The Beauty of Destruction

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘I am not manhandling a ban draoi,’ Calgacus said. Britha translated. There were mutters of agreement.

  ‘She is no longer a …’ Bladud started. Calgacus held up his hand.

  ‘We can discuss this matter once things have been made right. If you do not agree then draw your sword.’ There were more than a few sharp intakes of breath from the assembled crowd. ‘In fact, let’s not waste your warriors’ lives. You have a grievance, you have wronged me, let’s you and I sort this. Draw your blade.’

  ‘Do you think I fear you?’ Bladud asked quietly.

  ‘No. You may even be a challenge, perhaps you will kill me.’ Then Calgacus smiled. ‘Why else would I be prepared to fight you?’ Britha finished translating and it went quiet. ‘Because we could do all the talking and posturing that seems to be so common. We could drip honeyed words, laced with venom, in each other’s ears, but when it comes down to it, you say a thing is one way, I say it is another, and when all else has failed there is one final way to decide which of us is right. Or are the laws different down here?’ Britha finished translating.

  ‘The laws are the same,’ Bladud acknowledged. There were nods from the crowd. Britha was aware of more of the gwyllion joining the crowd.

  ‘Then we fight,’ Calgacus said. ‘Or you take your hands from the ban draoi and you can drink my uisge beatha, as my guest at my fire.’

  Bladud let go of her arm.

  ‘I am sorry that you feel wronged,’ Bladud said. Calgacus nodded to his people, who stepped away from the Brigante and Trinovantes warriors and sheathed their weapons, but kept their hands on the hilts of their swords. Calgacus gestured Bladud towards his fire. ‘I have my duties as rhi, as well.’ Bladud sat on one of the logs around the fire and Calgacus handed him an earthen jug with the fiery clear liquid in it. Britha shook Garim’s hand off her and went to stand on Calgacus’s left shoulder, on the other side of the mormaer from where Bladud sat.

  ‘But there is a right way to do things,’ Calgacus said. ‘There’s always the sword and brand when the time comes.’

  ‘I was tasked by Moren, arch dryw of Ynys Dywyll, to take Britha prisoner, to be delivered to him to be burned for her crimes.’

  Calgacus nodded, playing the thoughtful mormaer. ‘And what has she been accused of?’ he asked.

  ‘She is guilty of murdering Nils, the previous arch dryw,’ Bladud told Calgacus, raising his voice slightly. There were more gasps and mutterings. Britha was aware of eyes on her. Anharad was staring at her with undisguised hatred. She saw Guidgen whispering urgently to those around him.

  ‘Guilty?’ Calgacus asked.

  ‘Aye, she was tried by Moren, who was forced to step into Nils’ position,’ Bladud continued. Britha could not help herself, she let out a snort of derision. ‘She was tried by the arch dryw.’

  ‘I see. This is grievous indeed.’ Calgacus glanced up at Britha. ‘Did you kill this man?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Britha said.

  ‘She was seen by the arch dryw himself,’ Bladud said. Calgacus was studying the Witch King as he spoke. This time he hadn’t raised his voice to make the accusation, though he was speaking in the language of the Pecht.

  ‘It was my warning cry that awoke Moren,’ said Britha. ‘I saw someone kneeling over Nils. I went to help the arch dryw, and whoever the figure was fled. I called for help. Moren made the accusation pretty much on the spot. A little while later Madawg came in the other door.’

  ‘What’s she saying?’ Madawg demanded, having heard his name among the words spoken in Pecht. ‘I have a right to know.’

  ‘She seeks to cast blame on good warriors—’ Ysgawyn started.

  ‘Piss breeks, you may not speak in this camp,’ Calgacus said. Britha translated, she saw Tangwen grin.

  ‘How convenient,’ Ysgawyn spat.

  ‘He will kill you,’ Britha warned him.

  ‘Can you prove that Madawg did it?’ Calgacus asked.

  ‘No more than they can that I did,’ Britha said.

  ‘Then do not cast aspersions. You’re better than that,’ Calgacus said evenly. Britha stared at the Cait mormaer. He might as well have slapped her. ‘I do not think that she did this,’ Calgacus told Bladud.

  ‘And I do not think that she is the person you once knew,’ Bladud said. ‘She ran because she feared the consequences.’

  ‘I ran because Nils’ death served Moren and yourself, and neither I or Guidgen could work out why you brought Madawg along with you.’

