A Quantum Mythology (8 page)

‘Has anything weird ever happened to you?’ Vic asked, mindful of what Scab had told him to do. He felt more exasperation over the experiential ’face link Scab had downloaded into Vic’s neunonics.

Talia pulled away from him and stared at him as if he was mad. ‘No, this is
perfectly
fucking normal! All the girls in Bradford curl up with a giant insect and watch starless space of a Saturday night!’

‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’ Vic said in frustration. He got the feeling she was making this more difficult than it had to be. ‘I don’t know what’s normal for you. We have a queen, workers and warriors, and that’s it. I grew up in a hive. Humans have, like, five sexes alone, and every one of them is different, and weird, and really fucking difficult!’

‘Five sexes? Really?’

‘Some of them are fashion genders.’

‘In my day we had two, maybe three, max.’

‘I’m sorry I can’t relate to you.’

‘Look, this sea of fucking weirdness … I mean, there are no aliens, only uplifts …’ She gestured at him. ‘And you’re hitting on me. It’s just … everything’s been so weird, for so long, and it’s not going to get better, is it? Because you’re planning to sell me.’

‘I’m not,’ Vic told her. ‘If I could, I’d send you back to your own life, but I can’t.’

‘So you’ll be nice to me? We can be friends, right?’ She cocked her head to one side in a way that Vic found very attractive. Every bit of facial and voice-analysis software he had was telling him he was being manipulated. He didn’t care.

‘Yes.’

‘And you’ll protect me from him?’

‘I can’t.’

‘But you’re like a giant insect killing machine, aren’t you?’ she asked. The manipulation was gone. This was desperation.

‘You don’t understand …’ Vic was growing less and less sure of the benefits of his human psychosurgery as time went by. He was becoming more intimate with shame than he really wanted to be.

Ask her how the weirdness started
, Scab ’faced to him.

‘How did the weirdness start?’ Vic asked.

‘Why do you want to know?’ Talia demanded suspiciously. ‘You’re communicating with him somehow, aren’t you?’

‘What? How’d you—’

‘I’ve seen you do it before … Oh, Christ, he heard me, he’s going to fucking kill me …’ She was so terrified that Vic thought she was about to be sick. ‘You fucking bastard!’

‘Look, that’s not what he cares about. Please, just answer me.’

‘I’ve always known I was different, special …’

The first thing that stood out, not her feelings.
Vic didn’t like the sense of impatience he was picking up from Scab’s ’face.

‘Something specific.’

‘I was held by some sick crime boss—’

‘Why?’

‘Something happened. We were bloodletting. I was with a boy. Others had said my blood was odd. He drank some and … something happened.’ She shook her head violently. ‘I don’t … I can’t think about it … I don’t know. Please don’t make me think about this.’ She was pleading now. ‘Something terrible happened to him … oh, god, I can’t even remember his name.’

Was he a blank?
Scab demanded in Vic’s head. It sounded like an odd question to the ’sect.

‘Was he a blank?’

‘What?’

Vic searched around for a way to explain it. ‘Was he biologically entangled with you?’

‘Of course – we were fucking.’

Vic tried to ignore the pang of jealousy. ‘No, I mean—’

‘He was so sweet, sensitive. He was an artist. What was his name?’

‘An artist? What? Like, he did porn or something? So what? Everyone does that.’

She looked up at him sharply. ‘You know what? You’re a fucking arsehole as well!’ Then she stormed out of the observation chamber, taking the bottle of cleaning fluid with her, leaving the smell of cigarette smoke in her wake.

Scab changed the shape of the smart-matter vial into a pipette and the drop of blood ran down to the tip. He had been staring at it for more than an hour now. He lifted it up to his lips and opened his mouth. He held it there. He ’faced another instruction to the vial. All the smart matter connected with the heretical sect’s habitat was oddly truculent, but the pipette eventually changed back into a vial. Scab put the vial down on the bench.

He knew something. No, he
sensed
something that was just beyond his understanding, something that unsettled him.

As he looked at Talia’s blood in the vial, he felt something that had been foreign to him for a long time. He knew fear.

