Bloodsong

  He rose early and began work at once, laying down the wires that would set off a series of explosive charges. Once that was done, he would unload Regin’s horse; everything would be destroyed—everything. The work was well under way when Regin woke and wandered across to see what he was up to. When he realized, he went mad. He tried to pull authority—he was old, the boy was young. Alf had not given him permission to do this—he was still king, the lord of them both. Sigurd was unmoved. He had won his right, he had killed the dragon. Nothing of the monster’s hoard would be left to take but the gold, and that was his.

  Regin became so incensed, he seized Sigurd’s arm and tried to fling him to one side. The boy gently released himself and insisted; this was going to be. Regin was under the influence of something evil among all this crazy weaponry, he needed to calm down. When it was done he would feel better and understand.

  “No! Everything is turned off. This is me, Sigurd. What you’re doing—it’s like burning the books, tearing down the museums, the libraries. You can’t do this!” screamed Regin, beside himself. But Sigurd placidly put the older man to one side and went about his business.

  All these wonders were going to be destroyed in front of his eyes, and Regin was helpless to stop it. He left the citadel and raged about outside, skidding and falling in the mud, beating the rocks with his fists in his frustration. His mind was in its darkest hour, and that’s how he went to his death, that kind man—trapped at his lowest, unable to think, hysterical with rage. Who can say what he remembered or had forgotten at the last moment? He had loved many things and many people in his life, but none more so than Sigurd, yet now it seemed to him that the boy had turned into a tyrant, a monster who was capable of anything. He became implacable. He alone had the knowledge to do this, it was his duty. He was ten feet away as he raised his rifle and took sight to the aspen, leaf-size point, where Sigurd was still mortal.

  Regin was no marksman, he had to get so close to be sure. What warned Sigurd? A sound? A birdcall, some said—a blackbird that had strayed inside the citadel after maggots, calling alarm from the rubbish stinking in heaps along the corridors. Sigurd’s hearing and sense of smell had already become more acute as a result of bathing in Fafnir’s blood. Perhaps he caught the scent of murder as he crouched over his wires. He turned anyway and saw the gun. He was already out of harm’s way—the bullet was fired that very second as Regin saw him move, and the aspen leaf was already out of sight— but he was not used to his immunity and instinct took over. He drew the stub of the sword from his belt and flung it. It glittered in the light, twisting and turning in the air for only a fraction of a second before it struck Regin in the chest.

  Every day for the rest of his life Sigurd asked himself if he could have avoided that action, but the decision to strike back when death threatened was made long ago, when he was three or four and through all his other years, when he was trained to bypass any thoughts that might delay his hand. And perhaps Andvari’s ring on his finger helped to push him in that split second to an act he would forever regret.

  Sigurd rose and walked across to where Regin lay, his life’s blood pumping out of him on the rock floor. Regin had forgotten that Sigurd had the means to pierce him, as he had Fafnir. He gasped, met the boy’s eyes, tried to speak but could not, and died.

  Standing there over the body, Sigurd’s world began to fall apart around him, like sections of land falling into the sea. Nothing he believed in was real. All his assumptions were wrong. He had been betrayed by someone he loved, and, it seemed to him, had reacted by betraying back. He had not needed to kill Regin. He could have protected him from this— restrained him, kept him safe until he’d blown this evil place to kingdom come. Then Regin would have come to his senses and understood.

  Overwhelmed by the ordeal of the past few days, Sigurd for a second in his mind slipped out of the darkness of the present into the bright past he had loved so much. Before him was the sea of the Welsh coast, the dunes, the beach, his friends playing, voices calling, seagulls. His friend and tutor lay on the ground playing dead in a childhood game, as he’d done many times before. Sigurd leaned forward and shook his shoulder.

  “Regin? This was a game we were playing. Wake up, Regin. Take me home. I want to go home now.”

  But Regin never moved. Kneeling by his side, Sigurd laid his head in his hands and began to weep, there in the shattered vales of Hampstead Heath, where only sorrow ever lived.

