Bloodsong

by Melvin Burgess

  You think I’m arrogant; I’m not. I was made for this— literally. My father designed me for it. Every gene in my body was picked for just this purpose. My mother brought me up for it, the gods shaped me as the keystone for this time and place. It’s no credit to me. I have less choice than anyone. I’m more a machine than a human being. Sometimes I wonder if I’m even human.

  Hiordis kept the dust in a small wooden box, inside another box, inside another box. Originally it was in a single steel box. My mother only realized what was going on when she looked into it one day and it seemed to her that the dust had grown. She got quite excited about it at the time, she told me, until she realized what was going on. As the dust moved, it was wearing away at the steel, and it was gradually getting mixed up with steel filings. That’s why she kept it in wood after that—it was easier to tell apart. Once, it wore right through a box, and when she picked it up it spilled out all over the floor—it took her ages to clean it all up. So she kept it in several boxes to keep it safe.

  I opened the box—and there it was, waiting for me. It was like sand—well, it was sand, in a sense. Some sand. I took a pinch of it between my fingers and rubbed it on the buckle of my belt. It was like scrubbing an apple with a wire brush, the buckle just rubbed away. Then I rubbed a pinch on my tooth; nothing. And if I wasn’t sure before, I was then. It was with me as it was with my father. The dust could cut anything—but not me. It was tuned in to me. It was mine.

  “Godworld!” said Regin, and I just smiled.

  I think Regin could’ve spent the rest of his life experimenting with that dust, but I didn’t have time for that. All I was bothered about was what sort of weapon to make it into, and how to use it.

  We spent hours trying to work out what the best means of attack was. We watched the few scraps of film there were of Fafnir, read everything anyone had ever written about him. What his habits were, what he ate, what he did, everything. And you know what? No one knew hardly anything. No one had even seen him eat. He did everything in private. About the only piece of what you might call personal detail there was about Fafnir was this: He liked to swim. There was a pool on the Heath not far from his citadel, and once or twice a week he’d come down to swim. There was a great path made where he crawled. It got like a mudslide when it was wet.

  It wasn’t much, but it was enough. This was our plan. We’d dig a hole in that track where I could hide myself, cover me over with some sort of lid, then mud, and then smooth it down so there was no disturbance. When Fafnir passed over me, that would be my chance.

  “What do you think?”

  Regin squinted at me. We were sitting in his lab by the window. There was that acrid laboratory smell, but outside the rain was pelting down in gray sheets and you could smell the wet earth and the cool air.

  “It might work,” he said.

  Then I had a nasty thought. “What if he’s wired for X-ray?” I said. “He’ll spot me lying there under the ground.”

  Regin thought about it. “There’s a hundred skeletons buried in the earth. Men he’s killed. You’ll just be one more. Infrared would be more of a danger, but anyway, we can find something to mask you. And how about this? We can dig up one of the skeletons and replace it with you, so that he won’t notice you even if he can remember what lies under the ground.”

  I liked that! The worm would think one of his own dead had risen up to take him on. And Odin would like it. God of the dead, god of killing, god of poetry. It’d be a plan that’d suit him well.

  But we still had the problem of what weapon to use. That wasn’t as obvious as it seemed, either. On the end of an armor-piercing shell? What if we missed? What if the explosion blew the dust off the end before it penetrated? It wouldn’t even break Fafnir’s skin if that happened—the blast would get flung downward and I’d get it.

  How about bullets?

  We tried it out—a titanium bullet with a layer of dust on the surface. It got through the scale all right, but then it was spent. It fell out the other side like a slug coming through a lettuce leaf. So then we tried making a titanium bullet with dust mixed in right the way through it. Better. It came whacking out the other end, but—I didn’t like it. There wasn’t that much dust, we’d only be able to make a handful of them. The risk of missing was too high.

  We must have been through every type of firearm there was before the answer suddenly dawned on me.

  It was ridiculous really. Regin thought it was hilarious. “Obvious!” he said. “So simple! Why didn’t I think of that before?”

