‘You are like us,’ she said.
He laughed. ‘A runt and a cast-off? How right you are.’
* * *
Everything went wrong in ’94.
The year before had been good for killers, cannibals, and fanatics – eastern Europe was tearing itself apart all over again, Waco burned, and the World Trade Centre was bombed – and as if in response to that, Moccus did not submit peacefully to the sacrament of the first flesh. When Mother summoned him with the bone carnyx he came unwillingly, snorting and roaring in the peculiar throaty squeal of a mature boar, and if he hadn’t already been weak with age and the unaccountable malaise that had afflicted him in ’68, it would have been impossible to subdue him at all. As the Farrow held him on his knees, the deserter looked into his blind eyes with concern.
‘What’s up, old chap?’ he murmured. ‘You’re not yourself these days.’
Moccus had merely snarled at him, so he’d done the only thing he could do which was to put the god out of his misery and hope that the replenishment sacrifices restored him better than they had last time.
But he didn’t even get around to the first one before the Farrow realised that something was wrong. A week after the feast of the first flesh Everett awoke with a familiar weight in his lungs, and when he got out of bed he was seized with a fit of coughing. It wasn’t as bad as it had been in ’16, but it terrified him, nonetheless. The rest of the Farrow were similarly afflicted. While the scars of old physical injuries remained healed, illnesses and disabilities were creeping back – arthritis, gout, deafness, blindness – not drastically so, but just the first twinges which warned them that whatever was wrong with Moccus hadn’t been remedied, and was in fact getting worse.
The first flesh was losing its potency.
Urgent debates were held.
‘We must hold to our faith,’ said Mother to the Farrow assembled in St Mark’s. ‘We must trust that he will grow strong again, and bless us once more.’
‘As a plan of action goes, I have to say it stinks,’ said the deserter. ‘The only thing that we will get by sitting around waiting on the off-chance that something spontaneously improves is very bored and then very dead.’
Gus Melhuish sneered. ‘I’m amazed that you have the audacity to even open your mouth, Butcher. If this is anybody’s fault, it’s yours.’
‘How do you figure that, chum?’
‘Nobody else is wielding the knife.’
‘That’s very true. You’d best remember that in case I decide to wield it in your direction.’
‘Oh, this is ridiculous,’ said Ardwyn, likely meaning both the situation and their squabbling. ‘Whatever we’re doing, it’s obviously not enough. We need to modify the ritual in some way to make our lord stronger.’
‘There will be no modifications,’ asserted Mother. ‘We will worship as we always have. If there is a fault it lies in us – in our doubts and weaknesses. We must look to our own souls for the answer.’
Stronger. Everett remembered Sus’ words in the woods after eating the poacher’s viscera. The poacher that Moccus had killed and dumped in Mother’s sty, which everyone at the time had interpreted as some kind of cryptic warning – against what, they still had no idea – but which the deserter was now starting to think might not have been a warning at all, but a demand. Man is stronger, Sus had said.
‘I think I know what we need to do,’ he said, knowing too that it wasn’t going to go down at all well with the Farrow, and least of all Mother.
‘Really?’ scoffed Gus. ‘Give us the benefit of your deep theological insight, please.’
‘Human vessels,’ he replied simply. ‘The swine that we used last time obviously weren’t enough. You remember how weak he was, and how we had to dig him out of the ground. I think the poacher was a message to us. Moccus put his body in the sty where the vessels are kept for a reason. Man is stronger.’ He gave a little laugh. ‘I think our lord wants a change of menu.’
A babble of consternation and outrage broke from the congregation, over the top of which Mother’s voice came ringing: ‘Unthinkable! Absolutely unthinkable! What do you think we are, Everett – savages? We do not perform human sacrifice! Would you go into a Christian cathedral and suggest that they begin eating their infants? The very idea is an abomination!’
‘Maybe, but it didn’t used to be, did it?’ he replied. ‘Two thousand years ago, when the Farrow were Cornovii tribesmen? Do you think they shied away from giving the hunter of the first woods their blood? At some point since then the practice has switched to swine, which is more civilised, obviously, but what does Moccus care for civilised? He is a hunter and a killer – he wants what he wants, and it’s been denied to him for so long that it’s not surprising he’s finally starting to sicken from the pale substitutes that you’ve been offering.’
Mother fixed him with a look of steel. ‘We. Are. Not. Murderers.’
‘No, but he is,’ said Gus, pointing at the deserter.
‘What’s your point, chum?’
‘The beast takes on something of the butcher, isn’t that right, Mother?’ Gus asked.
She nodded. ‘With each rebirth he is created anew, shaped by the man with the knife.’
‘Well, forgive me if I’m mistaken, but the man with the knife in this case is a murderer and a cannibal, isn’t that so?’
‘You’re saying this is my fault?’ asked Everett. ‘You might want to be very careful there, Gus, because it seems like you’re questioning the wisdom of Mother in choosing me as the god’s butcher.’
‘Whatever the cause,’ Ardwyn interrupted, ‘we are still left with the problem.’
‘We will hold to the
