Bloodtide

by Melvin Burgess

  First it was the big stuff: the lorries, the tanks, the armoured vehicles. Then came the carts pulled by horses – many more of these; horses were easier to get hold of than petrol. All around the men milled, shouting and carrying torches, so fire and light accompanied them every step of the way.

  Then it was the booty. The captured machinery: our cars, our tanks, the lorries loaded with gifts for Conor. The grey-faced prisoners marching along with their hands on their heads. Slaves. I couldn’t make out their faces. Even through the binoculars and with torchlight it was too dark to tell who they were, but I knew the uniforms. But I still didn’t believe. With something like that you need every doubt to be dragged from you before you’ll allow that it really has happened.

  In the middle of it all there was a cart with a small tower of scaffolding built on top of it. A team of men dragged the tower along. When they stumbled or fell they were whipped and that told me. When did my father ever have slaves, or whip them? On the top of the tower, picked out in spotlights, was a figure, tied spread-eagled in a square of scaffolding. The head bounced and flopped as the cart bumped over the road. They were throwing stones and sticks at him. They were taking pot shots with their guns, even though he was already dead so he was just a bloody mop of rags tied up there by this time. I had to stare hard to make out anything. Of course they aimed at the face all the time and I could have fooled myself longer if I’d wanted to, but I knew my father, even after all they’d done. I knew him by his shape. I knew him by the way I began to cry as soon as I got his figure in focus.

  I took the binoculars off. I think Cherry was mewing at my feet. I didn’t care who’d done it, I just hoped and hoped it wasn’t Conor, but it didn’t matter anyway. I went to the trap door. I’d have to smash a window so I could jump out of it. But down below, the gangmen were waiting for me.

  30

  She ran straight back up to the roof as soon as she heard the door below her burst open, but there was no lock on the trap door. Everything had been thought of long ago. They pulled her down off the fence she was clinging to. In distraction she started to call for Cherry but her pet was nowhere to be seen. Her hands were cuffed behind her back and she was dragged roughly down again through the trap door. Signy screamed once in pain as they bent her arms too far back, but after that she uttered no sound, as if even her voice was worth more than these people deserved.

  The guard pushed her through the trap door like a sack of bones, and dropped her down from the top of the ladder, so she twisted as she fell and landed on her side with a sickening thud. She was pulled at once to her feet, gasping and winded, and dragged into another room. All the time she kept her silence. She was pushed to the floor. The guard cried, ‘Ma’am!’ and stood to attention.

  Signy twisted her face sideways from the carpet to see who she had been taken to. It was a woman, tall, red-headed, dressed in a business-like grey trouser suit. She was talking evenly into the phone, which had been reconnected. As she talked she stared down at her victim with eyes that looked right through her. Signy knew her from before. Conor had pointed her out often enough. This was Anne Sanderson, one of the heads of the Interior Security Forces, a high-up official in the secret police.

  The woman put down the phone still watching Signy.

  ‘Where’s Conor?’ begged Signy. But she didn’t dare ask what they had done with him.

  ‘Celebrating,’ said the woman. She smiled thinly and picked up the phone again. Signy spat.

  The woman began dialling. ‘Both legs,’ she said to the guard without looking up. They picked Signy up and carried her away into an adjoining room. She was put down on the floor, more gently this time. Three guards held her down, one pressing her shoulders onto the carpet, the other two holding tightly to her ankles. She twisted her head round and asked, ‘What about my brothers? Tell me, tell me – I want to know what has happened to my brothers.’

  One of the guards said quietly, ‘Your brothers are dead.’

  Someone else came up behind her. She caught a glimpse of a pair of wire-cutters with red plastic on the handle. One of her legs was bent halfway up at the knee and there was a searing pain at the back of her leg. At the same time there was a horrible slack sensation right up her thigh. Signy sobbed. The leg was released and fell like a joint of meat to the floor. No one bothered to hold on to it. She tried to kick but her muscles only twitched. Then, the same on the other side.

