by Angus Watson
“These men, women and children come inland, devouring plants, trees and animals as they walk, stopping only to urinate and defecate in great sprays. Everything that their effluent touches—plants, animals and people—dies. Some tribes befriend them, others attack them, but the result is always the same. The tribes die. The pale-skinned people walk on, gorging and growing all the while until they are fat giants towering over the land. Their urine dissolves forests. Clods of excrement pulverise mountains.
“Steam from their discharge rolls across the land in a ravening fog, killing all. The putrefying cloud spreads up the Water Mother like infection consuming a limb. It spills over the river’s banks, along Calnia’s streets and over its pyramids. When the foul mist clears, almost everyone is dead.
“The few survivors capitulate and mimic the ways of the invaders, drenching the world with their waste. The last plant and the last beast die and the land is gone.
“Finally the people are consumed by their own filth. Everyone and everything is dead. The world is one stinking slurry sea. That is my dream.”
Yoki Choppa nodded. He poked about with pudgy fingers in his alchemy bundle, hooked out a variety of oddments and crumbled, flicked and dropped them into his alchemical bowl. He added a smouldering nugget of charcoal from the Innowak-lit fire. Stirring the mix with a bone, he peered into it with narrowed eyes, lower lip protruding even further than normal. At one point he grunted with something approaching surprise, but other than that he mused and prodded silently.
After perhaps ten minutes he put his bowl aside and said, “Can we have a pipe?”
No “please.” His manners were appalling, something else Ayanna had to tolerate. She raised a hand. A pipe attendant arrived moments later holding a lit clay pipe. She inhaled the pleasant smoke twice, then handed the pipe to the pipe attendant, who walked around to Yoki Choppa.
He took a long draw and held it for a good while. Finally he breathed out slowly, then said: “The obvious interpretation is the correct one. You have seen the end of the world. It will be destroyed by these pale-skinned people. They will kill everything, including us and themselves.”
“When?”
“That is not clear.”
“There is a tribe of pale-skinned people living in Goachica territory, is there not?”
“The Mushroom Men.”
“Is my dream linked to the Goachica attack?”
“I don’t think so. That was a result of Zaltan’s mistreatment of the Goachica, and I have seen no pale skins among the dead or captive.”
“What do you know about these Mushroom Men?”
“They arrived by boat on the south-west shore of the Lake of the Retrieving Sturgeon in Goachica territory around a hundred years ago. The Goachica decided that they were spirits from another world, loved by the gods. They treated them like children, or perhaps pets, providing protection, food and fuel.”
“But that would have ruined the Mushroom Men.” The empress clicked her fingers twice to summon iced water. “Give someone everything and you take away all that they are. Why did they allow it to happen?”
Yoki Choppa shrugged.
“What else do you know about them?”
“They number around a hundred. They are very tall, with pale skins. Many have yellow hair. The men grow beards. They have a ten-man Owsla called the Hird, of which they are misguidedly proud. The Goachica cossetting has indeed rendered them lazy, fat and stupid, other than their Owsla, who train a great deal and are not fat.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Your predecessor Zaltan took a brief interest and asked me to find out about them, but events overtook his plan to see them for himself.”
“Events?”
“His assassination at your hands.”
“Oh yes, that. So, we must slaughter these Mushroom Men to prevent them destroying the world.”
The warlock moved his head non-committedly, neither a nod nor a shake. It was an annoying gesture.
“It’s obvious,” Ayanna continued. “And could not be easier. I am already about to send an army to destroy the Goachica for this morning’s attack. They can deal with these Mushroom Men, too.”
Yoki Choppa lifted a blowpipe, pressed it to his lips and pointed it at her.
She felt a rush of panic. Was this assassination? The dart in the pipe would be dipped in the poison of a frog from a southern empire. It killed instantly.
Her body froze, but a herd of thoughts charged through her brain.
Was this revenge for her slaying of Zaltan? Was Yoki Choppa a Goachica, and this part of their attack, or was this about something else? Would her physicians be able to cut her baby from her dead body and save its life or would it be poisoned, too?
And why, by Innowak’s shining arse, had Yoki Choppa waited until now to kill her? He’d had a thousand opportunities before.
