A Quantum Mythology
Page 4
His thoughts returned to the woman. From his perspective she was little more than a savage. But he remembered her naked form, painted blue like the night, when she had come to try and kill him. He remembered feeling her skin under his long fingers.
Skin bubbled, blistered, burned and healed, again and again. Even with his tolerance for pain it was becoming too much. He stepped into the smoke. As he fell his thoughts were still of Britha. Crom Dhubh was just a receding, mocking laughter in the back of his mind.
The one called Bress had said that Fachtna was dead. Teardrop was dead, though Tangwen had the feeling he died some time before he stopped moving and talking, consumed by the crystalline magic that lived inside his swollen head. The captain of the ship that had taken them west along the Grey Father, into the lands of the Atrebates, was dead as well. Though he kept talking even after his head had been taken, until she helped kill Ettin. And she did not know where Britha was.
All her muscles ached and her chest burned, for the current was strong here. After all the swimming and the climb to the wicker man, which even now was burning as it crumbled into the water behind her, she was surprised that somehow she was still moving towards the easternmost island.
She might have grown up in a marsh, but she was beginning to think she never wanted to see water again for as long as she lived. Judging by the moonstruck on the island towards which she now swam, who had mocked them, as they had marched towards Bress’s forces, living long might not be such a problem. She had seen the feast they left for the crabs and the other things that lived in the water.
She was peripherally aware of others swimming near her as she made for the beach. Survivors. Those who’d been strong enough to live through their imprisonment, escape from the burning wicker man into the water, survive the unnatural feeding frenzy at the claws and teeth of the children of Andraste, and then swim against strong currents to the eastern island.
So few of them left.
Her hands and feet touched silt. Now she could allow the hope she had denied herself in the water. She tried to stand, but burning muscles protested and she collapsed into the water again. She would crawl if she must – she knew she had to get out of the water.
On either side of her, people were staggering up the beach and collapsing. She saw figures sprinting towards them from the dunes further inland, kicking up sand as they ran. Clothed in rags, if wearing anything at all, many of them were painted with lime, woad, blood and excrement, or decorated with crude tattoos and self-inflicted scars. Carrying makeshift weapons, they howled, and gibbered as if they were angry at the sun for not being his brother the moon.
Tangwen, the huntress of the Pobl Neidr, the People of the Snake, a tribe of the Catuvellauni to the north and east of here whose name meant Expert Warriors, knew that the mad were closer to the gods. It was this closeness that made them moonstruck. They could not but fail to be affected by what had happened. The torture of the Mother in the sea. The eating of the sky.
On the beach she could see one of the foreign traders. He had come from across the sea, far to the south, and had been the navigator on the ship. His name was strange and she was too exhausted to remember it. He wore a filthy woollen blaidth which had once been white. When she knew him on the ship, he had black dye painted around his eyes, a trimmed and lacquered dark beard, and a belly that told of a life of plenty. Now he was gaunt, his dark hair long and matted, his beard similarly wild. Paler than he had once been, his leathery, weather-beaten skin was still many shades darker than that of the inhabitants of her own land.
One of the moonstruck stood over him, raising a crude club made of driftwood with bits of stone, bone and shells embedded in it. Another was running towards the navigator; there were more behind that one. From further along the beach she could hear howls of pain, fear and madness. There were explosions of water as the moonstruck sprinted into the sea to reach the survivors.
Germelqart heard the screaming. He was sure it wasn’t a language. He smelled the stink of the moonstruck man before he’d even opened his eyes. All he could see was thin, muscular arms swinging the crude club plummeting towards his head.
The woman – little more than a girl, the navigator thought – collided with the moonstruck man. There was sickening crunch as the rock she swung caved in the man’s head. The pair of them collapsed into the sand. The man was muttering and sobbing, his head a new shape of red blood and white bone. Despite his madness, all the fight had left him.
The navigator watched as the wiry young woman pushed herself up off the sand on arms shaking with exertion. He recognised her as the warrior from the snake tribe. She was the one who knifed Ettin, the thing that had worn Hanno’s still-living head when Germelqart and Kush had dragged the creature off Britha. Germelqart was sure her name was Tangwen. The young huntress had travelled with Britha, the mad woman, the sacrificer, priestess, witch, warrior and demon.
He had watched her paint her short hair with lime to spike it, but wet it lay flat on her head. Her skin bore traces of the dyes the warriors of Ynys Prydein wore for war and ritual but the sea had washed most of them off. Her only garments were a soaking-wet tunic and a leather belt around her waist.
She drew a long, iron-bladed knife from a sheath as more of the moonstruck came sprinting across the sand towards them. She was saying something to him but he did not know enough of her language, and he was too exhausted and frightened to understand her.
A naked man skidded to a halt nearby. He danced around them, into the water, screaming imprecations as he drew patterns in his flesh with the knives he held in each hand. A large woman charged them, shrieking and wielding a skull filled with lime cement hanging from the end of wooden haft.
‘Get up! Run!’ Tangwen tried to scream at the navigator, but she barely had the strength to croak.
