You Die When You Die

by Angus Watson

  None of the children further along the beach had spotted him yet—they were busy arguing about something—and neither had Thyri, so he stood and watched her for a while.

  She was barefoot, as always, wearing the Scrayling fighting garb that she’d made herself: a short leather jerkin and a breechcloth made from two squares of leather hanging from a belt, one at the back, one at the front. On her head was the padded felt and horn hat which she’d made herself too, copying the design of Garth’s iron helmet which the ancestors had brought from the old world.

  As far as Finnbogi was concerned, Thyri had the sort of figure that men sung songs about, but she could not be called a slender girl. Everyone said it was because of the maple syrup and sugar which the Scrayling boys had been bringing her for years. She didn’t pay much attention to the donors, but she gobbled their gifts readily enough.

  Still prancing about in mock battle, she threw her sax aside as if it had been whacked out of her hand. She ripped her two small axes from their holders on the back of her shield, tossed the shield away, leapt at Olaf’s Tree, dug her axes into the trunk, gripped the bark with her feet and scaled the trunk in the blink of an eye, like some demon insect.

  Maybe, conceded Finnbogi, if he was being entirely objective, she did deserve to be in the Hird more than he did.

  She paused near the top of the tree and caught sight of him.

  “Hey there, Boggy!” she shouted, hanging out from the trunk on one axe and waving the other.

  Finnbogi winced and muttered, “It’s Finn” through gritted teeth and waved with his free hand. To show that he wasn’t standing there staring at her, he walked on towards the arguing children, the tree stump on his shoulder suddenly heavier than before.

  The children had stopped hanging fish to concentrate on bickering. The argument was between Freydis the Annoying, Finnbogi’s sort of sister, and all the rest of the little buggers. This was no surprise. It was about Ottar the Moaner, Freydis’s older brother and Finnbogi’s sort of younger brother. That wasn’t a surprise either.

  Freydis stood, feet planted in the shingle, fists on her hips, shouting up at the larger girls Raskova the Spiteful and Marina the Farter, twin daughters of Jarl Brodir the Gorgeous.

  “No, Ottar can’t speak,” Freydis declared in her high-pitched, sing-song voice, “but he doesn’t need to to be a lot cleverer than both of you put together. You can both speak but neither of you has ever said anything interesting or useful, ever. And you smell. Especially you, Marina the Farter.”

  Finnbogi smiled. She might be only six, but you did not want to upset Freydis the Annoying.

  “We are Jarl’s daughters and your mummy and daddy are dead and you will not speak to us like that!” spat Raskova, poking Freydis in the chest. “Ottar’s said stupid things and scared people and we’re going to punish him by throwing him in the lake.”

  “Where we will hold him under until he’s sorry!” squeaked Marina.

  Behind Freydis, Ottar picked up a stone, threw it in the air, watched it rise and fall, then repeated the procedure.

  Freydis laughed. “What did Ottar say, Raskova the Spiteful? He can’t speak, you just said it yourself, you racoon-headed dimbo!”

  “We mean what you said he said!” Raskova tried to poke her again but Freydis dodged.

  “Which bit of what I said he said? I say he says a lot of things.”

  “You said he said that we’re all going to be killed! By Scraylings! Which is stupid because the Scraylings look after us. Their gods tell them to. They’d never kill us. My daddy said that what Ottar said—I mean what you said Ottar said—is dangerous, and he needs to be punished.”

  “He doesn’t need to be punished. We all need to run away. If he says the Scraylings are going to kill us, then they are going to kill us. He’s right. He’s always right.”

  “He’s always a silly boy who can’t talk and you just make up what he says and you’re stupid.” Raskova took a step forward and towered over little Freydis. Freydis glared up at her.

  Ottar put a hand on his little sister’s shoulder and gestured at her to come away.

  “What’s he saying now? That you should scurry off like baby chickens and cry about your dead mummy?”

  “No,” Freydis grinned. “He said that you look like a fish’s bottom, and that your daddy goes into the woods and begs the bears to put their pee-pees up his bottom but they won’t because he doesn’t know how to wipe his bottom and it’s covered in crusty old poo!”

