Bone Harvest E-Book

James Brogden

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 606

Beschreibung

A breakaway faction of a pagan cult performs human sacrifice to resurrect the ancient fertility god Mokos on an allotment in an isolated rural town. The one person who sees what's happening is a woman suffering early-onset Alzheimer's, so nobody believes her, not even herself.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

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Title Page

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Copyright

Dedication

Part One: Prepare The Ground

1: The Grey Brigade

2: Bill

3: Swinley

4: De-Tusking

5: The Recklings

6: Theophagy

7: Replenishment

8: The Sixth Sacrifice

9: 1942

10: The Sacrament of the First Flesh, 1942

11: Attenuation

12: Schism

Part Two: Sow The Seeds

1: Dennie

2: New Neighbours

3: The Shed

4: Bruises

5: The Summoning

6: Barbecue

7: Lizzie

8: Tusk Moon

9: Grafting

10: Infection

11: Snares

12: Somnambulism

13: A Nice Neighbourly Chat

Part Three: Plant Out Seedlings

1: Boundaries

2: The Abattoir Shrine

3: The Wild Side

4: A Premature Interment

5: A Blood-Painted Moon

6: Hot Pot

7: 3.07

Part Four: Aggressively Weed

1: Ashes

2: Giving Thanks

3: Hell Weekend

4: Sunday

5: The Bone Carnyx

6: Desertion

Part Five: Harvest The Crop

1: Interview

2: Homecoming

3: Night Shift

4: Visiting Hours

5: Guns and Dogs

6: The Clearing

7: Echoes

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

BONEHARVEST

Also available from James Brogden and Titan Books

Hekla’s Children

The Hollow Tree

The Plague Stones

BONEHARVEST

JAMESBROGDEN

TITAN BOOKS

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Bone Harvest

Print edition ISBN: 9781785659973

E-book edition ISBN: 9781785659980

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: May 2020

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2020 by James Brogden. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

FOR JOHN AND GRETA

The dews drop slowly and dreams gather: unknown spears

Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes,

And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries

Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.

We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore,

The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew,

Being weary of the world’s empires, bow down to you,

Master of the still stars and of the flaming door.

From “The Valley of the Black Pig” by William Butler Yeats

Theophagy (n.): the sacramental eating of a god

PART ONE

PREPARE THE GROUND

1

THE GREY BRIGADE

THE DESERTER RAN FROM THE BATTLE, AND HID IN A shell crater in No Man’s Land.

By the time he felt that it was safe to move, the sun had disappeared in a crimson smear behind the shattered reek of sky. The thunder of the big guns had stopped hours ago, and the popping crackle of rifle shots was dwindling like rain, leaving only the evening chorus of screams, prayers, pleas and curses from men dying unseen, as if the churned earth were bewailing its own torture.

He was sprawled halfway down the slope of the crater, little more than a water-filled pit with the half-submerged corpses of three other soldiers for company. With their uniforms the same mud-grey as their flesh, it was impossible to tell which side of the line they had originally come from, and the mud also caked him from head to foot, making him one with the dead, all brothers together. He’d spent the hours waiting for nightfall watching the rats eat them, their sleek bodies cruising the crater’s waters like miniature destroyers, graceful in their element. They’d avoided him once an exploratory nibble at his left boot had prompted a kick; there was no need to attack the living when they could glut themselves on the dead. One particularly bold fellow had sat by a corpse’s outflung hand and taken his time to gnaw away the fingers, pausing every so often to look at the deserter as if inviting him to join them. Plenty to go around, chum.

And despite himself – despite the screaming and the stench of shit and bowels and rot – the deserter’s stomach had been growling before long.

He wondered how he might go about catching one. It would not be the first time he’d eaten rat, but it might be the first time he’d done so raw, since he had no means of making a fire and to do so would be suicide anyway.

The attack had been at dawn, of course. The result had been butchery, of course. It was possible that one or other side had gained several yards of ground, but in the noise and tumult he had become so disorientated that he no longer knew in which direction lay his own trenches or those of the enemy. Not that such a distinction had meaning any more. All that mattered was that he had been lying in this crater from sunrise to sunset without food or water. He remembered (or tried to; it was hard, his thoughts darting to and fro like the rats), eating some kind of thin oat porridge in the pre-dawn dark before the attack. He had not eaten since, and what little water he carried had run out before noon. By evening he’d developed a nasty fever, which from the heat of it in his blood felt like it wasn’t going anywhere soon.

The western sky grew sullen, and when he felt that it was safe to move the deserter began to inch his way down, lower into the crater, keeping his head below the rim. The rats squealed, reluctant to abandon their feast, and watched him with glittering eyes as he fumbled amongst the dead soldiers’ packs and pouches. He found a few crumbs of salted pork that the rats had somehow missed and some lumps of a dark, waxy substance which could have been chocolate or the remains of a candle but which he ate anyway since experience told him that there would be little difference in taste. There was a letter from a loved one addressed to ‘My darling Everett’, which he kept since paper was good for lighting fires. He also found a leather case about the same size and shape as a large notebook, which contained a brush, a few blocks of watercolour paint, and a packet of daubings on pieces of thick cartridge paper. Anaemic landscapes, for the most part – pale hills and flowering trees – this trench-bound Constable’s idyllic memories of his homeland. The deserter tossed them into the stagnant water at the bottom of the crater. None of that existed any more. They were lies. Lies got men killed. Lies like ‘it’ll all be over by Christmas lads!’ and ‘just this one last big push and we’ll break them!’ and ‘for God and the King, boys!’ He peered into the dead man’s face – the half of it that wasn’t a pulped ruin of skull and brain, all that remained of Everett’s loves and artistic aspirations reduced to the one remaining eye rolled up so high in its socket that it looked like a boiled egg.

