BLOODSONG

Read this fabulous review of Bloodsong by Kathryn Huges in the Guardian

6 - Sigurd

…and I was running across bent over double to the remains of a low stone wall, going so fast I was toppling forward. I was dead already, there was nothing to lose. I flung myself face down in the dirt. I retched again, pure bile. Shit! The fear's supposed to stop once you get going. I pulled my face out of the mess and looked back. Regin was out of sight already - hidden safe away.

I felt so betrayed. Everyone had led me to this. That's why I couldn't say no, that's why I couldn't run away. It wasn't me doing this - it was them. My father, my stepfather, my friends, Regin, my own mother. They were sending me to die and I was going along with it. Coward! I said to myself - coward! I did what they said because I lacked the courage to do anything else.

I got up and started to crawl along, keeping down under the cover of the wall. At the end of the wall I was sick again. I looked at it hanging out of my mouth in strands and I thought - I'm still here, and I didn't mean I was still alive. I meant, I was still myself. Dead or alive, this was my fate. The time and place and manner of my death - these things are fixed. All I have of my own is how I face it. And this is how - on my hands and knees with green vomit hanging out of my mouth, scared shitless.

"Today is a good day to die," I whispered to myself. I was almost tempted to walk the rest of the way just for the style of it. But you got to try. That's right, isn't it? You got to try. Stupid! Even then I was hoping to survive.

I got to my feet and ran down the muddy slope that led to the lake. There was Fafnir's track - a muddy rut, two metres, with the mud squidged up at the sides where his weight had crushed the earth. Gods! He was just vast. This was where he slid his way down to the pool to swim. I'd seen the film of it. It was poor quality film, shot from a mile away but you could still see how he went down there like a kid on a slide, rolling and twisting in the mud until he hit the water like a ship being launched. This time he was going to disembowel himself on the way down.

Not. He'd dig me out of the ground like a badger digs up baby rabbits.

We'd already picked a place where a skeleton was buried so that the monster's x-ray eyes wouldn't see anything amiss. I pulled off my backpack, unbuckled the spade from the straps and got digging.

It was a joke. Heroes and dragons! Fafnir was the most advanced piece of military hardware on the planet. What did I have? A sword. I was so dead.

Actually, I had a few other things. A Dranby-Cocke machine gun with five hundred rounds and a shotgun with explosive shells. It might as well have been a slingshot. I needed a fleet of helicopter gunships and a nuclear warhead to see this bastard off. Still - you gotta try. As I dug, I thought to myself, OK, if I have to die, I'm going to die as if my life depended on it. Does that make sense? This digging in the cold clay, the vomit, the piss, the fear and loneliness. It was mine. This was my death. It was all I had and I wasn't going to miss out on one drop of bile. I had no choice. It was life. It was shit life, but it was all I had.

Out there in the brightness of the security lights I was like a black fly on a white plate. I was relying on Regin's bag of tricks - he reckoned he could use Quiet Technology on the small area from where he was hidden to where I was digging. It was back-breaking work. Fafnir's weight had crushed the mud into a dense clay; I had to lever out every spadeful. Every second I expected him to appear, but either Regin had done his work well or the dragon was asleep, or playing with me, or something. Gradually I scraped away a grave for myself, over a metre deep and just long enough for me to lie down in. It wasn't done yet, though. I had to camouflage it. I had some lengths of invisible plastic with me - I don't mean invisible to the eye, I mean invisible to x-ray and so on - a length of latex sheet in my pack. I lay the ribs over the hole and rubbed the latex in the mud before I stretched it over the pit and smoothed it over.

I wished Regin was there. I didn't want to die alone. But this was my place, that was his. I had to die; he had to watch.

I'd come this far, though.

I was just about ready to push my pack in and follow it down when I heard a sound. I looked up and there was an old man standing by the side of the track watching me.

My heart leapt. Fafnir? Could it be him? Could he shape change? No one ever said so. So what was this old bloke doing here, standing watching me like I was a workman digging a hole in the road?

"What are you doing?" I said, getting to my feet. Then I thought - a spy! I felt at my belt for my knife. The old man took no notice. He simply pointed down at the trench.

