Bloodtide

by Melvin Burgess

  Me an’ Sigs stuck into the maps and he did what a good general would do – looked glum when he saw the extent of Conor’s conquests and then cheered up when it became clear he’d overstretched himself. Ah, ah, I could tell! His face? That meant nothing. I’m a sodding dog! I can’t read faces like you monkeys. But we have our ways. Moods stink! Yeah, yeah, I liked him. He smelled good.

  He was a practical type, y’know. No visions, none of that stuff you heard about his father – uniting the nation, that fizz. Siggy, he just didn’t like suffering and Conor was a bit of filth he needed to scrape off, that was all. An’ that’s good, y’know because…

  Well, listen, there’s only room for one top dog! Me! Oh, I want unity. The country, the species – everything. Under me. Yeah! Yeah! I don’ wanna be just top dog. I wanna be top pig, top man too. So – no vision, maybe he won’t wanna fight me for it. Yeah?

  Maybe. Maybe not. I never knew no general didn’t want to hold the power.

  I took him round and showed him the divisions. Everyone wanted to see him. Volson, the name means something. He was the same as the rest of his kind, hair standing on end and trying to show he was cool. But they don’t know, see? They stink! Yeah, yeah, you get every whiff of fear. I was grinning and laughing and laughing and grinning until he asked me why and I told him. He laughed at hisself! I like that.

  Well, people, they expect to see spider-cats and bird-dogs and bee-horse-men and babies that fly and get in your hair, but all that fancy stuff died out a long time ago. Nah, nah, nah! Not fertile – types are too different. There’s dogs and there’s pigs, stuff the rest. Horses? Taste good! Cats? Yeah, well, never trust a fucking cat, pal! Never. Nah, nah! Birds? Stooooopid! Yeah!

  People? Dangerous! Ah. Oh, yeah.

  So, later, Sigs got to speak to the human troops. Yeah, well, now that was something. Listen, it’s part of the job, know what I mean? You gotta make them think you know everything, man. You gotta make ’em think you’re really one of them. Oh, boy, he had them in his damn hand. He knew how humans work, and listen, when it comes to species, there’s dogs, there’s pigs and there’s people, and it’s the people you got to watch! Yeah!

  And it wasn’t just the monkeys –’scuse me, no offence, nickname for mankind, y’know; stoooopid monkeys. Everyone pricked up their ears when Sigs spoke. His voice ringing over the fields. His flame lighting them up. At the end of it they cheered themselves hoarse. He more or less promised them victory and they were stoopid enough to believe it!

  I said, ‘Some speech, got ’em going, dincha?’

  And he said, ‘You need to. Morale.’ Yeah, as if it was just another practical thing, y’know? You gotta be inspiring or you don’t win.

  And then right at the end of the day I showed him the glass wombs.

  Monkeys and their faces. You’re a dog, you lose your ear, you break your tail, you get your chops ripped up – who cares? The bitches? Hah! If it’s a bitch, do the dogs care? Nah, nah! See, you’re a dog, it’s smells that count. You lose your smell you’ve had it, but who loses their smell? That, you keep till the end – you can get every bone in your body broke and you still smell! But people! Get a scar on your cheek and it’s sex-death, the way they go on. I remember this kid, one of yours – brave boy, fought like a dog. Got his face smeared off with hot oil and he was weeping and you know what? Sod the pain, it was his looks bothered him!

  ‘My face, how’d I look, how’d I look?’ he kept going. I reckon he’d rather have his tackle chopped off than lose his face. So right away when I saw Sigs I thought of the wombs. Y’know? The tanks.

  These days, we like to go at the breeding the ol’-fashioned way, but if you want something a bit more specific – bit more special, y’know? – then you gotta use a tank. They say maybe the gods was born outta tanks. Yeah, some technician did a few tricks. I mean, you get a priest of Odin knows how to operate a womb, what happens? Nah, but I don’ go along with it. Ragnor never made the gods, but maybe the gods made Ragnor.