  With this weapon I could carve a hole in the monster two or three meters long, from his heart to his arse. I could have his guts on the floor next to him before he knew what was going on. The beauty of it was, I’d use his own strength and weight as he passed above me to rip him open. All I had to do was stick it up out of the pit as he went overhead and his own momentum would do the rest. Fantastic. Fafnir was about the most advanced piece of technology on the planet and we were going to kill him—with a sword!

  We both laughed like maniacs, but you know what? Inside me my heart was fizzing. To kill a dragon like that, hand to hand! Oh, man! This was going to be the boldest thing you ever heard!

  So Odin’s knife became a sword. Regin forged it from a steel alloy, stretching and folding the metal over and over like a ribbon to make it strong and flexible. As he hammered and folded, he dusted in the remains of Odin’s knife wrapped up in microscopic packets of Sigurd’s own DNA, treated to stand the heat. The DNA held the dust secure, the metal alloy held the DNA secure. The result was a slim, elegant, flexible blade that could cut through any known substance—except for the flesh of its owner.

  But it had one small flaw. As he was working the bellows, a blowfly landed on Regin’s forehead and stung him on his eyelid. With a yelp, the old pigman dropped the bellows to swat it off and wipe away the blood—only for a second, but in that second the heat lessened. Afterward, he examined the blade closely and could see nothing, but he knew there was a chance of a hidden flaw deep inside the metal, halfway along. Regin had done his work well and nothing on this earth could melt the metal now that it was mixed with the dust, so he said nothing of it to Sigurd. He could only hope that the damage was small and that the blade was still strong enough to do its work.

  When he handed the sword over to Sigurd, Regin felt as if he was offering a prayer. The boy was so bright and perfect, at the beginning of everything. He was handing the golden child the future—not just his own future, but the future of his whole people. He was certain that Sigurd was capable of performing any task asked of him.

  Sigurd gripped the handle and the weapon gripped his hand back just as it had gripped his father’s hand over a hundred years before. It was more than his; it was a part of him.

  The boy’s first concern was simple. Turning to the wall beside him, he pushed the point lightly against the brickwork. The sword slid easily in with a slight, grainy hiss.

  From his pocket, Regin plucked a small handful of fleece that he had plucked off the barbed wire during a walk the day before, and let it fall on the edge of the blade as Sigurd held it out. The wool fell through the air and across the blade, and without even changing speed, fell in two neat halves toward the ground under its own weight. Nothing could stand in the way of that blade but Sigurd himself. He tested that too, trying to slice through his hand and arm. Soon he had Regin striking him with some force, but the blade just slipped off, fell to the ground point first, and stuck in the rock like something from a fairy tale.

  They made preparations to leave.

  Journeys in an age with no roads were adventures in themselves. Sigmund had built roads, but on that day fifteen years before when his regime was atomized, the building and repair programs had stopped. All along the way there were ganglords, outlaws, men who would be king, men who would eat, robbers, refugees, and a frightened population to contend with.

  There were many among the pigmen who did not expect Sigurd to come back. Letting
a fifteen-year-old child do a job small armies had failed at—it was absurd! Hiordis herself was terrified for him, but she was unable to stop him. Sigurd was a prodigy. His father had planned him with science, prayer, and love, and no one, not even his own mother, was ever able to deny him. But now that the time had come, Sigurd himself was uncertain. On that last night of his boyhood when he went to see his mother, he was pale and unhappy. Hiordis thought her boy was sad to be leaving her, but when she took him in her arms, he began to tremble and cry.

  He was always open, ready to share his worries and fears, but she had not seen him so distressed since he was little. “What is it?” she asked him. Sigurd shook his head, but when she pressed his face into her tawny neck he whispered,

  “I’m scared, I’m so scared.”

  Hiordis’s heart cracked. She squeezed him tight and stroked his head. “There,” she murmured; but the words “Don’t go” failed in her throat. It could be that he was going to his death, right now, at the beginning of his life. She wept, but her instinct that he was made for this was even stronger than her mother’s love.

  “It’ll be all right, you know it will,” she said at last. It was the best she could do.