  She was panting in shock. The men were no longer bothering to hold her down. She sat up, trying to kneel to examine the wounds, but her legs wouldn’t hold and she fell back. She tried to straighten her legs but couldn’t. She pulled them out from under her and twisted round to see.

  It was the tendons behind her knees. Signy had been hamstrung. She was to be a prisoner in her own body. She would never walk straight or run again, but only hobble painfully like an old woman.

  One of the guards, the one who had spoken softly to her, picked her up in his arms. She clung to his neck like a baby, weeping. The blood poured from her leg over his arm.

  ‘Bed for you,’ he said, and he carried her up.

  31

  Siggy, Hadrian and Ben weren’t dead – not yet. Nothing so quick was planned for them.

  They made their journey to the compound tied hand and foot in the back of a horse-drawn cart. The soldiers walking alongside spat at them and threw bricks and hit them with sticks. One of the gangmen got scared they’d be killed by the time they got back, so he had them transferred to an enclosed van where they couldn’t be got at.

  Once inside the compound they were locked in a cold, oily building, obviously a garage workshop. There was a ramp with a pit under it, with a car jacked up overhead. Other cars, some half in pieces, some clean and shiny, were parked nearby. The floor was concrete, oil-stained and damp; all around the sides were work surfaces, vices and tools. On the floor where they lay was a steel girder, some bottles of gas and a pile of chains.

  The three brothers were bound in the chains. Siggy and Ben put up with the rough treatment as well as they could, but Hadrian had suffered badly in the crashes in the armoured car and couldn’t help screaming. Once they were secure, one of the men put on a thick welder’s helmet, dragged the equipment over, and began to weld their chains to the iron girder.

  He began with Had. There was the smell of hot metal, the singe of burning hair and cloth as the chains heated up. The links turned red; there was the sudden stink of scorched flesh, and Had began to scream like a madman. When he was securely welded to the beam, the man moved along the line and turned his attention to Siggy.

  Only when the work was all done and the brothers had been gagged, did a door open and out stepped Conor from the shadows.

  He did not look at them or address them. He came to stand by their feet and looked at their legs. Then he motioned to one of the guards and pointed at Siggy.

  ‘The knife,’ said Conor. ‘Hand me the knife.’

  The guard bent to Siggy’s waist and removed the knife with the blue milky blade of chipped stone and handed it to Conor. Conor smiled, for the first time. He ran his finger along the side of the blade and said, ‘You should have given it to me when I asked you,’ as if all this had been just to get the knife. Perhaps it was. He stroked the flat of the blade carefully, and smiled once more.

  ‘Leave them Outside for the Pig,’ he said, and turned to leave.

  Back in the fresh air, Conor stopped and leaned back against a wall. It had been a long day, and he had managed very little sleep for the past weeks. Seeing the brothers had exhausted him somehow. He thought of Signy locked in her tower and winced. Behind him, he could hear the screams from the brothers as ten of his men heaved the girder up into the back of one of the trucks. Conor winced again, but he smiled a moment later.

  He’d done it. He’d done what even the great Val Volson had failed to do; he’d united London. He was the one who would be remembered as King of London. And he wasn’t done yet. He hadn’t even begun. Next, it would
be the half-men. After that, the towns and cities around London – Ragnor itself.

  And now he had the knife.

  Conor looked down at the crude blade. His. He took it firmly by the handle, pressed the point against the brick of the wall he stood by, and pushed. The blade sank into the stone with a soft noise, as if he was pushing it into warm, dry sand.

  Conor smiled with delight. He had not dared try this in front of Siggy in case it refused to work for him, but now he was sorry he’d doubted himself. Odin had meant him to have it after all.

  He took the knife to draw it out again, but it refused to budge.

  Conor hissed with frustration and heaved, but it was set solid. He looked around him to make sure he was alone before putting his all into it. It would be awful to be caught straining at this greatest prize of all like a silly weak boy. He tried again, put his foot to the wall, tugged and strained. But the knife was immovable. Now he would have to get his men to chip it out, and the word would be around the compound in a day. Conor was livid.

