Bone Harvest

by James Brogden

  ‘What are you, Everett – if that even is your name?’ he sneered. ‘What’s a strong, healthy young man like you doing skulking out here amongst decent folk, instead of serving your King and country?’ Wealth and breeding did not confer an overabundant sense of irony, it seemed. ‘I bet you’re a deserter, aren’t you?’

  The insight took Everett aback, and he looked at Gus more closely. Maybe there was something more going on behind those soft eyes than just self-regard.

  ‘Yes, that’s it, isn’t it?’ Gus persisted. ‘I might have a bit of a word with some people my father knows at home. War Ministry folks, don’t you know. Have them send some constables out here to find out who you really are.’

  The deserter took a final drag on his cigarette and flicked it to the ground, extinguishing it beneath his heel. Then he leaned closer to Gus and sniffed. ‘You smell of cloves,’ he murmured, and sniffed again. ‘And pepper. It must be whatever mouthwash or cologne you’re wearing. Under that…’ He inhaled more deeply. ‘You’ve tried to wash off the smell of sex but it’s still there.’

  ‘What the bloody hell are you on about?’ The other man flinched away from the deserter’s proximity, but he followed, sniffing close to the line of Gus’ jaw where it met his neck in the densely clustered trunk of veins and arteries.

  ‘And talcum. Or flour. And lard. Lots of lard. Why, I bet if I killed you and boiled you down I could make some halfway decent dumplings out of you.’

  ‘If that’s your idea of a threat—’

  ‘It’s not a threat. It’s more of a menu option.’ Everett winked at him.

  Gus stormed off and the deserter found that he was being watched by amber eyes. Mother’s swine chewed, unimpressed.

  ‘And you lot can shut up too.’

  * * *

  He slaughtered the first of them a month later.

  ‘Let’s face it,’ Mother said to him. ‘You’re no farmer. You didn’t seek us out to spend the rest of your long life digging turnips and milking cows, and I wouldn’t be so foolish as to think if you ever did become one of the Farrow that you would stay with us for long afterwards. Fortunately, there is an important role that you can perform for us which doesn’t require you to do so – in fact, it makes perfect sense for you to take it up since it was Michael’s role too. You’ve replaced him in our community, you might as well replace him in our rituals too.’

  It sounded ominous. ‘What was his job?’ the deserter asked warily. They were standing at her sty, watching her Welsh grunt and wallow contentedly.

  ‘He was our slaughterman.’

  ‘Of course, he was.’ He almost added and you bloody need one, after that botched mess at your orgy, except that he wasn’t supposed to have seen it. ‘But I still haven’t passed my initiation, or whatever you call it. Is that allowed?’

  Mother’s smile was thin, but not entirely humourless. ‘What is allowed is what I judge best for the Farrow. It’s why I’m going to overlook your threats towards Ardwyn’s intended. This is a role for which it seems to me your skills and personality make you ideally suited, but don’t worry if you don’t feel up to it straight away. It will be twenty-six years before Moccus returns and you are needed, which gives you plenty of time to practise and for us to find a replacement if you turn out to be unsuited.’

  ‘Why twenty-six years?’

  ‘Because that is the duration of the cycle of Moccus. Do you want to spend years here learning about the lives of the stars and the planets, their correspondences with human souls, and the majestic mathematical balance of the universe? I can teach you the answer to that ‘why’ but I doubt you’d find it rewarding. You’re even less a priest than a farmer.’

  ‘Fair enough. But I’ll be…’ He stopped, realising that he had no idea how old he was. ‘In my forties,’ he finished.

  ‘You won’t feel it. Nor will you look it. You’ll continue as strong and healthy as you are for a long while yet. But nothing is immortal, not even a god. Moccus takes on the burden of birth, ageing, and death so that we don’t have to. For a while.’

  She told him that the six months after Moccus’ sacrifice between the equinoxes was a time of replenishment, when that which had been given was repaid. Replenishment came in the form of one perfect swine, sanctified by consumption of the first flesh, to be sacrificed to Moccus each month just after the new moon, when the waxing crescent formed the great boar-god’s tusks. It was taken up to the clearing and slaughtered in a much smaller ceremony, which the deserter much preferred the sound of – anything instead of watching a bunch of middle-aged toffs humping each other.