6

Ubh Blaosc

Cold metal on her skin. Britha’s brain was assaulted by memories from someone else. Some
thing
else. Contact with the Muileartach, her mother, the All-Mother. Its suffering. Crom Dhubh, so hard to look at. Her head splitting as the crystal crawled into it. Things she would never do: the taste of human flesh in her mouth. Throat after throat slit, the bodies tossed into the water. Killing the boy the Corpse People had captured.

‘No!’

She was in darkness. She tried to scuttle into a corner but found herself in a rounded chamber. Judging by the feel of the metal against skin, the inside of the metal chamber had been carved with various patterns or images. She curled up in a foetal position. She was frightened, but more than that she was disgusted with herself at what she had become. She would kill in battle, a necessary sacrifice to defend herself or to protect her people; but this time she had revelled in it. There was something inside her, speaking to her – the spear, the eaten flesh, Crom Dhubh’s whispers. Bress.

Teardrop was dead, Bress claimed to have killed Fachtna, she had abandoned Tangwen and the others, her people. Cliodna. She had killed Cliodna. The sobs wracked her frame as she remembered what it had felt like when the head of the spear had penetrated her lover’s flesh. Looking into her dark eyes. She had done that.

Sometime later she reached up to touch her head. It was no longer swollen. She felt different as well. Her sobbing had made her ache; she was no longer aware of everything around her. She felt weary. She felt like she always had before. Before Cliodna had done something to her. Before she had eaten of one of the Lochlannachs’ flesh. Before her magics had become so potent.

There was light above her.

She tried to collect her thoughts and cursed herself for her weakness. Bress had lied about Fachtna. She remembered now. There had been stones. She had walked with monsters, warped creatures born of the Muileartach’s womb, poisoned by Crom Dhubh’s great working. They had let her be. They had known her as sister. Then she had summoned great power from the earth.
How did I do that?
Lightning had danced for her among the stones. A star had gone out in the night sky.
How did I know that?
And she had been somewhere else. Different stones. There were people all around her, tall, well made, Goidel warriors, male and female. There had been
dryw
there, brown-robed, leaning on staffs, hoods masking their features. Fachtna was there, too – she had seen his face illuminated by the light they’d caged her in. He had looked sad. Then they had killed her.

She looked up. The light was faint, the grey light of the time-between-times, dusk or dawn. She stood up. It was only then she came to realise that she was in a massive cauldron. She wondered if they were planning to eat her, but it would be a poor meal. Then she remembered the magic of men, the metalworkers. How the rounded belly of a cauldron was supposed to be the stomach of a pregnant woman.

She reached up and felt the cauldron’s lip. She was not nearly as strong as she had been, but she managed to pull herself up over the lip and all but fell onto wooden boards.

Painfully she stood up and looked around. She was in a large wooden long hall any
rhi
could be proud of, though why they had covered good earth with wood was beyond her. The walls were ornately carved and stained with bright, vibrant colours. She saw knotwork, spirals, shapes she recognised as women and men, animals, chariots and
curraghs
, and other things that she did not recognise or understand.

The cauldron was a massive bronze vessel with little external decoration. It had two handles on either side, though only a giant would have been able to lift it. She shivered at the momentary reminder of the giants that had walked and fought alongside the Lochlannach. No fire had been set beneath the cauldron. In fact, it looked as if the bottom of the cauldron had been sunk into the earth beneath the boards of the long hall.

There was no source of light in the hall. Her guess was wrong – it was neither dawn nor dusk, for bright sunlight shone through cracks and gaps in the wood. She made her way towards the hall’s double doors. She felt very unsteady, and more than once her legs went from underneath her, but she made it to the doors.

Vertiginous fear overwhelmed her. Things were not as they should be.

She collapsed to the floor, desperately trying to make sense of what she could see. Then she remembered where she was. Then she remembered coming to the Otherworld.

Britha collapsed onto the warm, slightly damp, lush green grass outside the hall. She clung to the ground expecting to fall into the sky. The land was enormous, too big to take in properly, and she could see so much of it – farmed fields, thick forest, mountains, rivers, lochs, even seas and, beyond the seas, other lands. Mists and cloud obscured some of the places in the distance but it went on as far as she could see, and she imagined it went much further than that.

