by Gavin Smith
All of this contributed to Vic’s decision. He felt that it was the only rational thing to do, though he giggled a little, his mandibles clattered together and he got a little aroused when he thought about it.
He was going to kill Scab.
The Elite was a photographic negative, a human-shaped shadow after a nuclear explosion in the all-encompassing light.
‘Well?’ the man behind the desk asked.
‘I delivered your message,’ the Elite said somewhat belligerently. ‘Though I don’t think I understood it.’
The man behind the desk just smiled.
20
Southern Britain, a Long Time Ago
She felt his weight on her. His skin on her flesh was hot, almost feverish. The tang of copper in his mouth, he tasted like the air just before a spring storm. Her fingers traced down his skin. She saw the dark pools of his somehow sad eyes before he entered her and she closed her eyes, back arching as she cried out. Strong fingers against her skin, his arms wrapped around her as she opened herself to him.
But there was something else in the room, something just out of sight, little more than a shadow that whispered to her. Promised her this and so much more, if only she’d give in.
Britha sat up straight, flushed, hot, covered in sweat and gasping for breath. She had wrapped her robes around herself to go to sleep as she always did, but they were in disarray now. The intensity of the dream had shocked her. An intense heat burned through her body.
‘Britha?’ Her head shot round to stare at the deformed man. She narrowed her eyes. She could see perfectly even in the depths of the night. Something had changed in Teardrop’s eye: there was something in it now, a tiny glint of silver. ‘Bad dream?’
Anything but, she thought. That was the problem.
There was a dry chuckle from the other side of Teardrop where Fachtna lay wrapped in his cloak.
‘It didn’t sound like a bad dream,’ Fachtna said.
‘That’s what pleasure sounds like, boy. You’re unlikely to ever hear it as the result of anything you do,’ Britha spat.
The deck of the ship moved with the gentle lapping of the waves. They were anchored off a sandy beach below towering cliffs that should have been little more than shadows in this light, but she could make out every detail of them clearly.
‘Perhaps if you had the real thing, you wouldn’t need dreams to make you sigh?’ Fachtna suggested.
The sound of the waves against the wood of the ship was drowned out by the prayers of the god-slaves that had come aboard with them at the harbour beneath the Goddodin hill fort.
Their presence discomfited her. The ship was a strange place, peopled by stranger people. More than ever she was becoming aware of how small her world had been. It had been one thing to deal with traders not unlike these on her own terms, in her own territory; it was quite another to be thrown in among them. On the one hand she recognised them as folk like any other – they breathed, ate, drank, shat, fucked and had the same needs and wants; on the other hand she found so little similarity between how they acted and how her own people behaved that she struggled to find any common ground. Even Teardrop seemed less bizarre than the Carthaginians. All of this, along with her new capabilities, hungers, feelings and the dreams that haunted her sleep, left Britha wondering if she hadn’t somehow walked into the Otherworld.
It was obvious the experience was strange to Fachtna and Teardrop as well, but if they didn’t have any more experience of life aboard a Carthaginian ship then they certainly seemed to have more knowledge. Both of the visitors from the Otherworld seemed to be enjoying the experience regardless of how strange it was for them.
Britha was annoyed by the presence of the god-slaves on board. She was sure they hadn’t paid as much as Fachtna had for their passage. She also thought Hanno had since had cause to regret the deal as all they did was pray. It seemed they required little sleep. Their prayers sounded like nonsense even with her new-found understanding of languages. Teardrop said that they tried to talk in a tongue that their mouths were not made for. What she did understand sounded like appeals for secrets or knowledge or madness or death, perhaps all at the same time.
They had exhorted the crew to join in their worship but the sailors thought them all northern madmen, believing that the cold air had driven them insane. This was a belief held particularly strongly by Germelqart, the quiet navigator. A life at sea meant that he understood bits of many languages, but Britha only ever heard him speak the language of Carthage, which she now found herself able to understand. When he spoke it was tersely, his voice carrying to give orders to the two banks of thirty rowers. The rowers were all free men with massive upper bodies, from all over the known southern world. The colour of their skin went from light brown to almost black like Kush. Hanno said that free men cost just as much to feed but were more likely to outrun pirates if they had a share of the cargo.
