Midwinterblood

by Marcus Sedgwick

  “That was where Eric had been. He’d crawled into the hay. It was long, and he must have been hidden. Someone hit him in the grass with a scythe. It didn’t cut him, thank God, it hit him on the back swing. It hit him in the head. He was unconscious, we thought he was not going to…”

  She pauses again.

  “I’m sorry,” says Edward. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “No, it’s okay. Really. I just haven’t told this story in a while. No one is interested, you see.”

  “I am,” says Edward, quietly.

  Merle mouths the words thank you.

  “When he woke up, we knew something was wrong immediately. He was still our little boy, but he had changed. As he grew up, it became more and more obvious.”

  “What was he doing in the hay anyway?”

  “Who knows? Who knows how a tiny child’s mind works? But, well, I’ve always thought it was because of the hares. Have you seen the hares? On the island?”

  Edward shakes his head.

  “Well, keep watching, there are lots of them, and Eric was fascinated by them, even when he was tiny. They often sit in the long grass of the meadow, before it’s cut. When the scything starts, you can see them bolt for cover somewhere. I think Eric wanted to be a hare, that’s all.”

  Suddenly Merle grasps Edward’s hand earnestly.

  “I love him so much. I’d do anything for him, you know? Do you have children, Edward?”

  He shakes his head. Thinks about her hand on his.

  “I just can’t reach him. Not how a mother should. He goes away from me, as if he’s on a journey somewhere, somewhere I can’t follow. Seeing things I can’t see. I can’t explain.”

  She breaks off, then tries once more.

  “It’s like loving someone from another world.”

  There’s a long pause, and then Edward knows there is something else he has to ask, something that has been unspoken but that has been implied in everything since the moment he crossed the threshold into this quiet house, of son, and mother.

  “Who did it?”

  Merle doesn’t reply. She half turns, tilting her head. But Edward cannot let it go.

  “Who was it, who hit him with the scythe? I mean it was an accident, of course, but who did it?”

  Again Merle pauses a long time before answering.

  “It was his father. My husband.”

  “Where is he now?” Edward whispers, so quietly he can barely hear his own voice.

  Merle’s eyes moisten.

  “He couldn’t cope with what he’d done to our little boy. He’s … gone.”

  Eight

  Over supper, the four discuss the find, what it means, how to proceed, but despite the excitement, Edward’s mind is only half on the job. The other half of his thoughts are in a house by a meadow, the other half of his thoughts are in that hay meadow, fourteen years ago, as a small boy crawls through the long grass, and curls up to sleep, with his friends, the hares.

  The others talk.

  “There’s an adult and a child, that’s clear,” says Mat.

  “No, it could be a small woman,” says Isabella. “And we don’t know either sex as yet. Tomorrow, if we lift the skull we should be able to tell something from that.”

  “Hip bones are useful, too.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well, my guess,” says Nancy, “is that it’s a parent and child. They must have died at the same time—probably disease—and were buried together. The child in the arms of the mother. Or father.”

  “That’s so sad.”

  “It’s kind of nice, too, though,” Nancy says. “It’s so protective. As if the parent is keeping their child safe. Even in death. Did you ever read about that Mesolithic burial with the skeleton of a child, lain on a swan’s wing? I think that’s beautiful, too. Like the wing would fly it to heaven.”

  Finally Edward snaps out of his trance.

  “Well, we know what we know and what we don’t know we will learn. Tomorrow, Nancy and Isabella will go on with the bones. Mat and I will continue trench two. There’s no room for us in the cist, and we’ll only get in your way.”

  “Are you sure?” Nancy says.

  “Absolutely. But we’re going to do it all properly. Which means I have to phone the university in the morning, and that means that in three days, four at the most, many other hands will be here, crawling all over our find.”

  The three are outraged.

  “Come on,” Edward says, “You know how this works. You’re going to have to get used to it. But look at it this way. For the next three days, possibly four, it’s all ours, so let’s do what we can in the meantime.”

  He winks.

  * * *

  They are pleased with their find, but they are unaware that the next day they will find something just as remarkable, though it will not be eleven centuries old.

  It will be a mere sixty years old, and it is lethal.

  Nine

  They spend the following day working carefully at the dig, and while Nancy and Isabella begin to lift the bones, Mat and Edward start to make some progress with their trench.

  Once more, Eric watches from a mound, clutching his hare tightly.

  They’ve gone really deep now, and have found something that looks like cut wood, not as exciting as the other trench, but possible evidence of settlement, and if the full picture of the cist is to be made clear, they need to build up an impression of the surrounding environment, too.

  “Should we prop?” Mat asks Edward, mid-morning.

  Edward looks at the trench.

  “Not yet. No. If we were deeper, or the substrata less coherent, I would say yes.”

  Mat doesn’t look convinced.

  “Are you sure? We’ve gone much deeper, even this morning.”

  Edward knows the boy is right, really; the pit is deep. But they don’t have time to go and buy wood on the mainland and make the props and fit them, when all he really wants to do is see what the bones are showing.

  “We’re okay. We’ll press on.”

