Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

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.

‘No.’ Sharp nails dug into flesh, drawing lines of red on weather-beaten skin. ‘No!’ Louder, more forceful. Those who were dead had lived and died well; they could not have asked more from life. The memories of them could not be stolen from her even if the demons came for her flesh. This was weakness, self-pity. She still had responsibilities. Some of her people were still alive. She could fight the Lochlannach. She was the only one who could. She needed to find a way for others to do the same.

Britha stood on the shore and watched the fire arrows arc into the night air on the other side of the Tatha. In flight they were mirrored in the black glass of the river before studding the demon curraghs with points of orange and red light. It was a good plan but she knew it would not work. She watched the Fib villages all along the river’s north shore burn.

Then because she did not feel tired she turned to the west and started walking. She walked all night, tireless, no pain in her muscles or her feet despite a steady, fast pace.

She passed the black rock on the shore of the Tatha. In the distance she could see the hill fort. The height it sat on was just known simply as the hill. It would be locked up tight but only the younger children and the older landsmen and -women would be there. They were Cirig – their clan elders owed fealty to Cruibne – and all of the elders had been at the feast with their warriors and would have died on the red beach.

Beyond the hill fort were the Sidhe Hills, where the fair folk slept in their mounds and her people chose not to go. Best to leave the Otherworld alone. What if it would not leave you alone? she wondered.

In the woods just west of the black rock she met some of the older children from the fort. They had chosen to go out scouting. She told them to return to the fort and that if they saw the black ships land on this side of the river they were to flee, with everyone, carrying the old if they had to, into the north and stay away from the coast and the wider rivers. They knew her – she had delivered some of them – and would listen and do as she asked.

Watch fires on either side of the river flickered into red life, Cirig and Fib alike warning of the black ships. Still she headed west. She was sure that Bress would take his people raiding as far up the Tatha as they could get where there were still villages and settlements worth raiding. This time she wouldn’t hesitate. She would kill him and that monster, Ettin, as well.

Under the wooded grey cliff-lined hills to the west, the Tatha narrowed considerably and there was an island in the middle. Britha tied her robe around her. She had taken as much food as she could carry – oatmeal, heath pea, salted meat, anything that wouldn’t spoil quickly – and wrapped it in hide sacks. She tied the sacks and the horseshoe fungus carrying the embers of her hearth fire to the end of her spear and waded into the cold river.

She had taken off her fur leggings. Barefoot she was better able to grasp the smooth stones on the riverbed with her toes. Even so, halfway across, when the water was over her stomach, she began to feel as if she had made a mistake. The sacks of food tied to the end of her spear threatened to unbalance her. She managed to compensate and then slipped, going down on one knee. The fast-moving current nearly tore her off her feet. She fought to hold on to the spear, dipping the sacks slightly in the water but regaining her balance. Eventually she managed to stagger to her feet and take another step, knowing that if it got any deeper she would have to ditch her food and spear and swim for it. But the water got shallower.