She remembered playing with blowpipes when she was a girl. Even then she’d wanted to be empress and she’d fantasised about slaying the emperor with a poisonous dart. And then she’d fulfilled her ambition. Not many people got to do that. She’d lived a good, lucky life.
She remembered Zaltan gripping his chest with a clawed hand, the other reaching towards her while he stared at her in disbelief and rage. He’d said “glurk!” and fallen dead.
Could she somehow engineer a more elegant death and a finer last word? Perhaps she could swoon gracefully and say something like “I die as I lived—beautifully?” Or was there no choice? Was “glurk” all one could manage as the poison stopped one’s heart? So should she stay silent instead of trying to speak? It was something of a shame that she was only going to get one go at it.
Yoki Choppa blew with a per-choo!
The dart flew over her shoulder.
“Glurk!” said someone.
She twisted around to see one of her fanners topple. His swan wing fans fell to the ground with surprising “thunks.” The man twitched and was still.
“Goachica,” said the chief warlock. “Hand axes hidden in his fans. Saw it in the alchemical bowl when I was looking at your dream.”
“I see. Are there more?”
“Not here.”
“I see.” Ayanna relaxed back into her cushions again. “Thank you, Yoki Choppa.”
The warlock shrugged.
Chapter 7
The Swing of the Thing
Back at the old church of Krist, where he lived with Uncle Poppo and Aunt Gunnhild’s family, Finnbogi the Boggy prepared for the Thing, the quarterly Hardwork meeting when business would be discussed and everyone over the age of twelve would get drunk.
He tried on his second smart outfit, another Sassa Lipchewer creation, but decided on his blue tunic and striped trousers again. To change it up a bit, even though nobody would notice probably, he swapped his rawhide-soled shoes for his all-leather ones and added his red and blue headband, which helped to disguise the broadness of his forehead and covered up a couple of spots that he could feel glowing like fires on a beach at night. The headband also pushed up his brown hair into something of a mushroom, but one had to make sacrifices.
His Uncle Poppo Whitetooth, Aunt Gunnhild Kristlover (who weren’t really his uncle and aunt), his sort of sisters Alvilda the Aloof and Brenna the Shy and his sort of little siblings Ottar the Moaner and Freydis the Annoying were waiting for him outside the church next to the life-sized wooden cross of Krist. Gunnhild said it was “life-sized” anyway. Finnbogi had asked a few times if the fellow stuck to it wasn’t meant to be dead, so wasn’t it really death-sized? Gunnhild had always ignored him.
“Are you beautiful enough for the Thing yet, Finn?” asked a beaming Uncle Poppo and they all laughed, apart from Ottar, who was at the edge of the woods, flapping his arms and shouting at a butterfly.
“Uh, yes,” said Finnbogi. He didn’t mind Uncle Poppo’s teasing much since it was always good-natured, and Poppo was always happy to be mocked himself. He didn’t know why Alvilda was laughing, though. She always sp
ent about a week beautifying herself before a Thing.
They headed for Hardwork along the path that burrowed through an untidy woodland of tangled trees strangled by rampant, aggressively green undergrowth that wanted to be overgrowth.
Poppo and Gunnhild were kind and he was grateful that they’d taken him in after his parents’ death, but they’d never treated him like their own. Uncle Poppo had never cared what anybody else got up to, and Aunt Gunnhild had been too busy worshipping her god Krist and looking after her own twin daughters Alvilda and Brenna—particularly weird, shy Brenna—to waste any time on Finnbogi. Even when they’d found out that he’d taken some of Bjarni Chickenhead’s hallucinogenic mushrooms, Uncle Poppo had laughed and Aunt Gunnhild had just looked at him in her tight-lipped way.
Alvilda and Brenna, three years older, had been pretty kind, too, or at least not unpleasant. He couldn’t complain.
The only problem had come when he’d fallen sandals over breechcloth in love with Alvilda. Her trim waist, pertly round bum, over-pronounced cheekbones, hair tied into a high, bouncy tail and her withering haughtiness combined to make him dizzy with lust and there’d been a period when he’d had to run into the woods to be on his own for a while pretty much every time she’d spoken to him.
