The Age of Scorpio

11. Northern Britain, a Long Time Ago

She was moving, floating to the sound of waves gently lapping against the shore. There was a bump as she hit the beach. She enjoyed the gentle movement of the sea. It was a moment of peace before her nostrils were assaulted by the charnel smells of aftermath. Her eyes flicked open. Carrion eaters wheeled in the grey, blank, nothing sky above her. She sucked in air in a long ragged gasp like the first breath of the infants she had delivered. She didn’t scream though. Britha just didn’t understand why she wasn’t dead.

The beach looked red. The sand crawled with flies that rose into the air in thick black swarms when the ravens landed to feast. The carrion that used to be her people had enticed a pack of wolves out of the forest, their maws red now.

Britha’s hand went to her chest and she traced the line of scar tissue. It was as if the wound had been received years ago. She understood that her magics were getting stronger, perhaps because of her relationship with Cliodna bringing her closer to the Otherworld and its wellspring of power, but it had been a mortal wound. She had felt the head of the spear grow through her like the sharp roots of an iron tree.

She had dreamed of Cliodna. The selkie had been strange, frightening and hateful. In the dream Cliodna had done cruel and agonising things to Britha’s body. Her eyes hurt but felt dry. She couldn’t cry. She ached but she could stand, though it seemed like the beach was trying to tilt up to meet her, nausea washing over her. She felt different somehow, hot, feverish.

The warriors and landsmen of her tribe were gone, all that was left was their empty shells making red patterns on the sand. Britha could not bury them all. She would not try. The sky would be their burial place. There was no shame in that. The ravens would carry their flesh there. The beasts of the land had nurtured them and they would do the same for the carrion eaters.

There was a low growl. The wolf pack scattered. Britha watched the bear lumber across the beach towards her, its maw already red from feasting on the dead. Normally all gave way to the king of the forest, but Britha felt nothing. That included fear. The beast got up on its hind legs but did not roar at her. It just stared. It was as if the bear didn’t think she belonged.

‘Maybe I am just a shade now,’ Britha said quietly to herself. She had failed to protect her people. This was the ban draoi’s main responsibility – to live apart from the tribe but use her knowledge, wisdom and skills to keep them safe. Britha could not imagine a more complete failure. But how do you protect against the likes of the Lochlannach? she wondered.

Among the bodies Britha only found one of their dead. She had killed him, she knew, but she had killed more than one. They must have taken the rest of the bodies with them. As well as the hungry wounds she had drawn on his flesh with sword and sickle, she saw thousands of tiny cuts on his skin.

Britha cut into his cold dead flesh with an iron knife she had found. The strands of filigree were gone. His armour and weapons had been taken as well.

She heard the voice, soft and weak, barely audible, carried to her by the breeze.

He was lying on the beach propped against some rocks. He had stained the sand red underneath him. He spoke the same words over and over: ‘I fought well, I deserve to die in battle. I fought well, I deserve to die in battle. I fought well, I deserve…’

‘Feroth?’ Britha said softly. He turned to look at her. Tears sprang to his eyes. She could not recall anyone looking happier to see her. He had been old, Britha thought, but always full of life; now he looked all but a corpse. The life had been taken from him by what he had seen. It had left him a long time before he would actually die.

‘Britha.’ Then he became more guarded. ‘Do demons ride you?’ he demanded, trying to hold in his guts with one hand and reaching for his sword with the other.

‘It’s me, Feroth,’ she said. He relaxed though more blood ran through his fingers from his exertions.

‘Too old and too wounded to take, they told me. The demons would not even grant me an iron death,’ he managed. ‘Even the wolves wait until I am too weak to fight.’

‘I will give you an iron death,’ Britha managed, her voice cracking, the tears coming now.

‘I saw them leave. The black ships, the demon ships. They grew… then they sailed against the tide and the wind…’

‘Which way?’ Britha asked.

‘All the while Cruibne’s head was screaming from that monster’s shoulder.’

He was just raving now, Britha thought, but then they had all seen things. It must be true.

‘Where did they go?’ Britha asked again.

‘West, up the Tatha.’ He was sounding weaker and weaker.

