Bloodtide

by Melvin Burgess

  Siggy looked sideways to where Signy was sitting at the table, watching anxiously. She saw him looking, and nodded. Yes, yes, give him the knife. Do it for me, Sigs, for old time’s sake. Give him the knife…

  Siggy weighed the knife in his hand and suddenly struck it, hard, in the wood of the table they stood by. It thudded home right up to the hilt.

  ‘Then take it. And if you can, it’s yours.’

  The stillness settled all round them. Conor glanced at the knife but did not move a muscle.

  ‘Go on. It’s only in wood.’

  Conor reached out a hand and grabbed the knife, but you could tell just by looking that under his hand it might as well have been the root of a mountain. He hefted. The table shifted. Conor scowled, but he wanted the knife. He put one leg on the table and heaved. He let out a savage grunt that gave away the effort; the muscles on his neck showed momentarily. Then he took his hand away, glanced briefly at the deep, angry marks he had made before he smiled and shrugged at Siggy as if this was just a game.

  Siggy put out his hand for the knife and it leaped into his hand like a living thing. Gloating, he leaned close to Conor’s face and whispered, ‘You could cover this floor with gold and it wouldn’t buy my knife. You’ll never have this.’

  Conor glanced over his shoulder and back. He was checking that no one was close enough to hear him spoken to like that. No one needed to hear. One look at the two faces told all – Siggy’s, wide with a sick grin, Conor’s, pale with venom and rage. Then he smiled at Siggy, and laughed good naturedly. It sounded entirely natural. He turned back to join the other guests. Siggy put the knife back home, into his belt.

  14

  The next day, in a small room in Val’s apartments, the twins were having a bitter argument.

  ‘You’re barmy.’

  ‘Why won’t you?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You know you should.’

  ‘Why? Why should I?’

  ‘He’s a guest.’ Signy paused with a sudden thought. ‘It’s not some trick of Val’s, is it?’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Why won’t you let him have it?’

  ‘Because it’s mine, Signy. You saw! I was the one to pull it out.’

  ‘You never believed in any of that stuff…’

  ‘I still don’t. But I pulled it out. Didn’t you see? It cuts through anything. Look.’

  Siggy took the knife out of his belt and stuck it in the wall next to them. There was a hard little crack as it entered the stone and stuck still.

  Impossible.

  In a little fit of resentment, Signy made a movement towards the knife, then stopped herself. It wasn’t just that she wanted it for Conor. The fact was, she was scared she might have been able to remove it herself. Of them all, only she had not been given the chance to take the knife from the lift shaft. The boys were all put first. Maybe the knife could have been hers instead of Siggy’s. Odin had touched Siggy, but he had embraced her. Everyone seemed to have forgotten that.

  ‘Go on – try,’ jeered Siggy, confident that no one but he could use it. Signy shook her head, and he took it back out of the wall. ‘It’s mine. It knows it’s mine. What use would it be to him? He couldn’t cut a lemon with it,’ said Siggy. He looked curiously at her. It felt as if she was turning into another person before his eyes. ‘It’s tuned in to me. He’d have to call me to come and take it out of its sheath for him!’

  Signy stared at the knife angrily and in some awe. It was an event, that knife. But… ‘It’s humiliating for him to be the chief guest and then for you just to walk off with the big prize,’ she insisted.

  Siggy stamped. ‘This is mad! It’s no use to anyone but me!’

  ‘Oh, but… Please, Siggy. It’d be a wedding present. Please…’

  Siggy suddenly felt about a hundred miles away from this argument. He’d seen how unreasonable Signy could be once her mind was set, but she’d never turned against him like this.

  ‘You’ve changed so quickly,’ he said.

  Signy’s face became white and hard. Conor had asked her to do this for him – this one thing. She knew it was asking a lot. But she was going away! Hadn’t she and Sigs always agreed in the past? Hadn’t they always done anything for each other? Certainly he could do this one thing – for her, for her wedding, for her going away.

