Ardwyn got up from her chair and stared down at Matt. He tried to meet her eyes, but quickly surrendered. ‘I understand why you wanted this girl,’ she said, and he flinched as she began to stroke his hair. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that. But you’ll have a long, long time as one of the Farrow to meet someone who will have already come into the church with open eyes and embraced the first flesh, and there’ll be no need for all of these silly games. The word “sacrifice” that you use means to give up something precious to prove your devotion to the gods; if you really want this girl then you could have made no better choice.’
‘In the old days,’ said Everett, ‘a man would raise a piglet as his own for years and then sacrifice it to Moccus in order to join the Farrow.’
‘She’s not a pig.’
‘No, she’s not,’ said Ardwyn. ‘She is a vessel for the replenishment of the first flesh, and as such she is sanctified above all animals. If you think about it, you’re actually doing her an honour. But it’s three days until the tusk moon – she needs to be watched, guarded and tended. Fed, watered, and cleaned. By you. That’s your penance. Do you understand?’
‘I suppose so,’ he mumbled.
‘That’s my boy.’ She folded her arms around him and pressed his face to her belly in an embrace that grew tighter, and then tighter still. ‘But if you ever do anything like this again,’ she murmured, ‘you will be the next to have that honour, and I will use the knife myself. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Mother.’
* * *
Ardwyn gave it twenty-four hours before she went out to the half-converted dormitory to see the vessel – partially to make sure that Matt was fulfilling his duties, but also because she was curious. He seemed to be taking it seriously; the girl was tied securely, she had a bucket on one side and a bottle of water on the other. There was a plate of biscuits, but she didn’t seem to have touched those. She watched Ardwyn enter, keeping absolutely still, her eyes huge.
‘I wanted to say thank you.’
‘Get fucked,’ the vessel spat. Her voice was hoarse from hours of useless screaming.
‘I know, I’m not so naïve as to believe that anything I say is going to make a difference to you. I’m not trying to comfort you or persuade you that this is a good thing or a necessary thing, because all you can see is that you’re tied up in a horrible place by evil people, and I can’t blame you for that.
‘For thousands of years it was only the most perfect swine of the village that were chosen to be the vessels of the first flesh,’ she said. ‘We’d have a wonderful feast afterwards and give thanks to the beast for giving life back to our god, but of course the beast never knew what its role was because, well, it was still a pig at the end of the day. So the thanksgiving was really just for us, to remind us to be humble and not to take things for granted. But now…’ Ardwyn knelt down before the vessel and stroked a stray hair back from the girl’s eyes. She flinched, but that was understandable. ‘Now you. Not just you personally, I mean, the ones that have come before and the ones after, and not even just this time around. You are all aware of what is happening. You are the legacy of our faith. You give rise to an entirely new form of worship for us. Can’t you see how exciting that is? In time, members of the church of Moccus will volunteer happily for this honour!’
She realised she was becoming intense, because the young woman had started to cry again, so she gently thumbed the tears away and stood up. There was no need to distress her any more than necessary. ‘So, when I kneel before you and thank you, it makes a difference that this time you actually understand. Even though I know you’d like to strangle me with that rope and run far away from here.’
She paused on the way out, looking at the biscuits. ‘And try to eat something. You can’t starve yourself and it might be some small comfort.’
3
HELL WEEKEND
THE KITCHEN CALENDAR IN THE PIMBLETT HOUSEHOLD had three columns: one for Daddy, one for Mummy and one for Alice. Alice’s column was mostly filled with hospital appointments, and Mummy’s had a lot of crossover with that, but for Daddy the three days from the 19th to the 21st of June simply had ‘Hell Weekend’ written through them in red sharpie. Hell Weekends were not common, but they cropped up whenever his shifts at the printers coincided too closely with his volunteering rota, and this was one of them. On the Saturday he was down for a night patrol with the regulars, and being Midsummer’s Day meant that the night would be shorter and rowdier for it in the pubs and clubs of Burton-on-Trent. He was very tempted to call in sick, but he stood a better chance of finding out more about what was going on behind the wheel of a police car than by fretting at home. So on the way back from the print works he steeled himself for grabbing a shower, a change, a quick bite to eat, and then an evening of picking drunks up off the pavement as the token ‘hobby bobby’.
As he got through the front door and hung his jacket up he was met in quick succession by Alice throwing a flying tackle at his waist and Becky shouting from the kitchen, ‘We’ve got guests, so behave!’ Alice ran back through and he followed her to find his wife enjoying tea and cake at the breakfast counter with Everett Clifton.
‘David, what a pleasant surprise!’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘I was finishing up