His stomach growled again.

He couldn’t remember anything from before the trenches. Every time he tried to think further back than that – to home and family, assuming that he had either – he was met with the monstrous anger of the guns roaring continuously, like a great standing wave threatening to overtopple and crush him if he got too close. He had tried to point this out to Captain Milburne, but since his memory for killing was intact that was all that seemed to be required, and he’d been ordered to pick up his rifle and return to his post. Both post and rifle were long gone, obliterated by the enemy guns, along with his rank and his name, but they hardly mattered.

What mattered now were boots, lucifers, field glasses, weapons, and especially ammunition. He was going to need a sufficient tribute if he hoped to be accepted by those whom he had come in search of rather than simply killed out of hand.

The Wild Deserters.

The Grey Brigade.

The No-Men.

It was said that they lived in the remains of old dugouts and the cellars of shattered buildings in No Man’s Land, and that they emerged by night to scavenge amongst the dead, even going so far as to eat the flesh. Some, it was whispered with ghoulish glee by veterans to wide-eyed new recruits, preferred it fresh rather than bloated and maggot-ridden, and would lure an unwary man away from his post to butcher him like a beast. Others told stories of them appearing like angels out of the drifting smoke to give mercy to the dying and rescue the wounded, returning them to their lines before disappearing. None, that the deserter had ever heard, had been ordered to march to their deaths in a hail of bullets and shrapnel by fat, complacent generals who sat safely distant having their cocks sucked by French whores and dining on three square meals a day. The Grey Brigade had no generals or officers, it was said.

The deserter shouldered his satchel of loot and set off, coughing like a hag, into the cratered waste to find his new company.

* * *

There was a purity to No Man’s Land that the deserter admired, in the way that one might admire a piece of machinery engineered perfectly for its purpose, without fripperies or useless ornamentation. It was a landscape that could not have been better designed to take life, and in this it succeeded beautifully. One did not walk through No Man’s Land – to do so would risk a sniper’s bullet. You squirmed up the slope of one crater and peered over its lip into the other, trying to see what awaited you as you slid down into the next, often half-swimming in mud and blood, and sometimes, if you were lucky, on a more solid carpet of corpses. Every yard of progress was a negotiation with barbed wire, splintered wood and bone, mud so deep it could drown a horse, and scum-covered water that hid razor shards of metal. Entrails garlanded the wreckage. Dying men sobbed and implored him as he passed. Others dragged themselves blindly through the mud, shattered legs trailing behind them like worms. He ignored them all, just one more worm amongst so many. As night deepened, one side or the other would fire off the occasional flare, and in the shifting shadows of its descent the corpses seemed to move too, twisting like things rolling in deep ocean currents.

There was a place that had once been a wood – the trees now little more than broken, jagged pillars – and he aimed for this as it seemed as good a place as any. A flare was dying behind him, and as it fell with the wind its glare threw long spokes of shadow that swept the ground around him.

And then, without transition or warning, three of the stumps were men.

They hadn’t moved an inch or done anything to signal their existence to him; one moment they were simply there, in the same way that a picture of a young woman will be that of a crone, or a candlestick becomes two faces. They were motionless in the light of the falling flare, and there was something breathtaking about the fact that they were actually standing, like men, not crouched and creeping like animals. For all that the No-Men were bearded, unkempt and dressed in rags, they claimed their ground with more authority than any groomed and pressed officer. Despite his earlier confidence, and the fact that he’d brought them tribute, the deserter nevertheless felt that he should drop to his knees, were it not for the fact that he was already lying on his belly. A worm. A corpse lacking the wit to realise it was dead. He could think of no reason why they shouldn’t put a bullet in him and correct the mistake. He would have done so in their position.

Then the flare died completely, and the No-Men must have moved, though how they could have tackled this terrain so swiftly didn’t seem possible, because they were standing around him, three deeper shadows in the blackness, and he felt the prick of a bayonet pressed between his shoulder blades.

‘What’s your regiment?’ The whisper was hoarse, and in English.

‘Royal Warwickshire Territorials, sir,’ he stammered in reply.

‘Don’t sir me.’ The bayonet pressed harder. ‘What do you think I am? I’ll ask you again. Your regiment.’

‘Who do you take orders from?’ added a second voice, accented, probably German. A third voice sniggered, thick and low. They were mocking him. Testing him. Then he realised what the first voice had really asked.

‘None,’ the deserter answered. ‘No regiment. No orders.’

‘So, who are you, then?’ asked the whisperer.

‘What are you?’ added the sniggerer.

‘Nothing,’ he said, and as soon as it was uttered he felt the truth of it lift its burden from his soul. ‘I’m nothing,’ he repeated more confidently, on an outrush of breath as if it were a confession of love. ‘I’m a deserter. A coward. If they catch me they’ll put me up against a wall and shoot me.’

‘Funny, that,’ replied the European. ‘What do you think they have been doing to you all this time?’

The bayonet disappeared from his back, and hands helped him to his feet. It was such a simple act, but it ran counter to months of crouching that he cowered, convinced that a sniper would immediately blow his brains out, but nothing happened. There was no challenge or gunshot, just the screams and tears of the wounded all around them in the darkness. Then another flare soared into the sky, much further off than the last, and the hands that held him up began to guide him.

They led him deeper into the skeletal wood, to the shell-blasted ruins of what might have been a farmhouse. It seemed so obvious a landmark and rendezvous point for raiding parties that anybody trying to avoid patrols would go nowhere near it, and he said as much.

‘Regulars have learned not to come here,’ replied the whisperer. ‘This place belongs to the Grey Brigade.’

