Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

‘Each one of us only has to kill two of them,’ Morfudd said. ‘With your help we will triumph.’ But she was looking uncomfortably at the giants. They knew them to be excellent swimmers despite their deformed limbs and the horrific growths that sprouted from their rough skins.

‘We will not fight with you,’ Teardrop told her. To Britha’s surprise this seemed to come as a relief to the warband leader.

‘You will fight the giants then?’ she asked. The Cigfran Teulu had acquitted themselves well, but the giants were something else. The dead looked like people and subsequently were found to be so, and fighting them had been comparable to what they had done in the past. The giants, however, were things that should not be, things from stories told by the bards out of their colleges to the west beyond the plains of the dead. Giants were thought to be long dead.

‘No.’

Fachtna frowned at Teardrop, who had been staring at the giants as if searching for a way to kill them. The warband had spilt onto the sand at the end of the causeway, and the two forces were eyeing each other. There had been no point in hiding.

Morfudd turned on Teardrop. She did not flinch away from his strange eyes. ‘Then I call you craven, demon!’ she spat.

‘We need you to carry the fight as close to the water as you can, and indeed into the water if possible,’ Teardrop told her.

‘And then what?’ Morfudd asked.

‘Die well.’

Morfudd stared at him. Then she started laughing.

‘Your sacrifice will not be so that we can escape.’

‘I will fight with you, at the start,’ Fachtna told her. Teardrop opened his mouth to object. ‘Don’t worry. I will meet you in the water.’

‘The water?’ Tangwen said. ‘Did you see the people tied to the poles?’

As the discussion went back and forth around her, Britha could not shake the feeling that the water was her home. Where she should be. She knew that beneath its surface she would hear a song calling her back.

‘What about stealing a boat?’ Tangwen asked.

‘We don’t have time to break the magics that control them,’ Fachtna told her.

‘We’ll be fine in the water,’ Britha said. ‘I’ll protect you.’

Teardrop was looking at her, almost smiling. Britha did not see what they had to smile about. From here the wind carried the smell of hundreds, possibly thousands, of people kept in close captivity, the cries, their pleas. From here they could better appreciate the sheer size of the wicker man as it towered above them.

Britha stripped off her robe and cut her rope belt in two with her sickle. Half of it she tied to her spear as a sling. The other half of the rope she tied to the sickle, which she slung over her shoulder. Tangwen took off her trews but tied the long rough-spun shirt she was wearing between her legs. She had left the bow and looked sad to see it go. Teardrop used some thong to make a sling for his staff, but both he and Fachtna assured the others that they could swim fully clothed and in Fachtna’s case armoured, though both removed their boots.

The Atrebates marched out, their shield wall a little sparse as they only had the shields they had taken from the dead Corpse People. The Lochlannach stood between them and the water. At first it looked like the Cigfran Teulu would close in the usual style, but they then picked up the pace a little, though Fachtna dropped back and then stopped. The warband charged. As they did, they screamed the name of their dead king. Morfudd had reminded them of everything they had lost. She had told them how all those who had died by the hand of the invaders were watching them now from Annwn. She had reminded them that the Cigfran Teulu were not the pretend dead of the Corpse People; they were walking dead and the only thing left was the formality of actually dying. She told them that they did not have to care about their lives any more.

As they charged, many of them with wide smiles on their faces, few with any fear, their feet kicking up wet sand as they ran, they shifted direction to concentrate on the left flank of the Lochlannach line, as they looked at it. Because they were outnumbered, this meant that the Lochlannach could wheel around and hit them in the flank and eventually the rear, but that did not matter today.

He would need more matter. Fachtna felt the sand beneath his feet as his flesh grew roots and started sucking it in, cycling the sand through conduits in his flesh to the implanted assembler in his stomach. The assembler converted it at a molecular level to L-tech nanite-augmented flesh. He would only be able to handle the vast increase in mass and the large amounts of energy needed to sustain it and still move for a very short period of time. Already as he grew, his flesh warping and becoming monstrous, the heat bleeding from him was turning the sand around his feet to glass. The pain was becoming unbearable. That was the reason for the berserk fury. If not for the riasterthae frenzy, no warrior would be able to survive. He started to glow from within. Fortunately his armour was designed to shift with his warped riasterthae form and was able to deal with the extremes of temperature. His last action before the agony forced him to lose himself to the frenzy was to draw his rapidly oscillating thermal blade. His last thought was, Kill the giants .

The thing that was once Teardrop became aware of the glow first. He turned and saw what Fachtna had become. The warrior was huge now, a mountain of unsustainable muscle mass that glowed from within, contorted, no longer human, features that told of the agony of his flesh, steam shooting from a blow hole in his head. There was a look of horror on Teardrop’s face.

‘Too soon!’ he shouted. Britha turned and glanced behind her. She had a moment to see what Fachtna had become. The glance was not nearly long enough for her to understand.

The warband threw their casting spears at the last moment. Few hit their mark; that wasn’t the point. They aimed high, then, still running, swapped the longspears or swords that they had in their free hands into the hands they would wield them with just as they hit the Lochlannach line. The casting spears made the Lochlannach raise their shields high.

Morfudd led the charge. She closed only slightly ahead of the rest of her people. Her shield got her past the spear point on one side. She held her spear vertically and slid it down the spears on the other side, pushing them away from her. She kicked up the shield of the one she had hit. Couldn’t get her spear to bear, so she let go of it and dragged her sword out of its scabbard and opened up his chest. Her shield was stuck so she let go of it. She kicked out against the Lochlannach spearman in front of her, knocking him back into the second line. Since she had drunk the blood of the newcomers she had felt stronger, faster and more powerful than ever before. She held her sword two-handed, and as the already wounded Lochlannach was pushed back towards her, she cleaved him open with a cut from shoulder to hip. She then became furious that she could not get the corpse out of the way quickly enough to get at the second rank. The force of the charge had carried them forwards. Morfudd was standing in water now. She had not noticed.

It was hard not to get caught up in it. Inside her, the urge to disappear into the water and the burning in her blood that wanted to kill competed. Whispers from her spear – even now its haft was burning – agreed with the lust for violence that burned inside her.

She ran at the line, wet sand under her bare feet, the salt smell of the sea strong in her nostrils despite the stink from the wicker man, the screams and pleas of the captives now drowned out by battle cries and iron and wood meeting flesh and bone.