Nevertheless, if I’m prepared to go through with the necessary procedures, then the rules state I have that right
‘You can have the woman, Shaman,’ the captain coolly announces.
For the first time, Bjorn looks startled, furious even. He briefly but fruitlessly struggles to break free of the firm grip that the soldiers standing alongside have on his arms.
The woman might not have any real knowledge of what the captain’s order entails for her, but she’s sensible enough to recognise that it can’t be good; like Bjorn, she makes a vain attempt to struggle free of the soldiers who have dragged her down from her horse. The waggon’s driver is also shocked and horrified by the announcement, and although he isn’t being held by anyone when he first begins to protest, he’s soon brought down with a swift blow of a mailed fist to the back of his head.
I doubt if anyone isn’t startled by the captain’s decision to place the poor woman in the shaman’s hands. It’s one thing for a deserter to suffer the shaman’s journey, another entirely to inflict it upon a farmer’s wife.
The captain holds my eyes, daring me to protest.
This is a part of my punishment, to know that I’ll be responsible for the woman’s nightlong agony.
There’s no going back now, however.
As I withdraw my sword, a sign that I accept my task, the soldiers securing Bjorn force him to his knees before me. In the same motion, the gag is whipped clear of his mouth, in the hope that the cowardly deserter will humiliate himself further by screaming for mercy.
Bjorn doesn’t plead for mercy.
He glances up at me, grins his thanks.
‘Don’t fear the Hellhound, Heliq,’ he says brightly; then bows his head, waiting for my strike to his head.
I hesitate; just what did he mean by that?
That I’ll be facing hell for taking his life?
The life of my lover, perhaps even the father of any child already lying deep inside me.
Does this man really deserve to be the first victim of my blade?
‘Strike now, Heliq!’ the captain growls bitterly. ‘Or join him fully in his shame!’
I raise my sword.
I swiftly bring it down, as cleanly straight as I can manage.
Severing Bjorn’s head is much easier than I could possibly have imagined it to be.
*
Bjorn’s face is frozen into his familiar smile as his head rolls across the ground.
My face is stony by comparison. It would be shameful to shed a tear for him.
Naturally, I didn’t want to be the one that took his life; the whole act felt repugnant and wrong to me, despite this being an easier way out for Bjorn than the shaman would have allowed him.
And yet, physically the severing of his head was almost ridiculously effortless; as if, crazily, his head hadn’t even been properly attached in the first place.
That’s impossible, of course; not only was Bjorn walking, talking, but the shaman had carefully inspected him for any strange marks or wounds.
Around me now, there’s a bewildered, fearful mumbling rising up over the wailing of the bound woman.
‘What demonic trickery is this?’ the shaman furiously scowls.
I don’t know what he means at first.
And then I see what everyone else has already noticed.
There’s no blood.
*
Chapter 4
‘He was a good man!’
When the woman shrieks this out, I presume she’s referring to the wagon driver, whom I’ve taken to be her husband.
‘Why kill him?’ she demands. ‘He was helping us!’
She means Bjorn.
Why was Bjorn helping them?
‘All the more reason for him to die!’ gleefully cries out one of the higher ranking members of the scouts who had brought them in. ‘She’s an angel mother!’
Any pity that anyone might have felt for the woman immediately dissipates.
Now she suffers the jeering not only of the surrounding troops but even, too, of the villagers – many of whom must have known this couple if their farm lies nearby.
Where is this baby? I wonder, glancing apprehensively towards the wagon.
Still in there, no doubt,
Dead, now, of course.
Someone will have killed it as soon as they saw the tiny wings.
As we’re all under orders to do.
If Bjorn offered protection to these people and their demonic spawn, then I can only reason that he had given up any notion of loyalty to his people.
Of course, the parents (or rather, parent: the baby couldn’t possibly be her husband’s – and yet the cuckolded are so often fooled into accepting these cuckoos as their own) must have done all they could to hide any signs of wings, as we’re warned to look out for when coming across anyone with a baby.
Like us, the parents of any Angel babe are supposed to kill their child as soon as they realise he or she isn’t fully human. Even if the mother finds it hard to go through with this, the husband should surely delight in the task, rather than being willing to raise the child of an angelic father.
How many signs does a man need to know his wife has betrayed him?
Men have left for the wars, with their spouses only showing the usual symptoms of pregnancy almost a half year after his departure. The time the child spends in the womb is also remarkably unnatural, being a few months at most.
‘The demon child!’
One of the girls has either clambered into or through the covered wagon, dragging out the dead baby. She holds the corpse up high by the ankle, dangling it as unceremoniously as any butchered piglet.
There’s a rush forward to get a closer look at the angel child.
From a distance, it appears as pathetic and pitiful as any dead babe. Despite my revulsion, I also feel a need to draw closer, to see at least these wings we have heard so much about, for we have never been shown any examples.
The adult angels, the soldiers, rise up through the sky on wings of fire, we have been warned.
The bow and the arrow; these are the most effective weapons against them, we’re informed in our training.
