Trouble is, it didn’t matter how quiet we were. Someone knew exactly where we were.
It started with a scraping noise – quite soft to start with but it stopped us in our tracks. This noise wasn’t muffled; it was in there with us. In our tunnel. You could tell. It began slowly, then it got louder and it was followed by an almighty BANG – a real big bang like a giant hammer coming down behind us. It made the rock shake under our feet, it made your insides shake. There was a pause and a brief movement of air in the tunnel. We stood still eyeing one another.
‘What the fuck was that?’ said someone suspiciously, but it was pretty obvious what it was. Then it happened again, right in front of our eyes this time. We could see it in the lights of our head torches – a section of the tunnel coming down. It wasn’t a collapse either, it was far too neat a job for that. It was a slice of rock about half a metre thick. We had a fraction of a second to look under it as it came down – BANG! I can’t describe how huge it was. It thudded down a metre in front of us so violently we were sure it was going to bring the roof down. The men shouted and we all turned and ran back the way we’d come, but we’d had it, we knew that at once. We ran about ten steps and there was the other block, the one we’d heard before, cutting off the way.
Styr said, ‘Now that’s what I call a trap.’ And that’s what it was. Conor must have known about this way in the whole time and he’d got the last cut in after all. I stood there thinking, is that it? So we were going to win but I wasn’t gonna be there?
Of course Conor would be long gone. The bunker would be empty, except for the body of my sister. Let’s face it, if he knew we were coming down here, he must have known who told us too.
Someone said, ‘They’ll rescue us when they get down here,’ but I was already thinking it was a good job we had weapons on us, because I didn’t fancy dying of thirst down here. The only other chance, I suppose, was that Conor wanted to get us in person to bargain with.
We sat down, leaning against the walls of the tunnel, and waited. No one was really scared yet. It was almost like a relief because we weren’t going into the fighting, despite the knowledge that it was going to get awful in there soon enough. Only Styr was up on his feet, pacing the section of tunnel, leaning his ear against the walls to see if he could hear anything.
And then – it was only half an hour later by my watch, although it felt like hours – there was a clatter far above us. We all looked up towards it. There’d been other noises in that time, knockings and rumblings, the sound of voices once or twice, so we knew there must have been other passages quite near us. But again, this noise wasn’t heard through rock, it was inside with us. Someone shone a torch towards the clattering and we could see a small opening. An airhole. There were lots of them all the way along the tunnel. Something was falling down this one towards us.
It clattered and rattled on the rock, getting louder rapidly on its way down. Everyone was cringing and getting ready to duck, because they were sure it was going to be a grenade of some sort. But not me. I was staring up there and smiling away because… I knew. Don’t ask me how. I just knew. I could feel my hand tingling where I was gonna be holding it in less than a minute. Yeah, baby was coming home. I opened my mouth to say, ‘It’s my knife,’ but the words never came. What for? I just looked up and waited. I burst out laughing when it came through the hole and everyone threw themselves on the floor. I didn’t even leap for it. I let Styr pick it up. He knew too, he knew at once. And trust Styr, of course he had to try it for himself before he let me have what was mine. I watched him strike it into the side of the tunnel and then the way his body shifted in surprise as he tried to pull it out. He glanced at me, put both hands to it and heaved for all he was worth, but of course nothing moved. Only then did he step aside for me.
I felt it leap into my hand like it did before. I just stood there with my whole heart and soul singing with the strength of it. Then I walked forward to the block of stone that stopped our way forward, struck my knife into it hard and I began to saw a hole in the rock under London.
34
Under two hundred metres of rock the only evidence of the fire-bombing was the sound of distant thuds, like the footsteps of a giant far above their heads. Sometimes the light fittings shivered ever so slightly. Later, as the evening came on in the day so far away, the lights went out.
Above, the blue-uniformed soldiers waited in the passages leading up to the surface, armed with heavy weapons, laying their booby traps. Conor could have run, but where to? No one would hide him, but he would never go anyway. He had not yet lost everything. There was one thing left, something more powerful than cities or armies or reason itself. He still had the knife.
The knife meant everything to Conor; and it meant everything to Signy too. Over the past weeks and days, she had quietly and systematically made her way into every cranny and slit and crack in the whole bunker, but she still hadn’t been able to find where Conor kept the key. On that last day she stuck close to him, watching, waiting; but he gave no sign of going in the end to his most sacred treasure. On the morning of the final attack he had his son called to him. Vincent, now eleven years old, stared in horror at this strange, trembling father who had never had anything to do with him before now. Conor made him read to him and watched his face closely as he stumbled over the words; it was all the boy could do to keep his eyes on the page. After half an hour, Conor turned away abruptly to scold his wife for spending no time with the boy.
‘Now look, what’s his life been for?’ he asked. He meant that the boy had been brought up for a future that would never happen. Now he would die without ever even enjoying the present. Vincent understood something of this.
‘We can escape. Why can’t we escape?’ he begged. But neither parent answered him and he was too scared to question these dangerous people any further.
