Bloodtide

Conor did not have to force her underground. Gladly, she retreated down into the earth and there she remained like a termite, playing the war on both sides to her own tune. Here, all information came through to her – who, where, when, what, how. She was the one who decided where the battles would be fought, who would win and who would lose. Sometimes for the sake of appearances or even just whim, she let Conor win – a birthday present perhaps, a Christmas treat. She was the real seat of power, building her network both for and against him, laying plans of conquest for him only to betray them to his enemies. Conor suspected nothing. He never saw the little brown bird that flew up the ventilation shafts and into the open sky and back and forth and to and fro about the endless business of Signy's ambition.

Siggy, making war with increasing ferocity, began as Dag predicted, to lose his humility and carelessness for power. Why else fight so hard and see so much suffering, if not to take power himself? Hadn't Odin touched him? Hadn't he given him the knife? Before him he felt the knife all the time, calling him, waiting for him. Sometimes he was scared that Styr lusted after it, but he forgot that Odin had embraced Signy too, on that day long ago in the Galaxy Building.

Very often in the quiet empty periods in between the battles, Siggy wondered to himself what all this meant, where it came from. Was it after all some plot out of Ragnor that was now spinning out of control? Ragnor was being dragged into the war these days. Conor had once reached out so far as to send raiding parties into the golden city at the height of his power. Now, in decline, he heard stories of the halfmen making demands there: more money, more weapons. The demands these days had the power of threat. The human-halfman alliance was now becoming the power he had hoped for himself.

Or was this strange history truly the work of the gods? And if so, was it simply the unfolding of things that had to be, the world moving on like a perfect machine into eternity, unfolding these events in the way a keyboard makes a letter? Perhaps the gods were simply a part of the machine of the world, perhaps they watched and took part just as people did. Or was the world dancing to their tune? And could one stop that tune, or change it, despite their wishes? Siggy did not know it, but someone else was asking herself very much the same question.

29

Signy

'Tell me a story, Cherry.'

She sits cm her chair, leaning forward to peer at me. She's an old woman now, her face creased with a network of fine lines, her eyes as black as holes. Holes through to a future where I am not welcome.

She purses her lips. 'There was once a woman who gave everything for the sake of revenge…'

'Yes! But tell me what I don't know…'

'…she gave everything to avenge her family.' She leans forward. 'Everything,' she repeats.

'No, no, Cherry, not that one! Tell me something else.'

'…she had the fortunes of war at her fingertips. She forced the king to murder his best people…'

'No! Not the past – the future. You know what I want.' Cherry looks at me and frowns. 'That's the story. I don't make it, I just tell it,' she scolds.

'Tell me the end. Tell me the very end,' I say.

She pouts like a sulky girl. 'I don't know the end. The gods don't show me the end,' she says.

I smile to myself. 'That's just what I tell Conor.'

Cherry leans forward in her chair and tries to weave me into this web that I've been a part of for so long.

'Here is one who never forgets. Here is one who lived a life of love in order to destroy it. Here is one who followed the hard stone of her heart, right back into the flames of destruction.' She settles back and watches me closely to see if I'm listening. I stare quietly back.

'When she let Siggy into the bunkers, the end was very near. Conor, still unable to recognise that the traitor lay in hisown bed, raved and shouted at his generals to save him, but not one of them could guess where the real danger lay. Only when he was about to die did Conor realise that it was his heart's love who had destroyed him.'

Yes, yes, Cherry, I've seen it too, in dreams sent to me. But… 'What happens to me?'

She shakes her head angrily. Is she cross because she doesn't know enough? Or is it because… is it because I've started to want too much?

She tells her stories. There is Siggy the King… King Sigmund. The nation united just as my father dreamed it. But where am I in all this? Why should it be him? This is my war.

Where am I under this new regime?

She looks away and won't answer. Am I supposed to die with my husband as if I'm some part of his body?

'Listen, Cherry. I have a story to tell, too. There was one who would not be a part of someone else's story. Cherry… Cherry? Look at me, Cherry!'

Cherry looks at me with hard, deep, angry eyes. She hates all this.

'I want you to tell it my way!'

She shakes her head. 'No. You have to do…'

'What I'm told?'

'As it is. There's no other way.'

She sits in her chair staring at the fire and won't answer any further questions. 'There's no other way,' she repeats.

'Is it the flames for me?' I ask her. 'Is that what's in store for me? Won't you lift a finger to save me from that?'

But there's no answer. To that question there never is.

30

Three years after Siggy joined the alliance, thirteen after the massacre of Val Volson and his people, Dag Aggerman was killed in an attack from within his own camp. The common view was that Conor had brewed halfmen of his own and used them to infiltrate the dogmen's bodyguard, but others claimed it was an internal coup; they said that Siggy had arranged for the halfman leader to be killed while the war was still on, to make a clear way for himself to the throne when the fighting was over. Certainly, Styr was there in camp that day and Styr and Siggy were like fingers on the same hand. Certainly, Styr survived the massacre that took place – the only one out of over fifty from both sides. Of course, Styr was a machine of war that has not been, equalled before or since, but even so…

Dag's assassination was followed by a lull in the allied progress while a ferocious struggle for succession took place. Another dogman, Jack Tebbs, emerged after six months of fighting as the new leader of the halfmen, but the real winner was Siggy. He was the allied commander, and it was understood by all that he would rule London and the lands around it when Conor was finally vanquished.

With his power consolidated, Siggy rejoined the war with terrible ferocity. Conor watched the towns under his control licked up like crumbs by the allied armies. Bournemouth and Portsmouth had long gone; Winchester, Salisbury and Bracknell had fallen. Now he saw his enemies advancing on Guildford. In the north, he had once laid siege to Birmingham, but now a confederation of allied and city troops, under the command of Siggy himself, chased the tyrant south from field to field, from town to village. All around the little empire shrank. Desperately, Conor tried to find allies abroad, but no one was interested in the local wars of an obscure little island. Defeat heaped upon defeat. The direction of the war was obvious now, even to the blindest of his followers. It was just a question of working it out. As the circle shrank, Conor gave wild and contradictory orders. Some towns were burnt to the ground. In other cases he ordered his men to loot them of all their treasures, what was left after the period of occupation. He developed a taste for great monuments, and as the enemy shells whistled overhead, his troops were engaged in dismantling whole buildings stone by stone and packing them in numbered crates to be re-erected