Everett, Gar, and Ardwyn had the piglet in a ‘crush’ pen with its backside wedged into a corner. A rope noose was looped around its upper snout and behind the front tusks, with Gar on the other end holding it steady. The animal was making a continual deep-throated squealing, mightily displeased by its situation.
‘I notice you’re not wearing one,’ the deserter said to her. ‘It seems to be only the men. Why is that?’
‘Because we have nothing to prove,’ she replied, flashing him an insolent grin. ‘Boars are matriarchal. They group in sounders around a few dominant females. Males are solitary, meanwhile, joining the sounder only to breed. They have to demonstrate their worthiness.’
‘We’re not pigs, though.’
She looked him up and down. ‘That’s debatable. This small, angry animal is you; it is your masculine power which you must cherish, nurture, tend, and eventually sacrifice to Moccus, taking the tusk circle as a symbol that you have given yourself to him.’
‘So how long will it take to grow?’
‘This little chap should come to maturity in another two to three years.’
The deserter laughed so hard that it brought on a coughing fit, and he had to lean against the fence to catch his breath. ‘I’m not going to survive the next winter, never mind three years.’
‘You would be surprised what the favour of Moccus can do.’ She gave him a cheesewire saw with sturdy wooden handles at each end. ‘Come on.’
Somewhat nervously, he strung the wire saw behind one of Nikolai’s whetters while Gar held its mouth open. The young boar’s eyes rolled and glared at them both. ‘I’m not enjoying this any more than you are, chum,’ the deserter muttered, pulled back on the wire and began to draw the saw back and forth against the rear of the tusk.
Nikolai really didn’t like this. The noise he made was like a drill in the deserter’s skull. Ardwyn told him to hurry up, so he did, and smoke came from the saw along with the stench of burning tooth. Abruptly, the tusk sheared free, and the release of tension sent the deserter sprawling on his arse in the mud. Gar roared with laughter.
‘That’s one,’ said Ardwyn, smiling.
Sighing, the deserter picked himself back up.
5
THE RECKLINGS
HE EXPLORED THE VILLAGE AND WALKED OFTEN IN the woods around Swinley looking for the god but without success. The only sighting of Moccus he had was in the stained-glass windows of St Mark’s church: they repeated the images engraved on the obelisk in the woods. Where Jesus Christ would have stood in the central panel, boar-headed Moccus raised his hand in beatific blessing, showering fruits and corn onto the multitudes fornicating in the panels below, while to either side men were speared, decapitated, and disembowelled. The deserter often heard furtive rustlings accompanying him from the shadows beneath the trees. Gar’s cousins, if he was to believe what he’d been told, but by then he was swinging back around to the conviction that this was all an elaborate hoax, or at best a collective delusion, and the creatures in the bushes nothing but rabbits, badgers, or just more boar.
In a black mood he sought out Gar, and found him hacking a tree stump out of a field with a huge mattock. His bare torso was shining with sweat, and a pelt of coarse black hair which might have belonged on an animal spread across his shoulders and narrowed to a point down his spine. With each blow, clods of earth and splinters of wood flew everywhere, and the deserter had to blink away the sudden vision of artillery explosions launching geysers of mud and human remains into the sky. The remembrance just made his mood fouler. There was only so long a man could be fobbed off.
‘Gar!’ he called.
Gar paused in his work, leaning on the mattock handle. He grunted.
‘They say you’re a child of Moccus, is that right?’
Another grunt.
‘And all his other children are out there in the woods capering like pixies, aren’t they? Though I’ll be blowed if I’ve seen any of them.’
Gar shrugged and sniffed, picked up the mattock and prepared to swing.
‘Well, I want to meet them.’
Gar put the mattock back down and looked closely at the deserter, narrowing his eyes. ‘Mee hem,’ he rumbled, drooling a little as the words struggled to emerge from around his mouthful of tusks.
‘Yes, meet them. Because you’re a big lad and all, but I’m having a hard time believing that’s down to anything other than your mummy and your daddy’s branches growing a little too close on the family tree, if you take my meaning.’
If Gar had taken offence, or even fully understood the insult, he didn’t show it, but simply shrugged again and set off for the edge of the field with the mattock slung over one shoulder. The deserter hurried after.
Past the clearing with Moccus’ stone the ground delved sharply into a gully carved by a stream from the hilly slopes above. It was treacherous with mossy boulders and dark with the dripping gloom of overhanging beeches, whose roots, snaking over and around the rocks, threatened to trip him at every turn. Gar stopped at a place where the tumbling water formed a basin, and his face split in a smile. ‘You mee hem,’ he repeated, then cupped his hands around his mouth and let loose a volley of barking grunts into the shadows, calling to his kin.
And they came, but if he’d expected the half-human spawn of a god to be something majestic or terrifying, he was wrong.
They were tentative, fearful, hiding themselves behind tree trunks or peering from
