Bloodline Rising

by Katy Moran

  He claps me on the shoulder. “Go, boy, get out of it if tha wants to see morning.”

  “Isn’t the shield-wall broke?”

  “The Mercian only – if tha’s with the Devil and his Cub, pray to God. Godsway’s men advance; get up the hill and tha’ll meet them.”

  Wulf, I think, desperate. Cenry. But then I hear Thorn’s words echo in my mind, and I’m hollow once more. The day Penda’s army killed my mother and father was the day they took the lives of all your kin but Elfgift. Every last one of them: your mother’s mother, her brother, and even her grandfather too. Poor Ma. No wonder she never spoke of her life on this island: it is filled with nothing but ghosts.

  I have been living in a nest of vipers, and they shall pay.

  “Have you lost your wits, boy?” the man roars. “Run!”

  As he speaks, spear-bearing men seem to rear up on all sides, their faces twisted with battle-madness, and he turns with a roar, jabbing-spear held out before him like a claw, shield up.

  I reach for my bow, still hanging from my shoulder, but the quiver full of arrows is gone – it must rest now in the mud next to Maelan. I am alone in the midst of a battle, weaponless save for my little dagger. I run blindly, snatching arrows from the mud wherever I find them. I even pull one from a dead man’s leg: it makes a sucking, grinding noise as the head comes free from flesh and bone. He makes no sound, so he must be dead – I hope so; I should not like to have done that to a living man.

  I’m at the core of it. All around me, men hack and scream at each other. They ram spears, wheeling and jabbing, parrying blows with their shields. It is like a dance. Spearheads smack into shields with dull, wooden thuds. Somewhere, someone blows a horn, a low, mournful note that sings out across this bloody field. Hot liquid splatters my face and I taste blood. Where I tread not on corpses, I’m up to my knees in mud and water. What good shall these arrows be now? They’re no use down here; I have nothing but my speed. My shoulder feels strangely hot, and I’m breathless, but on I run, weaving through the throng. A man comes straight for me, his face twisted with rage, hair matted with mud, spear jutting out like a claw. I dodge him. I know not where I go, but a strange calm washes over me.

  None of these folk shall touch me. None of them can catch me – they barely see me. I am the Ghost and I am not here. I seek only one man. I seek Penda of Mercia.

  The bloody knot of men twists, surges; I hear roaring, I hear men calling out to their God for mercy. One cry rises above the others and it strikes a note deep within me; I know that voice.

  I run for higher ground, heart pounding. I turn, looking back down the slope at the brawling clash below. Spears fly through the air like darts of lightning, the crash of iron and steel so loud I can scarce think. A horseman rides hard down the hillside facing me, knocking men out of his way, a tattered black cloak streaming out behind him. Hair flies back from his bare head in fierce-blown flames. He rides like one of the elf-kind come galloping straight out of the spirit world, fast and tight. He wields a shield and a great spear, and I know who he is.

  “Tasik!” I shout and shout till my lungs are in rags, but the battle closes around him and I can’t see him any more, just a tangled mess of men, mud and corpses.

  I must have been dreaming. It is like when I used to see Tecca, slipping too near the land of my ancestors, to the world of the dead. Tasik cannot really be here. There is no way.

  Perhaps my death is near, hovering close by, and he has come back from that other place to meet me. I don’t know. I don’t know any more what is real.

  It’s growing harder to move; I’m so weary, and my shoulder burns. Where have all the folk gone? I’m near up to my waist in floodwater. When I look down I see fallen men, floating, peaceful, their wounds washed clean. Their hair spreads around them like fish-weed in the river. Their eyes stare up: blank. One has no head. A red cloud blooms from the severed neck; the torn skin is frilled, beautiful, like the petals of a flower. I can sit to rest for a moment, can’t I, surely? There’s a ridge of higher ground; I stagger towards it. My legs buckle beneath me and I sink into the mud on my knees, leaning forward, gasping for breath. The last of the light’s melting from the glowering, cloud-heavy sky. What’s left of it reflects dull yellow off the floodwater. Rain streams down my face. My clothes are soaked, sticking to my body. A rust-brown stain clouds the front of my tunic. It hurts to breathe. When I look down at my hands they are white and shaking, but I’m not cold.