"Haven't you thought what will happen when Fafnir's blood pours out into the trench and his body slumps down on top if it? What will happen then, Sigurd. How will you escape?"

I was about to grab him, but he flashed me a warning look. "Listen to what I say, boy." I stopped. There was something about him. I was finding it difficult to think.

I glanced up the slope at where the dragon would come. I had to hide! But the old man had a point. I scowled, not knowing what to make of him.

"You'll drown in his blood." He pointed down. "Dig a channel out to the side, like the blood gully on a knife. The blood will run off and you'll have a way out."

"But I have no more latex. He'll see!" I was in a panic already, but the old man shook his head.

"Dig the channel here, where the mud slopes up. It'll be hidden from him when he comes down the track from his citadel … at least until it's too late."

He had a point. But I was suspicious. "How do you know so much about Fafnir?"

The old man smiled and glanced up at me. He was wearing a wide brimmed trilby and a herringbone coat, dripping with the rain. He had short grey beard and only one eye.

"Sigurd, my love. You were wishing you weren't alone. I'm here now. Do as I say."

I frowned at him, trying to work it out. What on earth was this - in the middle of this destroyed land with the dragon only half a mile away, and this old guy turns up in his herringbone coat like it was the high street in some little county town talking about blood gullies and reading my mind? But what he said made sense. I thought that maybe he was keeping me occupied until Fafnir got here, but I did what he said anyway. I was so tired, but I picked up the shovel and started to lever more clods of rock hard clay out of the ground. He stood there with his hands behind his back and watched.

"But don't try to avoid his blood. If you bathe in the blood of Fafnir, you'll take its qualities. No weapon will ever harm you then, Sigurd."

"You know too much," I said; and as soon as I'd said it, I realised - my god! Who knows too much? Who has only one eye? It was Odin, the alfather. Odin! He'd come here in person to help me.

How can I describe that feeling? Odin was with me! It didn't mean I was going to live - not with him by me. Odin is the god of violent death. Maybe he'd come to take me with him - not that I needed any help to die here on the Heath, waiting to face the dragon. But - god was with me. He had come to be with me.

My first thought was to bend my knee to him. But then I thought of my father, who had never accepted his fate but fought against it. I remembered the story of how he wrestled the god to his knee on the last night of his life. That's something, to wrestle with a god! I always thought that that was the most glorious thing I ever heard of. And - I don't know why, maybe because I'd already decided I was going to die, I'd lost everything already - but I suddenly threw down the spade, leapt over the trench which lay between us like the grave, and grabbed hold of him. I had the god in my hands! I twisted him round, forced him down. He grunted in surprise and I saw his face flush with anger. He was strong, but I was stronger and I felt him yield to me. Then I had him, he was down in the mud and …

And then I was holding his coat in my hand and the man was gone. I thought to myself - What a fool! Fighting the gods! But maybe no worse than fighting a dragon.

"Thanks!" I called out into the rain. "Thanks, old man!" Why I should thank him after trying to fight him I don't know. He was my god - my destiny. Everything that I felt that day was of Odin - the fear and the poetry of fear, and the blood lust and the embracing of death. I loved him almost like a lover. But although I had to accept, I didn't have to go quietly and I don't think he held it against me, although I made him slip in the mud and lose his coat.

Then I bent my back again to the task he had set me. I dug a gully leading down, hidden by a ridge of mud - and then I was ready. I offered up a prayer - my father's prayer. "And have the grace to leave us to our own affairs. Amen!" Then I slid down under the earth, into the grace of the grave. I pulled the latex over the gap where I came in, got out my rations, my water and my weapons and began the wait.

7 - 1st Death

Regin had told Sigurd that the dragon would come to bathe at the pool that night, or maybe the next, but he was wrong. Fafnir changed his habits from week to week, day to day, even from hour to hour, so that there could be no predicting him. As luck had it, he didn't come that night, nor the night after, nor the night after that. Sigurd had only a handful of dried fruit and a bottle of water with him and that was soon finished. In the total darkness underground, in growing fear, with his food and water soon all gone, the boy very soon lost all sense of time and reason. No light or sound crept into his little prison. The smell of the cold clay filled his nostrils and then seeped into his whole body until he felt he was a part of it already.