  ‘You must hate me,’ she said. The sourness was rising around them. Neither wanted it but neither could make the sacrifice to stop it. It was all so late. In a few hours she would be gone, but Siggy couldn’t give up the knife and she couldn’t grant him his right to it.

  ‘He’s using you,’ Siggy told her. ‘He’s treating you like a dog to fetch and carry and steal for him, and you don’t even know it.’

  Signy felt a spasm of real hatred. She would have struck him or spat, if it wasn’t for the past life between them.

  ‘I’ll never trust you again,’ she said. Then she showed him her back and left the room. That was how the twins parted. Although each knew that the other must be wounded to the hollows of their heart, they refused to take back their bitter words.

  Coming to the centre of Val’s territory had been a real act of trust for Conor and his men, no doubt about it. Over the past few days there had been a thousand opportunities for treachery, and it wasn’t over yet. The road back was fraught with more chances if Val cared to take them. But now it was different. Conor had Signy with him.

  And something else was different. During the celebrations, something had happened. Somehow, the mood on the streets had been transformed. When Val and his sons were woken at four in the morning with news that crowds were gathering outside they had no idea whether the crowd was angry or glad. By the time Conor and his new wife woke up, the voices were a roar. Outside the Galaxy Building, a host had gathered to see the couple off.

  Val’s dreams! Somehow they always came about. When Conor had come, he had been hated and now he was a hero. What other leader could make a treaty work like that?

  It was the wedding that did it. Here was a story everyone wanted to believe in: the golden girl who married the king and brought peace to the world. Val had told the story, Signy and Conor had acted it out, Odin had come to bless it. And now the people believed it. The crowd numbered hundreds of thousands. It was unheard of, unimaginable. An ocean of people, every one of them looking hopefully to the future, each one hoping to be seen by the princess, to be smiled at, to catch her eye. As Signy emerged from the building a great wave of cheering broke over the families and their staff. The Volsons, the Conors, the VIPs, all stood blinking uncertainly and smiling in bewilderment.

  Signy was shocked. She had seen it from the window but here on the ground – such a vast crowd! So many smiles! She lifted her hand and waved. The cheering rose up. She smiled and blew a kiss. Then she and Conor ducked their heads and ran to the car.

  Only one man wasn’t surprised. It seemed only natural to Val that his plans had worked out. And to those around him too, it was as if the world was only waiting for Val to tell it what to do. But by his father’s side, Siggy watched with a razor pain of sorrow inside him. He and Signy had been together like two bones in the same hand. Now she had to force a smile when she said goodbye to him. He watched the cars pull away, his hand resting on his precious knife. Was it worth so much?

  Listening to the cheering, even Siggy believed. The people screamed in pleasure and flung flowers onto the cavalcade of cars and he thought, maybe, maybe after all Val is right. Maybe the treaty will work. Everything will work out for the best.

  15

  signy

  It was as if, because I’d fallen in love with Conor, everyone else had fallen in love with me. The whole world! People leaning over to touch the car, people cheering and clapping as if I’d done something wonderful. I was something wonderful. Can you imagine that? It doesn’t matter what you do. You just are.

  I was terrified someone was going to get hurt. No one expected it, no one was prepared for
it. I never saw so much happiness. I had to tell the driver to edge forward. They could never have got out of the way no matter how much you honked and yelled and threatened, there were just too many people. We kept having to stop while security came to clear the way. They were edgy, really edgy. I was more scared of them than the crowd. If someone opened fire it would’ve been slaughter and all that happiness would have turned to hatred.

  Conor and his men were terrified! You can’t blame them – surrounded, all our people stacked up around them. Conor’s father had ruled by fear, you see. They were used to fear, they understood that. But happiness? Hope? To them it was unnatural, a ghost, a monster! I said to Conor, ‘You better get used to it. This is how it’s gonna be from now on.’

