Bone Harvest

by James Brogden

  ‘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 that the war had emptied and set to repairing both it and himself. He met many of the other villagers, and discovered that they were all either women or children; even given the fact that the war had reaped so many such villages of their menfolk it was odd to find none at all. Other than Gar, he seemed to be the only adult male for miles around. As the weeks passed he put on weight, most of it muscle, and even his cough abated somewhat. He also made a number of advances towards Ardwyn, but was even less successful with this human quarry; although her opinion of him had warmed, she firmly but good-naturedly rebuffed him at every turn, leaving him in another No Man’s Land of seething frustration. She was unshocked by his crude ways, treating him with an amused coolness which he found as infuriating as it was arousing. ‘Catch your boar,’ was all she said. ‘And we’ll see.’

  ‘All right, then, now I’ve caught one,’ he said, showing her the small, striped bundle of panic that was squealing and dashing around the pen he’d built in his backyard. It was tethered to one of the fence posts and going nowhere, but it didn’t know that. He’d already decided to call it Nikolai. ‘What do I do now?’

  ‘You look after it,’ said Ardwyn. ‘You raise it until its lower tusk curves back on itself, and then you sacrifice it to Moccus and you become one of the Farrow. And I,’ she added, twining her arms around and pressing her curves against him, ‘become yours. After a fashion.’ She kissed him, and she tasted of apples.

  The grisliest part of looking after Nikolai was over soon, mercifully: the de-tusking.

  The boar’s lower tusks were called its ‘cutters’, he was told, and they would continue to grow throughout the animal’s life, kept sharp and to a reasonable length by the grinding action of the upper tusks, called its ‘whetters’, and these were the ones that had to be cut short so that over time the cutters would grow unchecked and curve back on themselves in a loop. He would wear this as a bracelet once Nikolai was sacrificed and he was made one of the Farrow.

  Everett, Gar, and Ardwyn had the piglet in a ‘crush’ pen with its backside wedged into a corner. A rope noose was looped around its upper snout and behind the front tusks, with Gar on the other end holding it steady. The animal was making a continual deep-throated squealing, mightily displeased by its situation.

  ‘I notice you’re not wearing one,’ the deserter said to her. ‘It seems to be only the men. Why is that?’

  ‘Because we have nothing to prove,’ she replied, flashing him an insolent grin. ‘Boars are matriarchal. They group in sounders around a few dominant females. Males are solitary, meanwhile, joining the sounder only to breed. They have to demonstrate their worthiness.’

  ‘We’re not pigs, though.’

  She looked him up and down. ‘That’s debatable. This small, angry animal is you; it is your masculine power which you must cherish, nurture, tend, and eventually sacrifice to Moccus, taking the tusk circle as a symbol that you have given yourself to him.’

  ‘So how long will it take to grow?’

  ‘This little chap should come to maturity in another two to three years.’

  The deserter laughed so hard that it brought on a coughing fit, and he had to lean against the fence to catch his breath. ‘I’m not going to survive the next winter, never mind three years.’

  ‘You would be surprised what the favour of Moccus can do.’ She gave him a cheesewire saw with sturdy wooden handles at each end. ‘Come on.’

  Somewhat nervously, he strung the wire saw behind one of Nikolai’s whetters while Gar held its mouth open. The young boar’s eyes rolled and glared at them both. ‘I’m not enjoying this any more than you are, chum,’ the deserter muttered, pulled back on the wire and began to draw the saw back and forth against the rear of the tusk.

  Nikolai really didn’t like this. The noise he made was like a drill in the deserter’s skull. Ardwyn told him to hurry up, so he did, and smoke came from the saw along with the stench of burning tooth. Abruptly, the tusk sheared free, and the release of tension sent the deserter sprawling on his arse in the mud. Gar roared with laughter.

  ‘That’s one,’ said Ardwyn, smiling.

  Sighing, the deserter picked himself back up.

  5

  THE RECKLINGS

  HE EXPLORED THE VILLAGE AND WALKED OFTEN IN the woods around Swinley looking for the god but without success. The only sighting of Moccus he had was in the stained-glass windows of St Mark’s church: they repeated the images engraved on the obelisk in the woods. Where Jesus Christ would have stood in the central panel, boar-headed Moccus raised his hand in beatific blessing, showering fruits and corn onto the multitudes fornicating in the panels below, while to either side men were speared, decapitated, and disembowelled. The deserter often heard furtive rustlings accompanying him from the shadows beneath the trees. Gar’s cousins, if he was to believe what he’d been told, but by then he was swinging back around to the conviction that this was all an elaborate hoax, or at best a collective delusion, and the creatures in the bushes nothing but rabbits, badgers, or just more boar.

  In a black mood he sought out Gar, and found him hacking a tree stump out of a field with a huge mattock. His bare torso was shining with sweat, and a pelt of coarse black hair which might have belonged on an animal spread across his shoulders and narrowed to a point down his spine. With each blow, clods of earth and splinters of wood flew everywhere, and the deserter had to blink away the sudden vision of artillery explosions launching geysers of mud and human remains into the sky. The remembrance just made his mood fouler. There was only so long a man could be fobbed off.

