The Age of Scorpio (25 page)

‘I did not do this,’ she said. Though he would not know her tongue. The Goddodin shared the same language of the people known as the Britons, who, like the Pecht, were made up of many different tribes. All of them were gods-slaves, to hear tell of it.

The champion was not far from seven feet tall – he towered over Britha. He wore fur leggings and trews, and his naked torso was covered in intricate blue woad scales. The top of his shaved head was likewise tattooed. Britha reckoned that his god made him ashamed to fight skyclad and that the tattoos were meant to make him look like a fish, or maybe it represented armour. The dead warriors she had seen had been similarly tattooed but not as extensively.

‘I wish to talk. They attacked my people as well. Many were taken. I am tracking them.’ The man ignored her words. He just stumbled towards her, a look of slack confusion on what little she could see of his bovine features.

‘Can you hear me? Are you hurt?’ she asked, thinking that he had taken a blow to his head that had perhaps laid him low, and the Lochlannach had left him for dead. It was a shame Ettin hadn’t taken his head, she mused; the size of it would have unbalanced him.

The man turned to face her and she saw it. His eyes were a solid metallic red, and paths of blood bulged beneath his skin as if he was in the throws of
riasterthae
, the fabled battle frenzy that she’d oft heard of but never seen. She looked hard at him and saw fire crawling like insects throughout his body. Britha cursed.

Then the man was holding his spear one-handed, and the powerful upwards sweep that Britha only just managed to parry with her own would have splintered the haft of any normal weapon. As it was, it sent her staggering back towards the Black River. Whatever he had been, he was one of them now.

The huge man roared as he threw his large oval shield into the air and caught it by the handgrip. He did the same with the spear, getting a better grip. Britha backed towards the river. She was running out of platform, and the shaved, rounded branches beneath her feet were slippery, preventing her from finding a steady stance. The huge man would be used to the shifting platform, however, and if he had been a good slave to his sea god then the water itself could act against her.

The Goddodin warrior stabbed out at her with the spear. She dodged it, darting to the left, exactly where he wanted her to go. His leather-covered oak shield hit her with enough force to pick her up off her feet. She landed hard on the platform, feeling the branches bend beneath her. The impact drove the wind from her but she still had the presence of mind to scrabble for her spear as she tried to remember how to breathe again. Britha rolled to the side as his next spear thrust turned the branches that had been underneath her into splinters.

Grabbing her spear, Britha staggered to her feet and threw herself through the hole in the wall of the crannog. The huge warrior stabbed at her through the wall as he moved around the building to block off her escape.

Britha ran out of the crannog and made to jump into the river but changed her mind. She did not want to feed herself to the Goddodin’s sea god. Changing direction, she made for the bridge leading to the next crannog. The warrior made lies of Nechtan’s words. He was incredibly fast. The thrust missed, but then he reversed the blow and caught Britha in the back hard enough to take her off her feet and slam her, winded and struggling for breath, again, onto the floor of the bridge.

As he advanced on her, Britha’s foot hit him in the groin with a maiden’s kick. He barely seemed to notice. From the ground she had to batter aside another savage spear thrust. She lashed out with a foot again, this time at his knee. Her foot contacted with force that surprised her. She heard the knee shatter and the man staggered back. Suddenly he looked unsteady on his feet. With a roar he reached down and grabbed her round the neck. He was too close for Britha to use her spear. Britha beat and clawed at him ineffectively. He picked her up and held her high. The fingers on his massive hand squeezed, cutting off blood and air.

Panic.

Britha reached down and pressed the ragged nails of her thumbs against his eyes. They did not feel like eyes; it was like pushing against bronze. Then she felt burning in her arm and then her hand, a sensation like something moving beneath her skin. She watched in horror as the nails on her thumbs changed shape and colour, turning into sharp black claws not unlike Cliodna’s. She pressed them into the huge man’s eyes. The nails pierced and Britha felt something wet squirt out over her thumbs. He howled like an animal and dropped her. His hands went to his eyes.