And so I’m disappointed when I get up close to this minute little corpse and see not wings of fire at all but what could be the minute wings of a wren, only feathered with the snowy white flames of the most glorious of swans.
The wings don’t even sprout from the babe’s back, which seems as clear and regular as any another child’s. There’s a pair of wings on the ankle of the leg that swings loosely and awkwardly from the babe’s hip, another pair partially crushed beneath the hard grip of the solider.
There are two further pairs on the child’s wrists, quite beautiful in the way they sparkle in the light.
It’s a sight that can’t help but make me think of Bjorn’s heavily scarred and burnt wrists.
But he didn’t have wings on his ankles.
Did he?
*
My punishment for thwarting the shaman of his prized companion continues.
I’ve been set to guard the woman until it’s dark enough to go ahead with the procedures that will satisfactorily transform her into an underworld guide.
She’s serves as a constant reminder to me that her suffering will all, ultimately, be down to me.
If she spends all her time wailing, or begging for compassion, all the better, as far as my superiors are concerned.
It’s also a test; will I try and free her, demonstrating that I’m every bit as untrustworthy as Bjorn the deserter and traitor?
There’ll be other troops nearby, keeping a watch on me; my guards.
All trust in me has now evaporated.
The woman isn’t wailing. She’s not even weeping.
I think she’s accepted what’s about to happen to her, perhaps even regarding it as a fitting penalty for being unable to protect her child.
She’s not much older than I am.
At least she had a chil
d, even if it was a demonic one.
Me, I’ll be dead long before Bjorn’s demonic child begins taking form inside me.
That, of course, is all for the best. In so many ways.
Who was Bjorn really?
What was he?
Is it possible that his wrist scars hid the earlier removal of his wings?
Could he really have been an angel’s child?
If so, his parents never displayed any signs of suspecting it.
I never heard any tales of them trying to hide him away when he was first born; no tales of Bjorn’s family one day turning up unexpectedly in our village.
Besides, there were no stories at that time of angelic children being born to women. We weren’t even aware that angels were anything but kindly visitors, who appeared only rarely and then purely to the most fortunate of people.
Now, of course, there are countless women spawning demonic children. And the angels have been revealed to be a malignant force who wishes all humans dead.
Am I carrying a demonic child?
I’ll never know, thankfully.
‘You won’t die,’ the woman abruptly says to me, almost as if she has been listening to me, as if I’ve been blabbing out everything that’s nagging at my mind.
‘What? What do you mean?’
I should just order her to shut up; she’s my prisoner, after all.
‘Your friends: they will all die,’ she continues coolly. ‘But not you.’
I have to restrain my urge to draw my sword and kill her dead with one brutal slash.
Is that what she wants? Is she hoping to cause me such anguish and hate for her that I unintentionally spare her the shaman’s journey?
Hah! As if I’d be so stupid.
Then I’d be the shaman’s companion!
I won’t betray my friends!
I may have been foolish enough to become Bjorn’s lover; but that doesn’t make me him!
‘I can see you’re offended by what I said.’
‘You see too much,’ I growl cruelly. ‘And you’ll be seeing far more tonight than you had ever feared you’d see.’
‘I saw things when I was carrying Keris: my girl,’ the woman says with the first hint of sadness I’ve caught in her voice.
‘All pregnant women see things,’ I reply nonchalantly. ‘The child is newly arrived from the spirit world; they always bring to their mothers a brief sense of contact with that world.’
She shakes her head.
‘No, no; not just in that sense,’ she protests. ‘I mean, I saw that – eventually, and unstoppably – this will be the time of angels.’
I shrug.
‘We can’t stop them; it needs no insight to see such a world lying ahead of us.’
‘It’s for the best, though; that’s what I mean. It’s meant to be.’
‘I do believe the shaman has a worthy guide for his journey,’ I sneer irately, abruptly adding with even more bitterness than I’d intended, ‘Why did Bjorn help you?’
Now she’s the one who shrugs.
‘He was your man?’ she asks unsurely; perhaps being a little unsure after seeing me sever his head from his shoulders.
Has she deliberately avoided answering my question?
I’m more irritated by her than ever.
‘I wouldn’t betray him the way you betrayed your man, if that’s what you mean.’
I don’t want to say I was in love with Bjorn.
I’m definitely avoiding that.
‘Keris was my husband’s child.’
She says it flatly, as if she’s had to make this very same declaration countless times.
Perhaps her husband had initially had his doubts after all.
I chuckle, a guffaw that obviously says I don’t believe it.
‘I think I’d know if I’d lain with an angel, don’t you?’ she snaps back.
‘So, these angel babes; they’re just born like that, are they?’
‘Yes; it seems so. I’ve heard it said that there’s a phial of blood, taken from an angel long ago; and if someone slips it into your drink or food, it’s that that can cause you to have an angel child!’
‘And could she fly, your angel babe?’ I ask, a mingling of both sarcasm and curiosity in my voice.
‘Not that I know of; maybe she could have, though, if your friends had been so gracious as to let her live.’
