What Moves the Dead (Sworn Soldier, #1)

by T. Kingfisher

I am delighted by obscure passions, no matter how unusual. During the war, I was once holed up in a shepherd’s cottage, listening for the enemy to come up the hillside, when the shepherd launched into an impassioned diatribe on the finer points of sheep breeding that rivaled any sermon I have ever heard in my life. By the end, I was nodding along and willing to launch a crusade against all weak, overbred flocks, prone to scours and fly-strike, crowding out the honest sheep of the world. “Maggots!” he’d said, shaking his finger at me. “Maggots ’n piss in t’ flaps o’ they hides!” I think of him often.

If you have never met a Gallacian, the first thing you must know is that Gallacia is home to a stubborn, proud, fierce people who are also absolutely piss-poor warriors. My ancestors roamed Europe, picking fights and having the tar beaten out of them by virtually every other people they ran across. They finally settled in Gallacia, which is near Moldavia and even smaller. Presumably they settled there because nobody else wanted it. The Ottoman Empire didn’t even bother to make us a vassal state, if that tells you anything. It’s cold and poor and if you don’t die from falling in a hole or starving to death, a wolf eats you. The one thing going for it is that we aren’t invaded often, or at least we weren’t, until the previous war.

Every time we lost a fight, we made off with a few more loan words from our enemies. The upshot of all of this is that the Gallacian language is intensely idiosyncratic. (We have seven sets of pronouns, for example, one of which is for inanimate objects and one of which is used only for God. It’s probably a miracle that we don’t have one just for mushrooms.)

Animals like me, but I occasionally think they must find me frustrating, as they stare and twitch at unknown spirits and I say inane things like “Who’s a good fellow, then?” and “Does kitty want a treat?” (Look, if you don’t make a fool of yourself over animals, at least in private, you aren’t to be trusted. That was one of my father’s maxims, and it’s never failed me yet.)

Very few ancient crypts have plump shepherdesses and gamboling sheep on the walls. I consider this an oversight.

He wore his clothes as if they were clothes rather than symbols of rank, and his mustache was too long for fashion. “How do you do?” Denton said. Ah. American. That explained the clothes and the way he stood with his legs wide and his elbows out, as if he had a great deal more space than was actually available. (I am never sure what to think of Americans. Their brashness can be charming, but just when I decide that I rather like them, I meet one that I wish would go back to America, and then perhaps keep going off the far edge, into the sea.)

Denton likely thought that a sworn soldier would be a seven-foot-tall Amazon with one breast cut off and a harem of cowed men under kan heel.

May I ask—I’m sorry—why did you swear?” There are two kinds of people, I have discovered, who will ask you these questions. The rarer, and by far the more tolerable, are seized with an intense curiosity about everyone and everything. “A sworn soldier! Really!” they will say. “What does that involve?” And five minutes later, someone will mention that their cousin is a vintner, and they will transfer all their attention to that person and begin interrogating them about the minutiae of winemaking. I served with a man like this, Will Zellas, who was equally fascinated by the stars, herbs, shoemaking, and battlefield surgery. I have always regretted that he was not with me to hear the remarkable maggots-and-piss speech from the shepherd. By then, alas, Will had taken a bullet to his shin, and had been in hospital. The last time I saw him, he walked with a cane and told me at extraordinary length about wood carving, the decline of the turnspit terrier as a breed, and how they harvest water lilies in India. His wife would interrupt occasionally to say, “Eat, dear,” and he would manage about three bites before he was off again.

They ask questions, but what they really want to know is what’s in your pants and, by extension, who’s in your bed.

The system still has a lot of blind spots and translating anything into another language gets complicated, but it works about as well as anything in the army, which is to say, despite everything.

I’d been tired of it a decade ago. Now I’d moved to some other state entirely. Transcendent exhaustion, perhaps.

“Hysteria?” “Yes. Which is a useless damn diagnosis.” He poured himself another cup of tea and offered me what was left of the teapot. I took it, even though the tea had steeped to bitterness. “Hysteria is like consumption used to be. Something wrong with you that we can’t seem to fix? It’s probably consumption. Now Koch has isolated the bacillus responsible for tuberculosis and we don’t have that to lean on any longer, so we have to admit that there are people dying of something that isn’t tuberculosis.” He slugged back his tea and grimaced. “But we still have hysteria, although Monsieur Charcot tells us it’s in men as much as women. Do we know the cause? No. Do we know how to treat it? No. Is it probably a dozen different disorders lumped under one name? Almost certainly. Don’t ask me. I’m good with a bonesaw and I’ll pour brandy down your throat and over your stump, but disorders of the nerves are beyond me.”

Lovely is not the word I would have used to describe it. In need of fire and holy water, perhaps. Could you even burn a lake? I know there was a river in America that caught fire once, and had made the papers as an amusing footnote about how the Yanks could even make water burn, but I vaguely recalled there had been some kind of chemicals involved.

“This place can’t be healthy. Let Roderick bring you back to Paris. We’ll go to the theater and the museums and walk in the parks and eat lemon ice.”

“A short journey with fresh horses over empty roads in decent repair. Truly it taxed me to my limits. Sir.”

“For,” he said, “the Good Lord may look out for fools, but it won’t hurt to have another set of eyes helping.”