Conor sent the boy back with his tutor and moved to a table to eat, but he was able to take nothing. He stayed there for over two hours with his head sunk on his hands. When the lights went out, he groaned. Signy stood and stared at him fiercely through the darkness before she sent for candles and oil lamps. There were tears in her eyes, who knows what for? She herself did not know. She came and stood behind him in the candlelight, her hands on his neck, and tried to rub the knots of tension away.
Conor watched her in a mirror opposite. ‘Maybe the way up is blocked. Do you think we’re already dead?’ he asked.
‘Not yet,’ she answered. She leaned against the wall, thinking to herself, if he doesn’t go to get the knife soon, I’ll have to make him.
‘Siggy will make sure he can get to us,’ she said at last.
Conor looked up at her with a curious little smile. ‘And what will he do with you?’ he asked her. ‘He’ll think of you as a traitor against his own family, won’t he?’ By that smile she knew he did not really believe it, but she had no idea how much he knew of her double role.
Soon after, the distant footsteps of the bombing stopped, but as yet there was no sound of fighting in the tunnels and passages of the bunker. Elsewhere, the servants waited. In among them an old woman with a fierce face sat close to Vincent, and tried to comfort him when he wept. She had strange black eyes that gave nothing away, and deep lines on her face. Her hair was strangely textured, full of grey and white and red. For the last couple of years she had been nanny to the boy, more of a mother than his mother was. Cherry, old but still strong, was not with her mistress today. Signy did not want her there for the final hours.
At six o’clock in the evening, the first sounds of fighting began to come down from the upper corridors. Signy was becoming scared; if she left it much longer the soldiers would be here and she would lose her chance. But she did not say anything to Conor; she still hoped that he would be unable to resist the urge to go to rescue the precious thing, to have one last look before the end. And sure enough, as the sounds of the battle came down, Conor grew agitated and cast little looks at her which he tried to hide. Ano
ther fifteen minutes and he got up and left the room. Signy, sitting at the table with a cup of tea in her hands, nodded and tried not to show her excitement.
Conor closed the door behind him and still she waited, trembling with desire. She would give him five minutes and then she’d go to the room with the great safe built into the floor. She didn’t have to wait so long. Conor burst into the room where she sat, white with fear.
‘Where is it? Where is it? What have you done?’ he cried.
Signy jumped up. What was this? No need to ask what he meant. She pushed past him, past his fingers clutching at her, and ran into the room where the safe was built into the solid floor, just a few metres down the passageway. There it was, the sight she had never seen – the thick door gaping open out of the floor. She ran to look in. It was empty.
‘What have you done with it?’ she hissed, but even as she spoke she was certain this was no trick he was playing. Conor was terrified. Despite everything he had somehow believed that nothing could harm him so long as he had the knife. Now he had opened the safe and the sacred treasure was gone.
He stared at Signy in disbelief. If not her, who else? No one else even knew! This was one lie too far.
‘You have no right,’ he hissed, furious, in fear for his life truly for the first time. In the adjacent room, the servants trembled. Murder was in the air.
But Signy was staring around her as if she would be shown the clue. ‘But who? Who…?’
And even as she spoke she knew the answer; there could only be one answer. She turned her head to look for her before she reached the end of her sentence and heard it – the furious, scared hiss of the trapped animal coming in through the door to the next room, where Cherry had been waiting and watching for this moment of discovery.
‘You!’ hissed Signy. ‘You!’ In the last moment, the shape-changer had been more faithful to the gods than to her mistress, who wanted to change what the gods saw.
Signy ran for her; Cherry without another sound pelted out from the doorway as she opened it. Conor stood in Signy’s way, but she brushed him to one side. He stared at her in horror. He had never seen before so much as a hint of the strength she had given to herself during her time in the tank. Cherry came quickly to a locked door, but rather than change to her human form – so great was her habit of never doing this in front of Conor – she tried to double back and then Signy had her. There was a ferocious second of clawing and struggle before Signy had her by the neck. She whipped the little body, one, two, three times like a rag, and then dashed her brains out on a sideboard by the door.
‘There, you traitor!’ she hissed, and flung the body down at her feet.
At the door, Conor stood, the blood gone from his face, staring at the smashed mess on the floor. Suddenly, the woman he had known and loved for so many years was as fast as an animal, as strong as a machine. Where had all this been hiding for so long? And why was she destroying this animal she had loved? Signy stood there before him panting, her face white, tears streaming down her face. She had shown herself to him at last but even now, Conor was more scared about the knife.
‘You’ve done this… you’ve done all this,’ he cried. Only now, half mad with fear, was he able to act against her. He went for her throat with his hands like claws but she brushed him aside. He half fell but managed to seize a heavy glass sculpture from the sideboard. He brought it back to smash against her head… but there he paused, mid-murder. Signy was the one thing Conor was never able to destroy. There was never any danger to her from him.
Signy stepped to one side and knocked the glass out of his hand. It fell to the carpet with a heavy thud. Then she grabbed his arm, swung him round like a child and had her knife in his back.
‘Goodbye, my darling,’ she whispered in his ear, and took the knife home up to the hilt in his blood. Conor gasped, his eyes swivelled to try and meet hers, and he fell dead to the floor.