‘Hold on,’ she told him gently.

She found one of the invaders’ longspears. It had been driven deep into the sand and must have been overlooked. She grasped its wooden haft. There was screaming in her head. She felt hot and feverish again as she staggered back still holding the haft. She watched as tendrils of filigree grew, writhing from the spear’s silver-coloured metal head and crawling towards her flesh. Britha understood now: all their weapons were alive, prisons for the demons locked inside. She wrestled for control of the spear, knowing that her magics were stronger, that she was stronger. The demon in the spear shrank before her, the fever subsided and the red-gold filigree crept back into the spearhead.

Britha was relieved that Feroth was still alive when she returned with the spear. He made a weak attempt to attack her with his sword as she drove the spear through his chest, burying it in the sand beneath him. She twisted the spear and tore it out. Her eyes never left his. She watched the life leave him, ready for his next journey.

She felt nothing.

Britha woke suddenly, her face raw, sore and covered in sand where she had collapsed face first onto the bloody beach. She felt so weak. She had dreamed of Cliodna again. She had dreamed of being dead, a corpse, and Cliodna making her walk to her cave and laying her in a pool of blood. Then the selkie had danced around her and made her drink blood. Cliodna had been angry. Only the moon had lit the cave, the shadows the moonlight threw were horrible to look at.

Cliodna had looked different: her skin had seemed harder, her features more angular and predatory, her lips peeled back to accentuate her wicked rows of blade-like teeth.

Britha rolled over and sat up. She felt frail, emaciated, all skin and bones, as if she had been feeding off herself just to survive, or her magics had. She used the spear to push herself to her feet. Slowly she made her way across the corpse-dotted beach back towards Ardestie.

Nobody falls further than a proud people. Were they slaves now? she asked herself, but she knew the answer.

In the village most of the food had been taken. The stone-lined storage pits next to each house were empty. The salted and smoked meat and fish, the fresh vegetables that had been harvested for the feast, the grain, all had been taken. Britha guessed this was to feed her people on their journey. She wasn’t sure, but she thought that some of the sheep and cattle were missing.

All the horses had been killed, presumably to stop pursuit. In normal circumstance she would have mourned Dark Cloud’s death but she was already overwhelmed. This and the beach would mean fat ravens.

Still, she knew where more food was kept and she was ravenously hungry. She gorged herself on heath pea, the tuberous root of the bitter vetch plant; she fried up oatmeal with blood and water; she found the last of the meat in the smokehouse that the raiders had overlooked; she raided the salt pits for fish and more meat. She ate more than she had ever eaten in a single sitting before. No matter how much she ate she was still hungry.

She knew that it should all go to her belly, but instead she felt herself start to bulk out again, to return to the shape she had been only last night. It was wrong, unnatural – she knew this – but still she kept eating, enough for five at a feast. She was eating in a way that would have shamed her in front of the rest of the tribe as others would have had to go hungry for her gluttony, but that did not matter now. Something had changed inside her. She felt different.

Finally she was sated. She did not feel bloated or uncomfortable but more awake, healthy; her wounds had healed and the only pain she felt was a dull ache from the branches of scar tissue on her stomach. She had the same heightened awareness of the night that she had felt the night before, when she had thought it was the woad.

Britha went to her roundhouse, set a little aside from the rest to show her position in the tribe. She took the ritual tools and materials, the herbs, medicines and poisons she thought she might need, those that could be carried easily. Her hearth fire was mere embers now. She swept them carefully into a hollowed-out horseshoe fungus and blew on it, letting it burn. It would smoulder for hours and the fungus was proof against water and wind. She found an old robe and hood and put them on. Her usual robe was still back in the circle of oaks in the woods and she did not have time to fetch it now.

Britha took one last look around her home. It felt strange and foreign to her. It was nothing without the sound of her tribe outside.

She made her way tiredly towards the Hill of Deer. Even as she made her way across the fields towards the hill, she knew the broch had not kept her people safe.

The carrion eaters took to the air on black wings as Britha approached the broch. There were only a few bodies, mainly those of landswomen. Grandmothers who had died trying to protect children, Britha guessed.