“They say mushrooms spring up where the Devil walks,” said Angus sourly. “And where fairies dance.” “Do you think they ever get the two confused? The Devil shows up to a fairy ball, or finds himself mobbed with elven ingénues?” He gave me a look from under his eyebrows. “You shouldn’t joke about fairies. Sir.” “Oh, very well. As long as I can still joke about the Devil.” He grunted, which was Angus-speak for not approving but not caring enough to stop me.

I asked about hunting hereabouts, and they told me not to do it. Said the place is full of witch-hares.” “Witch-hares?” “Aye. Familiars to devils. You shoot one and the next day you find a witch with a bullet in her heart.” “Hard luck for her. Are many little old ladies with warts turning up with bullets in them around here? That really sounds like a job for the constabulary.”

When I am perturbed, I like to walk. I feel slow and stupid when I sit, but walking seems to wake something up in my brain.

The house was obviously terrible for anyone who was sick. Miasma, as my great-grandmother would have said. Of course, it was 1890, and no one really believed in that anymore. It was all germs now, thanks to Dr. Koch. Still, germs could linger in a place, could they not? Was there enough disinfectant in the world to cleanse the house of Usher?

Horses don’t understand a lot about the world, but I have found that they sometimes understand particular humans terrifyingly well. Mules understand a lot more about the world, but less about humans—or possibly they just don’t care what humans think. I’d buy either explanation, really.

I took my leave of Miss Potter, pausing to compliment her painting. She turned the compliment aside with a practiced air. “I’m well enough. You should see my niece Beatrix. Twice the talent, and an artist’s eye. And a very gratifying interest in mycology.”

“Young man,” said the cow’s previous owner, and stopped. I didn’t bother to correct him. It’s less galling to be mistaken for a man than a woman, for some reason. Probably because no one tries to kiss your hand or bar you from the Royal Mycology Society.

Plankton, the first mate told me. Bioluminescent plankton. After he walked away, one of the sailors said, “Don’t listen to him, sir. The dead carry lanterns down in the deep.”

The next day was good. I say this because it stands out so starkly alongside all the rest. The house was still damp and dark and falling down around us, Maddy and Roderick still looked like a pair of corpses headed for the bier, Denton still didn’t know whether to stand up when I entered the room or not, but still … it was good. Roderick played the piano and we sang badly together. Maddy’s voice was barely a thread and I can just about belt out the chorus to “Gallacia Will Go On” if somebody else handles everything past the first verse. Denton didn’t know most of our songs, and we knew none of his. But none of that particularly mattered. He sang something about John Brown’s body, and I picked up enough to bellow, “Glory, glory, hallelujah!” at the appropriate moments.

It was fun. People get hung up on happiness and joy, but fun will take you at least as far and it’s generally cheaper to obtain.

Livrit is a Gallacian specialty, which means it’s uniquely terrible. It strongly resembles vodka, although vodka would be ashamed to acknowledge the connection, sweetened, as livrit is, with the cloudberries that grow in the mountains. That might actually be palatable, though, and we can’t have that, so lichen is also included. The resulting drink starts syrupy, ends bitter, and burns all the way down. No one actually likes it, but it is traditionally made by widows as a means of supporting themselves, so everyone drinks it because you can’t let little old ladies starve to death when they could be climbing mountains and scraping lichen off rocks instead.

He had always been jumpy. Nothing wrong with that. Jumpy means you survive. It also means you wear yourself out faster and drive the rest of your unit nuts, but everybody copes in their own way. He was never going to be a career soldier, but that’s fine. Not everyone should be. Ideally nobody would have to be, but that’s a bigger problem than I could tackle today.

(A Frenchwoman once told me that I had no poetry in my soul. I recited a dirty limerick to her, and she threw a lemon at my head. Paris is a marvelous city.)

How many works on the life of Lord Byron does the world really need, anyway?

Most of us go to the Devil without him having to personally oversee things.

I do not argue with my instincts. They kept me alive in the war.

His voice had that light veneer of humor that we all get, because if we don’t pretend we’re laughing, we might have to admit just how broken we are. It’s like telling stories at the bar about the worst pain you’ve ever been in. You laugh and you brag about it, and it turns the pain into something that will buy you a drink.

Falling asleep quickly, whenever you have the chance, is the third thing you learn in the army. (The first thing you learn is to keep your mouth shut and let the sergeants blunt their teeth on the people who can’t. The second thing is to never pass up a chance to piss.)

Roderick’s music was genius, and I knew just enough to know that I could not appreciate just how far beyond me it truly was.

I came into the room and thumped him on the back and did all the things that soldiers do with each other because most of us have forgotten how to cry.

Headache is always preferable to heartache, and if you’re focusing on not throwing up, you aren’t thinking about how the friends of your youth are dying around you.

One of the few things I learned from the Brits who served with me was that if you’re feeling dreadful, it helps to dress well. I dragged on fresh clothes. My tongue felt like it needed a shave.

I could hear the edge of a smile in his voice, and also what that smile was costing him.

Denton was even more American than usual. If his accent got any broader, he was going to start singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and shaking hands with the tablecloth.

He had plenty of courage but little nerve,

(We did not run. If we ran then we would have to admit there was something to run from. If we ran, then the small child that lives in every soldier’s heart knew that the monsters could get us. So we did not run, but it was a near thing.)

It took so much to burn the hare. Oh God, why are bodies so wet?

We could not risk humanity on the continued goodwill of an infant monster that could puppet the dead.

She nodded to me, that fine, stern woman with the heart of a lion.

As writers say to each other, “Yes, it’s been done, but you haven’t done it yet.”