  Sigurd rises from the floor by the side of his murdered friend and glances over his shoulder into the cavern at the ranks of weaponry and machines—Fear, Delight, Conflict, Bliss; Odin, Jesus, Allah. He has them all. He killed the dragon and won the prize. He is favored by the chief of all the gods. He has died and resurrected. His is the highest star.

  And he has killed a brother and a dear friend. Is he turning into a god, or simply losing his humanity?

  Outside, a small bird comes to stand on a rock near the cavern’s mouth, opens its mouth, and puts out a song. Sigurd listens, astonished in this terrible moment by the sheer beauty of it—and astonished at his own ability to be moved by it, now of all times. A blackbird, a small common thing, but it makes Sigurd’s heart so full that tears spring to his eyes. The small things. The wind in the grass, birdsong, his mother’s kiss, every living thing. It would burst your heart open if you didn’t keep your eyes closed sometimes.

  He fills himself with a great breath of air. The vaults stink, but the wind is blowing sweeter scents over the burned rock and poisoned waters of Hampstead. There is a world beyond the bombsite. There is birdsong and the smell of grass and the scent of another person’s skin. So full of love is Sigurd, and so full of death, too, that he hardly knows who he is anymore. He is fifteen years old, and he has been broken and put together again in a way no one ever should be.

  Outside, the blackbird flips its wings and flies away. Sigurd wipes away his tears. All he wants to do is lie down and sleep until life ends. What does it matter? The gods will have their way. But what else is there to do but carry on as full of love as if your life was your own and what you did mattered? It is an act of faith. So Sigurd stands up and gets on with the work that Regin interrupted. But as he turns back to his wires and detonators, he realizes that there is an easier solution. All he has to do is plant a homing device and then fire a missile from a few miles away. The missile would fly through the hole in Fafnir’s front door like a letter through the letter box. The whole place would go off like a bomb.

  Outside it had begun to rain again; Fafnir’s corpse with that impossible skin glistened like a huge, dead jewel. Beyond it—the world. Birdsong and sun and sea and the millions of living things. Sigurd thought to himself—that had to be enough for anyone. To rule and conquer and make the world a safe place was a big job, a job for generations. He was no longer sure of himself after what had just happened. It was enough just to be alive.

  It was only left to say good-bye to Regin.

  Sigurd could not conceive that Regin could love him any less than he loved Regin. Betrayal was not in his nature and he did not understand it in others. In his mind, it would always be he who was the murderer. He lifted the body and carried him into the citadel, leading Slipper behind him. He laid the body down on top of the machine labeled DELIGHT. The old custom of burning the dead with things that were precious to them had come back with the old gods, and Sigurd planned a funeral pyre for Regin of a kind no one had ever seen before.

  He kissed his old friend, straightened out his limbs. His horse with its belly full of horror would stay there. Then he went to destroy the den of destruction.

  He rode Slipper hard for fifteen minutes. He had no idea how all that stuff would go up, but he wanted to be miles away when it went. Already he was surrounded by bushes and grass and a few small trees. The spring sunshine was brightening the leaves, he could smell the sap rising. From this place, where life had a hold, he would put an end to many deaths.

  He dismounted, set up his missile, tracke
d and recorded the place where he wanted it to go—and launched.

  The missile leapt into the air and wove an uncertain path as it nosed along the radio signal to its own destruction. As it got higher, it found a clear signal and headed straight off. Two minutes later there was a heavy crump and a shock in the air as it passed through the door and exploded inside. Sigurd lifted his binoculars to watch, but before the smoke could rise high enough for him to see it, there was another, bigger explosion; the ground shuddered under his feet and a thick cloud of black smoke and blue and orange flames rushed skyward. Then, another bang, and another, and another—and then to Sigurd’s horror the horizon itself began to rise. He dropped the binoculars; this event was too big to see magnified. A great wall of ground had lifted up high above the trees and was rolling toward him. Something so violent had exploded underground that the bedrock itself was behaving like liquid. A tsunami of solid rock was rushing toward him.

  Sigurd leapt aboard Slipper. Everything around him was shaking. The trees were falling over, the rocks shuddering, the ground quaking and cracking even though the event was still kilometers distant. The cyber-horse leapt forward as if it was putting a soul it did not have at Sigurd’s service. Behind them the wall of rock had begun to glow with heat. Mountainous though it was, it was traveling as fast as flight and had already begun to break, leaning forward like a giant hand.