  It was me and Conor everywhere. People were holding up banners with me and Conor painted on them. People were wearing masks of me and Conor. There was one man wearing a huge outsize knob out of his trousers. Conor was furious, but I just said, ‘Hmmm, quite a good likeness,’ and made him laugh. There were these little stalls selling painted mugs and plates and tea towels for the poor people to buy, and little silver teaspoons with enamelled pictures of me on them, and coins printed in silver and gold for the rich. You see? Everyone felt the same, rich and poor. Whenever they saw me looking out of the window, people just screeched.

  ‘Good luck, princess! Bring us peace! Bring us peace!’

  I said to Conor, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’

  He said, ‘You married me.’

  There were these little leaflets they were selling on that cheap grey paper that’s been recycled about ten thousand times. We sat in the back of the limo and read all about it, all about us. As if we were something from the old movies. Half of it was true and the other was just… well, whatever people cared to think! How our marriage had been blessed by the old gods. How Sigs had been given a magic knife which he gave to Conor (I wish). Or how he’d been given it to protect me if Conor turned against me. (Yeah, yeah.) How me and Conor met each other when I was only eight and we’d pledged to wait for each other. How we’d met in a dream. How the marriage had been forbidden by our fathers but of course they came round in the end.

  But the best one was about me being this Robin Hood person. And that was true. That’s to say, when I saw all those people and how much we meant to them, I decided to make it true. It was gonna be just like the games me and Sigs used to play. Well, it wasn’t play at all, really. We robbed the rich to give to the poor. Now that I was married to Conor, the people would be freed, the people would be fed. I was gonna make sure of it…

  ‘I’m a legend!’ I told Conor gleefully.

  ‘And I’m just an accessory,’ he complained, pulling a face. He was jealous! Well, what do you expect? I mean, he was the prince. But me – I was the princess. He had to do something but us princesses, we bring all the good things just because. I was the sacrifice and I liked it. I was joining the houses of the ganglords together and if I could be happy like that, so could everyone else. I just thought – my father! How did he know? He had sacrificed me and it was all perfect. I was in love. I was going to make the world better.

  I looked out of the window and my heart just filled up for them all – all of them out there, in their thousands and their tens of thousands and their hundreds of thousands. I thought, they depend on us. They need us. We can’t let them down now.

  16

  As they drove back out beyond Camden, bumping and jerking across the ruined roads, the sense of relief in the convoy grew. The final possibility of ambush had gone; Val had been as good as his word. What was more, the well-wishing was just as strong once they crossed the border into their own lands as it had been in Val’s. The crowds swelled on each side of the road to cheer the newly-weds home, the same light of hope in their eyes. And the men and women in the convoy – the suspicious army chiefs, the hard-nosed businessmen and women, the smugglers, the gangmen who had thought they were driving to their deaths when they entered Val’s lands – began to eye each other suspiciously to see if they shared the unfamiliar feelings that were stirring inside them. It had been a long time since hope had been at large north of the city.

  They had begun to believe at last that the great dream of unification, of breaking out into the big world, was possible after all.

  Home was once a kingdom of toppling towers, of flaking concrete, shattered glass and brick dust underfoot. There were flooded towers, great ruined houses, ancient stone buildings with no roofs. The floors of churches a thousand years old had stone flags slippery with algae.

  That was then.

  And this was now: flat, green and low. An open acreage of crippled suburbs. The wide acres of brick houses, detached and semi-detached, estate after estate of them opening out on either side of the crumbling roads that used to be Finchley. The walls would stand for centuries, but the roofs of most had long gone. Many of the old houses were now factories, shops and offices. The gardens enclosed by the old housing estates had been cleared and the fences knocked down to form fields. Beyond the houses, on the fringes of the city, were the big fields that grew seven-eights of the fresh food for the enclosed city, acres of beans and potatoes and cabbages and leeks.

  No one travelled far these days. Petrol was a luxury for the rich. Buses and trains lay rusting in the street, every useful part cannibalised decades ago. The bus stations had been turned into cowsheds. The tunnels where the Northern Line trains once ran were a home for rats, mice and other vermin – thieves, for instance, or beggars sheltering from the rain. And prisoners. The prisoners of London kept prisoners of their own. Lifetimes had been spent trapped in these filthy, damp passages.