Hours passed and he was already unsure of the day. By the end of the first night, Sigurd was so unhinged with cold, fear and darkness that his dreams had become as real as the cold earth he lay in. In his mind the dragon came a dozen times; in his mind, he died a dozen times and still he lay there and suffered, stiffening like a corpse.

In the shit and the piss and the cold mud underground, in the darkness which his mind populated with phantoms - surely none of them worse than the reality waiting for him above - Sigurd at last seemed to awake; someone, something, was approaching. He knew it wasn't Fafnir, the tread was too light. It was the old man. He stood quietly above Sigurd for a minute or two before he began to work. He had come to heap more mud up around the edges of the latex, smoothing it down, sealing Sigurd even more firmly into his tomb. Grateful for something to listen to, Sigurd lay still and said nothing while the old man worked. It was a long job; Odin seemed to want to be sure that not even the air could get in or out of the little tomb underground. As the clay heaped up above him, the latex skin sank closer and closer to his face, and still Sigurd lay still and listened until the work above his head was done, and the figure retreated.

Then came the bad air. The heaving of the chest, the tearing pain and desperation. Was this another nightmare? The blackness entering beyond his eyes and into his soul; the body begging for fresh air. But there was none. The god had sealed the tomb against that. Still Sigurd waited, faithful to his fate. Now his limbs begin to twitch and shudder, his hands involuntarily to snatch and claw at the covering above him - but it was too late now, the weight was too great, the clay too densely packed, the fibre sheet too strong for him to make any impact at all. At last, with the air all gone and his struggles exhausted, Sigurd ceased to breath and began to turn blue.

Of that time, what can we say? The grave is the most private place. What words are heard? Who visits us, apart from the fly and the worm? It is said that there are secrets only the dead can understand and that the Alfather knows how to make them speak. Perhaps that's why Odin murdered his favourite underground. But after death, came the divine. Odin opened the gully he had told Sigurd to dig, entered into the grave and lay there with him. What passed between them? Don't dare ask! This is death, it is beyond the understanding of the living. For us there is only silence to hear. Odin came; that is enough. Whether it was to question or to whisper his own secrets to the dead boy, we shall never know. But there he breathed new life into him. Odin, the god who turns soldiers into priests, poets and angels, blew death away, reversed decay and turned the bitterness of fear and pain into joy - the joy of life, the joy of living. Sigurd would never fear death again.

After the god left him, Sigurd lay very still, not even breathing; he didn't need to. He lay for another day in utter stillness until at last he felt the ground shaking around him and he knew that the dragon was coming. The he lifted his head, drew in air, bared his teeth at the unseen sky above his head and prepared to die again in a torrent of blood.

***

It was a simple plan, and like so much that is simple, it had to be done well. Sigurd was to plunge the sword up through the clay at exactly the right moment. Fafnir was travelling fast; too soon and the monster would see the sword and fling himself aside. Too late and he would miss the vital organs. In his dark cell underground, all Sigurd had to go on was the shaking of the ground around him.

Fafnir was sliding like an otter on a mud slide by the water's edge. In the fifteen years that he had ruled Hampstead Heath and all that remained of London around it, this was his only sport - to slide out of his citadel on his belly and plunge head first into the water below. To Sigurd, it sounded like a train rushing towards him - every second he thought the monster was over him, but still the noise grew, still he held back waiting for the perfect moment. Odin would tell him when, he thought. Then suddenly the latex ballooned down above him. For a split second the thought was in his mind - Hold back, lie low, you can still live. Then he lunged upwards with the blade with all his strength, up through the latex and the mud, up through the impossible, impassable skin and deep into the bowels of Fafnir.

The sword was wrenched violently along in the direction the dragon was travelling, and Sigurd was crumpled violently up against the end of the chamber with such force that the steel of the sword cracked. Stunned, Sigurd hung on for a moment longer while the dragon, forcing his claws deep into the clay to stop his flight, continued down the slope and the sword carried on with its deadly work. Then, as it hit the pelvic bone, the blade snapped. There was a terrifying scream above him like a bomb falling and a torrent of blood and guts came tumbling down into the trench, covering Sigurd's eyes and filling his mouth. Stuffing the stub of the sword into his belt, he began fighting his way upwards, towards air and life.