  ‘What is she saying?’ Madawg demanded.

  ‘She’s talking about how you murdered the arch dryw to profit his successor and Bladud,’ Tangwen said in her southern Pretani tongue. A language that enough of them could understand. Now all eyes were on Bladud. The Witch King glared at the huntress, who held his look. He turned away first.

  ‘Did you not learn your lesson?’ Madawg asked, leering at Tangwen, expecting the young woman, his defeated foe, to look away from him. She didn’t.

  ‘Tangwen, can you prove what you say?’ Calgacus demanded. The hunter stared at the Cait mormaer. ‘Then you should not be making such insinuations either.’ Tangwen looked unhappy but Britha noted that Calgacus had not interrupted her when she had raised suspicions about Madawg and the Witch King. She assumed that Bladud was under no illusions as to what was happening.

  ‘I was there as well,’ Guidgen started. Britha translated his words into the Pecht tongue for the Cait. ‘It is as Britha says.’

  ‘Prove it!’ Ysgawyn demanded. Calgacus stood up and punched him very hard. Madawg and Gwynn, the other surviving member of the Corpse People, went for their swords.

  ‘Enough!’ Bladud roared before turning on Calgacus. ‘The time for her to prove her innocence was on Ynys Dywyll!’ Britha translated. Calgacus sat back down again.

  ‘She would not have received a fair trial!’ Guidgen cried. ‘And when do we try you? And Madawg?’

  ‘Try it, old man!’ Madawg spat.

  ‘So you would harm a dryw?’ Tangwen asked loudly.

  ‘I have the right to a trial by combat,’ Britha said.

  ‘I will stand for the arch dryw, I will avenge Nils!’ Madawg cried.

  ‘You cannot fight a dryw,’ Guidgen said. There were a lot of muttered agreements.

  ‘She is no longer a dryw,’ Bladud said.

  ‘That is not a decision that Moren can make,’ Britha said, exasperated now. At best she saw this descending into shouting, at worst violence.

  ‘See!’ Madawg howled. ‘She would defy the arch dryw!’

  ‘I cast aside the protection of ban draoi! Let’s you and I fight!’ Britha screamed at Madawg. Almost immediately she knew she had let anger get the better of her. Calgacus was sitting quietly on his log looking at the fire, occasionally poking at it with a stick.

  ‘Britha, you are with child!’ Guidgen pointed out.

  ‘I will stand as her champion!’ Tangwen said quietly. It took a moment for her words to sink in, for the crowd to quieten down. Then mocking laughter filled the air.

  ‘A fight I have already won,’ Madawg finally said.

  ‘Then it will not prove a challenge to you,’ Tangwen said.

  ‘I do not think that this is a good idea—’ Calgacus started in Pecht.

  ‘No,’ Britha told the younger woman. Tangwen turned to look at the Pecht dryw.

  ‘I always welcome your counsel, ban draoi,’ Tangwen said, somewhat formally. ‘But I do not think that this is your decision to make.’

  ‘The time for trial by combat was at Ynys Dywyll—’ Bladud started.

  ‘She has the right to trial by combat and to a champion,’ Guidgen said, sounding resigned. ‘You know that is the case. If she is guilty then you have nothing to fear, Madawg will be triumphant.’ Britha translated for Calgacus, who was looking between Tangwen and Madawg.

  ‘This is foolish,’ Madawg said. ‘There is no need for a fight, the outcome is inevitable. I spared her once. She may as well kill herself and we can b
e about the arch dryw’s business.’

  ‘Then you have nothing to fear,’ Guidgen said again, though he sounded uneasy. Britha looked at Tangwen. The younger woman’s face was expressionless. If she feared Madawg it was well hidden.

  ‘Let me make this simple for you,’ Tangwen told Madawg. ‘I know, as the gods know, that you killed this Nils, and this will be proven when the gods judge you with my axe and knife.’

  Madawg leant in towards Tangwen. Britha was aware of Tangwen recoiling slightly.

  ‘This … nonsense … this insult to honour, is what comes of warriors not being allowed to take their rightful spoils, of not properly breaking their defeated—’

  Tangwen spat in his face. Madawg went quiet, his face turning red, eyes bulging. Tangwen had a wry smile on her face.

