The Land You Never Leave

by Angus Watson

“What happened?”

  “A giant snake called a rattleconda ate a man called Grunyan. He was still alive when it swallowed him and I could see him moving inside.”

  “And Finn?”

  “They sent me back here. Finnbogi the Boggy was droning on to Beaver Man about the gods. He probably still is. He was getting quite a lot of it wrong.”

  “He’s not fighting?”

  “I don’t know. He might be.”

  “Big dog’s cocks.”

  “Erik the Angry!”

  I’m going to catch it and eat it, said a very weird voice.

  What the fuck was that? thought Finnbogi as he ran from the approaching snake, which unfortunately meant heading directly towards the other one.

  It’s fleeing. Good. I love it when they flee.

  It was the snake!

  Don’t kill me! he tried to think at it. You don’t want to kill me!

  I want to kill everything, came the reply.

  No, you don’t.

  I do.

  You don’t. He tried to think in a snakey way.

  I do.

  This was going nowhere, and now the other snake was coming for him, too, and he was running straight towards it.

  When he was five paces from the snake in front, and he reckoned the snake behind was about the same distance, he jumped to the right. The snake ahead adjusted its course, but Finnbogi looped around, fists and legs pumping, back the way he’d come. He heard the rattlecondas collide and then, in his mind, curse each other for getting in the way of their prey.

  Finnbogi ran towards Beaver Man and his gang. He was quite powerful. After all the training with Thyri, he was fitter and stronger. Leaping about and running like this felt good, or at least much better than it would have done a moon and a lifetime before. The Badlander boss brought him back down by shaking his head at Finnbogi as if he was disappointed; perhaps as if Finnbogi was meant to remember something …

  He ran through all that Beaver Man had said to him. Grunyan was a show-off. The serpents were a mix of a snake from the south and a rattlesnake. They were not controlled by the Empty Children. It was best to defeat one before it swallowed you. They didn’t ever attack the spectators because they were on seats in a mass and nothing is more frightening than the unknown. Nothing is more frightening than the unknown …

  The rattlecondas were big, but they were still snakes. Rattlesnakes, the normal kind, could kill you with a bite, but they fled when they heard you coming. Everyone knew that the way to avoid being bitten by a rattlesnake was to make a noise as you walked so that the buggers pissed off before you knew they’d been there.

  He stopped and turned. The rattlecondas had disentangled and were slithering towards him side by side, as if racing to kill him.

  I will get there first and it will be mine!

  You will not! I will eat it!

  Finnbogi closed his eyes and spread his arms. He pictured Garth Anvilchin kissing Thyri Treelegs; that long, lingering kiss while he and the Lakchans had looked on. He opened his mouth and screamed with all the rage, hatred and jealousy that he’d suppressed.

  He opened his eyes.

  The snakes had stopped. What? What is it doing? Is it prey? he felt them think.

  Finnbogi pictured Garth punching him as the tornado bore down on them.

  He screamed his anger at the fucker.

  He balled his hands into fists and jumped up and down, shouting his hatred for Garth and frustration at his own inadequacies.

  The snakes recoiled. I do not like this. Is it an eagle? It might bite and tear flesh.

  It might carry us up then dash us down on rock!

  Finnbogi pictured his mother dying while giving birth to him. He screamed all the more, shaking his hands in despair. There she was, beautiful but bleeding, opening her woozy eyes to see her newborn wailing in someone else’s arms. She knew she was dying, knew she was leaving a baby to learn the terrors of the world on its own, knew she was going to miss the joys of his first laugh, his first word, his first tree climbed, his first fish caught. She was dying and he would never know her, never feel the raging power of her love. She was dying and she’d never soothe his crying with hugs, never cuddle him close and breathe in his smell and tell him how much she loved him. She was dying and it was so unfair.

  Finnbogi lifted his head and shouted. He wanted his mum and his mum shouldn’t have died. He screamed and screamed, roaring his raging loathing at the unjust world. He beat the air with his fists. He was crying. Snot was streaming from his nose into his mouth. There were a lot of people watching. He didn’t care.

  Wha …? The snakes shrunk back on themselves.

