NORTHMAN, page 41
The figure stood naked before her and despite her words she shuddered. The form of Thorkild was beautiful and she felt the warmth of desire begin in her loins. She forced the sneer to remain, hearing the pounding of her blood in her ears.
“Fool!” The figure spat the word and she felt the spittle hit her body and burn the skin like tiny drops of acid. “Forever. The pattern is forever. I will change it back to what it should be. The pain will be forever. Until I have the end of all, here.”
It clenched its hands over her body and a thick, foul smelling stream of excrement poured onto her abdomen. Still she sneered, her face rigid, her muscles twisting in agony and hatred; desire flickering alternately through her mind like a faulty light bulb.
The baby screamed and it turned to the sound, pulled the child from its crib and held the struggling form above her, by the thin, downy scalp hair.
“Until I have it here.”
She smiled, the smile a falsehood before it started.
“You have no power. Prove me wrong. Leave the baby - that proves nothing. Kill me. If you can.”
The thing was not deceived, it smiled back and mirrored her smile and for a moment Kate saw her mother’s face staring down without concern, like a porcelain doll.
“It proves everything, Kate. You remember what daddy always said, ‘look before you leap’.” The voice matched the image precisely.
Mother. Mummy.
Kate felt the new fear arrive, a worm burrowing into her brain, expanding, expanding. Leave the child alone, you bastard! Leave the child alone. Where are you God? Is this your love?
The baby’s face bulged before her as the large hands turned the child upside down and dangled it by one tiny foot. Thorkild held the infant before him and laughed, before carefully setting it down in the crib and picking up his sword. He drew the flat of the blade across the downy scalp. “Just before you die, I will crush your child like an egg and that will be the image in your mind as life leaves it. The crushed image of God you will take back to Him in his arrogance.”
The blue eyes turned to her, locked onto hers and for all the violence of that face there was sadness, the sadness of the unloved, of the eternal. “But first, my love, Kate. My love.”
She saw the figure fall towards her, smelt the corruption overwhelm the excrement and then the first thrust rammed into her like a burning log, and pumped once, a recoil throwing ice and fire into her flesh, but the scream would not come, it fell away as a whisper, too late for the pain, as she felt her womb tear open, blood and mucous spilling through the rude cot and onto the hard, dirt floor. She felt her life pass from her into the approaching dark and shrank from its touch.
I can hear my blood leave me. It falls like rain. A summer shower. Wet grass and the smell of mother’s damp frock under the tree and laughing and I love you Mummy I love you oh Michael it’s not your face I love not your face your wet face the frock is wet flowers and the smell is nice warm nice warm apples in the sun Michael look at the apples in the sun how they shine…
45.
FINAL CUT
The horses passed and they rose from the thicket.
“Damnedest thing I ever saw,” said the doctor. “Horses with silver shoes.”
The gods live, the old man said.
Shut up, the doctor thought. Horses are not gods.
But, the old man began.
Weatherall grunted. “Leave it to me, old fellow, it’s only because you have a redundant belief system, you might as well say a Rolls-Royce is God. We’re into black holes, quarks, Higgs boson particles and selfish genes now. No place for equine deities there, believe me.” Very strange this interaction, he thought, conversing without the necessity of sound: a totally internal exchange. Come to think of it there is something faintly god-like about a Rolls.
The old man grumbled and lapsed into silence.
“Gyppo nags, betcha.” Martin hugged Merwenna to him. “Might get a few of them meself. Buggers look faster than the Escort.”
Weatherall stared in the direction the horses had taken. “Abnormal horses. Mythical horses. No Valkyrie. Strange.”
The gods. I called them.
Weatherall ignored the comment. “They’re heading towards the village. What for?”
“They would,” said Martin, following his gaze. “That’s where the nosh is. Reminds me - I’m hungry.”
“Shut up, Martin, I’m thinking.”