There had been one large room which was now a courtyard with its roof gone, and in one corner a wide trapdoor made of heavy timbers. Two of the No-Men hauled it open to reveal stone stairs descending to what had presumably been the farm’s cellar. Down here there wasn’t even the meagre ambient light of the outside, and the deserter stumbled in absolute blackness. Then a fist thudded on wood, a rattling bolt was withdrawn, and a door opened into light, warmth, and the aroma of food.

The cellar was long and low-ceilinged, and even though it had collapsed at the far end it was still luxurious compared to the funk-holes he’d slept in and even some of the officers’ dugouts he’d seen. Scavenged kit was stacked in piles all around – rifles, ammunition, boots, blankets, mess kits, tools – between which were makeshift cots for the dozen or so men who called this place home. It was humid with the reek of contained and unwashed men. They lay or sat, picking lice off themselves, mending or making gear, or any one of the dozens of small tasks that kept off-duty soldiers busy. Some stopped what they were doing to stare as he entered, while others carried on as if he didn’t exist. Four were sitting on chairs about a small table, playing cards. Their uniforms were a motley of German feldgrau with red trim and gold buttons, French horizon-blue and British khaki, salvaged and patched from either side of the lines. The only thing they had in common was the lack of any rank insignia – cuffs, collars, and epaulettes were all stripped bare. Light came from stubs of candles set around the room and at the far end where a crude fireplace had been made out of the rubble and the damaged ceiling allowed smoke to vent. Here a man crouched on his haunches by a large cast-iron pot, who turned from regarding the newcomer to resume stirring its contents. As he stood in the doorway gaping, the European and the Sniggerer pushed past him to their own particular corners and started stripping off their gear.

‘Welcome to the Wild Deserters,’ said his escort. Seen properly for the first time, he was younger than the hoarseness of his voice had led the deserter to imagine, dressed in the same assortment of gear. ‘I’m Bill. You have a name?’ His voice was still a guttural whisper, which served well enough for survival in No Man’s Land, though it appeared he had little choice since his throat was a scrawled nightmare of scar tissue. Bill, then. No rank, no surname. Probably not even his real name.

‘Everett,’ he said, since it was as good a name as any.

‘Lads,’ said Bill to the room, ‘meet Everett.’

There were grunts, a couple of tin cups raised in sardonic welcome, and one cry of ‘Fresh meat!’ which was met with chuckles.

‘You’re hungry,’ said Bill. ‘Come on.’

Everett helped himself to an empty mess tin and spoon and approached the cooking pot, inhaling deeply. The aroma felt rich and heavy enough to fill him on its own – something meaty, with pepper and rosemary that conjured up images of Sunday roasts and tablecloths and creamy white plates at a table with roses at the window, but the roaring noise at the back of his head overwhelmed that unbidden memory, and when he shook himself he saw that the cook, introduced only as Potch, had ladled his mess tin full of stew. Large lumps of meat and dumplings were drowning in a thick brown gravy. Bodies in mud. There was a space next to where Bill was unwinding the puttees from his calves, so he sat there.

His first mouthful stunned him. He’d been expecting some creative use of bully beef, salty and formless mush, but his tongue encountered flesh and gristle, and he chewed and chewed and finally swallowed. ‘My God!’ he grinned at Bill. ‘Is this actual pork?’

Bill paused in unwinding the strips of cloth from his legs and eyed him. ‘What do you care?’ he asked.

The deserter became aware that the room had become very quiet, and that everyone was looking at him. In their eyes he saw the same flat appraisal that the rats had given him. Plenty to go around, chum. What did he care? The answer, he found, as he devoured his meal and then licked the mess tin clean, was that he didn’t.

2

BILL

EVERETT’S TIME WITH THE GREY BRIGADE WAS IN many respects much the same as life in the regular army. There were long periods of intense boredom alleviated only by finding creative ways to gamble and the ongoing war of attrition against lice and damp, interrupted by outbreaks of nerve-shredding noise and terror when one side or the other made another futile attempt to break the stalemate and claim another few yards of No Man’s Land. There were rifles to be maintained and latrines to be dug and the cellar ceiling was forever threatening to collapse and needed shoring up with pieces of timber.

In other respects it was a different world.

There was no command structure and hence no one to order that these duties be done, and so they were only ever completed haphazardly, or at the cost of sometimes brutally violent arguments about who should take responsibility for what. There was no stand-to at dawn, and no inspections. But there was no relief either. Before, he could have expected six days at the front before being rotated back to the reserve trenches and possibly even some home leave, but with the Grey Brigade there was nowhere to rotate to. And, because of the exposure to snipers during daylight, they led an almost entirely nocturnal and silent existence. Light and noise were shunned. He had hoped that the relative warmth and better diet might help his fever, but if anything it worsened, developing into a persistent cough. Long bouts would leave him with blood on his lips and unable to stand, and he felt something heavy swilling at the bottom of his lungs, like water in a shell crater. Almost certainly it was tuberculosis, fatal in the long term, but given that his life expectancy was likely to be a matter of days he tried not to let it bother him too much.

At times, sitting in his alcove in the cellar either mending a sock or cleaning a gun, he wondered if this was how medieval monks had lived. Before, it was not unknown for some of the men to comfort each other physically, but with the threat of court-martial and imprisonment such acts were scrupulously clandestine; amongst the Wild Deserters there were no such inhibitions and he quickly ceased to be shocked by the sight of men fucking.

Sometimes, regulars from one army or the other would try to use the farm as a staging point for a raid or recce, and then the Grey Brigade would hide, deep and silent. Taking the wounded, who were as good as dead anyway, was one thing, but to attack a fully armed squad of fighting men would attract reprisals. And the caution was felt on both sides. On one occasion a private discovered the cellar door and excitedly called to his sergeant while in the dark on the other side Everett and the others gripped their rifles tighter and readied themselves. The deserter tried to take slow and even breaths, as a coughing fit at this moment was the last thing they needed.

