Bloodsong

by Melvin Burgess

  As he emerged from his convalescence, Sigurd suffered nightmares, in which he endured death after death, but had lost the ability to die. Odin had shown him death; was he showing him eternity now? If so, Sigurd knew what he feared the most. Every pleasure finally becomes a torment, and the gods, like kings, go mad at the end. All he wanted was to be human, with its little span of years and its frustrations and unfulfilled yearnings. He knew that the world was more lovely by far than any heaven. Eternity disgusted him. The immortals cannot love. They never age, they never change, they aren’t really alive at all. The thought that he was turning into one of them so terrified him that he awoke from his dreams, screaming at the top of his lungs to be sure that Odin heard his rejection.

  Bryony ran through from the kitchen to his call. She touched his face. His eyes snapped open and he stared up at her.

  “Hush, hush—it’s all right. There’s nothing here,” she murmured. Sigurd suddenly reached up and flung his arms around her. She was like him—human. He understood now why Odin interfered and fouled things up. He was jealous. All gods are. Their lives, so diluted by endless time, are worthless; they have nothing.

  “Unchanging, invisible,” he muttered to himself, then he laughed. Eternity was a frozen moment in which nothing ever happened. Every second he lived as a man was worth more than all their countless centuries. Bryony believed that memories were holy—she was right. The gods were parasites on the lives of the living. The truest way to worship them was to forget them forever.

  Sigurd took the girl in his hands and held her face so that he could see her better. Another human being—the most precious thing imaginable. She was beautiful, full of life, living and growing, knowing, remembering, rushing along with him now in the arms of the present. She was so much more than anything you could possibly make up. Lovingly, Sigurd traced his fingers around her face, exploring her eyes, her ears, the contours of her jaw. He ran his fingers through her hair and watched her watching him. No one had ever touched her like that before. He seemed to be sharing the sensations in her skin.

  Encouraged, Bryony put her hand to his face and did the same back, exploring all the shapes of his face.

  “This is just for us,” he said. “Not for Odin—this is for us.” Bryony nodded, yes, yes! She knew exactly what he meant.

  “He has too much already,” she said. “He can’t ever know what it’s really like, anyway.”

  There on the bed, they explored each other from head to foot, stroking, smelling, tasting, listening, soaking up every sensation, filling every sense—in between the toes, the tips of the fingers, behind the ears, eyes, mouth, nose—yes, every part. What nicer parts to kiss, but those that feel the nicest? It was all delicious.

  Bryony frowned at his penis, nodding its head at her. “I know what this is for,” she said, holding it in her hand.

  Sigurd leaned forward and touched her underneath. “And I know what this is for,” he replied. They laughed, reached out to each other, and became lovers.

  Every day they made love and talked—about gods, about dreams, about hope, about life. They shared their histories in whispers. Within a week, when Sigurd was well enough to get out of bed, they had already fallen in love.

  They were the only thinking creatures in their world. There was no society, no crowds, no parks where they could mingle with other people—just the warm metal under their feet, the beating flames, the grinding of worn metal parts. There was the smell of hot metal and oil, of chemicals and protein soups, boiled fur and rusty blood. Sigurd had the memory of a rich life, and all she knew was this. She had no way to measure him, no memories or experience of other boys and girls, or men and women, but she wanted to give all she had, her entire self, body, mind, spirit, and soul, to this experience here and now. There were never two people more prepared to fall in love, more suited to fall in love, more willing to carry it through to the end.

  And love, which we can all have, which is common as grass, truly does conquer all. Prisoners fall in love with guards, torturers with their victims, racists with other races. There’s no corner of Hel you can’t find people in love; but it doesn’t always make you whole again. There are wounds of the mind that never heal. What is the future for these two—the boy so young, designed for greatness, so easily loved and loving? And the girl, so greedy for life? Look at the two of them, amazed at this sudden secret between them. Love is a secret society, a community of two. Only you know, only you understand, only you can see. It’s sex and talk and discovery; everything one learns about the other, they learn about themselves, as well. It’s a revelation. But after that? Maybe Bryony was bound to fall in love with the first boy she ever met—she’d been on her own so long, you couldn’t blame her. Maybe Sigurd, after what he’d suffered, was bound to fall in love with whoever happened to be there. But maybe, just maybe they are made for each other, two people only complete in their togetherness. For now at least, in their secret place, they believe that this is forever. They are visionaries. There is no one more loyal than Sigurd, except for Bryony herself.

  And in a room half a mile away, a dead man swings by his heel and half smiles with his cold lips. If Odin wants this, surely it can work?

  And if he doesn’t, what then?

  It is six months later. Sigurd and Bryony are preparing Slipper for a journey. It’s time to go back to the world.

  They hadn’t missed it so far, not even Bryony, who felt at first that she couldn’t wait another day, another hour to reach the fresh air now that the means of her deliverance was with her. She’d had to wait while Sigurd recovered, and by the time he was better, neither of them wanted anything but each other. The world above, that festival of everything—that’d still be there tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. There was so much here already to know in their world of two.

