And you know what that did? It really turned me on. He always made me feel horny, ever since the first time I met him. Suddenly all I wanted to do was grab him and drag him upstairs. In fact I’d have been perfectly happy to shag him on the carpet there and then if I wasn’t scared the servants might walk in. I might have done it too, but the poor boy had just had a nervous breakdown. That would be taking advantage. I didn’t want to make him do anything he might regret.
We had a cup of tea. We had to go to the kitchen together because he wouldn’t be on his own. I made it, he sat at the table and followed me round the room with his eyes. You know? Rrrow. Okay, it was partly because he wanted someone to be there, but all the time it was getting more and more like—Yum! I was suspicious at first. All that weeping and now this. What was going on with him? Another two minutes and he might hate me.
I started to ask him questions, just to get his mind off things. You know, nice day yesterday, did you have a good journey? How’s Slipper? When’s Mum back, anything like that. He just sat there watching me, and smiling while I talked. It kept making me laugh, and he laughed too. And all the time there was another raft of questions I wanted to ask. Like, What about Hogni, what was that about? He said you had someone hidden away already, what about them? And, How come it’s taken you this long to get round to it? I’ve been practically throwing myself at you. . . .
I sat down to drink my tea with him, and he kept on looking at me until I just couldn’t bear it anymore.
“Can I help you?” I said. I felt like I was a waitress with a trolley full of cakes.
“I feel like . . . I just want to . . . it’s like I’ve never seen you before. You really are gorgeous, you know?”
That made me flustered but I tried not to show it. “The important thing is you’re feeling better now. We just have to make sure you’d don’t get into a state like that again. Let’s talk about that. You need a rest. A break of some sort . . .”
He looked at me. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe. But I know what I’d like to do.”
And I said, “What?” in a surprised voice, even though I knew the answer. My heart was going like a drum.
“You,” he said.
So I had to say, “Well, you can’t have me. Sorry.” Which wasn’t easy! I mean! “You’ve just had some sort of breakdown, Sigurd.”
“Yeah, I know. But shall we?”
I said, “No!” in an affronted voice and he nodded. I got up and dithered about, washing up the teapot. I was so disappointed I was being so sensible. Yes, I know—it was stupid, we’d probably get undressed and he’d change his mind and we’d both be appallingly embarrassed. But still. I wanted to do him so badly. I made another cup of tea and I got as far as pouring it out, when I just couldn’t do it anymore. I took him by the hand and said, “Come on.”
“What are we doing?”
“We’re going to have a shag,” I said. “I can’t think of anything else. Then we can worry about what happens next.”
“Oh. Righto,” he said. So we ran upstairs laughing like a pair of kids and went to my bedroom and that’s what we did. I kept telling him how stupid we were being and how selfish I was for taking advantage of him, and then we did it again. Then we went to the kitchen and stocked up on snacks, and then we locked the door again and we had the best sex I’ve ever had in my life. Over and over and over again. In between, we told each other everything—everything we could think of about each other, and what it was going to be like from now on, and what was going to happen and how it was going to happen. Stupid! I asked about the other one—we’d all assumed he had a girl somewhere, he’d told Hogni as much, but he said no, it wasn’t true, he’d just said that to get Hogni off his back—so to speak! No—it was me he wanted. It was as simple as that.
I kept drifting off and thinking, But this is mad, he’s just had a nervous breakdown, I can’t be doing this! He kept saying, But I love you! And then I’d say, No, you don’t, you just think you do; and he’d say, No, I’m certain. And in the end I admitted that I loved him, and that I’d loved him since I first clapped eyes on him, right from day one.
I know I shouldn’t have. But he seemed all right now. I mean, completely better. I kept thinking, Boy, am I going to regret this! But just then, it was the only thing to do.