‘Leave it, private,’ they heard the sergeant grunt.

‘But, sir!’ complained the private. ‘There could be all sorts down there! Bottles of wine! Brandy, even!’ There came a murmur of interest from the other men in the squad at that.

The sarge’s reply carried the low and intense anger of a man who was deeply scared. ‘Now you listen to me, boy. The only thing on the other side of that door for you is death. You can go in and look for it if you like, but you’re going on your own, and you ain’t coming back.’

That seemed to do the trick for the curious private, and the squad moved off, but not before the sarge hawked and spat heavily at the door.

‘Why didn’t they come in after us?’ asked the deserter afterwards.

‘They don’t know for sure that we exist,’ said Bill. ‘Or if we do, what our numbers are, how we are armed, what we are capable of. Hard enough to carry out your orders as they stand without going looking for trouble. They try not to believe that we exist for the simple reason that they can’t comprehend our motives as being anything other than cowardice and the desire to save our skins. They think, why would a man who cares only for his own survival willingly put himself in the middle of conflict? For men such as they are, who are moulded by and perpetuate a system of fear and unthinking obedience, the notion that a man might flee them out of a refusal to have his spirit so enslaved and that the safety of his flesh and blood means nothing in comparison – it’s beyond the scope of their imaginations. Easier for them to imagine ghouls and monsters than men with a sense of their own dignity.’

I am what the elders teach the young ones to fear, Everett thought proudly. I am the thing in the cellar. ‘I’d like to get a full, proper Grey Brigade together out here,’ he said. ‘We could invade the world from No Man’s Land. Imagine their faces!’

‘Imagine their faces as they mowed us down with Lewis guns, perhaps.’

‘So why did you join up, then? You don’t seem very much the unthinking obedient type.’

But all Bill would offer him by way of reply was a wry smile and the response, ‘Who says I joined up?’

* * *

It occurred to him that he should have felt sickened by the act of cannibalism, or at least guilty. But he found that after seeing so much of how human flesh and bone and viscera could be mangled and mutilated, the sacred vessel of the human spirit torn open and spilled into the mud with no revelation, it lost any sanctity it might have once held for him, and the taboo became as meaningless as trying to stay a virgin in a brothel.

This was not to say that he didn’t retain some principles – he made it a point of pride to only ever eat from men he had killed as a mercy. The problem was that any kind of meat perished rapidly in such damp and unsanitary conditions, and when even the living suffered from gangrene the freshness of a carcass could not be relied upon. The balance, then, lay in finding a man so wounded that he had no hope of survival.

Everett’s first kill was a young German Gemeiner that he and Bill found in a shell crater, semi-conscious and raving with infection.

His left leg hung in tatters, though he’d done a passable job of using his belt as tourniquet above the knee. Since bone was always awkward to cut through, and the explosion had already done that work for them, Everett decided to take advantage of this and moved in with a knife to cut through the remaining tissue and sinews; however, the sensation of being sawn at roused the private to such fresh pleading and screaming that the deserter felt something like pity and drew his pistol to put the boy out of his misery.

Bill pushed his gun down, miming Noise. As if the boy were not already making enough. But Bill was right; screaming was just background noise, easily ignored, whereas a gunshot in No Man’s Land might draw the attention of snipers. So the deserter replaced the gun and used his knife. It whispered across the boy’s throat and as his screams became gurgles and then finally stopped, Everett was aware that Bill was murmuring some litany and turning a bracelet that hung on his right wrist.

Later in the cellar, eating what the boy had provided, he remarked to Bill, ‘If it’s forgiveness you’re after, I think you’re looking in the wrong place.’

‘Not forgiveness,’ replied Bill in his hoarse choke of a voice. ‘Blessing.’

Everett laughed. ‘Even worse!’

Bill removed the bracelet with which he had been fiddling and passed it to him. It was a simple loop of something whitish-yellow that felt like ivory, with open metal-capped ends.

‘What’s this?’ Everett asked.

‘It’s a boar’s tusk, the symbol of my faith. I belong to the Farrow, the followers of Moccus.’

‘Huh. Sounds Greek.’

‘He’s older than the Greeks. Moccus is the Great Boar, He Who Eats the Moon, much older even than your Christ.’

‘He’s not my Christ.’ Although given the roaring blankness of his memory even that might not have been true.

‘All the same. Moccus protects warriors and hunters, as well as bringing life and fertility to the land. Think of him as the patron saint of soldiers, if it helps.’

‘Naw, that’s Saint George,’ said Geordie, one of the other Tommies.

‘Khuinya,’ growled Nikolai, the small Russian sapper. ‘Bullshit. Saint George is patron of Moscow.’

Bill overrode them both before an argument could brew. ‘Moccus was old when your city was a village of mud huts,’ he said. ‘He defended the people of the deep forests against the Romans. He’s there still, for those who know how to look for him.’

‘Then why hasn’t anybody heard of him?’ asked the deserter, passing the bracelet back.

‘Why haven’t you heard of him, you mean? As if the world will simply open its secrets to you like a whore because you’re in it?’ Bill shrugged. ‘You’re hearing about him now. That boy, the German with the leg, he was a soldier, and his death gave us something, so I hoped that Moccus might bless him for that.’

The deserter chewed slowly, wondering if he should be grateful, and if so to whom. The corpse he had left in the mud with its throat cut, indistinguishable from all the others? God? If He was there, surely He could regard such acts only with abhorrence. ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that if this Moccus of yours is a protector of warriors and hunters then he’s doing a bloody awful job of it hereabouts.’ This earned him some chuckles from the other Wild Deserters.

Bill simply nodded; if he’d taken offence he kept it to himself, but he raised his chin to expose the pink ruin of his throat. ‘Do you think I would have survived this otherwise?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ the deserter admitted. ‘I’ve seen men survive some pretty horrible things.’

