The Book of the Emissaries: An Animism Short Fiction Anthology Read online

  Penarddun spoke quietly, but urgently. “My lord, do not do this. No man can hold such power in his hands and give it back.”

  “Only one who is true of heart can pick it up,” I said. “You didn’t think I’d grant my powers to just anyone, did you?”

  Caratacus ran his hand through his hair and then licked his lips. “This thing makes you into a god?” He stepped towards it and a bolt of lightning leapt from the mask to his outstretched fingertips. He yelped and stuffed them into his armpits. “Well, that wasn’t very friendly.”

  Brennan crossed his arms. “Magic trinkets are well and good, but what do we do now?”

  “We wait,” I said. “Perhaps some other fate will befall Hox the Younger before he can even approach the island.”

  But no other fate befell him. Instead, he grew steadily closer, gathering warriors to him like flies to manure. Soon his armies outnumbered every man, woman, and child in Brodgar.

  One day our fisherfolk, who sailed the Pentland of Ferth and pulled cod and skate from the ocean with nets of woven grass, looked to the opposite shore and saw men moving between the trees. Some were dressed in the pelts of animals – wolves, bears, badgers – and their exposed skin was smeared with bear fat and chalk for warmth. They looked like pale ghosts in the trees. Weird calls were shouted towards the fishermen and they quickly brought in their nets and sailed back to safety. Behind them, Hox’s men began to hew down trees with primitive stone tools and fashion them into rafts. All the while their numbers swelled. Soon there were no trees on the opposite bank – only a forest of men.

  I sent a great storm against them the night they crossed the Ferth, and many drowned. Our armies spread out along the beach and stabbed at the Younger Men as they emerged from the ocean. But even a half-drowned rat still bites, and many of my soldiers went to their graves with a surprised look on their faces as men they thought dead rose out of the waves and hacked them to pieces, or dragged them screaming back into the Ferth.

  The sun rose on a scene of utter carnage. The ocean was thick with bodies and the beach red with blood, but the standard of the Younger Men had been planted in a pile of dead and bloated bodies – a circle surrounding two downwards pointing spikes on a field of red. It was an open maw with fangs.

  That afternoon, the Younger Men dragged their remaining rafts ashore and used the wood to build huge bonfires on the beach. They gathered up the dead on both sides and butchered them with quiet efficiency. They skinned them, tossing the pelts in piles near the fire to dry, and then began to harden the bones in the fire so that they could fashion blades out of them. When their work was done, warriors knelt in rows on the beach and drank the blood and ate the cooked meat of their fallen brethren, and every man in Orkney knew they were doomed.

  My advisors met me on the high cliffs above the beach. Brennan spoke first. He had joined the troops below but had been stationed in the rear guard and had ordered the withdrawal before seeing combat. “What good is a god if you can’t wave your fingers and throw the Younger Men back into the sea?”

  “What good is armour if you can’t wade into battle without being killed?” I asked.

  Brennan reddened, but said nothing.

  “Orkney might be rich in people,” Ina offered, “but not in the things the Younger Men seek. We have no metal, no weapons, and our land is small. Why have they crossed the Ferth to attack us?”

  “We have cattle,” said Brennan recovering himself, “six hundred head would feed that lot for months.”

  I didn’t point out that transporting that much meat back across the Ferth was an impossible task for a group as savage as the Younger Men.

  “Why can you not make it rain fire on our enemies, my lord?” asked Penarddun quietly.

  It was an awkward question. “It would not be beyond my power,” I admitted. “But if I did so, then Wetiko would be free to unleash his power as well, and the resulting battle between us would claim many more lives. The storm I called was a lesser magic. There was a chance it would have arisen anyways. I simply adjusted the odds that it would.”

  If thought that would satisfy the priest, I was wrong. “But Wetiko would not immediately retaliate?”

  “Perhaps not, but he would eventually. Better that some lives be lost here that many more might be saved later on.”

  “But they are our lives,” he said quietly.

  I grew angry then. I had not expected Penarddun of all people to be so short sighted. “You cannot understand,” I said, struggling to master my anger. “Go back to the Ness and kneel before the altar. Do not return until you understand the nature of sacrifice for the greater good.”

