Bloodtide

by Melvin Burgess

  ‘Different, other. Good pig. I…’

  ‘Oh, Cherry! Cherry… Cherry?’

  But as she watched, the girl began to flicker, the fur on her face, off her face, on her, off her. As Cherry fell asleep, she changed back to her own true shape.

  ‘Cherry! Please…!’

  There was a tortoiseshell cat on her lap, fast asleep. Signy turned to look out of the window. Two dead! But one alive. And it was Siggy. That was something. Cherry had done well, but what was happening to Siggy now? He was in the hands of the halfmen. There was no guarantee she would ever see him again.

  For a long time Signy sat there with her hand resting on Cherry’s head. She watched the sun sink behind the roofs and wondered… what for? Her father was dead, all the dreams and ambitions of her family were extinguished. She was a cripple, chained to the wall. She thought of the day after her wedding, in the Galaxy Tower, when the dead man had come to life. He had given her brother a knife that was the wonder of the world.

  Had Odin picked her and Siggy just for this? Or was this a part of things yet to finish?

  Neither cat nor girl moved for maybe half an hour. The future had been frozen inside her for days now, but at last she allowed hope. It was the hope that she would be granted the chance to take her revenge.

  Signy turned her head to look at the tray of food left in front of her. Strawberries. She picked one up, sniffed it, and took a small bite from the side of it. A slow, sweet explosion filled her mouth as she crushed the ripe berry in her teeth. The flavour crept into every crevice of it, in her cheeks, under her tongue, even between her teeth. Signy was amazed. She looked at the strawberry. It was a perfect, deep, deep red, the soft little seeds sunk slightly in the plump flesh. There was the pale wet crescent of her small bite into it. She had eaten nothing for four days and she was astonished at how wonderful food could taste.

  Slowly, relishing every mouthful, Signy began to eat the rest of the berry. Then she started on the next one. She ate them all except one – the most perfect, which she left lying in the little blue bowl because she wanted to be able to look at it.

  Out of the window before her stretched London. A million lives were going on under the wet, shining roofs, every one of them an empire. She saw the sycamore tree at the edge of the Estate just turning yellow at the edges, the other trees, bright green, the reddish browns of the brick and stone. Colour seemed to be seeping into the world around her.

  She was going to live after all. She was going to live and she was going to wait. As long as she was alive, there was a chance she would be able to take her revenge.

  36

  As the sun went down on the halfman lands, the undergrowth began to shake and quiver and scratches and snufflings came from underground hideaways and burrows. By day the great monsters of no-one’s land stamped and roared their way about – the Pig, the Birds, Amanda the snake woman, the Badger. But at night the smaller, weaker, older beasties snuffed the air and came out to scavenge for food.

  In the middle of a long row of rubble, a door opened in one of the few remaining walls. A great heavy jaw, all bone and very little meat, peered out. Then, a snub, fat nose and a pair of wide, amber eyes with a slit instead of a circle in the middle of them – perfectly out of place in this pig’s face. Twilight, and Melanie was coming out to see what the day had left behind for her to find.

  The more successful halfmen lived further out, away from the Wall, where it was possible to build some sort of a life without interference from Conor. There they built their towns and villages and traded with other towns and villages further out. These days, as the power of Ragnor decreased and turned inward, the halfmen were able to move freely further around the country, as far as Birmingham to the north and right up to the coast and beyond in places in the south. All that was about to change. Conor had been carrying his raids deeper into the halfman lands in recent years. Now, with Val out of the way and all of London at his disposal, he planned to reopen the halfman wars in full.

  But that was to come. For now, the halfmen lived their lives as they had done for decades. As with the people in London, the closer to the Wall the poorer the people, and right up in no-one’s land lived the real dregs of halfman society. These were the ones the halfmen themselves didn’t care to live with, banished to the very edges of everything – the monsters, the mad, those whose crazy genetic mix was tearing them in half even as they breathed. But Melanie was not one of those. She had other reasons for living so close to mankind. It was loyalty that kept her there.