As had happened so often in his lifetime, Weatherall felt the strands of his knowledge knit together into a coherent whole. It was a mixed Saxon and Celtic village raided by Vikings, with Thorkild as their leader. Raiders, chancers, maybe thirty or forty years before the big Danish army that was part of the various invasions of Eastern England in 870 or so. A motley assembly of pirates and farmers, or perhaps an advance party. The monastery at Repton not sacked yet, but the one at Lindisfarne probably: maybe by this bunch of reprobates. Thorkild dies at some point. No marks on the body except the welded hands. An infant interred with him. An elderly man buried a few feet away, to the North. The weapons. Then, twelve hundred years later, bang, a German bomb and he’s trying to get to Valhalla. Why not before? Obviously, the baby and the old man were guardians of some kind. We remove them and his program kicks in. No weapons. Get weapons. Kill people. Not us though; me, Martin, Peterson. Then mythical - to all intents and purposes - white horses running faster than a family saloon. I remember the horses. Why do I remember the horses? Somewhere in memory, but where? No friendly Dobbin that bit me unexpectedly as a child. But there they sit, or rather run, through my mind. Race memory? Presupposes genetic acquisition of knowledge, genetic cell memory? No. Like a film I saw perhaps? General Custer?
Weatherall clung to the idea of Custer, blonde hair flowing in the wind: Hollywood’s idea of a hero. Thorkild: no doubt a cloned version of Custer at the prow of his longship riding the waves from Denmark or Norway for the promise of wealth and fame. Where was the link? He ran his hands through his hair and momentarily imagined a large schooner of sherry in his hand and the senseless chat of academics in the pub.
But it is like a film, he thought. That is the closest. When I left the car, I remember feeling as if I were walking into a stage play. This old man knows the lines. So do I. What about Martin, Kate and Peterson? Where is Peterson?
“Have you seen Mister Peterson, Martin?”
“Biggles is dead, Doc.” Martin turned away from him. “I forgot to tell you. Too wrapped up in meself. He was one of them bikers. Got chopped up when they attacked. I tried to save him, honest I did. I liked old Biggles.”
Bikers? Vikings. Peterson a Viking? Yes, it makes sense. Dead. I am sorry. Dead. Just here or in the future? How could he exist in the future if he were killed in the past? Not him but some incarnation of him?
He was a good man. Are these Vikings good men? Not likely. Good men do not split women in two. The doctor shuddered, the taste of bile in his throat and squinted at Martin in the darkness, still turned away. Merwenna was attending to him and from the slump of his shoulders it was apparent he was distressed.
The doctor put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. “Probably only here, Martin. Not in the future. How could it be, eh?”
Martin turned back to him, recovering, wanting to believe, but still with the remembrance of blood and severed limbs strong in his mind. “Think so? Hope so. He was all right was Biggles.” Martin paused, then continued. “Kate’s here too, I saw her earlier, but she didn’t recognise me, just like you. Mebbe she’s on something.”
“Kate? Here? What, our Kate?” The cast assembled. Weatherall had a vision of a wooden jigsaw remembered from childhood; the Houses of Parliament and the last piece - the face of Big Ben at ten to two - clicking into place, but this was not the last piece, oh no.
“Yeah. Still just as snotty. I shouted, then Merwenna’s bloke dumped me on me arse, and I didn’t see no more, but it was her all right.”
So, we are all here. For what purpose? Do you know old man? Can you see the image I am showing you of Kate?
Hilla, daughter of Cenric, sister to Queen Aelflaedda, came the reply. Unwed, she became with child by one of the Christus holy men. Cenric wanted to burn the monastery of the Christus, but Hilla would not let him. She said it was foretold. They are strange those Christus, they worship a dead man and they moan and sing like women and beat themselves with hazel twigs. They have a jar of blood which they say is the blood of the dead god, but I know the pig it came from - it was one of Cenric’s they stole. The Christus eat their god in their bread. I would prefer the pig.
Yes, yes. Thank you, but I don’t need a lesson on primitive societies or the culinary arts. Was Hilla killed in the fight?