  ‘I will rape you as you lie dying!’ he screamed. ‘The last thing you will see is my f—’

  ‘You really are frightened of me, aren’t you?’ Tangwen said. Madawg stared at her. He seemed to have lost the ability to speak. He went for his sword.

  ‘No!’ Ysgawyn screamed. Madawg’s scream joined his master’s only to be cut off a moment later by a wet choking noise. Tangwen’s axe had bit into his knee. The slash that opened his throat had looked almost casual, though Britha knew how difficult it was to cut a throat. Usually you had to saw at it. It took a lot of force to do what Tangwen had just done. She had half-severed the Corpse People warrior’s head, with a dirk. Madawg staggered back, dripping red onto the snow beneath him. He let go of his sword, the blade sliding back into its sheath. He hadn’t even half drawn it. Tangwen watched him impassively as he reached up for his own throat, the blood-drunk magics in Madawg’s flesh warring with, and losing to, the chalice-forged venoms of Tangwen’s dirk. He sank to his knees. Tangwen stepped to one side and he fell face-down to further stain the snow.

  Calgacus also watched him fall.

  ‘Well, I think that concludes that,’ the Cait mormaer said.

  Tangwen turned to make her way through the crowd. The warriors parted for her, eager to get out of the hunter’s way. The Witch King was staring down at Madawg, horrified. He opened his mouth to protest.

  ‘You clearly have the guilty party there,’ Guidgen said loudly. Britha noticed that Calgacus was watching Tangwen leave, grinning. ‘The gods must have acted through Tangwen because of Madawg’s guilt, or how else would you explain her defeating someone we know was her better so easily? The only question remains is, did Madawg have any help?’

  The murmurs of agreement among the assembled warriors and spear-carriers were increasing in volume. Bladud stood up and walked away with as much grace as he could muster.

  ‘I think the little southron girl fooled us all,’ Calgacus mused.

  ‘And used Madawg’s fear against him. He made a stupid mistake,’ Britha said, but she too had been taken in by Tangwen’s performance. The hunter had taken her life in her hands during the first challenge because she had taken Madawg seriously enough to see him as a threat, to go looking for a weakness.

  Britha watched Bladud stalk into flurries of snow with Anharad and the rest of his retinue, Ysgawyn hurrying to catch up with the Witch King.

  Calgacus followed her look.

  ‘And I think it is a dangerous thing to humiliate a rhi,’ he mused. Britha nodded. ‘Do you think Tangwen will want the head?’ Calgacus asked, looking at Madawg’s body.

  ‘No, it is an ugly thing,’ Britha said, distracted. She had just realised that Germelqart was nowhere to be seen, nor was the chalice. She hadn’t even seen Tangwen hand it off to the Carthaginian.

  Germelqart understood enough about himself to know that it was not the snow that made him cold. He no longer felt the cold in that way. It was the sight of the snow and the trick his mind played on him. It was what the Greeks called the psyche that made him shiver under his furs.

  He knew he shouldn’t be out here on his own. It risked his discovery by the Lochlannach, but he had had enough of the noisy, violent, foul-smelling barbarians and their moonstruck ways for one day. He could make out the wards, drawn by the tiny glowing demons from the chalice, in the air. They would warn him if anyone approached.

  He was sitting on a small rock outcrop looking down at the campfires. The night was mostly free of cloud. The stars and moonlight made the snow-covered valley glow. They were a fractious people. It occurred to him that what they really needed was a strong leader like Bladud, who they kept undermining, to truly bring them victory, tyrant or no. He thought of the Achaemenids. Sometimes what you needed was a bit of tyranny.

  Germelqart closed his eyes. He felt along the threads the demons from the chalice had drawn subtly in the cold night air. He felt Selbach’s fear … no, his terror. The scout’s trews were full of his own soil. He saw through the scout’s eyes. Then the Carthaginian felt his heart start to hammer in his chest. He pushed down his own fear. Selbach was on Oeth, the island itself, standing on the highest level of the tower of bone. He felt strong, powerful fingers gripping his shoulder. Bress.

  ‘I found him in the tunnels as I returned,’ the tall, pale warrior from the Otherworld said.

  ‘There’s someone else looking through his eyes,’ the tall man with skin the colour of obsidian said. ‘Is that you, my old friend?’