‘I’ve survived a lot more than most. I was at Mafeking, where we were so hungry we ate our own horses. I was with the 90th Light Infantry at Ulundi when we broke the Zulus. Got this.’ He pushed up his trouser leg to reveal a long, shining scar that curved down his calf and disappeared into his sock.

‘But that was over thirty years ago!’ Everett protested. ‘You’re nowhere near that old.’

‘He’s full of bullshit,’ said Nikolai.

‘The sound of their spears drumming on shields was like thunder rolling across the plain out of a clear blue sky,’ Bill continued, as he stirred the stew in his mess tin.

‘Next you’ll be trying to tell me that you rode with bloody Wellington himself.’

Bill smiled at that. ‘A bit before my time,’ he admitted, and was quickly sober again. ‘The favour of Moccus is not some deferred celestial reward if you say enough Hail Marys and eat fish on Fridays every week until you die. It is writ in the flesh and blood and muscle and bone of his worshippers, gifted from that of himself. He makes his followers strong.’ He was still stirring his food, not eating, and the deserter caught the unspoken word hiding in his tone.

‘But?’

‘Strength doesn’t count for much when a man is all scar.’ Bill grunted a dry little laugh and put his meal to one side.

‘Ah yes, the sword of righteousness and the shield of faith. Forgive me if those don’t sound much help against a trench mortar and Jerry coming at you with a bayonet. No offence, Hans,’ he added. The German lad picking lice out of his beard with the use of a candle and a mirror waved the insult away. ‘Are there songs? Does your Moccus offer virgins in heaven?’

There was more laughter at this. Only Potch, the cook, who had known Bill longer than any of them, didn’t join in. ‘Don’t provoke him,’ he warned the deserter.

Bill drew out his knife.

Everett jumped to his feet and stepped back. ‘Now hold on there a moment, chum…’

‘I told you,’ Potch murmured, watching with interest. Activity in the cellar had stopped; white eyes in the gloom turned their way, wary. It wouldn’t be the first fight – or death – this room had witnessed.

But it seemed that fighting to defend his faith was not what Bill had in mind. ‘There’s this,’ he said, pulling up his sleeve, and then drawing the blade across the underside of his forearm. The cut was shallow but bled in a quick, red flood. He winced a little, put the knife down, gripped the cut with his other hand and then wiped the blood away. Where it should have bled afresh, there was the shining pink line of a new scar.

Everett gaped while the other men, evidently familiar with such small miracles and uninterested in the conversation now that it seemed unlikely to become violent, went back to their business. He felt his lungs go into spasm and sat back down heavily as coughing wracked him. ‘Well,’ he wheezed, wiping blood from his lips with the back of one hand. ‘You’ve convinced me. I could do with a bit of whatever you’re selling. Consider me a convert. Where do I sign up?’

‘It’s not as simple as that. If this ever ends,’ Bill said, with an upward nod that meant not just the outside but the whole war, ‘and you’re alive to see what comes next, find a village called Swinley, on the Welsh Marches in Shropshire. That’s where you’ll find us: the Farrow. It’s where our god walks – you can make your case directly to him.’

3

SWINLEY

THE DESERTER WASN’T CONVINCED THAT THE WAR would end. With his past lost behind that wall of thunder, and along with it any clear recollection of a time of peace, it seemed entirely possible that no such state had existed, that slaughter and mud and mangled flesh had been the condition of mankind forever and would continue forever, war without end, amen. He wasn’t persuaded by the way other men claimed to recall such a time and told stories about it. The members of the Grey Brigade rarely offered insights about their pasts, presumably fearing betrayal to the authorities and a firing squad, and it was easy to dismiss those that did talk about their lives before as madmen. There were plenty of men in the trenches who were shell-shocked and suffering from all manner of absurd fantasies – what more absurd than a world of green grass, trees, and birdsong? Then the Loos offensive was launched, and in the botched attempts to cut the German wire an artillery barrage brought down the cellar roof, killing half of the Brigade along with Bill, and his particular absurdity died with him. Apparently his unnatural healing couldn’t do much in the face of several tons of stone and earth. The Allied offensive rolled over their position in a wave of steel and thunder, and while the surviving Wild Deserters tried to flee before it Everett let himself literally sink beneath it as it passed, reasoning that the world would have its way with him and there was little he could do about it.

When British arms pulled him out of the mud they found a man dressed in the rags of a British uniform but who, despite speaking English with an accent which sounded vaguely Midlands, claimed to have no memory of where he was from or what had happened to him. This in itself was not unusual, but the lack of any insignia, tags, or documents to give a clue as to his identity caused more suspicious voices to suggest that he was simply shamming and really a deserter. Nonsense, it was countered, who in their right mind would desert forward, into No Man’s Land? And so he was declared to be suffering from shell-shock and sent to an army hospital at Langres, where the surgeons confirmed that diagnosis and added tuberculosis to the list, and he was invalided out to an asylum for enlisted men called Scholes Farm on the outskirts of Birmingham.

Here, for the first time, he felt truly afraid.

He saw strong men reduced to stammering and twitching puppets, jerked by invisible strings that tied them inescapably to the horrors that they had experienced – weeping, vomiting, pissing themselves like infants. Still, for them there was some hope, however thin, that their minds might be healed. Worse were the ones who retained their clarity of mind within mutilated bodies – who had lost faces, limbs, genitalia, and who knew that nothing would ever make them whole again – but even for them the damage was done, and as bad as it was, wouldn’t get any worse. For himself, the consumption that ate away at his lungs was a death sentence by slow and insidious degrees. The best that he could hope for was a massive haemorrhage and a swift bleeding-out. At worst, the disease would spread into his bones and brain, causing meningitis and warping his spine, trapping him in the rotting corpse of his own body.

