A Quantum Mythology (12 page)

He ’faced the instruction to open the door to the room she’d grown for herself. The most insulting thing was that Scab hadn’t even bothered to lock the door after himself. Vic saw his partner/captor’s pale back first as it moved up and down. Talia moaned underneath him. Scab must have known that Vic was there. Talia opened her eyes for a moment and saw the seven-foot-tall insect in the doorway. She gestured for him to go before closing her eyes and moaning again.

Vic ’faced the instruction to close the door to Talia’s room and watched it slide shut. He stared at it for a while, holding a tray of narcotics and flowers.

9

Ancient Britain

Tangwen couldn’t remember a time when her throat didn’t burn, when her chest didn’t ache, when her muscles weren’t made of pain. She sprinted through the trees, barely registering the whipping branches tearing at her skin. She heard cries of agony and the shouted gibbering of the moonstruck as they kept pace with the survivors. They were dark, hunting forms wearing masks of flayed human skin, running through the woods, attacking any survivors they found. Tangwen skidded to a halt in the dirt. She needed to breathe. Her throat felt bloody.

How many did we leave behind, how many simply couldn’t keep up with us?
The thought was quickly forgotten as something thundered through the woods and collided with her. The impact dragged her across the dirt as she hit the ground hard. Tangwen wasn’t sure how, but she found herself on the man’s back. His face came away in her hands. No, it was only a red mask. She yanked his head towards her, and he soiled himself as she sawed at his throat.

‘Come to me, girl.’ The language was close enough to her own that she understood each word, but she could not divine their meaning. Her head whipped around. It was just easier to be a hunting animal now.

The speaker was an old woman, but she stood tall and strong, and carried herself with confidence.

‘You’re not one of them,’ the old woman said quietly. She was clad in tatters, her skin black with soot. Her hair was a tangled mess that the poorest slave would be ashamed of, but even in the dark beneath the canopy of branches and leaves, Tangwen could still make out her eyes. They looked bright, alert – strong, somehow. Like all the other survivors, her form was emaciated, ill-fed, though it looked like she’d had meat on her once. She had found a branch somewhere that she was leaning on it as a staff.

Tangwen hissed like an angry snake, her head whipping from side to side as she made out the many dark shapes in the woods around the woman, keeping pace with her, visibly stalking her, moving in and out of the beams of moonlight that filtered down through the trees. Most of them were watching the woman through the eyeholes in the flayed faces they wore, but a number of them looked at Tangwen.

There were screams from deeper in the woods.

‘Stay close to me,’ the woman said. She was doing a very good job of masking her fear as they started to move. The moonstruck were keeping pace with them as well. One of them swung at her and she hissed angrily and slashed back with her knife, more for show than anything else.

‘Why do they not attack you?’ Tangwen hissed when she remembered she wasn’t a wild animal, a serpent.

‘Well, whatever else they may be, they were brought up well enough to know to fear women.’

Tangwen glanced over at the other woman, surprised and more than a little worried that this was the extent of her plan.

‘Show no weakness,’ the woman told her. Only then was Tangwen fully aware of just how frightened the other woman was.

Germelqart glanced over at Kush, who was holding his head in his hands, eyes closed tight as he tried to block out the screaming, tried not to hear it. Germelqart knew his friend had been a slave and then a gladiator before winning his freedom, before earning a living protecting other people’s lives and goods. Kush was not a good man. He had looked out for himself. He had lived a life of violence, and that rarely troubled Kush’s conscience, but this?

Germelqart, for his part, couldn’t turn away. The circular building was little more than a wooden framework set in a cleared rectangular area. To the navigator’s eyes, the structure appeared to be positioned to catch the light of the moon. Maybe it had seen other ritual uses before this day, but now it was a place to hang the living and make them suffer. It was a place of casual torture where lifeblood stained the earth black in the moonlight.

The survivors strong enough to make it to the island who hadn’t immediately been killed outright by the moonstruck had been brought here. Here the
dryw
tended to them, their white robes stained red and brown. Even in this poor light, Germelqart could make out the lack of life in the
dryws
’ eyes. He knew that the priests of this cold, harsh land practised blood rites, as did the priests in his land and all lands he had visited. The gods were greedy, they had to be appeased or bargained with, and for the greatest boons, the greatest sacrifices were required. But this – this was a mockery. This could serve no purpose. This was the gluttony of the darkest gods. The giant wicker man within whom he had been imprisoned was the same. In this land they spoiled the worst of their gods.