He’d tried to hide it from Poppo and Gunnhild, but he was sure that they’d known and been disgusted. She wasn’t his sister or even cousin, so his cravings were totally acceptable … was what he’d tried to tell himself, but for about a year he fluctuated between being thrilled at living in the same building as Alvilda and being mortified by his own contemptible and semi-incestuous lasciviousness.
Then he’d fallen even more deeply in love with the sparklingly beautiful Sassa Lipchewer. But she was Wulf’s, so that came with its own variety of self-loathing. Even though he knew it wasn’t right as he was doing it, he’d fantasise about Sassa being menaced by a dagger-tooth cat. He and Wulf would fight it off. Wulf would be killed, Finnbogi would slay the beast and Sassa would confess to having always loved him secretly and immediately drop to her knees to show her gratitude.
So it was a great relief when one day he’d suddenly decided that Thyri Treelegs was hot enough to stop a herd of stampeding buffalo and he could focus his lust on someone who wasn’t his sister in any way, or a friend’s wife. Alvilda and Sassa still popped up in his fantasising, but he usually managed to shoo them away, or, at the very most, they’d play a secondary role to Thyri.
His other sort of siblings, Ottar the Moaner and Freydis the Annoying, had joined the family as a baby and a toddler when Finnbogi was twelve. There’d been some sort of scandal, which Finnbogi hadn’t paid much attention to, and the children’s parents had been executed. Finnbogi had been forbidden from ever talking about it to the kids, which he didn’t mind because he wasn’t at all interested in a weird toddler and a baby. The only major thing he’d contributed to their lives was their nicknames, which suited them well.
All Hardworker children were given unpleasant nicknames to keep demons at bay. Most people got new ones when they grew older, but some people, like Wulf the Fat, didn’t. Finnbogi had been called “the Shittyarse” as a kid, so it had been a mixed blessing when people started calling him “the Boggy.” He wished it could have been something less hateful and more suitable, like “the Strong Minded” or “the Man who Notices Things.”
A gigantic black and yellow bumble bee buzzed heavily across the path. It was a hot and soggy evening. A sultry breeze shoved its way through broad leaves and knotted vegetation and a few fat raindrops splatted down. Finnbogi thought for a thrilling moment that the Thing might be ruined by a rainstorm, but the gathering clouds seemed to decide that it was too hot to bother and buggered off. The sky brightened.
Aunt Gunnhild fell back to talk to him.
“How many animals have you seen on the way down here, Finn?”
Finn pointed up at the dozens of swift, dippy-type birds gathering in anticipation of the clouds of mosquitoes that would bloom nearer sunset, then at a fat, orange-brown squirrel whirling its tail slowly and snarling at them from a nearby tree. “Quite a few.” He held his hand to his ear. The woods were alive with birdsong. “And I can hear even more.”
“Not birds and squirrels, proper animals like deer or wolves.”
Finnbogi knew where this was going, and knew it was going to be boring, but he humoured her. “I have seen no proper animals like deer or wolves.”
“My great-grandfather—the one who was in Olaf Worldfinder’s Hird—told me that when they arrived there were thousands of animals everywhere. Under Olaf they were conserved and their killing managed, but the next generation had no respect for the land and slaughtered everything that they could see, not for food but for fun.”
“Did they? That’s terrible.”
“Yes. Your generation must take better care of the animals. The animals are our friends.”
Finnbogi thought of the wasp that had attacked him earlier, but said, “We will take care of them.”
“And I’d like you to look after Brenna at the Thing. Ottar’s silly tales about Scraylings killing us all have got her all het up.” She glared at the little boy’s back, up ahead on the trail. “So please make sure she’s all right. She’s your sister.”
She’s not my sister, but she is your daughter, he thought. Brenna became anxious in the company of anyone other than her family, and even with her family sometimes, so the Thing gatherings were a living nightmare for her. It was her problem, and entirely caused by Gunnhild’s coddling, so Finnbogi didn’t see why he should have his fun ruined by having to nanny Brenna.
“I’ll keep an eye out for her,” he said.