And—that was it. Just like that. I kept expecting it to change from minute to minute, then from hour to hour, then from day to day and week to week. But it didn’t. It stayed just the same. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that strange? I never heard of anyone falling in the love like that before. He had to go mad before he did it, but once he was there, he stayed there. So explain that to me, please. The strangest thing. It stuck. And it felt so right. He said it was like he had a hole in the middle of his heart, and I’d plugged it. And in a funny way, I knew what he meant because I felt the same way about him.
It’s like Gunar said. If it works, don’t fix it. Enjoy! And boy, have I!
What a thing a man is! You can make him think anything if you get to him young enough—but to make him love? Who can do that?
Clever old Grimhild—but so unwise! She didn’t make Sigurd love, she simply removed the memory of who he was in love with. Torn from its structure, its name, and its place, the clone’s love existed in a void, a passion with no connections. The most intense of human bonds unbonded, volatile, a free radical ready to attach to anything it came into contact with. That was his madness. There was acid in his soul. Sigurd would have fallen in love with a leg of lamb in the state he was in. All Grimhild had left to do was make sure that her daughter was there at the right time.
She’d withdrawn herself and Ida, given the rest of the servants the day off, and left Sigurd alone. She didn’t want him falling in love with some serving girl or gardener, or some thug from the bodyguard. At one point he’d grabbed hold of the cat and sat clutching that, which had scared her. The way he was hanging on to it—was it possible for him to fall in love with that? But then it escaped and he got the cushion instead, thank god. Then Gudrun was delayed and Grimhild was scared that he was staying too long in his broken state. She’d only planned on him being on his own for a couple of hours. By the time the afternoon was over Grimhild was certain that she’d ruined the wonderful boy. But then at last her daughter arrived, and the reaction occurred exactly as predicted.
Clever old bitch! Such precision, such understanding, such insight. Science, magic, and psychology all working in perfect harmony. The woman’s a genius.
So Sigurd was killed twice, once by a god and once by an old woman, and brought back to life both times, and both times changed. Well, Grimhild was clever, but no god. Make no mistake: What she has brought back is not Sigurd now. There’s a difference between resurrection and cloning, transformation and restructuring. The terrible wound she made has been filled by Gudrun, but this is prosthetic love. This isn’t Sigurd anymore. It’s just a cheap copy.
But even a cheap copy of Sigurd is worth more than all of us. It was no less than him in depth of heart, loyalty, and conviction. His mind was as quick and sharp as ever. The love between him and Gudrun may have sprung up from another root, but time is a healer; the flesh heals over, the mind and spirit grow.
The next day, by the time Gunar and Hogni arrived, Sigurd was no longer in any danger of losing his way. He had changed, that much was clear. It seemed to the Niberlins that Sigurd had been something larger than life, something superhuman, but now he was one of them—a human once again. Perhaps he had finished the task the gods intended for him and now they were leaving him to get on with his own life.
If he felt himself to be different—a gap, a falseness, a doubt in himself—he never said anything. He was, he felt, a casualty of war. So many people had lost so much. He had life, he had youth, he had love. Truly, he had so much. And after all, he was human again. There was no god growing inside him now. It may be that Odin himself had given him what he wanted most of all—humanity, with all its faults and weaknesses and failings. He h
ad lost something wonderful but he knew that disappointment is part of the human condition and he accepted that, gratefully and lovingly. He thought to himself that nothing is perfect and that what he was was better than what he’d been turning into.
Sigurd was only sixteen. Such a loss. He was robbed, and so were we all. But perhaps he had already done all he had to do. He had killed the dragon, won the gold and the girl, and saved the country. What was left for him? Growing old? Turning into a tyrant? He was changing so fast—perhaps Odin was scared of what he was becoming. And his legacy remained. England was united. After the destruction, the reconstruction; the nation rebuilt.
But there was something lesser about a world with no Sigurd in it.