  As he stared at the thing in the wall in hatred, there was sudden movement in front of him and Conor leaped up into the air with a squeal of fright.

  It was a child, a girl aged about ten. She seemed to have come from nowhere. She had no fear. She stood there and stared as if she knew all his secrets.

  ‘You’re a fool,’ said the child. ‘Don’t you realise that you love her?’

  Conor gaped. The child scowled at him and walked away, turning into a doorway a little way along. Conor was still trembling – she’d seemed to spring out of the earth – before he was overtaken by a tremendous anger. He ran along the wall to the door and followed her in.

  It was a small room, a storeroom for stacks of cheap plastic chairs. The only other door was closed and he would surely have heard it open. The girl must be hiding amongst the chairs.

  Conor turned his rage on them, heaving them and hurling them to one side, but there was no one there – only a small cat that ran out past his feet. He got down to peer along the floor, but there was nothing to see. She must have slipped out after all. He opened the door that led into the building and looked down the corridor. Nothing.

  As he stood there, confused and upset, it occurred in a flash to Conor that this was impossible, that the girl hadn’t behaved like a girl, but had appeared like a dream and disappeared again like one. The most likely explanation for what had happened was that he had seen a hallucination – a waking dream. What the girl had said, he must have made her say. He sat down on one of the chairs. He began to tremble again. Inside himself he could feel an avalanche of tears. He sat and waited for them, but as usual they never came. His father Abel had done his work well when Conor was a child. No quantity of tears could break through the mask of iron the old man had built around his son’s heart.

  32

  siggy

  It was early September, green just going yellow. Lovely day. Great swathes of fireweed gone all flossy. The air was full of fluffy seeds. There were blocks of woodland growing up in the old gardens, there were trees pushing up through the pavements, pushing through the roads, pushing down the walls. A whole house – well, a heap of rubble and a few walls, really, but it was all covered with this brilliant red creeper. Walls tumbled down, rubble piled up. It was a half town for the halfmen. You’d have called it pretty if you didn’t know what was waiting there for us.

  I thought of all the men and women who’d ended up like this, tortured and broken, set up to die in the worst way possible. Why go to such trouble to make us suffer? That was Conor for you. He didn’t just want defeat. He wanted humiliation.

  The Land Rover bumped and banged over the potholes and bricks. Had was screaming and gibbering, he’d seemed to get everything worse than me and Ben. He’d broken his ankle and some ribs in the armoured car, and then when they found us Conor’s men had really taken it out on him. They spent a good five minutes just kicking him. You could hear his ribs breaking. I thought it was going to be our turn next, but for some reason they didn’t bother.

  The Land Rover ground to a halt and the soldiers jumped out.

  ‘Feeding time!’

  ‘You’re going to see some sights tonight. You ain’t gonna live to tell anyone about it.’

  It took ten of them to lift the beam down. We hung groaning in our chains, then they dropped the whole thing heavily on the ground. One of them bent down and pulled hard at my hand to make me cry out. ‘Doesn’t hurt any less just because you’re gonna die, does it, boy?’

  They spent a little time tormenting us, kicking at our hands in the welded shackles to make us scream, but the officer with them put a stop to it. I think he and a few of the others might have been sympathetic – we could have done with someone to put some damp cloth between our wrists and the metal – but no one dared help us in case one of the others told. After he’d ordered them back into the cars he looked at us and just shrugged before he jumped in afterwards and they all drove off.

  You want to be brave, for the others as much as yourself. But you can’t. You can bite your tongue, you can pretend, but inside… that’s something else. You can’t help being afraid.

  There was a building to one side collapsed like a pack of huge cards, layers of it all fallen down on top of each other. I think it had been a multi-storey car park. We were on a sort of meadow of dry, thin soil, full of moss and seedy little plants. I think it had been an area of tarmac once. Here and there little birch trees and buddleia pushed through. A rusted, half-torn-up metal sign with a few scraps of paint lay nearby. In front of us was a stripe of the same thin mossy ground, where a road once ran.