  ‘Gar!’ he called.

  Gar paused in his work, leaning on the mattock handle. He grunted.

  ‘They say you’re a child of Moccus, is that right?’

  Another grunt.

  ‘And all his other children are out there in the woods capering like pixies, aren’t they? Though I’ll be blowed if I’ve seen any of them.’

  Gar shrugged and sniffed, picked up the mattock and prepared to swing.

  ‘Well, I want to meet them.’

  Gar put the mattock back down and looked closely at the deserter, narrowing his eyes. ‘Mee hem,’ he rumbled, drooling a little as the words struggled to emerge from around his mouthful of tusks.

  ‘Yes, meet them. Because you’re a big lad and all, but I’m having a hard time believing that’s down to anything other than your mummy and your daddy’s branches growing a little too close on the family tree, if you take my meaning.’

  If Gar had taken offence, or even fully understood the insult, he didn’t show it, but simply shrugged again and set off for the edge of the field with the mattock slung over one shoulder. The deserter hurried after.

  Past the clearing with Moccus’ stone the ground delved sharply into a gully carved by a stream from the hilly slopes above. It was treacherous with mossy boulders and dark with the dripping gloom of overhanging beeches, whose roots, snaking over and around the rocks, threatened to trip him at every turn. Gar stopped at a place where the tumbling water formed a basin, and his face split in a smile. ‘You mee hem,’ he repeated, then cupped his hands around his mouth and let loose a volley of barking grunts into the shadows, calling to his kin.
>
  And they came, but if he’d expected the half-human spawn of a god to be something majestic or terrifying, he was wrong.

  They were tentative, fearful, hiding themselves behind tree trunks or peering from under the arches of roots. No two were alike, though all carried with them in differing degrees the taint of something boar-like in their blood. He couldn’t tell which of them were the products of Moccus’ bestiality and which were from lying with human women. He imagined that some might feel it an honour to be visited thus by their god, but what must the mother feel as she came to term, wondering what might emerge from between her legs? Some were little more than animals themselves, though with human hands or eyes. Others were more human, though nowhere near enough as Gar to be able to pass as normal villagers. Some had limbs that were too short, or too long, or missing altogether, and dragged themselves along on stumps like some of the men in the asylum. He saw snouts, tusks, and the split pads of trotters for hands. Moccus might very well be a fertility god, thought the deserter, but evidently the seed did not always grow true. Seeing them, he felt no fear, only a rolling swell of pity for such creatures trapped in a No Man’s Land of their own – one that was carried in their blood.

  Something woman-shaped stepped forward, trying to stand upright on knees that bent the wrong way. She was covered in a pelt of light-coloured hair that became striped over her hips and dark below that, but was otherwise naked, and he tried not to stare at the twin rows of small breasts that descended her torso.

  ‘New. Man,’ she said. Her mouth was better shaped than Gar’s for speech, though again, tusks got in the way.

  The deserter nodded. ‘Everett,’ he said, checking the absurd impulse to hold out his hand. Her right arm ended in a thumb and half a trotter where the other four fingers should have been.

  ‘Sus,’ she indicated herself. ‘Do you have food?’

  ‘Oh, ah, no, sorry, I didn’t think. I don’t have any on me.’

  Sus made a gesture of disgust and dismissal, and turned to leave.

  ‘Wait!’

  She turned back.

  ‘Where is your father? Where is Moccus?’

  She peered around, at the enclosing woods, listening, sniffing. ‘He walks,’ she said. ‘Soon he will come to the stone, and they will dance for him. We are his Recklings. His runts. We do not dance.’ She disappeared back into the trees. Since he had no food, the others quickly lost interest in him too, and that being the sum total of all he was going to find out, it seemed, he followed Gar back to the village.

  After supper that evening he asked Ardwyn about them. ‘Isn’t there something you can do for them?’

  ‘Do? Like what? We put food out for them. We find work and homes for the ones like Gar who are capable of it and want it, and the ones in the woods provide us with some measure of security. What should we do instead, keep them as pets? Put them in pens and cages? Those that can think don’t want that. They’re wild, free creatures. You should understand that, being a Wild Deserter yourself.’

  ‘I suppose so. They just seem so lost.’

  ‘They are our brothers and sisters. We are all Moccus’ children, more or less.’

  ‘Some more, some less, it seems. One of them spoke to me.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes, she said that he will come to the stone, and then they will dance for him. What does that mean?’

  ‘It means that you’re not one of the Farrow yet, and when you are you’ll understand. In the meantime, look after your piglet.’

  The deserter grinned. ‘I’d rather you look after my “piglet”,’ he leered, and reached for her, but she skipped out of his reach, silver-quick as ever, laughing.

  Denied the pleasure of her company once again, he decided that the only reasonable alternative was to get blotto and so went in search of Gar, who he found in the barn mending some rabbit snares. ‘While I am not normally given to self-pity,’ he announced, plonking himself down on a crate uninvited, ‘I find that on this occasion I am prepared to indulge myself. I have a terminal lung condition, a beautiful woman who refuses to fuck me until I convert to her religion, and my occupation now appears to be swineherd to one very small and angry pig. At times like this it behoves a man to get gloriously drunk with his chums and you, my terrifyingly huge friend, are the closest to it. So.’ He produced from his coat pocket a bottle sloshing half full of brandy. ‘What do you say?’