Through the winter of 1915, a cheerless Christmas and the hollow promise of the New Year he got used to being awoken in the night by the sound of running footsteps and screams, often his own, and so the first time that Bill came to visit him was peculiar in its absolute silence.

He could not recall the process of waking up; one moment he was asleep and the next awake with the stark clarity of a gunshot. At first he couldn’t work out why. There was no noise from anywhere else in the building, just the ticking of his wristwatch on the bedside table, and then he became aware of the human silhouette watching him from the corner of the room. Something about the figure gleamed. He could make out no features and yet he knew instinctively that it was Bill, an understanding confirmed by the lighter shine of a boar-tusk bracelet around his wrist. The deserter waited for his visitor to say something. Then either he moved, or the thin light through the curtains changed fractionally because the deserter could now see the condition in which Bill had chosen to visit him: he was naked and slicked with blood from huge wounds where his flesh appeared to have been gouged – no, not cut, the deserter realised, but eaten. Then he was gone as suddenly as he’d appeared.

Bill returned for the next two nights, but not again afterwards. It never occurred to the deserter that it might have been a hallucination. The bloody footprints that his old friend had left were real enough, though the deserter made sure that he cleaned them away so that the doctors didn’t see them and think that he was up to anything unusual. Bill had simply, for whatever reasons of his own, chosen to visit him from the No Man’s Land between life and death.

Time and again he dreamed of that conversation in the cellar, Bill drawing a neat scar across his forearm, and the boar-tusk bracelet on his wrist, while his cough grew steadily worse. He searched county maps of Shropshire for a village called Swinley, and found it hidden in a narrow valley amongst the tumbled folds of hills right on the border with Wales.

The locks and bars of Scholes Farm Asylum were no more effective as barriers against him than the barbed wire and craters of the Western Front had been. He stole clothes, money, and identity papers from the other inmates, who didn’t need them and probably wouldn’t notice their absence anyway. It was January, the worst possible month for a man with a lung condition to be travelling, but instead of convalescing by a warm fire he travelled by train out through Wolverhampton and the Black Country, enduring a series of draughty third-class railway carriages and long waits in damp station waiting rooms until he reached the market town of Church Stretton, which huddled below the sombre bulk of a hill called the Long Mynd. Despite being the low season, it was impossible to find a guest house vacancy for the night, since at the first sign of his cough the proprietors would close their doors to him, terrified of the disease he carried. It also meant that there were no brakes to be hired and he was forced to walk up the hill road and onto the unsheltered moorland plateau of the Mynd. It was not especially steep but with his lungs the going was strenuous. For a place that billed itself to summer day-trippers as ‘Little Switzerland’, he saw no majestic snow-capped peaks, just a succession of grey slopes looming out of the drizzle like waves of a cheerless sea, and the closest he got to a buxom blonde milkmaid was a fat dairy farmer called Jones who let him sit in the back of his cart amongst the rattling milk churns.

The countryside on the other side of the Mynd was a tangle of narrow lanes and high hedgerows running between farms and small villages, mostly without signposts since presumably the locals knew where everything was, but if he’d been alone and on foot he’d have soon become hopelessly lost. As it was, Jones the farmer deposited him at a junction with an even smaller road – little more than a track between close-crowded trees – assured him that it was the road to Swinley, and continued on his way.

* * *

It was cold under the trees. They pressed close on either side and tangled heavy limbs overhead like the fingers of hands steepled in dark rumination, while the undergrowth filled the space between their trunks, holly and hawthorn as thick with barbs as any coil of barbed wire. There was no wind, and yet he fancied that he heard faint rustlings, either of the trees themselves or something moving stealthily amongst them, keeping pace with him.

At a turn in the track he saw, blocking his way, an animal that he at first took to be a pig, covered in a dark, bristling hide with stiff hackles, and tusks curved both up and down either side of its snout. A boar, then. But surely extinct in Britain? It was statue-still in the middle of the path, staring at him, daring him to dispute its existence. There seemed no point in trying to hide his purpose, so he said, ‘I’m looking for the followers of Moccus.’

The boar regarded him, almost as if it understood, then uttered a rattling, full-throated squeal and dashed back into the undergrowth. The deserter waited for any further reaction from the surrounding woods, but none came, so he took that as encouragement and pressed on.

Bill had called Swinley a village, but it was really more of a large farmstead surrounded by a cluster of satellite cottages and outbuildings hidden behind tall hedgerows and the coats of their own ivy, and separated from each other by a patchwork of small fields. There was even a church steeple rising from the midst. Beyond and above it reared the slope of another steep hill, wooded for the most part but bare where trees gave way to heather and the tumbled mass of a granite outcrop. Swinley appeared to be perfectly ordinary, probably unchanged since the time of Shakespeare, except that as he wandered its narrow lanes looking for someone to whom he could present himself, he saw no sign of people at all. Even in winter there should have been someone working the fields. He decided to make for the church: if the village had a centre it would be there, though if Bill had been telling the truth that the inhabitants of this place worshipped something other than a Christian god, he did wonder what kind of a church it would be.

Again, perfectly ordinary, as it turned out. According to a noticeboard by the lychgate this was The Church of St Mark’s in the Parish of Swinley. Mark’s, he thought. Moccus. Now more than ever he suspected that this whole affair was nothing more than the brain-fever of a man no saner than the rest of the madmen. He saw weathered stone, lichen-spotted headstones, and a stout oak door standing open to the church’s porch. From inside he heard a woman’s voice singing – not a hymn, but something with lilt and sparkle, something about a sailor and his bonnie bride.