  “Fucking snakes!” Finnbogi shouted, out loud and with his mind. “You want to kill me! How dare you how dare you how dare you! I’m going to kill you! You fucking dicks!”

  He ran at them roaring, fists flailing.

  The rattlecondas fled and zipped down their holes.

  Finnbogi stopped.

  The rattlecondas were gone.

  He could calm down now.

  He wiped tears and mucus from his face then wiped his hands on his shirt.

  A few spectators clapped like polite supporters of a sports team might clap impressive play by the opposition. The only person applauding with any gusto was the yellow-eyed woman. There you go, thought Finnbogi, fantasies can sometimes, sort of, come true.

  “Well done,” said Beaver Man, walking up, nodding. “That was good. Two rattlecondas unarmed … You didn’t kill them but there’s no way you could have done. You did your best and it worked. Now follow me.”

  Oh great, thought Finnbogi, what now?

  Chapter 7

  The Singer

  Beaver Man led him along the path towards the blood pit with the large living lumps that were apparently called lizard kings.

  Two Badlanders with a bucket of slops and a rag on a pole were feeding the unfortunates hanging from the rock walls. They held the rag above one man’s head. He strained for it like a baby bird clamouring for gut-mulched worms.

  “The compulsion to live is strong,” observed Beaver Man.

  Finnbogi felt faint, whizzy and other-worldly after his bout with the snakes. “I guess?”

  “Why do our blood donors clamour for sustenance and prolong their agony when they know they’re going to die?”

  “Because they might not die.”

  Beaver Man nodded. “Where there’s life, there’s desire to live.”

  Somehow this sort of bollocks sounded better coming from Beaver Man than it did from Gunnhild. Finnbogi realised he might admire the psychopath who’d tried to have him killed by giant snakes more than the woman who’d taken him in and raised him like her own child. Life was odd.

  They arrived at the pit of lizard kings. The living lumps were larger and more formed now, with defined necks and heads. Ominously, they’d moved around since the last time he’d seen them.

  “Are they—” started Finnbogi.

  “Don’t worry about those. This way.”

  Beaver Man scrambled up the vertical rock face as he had before.

  “I …” Finnbogi looked behind him. There was nobody there. No Empty Child on a bighorn sheep. Which presumably meant that Beaver Man had the same control over the beeba spiders as the Empty Children. Of course he did.

  Now that Finnbogi looked more closely at the cliff, he saw that there were what one might call, if one was being generous, hand and footholds.

  The climb was hateful, with moments of terror, but it had been that sort of day.

  Eventually, he made it up to a two-pace-wide finger of rock poking out from higher ground to the south. There was a higher, obscuring ridge to the east, but to the north and west the view stretched across the landscape of pointy hills, pale rock hummocks and prairie. Finnbogi could see the crescent of rock that sheltered the Wootah and Owsla prison camp. He wished he was back there.

  There was no sign of Beaver Man but there was only one way to go, so he walked
along the ridge, around a precipitous path high above the lizard king pit, and into a valley. All was bare, pink-yellow, crumbly rock, neither a plant nor an animal to be seen, just ever more grotesque spikes and lumps of rock.

  He followed the zigzagging valley, rounded a knobbly stack that would have had Wulf making comparisons, and found Beaver Man. The chief had taken his shirt off. His strangely shiny, lean-waisted yet muscular torso somehow juxtaposed and complemented his gentle brown eyes and childish face with its missing front teeth. Finnbogi gulped. He had no idea why he was following Beaver Man up this narrowing, remote canyon, but he hoped it wasn’t going to involve him removing his own clothes. Having thought that, if Finnbogi had to be with a man, then this smooth-skinned, hairless, taut-bodied, strong—

  “There’s no vegetation up here,” Beaver Man interrupted Finnbogi’s confusing self-discovery, “but the valley below is relatively lush. Why would that be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s a little colder up here, a little windier and the rain runs off a little more quickly so the ground’s dryer. Every difference is minuscule, but it takes this environment across a line. The niceties of nature that inhabit the valley a short climb below—the flowers and the fluffier animals—cannot exist up here. There are no plants here, and the only animals are spiders and lizards.