  We use them sometimes to make cray-zee soldiers. Something with steel teeth or claws. Made a few man-bombs. Yeah, they creep into the enemy camp and then go BANG! Course, you don’ tell ’em that. Ah, you can do anything with a womb – just depends how long it lives afterwards. You can get a pup, put a few toenail clippings from a man, a leg of a spider, a few shavings of stainless steel, type in the right notes – it takes a technician to do that, but we got them too – and away you go. The tank takes out DNA from the clippings and the leg, organises the steel and yeah! You got you a dog with steel teeth and hands that shits webbing! Yow!

  But it’s a dodgy business. They don’t live long. And they don’t like it much, either. It’s kinda, ‘Whatcha give me this crap tail for? What for the shit teeth?’ Or it’s, ‘You ain’t getting me to do that, I ain’t no machine!’ So we mostly use the tanks like a hospital, you know? A tank’ll take your DNA and fix you up. That kid with the melted face. We put him in, a week later out he comes pretty as ever. Yeah! Did the girls love that kid!

  So I thought at once of Sigs…

  You shoulda smelt him! It’s a sight, the womb shed. The technicians wandering about checking up on stuff and making notes. The tank-things, bloated and pruney and necks puffing up and down…

  ‘How about it, comrade? Ah, ah – new face? Old face back? Yeah, why not?’

  He thought a while. That heap of gristle at the front of his neck. Even I wouldn’t want that.

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘There’s a war on. I’ll get my good looks back when the peace comes. This is a face for war.’

  He was focused, man! I just yelped I was so fucking happy ’bout that! A face for war! Yeah! Oh yeah! Me and Sigs, me and Sigs – we work well together!

  28

  Time passes, children grow, hearts harden. London was at last opened up to the rest of the world, if you could cross the battle zones to get in or out. In these days of war, it was crumbling faster than ever. One January night a hurricane ripped across the city, flinging tiles through the air, clawing down the crumbling brickwork, tearing the panels from tall offices. It blew out a thousand windows from the old Galaxy Building. You could see the dust of a century blowing through the other side as dawn rose over the wrecked city. Conor, fearing it unsafe, had explosives put in the sides of the great building and had it levelled to the ground. In the mass of rubble and twisted steel, the lift shaft lay, a great cylinder unscratched by hurricanes, explosives or time itself. The only damage was a narrow slot right at the bottom, where a dead man once struck with a stone knife.

  Once Conor had let Signy out of the water tower, his fortunes began to change. Now, with Siggy in the fight and Signy doing all she could to help the enemy, it became his fate to watch everything he had achieved crumble under his touch. At first he raged and fought harder. There were purges, massacre after massacre of his closest and most powerful generals. Who else but they could know enough to give away his careful plans? In the early days he had still suspected Signy, had her watched and monitored and checked and double checked, but everyone agreed: there was no way she could get the information out. It was simply impossible. And at night didn’t she hold his head and comfort him when another battle was lost? Didn’t she weep with him as city after city fell from his grasp? As the months lengthened into years, he came to trust her even to the point of letting her help him lay plans of war. General after general was hung by his heels, but Signy’s loyalty and love was unquestioned. His plans continued to fall waste. In the end Conor himself began to believe the whispers that were abroad on the streets of London about him, that Odin was against him.

  ‘Not forever…’

  The years passed… one, two, and still the fortunes of war went against him.

  ‘Not forever.’ He would whisper that to himself as he watched another front collapse, another battle lost. The fortunes of war continued against him – but not forever. Deep under the ground in the very bottom of the great network of bunkers he was building in the rock und
er the Estate, he still had Odin’s knife in his keeping. How could the god be against him when he held his gift?

  Other treasures he kept deep in the secret bunker: his only child, Vincent, the future king, now seven years old. Conor wished and prayed for more children, but they never came, not from Signy at least. The boy grew up alone with his nurses; his mother and father were strangers to him.

  And of course Conor kept his queen safe down in the bunkers. Few ever saw her apart from him, not the generals who followed her plans, not the gangmen who lived and died by her word, not her own son. Certainly not her allies, Dag and Siggy, even though they depended on her so much in fighting the war.