‘We have to do something,’ Kush whispered. Germelqart glanced at his friend and then back the way they had come. There were around twenty survivors from the wicker man hidden in the woods. Germelqart was exhausted. He knew, despite the other man’s strength, that Kush was, too.

Kush’s head sagged and tears sprang from his eyes. There were so few warriors among the survivors – most had either died resisting the Lochlannach or been enslaved by their magics. It was a daemon’s choice: either protect those already with them, or risk all by trying to rescue those already taken.

‘We cannot leave them …’ Kush muttered.

Y
ou may not be a good man
, Germelqart thought,
but you are no monster.

‘We have to,’ Germelqart whispered. That was when they brought the child in. A strong child, a fierce child of a fierce people, who struggled and fought his captors but just wasn’t strong enough to break free. Not after climbing down from the wicker man, not after swimming to the island, not after trying to escape the moonstruck.

The moonstruck started to rope the boy to the frame. One of the
dryw
, a shaven-headed woman with a dripping robe – the face she wore was a male’s – approached the struggling figure. Germelqart turned to Kush but it was too late. The tall, dark-skinned man had already charged into the clearing.

Still breathing hard, Tangwen looked down at the
dryw
she had just killed. She spat and made the sign to avert evil. To harm or kill a
dryw
was a great crime, but her serpent father had always struck her as a very practical god, and she was sure he would forgive her. If she lived.

More survivors joined them. Tangwen killed more of the moonstruck, and others did the same. They caught up with the other survivors, those whom Kush and Germelqart were leading, whilst she protected their rear. Through the trees she saw the obscenity that the
dryw
had made of their holy place, their shrine to their god of the moon.

Tangwen watched Germelqart and Kush fighting for their lives, a boy battling desperately by their side. Something made her glance at the old woman she had been walking with. A beam of moonlight shining through the canopy of trees illuminated her face and Tangwen saw the look of fear. The woman knew the boy.

‘You fight in threes. Two of you grab one of them, the third kills them as quickly as they can, then you move onto the next one. Do you understand?’ Tangwen told the survivors.

‘We are not warriors,’ replied one man. ‘I can barely move, let alone fight.’

‘Then you are already dead,’ she told him and moved quickly to where he stood. She remembered Britha and tried not to puke as she knifed him to death as quickly as she could. The rest of the survivors stared at their erstwhile saviour, appalled. Some whimpered, some cried, but none moved.

‘Die helpless or die fighting. Decide now,’ the old woman told them with no little authority. Slowly they started to get up. The woman turned to Tangwen and nodded, and Tangwen all but fled into the woods. She would do more good on her own, she told herself, and then threw up. She felt a lot worse about killing the frightened man with the survivors than she had about the
dryw
.

She swallowed bile and scuttled forwards on all fours towards the rear of the press of moonstruck closing in on Kush. She cursed as one of them turned around, having heard something, but he did not look down. She stabbed him though the back of his ankle. He fell, his cries lost among the squeals of the moonstruck and the shouted devotions of the
dryw
. One of the others turned to face her, and she rammed the dagger up into his throat from her crouching position. The moonstruck woman sank to her knees, blood bubbling from the wound and from her mouth. Another turned around at the movement but did not look down quickly enough, and his screams cut through the other noise as Tangwen rammed her blade up into his groin. Now they knew she was there. She rolled away from them, coming unsteadily to her feet before backing into the woods. A number of them followed her. As exhausted as she was, as sickened by the violence, she started to hunt them.

The survivors came out of the woods. They grabbed at the moonstruck, trying to bear them to the ground as they clubbed or stabbed at them. Frantic, panicked, but somehow holding it together enough to fight. While they distracted the moonstruck, Kush started to swing his axe. Short, fast cuts with the blade, or hitting them with the head of the axe, wounding blows, blows that forced them back, gave them room until he could make longer swings. Then he started to cut the wounded moonstruck down.

Germelqart protected Kush with his club. He landed few blows and
fewer still did significant damage, but it was enough to keep them off his warrior friend.