The broch was sundered. Britha guessed it had been the giants. It looked like they had punched through and then torn apart the ancient moss-covered blocks of stone. She imagined what it had been like for the children inside. Stone walls ripped open, the monstrous heads pushed through to stare at them. Their fear. That was when the pain really hit her. The magnitude of her failure, the failure of Cruibne and the cateran. They were gone, all of them. Many dead, the rest taken by an enemy that they, that she, could not fight. They were probably already being ridden by demons. The tears came. Sobs racked her body. Their life, her life, children being born, the old dying, the councils, the harvests and the planting, droving, raiding, battles, feasts, laughter, tears, life – the raiders had taken all that.

‘No.’ Sharp nails dug into flesh, drawing lines of red on weather-beaten skin. ‘No!’ Louder, more forceful. Those who were dead had lived and died well; they could not have asked more from life. The memories of them could not be stolen from her even if the demons came for her flesh. This was weakness, self-pity. She still had responsibilities. Some of her people were still alive. She could fight the Lochlannach. She was the only one who could. She needed to find a way for others to do the same.

Britha stood on the shore and watched the fire arrows arc into the night air on the other side of the Tatha. In flight they were mirrored in the black glass of the river before studding the demon curraghs with points of orange and red light. It was a good plan but she knew it would not work. She watched the Fib villages all along the river’s north shore burn.

Then because she did not feel tired she turned to the west and started walking. She walked all night, tireless, no pain in her muscles or her feet despite a steady, fast pace.

She passed the black rock on the shore of the Tatha. In the distance she could see the hill fort. The height it sat on was just known simply as the hill. It would be locked up tight but only the younger children and the older landsmen and -women would be there. They were Cirig – their clan elders owed fealty to Cruibne – and all of the elders had been at the feast with their warriors and would have died on the red beach.

Beyond the hill fort were the Sidhe Hills, where the fair folk slept in their mounds and her people chose not to go. Best to leave the Otherworld alone. What if it would not leave you alone? she wondered.

In the woods just west of the black rock she met some of the older children from the fort. They had chosen to go out scouting. She told them to return to the fort and that if they saw the black ships land on this side of the river they were to flee, with everyone, carrying the old if they had to, into the north and stay away from the coast and the wider rivers. They knew her – she had delivered some of them – and would listen and do as she asked.

Watch fires on either side of the river flickered into red life, Cirig and Fib alike warning of the black ships. Still she headed west. She was sure that Bress would take his people raiding as far up the Tatha as they could get where there were still villages and settlements worth raiding. This time she wouldn’t hesitate. She would kill him and that monster, Ettin, as well.

Under the wooded grey cliff-lined hills to the west, the Tatha narrowed considerably and there was an island in the middle. Britha tied her robe around her. She had taken as much food as she could carry – oatmeal, heath pea, salted meat, anything that wouldn’t spoil quickly – and wrapped it in hide sacks. She tied the sacks and the horseshoe fungus carrying the embers of her hearth fire to the end of her spear and waded into the cold river.

She had taken off her fur leggings. Barefoot she was better able to grasp the smooth stones on the riverbed with her toes. Even so, halfway across, when the water was over her stomach, she began to feel as if she had made a mistake. The sacks of food tied to the end of her spear threatened to unbalance her. She managed to compensate and then slipped, going down on one knee. The fast-moving current nearly tore her off her feet. She fought to hold on to the spear, dipping the sacks slightly in the water but regaining her balance. Eventually she managed to stagger to her feet and take another step, knowing that if it got any deeper she would have to ditch her food and spear and swim for it. But the water got shallower.

The island was important to the Fib. It was a place of power for their dryw. It was said that the Auld Folk had come here to worship their terrible and uncaring gods. To the Cirig it had been a convenient place to cross when they went chasing Fib cattle, though they always had to ford the beasts further upstream on the way home.

From the island she watched another of the Fib’s villages burn. She was close enough to hear the screams but it was how quickly and efficiently it happened that got to her. The Fib were not as strong as the Cirig, but how quickly their resistance was dealt with shocked her. Standing on the shore of the island, she watched the Lochlannach, black figures silhouetted against the flames, herd their captives to the curraghs. The black ships were much larger than they had been when Britha had last seen them. If they came further west to make for the settlements on the Tatha further inland then Britha could try to sneak on board, either by swimming or via the branches that hung over the river.