  There was a long pause, and then he nodded his head. He was Sigurd, son of the great king and the hope of the future. He had been so independent, so sure of himself all his life, and often Hiordis had found this hard; she wanted to mother her boy. But when at last he came to her as a child, she sent him on his way. The mother had no words of comfort to offer her son. It was always this way with Sigurd—so vulnerable, so easily hurt, so bravely on his way to a destiny no one had a say in, not even himself. She never knew whether or not she’d let him down that day.

  In the morning, he was dry eyed. Good-byes had already been said. There was only time for one more embrace before he was mounted and gone with Regin into the early morning mist.

  Their journey took them down the south coast of Wales and east along the route followed two hundred years before by the old M4 motorway. The meadows of wild flowers that had covered these ways when Sigmund was young had given way first to birch trees breaking up the tarmac, then to sycamores and oaks. A track had been preserved in the center for a long time, but as the tarmac beneath became broken up by roots, it became too rutted to work. Sigmund had rebuilt a decent metalled road alongside the strip of woodland where the motorway once was, but now even that had fallen into disrepair and the road was on the move again. Those with carts and on foot had to toil through the mud. Sigurd and Regin were mounted, able to cut across the meadows and run through the woods.

  Along the way they had to pass through five separate administrations, varying from loose coalitions of towns and villages who had banded together for their own security, to corporate organizations, would-be nations, and ganglords. Food was scarce, wealth scarcer, and traveling across country was a fraught business. Alf’s little kingdom in the far west was too far away to trouble any of the bigger players, but the whole country knew that Sigmund had designed a son to rule after him. He was a Volson, a rallying point for anyone interested in either war or peace. Many people would follow him, but many others wanted him dead. The two travelers needed to be well armed and well mounted, too.

  Mounted? A king’s son in this age of science? But car or horse—what’s the difference? Some pump blood, some pump oil; some run on oats, some run on fuel. Some did both. There wasn’t a stretch of road in England longer than a few miles that could take a car or truck these days. It was tractors or 4x4s if you wanted to drive, but they were for the rich and wealth attracts attention. Horses were the usual way of traveling distances—they could be easily bred, they were cheap to run. The better ones had improvements—alloy frames, carbon-fiber muscle systems, and so on. The advantage of beasts like this for people like Sigurd and Regin, wealthy, traveling alone, was that you could be driving a racing car and a tank combined, but it looked no different from an old nag.

  Regin was riding something of this sort—a beast that had so many improvements to its skeletal, muscle, nervous, and other systems that not much more than the central nervous and hormonal systems remained of the organic base. Sigurd was mounted on something of another order: a real, live cyborg.

  He had been given to Alf long ago by Sigmund, and Alf in turn had given it to Sigmund’s son. He was called Slipper, a name Sigurd had given him when he was only four years old. No one alive had the skills to build something like him. Two systems in Slipper worked together, side by side or on their own. If the flesh was destroyed, the machine took over; if the machine broke down, the beast took over. In either case, the damaged parts were regrown, regenerated, fixed, or replaced. He grazed on grass, flesh, or scrap, one just as well as the other, self-repairing, self-regulating, self-building. He was the only one of his kind left, one of three made at the height of the old king’s reign. Technology was not enough to make these creatures. Odin himself was said to have had a hand in their brewing.

  The name Slipper had come about like this: Hiordis liked to tell stories to her boy, and the ones he loved best were the old myths, hero tales. One of his favorites was the story of Perseus and the Gorgon Medusa. Alf’s folk didn’t wear shoes, they liked the feel of the earth and mud under their trotters and between their toes, so Hiordis always made her son wash his feet and wear slippers in the house. Since he had no idea about any other footwear, she had explained the winged sandals worn by Perseus as slippers. So, when he saw the horse running across the beach, Sigurd had said that he went as fast as a flying slipper. Slipper it was from that day on.