  I see no living man. I do not even hear the cries of the wounded; they drown as they fall. When I look up I see birds wheeling in the darkening sky above. Six of them, arcing in and out of the cloud, blunt-tailed, spread-winged – buzzards.

  And now it’s as if the clouds press down on the earth and I can hardly see. The birds fade, hidden from me. I hear the hard breathing of a weary horse, the splashing as it moves. The poor beast must be up to its hocks or higher in mud and water. I hear the breathing of a man, too. One man, alone. Tasik, please let it be you. I force myself to stand and then I see it – the blurred outline of a horse and rider. The horse’s head hangs low; nearly spent, she is. Her muzzle brushes the water’s skin.

  The rider’s hunched in the saddle, long, straggling hair hanging forward, shoulders hunched, wolfish. I’m walking, walking down the high ground towards them both. My sight is fading and I’ve been hurt, though I know not where, for waves of pain wash through my flesh and bone. All I want’s to lie down and sleep, but still I walk on. The outline of the horse and rider grows clearer. It’s not Tasik – of course it’s not; just an old man, some poor old warrior dragged from his woman and his hearth to fight one more battle.

  “Who is there?”

  It’s Penda.

  My hand moves unbidden, reaching up to my quiver for an arrow. My fingers close on nothing – I’ve lost them again. What a fool I am. A dead man floats in the water by my leg; I reach down and tug the arrow from his chest. The arrowhead’s still there, and sharp it is, too. Well enough.

  “Who is there? Come, Helitha.” Penda’s voice when he speaks to the mare is gentle. So he is not bone-deep cruel. He is just a man like any other.

  Darkness clouds my sight. I draw back my bow. The gut string cuts into my bowfingers and there’s a burst of pain in my shoulder so great I must close my teeth tight together. I step forward.

  “You.” There’s laughter in his voice. “I will not even ask how you came to be here, boy.”

  I stand there, bow tight; I burn.

  Penda smiles, but his smile is twisted, bitter. He’s defeated. “Do it, child,” he says, “I beg you. My time’s gone. The old ways, the bright ways, they fade; my gods are become demons. There’s little place for men such as I among all this meekness and talk. Wrought was I to fight, and that is how I shall die, if you will give me the honour.” He bows his head slightly, the old snake, but he looks me in the eye to see it coming. “I thank you,” he says, and they are the last words he speaks on this earth.

  I hear the dull thud as the arrow strikes home, the scream of Penda’s mare as he falls, the dead king. He makes no sound, though. All is quiet. I wade closer, closer. If I’ve not finished him this shall be the end of me, but I must know, I must. The mare’s bolting, kicking up great sprays of dark water. Penda shall go nowhere, though. Not now. Most feared of all men in Britain, the King of Mercia floats on his back, drawn down into the water by his mail tunic, my arrow poking from his wrinkled neck. His eyes are wide open. There’s enough light to see they’re green, just like my lord’s, and that the grim, twisted smile on his face is Wulf’s, too.

  He died well, Penda of Mercia. I have paid him out for what he did, for the lives he took, but he went well into the next world, and I hope his father and his father’s father are coming forth to greet him now, the old warrior gone to his last home.

  There’s no way Tasik would call me a coward now, if he were here; I’d have made him proud at last.

  How foolish that the Ghost should come to this: from
a thief and a liar to a hero.

  It’s as well no one shall find out, or I’d never live it down.

  My legs barely hold me up as I turn and walk away, stumbling on the tangled limbs of dead men sleeping in the arms of the Winwaed. It’s harder than ever to walk. I cannot do it any more. I am tired.

  I must rest; I feel the waters close over my aching body, the night air chill against my face. It is done. I have done. I sink into the mud; it clags my hair, dribbling into my ears. I gaze up at the skeins of fog silvered by the moon. Full it is this night, round and cold, so huge and far away, like a great silver dish. What a price she’d fetch if she were plucked from the night and sold. It is the same moon that shone on me when I was lord of the thieves, lord over the City of the Rising Moon. But I am a thief no longer.

  I’m not afraid; I do but follow Tecca. I do but become the night, the falling leaf of an oak, the white crest of the wave. I’ll be free.

