The Fen-Dead

The fen-dead are the oldest Unquiet the archive can put a name to, and the least like the rest of their kind. Where the common risen are bodies of the third night or the third year, the fen-dead are dead of the third century: men and women given to the peat of the Sull fens below Ostmere long before the Sundering, kept whole by the black water, and woken only when the fen is interfered with — when a drain is cut, a turbary worked too deep, or a hard frost followed by hard feet. The wardens' rolls at Hrafnvik hold contracts on fen-dead going back to the Grey Years, written in hands that spell fen three different ways on a single page.

Appearance

The peat keeps them better than any embalmer. A fen-dead rises with its skin tanned dark as bog-oak and glossy as waxed leather, the hair intact and combed flat by the weight of the water. Their clothes are the clothes of another age — iron brooches of no house now living, shoe-leather cut in a fashion the archive cannot date — and the smell of them is not corruption but the fen itself: wet earth, old smoke, and something sweet underneath that wardens compare, without relish, to mead left standing. They do not rot as they walk. This, more than anything, unsettles those who meet them.

Habits

Accounts of the common risen describe a search — a groping after something lost, a turning toward any living voice, violence when the way is barred. The fen-dead do not search. Every deposition the archive holds agrees on this, and it is the strangest thing about them. They rise, they stand a while as if taking the weather, and then they walk without haste toward the nearest light on the water: a ferry lamp, the lamp-line of a night barge, a peat-cutter's torch. They are drawn to boats rather than to single persons, and to lines of lights rather than to one flame, as though following a road only they can see.

They do not run and they do not grasp. A fen-dead that reaches a boat will lay its dark hands on the gunwale and look up at the crew, patient as a passenger waiting to be taken aboard. If it is pushed off, it comes back. If it is beaten off, it comes back the next night, and the night after, and it is then — when it has been repeatedly refused — that the drownings begin. Ferrymen of the lower Sull say you may refuse a peat-man once. They do not say what happens the second time; the toll-tallies say it for them.

Encounters

Risings follow disturbance, and the worst years are the drain years. After the Long Winter, when House Vane's collectors pressed the fen parishes for arrears and the parishes answered by cutting new peat for sale, the lower fen rose in numbers no living warden had seen. The Peat-Cut of 311 alone put nine boats under between Ostmere and the middle reaches before the contracts were let. The ice-wardens who walk the frozen river mark the old turbary banks each autumn and leave the warning to those who can read their staves.

It came up out of the cut standing, not climbing. It looked at my lamp a long time. I put the lamp out and it looked at me instead, which was worse.

How the Wardens deal with them

The order prices fen work high and contracts it in winter, when the fen is hard and the dead can be followed home across the frost to the place they left. A warden's lantern — the written record carried against the Unquiet's feeding on forgetting — serves as well here as anywhere; the fen-dead will turn from a written name as a cur turns from a whip. What does not serve, and what the archive records because the wardens recorded it first, is fire.

Burning a body before the third night is the oldest surety the living have, and against the fresh dead it fails rarely. Against the long-buried it fails often enough that the rolls carry a separate fee for it. Warden Carr's successors note, without explanation, that perhaps one burning in four of the fen-dead does not take: the peat-tanned flesh resists, or the woken body, once burned, is reported again the following winter in the same reach. The order burns anyway, and keeps the tally.

Two readings of that tally stand in the archive. The first is a chemist's reading: peat water tans leather, and tanned leather burns badly; there is no mystery here, only wet fuel. The second is the pattern the tally itself makes when the years are laid in a row, which the archivist has set out elsewhere — that the fen-dead rise more freely in long winters, and that their risings have grown commoner by slow degrees across three centuries, as the winters have lengthened. The archive offers both and settles neither. It is not the archivist's office to say why a thing that has lain quiet for two hundred years should wake now, and more often now, and most of all when the cold comes early and stays late.