The world moved on. The body of Sigurd rotted in the mud at the bottom of the lake. The worms crept in through his nose and mouth, through the opening of his anus and the soft spot in the middle of his back, and lived inside him. When all the soft body tissue and even the bones had gone, that skin would float again to the surface after a dredging operation three hundred years later, and be displayed in a nearby museum with his name. He was well remembered even then. As for his soul— where was that? Where does such a spirit rest? Part man, part lion, part monster, part god. So many heavens and hells. Who can say?
In the world, the clone took his place entirely, no one suspected it wasn’t him. There was no repetition of the breakdown he had that day at the Old House. Sigurd’s love cleaved where Grimhild had planted it; he and Gudrun were inseparable. For a time he loved her desperately as well as passionately, but it softened as he grew into his new self. But the god vision had gone. The clone had no ability to see a man’s soul, or to watch the dance of the future in a map, and unlike Sigurd, his actions, thoughts, and feelings and the events that befell him were simply his own. His life was not hand in glove with destiny, with the fate of England. He was his own man now, not ours. It was what he would have wanted.
Grimhild saw all this and it pained her. She had not intended to make Sigurd less. But if his life was the working of fate, perhaps his death was too. He was the best of all and he died young, before his star had time to fade.
Meanwhile Crayley was munching its way through deep layers of clay and rock, trying to lift itself closer to the surface. It had creaked on for so long but its functions were failing. It needed more of everything. Fuel! Food! Air—even that. The one entry way to the surface had been made so narrow by the earthquake from Fafnir’s arsenal, it could hardly breathe. It was suffocating by degrees. It had been feeding off old landfill sites and low grade ores, its own internal organic systems of bacterial and unicellular plant life and the colonies of breeding creatures it kept in scattered farms, but its reserves were low, getting lower. Such a vast entity needed a great deal to fuel itself. Time was getting short. It was starving to death down there.
Crayley was not stupid. Crawling through the earth hunting for traditional materials to feed on was slow and ponderous. It, too, had listened to the stories Bryony’s mother had told her and eavesdropped on the talk between Sigurd and her. As it listened, it learned. A mile above, most of the work had already been done, the food gathered together, the resources harvested. Agriculture and industry, villages and towns. Population! Food and fuel, that’s what they meant to Crayley. The ancient factory city didn’t care if its prey was single or multicellular, sentient or dumb. Omnivorous, it could utilize anything. Even the soil up there was full of organic material. Underground it was living in a desert, imprisoned in the earth much as Bryony was imprisoned inside it. Up in the sun, that was where the wealth lay. The sun! There was energy in the very air.
The rogue city had to get to the surface. Low though its resources were, it could do that, but it was not able to harvest the wealth that awaited it. Mining, drilling, brewing, manufacture—it could do all that. But it could not redesign itself beyond certain limits. How did you steal and devour a village, a field of cows, a shopping mall, a school full of children? It had not been made to hunt. How did you rob a factory or steal the rays of the sun? Crayley needed to redesign, reinvent, and rebuild itself. Up there it would be like a hungry dog with no teeth in a shop full of tinned meat.
The old woman had helped. If it wasn’t for her it would have died already, but she wasn’t enough. The city needed a mind of its own. It had been planning to that end ever since it had realized what it had to do. Now those plans were nearing fruition.
These were black times for Bryony. She knew that things had gone wrong the day when, for the first time, Jenny Wren came back with no little gift in her beak or tied to her leg. At once she thought, “He’s dead.” Sigurd would never forget her, never abandon her. There had been a war. Even the best of us can be overcome.
But there was still hope; there’s always hope. She could not be sure he was dead. Jenny might not have been able to find him. He might be imprisoned, trapped, lost in a battle, anything. The days passed. The little bird flew off as usual with her gifts, came back each time still bearing them. But Bryony continued to hope. Those brief months with Sigurd—was that it? Her entire life?
“Not the very first one,” her mother used to say, but she’d gone and done it anyway, fallen head over heels in love with the first boy she met. Perhaps he had been the wrong one, how could she tell? What if he was full of lies? Her mother had said boys sometimes told lies.