The sun rose. The smoke from the still-burning settlements on the south bank was easier to see now. As were the black curraghs sailing east, back to the sea, their magics taking them against the wind. Britha still did not feel like sleeping. She ate too much, again, watching the huge black ships getting smaller and smaller. When she had sated herself she waded across the Tatha to the south shore and trudged south through the steep wooded hills. Avoiding the cliffs of wet grey stone when she could, losing time climbing them when she couldn’t.

Two days of walking. Britha had never been this far south in Fib lands before. She knew she could not be too far from the lands of the Goddodin. A tribe not of the Pecht, they were a weak people who bent their knees to a god of the sea. The only Goddodin that Britha had ever seen had been slaves of the Fib. If they worshipped gods this made them suitable to be slaves, in Britha’s opinion. But she knew that the Black River lay to the south – she had heard tell of it from southron traders all her life. If it was, as they said, similar in size to the Tatha, then she was sure the Lochlannach would raid along it for more captives.

Britha’s eyes flicked open. Usually a restless sleeper, she had woken from a deep, restful, dreamless sleep fully aware. The sensation that had roused her was a tug from deep inside. Instinctively she knew that something was wrong at a fundamental level with the world around her. She reached for her spear, the demon inside it long since cowed, and rolled to her feet.

She could see it through the trees. A bright, rapidly pulsing, blue and white light illuminated the thickly forested hill. It made the silhouettes of the trees look grotesque and alive. There was the sound of wind rushing through the branches. It tugged at her robes. She had been sleeping with them wrapped around her, although the night cold did not seem to bother her so much now. She realised that the air was being sucked towards the light and that her hair was standing up just like it did before a thunderstorm, but this feeling was stronger than any thunderstorm she had ever experienced.

She retreated and dropped low as she saw lightning play across the trees in the distance. Cursing herself for a coward, Britha forced herself to stand. She had never seen the like but she was sure it had something to do with the Otherworld. It was moments before dawn, and as the pulsing subsided, the forest was lit by the soft grey light of that time of the day and the occasional flash of lightning in the branches of the trees. Dawn was the time between times, the border times when it was easiest for things to cross over.

Britha cursed inventively for a long time for no other reason than to put off what she knew she had to do. As ban draoi she had to deal with the Otherworld, though she was of the opinion that Bress, Ettin and the Lochlannach were more than enough Otherworldly trouble.

‘Let’s just try not to sleep with them this time,’ she rebuked herself as she made her way towards where she’d seen the light.

It was a cairn, one of the circles of stones left by the Auld Folk. All the trees within a hundred feet of it had been blown over, their broken trunks pointing towards the circle. Lightning still arced between the stones.

It was known from stories told by mother to daughter and in the oak circles of the dryw that the Auld Folk would conduct rites and offer sacrifice in an attempt to appease or even curry favour with malevolent gods. Often the dryw of the Pecht would carve symbols of power onto the stones to counter the magic of the Auld Folk and their awful gods. Clearly this had not been done here.

The sense of power was palpable. The feeling of being on the edge of a storm was very strong but even now fading. She could feel the earth moving beneath her, vibrations that grew fainter even as the lightning flickered out. The sucking wind had long since subsided. At an instinctive level she knew that violence had been done to the very fabric of the land.

Britha walked around the stones slowly, looking for tracks, moving in a widening circle. In the soft earth beneath the trees she finally found signs. Two sets of tracks, both men by the length of stride and depth of the imprint, both carrying either spear or stave and, again judging by the depth, at least one of them armoured. One wore boots of a type she was used to seeing, though if she had been forced to guess she thought they looked more like the boots that the southron tribes wore, or even the warriors from the isle far to the west. The other man’s boots, the one who was unarmoured, were something else entirely. They had a hard sole of a type she had never seen before. She wished Talorcan were here. He had taught her how to track and hunt and would be able to get more from the tracks. She tried to ignore the tears welling in her eyes. She had to concentrate on what she was doing. Many of her tribe were still alive, though they might be little more than hosts for demons. The tracks headed south and east.