  But love is a story, the same as everything else, it moves on and changes. They’d explored Bryony’s world. They’d crawled through the ducts and vents, run together in the great machine halls, scooped creamy liquids from the protein vats, hunted the packs of creatures whose ancestors had been trapped here when the factory city had been closed down. She’d shown him the high voltage creeping around the cables in the refrigeration units, the great drilling machines and blue fire burning up the rock face where Crayley was opening up new areas underground and slowly colonizing them, the crystal rooms, the chemical units, the pigment units that endlessly, uselessly made every color under the sun, the vehicle factory where antiquated engines were manufactured, discarded, and then reclaimed over and over to be made again into exactly the same things.

  All the time during those first few months, Sigurd had been keeping an eye out for a possible escape route. Bryony had pointed out the possibilities—that tunnel leads into a mess of tangled machinery, you can’t get through; that duct leads to fire, that door never opened; behind that wall of steel it sounds hollow. Sigurd took the stub of his sword and carved a hole in the walls, or through the stone or a duct or pipe, but every way they opened up led nowhere. Time passed. It was love in a dungeon. Gradually the search had become more earnest.

  Sigurd himself could have ridden through the flames with Slipper, but he would have had to go alone; Bryony did not have dragon’s skin. If their story was to grow, it had to move out of the factory and into the world. They had to find a way out.

  The search was not only in the visible. They used sonar, magnetic resonance, wave and particle analysis, and other processes to explore areas they couldn’t see. Slipper was the secret; his senses could pass through walls, go around corners, explore heat, density, and structure.

  The cyber-horse had been left where he collapsed, near the dead man on the gibbet where the fire ended. When Bryony returned a few days later, the horse was gone and she’d assumed that the city had cleaned him away and recycled him. He’d been missing for a week before he returned, looking like a terror with his organics already beginning to regrow. He’d taken himself off to find the materials he nee
ded to repair and regenerate himself, grazing in the steel forests and silicone meadows of the factory city, feeding from the protein vats and chemical works, hunting down the living things that hid in the tubes and pipes. He looked demonic, part metal skeleton and other inorganic components, part cyber-form, with titanium and plastics wedded to flesh. Over the next few months he’d grown back entirely, and he looked again like the Slipper Sigurd had known when he raced around the beaches and sand dunes of South Wales.

  They’d worked their way slowly through the galleries, checking every few meters for hidden passages. If they found one, they painstakingly plotted it for size and for heat. The equipment was good, but not perfect; the results needed to be analyzed carefully. Often what seemed to be a passage turned out after several scans to be only a gap. Many ways that started out broad and wide turned narrow and disappeared, or branched endlessly and endlessly again. To have followed them all would take a thousand years, so they just stuck to the biggest ones, the ones that could take Slipper, as well. Every day, another hundred yards or so. Then, while they analyzed the results, Slipper hunted for them, or collected food and brought it back. If they found anything that looked promising, the next day they went to investigate. With the sword stub Sigurd cut his way through cables and metal work, rock face, concrete, ceramic or any other kind of material, to expose the likely hopes and follow them through. Some ways led on for a mile or more, coiling through abandoned scrapyards or galleries of solid rock, but they all ended the same way—in fire, hot enough to melt metal. They were in a little bubble of air surrounded by Hel.

  All around Bryony’s circumscribed little world they went. They found nothing. Then they went around again, and then again, obsessive with the panic of the trapped, until the dreadful urge to escape became weary and they found each other again.

  And now they are still where they had started. Two lovers trapped—not a healthy situation for any love affair. They both look well. Sigurd has grown taller. It troubles him; he is still scared of becoming a monster himself. With his gifts and additions, he is already more than human; it’s such a small step to become less than human next. Bryony, too, looks well. Her skin is better, her hair is better, she stands differently. She is more confident. She is loved and in love; how else could it be?

  And what’s this? Has she put on weight? Certainly around the stomach—but it’s obvious. The way these two are together it would be a miracle if she wasn’t pregnant. Another six months and there’ll be three of them down there. The beginnings perhaps of an underground community? But that will not be; they will not allow it. This family is for the world.

  And on her finger, a ring. Is she married? There are no priests here, unless you count the dead man, her father, and neither of them wants anything to do with him even if he was willing to speak the rites. Even Bryony has stopped visiting him. The little flowers and buds that Jenny Wren brings her she keeps for herself these days, and uses them to decorate the bedroom she and Sigurd share. He is the past, he is over. He is death: they are life.

  But she has a ring anyway. A curious ring, strangely carved, a gift from Sigurd’s own finger. This is her love token. She plays with it, feels it on her finger, and smiles. It reminds her of all the good things she has. A pretty, golden thing. Neither of them has any idea of the curse it carries.

  Having found no way out, they have come up with another plan: Fafnir’s skin. If Bryony were wrapped in that, she could survive the blaze as well. If! If it had survived the holocaust when Fafnir’s arsenal went up. If it’s not buried under a million tons of rubble, or blown into space, or captured and taken away as a souvenir by some prince or ganglord.

  If if if. But it’s a chance. And to get it, Sigurd must leave.