She watched the grotesque ripples in the flesh of the woman charging her. The sky was cloudless and blue above her, the sun bright and warm.
Tangwen staggered to her feet. She was surprised to see she had a knife in her hand, her axe long-gone now. The large woman swung at her. Somehow Tangwen ducked. The hand with a knife in it appeared to strike of its own accord and the blade scraped across the woman’s skull, cutting skin and flesh. Blood covered the moonstruck woman’s face, blinding her. This just made her laugh. The woman swung the skull-headed club and Tangwen ducked under another wild blow. The woman overextended herself, staggering past. Tangwen felt the impact run up her arms as she stabbed the knife into the back of the woman’s neck with enough force to sever her spine. The woman flopped to the ground like a dying fish.
More moonstruck were sprinting towards them across the beach.
Even if I had my bow, Tangwen managed to think, I still wouldn’t have the strength to draw it.
She wanted to give up now. Lie down. Sleep. Let the inevitable happen. She wanted death to carry her back to her Serpent Father in his crystal cave. Instead she stood over the body of the frightened navigator, bloody knife in hand. They had achieved so much. It wasn’t fair to die like this. She screamed so the gods could hear her anger.
Her cries were cut off as the man who had been cutting himself landed on her back, his weight sending them both crashing to the sand and rolling into the shallow water.
He was shamed. Unmanned. This small, tough woman raised in a cold, hard land was fighting, selling her life hard, whilst he lay shaking in his own water.
She hit the ground as one of the moonstruck jumped on her back. Germelqart’s hand wrapped itself around the haft of the barbaric skull-headed club the moonstruck woman had dropped. Then he was on his knees. Warm blood sprayed on his face as he brought the club down again and again onto the man’s head. He was screaming. The warrior woman had rolled from under her moonstruck attacker and was watching Germelqart beat the man’s head in.
He stopped, looking at the ruin he had made. The warrior woman had stood up, her knif
e at the ready, but she swayed as if she was ready to drop. Germelqart managed to stand, still holding the crude, horrible club. He was no warrior and never had been, but he was determined to follow the young woman’s example.
A group of islanders was running towards them. He wasn’t sure how many. In his exhaustion, he had forgotten how to count.
The stink. Hands grabbing at her. Tangwen was kicked, punched, bludgeoned, clawed with long, ragged nails as she slashed out with the knife and cut and cut. They didn’t appear to care that her knife bit into their flesh again and again as they forced her back into the red-frothed water. She saw the navigator swing the skull-headed club but they were all around her by the time he went down.
She felt herself go over as she sucked in her last, deep breath before she was under the shallow water again. She tried to fight free, but as more and more hands held her down, as more of her own blood leaked out into the stinging salt water, as the need to take another breath grew stronger and stronger, the panic came and she started to thrash around ineffectually.
Suddenly she could move again. Something bumped her under the water. A weight fell on her. She struggled free and sat up in the red-tinged shallows.
A number of the moonstruck were being forced back towards land by a tall, powerfully built, brown-skinned man with no hair. He was swinging a long-hafted axe with a double-crescent bronze head at them. A decapitated body bumped against her, pushed by the gentle movement of the waves. There was another body nearby, a huge bloody rent in its midriff.
Someone grabbed her arm. She turned to stab them and realised she’d lost her knife. The navigator let go of her, recoiling, his hands held up. He was trying to help her. He said something, nodding at the axeman. She recognised the word Kush. It was the brown-skinned man’s name.
‘We must help Kush,’ Germelqart repeated helplessly. The young woman turned from him and started feeling around in the silt under the red water. He saw the haft of his weapon bobbing in the gentle waves, anchored by its lime-cement-filled skull. He grabbed it and tried to run after Kush, but had to settle for stumbling.
Tangwen squeezed sand through her fingers as they closed around the hilt of her knife. Up and down the beach she could see survivors dragging themselves from the water only to be set upon by the moonstruck. All the while the dryw, wearing flayed faces, stood on the dunes, watching. The dryw with the filthy white hooded robes, who had been sent here to tend to the mad.
‘We have to help the survivors,’ she muttered to herself. Then she shouted it at Germelqart’s back in a language the navigator would struggle to understand. She stood up in the water and staggered after the two foreign traders.
Taking the horses onto the causeway had been a huge mistake. Ysgawyn could see that now. It was overconfidence, arrogance. He had underestimated the ability of the Atrebates’ warband and their allies from the Otherworld. He was not going to make the same mistake again.
It had cost them a number of warriors and more horse when they were forced off the causeway and into the swampy ground on the westernmost island. They had also lost Gwydion, his second-in-command and the Corpse People’s warleader. It was just another thing Ysgawyn was going to take out on the flesh of any Atrebates survivors.
Much of the lime had been washed off their faces, bodies and armour when they were forced to pick their way back north through the marshland to the causeway. Now they looked less like the corpses they tried so hard to emulate.
They had made it back to the mainland and were standing among a large field of tree stumps where the Lochlannach had chopped wood to fuel the burning, crumbling wicker man. The clear-cut swathe was a scar on the landscape.