It seemed to Signy in that second that her heart broke. It took her by surprise and before she knew it she was on her knees, grieving over the body of the man who had loved her, and whom she loved back in spite of the deformities of the years and the acts of bloody treachery. Now everything had been taken from her, the last by her own hand. She bent her blood-spattered face over the body, heart-broken, amazing herself, and wept for what might have been until her throat was dry.
Some time later, she became aware of sounds around her – the servants huddled up in terror in the nearby rooms, the sounds of battle coming down the passages towards the apartments. She didn’t care for any living thing now; she was horrified with this world that had no Conor in it. She sat up and looked at the dead cat a few metres away and shook her head. She had never dreamed that Cherry would betray her. For the first time she was truly alone with her ambition.
As she stared, there was a noise to one side she turned her head and saw… her son. Vincent, taking all his courage into his hands, had made his way out of the room next door to see what had happened, and been confronted with his dead father and his bloodstained mother. The soldiers from above were drawing in and he wanted to know…
‘Mother?’ he asked. ‘What’s going to happen to me?’
Signy stared back at him. It was of course she who had trapped Siggy and his men in the tunnel. She had intended to feed and water them, although whether or not she would have done it is another matter. A few years later, when all the power was safely in her hands, she might even have released them. But Cherry had stolen the knife. Signy understood very well that Siggy was now out and that there were no walls strong enough to keep him in when he had that knife in his hand. Her plans were all undone, but she still had certain advantages. For one thing, her brother had no idea that she was now his enemy. For another, she had his son.
‘Mother?’ asked the child again. Signy rose up on her knees; then she made up her mind. She stood up suddenly, scarcely noticing how her son winced as she did so. Ignoring him, she went to wash the tears and blood off her face. Then she seized him by the arm. ‘Come with me, we’ll go and meet your father.’ The lad stared at Conor – this was his father, and his father was dead! Signy half led, half dragged him down the passage, where she knew Siggy would be coming up.
Odin’s knife was miraculous, but the stone was hard. It took Siggy two hours to cut his way through the half metre of rock blocking him off from the rest of the passage. It was another half an hour before the hole was large enough for a man and, one after the other, Siggy, Styr and their men crawled back into the main tunnel.
As far as Siggy was concerned, it was Conor who had trapped them and Signy who had somehow stolen the knife and got it to him down the ventilation shaft. Therefore he went to finish his task full of fury and anxiety that Conor had pre-empted her rescue with murder.
They could hear the sounds of fighting even before they broke through. By the time they got out of the trap, the allied forces were already over a hundred metres deep into the bunker, clearing their way down with machine guns, grenades and gas. Siggy led his men at a fast run up the passageway towards the family apartment. It was vital to get to Signy before the troops did. They had been informed of her role, but probably not all of them believed it. Right up to these last days, she had been regarded as a traitor, perhaps even in league with Conor from the start. If she got caught up in the fighting, by accident or design, it was unlikely she would survive. He had no idea that Conor was already dead and that Signy was on her way down to meet him.
It was vile air down there. The system of pumps and air conditioning had been blown hours before and poisonous gases from the explosives were filling the passageways. The men were gasping and choking on the hot air, but they ran as fast as they could, urged on by their commander’s fear. They were only a short run from the family quarters when they saw another lamp swinging into the passageway ahead. Someone was coming down to meet them.
Siggy hissed, ‘Don’t shoot.’ The men fell to the floor, some taking sight along their weapons while others sh
one their lamps forward. The strong beams poked through the murky air onto the tall figure of a woman in the act of bending to put her lamp on the floor. By her side was a child. She stood up and peered ahead, one hand on the boy’s back, the other in the air as if in greeting. Siggy stared. Was it? She seemed taller, older. Well, of course she’d be older…
‘It’s her…’ he gasped, and he was on his feet and running. His men glanced nervously at each other; they didn’t trust this woman who had shared a bed with their enemy for all these years. Only Styr ran after him. As they ran, they blocked out the light behind them and saw Signy illuminated from below by her own lamp, making her seem taller than ever, grotesque and ancient. She was terrible enough as it was, covered in blood, maybe her own.
As they stared another figure appeared in the gloom. A man loomed behind her. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and held out his arms as if he was making them a present of all this.
The two men ground to a halt. Signy frowned and looked behind her, following their gaze.
‘Odin!’ She took two steps towards him and reached out to him, but the god let his arms fall to his side and stood still, silently watching her. They could see his single eye glinting from under his hat.
‘One of the Volsons will die today,’ hissed Styr. He stretched his lips into a sudden grin, jumped up, his gun in his hand, and fired at the dark figure. Twelve shots; the gun was empty and he sank to one knee to reload. Odin waited until the magazine was empty. Then he turned and in two steps disappeared back in the darkness of the passage.
Styr already had his gun back up, but Siggy slapped his hand down. What did he care for the god? It was his sister he wanted. He ran to her and flung his arms around her and hugged her tight, full of joy at having her back. She touched him lightly on the shoulders.
‘King Sigs,’ she said, smiling at Styr over his shoulder. But her cloned son had no eyes for her. He was staring at the boy… at Vincent… at himself… and his face was a mask that made her wince.