There’s no gain in courting trouble, Britha decided. She would continue south but keep away from the direction the tracks were going. Perhaps if she was lucky they were Otherworldly enemies of Lochlannach.

Britha found the first crow feeder some distance from the smoking village. The gaping wound was in his back yet he wore armour, though he had left his shield and spear behind when he had fled. The crows took flight at her approach. She took the time to spit on the coward’s corpse. She had a good mind to roll him into the Black River. He had no business being taken into the sky by the crows and the ravens. Then she remembered that these people worshipped a god of water.

‘If they are craven enough to bend a knee then this god gets what he deserves,’ she muttered, but she did not have the time to carry the coward’s corpse to the water, or any of the other corpses she saw.

Britha had seen her first glimpse of the Black River from the top of a cliff in the forested hills overlooking the mouth of the river. She’d only ever heard of the river in stories before. If anything it was larger than the Tatha. The north bank was a series of wooded hills and cliffs overlooking the river, which was studded with rocky islands, though the water did not look particularly black to her. More stone-grey under the overcast sky. She saw no demon ships either, though smoke rose from a number of places along the shore.

It had started to rain by the time she made it down to the village. It was the sort of constant drizzle that soon soaked through and made you feel very cold, though the cold still wasn’t bothering her.

The village was a series of crannogs connected by a network of bridges over the water. The crannogs were very similar to the roundhouses that Britha was used to: wattle and daub walls, conical thatched roofs held up by internal pillars lashed together with nettle rope. However, these crannogs were built on stilted platforms over the grey water.

The bridges between the houses and the land were made of strong branches cut to size and could be pulled up to isolate the buildings from the shore and each other. This defence had done little good against ships and giants. More than one of the crannogs looked like the top had been torn open, presumably by one of the giants standing in the river.

The village told the same story as her own and the others on the banks of the Tatha. They had come for the people. They had taken food as well. Those warriors who resisted were quickly killed. The tracks told of people herded onto dry land, along the pebble beach and back into the water to climb into a curragh. If she was reading the tracks correctly, then they had split their forces and only one of the curraghs had attacked this village. She guessed that the attack had taken place at least two days ago.

She looked down at one of the bodies. It was headless. The body was the largest and well fed, covered in patches of scale-like woad tattoos, and was also, judging by its hands, the oldest. Britha reckoned he had been the chief. She wondered if his head now rode on Ettin’s shoulder. She hoped that Cruibne was free from that torment at least. The headless warrior’s body wore scaled armour, a small fortune in metal, but it had been left. All the scales made him look like a fish, a true servant of their sea god. Judging by his wounds he had at least tried to fight. He had died on the smooth pebbles down by the waterside. He had charged them as soon as they came ashore.

‘Treat him well, you bastard,’ she told the river.

Britha stood on the platform that circled the furthest crannog from shore. She had had to lay the bridges back down to get there, and more than a few had been broken, presumably by the giants. She stared out across the river and out to the sea to the east, hoping to see the black curraghs but they were presumably long gone.

Sighing, she turned to look through the broken wall and roof of the crannog. The entrance faced to the east, she guessed to greet the dawn. Opposite the opening she saw an altar, carved from driftwood, the crude figure of the sea god, a scaled large-eyed man. Too Britha’s eye there was something grotesque and unsettling about the figure.

Britha cast her eyes back to the beach. The smoke had not been from the crannogs. They had left the stilt village but burned the tiny fleet of fishing curraghs and log canoes. Even if they hadn’t, if the Black River was anything like the Tatha then the tides and currents were treacherous and she would need the guidance of a local to make a crossing. She would have to head further west, deeper into the kingdom of the sea god’s people, to cross. The Lochlannach would make even more distance, but they had to be going somewhere and the land could only be so big, she thought.

Britha heard movement behind her as she looked over the seemingly calm, grey surface of the river. She loosened the grip on her spear slightly and turned around.

