders, of course, that there were places with lots of people. He’d heard about a number of great cities far off to the west and the south, though he’d never seen them with his own eyes. There were also towns in the Dark Lands, mostly to the southwest, that were considerably bigger than Insley.
The