Sprawled on the bridge gasping for air, she tried to crawl away, seeking desperately for her spear. She was trying to fend off the blackness of unconsciousness that threatened to overwhelm her from lack of oxygen.

The man was staggering on his damaged knee. He steadied himself and took his hands away from the red ruin of his eyes. Britha managed to find her spear as her breath came again. She heard the bones in his knee knit together. She turned to face him, calming herself like Feroth had taught her. Even through the blood she could make out the look of feral hatred on his face.

Yanking his sword from its scabbard and screaming incoherently, he charged her. She tried to remember everything that Nechtan and Feroth before him had ever taught her about fighting. Her spear had the benefit of reach over his sword, but as soon as he was past her guard she was dead. However, she was faster than him and, she hoped, more intelligent.

Britha glanced behind herself, making sure she knew the position of the crannog and the network of platforms and bridges, and backed away rapidly. His powerful sweeping blows were designed to intimidate, sunder shields and tear open armour. If you were fast and unencumbered they were easy to avoid.

Britha struck out again and again with the spear. Slower than her he may have been, but he used his shield well. The point of her spear just made deep gouges in its leather covering.

She feinted to his leg and followed up with a lightning-fast strike to the head that surprised even herself. She opened a cut on his face.

Ducking, avoiding and parrying blows with her spear that should have shattered the haft, she kept the perfect picture of the crannog village that she had taken from the quick glance behind her in her head. Britha was trying to make her way back to dry land.

She turned and ran, leaping across a gap that she had thought too far to jump, expecting to find herself in the water. The huge warrior was in the air right behind her. She threw the spear above her head to parry his sword as he tried to open her skull in mid-air. The blow shook the spear’s haft, sending painful shock waves down her arm.

Britha landed. The warrior’s knee caught her in the back as she did, sending her flying, but she managed to stay on her feet. She spun round to parry vicious sword blow after vicious sword blow with her spear. He was herding her, controlling her movement. This time when she tried to move around the closest crannog, he blocked her. She darted to the right, stabbing out with the spear. Somehow the huge man managed to parry the thrust and hit her with the shield again. The jarring blow knocked her off her feet and slammed her into the wall of the crannog. The structure cracked behind her. Her head lolled as she struggled to remain conscious. She felt broken inside, nauseous, not sure of where she was for a moment and she had dropped her spear.

As he screamed at her, raising his sword, he sprayed her with spittle, his breath smelling of fish, ale and decay. He brought the sword down, moving the shield that was pinning her to the wall aside at the last moment. It was enough. With new-found speed she threw herself to the platform, rolled and grabbed her spear. The Goddodin’s sword cut through the roundhouse’s thatch roof and wattle and daub wall. On her feet holding the spear, she turned and used the momentum of the movement to help power the spear thrust. The massive warrior seemed momentarily confused as to where she was. He was starting to turn when Britha drove the head of the spear into his side and up into his ribcage.

She cried out as the ash haft of the spear became burning hot. Britha let go. She had felt the demon in the weapon awaken. It wanted to bury itself in flesh and bathe in blood. It wanted to drink the champion’s death and revel in it, even if he was one of theirs now.

The man staggered towards her.

‘Die!’ she screamed at him, putting every bit of her will behind the word. Too intent on the curse, she did not move quickly enough to avoid the powerful backhanded slash of his sword. It drew a line of burning blood up her torso from right to left. She stumbled back, falling hard. Already she could feel the poison on the blade coursing through her.

The light went as he towered over her, dragging her spear in his flesh. He reached down and managed to yank it out, tearing so much of his flesh it looked like his chest had caved in. Even through the pain Britha felt horror at what she saw. The end of her spear was wriggling tendrils of bloody metal. It looked alive. The warrior dropped the spear and tumbled forward like a felled tree, crashing through the platform and into the water. Despite the pain, Britha rolled onto her side to stare into the dark water. She stared for a long time. He did not surface.
He has gone to feed his god
, Britha thought. She felt hot and feverish. Under her skin her flesh burned.