It was one of the Goddodin, of that she was sure. He was no spear-carrier though; he had the look of a king’s champion, the kind of massively built man that Nechtan had loved to fight because they always underestimated his speed and size. ‘They won because people feared them, not because they were good fighters,’ she remembered him telling her before he killed the last champion that Finnguinne had brought onto Cirig land.Britha wondered why the man still lived. Had he been craven? The patchwork of scars that covered his torso showed that he had not been afraid of wounds in the past, but she knew that each man and woman only had so much courage and could reach a point when all of it had been harvested. He staggered towards her, dragging his longspear and shield over the wooden bridge to the platform she stood on.

‘I did not do this,’ she said. Though he would not know her tongue. The Goddodin shared the same language of the people known as the Britons, who, like the Pecht, were made up of many different tribes. All of them were gods-slaves, to hear tell of it.

The champion was not far from seven feet tall – he towered over Britha. He wore fur leggings and trews, and his naked torso was covered in intricate blue woad scales. The top of his shaved head was likewise tattooed. Britha reckoned that his god made him ashamed to fight skyclad and that the tattoos were meant to make him look like a fish, or maybe it represented armour. The dead warriors she had seen had been similarly tattooed but not as extensively.

‘I wish to talk. They attacked my people as well. Many were taken. I am tracking them.’ The man ignored her words. He just stumbled towards her, a look of slack confusion on what little she could see of his bovine features.

‘Can you hear me? Are you hurt?’ she asked, thinking that he had taken a blow to his head that had perhaps laid him low, and the Lochlannach had left him for dead. It was a shame Ettin hadn’t taken his head, she mused; the size of it would have unbalanced him.

The man turned to face her and she saw it. His eyes were a solid metallic red, and paths of blood bulged beneath his skin as if he was in the throws of riasterthae, the fabled battle frenzy that she’d oft heard of but never seen. She looked hard at him and saw fire crawling like insects throughout his body. Britha cursed.

Then the man was holding his spear one-handed, and the powerful upwards sweep that Britha only just managed to parry with her own would have splintered the haft of any normal weapon. As it was, it sent her staggering back towards the Black River. Whatever he had been, he was one of them now.

The huge man roared as he threw his large oval shield into the air and caught it by the handgrip. He did the same with the spear, getting a better grip. Britha backed towards the river. She was running out of platform, and the shaved, rounded branches beneath her feet were slippery, preventing her from finding a steady stance. The huge man would be used to the shifting platform, however, and if he had been a good slave to his sea god then the water itself could act against her.

The Goddodin warrior stabbed out at her with the spear. She dodged it, darting to the left, exactly where he wanted her to go. His leather-covered oak shield hit her with enough force to pick her up off her feet. She landed hard on the platform, feeling the branches bend beneath her. The impact drove the wind from her but she still had the presence of mind to scrabble for her spear as she tried to remember how to breathe again. Britha rolled to the side as his next spear thrust turned the branches that had been underneath her into splinters.

Grabbing her spear, Britha staggered to her feet and threw herself through the hole in the wall of the crannog. The huge warrior stabbed at her through the wall as he moved around the building to block off her escape.

Britha ran out of the crannog and made to jump into the river but changed her mind. She did not want to feed herself to the Goddodin’s sea god. Changing direction, she made for the bridge leading to the next crannog. The warrior made lies of Nechtan’s words. He was incredibly fast. The thrust missed, but then he reversed the blow and caught Britha in the back hard enough to take her off her feet and slam her, winded and struggling for breath, again, onto the floor of the bridge.

As he advanced on her, Britha’s foot hit him in the groin with a maiden’s kick. He barely seemed to notice. From the ground she had to batter aside another savage spear thrust. She lashed out with a foot again, this time at his knee. Her foot contacted with force that surprised her. She heard the knee shatter and the man staggered back. Suddenly he looked unsteady on his feet. With a roar he reached down and grabbed her round the neck. He was too close for Britha to use her spear. Britha beat and clawed at him ineffectively. He picked her up and held her high. The fingers on his massive hand squeezed, cutting off blood and air.

Panic.