The deserter entered. In the porch a waxed jacket hung above a pair of muddy wellingtons, and the singing, soft though it was, was picked up by the building’s vaulted interior so that it seemed to come out of the very stones. As he opened the inner door the coolness of stone and the warm smell of furniture polish and old carpet folded around him. He saw ranks of darkly gleaming oak pews and a pulpit, a paraffin heater doing its best against the chill, stained-glass windows, and the singer, in the process of polishing the pulpit’s brass fittings, turning in surprise.

She was young, with dark hair wound up in a chignon, and wearing a pair of bib overalls like a munitionette. Cool blue eyes regarded him with the kind of still, silent appraisal that reminded him oddly of how the boar on the path had watched him. He could well imagine how he must look to her: a scarecrow of a man, dripping wet, in a threadbare suit. ‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘What do you want?’

Before he could reply, a fit of coughing wracked him, and when he could catch his breath replied, ‘My name is Everett. I’m looking for the followers of Moccus. The, uh, the Farrow.’

She at least did him the courtesy of not feigning ignorance. ‘Oh are you, now? And what makes you think you’ll find them here?’

He told her a highly selective tale of how he had met Bill and what the other man had shown him. ‘He must have been from here,’ the deserter finished. ‘Did you know him?’

‘Come with me,’ was all she said. She bundled her cleaning things into a bucket and edged past him down the aisle to the door, where she looked back to see that he hadn’t moved. He’d just noticed that there was something very odd about the images depicted by the stained-glass windows. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Are you coming or not?’

‘Sorry, yes.’ He shook himself and followed.

‘You look like you could do with a cup of tea and a hot meal, if nothing else. My name is Ardwyn.’

She led him out through the churchyard and to a neighbouring cottage – an ancient and rambling building with a humpbacked thatch roof and a chimney of granite. In the yard outside they passed an absolutely huge man with a slab of a jaw chopping wood, with whom Ardwyn stopped to have a few quiet words before leading the deserter on. The wood-chopper watched him pass with a frown of distrust.

‘Afternoon, chum,’ the deserter nodded.

The big man responded by baring his teeth in what could never have been mistaken for a smile. For a start, he had far too many of them; they crowded his mouth like headstones and looked more like tusks than human teeth.

‘That’s Gar,’ said Ardwyn. ‘He doesn’t speak much.’

‘I can see why.’

Everett was ushered into a kitchen with a ceiling so low that for a moment he was in the cellar again and Potch the cook was at the table with his knife, taking the meat off a man’s shoulder, and the deserter swallowed against the sudden rolling hunger in his guts and clenched his eyes shut, and when he opened them again Potch was gone, replaced by a middle-aged woman in an apron, chopping nothing more contentious than parsnips.

‘This is Mother,’ said Ardwyn. ‘Tell her what you told me.’ So while Ardwyn busied about pouring tea and setting a plate of bread, cheese and, cold ham before him, he told the older woman the same story. She quizzed him closely on his description of Bill, nodded and said, ‘Now tell me the rest of it.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Yes you do. You’ve just described my son and told me that he died bravely and honourably in the trenches, but Bill wasn’t his name. His real name was Michael.’ Ardwyn was weeping with her arms tightly crossed but her mother’s eyes were dry, her voice calm and steady. She might weep for her dead son but not now, not in front of him, a stranger. ‘Why would Michael lie about who he was, especially if you were so close with him that he told you about his faith?’

‘The Wild Deserters weren’t exactly the sort of chaps you used your real name with,’ he replied. ‘I’m sure he meant to tell me eventually – probably here, when it was all over. But then artillery barrages have a tendency to be a nuisance to one’s long-term plans, don’t you know.’

She came around the table, wiping her hands on her apron and perched on the corner, fixing him with the same blue eyes as her daughter. ‘So, what name did he know you by?’ she asked. ‘Who are you? If he told you such things he must have seen something in you that would flourish here, in our particular situation. But I hear nothing of that in the story you’ve told. If you want to enjoy the favour of He Who Eats the Moon, tell me who you are, really.’

The deserter pushed his plate away. ‘All right, then. My name might as well be Everett, for all I know. As for the rest…’ He shrugged, and told her all of it. He had nothing to lose; if they were revolted and threw him out, then so be it. It was a relief, in the end, not having to maintain a façade of respectability to protect the sensibilities of people who could not possibly comprehend what had been done to him and what he had done in return, in order to survive.

When he was done they did not throw him out, nor did they look particularly revolted. Mother nodded slowly. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘You don’t seem to be too surprised by any of this,’ he commented.

‘You’ll find that our particular circumstances here mean that we have to be a bit more open-minded than most. When you’re washed and presentable I’ll show you what I mean.’ To her daughter, she added, ‘Show him to Michael’s room. His things should just about fit.’

‘We’re taking him in, then?’ Ardwyn looked him up and down with evident distaste.

‘You disagree, I take it.’

‘He’s scrawny, and sickly. And a liar.’

‘Thanks,’ the deserter muttered.

‘And for all we know he could have murdered Michael himself. We’ve only got his word for any of this.’

‘Now wait a moment…’

But the women carried on talking over him as if he wasn’t there.

‘That is true,’ said Mother. ‘But even if it were, so much the better that he take on the responsibilities that Michael abandoned when he left us.’

‘But he—’

‘Enough! We will give him the benefit of the doubt, for Michael’s sake. If he proves incapable of living up to it, well then the Recklings can have him for their sport.’

‘Wait,’ the deserter repeated in sudden alarm. ‘Recklings? Who are the Recklings? What do you mean, sport?’

Ardwyn was looking at him now with something approaching a smile, but he was not altogether comfortable with what it implied. ‘Do you know what?’ he said. ‘I’ve been very rude. Thank you for your kind hospitality and for your food.’ He got up from his chair and backed towards the kitchen door. ‘I feel that I’ve imposed too much on your time already. You have a charming village. Utterly charming.’ He was retreating towards the back door, and they were making no move to stop him. ‘I would love nothing more than to stay longer but I must be getting back or I’ll miss the last train.’ He turned, opened the back door, and found himself face to face with Gar, who was cradling his axe casually across his great barrel of a chest. His eyes were entirely without whites, the tawny brown of his irises filling their orbits completely. ‘Steady now, chum,’ said the deserter. ‘I don’t want any trouble.’