  Conor’s headquarters in Finchley occupied several whole streets, an old estate of luxury houses. It was flanked on one side by an old railway cutting, on another by a reservoir. The old North Circular road on the other side was planted with razor wire and mines and was overlooked by wooden watch towers and armed guards. A great brick wall ran right around it all. Headquarters looked like a prison from outside, but the wall was to keep the prisoners out, not in.

  All around it brickwork crumbled, doors peeled and rotted, paving stones cracked, telegraph and lamp-posts leaned, toppled and fell. Conor had a smaller population than Val but he was a hard ruler. With every second penny they earned going to Conor – it used to be called protection money but the ganglords called it tax these days – the people had little to spare.

  But inside the Estate the houses were all perfect, the paintwork bright, the roads and pavements manicured to perfection. Conor took a pride in making his own place exactly as it had been in the old times, when there was still society. The Estate ran its own small power station. All the houses had electricity, running water and gas. For Conor, his family, his relatives, his friends, as well as all the top men and women in the organisation and their families and servants, life went on as it used to a hundred years ago. There were bin collections, schools, central heating. There were computer games, radio, television. The brick wall and a thousand security measures kept ignorance, poverty, violence, cold, damp, disease and hunger well away.

  Wide electric gates opened to let the convoy through. As they drove deeper into the compound, the roar of the crowd, who had been thirty thick at the gates, died quietly away.

  Signy turned to Conor. ‘One day,’ she said, ‘the whole of London will be just like your headquarters.’

  Conor smiled at her. ‘One day,’ he lied.

  ‘We’ll make it happen. We have to. Because we love each other and they love us,’ Signy said.

  Inside the compound was the usual round of face-to-faces that the powerful have the world over. It was Signy’s chance to meet the men and women who helped Conor run his tiny kingdom. With her father these people would have been colleagues; under Conor even the most senior were servants. Yet this pleased her. It was one of the things she would have to help change.

  After the reception Conor had something to show her.

  ‘
But I just want to stop,’ Signy moaned. It had been a very long day. She only wanted to bath and rest.

  ‘No, first come and see…’ He pulled at her hand excitedly. She pulled back. He got cross and dragged hard. Signy laughed and relaxed and let him run her out across the neat tarmac and carefully weeded paving stones, off behind the houses to an area of patchy woodland and grass fields. The people in the Estate walked and ran their dogs here, and their children played safe from the desperation of hunger on the other side of the high wall. The leaves on the trees were pushing through, lit bright green from the sunshine overhead. There were windflowers in the glades and primroses at the edges of the trees. Signy was enchanted. In her part of London woodland was almost unheard of. She wanted to stop and linger and listen to the birds and dig her fingers in the earth and run under the trees, but Conor dragged her and pulled her until they burst out into a field.

  ‘Surprise!’ Conor bent over, out of breath and gestured forward.

  She stared a second and then she said, ‘Some surprise.’

  It was some sort of weird tower. It was a great round body on four tall legs, thirty odd metres above their heads. It was made of metal beams and painted panels. Rusted metal legs zigzagged up. There was a ladder going into its stomach.

  It was an old water tower. The water system in London had long ago fallen into disrepair; most people took their water from rivers and drains. But if you and your neighbours could afford to get a tower like this, you could have water on tap. This one was huge. It had once supplied water to the Estate, but it had grown old and had been replaced.

  ‘Go on…’ said Conor, pushing her. He pointed up the ladder. Signy ran to it and began to climb. Conor came up behind her.

  The tower had seemed almost short and stubby from the ground, but once you started climbing it went on forever. At last, right under it, was a trap door. She pushed it up and emerged… into a room. The space that had been used to store water in the old days had been rebuilt. It was a house inside. And it was hers. Conor had built an eyrie for his bride.