  Pig, woman, a dash of cat – that was Melanie. She was the poorest of the poor, as filthy as a dog, as thieving as a magpie, as curious as a rat, as secretive as a beetle, as kind as a mother, as clever as you like. She had been wife to the Pig himself once, before he took to beating her. In the end he went mad altogether, not an uncommon thing among those halfmen who weren’t all that well put together. Melanie followed him from the slums where they lived, right into the darkest part of no-one’s land. Even though she no longer lived with him, she felt it was her duty to keep an eye on him and make sure he didn’t get himself hurt.

  Mostly she got blows for her trouble. Over the years the Pig had grown so powerful that there was nothing she could do to stop him. But she remained there, living nearby, helping him when he was sick and trying to stop him from doing too much harm. She was neither strong nor dangerous, but the monsters of no-one’s land left her alone, by and large, perhaps because they feared the Pig, perhaps because she was known as something of a witch. She could heal and help, and just perhaps – the halfmen monsters were known to be superstitious – she knew how to curse as well.

  Of course, everyone for miles around had known that the Volson brothers had been left out for the Pig. Further out among the halfman leaders, there were those who had wished for a very long time to make peace with the humans, with the Volsons in particular. Wasn’t Conor the common enemy of them both? The ancient human hatred and prejudice against the halfmen was too much for Val to overcome, and he had tried to make peace with Conor instead. Even so, these halfmen might have tried to rescue his sons, but what was the point? On the other side of the Wall, Conor was carefully and systematically destroying all that had been Val’s – the buildings, the people, the administration, everything. The executions were already running into the tens of thousands. Conor was thorough; the halfmen knew that well enough. There was very little to be gained from rescuing the Volsons now. So the brothers were left to their fate. They had nothing left to give.

  The monsters of no-one’s land knew very little about the politics of it, but they knew well enough that food had been pegged out for them. They found out soon enough when one of them escaped. The Pig made so much fuss about it, you could hardly avoid the fact. The talk was that Siggy Volson had been helped by one who was both halfman and whole-man, a shape-changer. Despite all their technology, the technicians of Ragnor couldn’t change a shape once they’d made it. Obviously, the gods were involved.

  That might have put a lot of the halfmen off, but not the people of no-one’s land. They were hungry. Dinner was in short supply out here. Siggy was about the best thing on the menu that night.

  Melanie sniffed the night air to see who was out and about. She cursed and grunted to herself and disappeared inside once more. She came out again, heaving at an old supermarket trolley she used to collect her finds in, and tip-toed into the night.

  Each night Melanie went off on her rounds scavenging. She had cat’s eyes and she preferred to work in the dark. Usually she went to the halfman slums that clustered around the tumbledown suburbs in between no-one’s land and the rest of the territory. At all hours she could be found, rummaging through the tips and rubbish heaps and middens for scraps that she could eat, sell or make something out of.

  Occasionally, if she had something worth selling, she would cross under the Wall and make contact with friends and acquaintances on the other side, but it was rarely worth rummaging inside. The rich areas were
no-go for anyone with a trace of halfman in them, and in the human slums of London folk were even poorer than they were in the halfman slums.

  It was hard work pushing the trolley around through no-one’s land where the ground was so torn up, but it would be worth it if she could find the human. If he was too badly injured, he’d make a decent dinner. If he could be nursed back to health there was the possibility of selling him back to what remained of the Volson army. Failing that, there was a good market for human slaves among the better-off halfmen. A Volson slave would make a good talking point for some fat merchant who wanted to show off.

  Despite her night vision and excellent sense of smell, it was a long shot that Melanie would get to him first. Siggy could have crawled off anywhere, and any one of half a dozen hungry beasts could have found him. But her luck – and his – held that night. Melanie caught the whiff of blood within an hour.

  Her nose led her to him, lying in the open, collapsed over a heap of rubble not far from where he had been welded up.

  At first sight it looked as though he wasn’t worth bothering with, he was so broken. The odds were certainly against his surviving. Melanie prodded him with her trotter and pushed him over with her paw. His mouth gaped open, a broken mess of tooth stubs, swelling and bloody. A thin column of steam rose above it.

  The old woman grumbled under her breath, it really was barely worth it. But… Oh, well. She heaved a length of damp old carpet out of the trolley, laid it on the ground and lifted Siggy up in her arms carefully. She jiggled him gently to see how broken his limbs were before she put him down on the carpet and rolled him up in it. She tucked in the corners to make sure no part of the body was showing, picked up the whole bundle and put him in the trolley. Then she set off back home.

