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.