Germelqart had made it clear that he felt the god-slaves were a curse, that he felt it was madness to invite onto the boat those who wished only destruction for themselves. Britha agreed with the navigator, whose magic was to direct them from one place to the next even though the next was far and out of sight. It was strong magic that to Britha’s mind required a great deal of skill, Hanno’s sacrifices to their god, Dagon, notwithstanding. Britha knew that the god-slaves’ prayers to their Dark Man in the south would interfere with Germelquart’s own workings.
Even if they hadn’t seen what they had seen as they left the harbour, she still would not have wished to travel with them. Her last glimpse of the field of the dead haunted her. She could see them dressed in white or naked, swaying backwards and forwards like barley in the wind, while one of their number, once a warrior judging by his size, walked among them cutting throats. Harvesting them. Leaving them slumped together, their life’s blood turning the sea red at the edge of the shore. She could not conceive of why, harsh as it was, people would not want to cling to life for all they were worth, as beyond this life they were at the mercy of gods who only cared for themselves.
They had been at sea for weeks now, hugging the coast. They had seen river mouths and massive inlets. Britha thought they had been travelling for so long that they must have reached another land, but Hanno, laughing, had assured her that it was still the same island that she had grown up on.
They had passed cliffs. On some of them they had seen beacon fires burning, warning of their passing. On others they had seen henges, some of stone, more of wood. There had been other wooden henges, half submerged, on some of the beaches they had passed.
Much of the land was heavily wooded, a lot of it very flat and nearly always marshy near inlets or the mouths of rivers that rivalled the size of the Tatha or the Black River. What few villages they passed were either abandoned or destroyed. The black curraghs were so far ahead of them now that the remains were not even still smouldering.
All but the most inaccessible of the clifftop forts had suffered the same fate. They had either been abandoned by their shrewd, if cowardly – in Britha and Fachtna’s eyes – defenders, or they too had been destroyed, their walls pulled down, presumably by the giants.
At the larger settlements Hanno, Kush and some of the oarsmen went ashore for supplies and goods to trade back in their homeland. Britha was not happy with this and had told Hanno that this was not a good way to behave. Hanno had told her that had the people been there they would have traded, but they were not and he would be ruined if he returned with nothing to show for his voyage. Not to mention they needed supplies if they wanted to eat. He scoffed at the idea of leaving goods as payment. Sometimes Fachtna would go with them. Not to loot but to get a feel for the land.
They saw people very occasionally. Here and there they would see a warrior on horseback. The southrons were a tall, well-made people with no beards to speak of, but their dark hair was long, as were their moustaches, which they braided. Their mail and weapons looked fine from a distance, and their horses were much larger th
an the ponies they used in the north. Britha understood that their appearances were a futile show of force. These were chiefs, princes and champions who had come too late to save their people from Bress’s depredations. It looked like a rich land but in the wake of the black curraghs the land seemed almost dead, populated mainly by ghosts.
At other times Britha had the sense that there were people keeping pace with the Carthaginian ship beyond a coastal treeline or hidden in the marshes. They were most likely a warband shadowing them in case they were raiders. She was sure that Teardrop sensed this too.
Fachtna was restless. It was all happening too slowly for him. He wanted, needed, to confront Bress. Britha wondered how much of that was fear of Bress and wanting to get it over and done with. He spent most of the time standing by the prow of the ship, getting soaked as the ram prow ploughed through wave after wave as sail and oar carried them south. Whenever he had the chance, he went ashore. Britha was sure that the nonsense of the god-slaves bothered him as well.