Gar shook his head, and his mouth worked slowly, trying to fit the immensity of those teeth around the shapes of human speech. ‘No truh-bull,’ he growled.

‘Gar is one of the Recklings,’ said Mother from behind him. ‘The children of Moccus. The servants of the Farrow. He’s very helpful to us – does a lot of the heavier jobs around the village and looks after us. For example, if there are people who need keeping out, he keeps them out.’

‘And if they need keeping in too,’ added Ardwyn. He felt her hand slip into the crook of his elbow. ‘Come on. When was the last time you had a decent bath?’

4

DE-TUSKING

MOTHER LED HIM OUT TO THE WOODS ON THE OTHER side of the village, which were even thicker, if that were possible, then along the entrance road. Here there was no road, just a well-worn footpath twisting uphill between ancient elms and oaks, their trunks moss-muffled and many times wider than a human armspan. Here and there outcrops of the granite bedrock erupted like half-glimpsed ruins. Birdsong was muted, and the light was dim. He knew that it was only a few hundred yards before woodland gave way to the heath and towering height of the peak known locally as Edric’s Seat, but for the moment it felt like the forest spread unbroken and untrodden for hundreds of miles, if not forever.

‘This wood hasn’t been touched by human hands for over two thousand years,’ said Mother as she led the way deeper. ‘This was once part of the tribal lands of the Cornovii people – that’s what the Romans called them, anyway, and even that word might be overstating it. They were more like a loose confederation of tribes who shared a similar language and beliefs. They revered Moccus, and when the Romans invaded the local Cornovii called on him to protect them. And he did.’

They came to a wide clearing, empty except for a single tall stone set at the centre. Although the clearing was grassy, the ground immediately surrounding the stone was bare and black, and the stone was carved with elaborate curvilinear knotwork and tableaux that he couldn’t quite make out yet from this distance.

‘Moccus is a protector of hunters and warriors,’ she continued, leading him towards the stone. ‘Especially hunters of boar, which was a sacred animal to those people, and still is. A cohort of soldiers from the Fourteenth Legion was sent here to suppress the locals, who led them to this spot, from which the Romans never returned. Moccus tore them apart – five hundred fully armed legionnaires.’

‘You mean this clearing is one whole mass grave?’

She nodded. ‘Their blood sanctifies this soil. It is a hallowed place for us. I take it that doesn’t disturb you?’

He looked around at the green, level grass and the black soil surrounding the stone. ‘I’ve seen worse.’

They were at the stone now. It reared ten feet high, carved on all sides with scenes of battle and slaughter in which one figure dominated repeatedly: a man of towering stature with the head and tusks of a boar. One image on the battle tableau showed a Cornovii warrior holding something that looked like a war-horn to his mouth, except that it was extremely tall, rising in an elongated S-shape like a striking cobra – if any cobra had the head of a boar.

‘That is a carnyx,’ Mother explained, when he pointed it out. ‘The horn that summons Moccus.’

‘Pretty useful god if he can just be summoned like that. Does he do tricks too? Roll over? Play dead?’

‘He will heal your body and give you a lifespan many times that of a normal man – will that do for a trick?’

Bordering the scenes of carnage were images of crops and copulation: sheaves of wheat and vines entwined with phalluses and figures fucking in every conceivable position, some surely beyond the flexibility of human physiology.

‘If you don’t mind me saying so,’ he said, ‘Bill I understand, but you don’t seem to be a village of Celtic hunter-warriors to me.’

‘I was speaking simplistically, in terms that you would understand,’ she replied, and he felt a dull flare of resentment at being patronised. ‘Moccus is the hunter because he is the boar, which is the oldest of all sacred animals. His tusks are the crescent horns of the moon, which he holds between his jaws, and so like the moon he is both eater and renewer, death-bringer and life-giver. His favour brings us fertility, bountiful harvests, and good health—’

‘That,’ the deserter interrupted. ‘I want that. You want blood – well, I’ve shed enough of that for other people so it’s about time I spilled some of it for myself. You want my soul…’ He laughed at the sky. ‘You’re welcome to it. I’ve no use for the wretched thing any more. My lungs are full of holes – the doctors say I’ll be dead in a year, eighteen months at best.’

‘In that case for your sake I hope that you’re able to hang on until September.’

‘Why’s that? What happens in September?’

‘The autumnal solstice. That is when, if you’re worthy, you will meet him.’

‘Meet him?’

‘Unlike the Christian god, who defers his rewards until his worshippers are dead and unable to enjoy them, Moccus delivers his favour here, on earth. In the flesh.’ She indicated the surrounding woodland. ‘He’s out there now, walking his domain. He populates the woods with his children, got sometimes on the wild boar that are still hereabouts, sometimes on the women of the neighbouring villages. You’ve already met one of them.’

‘Gar.’

She nodded. ‘He’s probably watching you right now, curious about whether or not you have the strength of character to become one of us – one of the Farrow.’

‘I do!’ Everett strode to the trees at the clearing’s edge and peered into their shadow. ‘I’m ready to do this now!’ he called. ‘Whatever this is!’

‘You don’t honestly think it’s that easy, do you? You need to prove yourself.’

‘Fine. How do I do that, then?’

Mother regarded him with an amused smile. ‘That depends. How good are you at catching wild boar?’

* * *

Not very good, as it turned out. It took him a good month before he was able to snatch a piglet away from its screaming, furious mother. In that time, he moved into one of the cottages