  When he’d killed the boy for his leg, the deserter had been starving, sick with neuralgia and barely aware of what he was doing. The first time he killed one of Mother’s swine it was with absolute clarity. He felt the life of the creature thrumming through it as it was held, like a bowstring drawn back tight and ready to let fly, or a bullet in the breech, an explosive release waiting for just the slightest pressure of his fingers. It wasn’t the sense of power that he experienced because the power wasn’t his – it belonged to the arrow, the bullet, the creature, and the blood of the god that it had eaten. It was the sense of control over that power, the ability to unleash and direct it, to destroy or reorder the world with it at his whim, the intoxication of finally, finally not being at the mercy of vast forces beyond his comprehension but for once possibly being in charge of them. For the first time he thought he understood those fat generals issuing their orders, and it should probably have made him humble but instead all he could think was More. How do I get more? The animal squirming in his arms was just a pig; imagine spilling the lifeblood of a god.

  The knife they gave him was an ancient thing, its sickle-shaped blade black and pitted with centuries of bloodletting, but the edge was as keen and bright as a slice of moonlight. It bit into the pig’s throat with almost no resistance – he only knew how deeply he’d cut when he felt the blade scrape against vertebra. The blood pumped onto the bare, black earth at the foot of the obelisk where Mother had buried Moccus’ head – pints of it swallowed up instantly as if the very earth thirsted for it.

  ‘Moccus, be replenished,’ the congregation around him intoned. ‘Moccus, be renewed. Moccus, be reborn.’

  Afterwards, he butchered the carcass – with the help of some of the older and more experienced men – and there was a hog roast on the village green, with music and dancing by firelight. A clay jar of cider kept over from last year’s harvest was opened and he was given the first pint as a gesture of respect. All throughout the evening people kept coming up to him and congratulating him on a job well done, the first time in his damaged memory that he could recall anyone ever doing so. It made him profoundly uncomfortable at first, but he found that if he just smiled and nodded and said thank you, that was all they seemed to need and they went away happy again. Nobody seemed to mind that he wasn’t yet wearing a tusk bracelet. Nikolai was growing well but his tusks were barely a quarter circle so far. He had never imagined that it could be so easy to make other people happy, or even that it was a thing he would value. He danced with Ardwyn, enjoying the way her eyes flashed and her hair smelled and her body moved beneath his hands in a way that wasn’t sex.

  That first time he was, admittedly, clumsy, but by the time September came and the harvest was being gathered in he had refined his technique month by month such that the beasts barely knew what was happening before it was over. Mother had been right, this suited him. In the meantime, he surprised himself by settling into village life quite comfortably. He made repairs to his cottage, fixing the roof and front door as best he could, and enjoyed sitting out on the lingering summer evenings, watching sparrows bickering in the honeysuckle, smoking or getting drunk with Gar. Beyond taking care of his own hearth and the monthly sacrifice, he didn’t have to do any more work to earn his place in Swinley; the Farrow fed him, and there was plenty to go around.

  8

  THE SIXTH SACRIFICE

  F
OR THE FINAL REPLENISHMENT SACRIFICE THEY HAD adorned the obelisk with harvest bounty: barrels of apples and pears, crates tumbling full of marrows, onions, and a dozen other fruits and vegetables in abundance that he couldn’t name. Sheaves of corn were stacked in pillars on either side of the stone. It was an obscene amount of food given that men fighting in the trenches were suffering from scurvy and malnutrition, but most of it would go on to be sold at local markets or to the War Ministry eventually. The little knowledge he could glean from newspapers and gossip in the surrounding villages suggested that, as impossible as it seemed, the same offensive that he had seen the start of was still grinding its way through young lives. As the solstice approached there was a buzz of excitement in the village – not on the same scale as the sacrifice-orgy, but in that September of 1916 the waxing crescent moon came almost a week after the solstice itself, a delay which caused Mother some anxiety.