There was no horizon. The ground curved up, so she found herself looking down at blue sky, and so much of it. Perhaps more than her mind could cope with. Above/below her, the sky was bright blue, but from where she clung to the ground she could see patches of dark sky obscured by thundery-looking clouds in the distance. Even further away she was sure a land across one of the seas looked white in colour. It was as if she stood on the inside of a sealed giant cauldron.

There were things in the sky, hanging there, floating. Rocks, strange round plants or trees, distant spheres that looked like they might also have land on them. Closer, but still too far off to make out what they were, she perceived smaller objects that moved more erratically than the sedate floating rocks and trees. The few birds she could see looked very different from the birds she knew in her realm.

Despite all the strangeness, it was the Otherworld’s sun that caught her attention. It was not that different from the sun she knew, except it looked much, much larger, and closer. She could feel its warmth. Few summers in Ardestie had been this warm. Sweat started to bead on her skin.

She had to force herself to let go of the grass, though instinct told her that if she did so she would fall into the sun. Looking around, she could see that this wasn’t the case. It was normal to be upside down, apparently. She stood up unsteadily, shading her eyes with her hand.

Awe and more than a little dread overcame her. She knew herself to be in the presence of the gods now. Her people had always sought to avoid their attentions as the gods only cared for themselves, and none but the gods could understand those cares. In front of the sun stood a giant figure. Difficult to make out against the brightness, it existed only in silhouette and was nearly as tall as the sun itself. She guessed it was a warrior because it carried a spear. Black lines sprouted from all over the figure, they reminded Britha of many hollow logs joined together. The lines connected the enormous figure to the sun itself, and then down to the land in a number of different places.

The figure had wings on its back. Six of them, Britha thought, though she wasn’t sure as some appeared to be extended, and others folded behind it. The extended wings cast the land below them into darkness. In the closest of the dark areas she could make out what looked like tiny pinpricks of light.

‘It’s called the Forge.’

Britha actually screamed and jumped. She rounded on Fachtna, who was sitting on the grass, his back against the long hall’s outer wall. He was barefoot and stripped to the waist, wearing only a pair of loose-fitting trews. There was no scar tissue on his chest and stomach, but she had learned that he healed faster than mortals. His body also looked strangely hairless, though a detailed tattoo of a serpent, or a dragon, in the knotwork style of the Goidels coiled around his left arm, over his shoulder and onto his chest. Its open maw surrounded the place where his heart would be. A silver torc curved around his neck and another around his upper-right arm. His beard was short and neatly trimmed, and his hair and moustache were both long and braided.

Britha took a step back from him. ‘Bress told me he killed you,’ she said. And then she remembered seeing his face in the crowd when she first arrived, when the lightning consumed her.

‘That’s disappointing,’ he said. His manner was … different, somehow.

‘Are we in the land of the dead?’

Fachtna picked up something from the ground next to him and held it out to her. She glanced at it suspiciously and then realised it was a folded grey woollen robe. She was more surprised when she looked back at Fachtna and found him meeting her eyes rather than staring at her naked body. Britha took the offered robe from him and started to dress. As she did so, she glanced around the local area. The long hall appeared to be on a foothill surrounded by larger wooded hills and truly grandiose snow-capped mountains in the distance. Looking downwards, the land narrowed into a long cliff-lined bay that led to what she assumed was a sea. A road meandered down through trees towards a small settlement surrounding the bay, though the huts were rectangular rather than round like those in Ardestie and most of Ynys Prydein.

The robe’s material was very soft and didn’t make her as hot as the scratchy, thick robe she had worn back in Ardestie. It had a hood and the belt was of leather, not rope.

‘The Cauldron brought me back to life, just as it did you,’ Fachtna said. She stared at him. ‘I’m sorry. With the crystals and the taint of Crom in your blood, we had no choice. We did it in the knowledge that the Cauldron could bring you back.’

‘I thought the crystals came from the Otherworld?’