  Mat takes one last look at the ground level, now some way above his head, and back at the ladder they use to climb into the trench, and then he bends to his work again.

  * * *

  Eric stands sentinel, watching Nancy and Isabella. He has come a little closer today, and holds the hare tightly to his chest, stroking its back from time to time.

  The girls lift each bone very, very carefully, as if they are dangerous, because they are so fragile they could shatter at any moment.

  As far as they can see, there are no remains of clothing, but there might be microscopic fragments that can be identified in the lab, later.

  Then Nancy sees something.

  “Hello,” she says. “What are you?”

  Apart from the bones, the grave has seemed bare, but now they have untwined the arms of the man from the arms of the child (as she likes to think of them), and lifted the child’s skull and ribs, she has a better view of the adult.

  “Something here!” she calls.

  Edward doesn’t hear, but Mat does.

  “They’ve found something. Shall we go and look?”

  “No…” says Edward. Then, “Yes, dammit. Come on.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Mat says. “Just finish this.”

  Edward climbs out first, up the ladder, and over to the cist. Mat turns to follow, and is halfway up the ladder, when something catches his eye.

  In the end wall of the trench, behind the ladder, just below the surface, something is poking out of the soil.

  He pulls his trowel from his back pocket, and takes a little scrape.

  What he sees intrigues him so much, he makes another little scrape. And then a bigger one. He sees metal, and now he carefully digs a whole chunk of soil from the side of the metal.

  He realizes what he is looking at, and jumps in fright. His feet slip on the damp rungs of the ladder, and he flails at the earth as he falls, dislodging a vast section of t
he wall, which falls away freakishly.

  He shouts, but he’s already lying at the bottom of the trench, covered up to his chest in the fall.

  Now, almost half exposed, the back end of a bomb hangs above his head.

  Ten

  At that moment, Nancy had been about to show Edward what she’d just found in the grave. The spongy, fragile remains of wood among the bones of the adult skeleton.

  One part at the chest, the other between the jaws.

  * * *

  They hear Mat’s cry, and the tumble of the earth, and from that moment on, everything is blurry.

  * * *

  In a moment, they are at the pit.

  At first, they are simply relieved to see that Mat is not fully covered, as they take in the mess of mud, Mat, and the ladder. Then they see the horror on his face, as he points wordlessly to the shell, now hanging out of the collapsed wall, right above his head.

  “Oh, God,” says Edward, in a very small voice.

  Then he shouts, “Go! To Eric’s house. His mother can call Emergency. Go!”

  The girls run, and Edward edges around to the slightly safer end of the trench.

  “Mat. It’s going to be okay. They’ve gone for help. They’ll get some help.”

  Mat is scared. In shock from the fall, maybe a bone broken, too. “Edward,” he says. “Edward, Edward…”

  “Help will come soon,” Edward says, but then he thinks that’s probably not true. There’s not even a police station on the island, which means sending a boat from the mainland, from Skarpness, which will take at least half an hour.

  At that thought, Edward looks up to the far end of the trench, at the bomb, and at the same moment he hears a scream.

  The scream is Merle, running across the field.

  She’s screaming because Eric is kneeling at the trench, by the bomb.

  Nancy and Isabella catch up with Merle, and grab her wrists, dragging her backward, trying to stop her from reaching Eric.

  “No! Eric, no!” she wails.

  Nancy pulls her back, hard, no longer languid.

  Edward looks across the pit at Eric.

  There’s no way he can rush him, get around to him in time. He thinks quickly, speaks calmly but firmly.

  “No, Eric. It’s dangerous. Go to your mother, now, Eric. It’s dangerous here.”

  Mat is lying at the bottom of the hole, fully comprehending the situation.

  “Edward, Edward, Edward,” he whimpers, repeatedly.

  “Eric. No!”

  Eric takes no notice of Edward.

  He leans over, and closes his fingers around the tail fin of the rusty shell, dropped by a dive-bomber in the closing stages of the War.

  Now, no one dares breathe, even Merle has gone quiet, though she struggles to break free.

  At the trench, Eric stands. The bomb is in his hands.

  Edward stands, too, his legs turning to water.

  Eric looks up at him.

  “Eric. It’s dangerous.”

  By way of reply, Eric stuffs his hare into his jacket pocket, then takes hold of the shell again with both hands.

  In the pit, Mat is moaning.

  Above it, Edward, Merle, Nancy, and Isabella watch as Eric walks across the meadow with the unexploded bomb, heading for the quayside.

  In slow motion, they see him climb the steps onto the quay, walk slowly along the stone pier, past all the fishing boats, and stand, a lone figure isolated against the seascape beyond.

  He drops the shell into the water, where it slips immediately and quietly out of sight with barely a splash, and calmly Eric turns back to the meadow.

  As they run to meet him, and throw their arms around him, he is chewing the ear of his hare.

  “It’s dangerous, Mommy,” he says.

  Merle cries, and cries, and Edward cries, too, then pulls himself together. He is responsible here.

  “Eric, you are so strong. We need to get Mat out of the hole. Can you do that? Can you help us?”

  Eric nods.

  * * *

  Later that day, when everyone has calmed down, they sit around the table in Merle’s house.