  Sigurd cried out; Slipper redoubled his efforts, bounding sure-footedly across the quivering ground. As he rode, the horse was seeking: Where was safe in this tumultuous landscape? Radar, sonar, infrared, every means of looking was available to him, but he could see nothing. From his shoulder a small missile fired. In seconds it was hovering below the clouds, checking out the lie of the land. Where? Where?

  Behind them the tidal wave of magma broke, toppled, and fell. It struck earth and washed forward. A splatter of it fell on Sigurd’s back and he screamed in pain. A rain of red hot rocks and burning earth began to fall around them. Now they were in danger of being crushed under the avalanche. Even Slipper could not outrun the debris, but at last he spotted a place it could not reach. A fiery crack was opening up before them. Without a pause, Slipper charged straight down into it.

  It was an evil-looking place, a maw of fire and black smoke. The billowing fug was lit by huge flames, thrashing and beating in violent winds. Sigurd choked and screamed as the flames swept over him, but Slipper charged onward down the tunnel, which shook and rattled like a copper pipe as the ground above it compressed. Behind them, it began to collapse, closing down like a swallowing throat. In between the smoke and fires, Sigurd could see twisted machinery, abandoned cranes and trucks, vents and pipes leaking fumes and polluted fluids. There was fire everywhere. What was this place? Hel? Did they have industry in Hel? There was fire everywhere. It seemed as if even the metal and rock around him were ablaze.

  Ahead of him now as well as behind was only fire. Sigurd looked backward—surely anywhere would be safer than in this underground catastrophe! But behind him the sea of rubble and glowing rock was melting after them. He leaned forward and whispered encouragement in Slipper’s ear, and the beast leapt forward directly into the burning gas. Sigurd screamed as the fire beat around his head and neck and set his clothes ablaze, turned his hair and the top layer of his skin into ash; Slipper screamed as his coat and skin caught fire. Forward they charged, through the heat, onward and deeper until they left the earthquake behind them in the upper layers of the earth’s mantle, and entered the deep underground where an ancient city still torturously attempted to function.

  This was Crayley.

  Long ago, before the government had withdrawn from the community, this had been the home of industry—a city of machines hidden underground. For almost a century it had provided for the nation, manufacturing electrical goods, weaponry, cars and trains, kitchenware, building materials, medicines—whatever it was asked for. With the age of genetic design it had been modified, but it soon became outdated and inefficient. Too expensive to close down, it had simply been abandoned. And so it remained, hundreds of years later, a huge industrial complex rusting and grinding away to no end. Deserted, lame, degenerating, isolated from its purpose, the city nursed a bitter heart. Its software maintained it, mended, replaced, expanded; its primitive nerve and muscle technology bred and evolved, but it could not change or redesign itself in any fundamental way. It stuck to its old ways, growing bitter over the centuries, resenting its creators and lamenting its fate. Inch by inch it mined its way through the deep layers of the earth, looking for new resources, new ores and fuels, sometimes sending an arm up to make use of ancient earthfill, or even up to the surface if it needed air. Automated vehicles trundled along the rock roads, oil and waste pipes ruptured and rusted; colonies of bacteria blossomed along the damp, warm passages, and strange creatures roamed in little packs, components of nerve and muscle that had separated off and become alive. Up near the surface, fires blazed, fed on leaking reservoirs of methane, tars, and hydrogen captured from water. Into this ancient, malevolent machine, down its only remaining airway, Sigurd now rode away from the terrors of Fafnir’s hoard, through fire and acid into a man-made Hel.

  For a long time all he could hear was the beating of flames in his ears, the rapid drumbeat of Slipper’s hooves ringing out on the floor, and the sound of his own moaning as the fires scorched him. Everything dead, the top layers of his skin, his hair, his fingernails and toenails, had now been burnt away; Fafnir’s blood only protected what was alive. Between his shoulder blades, in the shape of an aspen leaf, a great blister formed, boiled, and burst. Between his thighs, Slipper was ablaze, his skin falling off him in rags, then his flesh, then his nerves, then his organs; but the machine in him remained. Black with carbonized flesh and bone, his titanium skeleton tore on like a living thing.

