I am what the elders teach the young ones to fear, Everett thought proudly. I am the thing in the cellar. ‘I’d like to get a full, proper Grey Brigade together out here,’ he said. ‘We could invade the world from No Man’s Land. Imagine their faces!’
‘Imagine their faces as they mowed us down with Lewis guns, perhaps.’
‘So why did you join up, then? You don’t seem very much the unthinking obedient type.’
But all Bill would offer him by way of reply was a wry smile and the response, ‘Who says I joined up?’
* * *
It occurred to him that he should have felt sickened by the act of cannibalism, or at least guilty. But he found that after seeing so much of how human flesh and bone and viscera could be mangled and mutilated, the sacred vessel of the human spirit torn open and spilled into the mud with no revelation, it lost any sanctity it might have once held for him, and the taboo became as meaningless as trying to stay a virgin in a brothel.
This was not to say that he didn’t retain some principles – he made it a point of pride to only ever eat from men he had killed as a mercy. The problem was that any kind of meat perished rapidly in such damp and unsanitary conditions, and when even the living suffered from gangrene the freshness of a carcass could not be relied upon. The balance, then, lay in finding a man so wounded that he had no hope of survival.
Everett’s first kill was a young German Gemeiner that he and Bill found in a shell crater, semi-conscious and raving with infection.
His left leg hung in tatters, though he’d done a passable job of using his belt as tourniquet above the knee. Since bone was always awkward to cut through, and the explosion had already done that work for them, Everett decided to take advantage of this and moved in with a knife to cut through the remaining tissue and sinews; however, the sensation of being sawn at roused the private to such fresh pleading and screaming that the deserter felt something like pity and drew his pistol to put the boy out of his misery.
Bill pushed his gun down, miming Noise. As if the boy were not already making enough. But Bill was right; screaming was just background noise, easily ignored, whereas a gunshot in No Man’s Land might draw the attention of snipers. So the deserter replaced the gun and used his knife. It whispered across the boy’s throat and as his screams became gurgles and then finally stopped, Everett was aware that Bill was murmuring some litany and turning a bracelet that hung on his right wrist.
Later in the cellar, eating what the boy had provided, he remarked to Bill, ‘If it’s forgiveness you’re after, I think you’re looking in the wrong place.’
‘Not forgiveness,’ replied Bill in his hoarse choke of a voice. ‘Blessing.’
Everett laughed. ‘Even worse!’
Bill removed the bracelet with which he had been fiddling and passed it to him. It was a simple loop of something whitish-yellow that felt like ivory, with open metal-capped ends.
‘What’s this?’ Everett asked.
‘It’s a boar’s tusk, the symbol of my faith. I belong to the Farrow, the followers of Moccus.’
‘Huh. Sounds Greek.’
‘He’s older than the Greeks. Moccus is the Great Boar, He Who Eats the Moon, much older even than your Christ.’
‘He’s not my Christ.’ Although given the roaring blankness of his memory even that might not have been true.
‘All the same. Moccus protects warriors and hunters, as well as bringing life and fertility to the land. Think of him as the patron saint of soldiers, if it helps.’
‘Naw, that’s Saint George,’ said Geordie, one of the other Tommies.
‘Khuinya,’ growled Nikolai, the small Russian sapper. ‘Bullshit. Saint George is patron of Moscow.’
Bill overrode them both before an argument could brew. ‘Moccus was old when your city was a village of mud huts,’ he said. ‘He defended the people of the deep forests against the Romans. He’s there still, for those who know how to look for him.’
‘Then why hasn’t anybody heard of him?’ asked the deserter, passing the bracelet back.
‘Why haven’t you heard of him, you mean? As if the world will simply open its secrets to you like a whore because you’re in it?’ Bill shrugged. ‘You’re hearing about him now. That boy, the German with the leg, he was a soldier, and his death gave us something, so I hoped that Moccus might bless him for that.’
The deserter chewed slowly, wondering if he should be grateful, and if so to whom. The corpse he had left in the mud with its throat cut, indistinguishable from all the others? God? If He was there, surely He could regard such acts only with abhorrence. ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that if this Moccus of yours is a protector of warriors and hunters then he’s doing a bloody awful job of it hereabouts.’ This earned him some chuckles from the other Wild Deserters.
Bill simply nodded; if he’d taken offence he kept it to himself, but he raised his chin to expose the pink ruin of his throat. ‘Do you think I would have survived this otherwise?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ the deserter admitted. ‘I’ve seen men survive some pretty horrible things.’
‘I’ve survived a lot more than most. I was at Mafeking, where we were so hungry we ate our own horses. I was with the 90th Light Infantry at Ulundi when we broke the Zulus. Got this.’ He pushed up his trouser leg to reveal a long, shining scar that curved down his calf and disappeared into his sock.
‘But that was over thirty years ago!’ Everett protested. ‘You’re nowhere near that old.’
‘He’s full of bullshit,’ said Nikolai.
‘The sound of their spears drumming on shields was like thunder rolling