  Sure enough, just as she had expected, the old Pig heard her trundling about on the way and came rushing and screaming through the undergrowth towards her. Melanie cast an anxious glance at the carpet; the noise was enough to wake the dead, let alone the badly injured. The poor boy would certainly start screaming if he knew who was near. But the carpet remained still.

  The Pig came screeching up to her and stopped suddenly when he saw who it was. He began pawing at the ground and scratching his beard, all the time casting interested glances at the carpet. His nose, Melanie noticed, was half bitten off. It made her wince to look at it.

  ‘Pig! Pig! Melanie!’ said Melanie, just in case he’d forgotten. Then she dropped to all fours. The two of them walked around in little circles, noses to bums, sniffing at each other politely.

  The Pig grunted. ‘Wotcha got? Wotcha got?’

  ‘Bit a old carpet.’

  ‘Smell good. Good.’

  ‘Leave off.’

  ‘Lost me dinna. Gone.’

  ‘Don eat carpet. Eh?’

  ‘OINK!’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘OINK!’ The Pig was edging his way towards the trolley, and Melanie had to squeeze in, between him and it.

  ‘Poor nose,’ she said, trying to change the subject. ‘Poor nose!’

  ‘Poor nose!’ agreed the Pig tearfully. ‘Man did it,’ he added. ‘Biter!’ But he was still peering round at the carpet. He began to glare at her. ‘Mmmm,’ he growled greedily.

  ‘Mine!’ squealed Melanie. ‘Always stealin. Always pinchin. My carpet!’

  ‘Mmm. Smell good, good,’ explained the Pig. ‘Wotcha got in there?’

  Melanie didn’t bother answering. She got back on her hind legs and took hold of the trolley handle. The Pig stood up as well and stood there glaring at her, all wobbly. He wasn’t very good at this standing up business and only did it to impress. Melanie pushed forwards, bumping the trolley over the broken tarmac. The Pig watched her go, squealing angrily under his breath. But he didn’t try to stop her.

  It took her an hour to wheel him home, and she was exhausted by the end of it. It felt like a hundred years since she’d had a decent meal. She put a funnel in the human’s mouth and poured a little water down him, wrapped him up in dry rags and went to bed. In the morning when she got up, she was surprised to find him still alive.

  For the first few days she fed him on bitter teas made from healing herbs with a little precious honey stirred into it. She bathed his wounds, made poultices to bring the swelling down and treated his fever. At first, the poor boy was delirious, raving on about all sorts of people she’d never heard about. It was touch and go, but after a week the fever eased and he began to wake up for brief periods. Of course, his wounds could still go septic at any time and that would be that. But the odds were moving in his favour.

  There were huge problems to be solved, however, before he was saleable. His face and his hands had been wrecked. She had to reset both, especially the hands. Melanie knew her politics; she kept in touch with people further in who knew what was going on and she had by this time heard how great the rout of Val’s troops had been, how complete the subjugation of his lands. No one on the other side of the Wall would be willing now to pay for Siggy’s return. There were unlikely to be any of them left. His only value would be as a slave to a rich halfman, but the one thing a slave needed was a decent pair of hands. They would have to be fixed or Siggy would be worth nothing but his weight in meat, and after four days starving on the girder watching his brothers eaten, and a week in fever, that wasn’t much.

  37

  siggy

  There was a darkness so thick I could feel it. It was like silt coating my skin. It was as moist and as warm as blood and it stank of piss and pigs. When I opened my mouth it seemed to fall in. My face had grown enormous. It seemed to fill up the darkness. But mostly there was pain. Every bone and muscle and every fleck of skin, every corpuscle of blood was pain. I tried to work my vast mouth but it hurt so much. I heard someone screaming… it must have been me. Then I fainted.

  There was someone else there with me. I could feel the heat of them on my skin in the darkness. The darkness had changed to a dull red. I tried to see into it but nothing had any shape. I tried to open my eyes wider but they were so fat. Everything about my face was so fat. I realised I was seeing light through my closed eyes.