  Gar pointed at the bottle. ‘Wot.’

  ‘Eh? This? You mean what is this?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh my poor chap!’ The deserter laughed. ‘I didn’t realise! You have it so much worse than me!’ And he passed Gar the bottle.

  * * *

  Sitting by the fireside, Ardwyn looked up from her book. ‘What is that horrible noise?’

  Her mother, who was doing the household accounts, didn’t look up. ‘It’s just the men, dear,’ she replied. ‘Just the men.’

  6

  THEOPHAGY

  TOWARDS THE BEGINNING OF MARCH ACTIVITY IN Swinley increased – cottages that had lain closed and empty were opened, swept, and aired. Cartloads of food arrived and were stored away in larders and pantries. Daffodils, primroses, hellebores, and hyacinths appeared in tubs under windows, beside front doors, and all along the path leading up to the great clearing. Then the first visitors began to arrive – on foot, by horse, and by motor vehicle – and the deserter realised that the Farrow were not a small and local group but had adherents all over the country. There were a few single, unattached men, all of them wearing tusk bracelets, but the majority were married couples, obviously very wealthy to judge from their clothes and large number of suitcases – some had even brought servants. Did Moccus’ favour make them rich or attract the already well-off? If they all possessed the same sort of longevity that Bill had boasted of, maybe they’d simply had more time to accumulate their wealth. Too rich to be called upon for active service, that was for certain – no doubt working in sectors ‘crucial for the war effort’ and profiteering from it nicely besides. Far too busy to volunteer in the hospitals. These were the same type of people as the generals who sat in comfortable offices miles behind enemy lines and gave the orders to send thousands of young men into the meat grinder to gain a few yards of mud. He hated them instantly. He’d been hating them since before he met them.

  Mother knew them all by name and embraced them warmly, along with her daughter. The only thing that made this bearable was how obviously deferential they were to her despite their trappings of power. Ardwyn was kept busy looking after the guests and she had little time to spare for his questions, but he caught up with her as she was taking delivery of a cartload of bread. ‘It’s the spring equinox,’ she said. ‘The most important celebration in our calendar.’

  ‘Bit of a knees-up, is it? Bit of a sing-song?’

  ‘Sort of. We summon the god, sacrifice him, butcher his flesh and eat it.’

  ‘Ha ha, very funny. You should do music halls with that act.’

  She gave him a withering look and continued ticking off a wad of receipts.

  ‘No,’ he said, realising that she was absolutely serious. ‘No!’

  ‘Is that so strange to you? The Christians have been doing it every Sunday for two thousand years.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s exactly what the miracle of transubstantiation means.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I don’t really have the time for a long theological discussion at the moment.’

  ‘But that’s what keeps you strong and healthy, right? Stops you from growing old?’

  She sighed. ‘We enjoy the blessing of the first flesh – we take the strength of Moccus into ourselves, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘That’s what I want! It’s what I’ve come for!’

  ‘Out of the question – at least for now.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No! It’s the most hallowed sacrament of our worship! You can’t just barge in here as a complete stranger and expect to take that kind
of communion after only a couple of months!’

  ‘Mother said that I could meet him in September,’ he pointed out.

  ‘And you will, but you still won’t be one of the Farrow. You’ll be a privileged spectator, at best. Every one of those men has completed what you’ve only just started: spent years raising their boar—’

  ‘Been a glorified pig-keeper, you mean.’

  ‘Yes! Except that you still think of it as a low, dirty animal, which is the first thing you’ve got to purge from your thinking. The first of so many. You don’t understand what Moccus is. For women there’s no danger because he doesn’t see us as a threat. But if you, a soldier, and one who’s eaten human flesh at that—’

  ‘If you’re trying to shame me, it won’t work.’

  ‘I’m not trying to shame you, you idiot, I’m trying to protect you! I’m trying to explain that if you approach Moccus without due deference and humility – without having devoted part of yourself to caring for one of his creatures – he will rip you apart!’

  ‘And I’m trying to tell you that I don’t have however many years that would take still left in me! I’m not going to survive another winter, the doctors have told me that. So this whole tusk bracelet business is a total waste of bloody time! You want me here as much as I want to be here, we both know that. There’s got to be something you can do!’

  This tirade brought on a fresh bout of coughing, and he collapsed against the side of the bread cart, wiping blood from his lips. It stood out stark against the skull’s pallor of his face. ‘Deference and humility, is it?’ he gasped. ‘Fine then. I won’t give it to him, whatever he is, if he even exists – not until he earns it. No god ever did anything for me. But I’ll give it to you.’ He slid to the ground and knelt in the road before her. He’d never begged for anything as far as he could remember; begging was simply an invitation to be kicked in the face. ‘Please, Ardwyn, I’m begging you. I don’t want to die. Help me.’