Gar picked up the bottle and sniffed it. Then he took a quick step forward and grasped the deserter by the throat. Shocked and choking, the deserter was positive that Gar’s massive hand was meeting thumb-to-finger at the back of his neck. ‘Wait…’ he croaked.
‘Uss ook,’ Gar growled, his face inches from the deserter’s, every peg-like tooth and tusk on display.
Everett nodded, unable to speak now.
‘Uss ook, or…’ Gar squeezed a fraction tighter, and black blotches began to crowd Everett’s vision from the edges. Then he was released, and fell back, gasping.
‘That sounds very reasonable,’ he wheezed, and staggered past Gar into the trees.
The clearing was lit by flaming braziers set atop tall poles, which were burning the same jimsonweed as in the church, its smoke sweet and thick and heavy in the clearing. Beside the pillar a great bonfire had been built, and had obviously been burning for some time because it was by now a mound of glowing embers. The Farrow of Moccus had gathered in a loose circle around the stone pillar, having removed their robes but kept their masks. They stood naked and listened raptly – the men stroking their cocks, the women dipping between their legs – to a woman in the centre that he recognised as Mother from her voice as she declaimed to the congregation. Another woman stood close by who he assumed was Ardwyn; it was the first time he had seen her naked, and for a moment the sight of it blinded him to everything else. Then he realised that she was carrying a long, cloth-wrapped object which she unwound with reverent care and passed to Mother, who held it aloft.
It was a carnyx, the S-shaped war-horn of the Cornovii. It was at least four feet tall, and it was made of bone. The upper end, the bell of the horn, was very definitely an actual boar’s skull, but whether the rest of it was femur or vertebrae he couldn’t tell. He could only think that it must somehow be decorated over an actual brass instrument because he couldn’t see how that thing should be able to make any noise. Nevertheless, Mother raised the bone carnyx to her lips and blew a long, mournful note. It carried past the circle of worshippers, into the woods, through him, through his very bones, and every sinew, muscle fibre, and blood vessel sang in harmony with it so that his whole body felt like a tuning fork drawing the resonance out of him. His hair stirred on his scalp, his skin shivering with gooseflesh, his cock rigid in his pants. It was all he could do to stop himself from answering that call, breaking cover and running to prostrate himself before Mother.
She blew a second time, and the worshippers fell on each other. Some literally so – thrusting, grasping, sucking – in pairs and groups, copulating in combinations that in some cases he struggled to make sense of. For a man who believed himself incapable of being shocked by human depravity he was astonished – not by the acts he was witnessing, but by the energy of the participants. Most of them were middle-aged, with drooping breasts and flapping scrotums, yet they were going at it with all the fervour of dogs in the street. He understood the blankets spread out on the ground now, and he tried to follow what or who Ardwyn was doing, but it was impossible amidst the tangles of writhing limbs. Their gasps and cries filled the clearing. The smoke grew heavier and sweeter, and his head was swimming, sweat blurring his vision. The firelight that gleamed on backs, buttocks, and breasts began to resemble that of the flares drifting over No Man’s Land, and the rutting figures were churning the grass to mud, in places so deep that they were sinking and stirring up objects long buried in the earth as if out of a cauldron: sandbags, duck-boards, barbed wire, and bodies. Pale limbs in rotting uniforms, rats and rifles. The orgiasts fucked the cadavers as eagerly as the living in anywhere that gaped, or filled themselves with death-stiff fingers. He saw a woman straddling the face of a corpse with half its skull blown away, and a man held aloft by barbed wire wrapped around each limb, being sodomised with a bayonet. The deserter reeled away, head and stomach both churning, his damaged lungs in revolt, coughing and vomiting over the bushes.
A third time, Mother blew the horn. Now, however, it seemed that she didn’t so much create the sound as pull it out of the air, a note that had always been there unheard in the background, like the song of blood in the ear, from a time far down in the immeasurable well of the years when there was only woodland in whose shadow humanity crept fearfully, hunting aurochs with flint blades. The bone carnyx drew it out of the past and through the human bodies contorting around it, clothing itself with sound in the world, summoning.
And the god came.
The deserter heard it, something huge moving through the trees, pushing aside branches that stood higher than his head.
What emerged from the edge of the clearing walked like a man, if a man ever grew to ten feet tall – naked, its limbs and torso busy with tattoos and the raised ridges of ritual scarification in spirals, stripes, and complex knots. From the shoulders up all semblance of humanity ended in a boar’s head, its amber eyes reflecting the firelight back in twin points of yellow fire above a snout from which tusks curved like scythes.
But it was old, this thing. Peering harder through the stinging smoke, the deserter saw that its eyes were filmed with cataracts, its tusks were cracked and yellow, its once-broad chest was sunken above a sagging belly, and its wizened limbs shook with