  There was something very big moving in the darkness next to me.

  I made a huge effort and lifted my eyes open by the slightest slit and I saw that the Pig had come back. I screamed and tried to crawl away but he had me by the face. He held my face in his fingers hard and began squeezing and squashing my crushed face. And I died for about the nth time that day.

  38

  melanie

  Well, I done is oinky face n tied it all, and I done is hands, wot fingers e ad left, n I thought, not bad, as you could make out with all that swellin. Groink. Oh, you poor liddle thing, I coulda eated im up right there. Worra mess, all cept fer is liddle toes, all neat in a row like babies they was. Made I thinka my liddle piggies, wot Big Piggy drove off all them years past.

  Mind, this oinky-uman, he ain’t gonna be worth a penny fer is looks. But even ugly folk gotta eat, innit?

  ‘Little Tammy told a joke

  When e was building bridges,

  He laughed so much he fell and tore

  His brand new moleskin britches.’

  Tell ou oinky-wot, though. I’m feelin sorry for im already. My big eart, wot use is it out ere, it’s a curse a me life. Groink!

  I couldn elp it, I popped im onta me lap and rocked im like a baby. An guess wot, typical uman – e starts screamin! Ahhhhhhhhhhh, aahhhhhhhh, e goes. Think I be ol Piggy, I reckons, but e were so elpless lying there, I couldn elp lovin im.

  ‘Where am I?’ e goes.

  ‘Oh, liddle man,’ I says, an I sighs. Why’s I gotta go feel asorry fer anything live I gets? It don’t make no sense.

  ‘Who… are… you?’ e goes, or summat like.

  ‘Arr, you be quiet, groink. Get yerself some kip, my dear. Melanie’ll make it all right, you’m see.’

  ‘Melanie,’ e goes. ‘Pig. Melanie Pig.’

  Arr, innit sweet? Don it need m
y elp? Well, e’ll ave ta get better now, I don think I got the eart to eat im, now e’s tryin to talk. So I lit a candle fer im, so e can peep out if e wants, and I sang im one a they uman lullabies t’make it feel at ome…

  ‘Liddle man, ou’ve ad a busy day…’

  An would yer b’live it, when I got them bandages off im, it worked? When I saw wot they was like, I thought I’d oinky-ave t’do it all agin, but no. Jaw an ands, eatin and oldin. E ain’t got many teeth but he eats enuff. Don’t get fat though. Groink. Jesus! Ugly, though! Face like a dog’s arse, e’s got.

  ‘Peter said, “My dear I’ll pass,

  This one’s face is like my arse.”’

  An is ands, oinky-oinky! E’s got ands like a bowl o bones. Knows how to grab old of is dinna, though. And now ere e is, alive-o. An I think – what next?

  Well, I don’t know what t’oinky-do. E’s not gonna last long round ere! I only got two rooms, see, n e takes up the ole ofa my cellar, lying there eating n eating. Where’m I getting grub enuff fer im? S’all I can do t’feed mesel an ave a bit left over fer poor ol mad Piggy. An then, course, you can’t stop is whiff getting out through the door o’nights, oink-oink, when the heat-stench down there rises up. Say this – they stinks, umans. Uman ordure, the worst of the lot. Makes I gag, makes I hold my nose when I cleans him out. Keep a uman up in the bright air, I oinky-oughta, but a course Piggy gets a whiff. Groink. Snakey gets a whiff. I had Badger George sniffing round my ouse t’other day.

  E goes, ‘Smells a makin my turn go pop, Mels!’ – all grinning and staring at the door like it’s is larder.

  N I goes, ‘You get your snout oinky-outta my parlour, or I’ll tell on yer, I’ll tell Piggy I will!’

  N e goes, ‘No need, Mels, no need…’ all backing off like e don want no fuss. ‘Bit fer Piggy, is it, then, eh?’ e goes. N I goes, ‘Yers, you keeps yer oinky-nose oinky-outta my parlour!’ But e’ll be down ere one time, when I’s out. An Piggy will. Look, look what e did t’my door, t’other day – almost ate the frame off. When I got back t’whole thing was arf chewed up. I goes, ‘What you up to, Piggy?’