  I said, ‘Looks like a good place for a picnic,’ but no one laughed.

  As the day warmed up Had began to pant like a dog. He was so far gone. He was always the one with the cool head, but he was really suffering. He kept calling for water. Ben did a clever thing and started to sing to him, the songs our nan used to sing to us all when we were small. That calmed him down. Every now and then he seemed to come to.

  ‘Have you got your knife?’ he asked me. ‘You can cut us free.’

  ‘Conor took it, Had.’

  ‘Conor took everything,’ he said.

  But we didn’t speak much. There wasn’t any ‘How bad are you?’ stuff. What for? I tried to jolly everyone along with a few more wisecracks about picnics and who would taste the best, and maybe they’d leave Ben alone because of his flavour. Ben and I sung songs for a bit. Had joined in for a while, but then off he went again, panting and raving. I hated that, because he was the best of us. We tried to turn off, but he went on and on. There was nothing else to listen to, just the birdsong when he drew breath. We wanted so much to go and help him.

  I found myself thinking about Signy. What had Conor done to her? And I wondered – I knew it was hardly possible, but you never knew with my sister – I wondered if she’d manage to get help to us.

  After about an hour, the Birds came.

  Had spotted them first. He’d passed out for a while. There was a merciful silence, but when I looked across again his eyes were wide open and he was staring up into the sky straight above him. I looked up, and there they were.

  They were high up at that point, little shapes with silver wings circling high overhead. You could hear their calls as they came lower, but it wasn’t until they were as big as gulls that we could hear what they were saying.

  ‘We’re coming, we’re coming, we’re coming, ahh, we’re coming,’ they screamed. They had voices like yelling children. But maybe they were only tormenting us because they didn’t come – not yet, anyway. When they were maybe twenty metres above us they stopped and just circled round and round. Perhaps they were suspicious that the guards were using us as bait.

  They circled for another half an hour, calling, ‘We’re coming, soon, soon, soon, soon…’ in their high, funny voices. Then they began to swoop in lower and the call changed. ‘Hungry, hungry, hungry,’ they cried. Pretty soon we could make out th
eir faces in the pale light: cruel white wedges with dark eyes and fleshy beaks armed with yellow teeth. They were about the size of a child, with slim, tight bodies covered in black, glossy feathers like a rook’s, and wings as big as doors. They began to quarrel even before they’d touched down. ‘Mine, mine, mine… leave him, leave him, leave him…’ They were down so low we could feel the wind off their wings. Then the first couple landed, bouncing along a few steps and holding their wings above their backs. They settled, folded their wings, and began to step over towards us. Their feet were iron-clad.

  And then something began to bellow.

  For a dreadful second I thought it was Had, but no human throat spoke like that. It was like nothing on earth – squealing, screaming and roaring all at the same time. We all tried to jump to our feet and jarred against our chains. The birds screeched and reversed back into the air, flapping desperately. There was a gale from their wings. They were furious. I could see their beaks opening and closing. There was a brief gap while whatever it was drew breath and you could hear the birds. ‘Hungry, hungry, hungry… Ours, ours, ours, ours, ours…’ they cried. Then they were drowned out again as the bellowing started up again.

  Something was crashing in the undergrowth around the collapsed car park. I could see a huge bulk moving amongst the brambles. Then it pushed its way through, still screaming, and charged us.

  I think it was once a pig. It was huge… and so ugly! All pock-marked skin and stink. It had a vast head, the long snout filled with crooked yellow tusks. But things had been done to it. At the back its feet were clawed, but at the front it had hands – thick sinewy hands pounding the earth underneath it. Its body was bristly and pink, half pig, half man. Its shoulders were fat and muscly. Its face was all pig except that it had some sort of beard right up to its piggy eyes, and its mouth was too full of tusks.