Contents
Cover
Also Available from James Brogden and Titan Books
Title Page
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Copyright
Dedication
Part One: Prepare The Ground
1: The Grey Brigade
2: Bill
3: Swinley
4: De-Tusking
5: The Recklings
6: Theophagy
7: Replenishment
8: The Sixth Sacrifice
9: 1942
10: The Sacrament of the First Flesh, 1942
11: Attenuation
12: Schism
Part Two: Sow The Seeds
1: Dennie
2: New Neighbours
3: The Shed
4: Bruises
5: The Summoning
6: Barbecue
7: Lizzie
8: Tusk Moon
9: Grafting
10: Infection
11: Snares
12: Somnambulism
13: A Nice Neighbourly Chat
Part Three: Plant Out Seedlings
1: Boundaries
2: The Abattoir Shrine
3: The Wild Side
4: A Premature Interment
5: A Blood-Painted Moon
6: Hot Pot
7: 3.07
Part Four: Aggressively Weed
1: Ashes
2: Giving Thanks
3: Hell Weekend
4: Sunday
5: The Bone Carnyx
6: Desertion
Part Five: Harvest The Crop
1: Interview
2: Homecoming
3: Night Shift
4: Visiting Hours
5: Guns and Dogs
6: The Clearing
7: Echoes
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
BONE
HARVEST
Also available from James Brogden and Titan Books
Hekla’s Children
The Hollow Tree
The Plague Stones
BONE
HARVEST
JAMES
BROGDEN
TITAN BOOKS
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Bone Harvest
Print edition ISBN: 9781785659973
E-book edition ISBN: 9781785659980
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First edition: May 2020
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2020 by James Brogden. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
FOR JOHN AND GRETA
The dews drop slowly and dreams gather: unknown spears
Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes,
And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries
Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.
We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore,
The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew,
Being weary of the world’s empires, bow down to you,
Master of the still stars and of the flaming door.
From “The Valley of the Black Pig” by William Butler Yeats
Theophagy (n.): the sacramental eating of a god
PART ONE
PREPARE THE GROUND
1
THE GREY BRIGADE
THE DESERTER RAN FROM THE BATTLE, AND HID IN A shell crater in No Man’s Land.
By the time he felt that it was safe to move, the sun had disappeared in a crimson smear behind the shattered reek of sky. The thunder of the big guns had stopped hours ago, and the popping crackle of rifle shots was dwindling like rain, leaving only the evening chorus of screams, prayers, pleas and curses from men dying unseen, as if the churned earth were bewailing its own torture.
He was sprawled halfway down the slope of the crater, little more than a water-filled pit with the half-submerged corpses of three other soldiers for company. With their uniforms the same mud-grey as their flesh, it was impossible to tell which side of the line they had originally come from, and the mud also caked him from head to foot, making him one with the dead, all brothers together. He’d spent the hours waiting for nightfall watching the rats eat them, their sleek bodies cruising the crater’s waters like miniature destroyers, graceful in their element. They’d avoided him once an exploratory nibble at his left boot had prompted a kick; there was no need to attack the living when they could glut themselves on the dead. One particularly bold fellow had sat by a corpse’s outflung hand and taken his time to gnaw away the fingers, pausing every so often to look at the deserter as if inviting him to join them. Plenty to go around, chum.
And despite himself – despite the screaming and the stench of shit and bowels and rot – the deserter’s stomach had been growling before long.
He wondered how he might go about catching one. It would not be the first time he’d eaten rat, but it might be the first time he’d done so raw, since he had no means of making a fire and to do so would be suicide anyway.
The attack had been at dawn, of course. The result had been butchery, of course. It was possible that one or other side had gained several yards of ground, but in the noise and tumult he had become so disorientated that he no longer knew in which direction lay his own trenches or those of the enemy. Not that such a distinction had meaning any more. All that mattered was that he had been lying in this crater from sunrise to sunset without food or water. He remembered (or tried to; it was hard, his thoughts darting to and fro like the rats), eating some kind of thin oat porridge in the pre-dawn dark before the attack. He had not eaten since, and what little water he carried had run out before noon. By evening he’d developed a nasty fever, which from the heat of it in his blood felt like it wasn’t going
