Birds.
A huge murder of crows. Thousands upon thousands of them came banking and arching down the slope from the ruined city to ride the thermals out over the water. They cast a shadow across the world that might—if we truly were Grail Knights—have been a dragon. It wasn’t until the first of them fell out of the sky that I began to see the sickness in the flock. The surge of hope I’d felt at finally seeing some sign of life in the land died with them as one by one the birds fell, splashing down into the estuary.
It took an hour for the last of the circling birds to fall.
An hour of us watching them die.
I hated my eyes.
There was nothing there for us. We needed to move on. To hope that it was different in Newcastle or York or Leeds. We needed to believe that somewhere had survived. But with every passing mile, it became more obvious that no place had.
On the third morning out of Edinburgh, Yusef left us.
We’d slept around the campfire that night, taking refuge in an old Roman hillfort in the borderlands. When we woke, he wasn’t there. I stood in the doorway calling his name. My voice echoed across the Northumberland moors. Purple heathers stretched as far as the eye could see. Midges swarmed around us, but where a few weeks ago they would have fed on our blood, they left us alone now.
I saw the dog in the heather, playing. It raced in circles, chasing some invisible prey, each circle faster and tighter than the one before. I could have watched him play for hours. The way his tail was up and his gait changed to a prance as he finally tired was so familiar.
When the brothers emerged from the hillfort, I thought about pointing him out, but realized I didn’t want them to tell me they couldn’t see him.
Instead, I told them that Yusef was gone.
They didn’t say anything.
Maybe he’d walked off in the night to die alone so we wouldn’t have to worry about his body? What would we have done? Buried him? Built a cairn of stones over his corpse or left him to feed the animals? I realized we hadn’t discussed what we wanted to happen to us when we died. There were four of us left. We weren’t alone in this. Our deaths would require a certain measure of practicality from those who survived. We should agree on these kinds of things going in, shouldn’t we? It would save any arguments if someone wanted to be laid out for the birds or someone else wanted to be cut up into steaks to feed the rest of us.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been hungry.
Properly hungry.
I should have been ravenous.
But I wasn’t.
I remember a story, the Lambton Worm. I’d grown up with it. A local legend. I could only remember the first few lines of the poem, but I knew its lair was supposed to be around here somewhere.
The legend went that a local lad had skipped church to go fishing but hooked the devil rather than a fish. But thinking Old Toby a mere lamprey-like worm, the lad tossed it down a well and forgot all about it. As penance for his rebellious youth, the lad joined the Crusaders and went off to the Holy Land while the worm grew and grew down that well, until it grew so big, it could wrap itself seven times around the base of Worm Hill. The worm would snatch local children, growing fat on them, you see. With armor and sword magically blessed by a witch—the blessing itself heavily weighted with a curse—the lad’s promised his armor will protect him and his sword slay the worm. But after the worm is dead, the witch requires the lad to kill the first living thing he sees to pay the blood price and seal his pact with her. He slew the worm in a raging river, then looked up at the riverbank to see his beloved dog barking, full of excitement at its master’s return. The lad couldn’t kill his dog, and in breaking the pact brought a curse down on his family that saw nine generations of his descendants doomed—his son drowned at sea, his grandson killed at the Battle of Marston Moor, his great-grandson slain in the Battle of Wakefield, his great-great-grandson trampled under the hooves of his horse, and so on.
We were a day’s walk from Worm Hill.
The dragon-slaying sword was supposedly sealed away in the monument built atop the hill.
Was that the kind of truly British relic that could unite the people?
The story of the Lambton Worm was a variant of the Saint George tale, with the worm replacing the dragon. There was no more British a legend than that of George and the Dragon. Could the sword under the hill be Ascalon, the saint’s fabled sword?
The chance, however remote, that it might be gave me something to focus on as we walked. Part of me truly believed we needed a miracle to return life to a dead land. No matter how remote the possibility that Ascalon actually existed might be. I wasn’t thinking rationally. I knew that.
I told the others what I had in mind.
They followed me to the monument.
Before we disappeared inside the cavern at the foot of the hill, Priya let slip that she’d seen a stray trailing us for the last hour. Neither of the brothers had seen it, and I didn’t dare admit that I’d been seeing my own dog for the last month or so, or that he was watching us even now from a spot up by the Athenian structure that guarded over the top of the hill. There was so much destruction over the last hundred miles we’d traveled, it was amazing to think the ancient monument was still standing.
We lost Priya in the darkness.
Four of us walked into that cave, but only three of us emerged.
There was no sword in the stone waiting for me to find it.
We crawled about inside the cavern, reaching out blindly to feel our way along the walls in the claustrophobic darkness that smothered us. The air was old in there. Stale. It didn’t taste like the air outside, which in turn didn’t taste like the air I’d grown up breathing. The air now carried the dust of our lost world. Every lungful inhaled was another little bit of our loves that we’d lost drawn into us. That almost made the hell of it all bearable. But again with that word, almost.
I don’t know what happened. There was no fight. No screams. But with no light, we were fumbling around in there, trying to feel our way towards a prize we could never hope to find. It was a stupid way to go about it, I know that now. It wasn’t as if the sword would just be lying on an altar down there, waiting to be drawn up. I had tried to sell myself a lie that there was something Excaliburish about the whole thing, and that by raising the sword, people might start to believe that our greatest hero had found his way back and that we would prevail, we would batter back the darkness and find a way to rebuild. But even I didn’t buy the lie I was selling anymore.
I followed the golden blur of my ghost light out into the fading twilight. The Celts used to call it the time between times. It was one of the two hours of the day when magic was possible.
I guess the only magic here was that I was still alive.
I’m sure the brothers felt the same way, but like their Scandinavian stereotype, they weren’t very talkative. At least not with me. I think the fact that we’d lost Yusef and Priya weighed on them. But they didn’t argue when I said we had to move on.
We weren’t going to find a holy cup or a gleaming sword or any other sort of relic. I had come to accept that. I didn’t want to believe it, but I accepted it. We were still three hundred miles from the Downs, where I’d made my home with Em and Buster. I wanted to think that a lot could happen over three hundred miles. But as each mile passed beneath our trudging feet with more of the same dust and decay to show for it, how much could really change over that distance?
Heldur was the next to admit he’d seen something, but he was much more precise in his description of it. It wasn’t an animal. It was a sallow-skinned naked man, feral, his face blistered and raw, clumps of hair fallen out to reveal suppurating sores and puss seeping from his scalp.