Only in that way could I have been fooled into making love with him, and risk carrying his demonic child.
I’ve plenty of time to consider my foolishness as I patrol the edges of the village.
It’s supposed to be a part of my continuing punishment for bringing so much shame on our troop. I’m being denied the right to attend the ritual that sends the shaman on his journey.
I regard it as a blessing.
I’m hardly likely to be surprised by a night time attack of the angels.
Yes, they can see in the dark, I’ve been reliably informed. They can swoop out of the night as silently as any bird, swiftly killing any sentry before he or she is even aware of what is happening.
But it seems that our enemy have realised they cannot surprise us so easily. For anyone on a punishment detail remains on duty even when they are dead.
You have to report an attack, rather than heading home to say your last goodbyes to your loved ones; any refusal to perform your duty resulting in being forever shunned in the afterlife.
When the shaman’s journey starts, I can hear the poor woman’s screams of agony even out here.
*
Chapter 6
The shaman will be disappointed by the woman’s shrieks.
He believed he had a valuable prize in Bjorn.
I couldn’t fail to notice that he had delighted in the way Bjorn remained silent despite the vicious kicks and blows being delivered his way. That’s why he had checked that Bjorn still had his tongue; he couldn't believe his good fortune that he’d been granted this gift – as if that itself were an auspicious sign from the gods.
The screams of the living only unnerve the dead, for they fear trickery.
That is why the guide’s tongue will be spliced later; to show the dead that the travellers mean them no harm – that they have no intention of speaking any evil charms.
Besides, screaming is a waste of valuable energy that would be better utilised ensuring a longer and deeper journey into the underworld.
The shaman’s young apprentice tasked with administering the carefully placed cuts and probing incisions to the chosen guide is supposed to help keep that waste of energy to a minimum by working swiftly and efficiently, moving on from one to another slicing of flesh while the person is still in shock from the earlier wounds.
If this proves too difficult, the subject being too prone to suffering pain, then it is permissible to tighten a cord around the neck to choke off the shrieks if they continue for too long throughout the journey.
The woman’s screeching is particularly intense, every bit as unnerving for the living as it is for the dead.
If I give birth to Bjorn’s spawn, could a similar fate await me?
Why hadn’t Bjorn protected this woman and her child as he had promised he would?
He’d made no attempt to fight off our scouts, or even outrun them, from what I’d heard.
A coward in every way, then.
Perhaps he would, after all, have squealed far louder than even this unfortunate woman.
Perhaps I spared him the shame of that.
But what of my own gutless actions – or, rather, the lack of any honourable act?
I should have killed the poor woman to spare her all this pain.
Then her pain would have been mine.
But at least I could call myself a warrior, as opposed to being this empty, spineless shell I feel I’ve become.
*
The darkness of the night suddenly, strangely, seems almost touchable, almost suffocating in its abrupt solidity.
And yet it’s not really the darkness itself that’s changed; it’s just no longer being torn apart by the woman’s piercing screams.
It’s all, now, just a solid, worrying silence.
I’ve never known of any shaman’s journey that has ended so abruptly.
The cry hasn’t been choked off; the travellers have had little chance to have journeyed far.
That can only mean that the poor woman’s body has given up the ghost.
The shaman will be more furious with me than ever. He’ll insist that I’m assigned to the Forlorn Hope.
That’s probably for the best; the sooner I die, the less chance there is that I have to acknowledge I’m carrying Bjorn’s demonic offspring.
Even so, I almost shiver with relief when the wailing starts up again.
Or is just an awareness of the deeply penetrating chill that’s struck me?
This is a different kind of screeching; it’s one of fear, not pain.
There is a difference, believe me.
Gibbering, startled – frenzied.
It’s a sound of fear that rapidly spreads, remarkably contagious in its effects.
There are more murmurs and shrieks, the villagers who had curiously gathered to watch the shaman setting out on his journey immediately afflicted by the fearful cries, caught up in the rhythms of the clamour, of the waves of dread.
This is no usual journey.
I’m briefly tempted to abandon my post, to check that nothing untoward is happening to those gathered in the village’s centre.
But if I do that, I’d have to count myself lucky to last as long as receiving an appointment to the Forlorn Hope.
*
I swear that the anguished cry for help must have been heard miles out into the surrounding wilderness.
A male cry; the shaman. It has to be.
Something has gone badly wrong with his journey into the underworld.
The night-rending shriek comes just as my relief shows up to replace me, the expression on her face one of bewilderment, maybe even fear of the unknown, the unexpected.
With a nod of recognition to her, I leap down from my post on the small hill, rushing down past her as I sprint towards the centre of the village.
I feel at least partially responsible for whatever’s happening down in the village, for I was the one who denied the shaman Bjorn, I was the one who effectively condemned the woman to take his place.