Britha had no idea how long she had been unconscious, but she had woken to find the wound no better, although the cold night air had gone some way towards cooling her fever. She felt like there had been a war and her body had been the battlefield.

The sword wound had been deep but not deep enough to kill. It was puckered, wide, as if the flesh had torn itself open in the path of the sword. She had managed to hold it together long enough to start a fire in the hearth of the closest crannog, using the embers held in the horseshoe fungus. It too had a carving of the fish god. She did not like the way it stared at her. She wondered if it was working against her healing magics.

She had also managed to find some mead and had washed the wound out with the boiled liquid. She had passed out screaming doing this. When she came to again, she knew she did not have much time. She was already having to swat flies away from the gash. The knife she had taken from one of the dead warriors was red in the fire now. She picked it up and felt the heat coming from the blade. At that moment she feared nothing more than the red-hot blade of the knife but she knew she had to do it in one go. If she lost consciousness the flies would get into the wound, it would fester and she would die. Even after she’d cauterised the wound, she knew her chances of surviving were not great.

She tried to surprise herself. Suddenly she pressed the knife to the wound. She wondered if her screams made the sea god himself cringe far beneath the water.

There were no flies, no crow-black wings. Perhaps they felt how unnatural she had become, tainted by the Otherworld in some way she did not understand. She felt exhausted. The wound throbbed but was the manageable side of agony. She was very hungry, frail and emaciated. Looking at her body, she had lost a lot of weight again. Skin was stretched across bone.

She ate what supplies she had left. She scavenged and found more. What she ate she did not think a normal person would even be able to contain. Dimly she realised that she had not shat since before the red beach. She began to fill out again after she had consumed enough smoked fish and salted pork, lamb and beef to feed many people. She had been eating for hours.

A thought that had occurred to her on the red beach came to her again. She had tried to force the idea from her mind. It was the darkest of magics taught in the groves only when winter came, when animal innards festooned the branches of the oaks and blood watered the land.

Britha still knew almost nothing of them. Only what little Bress and Cliodna had told her. That they were slaves to a god and that they brought the madness of the moonstruck with them. It was not enough. She needed more. She needed to know where they were going. It would be more difficult if they were to sail across the sea, perhaps south to the kingdoms of the dark-skinned people the Pecht had sometimes traded with, or north back to their icy home.

She knew a way to steal knowledge but she did not wish to use it. Recovering from the wound had weakened her and these kinds of magics took their toll. They would stain her, make her less than other folk, but it was her people at stake, the people that she had sworn to protect.

Chanting to herself, hoping that her tattoos would offer enough protection to ward away the Goddodin’s sea god, she waded into the water. Every time she dived down into the dark water she feared the god of the carved effigies she had seen would find her. Eventually she found the body, her sight better underwater than she remembered. She managed to hold her breath for a long time and tie a rope around him. The huge warrior’s body was heavier than she thought, but with strength that surprised herself she dragged it onto the beach.

Naked, so that her tattoos could protect her, she had drawn with woad on her skin. The symbols would tell her body and mind what to do when she was lost in the vision. They were the magics that would steal knowledge from the dead champion. She had made do without the correct herbs to burn but she had said the words. Ancient words that allowed her to force her will on man, woman, beast, the land and the sky.

Her sickle would have been better, particularly since it had been bathed in her blood, and blood magic was the strongest of all, even more so than fire magic, but that had been lost on the red beach. The iron knife that had seared her flesh would have to do. She reached down to the champion’s body and cut the first slice of meat off. She held it to her face, steeled herself and opened her mouth. She had eaten raw meat before but it was all she could do not to vomit. She swallowed, stealing some of his power, looking for his knowledge, looking for what the demon inside him knew.

It was like swallowing fire. The fit hit her in a burning wave as she threw herself into violent contortions on the ground, screaming.