Britha reached down and pressed the ragged nails of her thumbs against his eyes. They did not feel like eyes; it was like pushing against bronze. Then she felt burning in her arm and then her hand, a sensation like something moving beneath her skin. She watched in horror as the nails on her thumbs changed shape and colour, turning into sharp black claws not unlike Cliodna’s. She pressed them into the huge man’s eyes. The nails pierced and Britha felt something wet squirt out over her thumbs. He howled like an animal and dropped her. His hands went to his eyes.

Sprawled on the bridge gasping for air, she tried to crawl away, seeking desperately for her spear. She was trying to fend off the blackness of unconsciousness that threatened to overwhelm her from lack of oxygen.

The man was staggering on his damaged knee. He steadied himself and took his hands away from the red ruin of his eyes. Britha managed to find her spear as her breath came again. She heard the bones in his knee knit together. She turned to face him, calming herself like Feroth had taught her. Even through the blood she could make out the look of feral hatred on his face.

Yanking his sword from its scabbard and screaming incoherently, he charged her. She tried to remember everything that Nechtan and Feroth before him had ever taught her about fighting. Her spear had the benefit of reach over his sword, but as soon as he was past her guard she was dead. However, she was faster than him and, she hoped, more intelligent.

Britha glanced behind herself, making sure she knew the position of the crannog and the network of platforms and bridges, and backed away rapidly. His powerful sweeping blows were designed to intimidate, sunder shields and tear open armour. If you were fast and unencumbered they were easy to avoid.

Britha struck out again and again with the spear. Slower than her he may have been, but he used his shield well. The point of her spear just made deep gouges in its leather covering.

She feinted to his leg and followed up with a lightning-fast strike to the head that surprised even herself. She opened a cut on his face.

Ducking, avoiding and parrying blows with her spear that should have shattered the haft, she kept the perfect picture of the crannog village that she had taken from the quick glance behind her in her head. Britha was trying to make her way back to dry land.

She turned and ran, leaping across a gap that she had thought too far to jump, expecting to find herself in the water. The huge warrior was in the air right behind her. She threw the spear above her head to parry his sword as he tried to open her skull in mid-air. The blow shook the spear’s haft, sending painful shock waves down her arm.

Britha landed. The warrior’s knee caught her in the back as she did, sending her flying, but she managed to stay on her feet. She spun round to parry vicious sword blow after vicious sword blow with her spear. He was herding her, controlling her movement. This time when she tried to move around the closest crannog, he blocked her. She darted to the right, stabbing out with the spear. Somehow the huge man managed to parry the thrust and hit her with the shield again. The jarring blow knocked her off her feet and slammed her into the wall of the crannog. The structure cracked behind her. Her head lolled as she struggled to remain conscious. She felt broken inside, nauseous, not sure of where she was for a moment and she had dropped her spear.

As he screamed at her, raising his sword, he sprayed her with spittle, his breath smelling of fish, ale and decay. He brought the sword down, moving the shield that was pinning her to the wall aside at the last moment. It was enough. With new-found speed she threw herself to the platform, rolled and grabbed her spear. The Goddodin’s sword cut through the roundhouse’s thatch roof and wattle and daub wall. On her feet holding the spear, she turned and used the momentum of the movement to help power the spear thrust. The massive warrior seemed momentarily confused as to where she was. He was starting to turn when Britha drove the head of the spear into his side and up into his ribcage.

She cried out as the ash haft of the spear became burning hot. Britha let go. She had felt the demon in the weapon awaken. It wanted to bury itself in flesh and bathe in blood. It wanted to drink the champion’s death and revel in it, even if he was one of theirs now.

The man staggered towards her.

‘Die!’ she screamed at him, putting every bit of her will behind the word. Too intent on the curse, she did not move quickly enough to avoid the powerful backhanded slash of his sword. It drew a line of burning blood up her torso from right to left. She stumbled back, falling hard. Already she could feel the poison on the blade coursing through her.