But what can have gone wrong?
Is it anything to do with the angel child?
The demonic babe?
Is the mother infected in some way by the birth, perhaps?
And, if so, what awaits me if I’m wrong about all the dates – who really knows, anyway, about angel babe term times? – and I’ve fallen pregnant?
*
Far from being in a peaceful trance, the shaman appears to be having the worst nightmare anyone has ever experienced.
He’s not only shrieking in fright, but also frenziedly thrashing around, going through the motions of attempting to run, or to shield himself from attacks.
The poor woman’s tortured body lies alongside him.
Unlike Bjorn’s death, here there’s plenty of blood.
Blood drenching the slight shift she’s wearing.
Blood seeping from countless wounds and incisions.
The shaman’s apprentice, a young girl being raised to eventually take his place, appears so distraught she’s suffering an uncontrollable panic, tearing at her own hair as she kneels weeping upon the floor.
Thankfully, the woman’s husband isn’t here to see what his poor wife has been put through. There have been occasions when the woman’s partner has been forced to watch, as punishment for believing his wife’s protestations that the demonic child was his.
As it is, he can’t have failed to have heard her screams, unless he’s been specially sedated rather than simply tightly bound to stop him running amok.
The villagers who had gathered to watch the ritual have fled back to their houses, yet I can still hear the odd terrified shriek, the nervous cries of ‘Who’s there?’ out into the darkness, as their imaginations now see devils and the unaccepting dead in every change of shadow.
Yet there are even many amongst my troop whose veneer of bravery has at last deserted them, revealing the petrified child so long veiled beneath.
There are few of them older than seven
teen.
Even those with the stoniest of faces finally break, however, when the woman’s body begins to quiver, to float up in the air – and then abruptly shatter and dissipate in an earthen-dark cloud, as if it had never been anything more than a charcoaled cocoon.
*
Chapter 7
I’m not in the village anymore.
The landscape is only vaguely familiar, being one of dark, thickly wooded forest, much as I might have seen surrounding my home village. (Not that I would ever have been foolish enough to walk in to it unaccompanied, of course).
Worse still, it’s how the forest looks on a night when there’s a bright, low moon; it’s devoid of colour, an almost sheer blackness where form is picked out in sparkling silvered edges, granting it all a sense of being somehow inverted, or switched, as if shadows have been flipped on to the wrong side.
We have a poem, a form of a riddle, for such a forest:
darker still
than night
grows silently
its shifting veiled
expanding by degrees
straggly youths
observed by looming ancients
A well-trodden track carves its way through the dense wickerwork of branches and twigs, like a tunnel hacked from a dark cliff face.
Despite the otherwise impassable nature of the forest, people wander freely through it, as if it were all nothing more than the darkness of the night sky.
Some of them warily glance my way, their eyes white and suspicious.
They could be heading out into the fields to farm, or walking to market, a few of the young ones driving before them what I at first believe are none existent geese or pigs until I begin to catch their faint glimmer in the odd slivers of light. The hay they scythe and collect, though, along with the carts they load it into, are either invisible to my eyes, or simply some figment of their imagination.
There are warriors too, many mounted, their horses more substantial than the farm stock, their lances and shields held haphazardly, warily, as if returning from a hard-fought battle.
Like the forest, they lack the brighter colours of the real world, everything muted as if seen in a badly flickering candlelight on a night.
Unlike these freely flowing people, the only route I can take is along the beaten track, and even here I have to duck and weave to avoid the more wayward branches that attempt to harshly scrape at my flesh, as if they recognise it as being something wholly alien that I need to discard to be a part of this landscape.
It briefly seemed a silent landscape to me, until I begin to catch the odd sounds familiar to any village life, but like the colours muted, only this time as if after a deep snowfall.
I’ve never seen so many dead in one place before. I’ve never seen any dead animals until now.
But these don’t act like the dead I’ve become used to seeing; the dead who walk along blank faced, their task only to reach home, a loved one. These, on the other hand, go about the tasks they probably fulfilled while alive, as if they’ve created a whole new existence here.
What of the insects?
Are there wraith equivalents of spiders, flies, moths?
Not that I can see.
But there’s one thing I can see perfectly clearly now; Bjorn was a born liar.
*
He’d once fooled me – yes, I see that now, and yet I was foolish enough to trust him at the time – into believing he’d once made a short journey into the underworld.
It wasn’t an intentional journey, of course.
A small troop of his legion out on patrol had found themselves in one of the violent disputes that often flare up between the living and the dead; usually over claims by the dead that we’re encroaching on land they regard as theirs.
Naturally, battle with a troop of the dead is something to be avoided, at all costs; and yet sometimes, as in this case (and I do know that this part of Bjorn’s tale is true!), the living can find themselves being ridden down upon before they're even aware that anything is amiss,
The dead, of course, move silently, even when mounted, and moving in a mass formation.