  Germelqart almost soiled himself. He was struggling to catch his breath. Selbach knew their plans! He had helped find the path. With a thought, tendrils grew from Selbach’s demon eyes, gifted to him by the chalice. The tendrils sought the Cait scout’s memories. The last thing Germelqart saw through Selbach’s eyes was the Dark Man reaching for him. The Carthaginian withdrew and burned every demon between there and where he sat.

  He felt a different kind of cold now. Now the Pretani barbarians needed to act. He stood and started running down the hill towards the camp.

  Crom Dhubh was looking thoughtfully at the blank-faced, now-blind, drooling man. Bress assumed that he was some kind of scout. His face was painted grey like the rocks. His furs and other clothing were stained the same.

  ‘They have found another way here?’ Bress asked, looking around. The ice was so thick that the island was no longer the good defensive position it had been. His eyes lingered over the boned bodies frozen in the ice.

  ‘It does not matter. They are no threat to us,’ Crom Dhubh said.

  ‘They stopped you at the wicker man and they destroyed the Muileartach’s spawn,’ Bress pointed out.

  ‘Because we let them,’ Crom Dhubh said. He didn’t seem to be entirely paying attention. ‘The Dragon’s Voice?’

  Bress opened the pouch on his belt and pulled out the smooth, faintly flesh-like, eight-sided stone that he had taken from the dead dragon he had found on the seabed between the three islands.

  ‘This one is as good a vessel as any. He will sing the song to the Naga, he will call them.’

  Crom Dhubh’s touch made Bress feel nauseous as he took the stone and pressed it against the man’s forehead. The stone started to grow through the captured scout’s head. His body shook as he spat and drooled. Then the stone was gone. Skin grew over the man’s eyes, as a reptilian eye grew in the centre of his head and his skin started to scale.

  ‘Start the preparations. You will go with him,’ Crom Dhubh said, and then turned to his silver-haired warrior-slave. ‘You need only live long enough for him to sing his song.’

  26

  Now

  Beth had thought it would be like driving through the movies, but it wasn’t. It was clear this had been just another poor city with factories and slums, though at least the weather was nicer and there were palm trees.

  She was wondering how much atrocity she would have to see before she became inured to it. She was sure that Bradford was the same, Portsmouth arguably worse, but there was just something about America: everything had to be bigger and better. Everything she saw made her want to close her eyes or to intervene, but they couldn’t fight the whole city. Du Bois had made it clear that they were no longer
the same species. For the majority of humanity only the flesh remained. So that makes it okay, then? she thought bitterly. And what about the sane ones?

  She wondered why they weren’t attacked. Sure, they were in an armoured military vehicle, but she had seen groups of marines, presumably from Camp Pendleton, the base between southern Los Angeles and San Diego, subjugating entire neighbourhoods as if they were in Iraq. But they had just watched them drive by in their stolen USAF vehicle. They were ridiculously well-armed, but they weren’t that ridiculously well-armed. Did the insane know? Were they somehow aware of the alien tech circulating through Alexia’s, du Bois’s and her own veins? Were they top of the food chain in this city of atrocities? The idea seemed absurd. She could feel the biological nanites in the air, sporing from the ocean. It wasn’t as overt as what had happened in Portsmouth, but she was starting to see the physiological changes to the people of LA. They were slowly being mutated. There was some kind of strange design ethos to the mutation. Du Bois had called it terraforming. Beth had thought he had said terror at first, until her neuralware had made her aware of the mistake. She suspected that even the city’s architecture was starting to warp.

  She should have gone to the moors. She had always liked the moors and now she knew how to survive there. Or she could have stayed in du Bois’s castle. Or stayed in the desert, but it had been too late then. She had found out about her father. The worst thing was, she understood that it had just been another job for du Bois. It hadn’t been personal to him. Somehow, despite how angry she was, despite her disgust at how easy it was for him to kill without a thought of the consequences, somehow she couldn’t quite bring herself to hate him, which just made her feel all the guiltier. Now she was trapped in this city with little choice but to play this out as far as it went, to grudgingly cooperate with du Bois and his sister. At least Alexia showed some reaction to the horror around them.

  They had come down out of the Hollywood Hills and back into the smog- and smoke-filled basin of the city proper. They had avoided the freeways because every time they got near them stray shots bounced off the ECV’s armour. They had also avoided the strangely intact downtown. The city still had power. From the hills it had been like a map traced out in light. The skyscrapers still looked open for business despite the chaos. It was eerie.