Fachtna grimaced. ‘They are from another realm, but it is forbidden to talk about them.’

‘To anyone, or just mortals?’

Fachtna looked up at her thoughtfully but said nothing. She realised what it was about him that was bothering her. He seemed quiet, more thoughtful. He hadn’t said or done anything that annoyed her yet.

‘Teardrop?’ Britha asked. Fachtna nodded. ‘Is he here?’ Britha asked, eager to see the strange, wise man with the deformed skull, but Fachtna was already shaking his head.

‘He struggled with the path he had to walk. His people’s equivalent of the
drui
. He wants something simpler now—’

‘To be a warrior?’ Britha asked, unable to keep a smile from her face.

‘Perhaps, or perhaps he will just work the land, but he is with his family and content.’

‘Will I see him?’ Britha asked, and was disappointed by Fachtna shaking his head again.

‘You would not know him, and he would not know you.’

Suddenly something struck Britha. ‘Is this a lie?’ she asked.

Fachtna regarded her strangely for a moment. ‘No, but that is a good question—’

‘Don’t patronise me,’ Britha said evenly. ‘This may be the Otherworld but I am still the
ban draoi
of the Cirig.’

Fachtna bowed his head. ‘Apologies, it was not my intention to patronise. I have no memory after leaving here to journey to your world, and nor does Teardrop.’

She let this sink in. ‘But then why can I—’

‘Because you died here. Your body was here.’

Britha sat down on the grass. She was quiet as she tried to think through all she had been told. Fachtna watched her, concern in his expression. Britha found herself looking at some distant thing making its way through the Otherworld’s endless sky. It did not move like a bird.

‘What is that?’ she asked.

Fachtna followed her gaze. ‘A chariot.’

It was almost enough for her. The vertiginous fear returned, but she knew she had to master it. She could not show weakness here.

‘You have a
rhi
here?’ she asked.

‘For this particular land, I am he.’

Britha stared at him; it made sense, but somehow it made her angry, too.

‘And the
dryw
?’

‘They wish to speak with you.’

‘Can I return to my people?’ she asked, ashamed that it had taken her until now to do so. She had been overwhelmed by this place, this land of plenty. It would be so easy to succumb to its apparently easy life.

‘In time.’

‘Am I prisoner?’

She knew the ways of the fair folk. A day in their world could be many years in her land. She thought of those in the wicker man – her people, the Cirig, taken on the beach and at the broch. She wondered what had become of Tangwen, of Kush and the navigator.

They might have stopped Crom Dhubh’s summoning of the Llwglyd Diddymder, the Hungry Nothingness, but she hadn’t set out to save Ynys Prydein, only to rescue her people. She cursed herself for weakness in front of a warrior as tears sprang to her eyes. Fachtna reached out for her but she slapped his arm away.

‘Why—’ she started, and then choked back sobs and wiped her eyes. ‘Why are you different? Has death robbed you of your manhood?’

Fachtna regarded her for a moment and then leaned back against the wood of the long hall. ‘You and I didn’t like each other, did we?’ he asked, smiling for the first time.

I considered you stupid and boorish, and in the end you believed I was a monster
, Britha thought.
Because that’s what I had become.

‘I went to war,’ he said. ‘The
drui
put certain geasa on me. They change us. As warriors we have to behave a certain way.’

‘Obnoxiously? Yes, I’ve met warriors before.’

‘No, I mean we cannot show weakness in front of others because then we would start to doubt ourselves. I took … certain potions and preparations.’

‘You mean you drank and boasted a lot?’

Fachtna was looking a little exasperated.

‘So what now?’ Britha demanded.

‘You are not a prisoner, but to send you back is a great magical undertaking. It will require a little time.’

‘My people … ?’

‘We can only know what you tell us.’

‘I don’t want to return a thousand winters after they are all dead.’

Fachtna shook his head. ‘We wouldn’t do that to you. The
drui
will want to speak with you but I don’t know when. I can arrange for food and drink, and I hope you will be my guest.’ Then he started to smile again. In the smile Britha saw some of his old cockiness. ‘Until then, perhaps you could entertain me with tales of the great deeds I did before I died.’