  Penarddun bowed and left the circle of torchlight.

  Caratacus broke the silence that grew up around the priest’s departure. “Priests, eh? They’re a strange bunch.”

  Brennan glared daggers at him, but Ina’s lips curled into a smile.

  “I believe the time has come for Hox and I to meet face-to-face,” I said. “He serves a god I know well, and that god’s Emissaries will sometimes betray their master if they are offered the right incentive.”

  Wetiko must have been busy in some other part of the world – if he had been with the Younger Men, he would have been at the battle on the beach. I did not need my mask for now. I could look upon Hox with my own eyes and take his measure. The decision to bring my advisors with me was a petty one – they had not fought with their people and I wanted them to get a taste of the same fear our soldiers felt.

  We clambered down the cliffs towards the beach. There we were met by several darkly-bearded men whose faces were covered in soot and blood, despite their recent swim across the Ferth. They didn’t bother searching us for weapons – what use was a blade when we were surrounded by a thousand Younger Men? The thought that we might be there to assassinate Hox never entered their minds – a sign of the near fanatical hold he had over them.

  As we were led through the camp, warriors gathered around the bonfires to hoot at us like baboons and throw their offal at us. Ina took the abuse gracefully and her serenity made her a boring target for the Younger Men. Only Brennan seemed to engage them, snatching at a hurled bone and throwing it back. Hox’s men merely laughed and called out more names in their alien, guttural tongue.

  There were flies and other biting insects everywhere and great swarms of them would leap off some piece of meat and settle back after we had passed. Wetiko’s totems – a circle made from yew upon which boar tusks had been lashed to form an overbite – had been erected at the centre of nearly every group of warriors.

  Hox’s tent was made from leather whose fine layer of dark hair and occasional blemish told us it was human skin. On the ground all around it, the Younger Men had scattered sharp bones and fragments of meat, and we were made to remove our shoes and cross it barefoot. While my companions picked their way through the bone fragments, their eyes fixed to the ground, I crossed with my head up, ignoring the painful fragments, and so I was the first to see Hox emerge from his tent.

  I was surprised to discover that he was nothing more than a boy, twelve summers old at best, with sunburnt cheeks and peeling skin. He stood no higher than my shoulder – only chest height to Caratacus. Though he dressed in leather and bone like the rest of the Younger Men, he wore no shoes and crossed the clearing of bone fragments without so much as a grimace of pain. He regarded us with eyes the colour of Arctic ice, arms crossed over the scrawny chest of a child.

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “You know why,” barked Brennan. “We’d like you to take your army back across the Ferth and leave us in peace.”

  Hox’s gaze never left me. “I can have him whipped for you, if you’d like.”

  Brennan reddened and several of the Younger Men moved closer to him in case he lunged at Hox.

  “I don’t need you to control my men for me,” I said. “Besides, in this case he speaks for me. There is no need for further bloodshed. Take what you want from our lands and go. L
eave my people be.”

  This provoked a round of laughter from Hox’s warriors. He glanced at them with a knowing smirk and then snapped his fingers. Several men emerged from the crowd bearing a large wooden cage lashed together with hemp. Others brought a totem like the one we’d seen before. One of the warriors knelt and used a sharp rock to beat a hole in the ground into which he put the base of the totem, and then used several more stones to keep it upright. The others placed the cage directly in front of the totem and then backed away. Something moved inside it. Flashes of ivory and brown mud-plastered fur told me it was a boar. Dilated pupils and spittle dripping from its jaws told me it was angry and afraid.

  “My god,” said Hox, “desires only one thing. Allow me to demonstrate.”