He burst out of the ground in a rush of blood like a baby coming into the world for the first time. Fafnir had stopped himself just short of the water and lay there right by him, writhing on the ground on his side, swinging his great tail from side to side and scooping his arms in front of him in a desperate effort to force his spilled guts back into his body cavity. There was a three-metre wound in his belly, from his sternum to his tail. He saw Sigurd rise out of the ground and swung at him with a groan, but the boy danced to one side. In the same movement he pulled the machine gun from his back and fired, a hundred rounds in three seconds, raking up and down directly into the wound. Fafnir roared in pain and flailed. Inside the great wound he had cut, Sigurd could see his diaphragm moving as his lungs worked and the pulsing beat above where the great heart did its work. There was a deep gash in his sternum where the blade had first struck; exactly right.

The boy dropped the machine gun, pulled the shotgun off his back, walked right up to the monster, thrust the double barrels in under the breastbone and up until he felt them press against the beating muscle inside. Then he gave it both barrels.

"Got you, you fucker! Now die!" he screamed, and jumped back to watch. The wound throbbed violently as the shells exploded. Fafnir screamed and clawed at him but Sigurd was dashed to one side as a fountain of blood burst over him. The dragon groaned again and rolled back onto his front, reaching out with his great clawed hand in a last effort to recapture his spilled insides. He took a deep sigh, which Sigurd was certain would be his last, rolled over so that the wound was buried in the mud and settled his great and beautiful head upon the bloody ground. But his yellow eye was still half open, and he fixed Sigurd in his stare. There was a long, still moment. Then the dragon spoke.

"A child, a beautiful child," he whispered. "Who are you?"

"Sigurd Volson, son of Sigmund." Fafnir, who had closed his eye in pain, opened it again to stare at his killer. Sigurd frowned back. He was thinking - I blew your heart to shreds! Why aren't you dead? What's happening?

The dragon coughed and snarled. "Brother!" he hissed. "No brother of mine!" "This is the kind of hero you are. I'm Styr. Do you know me, boy?"

"They call you Fafnir." "They know nothing." Styr! Could it be true? Sigmund's first son who had run off after killing his aunt and clone-brother. Had he spent all these years turning himself into this? Sigurd was shaken, but he didn't show it.

"If you ever were my brother, you gave it away long ago. What sort of a man turns himself into this?" "I was invulnerable!" boasted Styr. "I ruled. Lord of London!"

Sigurd laughed. "Ruled over what?" he demanded. "Burnt brick and gold? Some king. Some kingdom." Fafnir groaned again. His eye fluttered. But he wasn't dead yet.

"All those treasures brought me no joy, and no joy will they bring you either, Sigurd. You'll end like me, don't doubt it."

Sigurd just laughed. "If I was immortal like the gods, then maybe I'd fear death. But we all have to die, Fafnir. Why should I fear what can't be changed?"

All the time the dragon was lying there with his clammy eye fixed on Sigurd, watching closely. And all the time Sigurd was getting more and more anxious and confused. What was going on? He'd destroyed the monster's heart! What more did he have to do to? And why was the creature talking to him? What was going to happen next?

Fafnir - Styr - was keeping his arms wrapped over the wound, which he pressed closely into the mud beneath him. What was he doing - just holding on to life? But with no heart …? As the dragon had passed over him, it had twisted to one side in an effort to escape the blade, and so the wound twisted up his side towards the pelvis. Sigurd suddenly took two rapid steps to the side, bent down to look and managed to catch sight of the end of the wound, by the monster's tail, before he rolled on his belly to hide it. He looked into it and saw …

… flesh knitting together; blood sucking its way back up, the tubes of his insides reuniting, muscle knotting and pushing back into place, bone forming splinters that reached out to bone, forcing themselves together, knitting, stitching, joining. Styr was healing himself before Sigurd's very eyes.

There was a brief frozen moment; Sigurd knew; Fafnir knew Sigurd knew. They stared into each other's eyes.

"You thought you were watching my death," hissed the dragon. "But you were watching your own."

And then he lunged.