  Conor did not have to force her underground. Gladly, she retreated down into the earth and there she remained like a termite, playing the war on both sides to her own tune. Here, all information came through to her – who, where, when, what, how. She was the one who decided where the battles would be fought, who would win and who would lose. Sometimes for the sake of appearances or even just whim, she let Conor win – a birthday present perhaps, a Christmas treat. She was the real seat of power, building her network both for and against him, laying plans of conquest for him only to betray them to his enemies. Conor suspected nothing. He never saw the little brown bird that flew up the ventilation shafts and into the open sky and back and forth and to and fro about the endless business of Signy’s ambition.

  Siggy, making war with increasing ferocity, began as Dag predicted, to lose his humility and carelessness for power. Why else fight so hard and see so much suffering, if not to take power himself? Hadn’t Odin touched him? Hadn’t he given him the knife? Before him he felt the knife all the time, calling him, waiting for him. Sometimes he was scared that Styr lusted after it, but he forgot that Odin had embraced Signy too, on that day long ago in the Galaxy Building.

  Very often in the quiet empty periods in between the battles, Siggy wondered to himself what all this meant, where it came from. Was it after all some plot out of Ragnor that was now spinning out of control? Ragnor was being dragged into the war these days. Conor had once reached out so far as to send raiding parties into the golden city at the height of his power. Now, in decline, he heard stories of the halfmen making demands there: more money, more weapons. The demands these days had the power of threat. The human-halfman alliance was now becoming the power he had hoped for himself.

  Or was this strange history truly the work of the gods? And if so, was it simply the unfolding of things that had to be, the world moving on like a perfect machine into eternity, unfolding these events in the way a keyboard makes a letter? Perhaps the gods were simply a part of the machine of the world, perhaps they watched and took part just as people did. Or was the world dancing to their tune? And could one stop that tune, or change it, despite their wishes?

  Siggy did not know it, but someone else was asking herself very much the same question.

  29

  signy

  ‘Tell me a story, Cherry.’

  She sits on her chair, leaning forward to peer at me. She’s an old woman now, her face creased with a network of fine lines, her eyes as black as holes. Holes through to a future where I am not welcome.

  She purses her lips. ‘There was once a woman who gave everything for the sake of revenge…’

  ‘Yes! But tell me what I don’t know…’

  ‘… she gave everything to avenge her family.’ She leans forward. ‘Everything,’ she repeats.

  ‘No, no, Cherry, not that one! Tell me something else.’

  ‘… she had the fortunes of war at her fingertips. She forced the king to murder his best people…’

  ‘No! Not the past – the future. You know what I want.’ Cherry looks at me and frowns. ‘That’s the story. I don’t make it, I just tell it,’ she scolds.

  ‘Tell me the end. Tell me the very end,’ I say.

  She pouts like a sulky girl. ‘I don’t know the end. The gods don’t show me the end,’ she says.

  I smile to myself. ‘That’s just what I tell Conor.’

  Cherry leans forward in her chair and tries to weave me into this web that I’ve been a part of for so long.

  ‘Here is one who never forgets. Here is one who lived a life of love in order to destroy it. Here is one who followed the hard stone of her heart, right back into the flames of destruction.’ She settles back and watches me closely to see if I’m listening. I stare quietly back.

  ‘When she let Siggy into the bunkers, the end was very near. Conor, still unable to recognise that the traitor lay in his own bed, raved and shouted at his generals to save him, but not one of them could guess where the real danger lay. Only when he was about to die did Conor realise that it was his heart’s love who had destroyed him.’

  Yes, yes, Cherry, I’ve seen it too, in dreams sent to me. But… ‘What happens to me?’

  She shakes her head angrily. Is she cross because she doesn’t know enough? Or is it because… is it because I’ve started to want too much?

  She tells her stories. There is Siggy the King… King Sigmund. The nation united just as my father dreamed it. But where am I in all this? Why should it be him? This is my war.

  Where am I under this new regime?

  She looks away and won’t answer. Am I supposed to die with my husband as if I’m some part of his body?

  ‘Listen, Cherry. I have a story to tell too. There was one who would not be a part of someone else’s story. Cherry… Cherry? Look at me, Cherry!’

  Cherry looks at me with hard, deep, angry eyes. She hates all this.

  ‘I want you to tell it my way!’