  In secret storage compartments inside the horses, Sigurd and Regin carried a great deal of sophisticated hardware. Regin was after other treasure than bullion—it was technology he was after. Fafnir had raided near and far, beyond the sea, perhaps even beyond the ocean. Genetic technology had never been loosed into the population anywhere else except Britain and that, with the proximity of the godworld, made it a place foreign powers wanted kept down. But in terms of straight technology, Britain was a backwater, a third-world dumping ground for cheap, outdated goods. Regin was greedy for imported science. Companies like the Destiny Corporation and the Norn Group in particular made products he wanted, devices for use in the science of government that manipulated mood and mind. It was rumoured that Fafnir had captured machines such as Fear, Greed, and Awe, which could stimulate and manipulate the feelings they were named after. And was it true, as old Sigmund used to speculate, that some of the African superpowers had other, even more sophisticated machines? Did Odin really exist? Jesus? Could the Destiny Corporation generate godhead?

  And then, there was Andvari’s ring. A small, solid-state device, disguised as a gold finger ring, it was rumored that Fafnir had stolen it on a raid to one of the Asian superpowers, but he had not known what it was he was stealing, or how it worked. Rings of this kind were inventions with a more practical turn than those that generated emotions and godhead. They were made to set the future to work on your account. They were destiny machines, controlling the chaos of chance events into luck, either good or bad. The kings and presidents of Nigeria, China, and South Africa were said to wear similar rings on their fingers, generating a field to turn chance events in their favor. But Andvari’s ring was the opposite. It turned chance against you. Within its field of influence, nothing could work out well in the end.

  In other words, the ring was a curse.

  Yoking the future to your wishes—that was a prize worth dying for in Regin’s eyes. This ring, if it existed, had to be destroyed; it was here only to make the years to come as sour as the ones that had passed, a funnel to channel destiny down to the darkness. It closed doors, crushed hopes, ended. But before he destroyed it, Regin wanted to understand it, to unravel how it was made. His hope was that he could learn how to make one that served good fortune, and make luck favor the home market.

  But Regin said nothing of this to Sigurd. He was worried that the boy would think that the ring was too dangerous
, and demand that it be destroyed before he had found out how it worked.

  Sigurd himself carried a small arsenal of weaponry hidden in Slipper’s hold. He wasn’t only going to cut the dragon open, he was going to blow it to pieces, as well. Odin alone knew how difficult such a monster would be to kill—and to keep dead. Resurrection was no longer an impossible science.

  That’s how Sigurd began his first adventure—in disguise, on a horse that wasn’t a horse, with a saddlebag full of science and a sword forged with grit from the godworld. There were secrets kept from him. And burning in his heart, a hope that he could, with the strength of his bare hands and his love for the world, turn darkness into light, bad luck into good, and sorrow into gladness.

  So he set off with his mentor to win the finance he needed to drive hope through the heart of a riven land.

  As they traveled east, the land changed. Outside Alf’s territory there were more signs of conflict—hungry people, injured people, ruined buildings, poisoned fields, and war hospitals. There were whole slave villages, the populations ill fed, ill kept, ill used. And what for? The owners could have used their people well and not gone without themselves. But they considered that they were doing these people a favor in the first place just letting them live on the land. They could have brewed some witless halfman machine that would work day and night for a century on sunshine and cabbage and never complain. Sentience was a luxury in the workforce.

  Farther east the settlements grew fewer, the inhabitants less and less human—from dogmen to dog, from pigmen to pig. They were closing in on the poisoned heart of the country. Hedgerows and trees shrank and darkened, the roadsides and wastelands were full of strange looking plants. They began to see signs of halfman misfits—broken monsters begging for help in the hedges or roaring on the road; flocks of strange birds soaring above them, calling out promises and offering bribes, trying to strike deals if they’d just follow them to their roost. There was only one end to those promises. Then, as they got closer still, big creatures began to disappear and were replaced by little things— rats with odd faces, giant insects, and crippled reptiles. The gene pool close to London had been scrambled. Just as armies long ago used to sow the fields around a conquered city with salt to prevent people ever coming back and growing crops, so the new conquerors made sure that nothing that bred here would ever again come out straight. They had scattered chemicals that twisted the codes of life out of shape.