  After a time Sigurd fainted and Slipper paused, unsure of what to do or where to go. Already half of his systems were down; he was having trouble analyzing the environment. He needed to get Sigurd to safety—but which way did safety lie? Then in front of him appeared an impossible sight: a tiny reddish-brown bird, whizzing through the flames. The bird was not burning. It was so small and moved so fast it appeared to flick from place to place, to disappear, and then reappear. It perched suddenly on the horse’s nose. Slipper snorted. The little thing turned to look at him and then suddenly flew off straight ahead—and the horse jumped after her. The wren could have changed direction on a penny piece if she had to, but she set him no such task, flying only a meter from the end of his nose. If she turned too quickly, she reappeared when he paused, squeaking as if amused by the great beast’s weakness.

  So the horse and wren passed through the fire, one ablaze, the other unharmed, through the passages and ducts, through vents and across ancient factory floors glowing with heat where great machines pounded relentlessly and pointlessly on as they had done for centuries, stamping out dies that would never be used, bending and cracking under the heat. Blind robots tested and analyzed, ran to and fro, carrying out their endless repairs.

  Sigurd remained unconscious as Slipper at last cantered out of the fire, both of them glowing cherry red with heat. A few minutes later, when the air was cool enough not to burn flesh, they stopped in a clearing, red with rust, green with verdigris. At last the great horse collapsed. Sigurd, burned naked, and every cell of him alive, rolled on the ground and opened his eyes. In front of him was a young woman looking down at him, dressed in an amazing collection of rags and skins, holding a stick with a hook on the end of it in her hand. Behind her was a rough gibbet of scaffolding from which the body of a man hung, one eye shut and one open in a permanent wink. Sigurd glanced behind him in terror, unaware that he was safe now. The flames were behind him.

  “Quick! There’s no time!” he yelled. He tried to jump up but he was too weak and just scrabbled bizarrely like a dying rabbit as his legs gave way repeatedly underneath him.

  “There’s plenty of time here,” the girl replied. Sigur
d stared at her from the ground, and at the permanently winking man behind her, and slid back into a dead faint.

  Bryony had waited a long time for this visitor—all her life. She was seventeen and the future was a monster that terrorized her every day, but it was her hope and her promise that one day she would be free. The promise had been made to her mother by the dead man long ago, when he was still alive and Bryony in the womb. Sigurd was the only person who had ever come to her from the world above. He lay there, naked and beautiful, something from myth, a unicorn, an angel from Heaven, the word made flesh. He was a dream come true.

  It was hard to believe when all you had ever known was this cramped world of fire and passages that there was another world as huge as the one her mother used to talk about, with oceans and sky and fresh air and millions of people. People! She couldn’t imagine it, but she had to believe, because what was the point otherwise? Although she had been born and bred down here and the routines of survival in Crayley were all she’d ever known, Bryony knew very well that this was no life for a human being. Every single day she burned for freedom, but it scared her. How would she cope with it when it finally came? What if she couldn’t bear it? What if she had actually become a part of this terrible place?

  She was strong—stronger than her mother for instance, who had spent months in black depressions living down here. She was gone now—Bryony had never been able to find out what happened to her. She might have been taken by the creatures who shared this Hel with them, or by the city itself; but she would not have been surprised if her mother had taken her own life. She had lived in the upper world, the real world as she called it. It was all she ever talked about—how beautiful it was, how big it was, how open and cool, how full of life. Throughout Bryony’s childhood this other world was the basis for all her stories and games. It was a litany she still repeated. Birds, mice, trees, sun, sky, moon, cats and dogs, rainfall, snow, the sea. Weather! The wind. Clouds, huge mists in the sky that looked like cotton wool. She had made her mother tell her everything and tried to picture it in her mind, but it was impossible. Toast. Butter. Marmalade. Cows. Houses. Roast potatoes. Her mind was so full of pictures, all of them wrong. Her mother had told her so. Only a god could picture the truth of a single blade of grass; but when she saw one for herself, her mother told her, it would be like coming home.