  He quickly drew an obsidian blade from his belt and opened the cage. He hesitated only a moment as the boar’s maw whipped around in search of something to bite, then he slid his arm under its neck and yanked upwards. It was a display of strength I could not have expected from a small boy. With his other arm he drew the obsidian blade across its neck, sawing once, twice for depth. A torrent of blood splattered on the ground. Above him, the open maw of the Wetiko totem began to flicker with blue lightning. More lightning danced around the obsidian blade as it stabbed down again and again into the hide of the boar, and that energy spread all across the skin of the animal. I became aware of a low howl, almost beneath the range of human hearing. Of my advisors, only Caratacus, the youngest, seemed to feel it. He shuffled uneasily from foot to foot. The smell of flesh filled the air – not the welcoming scent of cooked pork, but rather something fouler, wet and rotten, that emanated from Wetiko’s maw itself. Finally, a blue copy of the animal’s physical form tore free from the boar and flew into the maw where it was consumed.

  I heard Ina gasp behind me. The implication was clear. If the Younger Men conquered the men and women of Orkney, this was the fate that awaited them.

  Hox let the now-lifeless corpse fall to the ground. “My god is a hungry god,” he said, smearing blood onto his naked chest and sides. “Take this totem and place it in the centre of your city. Tomorrow, you are to sacrifice your high priest to it. The day after, the youngest babe in your city. After that, we shall see.”

  Brennan carried the totem as we left the camp. Ina walked ahead of us, more eager than the others to leave the Younger Men behind, perhaps because, despite her age, the warriors called out to her and made lewd gestures.

  Caratacus, the likeable idiot, walked beside me. “At least you’ve never asked for a human sacrifice,” he said with a shrug, surprising me. Perhaps he wasn’t an idiot after all. As he spoke, he frowned and then pinched the skin of his left arm.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Killing mosquitoes,” he answered. “I used to swat them, but that was too good for the little buggers. Jakob showed me a trick that is much more satisfying. If you wait until the mosquito bites and then pinch the skin around where it draws blood, it is unable to withdraw its stinger. It keeps eating until eventually it pops.”

  He showed me a blot of blood and insect parts on his forearm. Fascinated, I looked up, focussing for the first time on the swarm of biting bugs that surrounded us. They had no interest in me, of course. They knew that no earthly blood coursed through my veins.

  “Show me again,” I asked, using the smallest touch of power to guide one down to his outstretched forearm.

  “It’s simple really. The little buggers can’t close their mouths, so my blood fills ‘em to overflowing. When they can’t handle no more, they pop.” Caratacus once again waited until the mosquito had inserted its proboscis and then trapped it. Blood distended its abdomen until it twitched and ripped open. Two more spasms rocked its small body and then it lay still in a pool of his blood.

  My mind churned as we ascended the cliff. At my command, Brennan ordered the retreat and the men and women of Orkney left the beaches and headed back to Brodgar, the shouts and taunts of the Younger Men following close behind them.

  Defences had already been erected in the Stone City when we arrived. Though my people knew little of warcraft, their greatest thinkers had devised stone ramparts to hide behind, and had amassed huge piles of stone pebbles to use as ammunition for leather slingshots. Herds of cattle and sheep, hundreds strong, had been brought close to the city to serve the dual purpose of protecting them from the Younger Men and feeding the city should the need arise.

  I asked Brennan to oversee the raising of Wetiko’s totem just as Hox had demanded. Then I commanded my people to spread out into the fields surrounding Brodgar and await my command.

  Brennan found me at dawn as the Younger Men came upon the city. A host of savages painted with the blood of their enemies hoisted a sea of pagan totems above their heads. Our own totem had been erected on the village green in the shadow of the great Ness. Caratacus held a docile bull by a length of hemp nearby. A stone spear lay on a platform within easy reach.

  Hox and three of his largest men emerged from the ranks of the Younger Men and approached the gate. Though he was still barefoot, the child warrior wore the mantle of a chieftain – a cape made from wolf pelt and bangles of beaten silver.

  “Have you decided to throw yourself on the mercy of Wetiko?” he asked, his eyes quickly finding the totem we’d erected. The round maw seemed to scream back in the direction of his army.

  “We won’t sacrifice ourselves to your god, boy,” said Brennan.

  One of his bodyguards made to cuff him for the crime of calling Hox what he was, but the boy-chief waved him off, instead striding past the herder. Most of those who had remained in Brodgar retreated before him, but some remained. Here was a bare-chested boy leading an army of the fiercest savages ever to come to the Isles. Such a sight would be rare in two lifetimes.