  ‘Don’t linger,’ she said. ‘Once you’ve bled the vessel, step to the outer circle as quickly as you can. When Moccus returns he’ll be confused and disoriented at first, and has been known to lash out at whoever is nearest. That’s why we form a circle to welcome him back into the world. It’s for our own safety.’

  The deserter did as he was told. Mother blew the carnyx to summon the god to life, and Everett’s knife whispered its song, and this time the earth gave it back. He felt tremors in the soil through his feet as he stepped back to rejoin Ardwyn in the circle. The tremors became shudders and throbbing pulses, as if a great heart were beating just below the surface, or else something was pounding its way out. The black, blood-soaked earth at the foot of Moccus’ column heaved and subsided repeatedly, a little higher each time until cascades of soil were pouring down the sides of a long mound that was slowly, painfully pushing itself out of the ground.

  Then a hand broke free, clutching at the air. It was followed by a second, thick fingers pulling apart and widening a well within which something huge stirred. The torchlight gleamed on tusks and straining muscles. Moccus screamed in the high, full-throated bellow of a boar as he raised his head clear and glared with burning amber eyes around at the assembled worshippers. Then he planted his hands either side of the hole and hauled himself into the world.

  This wasn’t the ancient and crippled thing that the deserter had seen being so ineptly butchered in the spring. Moccus rose before them in the full swell of strength and vitality. His broad chest and limbs were thick with muscle, the pelt that covered his head and continued down his back in a crest of hackles was black and lustrous, and his cock swung between his thighs like a club. His smell filled the clearing, thick and rank. He roared again, but it wasn’t entirely an animal’s squeal; it seemed that there might have been human sounds buried in it. Several of the Farrow faltered back, and Moccus’ head swivelled to track them, watching, alert. Instinctively, the deserter raised his blade in self-defence, and Moccus’ attention snapped onto him, the burning eyes narrow.

  ‘No,’ whispered Ardwyn, easing the knife down. ‘Don’t make yourself a threat.’

  Everett did as he was told. Moccus grunted, apparently satisfied that there was no challenge here, then in an explosion of movement he was racing past them and into the trees, crashing sounds diminishing towards the stream gully and the thickest part of the woods.

  During the customary hog roast on the green, Mother took him to one side. ‘Your work has been better than I could have hoped,’ she said. ‘You have a gift for bloodletting.’

  ‘Thank you, Mother. I’m sensing a “but”, though.’

  She nodded. ‘But now is the time for you to go. Moccus will go out into the wild places of the world to hunt and mate, and there’s no place or purpose for you here until he returns.’

  The deserter was surprised at how distressing he found this sudden change of plan. ‘What about Nikolai? My pig, I mean. I still need to complete my bracelet, don’t I, to become one of you properly?’

  ‘You already are one of us. The last six months should have proven that. I think sitting around here twiddling your thumbs for the next two or three years waiting for that pig to grow would be an unnecessary delay.’

  ‘I might get too comfortable, you mean.’

  ‘Something like that, yes.’

  ‘Too comfortable with your daughter.’

  Mother sighed. ‘Ardwyn has told you what her part in the Farrow is, I take it?’

  ‘Yes, she has, to shack up with some stuffed shirt and set up a happy little coven of her own, which if you ask me—’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Mother cut him off, and the flatness of her tone was absolute. ‘And I won’t. You won’t be consulted. Your approval is neither required nor wanted. I am Mother, just as she will become Mother of her own sounder, you’re right, and she will have the final say over the fate of the males that come to her, just as I have over mine. Over you. You are a soldier. You’re accustomed to obeying orders. Well, obey this one.’

  ‘I’m a deserter,’ he reminded her. ‘I gave up taking orders. And I’ve never taken them from women.’

  She met his gaze, and there was not one hint of indecision or mercy in it. ‘Then desert,’ she said. ‘Leave us. That’s exactly what I’m telling you to do, in case you weren’t paying attention. But if it satisfies your masculine pride to tell yourself that you’re going on your own terms and not because some woman told you, then I’m not going to argue.’