I did not see her. They will probably rape her or hold her to ransom. They would have more luck with the pig. Cenric is dead, so who will ransom her? King Wigmund, husband of Aelflaedda, is fighting in Hereford, so I must save her, for Cenric is not her real father. I am her father. Godwif gave me comfort after my wife died birthing. Cenric never knew, but he is… was… a good man... Give me back my body, spirit. I must call up the gods again.
Weatherall laughed. Dirty old devil. That would make me Kate’s father. It explains a few things. Old man, is there any way we could get into the village unseen?
I will walk in and they will not harm me if I call up the gods of the earth.
Fine. But if I may make a suggestion, since we appear to be sharing this body right now, it might seem a silly idea to you, but I would prefer it if we could rescue Kate, sorry, Hilla, before we become a pin cushion. I do not doubt your gods; just call me a cautious old fool.
Very well. The pouch holds the body of a dead god. If the power comes, it will kill the Viking. The old man smiled. No, not kill him but make his dreams real.
Well, be that as it may, are we agreed?
Yes.
“Martin, I’m going to need your help.”
******
She was less than a mote of dust in the roiling dark. All around, in every nook and cranny of this universe, of all the other universes, the vast, inchoate blackness that fed on life without awareness, without conscience, roared, and she felt her life collapse before it, collapse into a terror like no other. Dimly, she remembered the train and the flatlands of Cambridge, Madrid and the phantom birth, as that same oily blackness slid precisely between skin and flesh, between flesh and bone, a flensing machine rendering her down to be devoured. Food for the gods.
But it was not a machine. It desired. It hungered and the hunger was for all that lived. A name flitted into her mind - Erebus, the Greek god of darkness - from a classroom long ago as dust danced in sunlight and summer trickled by, but it was a puny description for that which ate the light, ate existence.
Suspended in time and tumbling through the slipstream of many realities, meaning became clear. She knew it for the moment of death: the chikai bardo referred to in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, read so long ago at university, incomprehensible then but obvious now. In a distant recess of her fading consciousness she knew it was what waited after life: the end for which humanity was destined.
Fear crashed against her fragile soul and hope departed as the darkness tore the breath from her lungs and the warmth from her heart. The slick knife of death had slipped in and she knew that it was not only the spark of life that was being excised, but also her naked soul.
This was what waited beyond. A thing that ate and made the worst death a pleasure before it gifted its final horror. Not the ordered tit for tat of Dante’s circles of hell, but no hell, just extinction, or slavery forever. She felt her being slipping away, her very core sipped, tasted.
“My love. Look upon me.” The voice of Sam, of Michael, of her father, but more than any of them.
He flew to her across the void, his magnificence beyond reason, his beauty unbearable. He reached out, his blue eyes searing the gloom; enveloped her with wings of bright shadows and her terror was replaced by numbness and it was welcome, so welcome. She felt tears of gratitude spring to her eyes and her will spin away like a sycamore seed. Within his embrace the blackness swirled around but did not touch her and she saw that it was because he was the source, the shape of the fallen angel yet another conjuration.
“Not too late.”
Her soul twisted in his hand as a fish on a hook, but there was no escape from the love in his voice, from the radiance of his face. She felt a pleasure beyond flesh build in her, a rising tide of submission to anything he desired.
“Such a small thing.” His voice caressed her soul.
No.
On the brink of a sensation that promised eternity, the word was rude, unwelcome. She tried to stop its vibration, dismiss it, but still the chorus within resisted. She felt him reach within her and take them, willing, one by one, into his boundless glory and the voices grew weaker, muffled by pleasure and finally became silent.
“You will become immortal, in me.”
Yes.
As she lost her will to the grasping dark, she heard the sound.
At first it was a distant tapping, then the cadence of a soft drum.
Through the dark, beyond the encircling wings, a split appeared, bursting with light and through that split poured a coruscation of bright movement, widening the split as it moved in an infinite river of white and silver.
The stream of horses (not horses) was endless, filling the void with light.