Britha had thought Teardrop ill. He had seemed in pain. She had seen him mouthing words in what she thought were the clipped syllables of his own language. At first, with disdain, she had thought him praying in a servile manner to his gods – it looked a little too much like begging. Then she had started to get the feeling that he was talking to someone that she couldn’t see. This disconcerting feeling grew.
Fachtna had told her that pain was the price of Teardrop’s power. This she could believe: it looked like the strange man was being tormented. Teardrop became colder, more distant, as if he was resigned to something. She was not sure if she was imagining things, but it looked to her like the veins in his head were bulging more. More than once she had thought something was moving under his skin. The flecks of silver in his eyes were not of her imagining. When she focused she saw that each one looked like a tiny shard of frozen quicksilver. The god-slaves were the least of Teardrop’s worries.
The ship was eighty feet long by ten feet wide. They slept on deck with those rowers who did not sleep below, all of them crushed together, sweating, farting and, in the god-slaves’ case, puking when the wave sickness was upon them. The wave sickness did not bother Britha, Teardrop or Fachtna.
‘Is it getting stronger the closer we get?’ Teardrop asked with urgency in his voice. Meaning her dream. It was, but she neither wished to admit that to Teardrop nor think about what it meant. She was frightened by the intensity of her experience, embarrassed that it had been so public, tired of being in the cramped stinking confines of the ship and thoroughly sick of listening to meaningless jabbering and incessant praying.
‘Enough,’ she said quietly to herself. She got to her feet, not even bothering to adjust her robe, grabbed her sickle and made her way over the sea of sleeping and half-awake rowers towards where the god-slaves were kneeling by the stern of the ship.
‘Britha!’ Teardrop hissed, but she ignored him.
‘Don’t want your life?’ she demanded. The god-slaves turned at the sound of her voice. She was no longer sure what language she was talking but they seemed to understand it. ‘Fine. I’ll have it.’
She started the words of the chant in the language of the Pecht, the language of her people. She saw the battle on the beach, the ruins of Ardestie, the destroyed broch empty, her people gone. Her people had fought until Bress’s magics, the demon magics – she had to not forget that – had enslaved them. The warriors fought, the landspeople fought, the old folk would have fought, the children would have fought, and here were people, victims of the Lochlannach like her people had been, and they wanted to embrace it.
The words of the working were not familiar to her. They were old and cold, taught to her a long time ago in veiled whispers by the black-robed sacrificers. Dark magics, every bit as dark as the consumption of the flesh of your enemies to know their secrets.
She grabbed the first one by the hair. He did not resist. Her pleasure at the hot salt splash of blood on her face was a pale echo of what she felt when she made love to Bress and the Dark Man whispered to her. She kicked the corpse over the side of the boat. She had taken what she needed from it with powerful words. Let Dagon consume the flesh now, or the cowardly gods of the Goddodin. Carrion gods.
Fachtna was sitting up now. His face neutral, he translated what she was saying so the crew could understand who she was, what she was. Someone had run screaming for Hanno. He came on deck, pulling his blaidth on. Kush was next to him, naked but for a loincloth, carrying his bronze axe. The rowers were scrabbling away from Britha now. Hanno and Kush exchanged a look and Kush started forward. Fachtna stood up, still translating Britha’s words as another god-slave died with no cry of pain, nor had she begged for her life. Britha used her sickle to paint the planks of the ship with the god-slave’s blood. It ran into the gaps and dripped into the hold below.
Fachtna stood between Kush and Britha. He was leaning on his sword, which was still in its scabbard, but his message, as he continued with the translation, was clear. There was not a moment of hesitation from the tall axeman, who stepped forward, but Hanno placed a hand on Kush’s shoulder and nodded towards Germelqart. The navigator was shaking his head.
Teardrop was on his feet, but Fachtna put a hand on his shoulder and shook his head. Teardrop, not long ago, would have stopped her, would have ignored Fachtna. He watched another of the god-slaves die and get kicked overboard. Then he knew he was just as culpable as Fachtna, as Britha. He found he didn’t care about their lives.