The boy had been trained. He held himself together in the face of the moonstruck and knew enough to bide his time, to pick his attacks with the small dagger, but when he saw an opportunity, he took it.

They fought their way through the moonstruck. Kush raised his axe high to strike down another half-naked, blood-covered savage with a dripping blade.

‘No!’ Tangwen shouted at him. Too late, Germelqart realised what was happening and made a grab for the axe. Kush cried out from the effort but at the last moment he diverted the path of the axe. The weapon dug deep into the earth next to a shaking Tangwen. She stared at him, eyes wide with the horror of the day. She sagged. He caught her as she fell, but then realised he was falling as well, barely able to move. All around them was murder as the remaining survivors dispatched the moonstruck and their
dryw
masters. It was only then that they started to feel the pain of all the wounds they had taken. Kush slumped forwards. Sleep or unconsciousness was trying to claim him.

‘No!’ Tangwen said fiercely. ‘We need to get off this island!’ She struggled to her feet and tried to pull Kush up with her.

The older woman was called Anharad. She was the mother of a minor chieftain of the Trinovantes, whose tribal name meant the Vigorous People. Tangwen’s own tribe, the Pobl Neidr, the People of the Snake, were part of the Catuvellauni. The Trinovantes were their northern neighbours on the east coast of Ynys Prydain, the Isle of the Mighty. Tangwen had scouted into their territory for more than one raid, but none of that mattered now.

The boy’s name was Mabon. He was Anharad’s grandson and had been abducted from the children’s camp, where he had been training to be a warrior, to follow in his parents’ footsteps. He had not said a word since the fight at the moonstrucks’ holy place, though he had been helping some of the other survivors.

There appeared to be few of the moonstruck left, and those that had escaped were keeping their distance. If any of the corrupt
dryw
survived, Tangwen had not seen them.

Their band had swollen to about fifty people now, though many were injured, a few so seriously that they needed to be carried, and all were exhausted. Tangwen, with Kush and the formidable Anharad’s help, pushed them onwards, north towards the mainland. Germelqart led the way.

They reached the shore by dawn as a faint grey light illuminated the land. Tangwen sighed as they staggered out of the trees only to be confronted by thick mud and a narrow stream.

‘We have to cross,’ Anharad said as she came to stand by the young woman. Tangwen didn’t think she’d ever been so tired. She nodded numbly and half-staggered, half-slipped towards the thick mud. Kush was by her side, helping Germelqart through the clinging ooze. Tangwen was forced to use her hands to drag her legs out of the sucking mud. Behind her she could hear Anharad ordering the survivors to follow.

Something exploded out of the mud, showering them all with dirt as it reared up on its hind legs. Tangwen caught a glimpse of a creature that looked like a flayed man fused with a flayed horse. Limbs poked from skinless flesh at odd angles, as though rider and beast had melted into each other. At first she thought the rider carried a sword, but then she realised the blade was fused with the monster’s arm. Tangwen found herself sitting in the mud, staring up at the creature. The muscles on its face contorted into a silent, agonised scream. It vomited a stream of bile. Numbly she felt it hit her. Then it started to burn her flesh. Tangwen found that she wasn’t so numb she couldn’t feel pain.

Kush had staggered away from the creature. He saw Tangwen rolling in the mud, her face smoking, and he could hear her cries of pain. The strange protean creature’s forelegs came down on the mud. One leg was a horse’s; the other looked like a skinless human leg. It stabbed forwards with its sword-limb and ran one of the survivors through as he tried to scramble across the mud to get away from the monstrosity. The creature lifted the screaming man up out of the mud on the blade.

Kush charged the creature, or tried to, but got bogged down in the mud. He swung his axe at it. The creature deflected the axe with what Kush thought at first was a shield, but then he realised it was a fused growth of bone. He swung again, but weakly. The fused-bone shield caught him in the chest and face, breaking his nose, cracking something in his chest. The force of the blow lifted him out of the sucking mud and sent him flying through the air. He lost his grip on the axe.

Germelqart had been knocked over when the creature exploded from the mud. He managed to stagger back to his feet and was frenziedly swinging his club at the creature’s flanks. It moved forwards slightly and kicked out with its rear legs, catching the navigator with a glancing blow to his hip. It was still hard enough to send him spinning into the air.