Her spirit and the spirits of those within leapt to them, joined with them, scythed through the darkness driving back the dark, but his wings reached out across the vastness of time and space and from them poured an inky slime, sucking at the scintillating movement until it was absorbed, clogging the split, sealing it shut. The light winked out and she was drawn back and back as if on a string, rushing through the darkness to the blue, blue eyes…
And for a moment she saw him. Not a Viking, not the numerous bodies he inhabited or the shapes he moulded and not the dark angel her soul longed for him to be. Eyeless, almost formless but for a vague, shifting shape reminiscent of a worm, he blended with, was the entirety of, the blackness. The sight of him… it… gave rise to a deep sense of revulsion within her, a race memory of disease and corruption that filled her being with a boundless sense of emptiness, of hopelessness.
It was what God had left behind.
Not a fallen angel, but an excrescence, the antithesis of light and beauty. Two sides of the same coin he had said, and in that one sentence he had almost told the truth. The beauty of God - whatever God was, if God was - had moved on to other realities like a magnificent butterfly and only the ugly, pupal shell remained, rotting but immortal in eternity.
That which was Thorkild and a million others shrieked in fury as it realised it was unmasked, seen, and she felt the shadow of its madness and loss as the feeling took her to the edge of insanity. Her scream joined his as they wailed for a lost god.
******
Michael, alone on an endless beach, plucked at the acoustic guitar and was surprised to find the familiar sound of ‘Córdoba’ by Isaac Albéniz emerge flawlessly from his fingers. He frowned. He couldn’t play the guitar well, had never been able to do so and certainly not in perfect imitation of John Williams at his best. At his best he was Jimi Hendrix stuffed with amphetamines and badly hung over. He tried to lay the guitar aside but his muscles ignored the request and the tune continued impossibly, his fingers flowing over the guitar with flawless certainty. The music seemed to diffuse through every cell of his body and he remembered the cathedral in Toledo, remembered the Transparente, the marvellous light falling upon the altar, the reredos… and there was a woman too, in the light, her face uplifted to the sun, but like so many women he couldn’t remember her face and where there should have been features there was only a fuzzy blankness.
He tried to dismiss the blank face, but it persisted at the edges of vision and for some reason a sense of disquiet broke through, the sublime music growing in intensity to mask the feeling, but the feeling becoming urgent, as if there were something he had to do, something important but difficult, rather than playing a guitar on a deserted beach.
It was preposterous: the perfection of the music, the immaculate beach, and the impossibility of preventing the existence of either. The music felt obscenely mechanical and he was reminded of Sophie and his capitulation to another form of coercion, but it was so easy simply to be in the moment, be supine and go with the flow. Still, the unease built inexorably as his fingers became a blur of precision and the music found pain in the absolute.
Distantly, along the curve of the beach he detected movement. It was difficult to make out what the movement was, but for a moment he had a distinct impression of horses, tails streaming, pounding through the shallow surf. He squinted his eyes, but it did not help. He turned away from the movement. Out to sea, a sail was visible heading towards the beach and the sight of it filled him with longing, to be there, on that ship and not stuck here on this interminably glorious strip of sand, thinking only of ‘Córdoba’.
As if someone had flicked the pages of the ‘Readers Digest Book of Landscapes’ he became aware that the beach was no longer a beach, but a mud flat and his feet were embedded to the ankles in thick, stinking clay. But still he played like an automaton, the music rising and falling with the sound of the waves.
Flick. A seagull brushed his face with a wingtip and he felt the wind in his teeth as the longship pushed for the shore where a man stood waiting in the mud, a man with a familiar face, holding a strange instrument.
Flick.
The thought came again. Impossible. With it came the face of the woman and she was calling to him in a strange tongue, but still he was trapped, unable to move. He strained against the mud as a madman, pain jabbing through his legs, but there was nowhere to go - the mud stretched to the edge of the world.
I need you!
She was shouting now in desperation and her voice cut through him. He struggled again, but the mud held him like an old lover and tears sprang to his eyes as he continued playing and soon her voice was no more than a discordant note in the music.