  “People are the same. You need only to tweak their environment a little and all the vegetation of civility and society falls away and they become base savages. The man we saw craning for the feeding rag was a proud warrior a few days ago.”

  Finnbogi nodded. He hadn’t been listening. He was too worried about what might be about to happen.

  They carried on along a constricted, airless gulley, climbed a couple of low ridges and arrived at a narrow gap between two high horns.

  Two men sat on either side of the gap, each with what looked like a huge animal skull between his knees.

  What, by Loakie’s tits, thought Finnbogi, was going on?

  As he ascended to the gap, he saw that they were at the edge of the Badlands massif. He could see miles south along the way they’d come on the Plains Strider, and west, across endless green prairie dotted about with bare pink-yellow rock islands and busy with shifting herds of buffalo.

  The settlement where they’d left the Plains Strider came into view. The Plains Strider had gone, but Beaver Man’s smaller craft, the Plains Sprinter, lay on the grass like a giant insect.

  At the lip of the massif he could see that there were thousands of people standing maybe a hundred paces below their gap. They were gathered on a wide bowl of land elevated from the plain, among a sparse woodland of dark green fir trees.

  The young chief turned. “Finnbogi, come and stand at the edge here.”

  Here we go. Finnbogi did as he was bid with a sinking sickening in his stomach. The shiny superman was going to throw him off the cliff. He’d escaped Garth’s attempt to hurl him to his death, he’d beaten the snakes, only for this. In the finest seat in Tor’s Hall, knowing that bastard, Garth Anvilchin was laughing.

  “I got the idea for the Plains Strider and Sprinter from your people, more specifically from your ships,” said Beaver Man.

  “You’ve been to Hardwork? We didn’t have—”

  “Several people from this tribe have crossed the Wild Salt Sea and returned.”

  “Really? I thought—”

  “That people from this side of the Wild Salt Sea were incapable of making the same journey as your tribe did?”

  “No! no, I just … didn’t know you had.”

  “We built big canoes. We went, we saw, we passed undetected, we returned. We have also been in the other direction, across a wider sea. The people over there are even stranger than you.”

  “When did you go? What did you—”

  There was a cheer from below. The people had spotted their chief.

  “They adore me,” said Beaver Man, his tone the same as a depressed man reporting that the birds have shat on the drying laundry again. “Lesser people love to adore a leader. A few men and women are lifted above their peers to experience this sort of adoration, Finnbogi. In the Badlands I am that leader and I am the greater person. I am faster, stronger and more intelligent than any of these below us.”

  I bet you’re not as fast as Paloma Pronghorn, strong as Chogolisa Earthquake or as intelligent as, well, me, thought Finnbogi.

  “Yet everything I am was made by alchemy. How much of me is me? Are these people worshipping me or the alchemy? Do you know what my power animal is, Finn? I have a few, but the chief one whose powers make me the best of all the power-charged warriors?”

  “I don’t know … lion? wolf?” Sycophancy didn’t come naturally to Finnbogi, but it seemed prudent, standing on the edge of a cliff next to an absurdly strong murderer.

  “No,” Beaver Man answered with a sad smile, “No. My chief power animal is the deer tick.”

  “Oh.” Would Beaver Man kill him if he laughed?

  “I’m very strong and not far off indestructible, like a deer tick. Find one and try to kill it, you’ll see what I mean. So these people aren’t worshipping me, they’re worshipping a tiny parasite whose favourite activity is digging its legs into the scrotum of a deer and sucking blood from his balls. You can see why I have existential concerns.”

  “I can.” Finnbogi was pretty sure he knew what existential meant.

  “Still, there is one skill I had before they began their work on me, and I still have that skill.”

  It’s throwing people off cliffs, isn’t it? thought Finnbogi.

  But it wasn’t.

  “People need beauty as much as they need to see death in the arena.” Beaver Man took a deep breath, opened his arms, and sang out a long, high, sweet note.

  The crowd below whooped, then fell silent. The young chief’s voice swooped down to a surprisingly low rumbling tone, then stepped higher and higher, then plunged back to that first note. His singing was loud, clear as a frosty morning and perfectly in tune.