‘Let her live to become another angel who can kill scores of us with their waterfalls of fire?’
‘What if she’d have fought for us: have you thought of that?’
No; I hadn’t.
‘Then – if we knew the angel children would fight for us, it could turn the tide.’
‘And yet it won’t; because I’ve seen it – the time of angels.’
‘Then we may as well kill them all just to be on the safe side, don’t you think?’
‘I don’t think we’re supposed to kill them; that’s what your man said, anyway.’
‘Why would he say that?’ I demand angrily. ‘He must have seen all his legion fall to the angels! How could he turn against us in this way?’
‘He said he had no choice; he’d knew, he said, that we were hiding an angel child–’
‘He knew? Had he seen the wings?’
She shakes her head.
‘No; it would have been impossible for him to see Keris’s wings – we were frightened as we saw him approaching. We saw he was a soldier; we knew they were under orders to kill any angel children.’
‘Then how would he know?’
‘He knew; he said he’d been sent to protect us.’
‘Sent to protect you?’
All this just gets crazier by the minute.
‘Yes, I know; it was hardly protection, was it? Allowing us to be captured, Keris to be murdered; but there were too many of them for him, I realise that now. At first, I was angry with him, with myself for trusting him. He simply said, “It’s meant to be” – and then I realised that yes, he was right, of course.’
‘Who sent him?’ I ask sternly.
‘The roebuck,’ she answers. ‘He said the roebuck had sent him.’
*
Chapter 5
When I ask what she means, the woman admits she has no idea what Bjorn meant by saying the roebuck sent him.
I’ve heard of animals who can converse with certain people, but I fail to see why Bjorn should be taking instructions from a tiny, docile deer.
‘So you’re not Heliq?’ she asks a little doubtfully.
‘Yes, I am Heliq.’
‘He said that if I found you, if he was killed, then I had to give you a message.’
‘A message?’ I snort dismissively. ‘He’s already given it to me!’
‘So you do know about the roebuck?’
Once again, she sounds unsure, a touch confused.
‘Of course not!’ I snap back. ‘Wasn’t that obvious to you? Why would I ask what he meant by the roebuck if I already knew the answer?’
‘He said you would know what it meant when the time was right.’
‘That was the message? That I’d somehow understand what it all meant at some point in the future?’
She shakes her head.
‘No; the message was that the roebuck hides the secret.’
I pause, trying to make sense of all these weird, apparently meaningless ‘messages’ Bjorn’s passing on to me. I mean, the way I’ve heard it, some strange beliefs hold that this incredibly small deer is this hangover from this incredibly ancient parent so many others are descended from; but why would that be called a secret?
Why would Bjorn suddenly start believing in such complete nonsense?
‘That was it?’ I ask the woman hopefully. ‘Nothing more?’
She shakes her head again.
I ask her if she knows how Bjorn had survived the battle in which the rest of his legion had died, wondering if he’d at least explained that to her.
He hadn’t.
She didn’t even
know that he’d been in a battle. He’d never mentioned it.
Perhaps he never had been in the battle.
Perhaps that’s how he survived it.
It would have been better for us all if he’d died, I think.
Then it would have been his spirit who came to me delivering any messages I needed to–
Wait!
‘Your girl; your Keris,’ I say, trying for perhaps the first time to grant my tone a suitable tenderness, ‘when she…I mean, did you see her spirit?’
The woman briefly pouts as she considers this.
Once more she shakes her head.
‘No; there wasn’t any spirit I can remember seeing.’ Strangely, she doesn't seem upset by this. ‘I don’t know why; perhaps angels are already of the sprit, yes?’
‘From what we've heard of our battle with the angels, no one’s seen their spirits rise up from the battlefield,’ I inform her morosely. ‘They’re demonic, obviously; only demons lack souls.’
I’m not being fair on this poor woman.
It’s not her child, or her anguish over her death, that I’m feeling so miserable about.
It’s just that, when I’d executed Bjorn, I’d been so involved in the horror of what I was having to do, so shocked by the lack of blood, that I’d failed to notice what should have immediately struck me as being odd.
There was no spirit.
No spirit rose up from Bjorn’s corpse, chastising me for killing him, for my betrayal.
Then he was an angel.
And that means if I am with child, then I’m carrying an angel child.
*
Now I think it would have been better for us all if Bjorn had died before we’d even met.
Why hadn’t his parents killed him when he was a babe, as all parents are supposed to do? Had his supposed father been fooled by his unfaithful wife into believing the babe could only be his?
Of course, we weren’t at war with the angels at that point. No one would have been sure they even existed in the malevolent form we now know them to take.
But the babe would have had wings, on his wrists, his ankles.
I see now that Bjorn had lied to me when he’d claimed that the scars on his wrists were the result of a test of bravery, of stoicism.
His parents must have hacked off the wings when he was still a babe, holding the no doubt screaming child’s hands over a flame to hide the true nature of the scars.
Only in that way could Bjorn have been raised as a normal child.