“And remember, let a man drink moderately, speak sensibly or stay silent. No one will admonish you for going to bed early.”
Finnbogi rolled his eyes. He always behaved himself, at least compared with the Hird men. At the last Thing, Gurd Girlchaser and Garth Anvilchin had bound Bjarni Chickenhead’s hands behind his back and tied his balls to a white-tailed deer. Bjarni had been quite badly hurt and the deer had been killed. It was that sort of “fun” that made Finnbogi glad he wasn’t in the Hird.
“Got it.” He nodded at her.
“And you know that buffalo know when to stop eating. A foolish man never does?”
“I will be a buffalo.”
“Hmmm. Never laugh at an older speaker; often wise words issue from a shrivelled hide,” she said, waggling what Finnbogi supposed was meant to be a wise finger before speeding up to rejoin her husband.
They walked on. Finnbogi half hoped that they’d stumble across a gang of ravening lions to prove Gunnhild wrong about the lack of big animals, but they didn’t. By the time they passed Olaf Worldfinder’s burial mound, which had been looted by Jarl Brodir the Gorgeous a few years before, they could hear trumpets, flutes and harps playing at the same time but not together.
Then they smelled the roasting buffalo. Sharing the land’s bounty with Tor was the best thing about the Thing. They called it a sacrifice, but since the buffalo came ready-killed from the Scraylings, it was more like an exercise in group gluttony, which Finnbogi reckoned Tor preferred anyway.
They emerged from the darkening woods. The clouds over Olaf’s Fresh Sea were huge and tinged pink. Oversized torches burnt triumphantly on those parts of the town wall that hadn’t been permanently borrowed to repair other buildings. They wandered through the ever-open gates, between regularly spaced wooden houses and halls lining the broad main road, and into Olaf’s Square—the wide, bank-ringed clearing at the centre of town. The town and the clearing had been designed by Olaf Worldfinder himself, to create somewhere central and safe for everyone to gather. Even though the cleared area was circular, it was called Olaf’s Square. Considering he’d died almost a hundred years before, Finnbogi thought that everyone went on about Olaf Worldfinder a bit too much.
Almost all the other Hardworkers were already there, dressed in a mix of old- and new-world clothes: wool capes
and shawls held together with silver brooches, furry boots, baggy trousers and so on from the old world, then garments like fringed leather shirts and quill-decorated dresses from the new. Several people were wearing Sassa’s colourful creations, which were generally a mixture of the two.
All were chatting and drinking wine and mead from birch-bark and horn cups. Finnbogi’s mouth filled with saliva at the delicious aroma from the buffalo roasting over the sacrificial fire pit, and he looked about for Thyri Treelegs.
“See you in a minute!” he said to the others. Gunnhild opened her mouth to say something—about looking after Brenna no doubt—but he skedaddled.
He hadn’t got far when he was stopped by Chnob the White, Thyri’s brother. Chnob was a couple of years older than Finnbogi, smaller and weedier but with the biggest beard in town and probably for thousands of miles, since the Scraylings didn’t much go for facial hair. Chnob thrust his beard at Finnbogi as if it were a weaponised shrubbery.
“Your brother Ottar is an idiot,” he declared. “And his prophecy is full of crap! The Scraylings would never hurt us!” he spat—probably, it was impossible to tell behind all that beard.
Finnbogi nodded.
“You’re not defending him?”
“You’re saying he’s an idiot and you don’t believe he can see the future?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” Chnob nodded aggressively, his beard bobbing.
“Well, that’s your opinion and I don’t give a crap. See you later.” Finnbogi strode away. He’d adapted his witty riposte from something he’d heard Keef the Berserker say, so it wasn’t exactly his line, but he was still thrilled by how marvellously he’d snubbed Chnob the Knob.
Thyri Treelegs was on the far side of Olaf’s Square with the Hird men. Several were dressed in their iron-reinforced battle leathers. Garth, as always, was wearing his mail shirt and iron helmet. Ogmund the Miller looked like he was already drunk, which was no surprise; he was already drunk most of the time. All were holding weapons which had never been used in real combat, at least not in their current owners’ lifetimes.