But she had been so sure! And so had he. Hadn’t he?
Days passed, then weeks.
“He might still be trapped,” she thought. It was a hope, but a bitter hope, not easy to believe. For now she had to make her own plans. She had her love tokens to remind her: a few scraps of ribbon, a shriveled flower, and, on her finger, a ring. She never took it off. Every day she kissed it. It would never grow cold until her love for Sigurd had grown cold.
Inside her the baby grew. Once started, it was unstoppable. And how she longed for her baby! It was something to care for—another person, another one of her own. Someone to love. She could bear even this lonely drab life, this prison existence, if only she could keep her baby. But the city was waiting too. She could feel its greed. All around her, under her feet, over her head, her enemy, her home, was planning to take her baby away from her.
She made what preparations she could. She built various hides, like a wild animal, and laid in stores of food for each one. As she worked, she talked, sometimes to Sigurd, sometimes to her unborn baby, sometimes to Jenny Wren if she was near, asking their advice, explaining what she was doing. Then she would remember and stop: The city was listening to her all the time. The air she breathed, the food she ate, the ways she walked—the world was all against her.
Crayley began giving her gifts now—pipes of nutrients appearing near her house, a small creature skinned and butchered, lying ready for her when she got up in the morning. At first she never touched them. They could be interfered with in ways she could only imagine. But at the same time the city withdrew what she needed from other sources. The creatures she had hunted disappeared, the water pipes emptied, the nutrient vats turned sour and then dried up. They were only being diverted, removed to a distance from her, but it got harder and harder to travel as she swelled, and in the end she had to give in and eat what was provided for her, like a baby taking food from her mother.
But she had one final, desperate trick up her sleeve. She had seen what Crayley was planning for her baby and she would not allow it to happen. If she had the slightest whiff that it was trying take her baby off her, she would kill it. This much she knew and this much only: Crayley would not have its way. The baby would die.
“Don’t think I won’t do it,” she warned, speaking to the world around her. She was capable of this. Anything rather than let her baby become . . . like that.
Sigurd, where are you? Odin! Anyone! It’s almost too late . . . At least she was not entirely alone. Jenny was with her. The little bird had never deserted her, was always there through every crisis and every pleasure. She hunted with her, ate with h
er, searched with her, inspected prospective birthsites for her. And she was with her, perched on a bucket handle, when the pain began.
The pain shocked Bryony. Agony! She was being torn to pieces! She had to do this on her own? But the waves passed and no damage was done.
“It’s time,” she told the wren. She packed up her things and made her way to her hideaway, pausing to bend over or sit down when the contractions took over. Jenny piped encouragement and flew on ahead to make sure the way was safe. As she made the journey, Bryony fingered a small bottle she kept on her at all times. This was her final insurance policy: poison. If the city tried to ambush her now and hold her while she gave birth, she would drink it.
“It’ll take me less than a second,” she said aloud. Crayley was listening, it was always listening. It understood. She made it to the hideaway unharmed.
The place she had chosen was as secure as it was possible to get—a little hole in a solid stone wall, high up out of reach, with plenty of stores, food and water, rags and furs to keep her and her baby warm. She was surrounded on three sides, above and below by solid rock. Below was a vast machine hall, as big as three football pitches, with assemblages of rusting production lines softening under the dust of ages. She could see it all from this eyrie, from rock face to rock face. Nothing could approach her here without her seeing it. It was perfect—as perfect as was possible. But it would not work. Crayley was everywhere, like God. How can you avoid the world you live in?
The birth was more painful than she had ever imagined. Her mother had told her about this, too, but nothing could prepare her for something like that. This was what it was to give life? Impossible—she was dying! But it was not like a wound. It passed without damage as if it had never happened, and then it came again, and again and again. It went on for almost a day, getting more and more frequent, and then the movement began. It began slowly, but then, suddenly, it happened quickly and the baby was there in her arms before she knew it—out of her into the world: into Crayley.