She laid her hands on his chest. ‘How does it feel here, in this heart that hasn’t aged for nearly thirty years?’
‘To be honest with you? It feels like theft.’
She laughed, her scorn bitter in his face, like smelling salts. ‘As if you care! Murderer? Cannibal? Why, even your name is stolen! Yes, you’re a deserter. Things too big, you say? Then run from death, because there’s nothing bigger than that. Even gods must die. None of us can escape it completely but you and I can run a while longer and further than most. Let me run with you! Or at the very least…’ She snuggled closer and slipped her hand under his shirt. Her fingers were cool and sure where they stroked his nipple. ‘At least let me enjoy a bit of light jogging.’
As always, he found it impossible to refuse her.
All the same, when it came to the replenishment sacrifices he couldn’t bring himself to stay for the whole six months. Something about sitting comfortably in his cottage drinking whisky and reading the newspapers felt like an insult to the god who was dragging himself slowly back from death once again. So Everett took himself off into the world in the meantime, returning at each tusk moon to slaughter one of Mother’s pigs, and when Moccus birthed himself from the earth that September, the deserter didn’t have to be ordered to leave this time. His satchel was already packed.
11
ATTENUATION
HE WAS ALMOST LATE FOR THE SACRAMENT IN THE spring following the Summer of Love, having discovered that psychotropic substances were an ideal method for deserting from reality altogether. But he got his shit together, as the saying went, and arrived in time to perform his duties. The sacrament and replenishment sacrifices went smoothly, and there were no signs that anything was going wrong – or if they were, his senses were still too battered to notice. It was during the sixth and final replenishment on the autumnal equinox in September of ’68 that the catastrophe became evident.
Moccus was too weak to arise.
As the blood of the sixth and final swine soaked into the earth and the earth began to heave, the assembled Farrow readied themselves for Moccus to break free and be reborn, but it just continued to heave, and nothing emerged – no reaching fingers, no gleaming tusks. The tumult in the earth was even diminishing, as if the god was weakening from his exertions.
Murmurs of unease and disbelief gave way to exclamations of dismay, until Mother ordered several of the congregation to run back to the village for shovels. When they returned with the tools, they set about digging their deity out of the ground, and were able to remove enough weight of earth such that Moccus was finally able to grasp the edges of the hole and haul himself into the world. He stood there, soil-streaked and panting, glaring around at his worshippers in the way a man caught in the act of some foolishness might seek to disguise his embarrassment, before staggering off into the woods.
Quite what had happened was the only subject of conversation in Swinley for days. Ardwyn’s husband, who was there to make sure that no opportunity to undermine Everett was missed, made his opinion that it must be some fault in the butcher known often and loudly. Everett himself was almost sure that it had nothing to do with the fact that he was stoned a lot of the time, but quit cold turkey all the same. Everyone assumed that Moccus had gone out into the world and that he would not be seen again until the sacrament of the first flesh in 1994.
Then the body was found in Mother’s pigsty.
It was the corpse of a poacher, still in his long coat with pheasants in his pockets, and disembowelled so utterly that his torso was virtually an empty sack propped open by his ribcage, but with no signs of his viscera anywhere.
Everett went up into the woods to see if the Recklings had played any part in this, and found them huddled by the stream with Gar, chewing on what the poacher had left behind.
‘Did you do this?’ he asked Gar.
Gar shook his head. ‘Moccus,’ he replied, with his mouth full.
‘But why would he kill a man and then dump his body in the village? Is it meant to be some kind of a warning?’
‘Man is stronger,’ said Sus, who was squatting on her haunches nearby and licking her bloody fingers. She had learned to wear clothes since the last time they’d met, but the way her dress rode up over her thighs seemed to make her more feral than if she’d been naked.
Everett prodded something gristly with his toe. ‘Well, he obviously wasn’t strong enough.’ He was about to leave when he got a proper look at what Gar was actually eating. ‘Is that his liver?’
Gar shrugged. Anatomy was not important, it seemed, for the enjoyment of this meal.
The deserter hesitated. Liver had always been a delicacy in the Grey Brigade, usually reserved for the one who provided the meat. He found that his mouth was watering in a way that it hadn’t done in the more than fifty years since he had tasted human flesh.
He glanced around to make sure that Ardwyn hadn’t, for some reason, followed him. She was tolerant of a lot, but he didn’t think she’d find it easy to accept this. ‘Here, pass us a piece of that,’ he said.
Gar narrowed his eyes and clutched his prize tighter.
‘Now then, I’m only going to have a nibble. You can’t begrudge me that, surely, can you, chum? After all the whisky I’ve brought for you over the years?’
Reluctantly, like a child giving up a favourite toy, Gar handed over the half-chewed organ. The deserter took his penknife, pared off a thin slice and tossed it back. Gar continued munching
