A Plague of Zombies: An Outlander Novella by Diana Gabaldon Page B

said. ‘Ye’d ken what that smells like, would ye?’
    It must have been her accent that brought back the battlefield at Culloden and the stench of burning corpses. He shuddered, unable to stop himself.
    ‘Yes,’ he said abruptly. ‘Why?’
    She pursed her lips in thought.
    ‘There are different ways to go about it, aye? One way is to give the
afile
powder to the person, wait until they drop, and then bury them atop a recent corpse. Ye just spread the earth lightly over them,’ she explained, catching his look. ‘And make sure to put leaves and sticks over the face afore sprinkling the earth, so as the person can still breathe. When the poison dissipates enough for them to move again and sense things, they see they’re buried, they smell the reek, and so they ken they must be dead.’ She spoke matter-of-factly, as though she had been telling him her private recipe for apple pandowdy or treacle cake. Weirdly enough, that steadied him, and he was able to speak calmly past his revulsion.
    ‘Poison. That would be the
afile
powder? What sort of poison is it, do you know?’
    Seeing the spark in her eye, he thanked the impulse that had led him to add ‘do you know?’ to that question—for if not for pride, he thought, she might not have told him. As it was, she shrugged and answered offhand.
    ‘Oh … herbs. Ground bones—bits o’ other things. But the main thing, the one thing ye
must
have, is the liver of a
fugu
fish.’
    He shook his head, not recognising the name. ‘Describe it, if you please.’ She did; from her description, he thought it must be one of the odd puffer fish that blew themselves up like bladders if disturbed. He made a silent resolve never to eat one. In the course of the conversation, though, something was becoming apparent to him.
    ‘But what you are telling me—your pardon, madam—is that in fact a zombie is
not
a dead person at all? That they are merely drugged?’
    Her lips curved; they were still plump and red, he saw, younger than her face would suggest. ‘What good would a dead person be to anyone?’
    ‘But plainly the widespread belief is that zombies
are
dead.’
    ‘Aye, of course. The zombies think they’re dead, and so does everyone else. It’s not true, but it’s effective. Scares folk rigid. As for ‘merely drugged,’ though …’ She shook her head. ‘They don’t come back from it, ye ken. The poison damages their brains and their nervous systems. They can follow simple instructions, but they’ve no real capacity for thought anymore—and they mostly move stiff and slow.’
    ‘Do they?’ he murmured. The creature—well, the man, he was now sure of that—who had attacked him had not been stiff and slow, by any means. Ergo …
    ‘I’m told, madam, that most of your slaves are Ashanti. Would any of them know more about this process?’
    ‘No,’ she said abruptly, sitting up a little. ‘I learnt what I ken from a houngan—that would be a sort of … practitioner, I suppose ye’d say. He wasna one of my slaves, though.’
    ‘A practitioner of
what
, exactly?’
    Her tongue passed slowly over the tips of her sharp teeth, yellowed but still sound.
    ‘Of magic,’ she said, and laughed softly, as though to herself. ‘Aye, magic. African magic. Slave magic.’
    ‘You believe in magic?’ He asked it as much from curiosity as anything else.
    ‘Don’t you?’ Her brows rose, but he shook his head.
    ‘I do not. And from what you have just told me yourself, the process of creating—if that’s the word—a zombie is
not
in fact magic but merely the administration of poison over a period of time, added to the power of suggestion.’ Another thought struck him. ‘Can a person recover from such poisoning? You say it does not kill them.’
    She shook her head.
    ‘The poison doesn’t, no. But they always die. They starve, for one thing. They lose all notion of will and canna do anything save what the
houngan
tells them to do. Gradually they waste away to