  ‘And come back in, what – 1942?’ He couldn’t keep the scepticism out of his voice. For all that he had seen and done, the horizon of his future had only ever been, at best, months at a time. To ask him to plan twenty-six years ahead, she might as well have been asking him to fly to the moon.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘But I like it here,’ he replied. ‘This is as close to a home as anything I can remember. I can be useful here in other ways.’

  ‘You mean farming? Building barns? We’ve already had this discussion. It’s not what you are, and you’d cease to be what we need if you tried to be anything else. In a quarter of a century you are going to have to sacrifice a god, and for that you will need the kind of strength that you won’t get from ploughing fields. You need to be out in the world, fighting it, letting it harden you. Moccus will be old, but his spirit might still be too much for you to cope with.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘I know that Michael wasn’t fighting in that war for the sake of King and country. Or possibly I’m mistaken and you’re made of sterner stuff than he was?’

  He had no answer to that.

  * * *

  The deserter went to where Nikolai was tethered in his pen. The boar was quite a bit larger than when he’d first been caught, his piglet striping beginning to fade and his lower tusks were curled halfway back on themselves, longer than natural but maybe not too long for him to survive in the wild. He eyed the deserter with undimmed suspicion. ‘Looks like you’re off the hook, young man,’ Everett said, and paused before untying him. ‘If you bite me I’ll bloody well leave you here.’

  Nikolai let himself be untied without protest. The deserter held the gate open but the pig hesitated, possibly suspecting that it was a trap. ‘Look,’ said the deserter. ‘I know we haven’t exactly got on but I’ve tried to do all right by you. You’ve got a nice sty here – bit of clean straw to sleep on, some yummy old slops to eat if you want. It’s up to you.’

  As he moved away from the gate there was a flash of movement behind him and a small dark shape bolted over the lane, through the hedge and off across night-darkened fields towards the woods that surrounded the village.

  ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I suppose so.’

  And he went inside to pack.

  9

  1942

  IT WAS WITH A MIXTURE OF EXCITEMENT AND apprehension churning his guts that Everett hiked down from the slopes of the Long Mynd and into the woods surrounding Swinley in late winter of 1942. It was like the feeling before battle, except worse, because this time he actually gave
a damn about the outcome.

  He’d done as Mother instructed and let his appetite for blood lead his feet out into the world. The Great War had finished not with a bang but with a whimper, and the mess of its aftermath had left plenty of opportunities given that there were so few men of fighting age left alive. Closest to home there had been the Irish to put down, and then half a dozen squabbles between the fragments of the old world’s broken empires as they fought to cannibalise each other. He rarely cared who he fought for, just relishing the irony that the whole of Europe had become No Man’s Land – as if that nightmare territory had leaked out like a swamp once the levees of the trenches had been dismantled, and had expanded to flood the continent, drowning everyone who had escaped the immediate fighting. He broke heads during the General Strike of ’26, and then for balance joined the International Brigades in Spain in ’33, from which catastrophe he retired to lick his wounds in Gibraltar. When, lo and behold, the Second World War broke out with all the inevitability of a toddler shitting itself, he enlisted with the 3rd Infantry and deployed to France to kill Germans again. He never once met another man wearing a boar-tusk bracelet, but he always kept the date of the Farrow’s equinoctial orgy firmly in mind – the 21st of March – and when the time came he deserted again, trading his uniform for a refugee’s rags and making his way home.

  He didn’t know what kind of welcome to expect. He imagined that by now Ardwyn would have long since taken up with her rich young man, Gus, but for all these years he’d deliberately avoided trying to find out. It was easy enough; her social circle was unlikely to overlap with his, and he wasn’t much for reading the society papers or the financial news.

  The rutted cart track through the outlying woods of Swinley was a gravel road now, with electricity and telephone lines strung on poles alongside. Presumably they had motor vehicles and lightbulbs. The Farrow could perform their blood-soaked rituals and then settle down nice and cosy to listen to the Light Programme on the wireless.