The light went as he towered over her, dragging her spear in his flesh. He reached down and managed to yank it out, tearing so much of his flesh it looked like his chest had caved in. Even through the pain Britha felt horror at what she saw. The end of her spear was wriggling tendrils of bloody metal. It looked alive. The warrior dropped the spear and tumbled forward like a felled tree, crashing through the platform and into the water. Despite the pain, Britha rolled onto her side to stare into the dark water. She stared for a long time. He did not surface. He has gone to feed his god, Britha thought. She felt hot and feverish. Under her skin her flesh burned.

Britha had no idea how long she had been unconscious, but she had woken to find the wound no better, although the cold night air had gone some way towards cooling her fever. She felt like there had been a war and her body had been the battlefield.

The sword wound had been deep but not deep enough to kill. It was puckered, wide, as if the flesh had torn itself open in the path of the sword. She had managed to hold it together long enough to start a fire in the hearth of the closest crannog, using the embers held in the horseshoe fungus. It too had a carving of the fish god. She did not like the way it stared at her. She wondered if it was working against her healing magics.

She had also managed to find some mead and had washed the wound out with the boiled liquid. She had passed out screaming doing this. When she came to again, she knew she did not have much time. She was already having to swat flies away from the gash. The knife she had taken from one of the dead warriors was red in the fire now. She picked it up and felt the heat coming from the blade. At that moment she feared nothing more than the red-hot blade of the knife but she knew she had to do it in one go. If she lost consciousness the flies would get into the wound, it would fester and she would die. Even after she’d cauterised the wound, she knew her chances of surviving were not great.

She tried to surprise herself. Suddenly she pressed the knife to the wound. She wondered if her screams made the sea god himself cringe far beneath the water.

There were no flies, no crow-black wings. Perhaps they felt how unnatural she had become, tainted by the Otherworld in some way she did not understand. She felt exhausted. The wound throbbed but was the manageable side of agony. She was very hungry, frail and emaciated. Looking at her body, she had lost a lot of weight again. Skin was stretched across bone.

She ate what supplies she had left. She scavenged and found more. What she ate she did not think a normal person would even be able to contain. Dimly she realised that she had not shat since before the red beach. She began to fill out again after she had consumed enough smoked fish and salted pork, lamb and beef to feed many people. She had been eating for hours.

A thought that had occurred to her on the red beach came to her again. She had tried to force the idea from her mind. It was the darkest of magics taught in the groves only when winter came, when animal innards festooned the branches of the oaks and blood watered the land.

Britha still knew almost nothing of them. Only what little Bress and Cliodna had told her. That they were slaves to a god and that they brought the madness of the moonstruck with them. It was not enough. She needed more. She needed to know where they were going. It would be more difficult if they were to sail across the sea, perhaps south to the kingdoms of the dark-skinned people the Pecht had sometimes traded with, or north back to their icy home.

She knew a way to steal knowledge but she did not wish to use it. Recovering from the wound had weakened her and these kinds of magics took their toll. They would stain her, make her less than other folk, but it was her people at stake, the people that she had sworn to protect.

Chanting to herself, hoping that her tattoos would offer enough protection to ward away the Goddodin’s sea god, she waded into the water. Every time she dived down into the dark water she feared the god of the carved effigies she had seen would find her. Eventually she found the body, her sight better underwater than she remembered. She managed to hold her breath for a long time and tie a rope around him. The huge warrior’s body was heavier than she thought, but with strength that surprised herself she dragged it onto the beach.

Naked, so that her tattoos could protect her, she had drawn with woad on her skin. The symbols would tell her body and mind what to do when she was lost in the vision. They were the magics that would steal knowledge from the dead champion. She had made do without the correct herbs to burn but she had said the words. Ancient words that allowed her to force her will on man, woman, beast, the land and the sky.

Her sickle would have been better, particularly since it had been bathed in her blood, and blood magic was the strongest of all, even more so than fire magic, but that had been lost on the red beach. The iron knife that had seared her flesh would have to do. She reached down to the champion’s body and cut the first slice of meat off. She held it to her face, steeled herself and opened her mouth. She had eaten raw meat before but it was all she could do not to vomit. She swallowed, stealing some of his power, looking for his knowledge, looking for what the demon inside him knew.

It was like swallowing fire. The fit hit her in a burning wave as she threw herself into violent contortions on the ground, screaming.