  “What if you can’t come back?” she asks. They are standing holding each other, face to face, body to body. He wants to have her, she wants to have him—it just happens whenever they touch. But they have been trying to escape for so long and now at last they are both scared.

  “Why should that happen? I have the sword. I have my skin. I can survive.”

  “But what if? Perhaps. What then?”

  “Then we’d be apart,” he says.

  They look carefully at each other.

  “It could come to that,” she says.

  “It’d be better for me to stay here, then.”

  “No. You can’t. You’ll go mad. I’ll go mad.”

  “This is terrible. This is so terrible.” Sigurd turns and walks away, rubbing his face. He is the golden one! Things fall into his hand. Why was this so wrong?

  “There’s always been a way for me in my life, things happen. I was made for things to work.”

  “This is just you and me, Sig. Maybe no one built you and me into the way things are.”

  He looks at her. She looks at him. She holds her stomach.

  “You could wait for the baby to be born?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t. You’re impatient. And I’m impatient too.”

  “If I wait for the baby, I’ll have to wait again after it’s born. It’ll be helpless—you’ll be helpless, maybe. You’ll need me here.”

  “Not for long.”

  He smiled, no, she wouldn’t be helpless, not for long. “But you know what I mean.”

  Bryony thought, bit her thumb, tried to see a way that was safer than this terrible separation, but couldn’t.

  “Then go now,” she said. “You’ll be back in time for the birth. You’ll be back in time to take me up and our baby will be born in the real world.”

  Sigurd nodded, but said, “One more week. Give us another week, maybe two. That won’t hurt. A holiday. Time to say good-bye.”

  Bryony didn’t like it—they were both boiling with frustration already. But because she didn’t want to lose him, because she thought that maybe this would be the last time she ever saw him, she agreed. Two more weeks. A holiday. Then the separation.

  So they had their holiday, but it was a desultory thing. The world was calling them. The search had become obsessive and that didn’t stop now just because they wanted it to. They tried to take their time, go swimming, go hunting, make love, but the real business, the next thing, the escape, wouldn’t leave them alone. Impatient, irritable with themselves and each other, they spent more time apart than they ever had before. Bryony spent hours poring over the maps and charts and scan results they had taken, pinned up in long rows on the walls of a deserted hangar, while Sigurd wandered about the galleries and shop floors, searching for clues. Either could have found one; it happened to be Bryony.

  “Look at this.” They were standing in the hangar. Three of the walls were covered with printed sheets of various scans. The entire reachable interior of Crayley was covered.

  Sigurd looked. The scans she was showing him were of an area right on the edge of their world.

  “I can’t see anything.”

  “Here, and here.” She showed him with her finger—small inconsistencies in the rock.

  “That could be anything—denser rock, ores. Anyway, it’s on the other side of the fire.”

  “And over here.” She led him on to a set of scans for the area to the right of the first. “The same pattern, do you see? The same shade, the same order. And in between—can you see?” Very faint, hardly visible, another set of marks.

  “It’s too faint.”

  “If it was darker, what would you say it was?”

  Sigurd looked closely. “Well, if it was darker it might be pipework. But . . .” He shrugged. The marks could mean anything.

  “Bit of a coincidence, though. Regular markings like these, all pale, I know, but it’s all regular. And then these marks where it’s cooler.”

  “There’s a lot of coincidences,” pointed out Sigurd.

  “But this bit just looks—it looks like it might look if someone was hiding something. It looks like it might be in disguise.”

  “Who has anything to hide down here?”

  “I don�
�t know. But there’s a lot I don’t know. It could be.”

  “It could be.”

  “It might be.”

  Sigurd grinned at her. “It’s something. It’s something to do if nothing else.”

  “And you never know.”

  “But the fire?”

  “There’s not much of it. I’ll go in Slipper’s hold. We could get through that much fire. It’s doable.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  • • •

  The area Bryony had found was in a long, high, wide corridor, sided by sheer rock. The rock was warm to the touch. A number of different pipes and ducts ran into it high up.

  Bryony was right. Those pipes had to lead somewhere. Something lay beyond.

  They gathered together some machinery, a drilling rig, and some scaffolding—there was plenty of that sort of thing in Crayley—and did some investigation before they went any farther. They used the scaffolding to reach the pipes and scanned them in detail. They carried air, water, and nutrients. The pipes carried on into the rock; it was their pale markings that Bryony had noticed, looking so much like natural variations in the rock. They didn’t double back at any time, but carried straight in and disappeared. What for? What needed feeding on the other side of rock and heat, with no way in or out?

  They set up the drill rig to gouge its way into the rock face and a conveyor to carry the resulting rubble away. Straight away they noticed something strange about the rock. It was artificial. As Bryony had suggested, this area was in camouflage.

  The rig bored its way in, driving a tunnel two meters wide into the rock face. Almost at once there was a disturbance in the corridor behind them—a stream of rumbling machines heading for them: reclaim-bots. Crayley was coming to put a stop to this. It was a moment of fear as the ugly machines trundled forward, but one of triumph, too. They were onto something. For the first time, the city was showing its hand. Crayley was scared.