They had been too busy trying to navigate through the marshland and pull their people and beasts from the sucking mire to have seen the battle, or the wicker man ignited. The wind had taken the smell of cooking meat the other way, but they still heard the screams. Even from so far away they had watched the angry red sea seethe and boil under the pulsing blue rip in the air, the gateway to Annwn. They had cheered when Arawn manifested as a mass of black maggots eating the sky. But their death god had not consumed the land. The gateway had closed. Ynys Prydein, the Isle of the Mighty, had not become Ynys Annwn, the Isle of the Dead.
He could see it in the eyes of his people. Despite the blessings of Crom Dhubh, despite having stolen the power of god-touched heroes by eating their flesh, his people were beginning to doubt their invincibility. In fact, having seen how the Atrebates warband and their allies had shepherded their comrades to Annwn, the Corpse People were beginning to doubt they were dead at all.
As Ysgawyn sat on one of the few surviving horses, hand gripping the hilt of his longsword so tightly that his knuckles had gone white, he knew that his people needed a victory. More fundamentally, they needed to hurt others and then kill them.
Somewhat worryingly he had watched his allies, the blank-faced warriors from the Otherworld, sail east against the wind. The giants had slipped beneath the waves. Whether they swam beneath the black curraghs or returned to their sunken homeland, he did not know.
They had all seen movement on the western isle, further inland from the causeway. They were not sure who or what it was but the movement was strange. It did not look like the movement of man or beast, and there had been a lot of it. It had started in the south but appeared to be getting closer, and it was making what was left of Ysgawyn’s warband even more nervous. There was something disturbing and unnatural about all that movement.
‘What are we doing?’ one of his warband asked. The young Corpse People warrior was looking to the south and west, where the sun had turned to red as it sank beyond the horizon. Under the lime and bravado, he looked little more than a well-built, frightened boy. The warrior was young enough that Ysgawyn hadn’t bothered to learn his name.
‘We’re waiting for survivors,’ Ysgawyn told him and then raised his voice. ‘Don’t you wish to avenge your humiliation?’ he demanded.
‘Our disgrace,’ one of the long moustaches said. Owen, he was called, well built and with scars to wear, he was one of the older members of the warband. He had been a good friend of Gwydion’s.
Ysgawyn seethed with anger at the correction but knew he could do nothing about it without alienating the warband further.
‘It is the time between times,’ Owen added. ‘The connections to the Otherworld grow in strength. The borders have been broken here this day. We should leave.’ Grumbles of agreement rose from the rest of the warband.
When did you become a dryw? Ysgawyn wondered.
There was movement in the dying light. They heard a distant splash and saw ripples in the water by the shore of the western isle, about half a mile from their position.
‘I think the Atrebates’ bitch goddess has given birth to some awful thing to revenge herself on us,’ said the young warrior who had spoken first. His fear spread like a sickness through the warband.
Ysgawyn opened his mouth to curse them for cowards, though the fear was not unknown to him, either. Then the thing surged from the water and mud of the marshy terrain close to where they stood.
Stinger-tipped tendrils of translucent flesh, like those he had seen on the strange sea creatures that sometimes washed up on the shore, flew from a maw filled with rows of predatory teeth. Its mouth was surrounded by multi-segmented, spear-like mandibles. It writhed up, eyeless and wormlike, its body covered in thick shell-like armour. It surged across the land towards them, moving with surprising speed with a rapid, rippling movement.
Some readied spears or reached for swords, bracing shields, whilst others ran. Even Otherworldly steeds reared in terror at the massive creature, which was growing as they watched.
Cries of fear turned into cries of agony as tendrils wrapped around the men, their touch burning exposed skin as they were lifted into the air and dragged towards the maw – men or beasts, it didn’t matter.
Despite himself, he looked back. His men weren’t dying. The thing’s mouth had distended to further enormity and sprays of liquids hit men and beast alike. Their skin sloughed off as their flesh fused with that of their steeds, and they screamed, and screamed, and screamed.
As he turned away to concentrate on riding north towards the hill that overlooked the three islands, he caught a glimpse of the western isle in his peripheral vision. The isle appeared to seethe as if it had a life of its own.
4
Birmingham, 1791
There was a lot of screaming. The Hellaquin caught a glance from upstairs of the dead man’s skin crawling, demons and devils moving in his flesh as the Knight’s necromancy tore word after word from the corpse through its gritted teeth. The Hellaquin heard the demon spit and curse at the Knight, shouting imprecations and threats, but in the end the devils in the Knight’s blood had proven stronger. It told the Knight that the cursed pepperbox pistol had come from one of the gun works on Steelhouse Lane. By then the house was ablaze and an even larger crowd had gathered. The two of them left via the back garden.
‘They’ll blame the Dissenters,’ the Hellaquin muttered.
‘Let them,’ the Knight said icily.
More redcoats spotted them as the Knight’s powerful horse carried them back into the city, heading for Steelhouse Lane. It was difficult to avoid the soldiers in the city at the moment. A mounted officer had even given chase, but the Knight’s steed easily outdistanced him. The officer fired at them on the gallop but the pistol ball went wide.