  Singing was his skill! Finnbogi would have been less surprised if Beaver Man had turned into a pink chipmunk. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  When Beaver Man reached the low note for the third time, the four men next to them blew deep, throaty tones on the huge skulls. Nearby, someone—or possibly something, Finnbogi couldn’t see—rolled pebbles down the cliff face, adding a soft drum accompaniment that sounded like waves on a shingle beach. Voice, skull-horns and cliff percussion combined to produce a tune so mournful yet so uplifting that Finnbogi found himself swaying from side to side, every hair on his body standing in horripilation, a smile on his face and tears in his eyes.

  Chapter 8

  Attack of the Calnian Army

  For Sassa Lipchewer, the two days after Finnbogi the Boggy’s encounter with the rattlecondas passed both quickly and slowly. The days themselves went quickly, practising the bow alongside Sitsi Kestrel and vastly improving under the huge-eyed woman’s tutelage. The nights dragged, as she lay awake dreading the next call to the arena.

  Shamefully, she was most concerned about herself; or, more specifically, the baby growing inside her. She lay with her hands on her stomach, worried that the mite would grow up without a father or a mother, or never be born at all.

  She couldn’t believe nobody had worked it out yet. Wulf never suspected that she might be keeping anything from him, which was both endearing and useful, but on this occasion she wished that he’d see through her. She wanted to talk to him about the baby, but also she didn’t want to talk about it. She’d heard that pregnancy messed with your mind.

  Two things were certain, though. One, she didn’t want to tell anybody else she was pregnant. She might jinx it. Babies were often lost in the early stages and she couldn’t face everyone’s pity if that happened. Two, she did not want her unborn child to die in the arena for the amusement of the Badlanders.

  She woke on the third morning since Finnbogi’s fight to find the Owsla go
ne. Beaver Man had taken them away.

  The Wootah went about breakfast, trying to be normal, but Sassa couldn’t help looking about herself, wondering what was coming next. Most of the others were doing the same.

  Perhaps it was her pregnancy, perhaps it was because their protectors had gone, but it seemed to Sassa that the Badland air that morning was even more oppressive, and that the usually welcome breeze was blowing clouds of terror through between the tents.

  So when Chapa Wangwa strode into their prison camp, followed by a trotting trio of Empty Children, Sassa’s hands shot to her stomach and she nearly vomited with the nauseating rush of morning sickness and foreboding.

  The rest of the Wootah looked up with varying degrees of fear and loathing.

  “Is the dying one dead yet?” was the Badlander’s charming opener, standing above the unconscious Bjarni and peering into his face. “No? He’s clinging on! Funny how they do.” He looked around at them all, grinning. “Very funny.”

  “Come on then,” said Wulf, “spit it out. What are you dying to tell us?”

  “Don’t look so sour! None of you will die today. Apart from maybe the dying one, of course, and any of the rest of you who have an accident. This is a dangerous place.”

  “So what do you want?” asked Thyri Treelegs.

  “It’s not what I want, it’s what Beaver Man wants. He thinks you’re special so he has a treat for you today. So, apart from the children and the dying man, follow me!”

  “Someone should stay to tend to Bjarni and look after the kids,” said Wulf.

  Chapa Wangwa shrugged. “Why not?” He pointed at Bodil Gooseface and Gunnhild Kristlover. “You and you, stay. You, Bodil, are too stupid to appreciate anything. And you, old woman, I have become tired of you. I thought you’d be interesting with your clever phrases, but they’re not that clever. You’re a boring, dumpy old woman. And stop snarling at me, I don’t like it. Remember that I am deputy to Beaver Man.”

  “Clag on a jarl’s arse is still clag,” spat Gunnhild, with a venom that Sassa had not known was there.

  Gunnhild and Chapa Wangwa stared at each other. A tic flicked into life in the corner of the Badlander’s grin. “I will not kill you now, old woman, because I have such a fine death planned for you. Stay here where you belong with the lesser Wootah and see if you can guess how I will kill you. You won’t, though. It’s too nasty for your little mind to imagine. The rest of you, follow!”