  If this is my end, it is a good one.

  IT GROWS LIGHT, then dark. I am riven with pain. I am hot; I cannot breathe with the heat of it – but a moment ago I was cold. Someone cries out and I can’t unravel the sense of the words. I’m cold again, so cold.

  Leofric ever said I was hell-bound, and I am sure he’d be glad to know he was right.

  Something hot and scratchy covers me and I cry out, fighting to push it away, but I can barely move. I burn all over. Devils prick at my skin. I see them; I see their laughing faces, their bulging eyes.

  But who speaks?

  “Come; be easy.” I know this voice but not where from. It sounds as though they talk at me from the far end of a long meadow. I wish it were Anwen, or Wulf, yet it is not. I will never lay eyes on either of them again.

  I hear the voice again, the voice I know, but I cannot make out the words, for they are too far away.

  So. I am not in hell, or at least not yet. This place is warm and dry. The floodwaters have gone. I’m lying on something that brushes my arm when I move, something with a faint smoky stink to it. It’s a deerskin, the pelt of a roe. I see pale fingerprints against the rustiness of it. Wulf told me once the gods left these marks when they made roe deer because they had drunk too deep of the honey-wine. Blankets are piled on me, three of them. My head rests on another, rolled up, with a white linen tunic wrapped around it. The linen has a smell I know, a salty warmness I can’t place.

  Where’s Edge? Sick guilt rushes through me. If he didn’t come out of that fight alive, the fault’s mine. I led him to it. I want Wulf to be here, and Cenry. But I’ve done something they can never forgive.

  I killed an old man, an old, helpless man. I shot him down.

  This place is full of light, so much of it my eyes are flooded and I must half-close them. It’s a tent. Sailcloth sweeps up; there’s a pole in the middle. There is no one else here but me. The tent flap has been pulled back, leaving an arrowhead-shaped hole where light and air rush in. I wish I knew where Edge had got to, what befell him after we lost sight of each other. Dear God, let him not be lying there beneath those still waters, his hair floating like river weed.

  Folk do speak outside.

  “Tha’ll be glad on it, my lad!” someone says, and laughs. Northumbrians. I must be behind Godsway’s lines, which is just as well, given that I killed Penda. King Godsway won the fight, Edge’s father. Penda cannot have done, after all, because he is dead.

  I hear footfalls, and it grows dark of a sudden. Someone’s here, blocking the light.

  He stoops to come in and straightens up, so tall he can barely stand in this tent. His hair’s shorter, hanging loose about his shoulders, and he’s wiry, leaner than ever. He’s filthy, too, covered in muck up to the knees, up to the elbows. He must have been helping to bury the dead. Is that how he found me? He does not know I watch him; he thinks I sleep still. A strange, tugging pain grips my chest.

  He turns suddenly, and crouches down beside me with the swiftness of a cat. “Are you awake?” he says – foolishly, for am I not looking dead at him?

  He is really here.

  I nod.

  Tears stream down his face, leaving pale tracks in the grime. I have never seen him cry before. He lets out a long breath, raking both hands through his hair, which falls through his mud-smirched fingers like flames. Then he laughs. “Cai, if you ever lead me such a chase again, I swear to God I’ll skin you alive.” And Tasik reaches out to grasp my hand, holding it tight. Our fingers twine together. He is real. He is here with me at last. Oh, he’s got a few things to tell me, all right. My witch-father.

  My shoulder burns with pain. I can’t think straight. I feel as though I’ve drunk too much wine. But I don’t care. How did he get here? How did he find me? “You’ve still got muck for brains,” I say at last. “I didn’t ask to be made a slave.” Does he think I wanted to be carried half across the known world and sold as a hostage to the Devil’s Cub?

  It doesn’t matter, though, because now he’s here.

  Tasik lifts one eyebrow, and my spirit sings to see him do it. “And you’re still a gabby wretch. I thank Christ your mother never saw the mess you were in when I found you, puthering out blood like it was water. She’d have fainted clean away.”

  Ma. It hurts to think of her. “Where is she?” I force out the words. “And Elflight and Asha?” I can’t stand to hear it. I can’t stand it if they’re dead and it’s my fault, my fault again.