Britha cared about their lives because she wanted them. She wanted what was left of their lives. She wanted what would have been. She would take their weak and meagre spirits. She would deny the Dark Man even the paltry strength of their weakness. She only hoped that by saying the words that stole their spirits, she would not taint herself with their weakness.
It was only after she had sawn through the final god-slave’s throat, only after her robe was soaked with their blood, only after her skin was hot and red, that she realised how grateful each of them had looked.
She turned around to face the rest of the ship. The rowers cowered away from her even as blood trickled towards them. Hanno stared at her with horror, Kush with distaste, and Teardrop’s expression was cold. Fachtna had an unpleasant-looking half-smile on his face, and the navigator, Germelqart, looked at her with approval and nodded his thanks.
Britha sat down on one of the benches with her back against the rail and hugged her legs. She could ignore the corpses in the dark water behind her but she still knew they were there. Britha did not sleep again that night, but that meant that she did not dream again either. When morning came, it brought raucous gulls to feed on the flesh of the floating dead behind them, the sun to dry the blood on wool and skin, and wind to carry them further south.
‘This is not a good place to be,’ Germelqart said. They had gone into the mouth of a river. It was not as large as the Tatha or the Black River but it had looked a reasonable size. Hanno had said that he knew the river and that the people there called it the Tamesas, meaning Grey Father, who was apparently the god of the river.
Either side was marshland. Britha could not understand how people lived here, but apparently they did or had. They knew this because they could see smoke rising from what used to be their villages.
‘This makes no sense to me,’ Hanno said. ‘These people were careful, clever people. They built their villages on mounds of dry earth in the marshes, and only those who had a guide who knew the secret ways could take you there.’
‘They would have made one of the guides drink from their chalice,’ Britha said. She still wore the blood of her victims. Flies from the marshes buzzed around her. The Will of Dagon was hidden from the main waterway of the Tamesas between a sparsely wooded island and the swampy mainland.
‘It would be easy to get trapped here,’ Germelqart said. Kush nodded in agreement.
‘You are a timid people,’ Fachtna observed dryly. Teardrop did not even admonish him for baiting the Ca
rthaginians; he was staring to the north into the marsh at the rising smoke.
‘This happened recently, I think,’ Kush said. Hanno nodded. Britha stared west. Following the snaking line of the river they could see more columns of smoke. It was definitely the work of Bress.
‘I think now we sail east to the land of the Gaul,’ Hanno started. ‘Then we hug the coast and head south regardless of how stormy it is. Their god Taranis hates and fears me, I think.’ There was a snort of derision from Fachtna. ‘Through the pillars of Hercules and back to my beloved Carthage.’
Germelqart nodded his agreement.
‘No,’ Britha said. ‘They are not on the river any more.’ She was certain of this. She had been feeling much stronger since she had taken the lives of the kneelers.
‘And the Grey Father told you this himself, did he?’ Hanno asked. His tone was derisive, but she smiled when she heard the fear there as well. They thought her a moonstruck witch now. It was a part she could play. It might even have been true.
‘We go south,’ she insisted. Hanno opened his mouth to protest.
‘We’re being watched,’ Teardrop said.
‘Frightened survivors,’ Kush said.
Teardrop pointed into the swamp. ‘And there’s something in there . . . power of some sort. It hides from me every time I reach for it.’
Fachtna turned to look at his friend with interest.
‘Madmen, demons and witches.’ Hanno spat over the side of the ship and touched an amulet that he had taken to wearing. It was a tiny effigy of Dagon carved from driftwood.
‘If Teardrop says he feels something then he feels something,’ Fachtna told them. Britha had turned to look at the man who claimed to be from a tribe called the Croatan.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
Teardrop shook his head as if concentrating. ‘Something ancient and slippery, it coils away from me every time I reach for it.’ He turned to look at Britha, then seemed surprised as if he was only now seeing her covered in drying blood. ‘I think we should go ashore.’