Even a graze from a weapon of the dead is – well, deadly.
which lance of the dead
that penetrates as if a cold wind
and putrefies flesh with its distasteful breath
is not feared?
And yet, the way Bjorn had it, he’d miraculously survived such a blow, the lance sinking deeply into the flesh of his arm.
Yes, he’d assured me; it feels so incredibly cold, so sickeningly damp – the first touches of death, readying to claim you as one of its own.
And when you are dead, some would have it, you’re immediately expected to take the side of your new friends, fighting against the old, ensuring that evermore of the living can join the ranks of the dead.
Bjorn reassured me that he never witnessed this.
Rather, the dead rose from their bodies and blankly headed for home, as they do in the midst of any regular battle.
After he’d been struck, however, he found himself in the world of the dead.
But it wasn’t a world like the one I find myself in now that he’d described; the dark forests were there, yes, but they were on the edges of rolling hills and more pleasant areas of woodland.
And the animals, well – in Bjorn’s fairytale, they’d talked of course!
Within the thicket, he’d come across a lapwing, one bravely attempting to lead him away from her secreted nest by feigning injury.
the eggs of the hare
a strange thing to see
the deceit of the lapwing
a fertility goddess’s shifting of shapes
Knowing of the ways of the lapwing, of course, Bjorn had peered into the thicket.
And there he had seen the nest, with a hare perched comfortably upon the eggs.
‘The lapwing veils the secret,’ the hare had said – and then before Bjorn could hear anymore, he had found himself back within his own feverishly suffering body.
*
The fever was all Bjorn had suffered from this wound inflicted by the lance of the dead warrior.
Oh, of course, he had a scar there, supposedly where the lance head had so deeply penetrated his arm; and yet, now I think back on it, it was only the most minor of scarring – nothing like as bad as I’ve seen people wearing after supposedly more trivial injuries.
That was how Bjorn had ‘survived’ his battle with the dead, he had claimed.
He’d simply been left for dead, but had recovered in his own good time.
Hah!
What a fool I’d been to believe his nonsense!
What a fool I’ve been not to see that he was still laughing at me as I’d prepared to take off his lying head!
All this roebuck hiding the secret!
It was all just his sad, malicious joke, wasn’t it?
Reminding me how he’d fooled me into believing his tale of the lapwing and this talking hare.
Even now, though, I want to believe him; if only so I can reassure myself I wasn’t such a complete fool, after all!
I look towards these animals being herded everywhere about me, hoping I can pick up even the faintest sounds that could be interpreted as chatter, as conversation – but of course, there are no such sounds.
There’s just the muted clacking of geese, the oinks of pigs, the odd bark of an excited dog.
As I glance quickly about me, once again attempting to take in as many details as I can of this strange world, I see someone I vaguely recognise.
The woman; the woman I’ve just seen die, whose body disintegrated into nothing but a cloud of dust.
She doesn’t look like the woman, of course; I just somehow know it’s her.
She’s with someone; a young girl she’s tightly, warmly embracing.
A young girl with wings on her wrists.
*
Chapter 8
Even as the mother
and her child happily embrace each other, the girl is growing, maturing.
The most glorious of swan-white wings are bourgeoning from her back. They unfold, spreading, as a butterfly unfolds its wings when newly emerged from its chrysalis.
The wings tremble, fluttering in the wind as the feathers dry, taking on as they do a sense of being so many white flames.
Then, with an effortless flap of those great wings, and still holding her mother tightly about the waist, the angel begins to rise up from the ground, passing through the thicket of dark trees as if they are nothing more than a black cloud.
As they rise, some of the people working around them at last seem to have been made aware of their presence. They stare at the gracefully rising couple, the wings fluttering about them now seemingly more numerous than I had at first realised. The people gawp at the rising of the angelic couple as one might gawp at the abrupt arrival of a popular god.
And yet their eyes, it seems to me, are full not of just awe but also envy, resentment, bitterness. Some of them even rush forward, reaching up to grab at the ankles of the departing pair; and whether that’s to drag them back down to earth, or in the hope of rising up with them, I can’t be sure.
The woman and her angelic child soar silently up through the night, eventually becoming little more than the sparkling glitter of a falling star in reverse.
And yet there are no glimmering stars immediately around them, no shimmering stars hanging high above them even.
For their intended destination is a darkly forbidding planet, one so huge and so close to us that it completely dominates the night sky.
*
Why has no one ever seen an angel’s sprit before?
Why have we never heard any reports of them rising up from the bodies of their dead on the battlefield?
Did the shaman witness this?
Where is the shaman? Has he already set off back to our world? Has he already awoken from his trance?
Questions, questions, questions!
Wasn’t the whole point of visiting this underworld to seek answers?
(Another question!)