  Tasik glances down at the ground, squeezing my fingers. “I had to leave your mother and the girls behind. It was Fausta – she had them bundled into a cart and taken to Saint Agatha’s – your mother was too weak to ride. It’s a god-house, a nunnery, up in the mountains, far from Constantinople. No one but Fausta knows where they are – not even Constans, the filthy coward, if Fausta kept her word.”

  So they are a half a world away. But they live: they live. Relief washes over me like a bucket of warm water, followed by the old darkness that trails me everywhere. All of this is my doing: from the moment I left my grieving mother to riot through the streets of Constantinople to the firing of the arrow that killed Penda. I will never forgive myself. I’m wicked to the bone and there’s nothing I can do to change it. My grandfather’s blood flows strong and deep through my veins; I am like him. I am the liar, the cheat – the great deceiver – and now I am a killer, too.

  I want Tasik to know the worst I’ve done, and then if he leaves me here alone, so be it. The words spew out, hot and bitter: “I killed Penda, Tasik. I shot him and he died.”

  Tasik looks at me awhile before speaking. I can’t read his face. Is he pleased or not? “I know, you little fool,” he says at last. “You shouted it often enough in your sleep. You choose your enemies ill, don’t you?”

  “I thought you’d be glad.” Fresh misery wells up inside me. So even that sin is worthless: I’ve taken a man’s life, and all for nothing. “I did it for you. Why didn’t you tell me anything?” I can’t stop thinking of Wulf. What will he say when he hears it was me that killed Penda, if he’s even still alive?

  Tasik sighs. Not for the first time I sense he looks at me but sees another, long ago. I remember that hot afternoon by the Palace harbour: I may have given you my father’s name, but by Christ I wish you had not his talent for deception. “I wanted to keep you safe.” He smiles at the look on my face. “I was once told the same, many years since, and it cut no ice with me, either. But I’m glad you killed Penda. I’m glad he’s dead. You did well.”

  There’s a start. I never thought I’d hear as much from him.

  I want him to know I’ve changed, that I’m not a liar and a thief and a coward any more. “Tasik,” I say. “I’m going to do right now, I swear. I’ll do everything you tell me.”

  He stares as if I have just sprouted wings or grown another head, then lets out a great wild burst of laughter. “Don’t you dare. I should get so bored. For God’s sake, Cai, don’t be such a fool.”

  I grin at him. We are all right now, my crazed witch-father and I. “See, you
’ve laid me a challenge.”

  He grips my hand again. “Na, give me a rest of at least a sennight before you do aught that’ll boil my blood. Are you hungry? They make a broth each night in the camp.”

  I shake my head. I don’t want him to go anywhere just yet. I want him to stay with me. “Tas, can we go and fetch Ma and the girls?” I do not know how long it will take, and I care even less. “We’ve got to find them.”

  “We will.” My father smiles at me. “And then we’ll go home. Wherever that is.”

  And I’m glad, for I am the Ghost, and I have been gone too long.

  Epilogue Hall of the High King, Northumbria, Yule AD 656

  IT’S FILTHY DARK out here, and cold, too, but Tasik does not seem to feel it. The great wooden door closes gently behind us. I’m glad I greased the hinges. It cost me a morning’s hawking, but oh, it was worth it.

  Edge knew. “Not coming, witch-brat?” he asked, when we’d broken our fast.

  And I said, “No. Not this day.”

  Edge reached out and we clasped hands. “Farewell, then, cousin.”

  “Good hunting,” I said.

  “You too, my friend.” He smiled and walked off to join his father in the yard. He’ll not say anything, won’t Edge. He’s my friend, my brother.

  I shall probably never see him again.

  Moving almost as one, Tasik and I slip silently across the shadowy courtyard.

  We come to a low, slumped building, and I slide my dagger from its sheath. Softly, softly, I take the heavy lock in my hands. Iron-cold, it is, and rusty, but it’s no bother to the Ghost. Here she comes: open.

  “They used to keep hounds in here, long ago,” Tasik says, and I hold a finger to my lips. Jesu, he’d be no use as a thief. The lock clicks free, and holding on to it, I sheathe my dagger and push open the door. We’re in.

  Wulf sits in the corner, alone, shoulders hunched, long legs sprawling out before him.