  Mat is fine, with just a sprained knee to show for his near premature burial. Everyone is drinking herbal tea, which Merle assures them is the best thing for their nerves.

  “It’ll help you sleep tonight,” she says. “You, too, Eric. Drink up.”

  She comes and stands behind her son, and puts her hands on his shoulders.

  “You silly boy,” she says, trying to sound bright. “You could have been hurt. You could have been killed.”

  Eric turns and looks up at his mother. “No. I couldn’t die. I’m not quite the last.”

  Nancy and Isabella look at Edward for some explanation. He shakes his head.

  “Don’t worry about Eric,” Merle explains. “He sometimes says things that don’t really make sense to me.”

  “I wouldn’t have him any other way,” Edward says, putting his arm around Merle, because it just feels right to.

  He’s never had children of his own. He thought that time was past, but who knows, he thinks, maybe it’s not too late yet.

  He knows he’d be proud to call Eric his son, even if he does say strange things sometimes.

  Eric smiles.

  “I’m not quite the last,” he says again.

  One

  It is dark when the airman falls from the sky.

  Above him, a storm rages, but it is an artificial one; the thunder and lightning are shellfire and tracer bullets.

  As he tumbles like a leaf in an autumn gale through the cold night air, he twists gently on his lines, the parachute sighing to him softly from above. He watches the storm, the flashes above him, the flashes below him.

  One of those flashes below will be his Supermarine Spitfire, and he tries to still the feeling of fear and loss that this thought gives him. Minutes ago it was a roaring beast, a tiger of the sky; now it will be a bonfire burning around a twelve cylinder Rolls-Royce engine, twisted and broken.

  He tries to spot his landing, but it’s dark, and the lightning flashes only serve to blind him further.

  Then suddenly the ground is right there, and there is no time to prepare himself.

  He’s unconscious before he even feels the pain.

  Two

  Hovering between life and death, the airman’s dreams are as twisted and broken as his fighter plane, which still smokes on a hillside a mile away. He sees weird visions of heaven and hell, and has a nightmare of running but being unable to run, as something chases him through fiery pits.

  He groans in his sleep, and thrashes wildly, disturbing the hare that has been sitting nearby, watching him, wide eyes blinking in the near moonless night. Finally, as he wakes in early daylight, he dreams he’s being eaten by a dragon.

  * * *

  He sits up and screams, because his ankle is broken.

  A beast scumbles away from him and he sees the dragon from his dreams, a large dog, a wolfhound. He collapses onto his back again, and with his thick leather glove he wipes his face, wet with the dog’s slobber.

  Turning his neck awkwardly, he sees the lines of his chute stretching across a field of wheat. He’s made quite a mess, and suddenly panic takes hold.

  He sits up again, this time avoiding using his right leg, the ankle of which is throbbing in a threatening way.

  The dog has run away a few paces, but now sits watching him, panting merrily.

  Where the hell am I? he thinks.

  The last thing he remembers is that he’d managed to radio Petter before he’d had to bail out, but even then they were way off course, having made a run north to avoid a fighter patrol. What bad luck to hit another one. They’d come from nowhere and taken half the flight down before they even knew what was happening.

  They’d been over the coast, God knows where, and he’d seen the lights of a small group of islands, and prayed he’d land on one of them, and not the sea, for to land in the sea wou
ld mean death.

  He considers the facts, the chances of his survival.

  His ankle is broken, he cannot walk.

  If his emergency kit has survived, he can inject himself with some morphine, which while it lasts will ease the pain.

  The island on which he has fallen must be inhabited; this is a wheat field, there is someone’s dog.

  He knows this is not the mainland, but it could be almost anywhere else; they’d gone a long way north before the dogfight.

  He’d radioed Petter, but maybe Petter didn’t make it, either.

  He decides not to think that.

  Petter Åkare is a good pilot, and he knows he’ll have made it. He’ll report their position, and then …

  Then what?

  They’re not going to mount a rescue operation for one missing airman, even if he is a flight lieutenant. The best he can hope for is to make contact with friendly forces, get himself picked up by the navy.

  He’s just thinking all this when he hears a harsh voice, shouting.

  “Skilla! Skilla!”

  He fumbles to pull his gloves off.

  “Skill-a!”

  It’s a man’s voice, and it sounds angry, even if he doesn’t understand what the man is shouting.

  He manages to pull his glove off with his teeth, and scrabbles for his pistol, but before he can pop the catch on his holster, the light is blotted out above him by the figure of a man. A large man.

  He looks down and whistles.

  The dog bounds over to him, begins to lick his hand.

  “Well, Skilla,” he says, “what have you found this time?”

  Three

  “Wait here,” the man says, and the airman is not sure whether he means him or Skilla, because the wolfhound stays, panting noisily beside him, while the man goes.

  He is gone a long time, during which the airman wonders if he should try to escape.

  “Good idea,” he says aloud to Skilla. “And where exactly shall I crawl to?”

  The dog pants at him some more, hanging out its long pink tongue.

  When the man returns, he’s with another, younger man, possibly his son. They have made a stretcher from two spindly pine trunks and some sacking.