  “That’s it!” Raskova’s eyes looked as if they were going to explode out of her head. “Marina, hold Freydis. I’ll drag the moron into the lake.”

  “All right, all right,” said Finnbogi, “that’s enough now.”

  “Shut up, Boggy,” squeaked Marina.

  “Yes, Boggy,” chimed in Raskova. “You can’t talk to us like that. We’re Jarl Brodir’s children and you and your silly sister and your sillier brother are orphans and—”

  “He said that’s enough. Go home, the lot of you.” It was Thyri Treelegs. She strode past Finnbogi, felt helmet in one hand, shield in the other, her scabbarded sax slapping her leg every other stride. Her black hair was sweat-glued to her forehead and swinging in a long plaited tail behind her. Finnbogi caught a whiff of her musky, maple-sugary scent.

  She loomed over Marina and Raskova.

  “Off you go, now, both of you.”

  “But we’re meant to be smoking the fish!”

  “Then get on with that. If I hear that you’ve been troubling Ottar or Freydis again, I’ll smoke you on the racks.”

  “But Ottar has been saying the Scraylings are going to kill us all.”

  Thyri raised an eyebrow. “What’s this, Freydis?”

  Freydis sighed exaggeratedly. “Ottar says that a lot of Scraylings are going to come and kill us.”

  “The Goachica?”

  “No. Different Scraylings.”

  “You see!” shouted Raskova.

  “Fish.” Thyri pointed at the smoking racks. The sisters stomped off. “Go on, Freydis.”

  “He says we have to leave now, head west, west of west, and go to The Meadows. We’ll find a home there.”

  “The Meadows?” Thyri wrinkled her nose. Finnbogi looked at her, then out over the vast lake. He shivered. There were not many Hardworkers, about a hundred in all, and the unknown land all around them seemed endless. There could have been an army ten thousand-strong coming to attack from any of a hundred directions and they wouldn’t know until it was on them.

  What was more, Freydis often reported Ottar’s prophesies—that there was a bear coming, that there’d be a storm the day after tomorrow, harmless things like that—and, as far as Finnbogi knew, he’d never been wrong. He’d predicted that they’d all get covered in shit, or poo, as Freydis had put it on his behalf, the day before the flock of crowd pigeons had started to fly over.

  “Yes, we have to go west of west to The Meadows. That’s what he said.”

  “Where is The Meadows?” asked Finnbogi.

  “West of west, that’s all he says. I don’t know what it means but I know we have to go. Stay here and we die.”

  Chapter Four

  Sofi

  Sofi Tornado ducked and smashed one attacker’s knee with the blunt face of her stone axe. She continued the swing to bring the weapon’s sharp side into the temple of the man who’d come at her from behind and was wondering how she’d known to duck.

  She heard another warrior running at her and leapt to meet him. An arrow zipped into his neck and he staggered. She glared up at Sitsi Kestrel, standing on a roof with her bow.

  “Sorry!” shouted Sitsi, the youngest and shortest of the Owsla, her abnormally large eyes even wider than usual with what might have been sincerity.

  Sofi Tornado, the Owsla captain, had trained to fight every day since early childhood. Like all the Owsla, she had her own alchemy-given skill which gave her an edge in battle. While Sitsi Kestrel could see as well as the bird that prov
ided her nickname and shoot the legs off a wasp from a hundred paces, Sofi had preternatural hearing and could anticipate the moves of twenty attackers by the sound of feet shifting on the ground, by the swish of sleeves, by catches of breath and in a thousand other ways. Everyone said that she could see a second into the future. That wasn’t true. But it suited her to let the rumour roll.

  The arrow-struck attacker fell. There were no others nearby who weren’t either dead or as good as, apart from the two that Malilla Leaper was fending off with her battle staff. They were large men, brothers by the look of them, armed with hefty wooden clubs the shape of a bird’s wings. Malilla could have finished them in moments, but she was enjoying herself. Despite her height—she was taller than most men—she was leaping about like a cat on hot stone, blocking every attack and jabbing painful strikes through every gap.

  Sofi wanted those men dead, and now. She whipped her obsidian knife from its sheath. Bumping Malilla aside with an exquisitely weighted nudge, she slit one man’s throat and drove her knife up through the jaw of the other.