  Hox came to the totem and sneered at Caratacus and his bull. “It is a good offering, but not the one that Wetiko hungers for. It won’t save you.”

  “I don’t think he’ll reject it,” I mused. “Wetiko is a hungry god, and the bull will feed that hunger.” I nodded at Caratacus, and he dropped the rope. Unprovoked, the docile animal remained where it was while he picked up the stone spear and stabbed it into the base of the bull’s neck. Too late, the animal bellowed and tossed its head backwards as if to dislodge the spear. Then its legs collapsed all at once.

  Lightning began to flicker around the corpse. Within seconds a ghostly blue image of the beast was yanked out of its body and devoured by the totem.

  “Very good, but I don’t see – ” Hox began.

  “Give the signal!” I commanded. In nearby houses village youths began to pile green wood and leaves on cook fires and the smoke billowing out turned black.

  Suddenly more lightning began to flicker around the mouth of Wetiko’s totem and a bolt of blue light shot past us and was devoured. Another flew by. And another.

  “What is happening?” asked Hox, stunned.

  “You might want to move back,” I said, barely hiding a smile. In the fields all around Brodgar, six hundred head of cattle were being slaughtered. Like the mosquito, Wetiko the Devourer could not close his mouth.

  More blue light flashed by until Caratacus and the others had to shield their eyes or risk being blinded. The sound was like oil thrown into boiling water and the smell of ozone filled the air. Suddenly fire and thunder rolled towards us, picking me up and throwing me down to the ground. Hard.

  More shockwaves followed, this time from farther away as each of Wetiko’s totems overloaded and exploded. Packed together in formation, the Younger Men could not escape and were torn to bits by the repeated shock waves. Like Caratacus’s mosquito, Wetiko had overeaten and burst.

  Nothing remained of Hox or his bodyguard but a pile of torn meat. Wetiko had been too full to swallow His agent but, enraged by failure, He had chewed him up and spat him back out.

  The death toll among the Younger Men was staggering. Where there had once been an army, only a few remained. Some w
ailed and tore at their eyes and ears as if they’d been struck blind and deaf, while others simply grabbed what supplies they could and ran for the Ferth.

  Flush with victory, I sought out Penarddun in the Cathedral to release him from my punishment. But he wasn’t there. Neither was the mask.

  We buried the dead over the next few weeks, butchered whatever we could from the sacrificed cattle, and threw an enormous victory feast. The villagers brought me gifts, but my mind was elsewhere.

  “My lord?” asked Brennan. “Ninian offers you a statue carved from whalebone.”

  The woman who stood before my throne in the Ness had painted holy triangles on herself with chalk and whale fat and had woven fragments of sea shells into her hair. She held in her hands an intricately carved bird of prey rising from a mountain top. Whale bone was itself expensive – the statue was worth far more than the jewellery in her hair and her use of chalk marked her as a member of the poorer class. One of Caratacus’s people.

  “I need to go.” I rose and the woman below me stepped back in surprise. “Please accept my apologies.”

  I turned and descended the steps of the dais where my throne sat and passed the bonfire. A hundred pairs of eyes followed me as I left the cathedral with Brennan close behind. I felt them on me, knowing that they saw me differently now. As a lesser being. The loss of the mask had robbed me of my divinity. I was no longer the god they once knew.

  “I’ll tell them you’ll be available to accept their gifts tomorrow,” he said.

  “No.” I could not understand how Penarddun had stolen the mask. It could only be picked up by one who was pure of heart. That alone should have made the theft impossible. “When I said I needed to go, I didn’t mean that I needed to leave the festivities. I meant that I need to leave Orkney.”

  “Why?” asked Brennan in confusion.

  “Wetiko is a hungry god, but not a stupid one,” I said. “We won’t defeat Him the same way again. I need to hunt down my former high priest and reclaim my power so that I can defend us against the next group of warriors Wetiko sends. When I have found Penarddun, I will return.”