  She shakes her head. ‘No. You have to do…’

  ‘What I’m told?’

  ‘As it is. There’s no other way.’

  She sits in her chair staring at the fire and won’t answer any further questions. ‘There’s no other way,’ she repeats.

  ‘Is it the flames for me?’ I ask her. ‘Is that what’s in store for me? Won’t you lift a finger to save me from that?’

  But there’s no answer. To that question there never is.

  30

  Three years after Siggy joined the alliance, thirteen after the massacre of Val Volson and his people, Dag Aggerman was killed in an attack from within his own camp. The common view was that Conor had brewed halfmen of his own and used them to infiltrate the dogmen’s bodyguard, but others claimed it was an internal coup; they said that Siggy had arranged for the halfman leader to be killed while the war was still on, to make a clear way for himself to the throne when the fighting was over. Certainly, Styr was there in camp that day and Styr and Siggy were like fingers on the same hand. Certainly, Styr survived the massacre that took place – the only one out of over fifty from both sides. Of course, Styr was a machine of war that has not been equalled before or since, but even so…

  Dag’s assassination was followed by a lull in the allied progress while a ferocious struggle for succession took place. Another dogman, Jack Tebbs, emerged after six months of fighting as the new leader of the halfmen, but the real winner was Siggy. He was the allied commander, and it was understood by all that he would rule London and the lands around it when Conor was finally vanquished.

  With his power consolidated, Siggy rejoined the war with terrible ferocity. Conor watched the towns under his control licked up like crumbs by the allied armies. Bournemouth and Portsmouth had long gone; Winchester, Salisbury and Brack-nell had fallen. Now he saw his enemies advancing on Guild-ford. In the north, he had once laid siege to Birmingham, but now a confederation of allied and city troops, under the command of Siggy himself, chased the tyrant south from field to field, from town to village. All around the little empire shrank. Desperately, Conor tried to find allies abroad, but no one was interested in the local wars of an obscure little island. Defeat heaped upon defeat. The direction of the war was obvious now, even to the blindest of his followers. It was just a question of working it out. As the circle shrank, Conor gave wild and contradict
ory orders. Some towns were burnt to the ground. In other cases he ordered his men to loot them of all their treasures, what was left after the period of occupation. He developed a taste for great monuments, and as the enemy shells whistled overhead, his troops were engaged in dismantling whole buildings stone by stone and packing them in numbered crates to be re-erected within the London Wall. Churches, cathedrals, the ancient office headquarters of multinational corporations, all were taken down piece by piece and boxed by numbers. The Great Hall at Winchester was burned to the ground. Stonehenge was removed and reerected on Hackney Marsh. When a pincer movement closed in around Oxford, the allied troops found Christ Church dismantled on a railway siding, each stone carefully numbered. But no one ever found the plans to put it back together again.

  Other treasures were successfully whisked away – statuary, jewellery, old cars, trains, aeroplanes – relics of the age of science stolen from museums and stately homes. Paintings, pieces of electronic equipment, books, records, documents – anything of value or importance. Many of these thefts were displayed around London in a belated attempt by Conor to placate his desperate population at home. But there was rarely enough time to rebuild properly. Londoners looked with bewilderment on half-built churches, odd battlements from ancient castles, or sheets of glass and steel or polymers from fancy office blocks. For a short while it may even have helped Conor’s popularity. Londoners were infamous for their sense of superiority, and it was a soft touch to play up to it. But soon they were to be desperate not for status, but for food.

  The war in London was entering its final phase.

  Now that he could see the end in sight, Conor began to use every means at his disposal to turn the tide. Chemical, gas, radioactive and bacteriological weapons, hoarded from long ago, were released. Overnight the winds filled with poisons that could reduce lungs to blisters, viruses that could turn your liver inside out. The plagues went on for months, carrying off thousands of lives on both sides. But there lay the trouble; such terrors could not be contained. They attacked everyone, and Conor could afford the losses less than Siggy. Terrible though these weapons were they could do nothing to change the outcome, only delay it. Antidotes were found; Conor’s supplies dwindled and could not be replaced. After an apocalyptic year of destruction, the winds blew clean and the war continued back on its relentless path.