  As the men fell, she heard Malilla prepare for a leaping strike—against her. She sidestepped and Malilla flew above, her heavy battle staff flashing through the air where Sofi’s head had been a moment before. The Leaper landed and snarled at the Owsla leader, battle staff twitching and ready. Dark eyes bulged and high cheekbones looked even sharper than normal. Malilla had a hard face at the most benign of times. In her rage she looked like she was carved from the same obsidian as the Owsla captain’s knife.

  Sofi Tornado smiled. “Come on then.”

  Malilla Leaper smiled back and lowered her staff. “I’m joking.”

  She hadn’t been joking. Malilla had meant to hit her with that blow, that wasn’t the question. The question was whether it had been an instinctive retaliation because she’d had her prey snatched from her—which Sofi could relate to—or whether Malilla wanted her dead.

  Whatever it was, the answer would have to wait because she could hear thirty or so more Goachica coming in hard from the south. She leapt round to meet them, half an ear on Malilla Leaper.

  Chapter 5

  Erik the Angry

  In Lakchan territory, three hundred and fifty miles to the north of Sofi Tornado and Calnia, twenty miles to the west of Finnbogi the Boggy and Hardwork, Erik the Angry strode up a woodland path.

  The bright air trilled with birdsong, the morning was warm and Erik was naked, apart from a small leather backpack containing a few tools. He’d hide if he heard any of the local Lakchan tribe approaching. The Lakchans deemed nudity highly offensive, which Erik still found a little surprising, given how foul-mouthed they were. It was something to do with their chief god Rabbit Girl. Or was it her enemy Spider Mother? One of those two gods hated nudity anyway, so the Lakchans did, too. More fool them. Their lives must have been much the less without ever experiencing the liberating shiver of a morning breeze on the bollocks—or across the vagina. He guessed it was the same for women, or at least similar. Perhaps better? Maybe a breeze across the tits was a delight? Whatever, Erik still thought it odd that the Lakchans found nudity offensive, given that the foul-mouthed fuckers swore every other word. Twenty years with the Lakchans, and he was a long way from working them out.

  Cottontail rabbits ran as he approached, zigzagging away along the path, then stopping, looking back, starting fearfully as if seeing him for the first time and zigzagging off again, still along the path. If you want to escape, run off the path, into the undergrowth he tried to tell them, but cottontails never listened, or at least they never heard. Like all herbivores, rabbits were dumb.

  Erik arrived at his hillside clearing, sat on his bee-watching bench and enjoyed the glow of the sun on his skin. It was the first time he’d gone naked that year, and it was definitely the day for it. The winter had been a shocker, with two snowstorms worse than even the oldest Lakchan could remember. The Hardworkers had said the sun was some lady with a cart. The Scraylings reckoned it was Innowak the swan, permanently fleeing Wangobok the lion, who was the moon, or something along those lines. Whoever was right, Erik was glad that the swan or the lady was actually generating some heat for once.

  Bees buzzed about the wicker hives. Some headed out, flower-bound, others returned from floral missions, all working hard to make mead for Erik.

  Although little more than a rise, the hill was the highest ground for miles. Beyond the bees the view stretched out over grassland, lakes, reed-beds, woods, spinneys and lone trees, all edges softened by shrouds of morning mist. Dozens of white-tailed deer picked their way through long grass. The elder ones stopped regularly, ears pricked and heads high on taut necks, scanning for danger. None spotted the lion slinking towards them from the west, despite the obvious stirrings in the grass. Deer probably weren’t as stupid as rabbits, but there wasn’t much in it.

  Erik began to sing, a song he’d learnt as a child about a man who was too fat to sit on a horse. He knew that a horse was a beast from the old world that people sat on to go about the place, or at least the slimmer ones did—it was the same beast that drew the sun’s cart—but he had no idea what the animal looked like. He could hardly remember what a Hardworker looked like. It had been twenty years since he’d seen someone from his old tribe. He saw Scraylings often enough, and knew that Hardworkers were pretty much the same shape—same number of legs, arms and so on—but he knew from his reflection in the lakes that a Hardworker was a larger, paler, lighter and shaggier-haired creation than your average Scrayling.

  As he sang, the buzzing of the bees throbbed along in harmony. When he reached the chorus—And that’s why they called him Igor the Walker—the bees rose in a buzzy cloud and flew away, down the hill to the stand of broadleaved trees where Erik had built another set of wicker hives.

  He nodded to himself, standing and singing the last of the bees out of the hive. It was a neat trick. Was it neat enough to get him back into Hardwork? Would Tarben Lousebeard, or whoever was Jarl now, see his ability to muster bees and allow him back in? No, Hardwork law was clear. If any Hardworker saw an exiled man, it was their duty to kill him. It wasn’t like Erik wanted to go back anyway. He liked it here and the idea of complicating his life by rejoining the Hardworkers made him shudder.

  He took his knife from his backpack, lifted the top off the hive and sliced out two lumps of honey-dripping comb. As he returned to his bench, a gigantic she-bear padded into the clearing. On all fours, she was as tall as Erik, with a head the size of a buffalo’s. She lifted her short snout, sniffed the air and moaned.

  The huge animal walked over to the hives, limping a little on her front left paw. She spotted Erik and roared, displaying fangs that could have bitten through his torso with as much trouble as he had biting through honeycomb. Erik stood still.

  The bear paced towards him, dropped heavily on its bottom, placed its forepaws on its knees and sat, regarding him evenly.

  “Good morning, Astrid,” said Erik. “Something in your paw then?”

  “Aaarrrrhgggghhh,” agreed Astrid the bear, lifting said paw.

  As Erik examined the gigantic foot, he heard it again. A voice from nowhere and everywhere filled his mind.

  “Come and find The Meadows,” it crooned. “Come west and find The Meadows.”

  “I’m fine here, thanks.” He shook the voice out of his head and plucked a thorn from the thick pad of grey skin on the bear’s paw.

  Chapter 6

  The End of the World

  In her private court at the centre of her palace on the Mountain of the Sun in Calnia, Swan Empress Ayanna welcomed her chief warlock Yoki Choppa and bade him sit on a duck-down cushion. Heavily pregnant, she was already seated and feeling, she imagined, not dissimilar to an overweight buffalo that had been stampeded for miles, driven over a cliff and was lying with its legs broken and waiting to die. Some women talked about a pregnancy glow. Ayanna felt the opposite of a glow, if “disabled, dying buffalo” was the opposite of “glow.”

&
nbsp; While most other Calnian warlocks dressed as whitecap eagles in white and black feathers, their leader Yoki Choppa’s outfit of choice was an old leather breechcloth—two squares of leather hanging off a belt, one at the front and one at the back—and nothing else; no jewellery save a gold sun necklace, no tattoos, no animal parts sewn into his skin or dangling from pierced holes. Generally Calnians who wore very little did so because they had a physique they wanted to display. Surely the dough-bodied old warlock couldn’t think that people were keen to ogle his greying flesh? She didn’t mind—he was such a fine warlock that he could have worn nothing but a furious rattlesnake as a hat for all she cared—but she would remember which cushions he sat on and have them burnt.

  They were alone, apart from a huge gold-plated swan representing Innowak the Sun God, a gigantic crystal on a wooden scaffold which could concentrate the rays of the sun to light her fire, the two largest humped bears killed in Calnian territory stuffed and standing in menacing poses, plus her usual retinue of six superbly formed young men fanning her with swan’s wings. Her fanners were men with good reason to wear very little.

  Yoki Choppa sat across two cushions, placed his alchemy bundle beside him and his alchemical bowl on his lap, and waited. Ayanna tried not to think about the warlock’s balls dangling between the gap in the cushions.

  “I have a dream,” she said, “which is why I have summoned you. I have the dream every night. It has been a month and a half, perhaps two. Always the same dream.”

  “What happens?” If Yoki Choppa was surprised that she didn’t want to talk about that morning’s Goachica attack, it didn’t show.

  She placed her hands on her enlarged stomach. “It is not pleasant. I am Innowak the golden swan. Although I am flying high above the world, I can see small details. Strange people emerge from the Wild Salt Sea. They are not Calnians, nor from any tribe I have seen. Their skin is pale, their features narrow and sharp, their clothes are unadorned and colourless, yet many have yellow hair that shines like gold in the sun.