"Now this might be worth a meal or two," Ukko said appreciatively. "Just don't fall off and bugger it all up."
The wood was weak.
Sláine scrambled up hand over hand, his feet slipping and falling into the gaps where the wicker was woven in on itself to form the giant man. He didn't dare look down. The distance was dizzying. The screams of the dead and dying reached him.
The smoke stung the back of his throat.
Sláine coughed, hacking up a lungful of catarrh.
He felt a cold black anger welling inside him.
This was a perversion of all things holy.
Morrigan's black birds circled, flying in close to him, feathers beating at his back and the side of his head as he tried to find a way around the outside of the giant head. Sláine tried to beat them off but they just kept coming, flying at him, trying to dislodge him from his precarious perch. He twisted, lashing out at them but they just flew in harder, their wings flashing at his eyes, making it impossible for him to hold on to the wood. His hand slipped and he dropped six feet, catching a broken spar of wood and dangling perilously over the huge drop.
It took a massive surge of strength to claw his way back to the relative safety of the wicker man's jutting jaw. He hung there, gasping, gathering his strength for one final surge upwards. He couldn't fail the woman trapped inside the head. He would save her. He had to, for himself.
He should have been down there with Blind Bran and Tamun, and Senoll and Ukko, and the others. His battle skills might have meant the difference between life and death for some of those men. Their lives were in their own hands now. There was nothing he could do about it. He needed to concentrate on breaking into the wicker head and rescuing Medb.
The flames were up around the effigy's chest already.
There was no chance of surviving.
He couldn't let himself think about it.
He needed to find a way into the head, but there wasn't one. The carpenters had made the thing like one huge coffin, designed no doubt to keep the woman from escaping before her sacrifice to the wyrm god was complete. He didn't have a weapon. He pulled at the wood, trying to pry it apart wide enough to make a gap he could slip through.
The cruel flames chased him higher.
Sweat and fear made his hands greasy.
You're too late, my love, always too late.
"Not this time," he said, driving his fist through the wicker, tearing up his skin. Ignoring the pain he ripped the wood apart, tearing a gaping rent in the wicker man's face where its mouth ought to have been.
He pulled himself inside.
She was there, laid out on a beautifully carved funeral bier.
Sláine clambered up to be beside her.
Medb: the Bride of Crom.
It was impossible to tell if she was beautiful or even what she really looked like. Thick coils of cloying smoke crawled over her. Her lips opened, drawing it in. Sláine stared at the semi-naked woman. Her skin was covered in an elaborate weave of tattoos, some patterns of art, others darker depictions of the wyrm god and the vile practices of the Drunes. Her hair was shaved at the sides, the centre teased into gorgon-like spikes. Eyes had been painted onto her eyelids so that she appeared to be staring at him as he leaned over her.
"I won't fail you, Medb," Sláine promised, taking her into his arms.
She had been drugged insensate. Her lips moved forming the word Crom over and over again. It was a small mercy that she was blissfully unaware of her plight. Sláine hoisted the woman over his shoulder. This once he was right, he wasn't too late.
He looked around the inside of the wicker man's head.
Tongues of red flame lashed up between the warp and weft of the wicker, licking at his feet. The smoke was suffocating. There was nowhere to go; no way out of the burning tower. The only thing he could do was climb higher.
The entire structure gave a sickening lurch to the left as one of its legs began the slow and irresistible process of buckling beneath the raging fire.
"Soth!" Sláine growled, swinging out of the opening he had beaten in the face of the wicker man. He hung there for a tantalising moment, Medb over his shoulder, legs dangling over the one hundred and fifty feet drop. Then the slow, arduous climb to the top of the effigy's flat head began.
The smoke stung his eyes. He blinked back tears. He couldn't let go long enough to wipe them away. As the flames licked and lashed around Sláine his anger at the sheer bloody unfairness of it grew, and a greater power burned within him. With the moon on his skin Sláine warp-spasmed with such ferocity that his body lost even the most remote of human qualities.
He became a pure creature of the earth: a giant living golem of flesh and blood.
With the tower collapsing around him, Sláine jumped, plunging down through the air, the flames tearing at his warped flesh, and into the shallows of the swamp. The fall would have broken a mere mortal man, but not Sláine Mac Roth.
Twenty
The Bride of Crom
Ukko saw the beast that was Sláine fall. The flames fell away from the young Sessair's warped body. The warp was unlike anything Ukko had seen before. Sláine's entire body had tripled in size, the musculature sharply defined even from such a great distance. His hair looked like a fountain of black oil cascading behind him as he plummeted. He clutched the woman, Medb, in his arms as if to protect her form the shocking impact and inevitable death that the pair rushed down to meet.
Ukko stumbled forwards, unable to take his eyes from the sight of the warped one's fall.
Sláine hit the ground hard, sending a tremor through the earth.
For a second Ukko saw a vast outline in the cloying smoke. At first he thought it was a silhouette of Sláine but it wasn't. It was a physical manifestation of the source of Sláine's warp, the true form of Danu, the Earth Goddess.
"Soth!" Ukko moaned as Sláine rose again out of the swamp.
Behind him the figure of Danu shimmered and blurred and was rudely shattered by the collapse of the towering wicker effigy. Blazing brands fell from the sky. Skull-swords and prisoners alike screamed trying to escape from the path of the falling giant. Part of the monstrous wicker man's arm crashed to the ground in a shower of flame and shrapnel, scorching the earth and those unfortunate enough not to have gotten out of its way.
"Sláine's alive!" Ukko yelled, praying his words would carry over the mayhem of the battle to some of the prisoners. "Into the swamp! Run!"
Fifty years ago there would have been a huge river, now there was only swamp. Back then barges would have run the river, bringing food and trade goods. Now the river was gone, mired in a swamp that brought nothing but mosquitoes and sickness. Where there had been life now there was nothing, only absolute stillness, the slow drift of low water and the scabs of withered vegetation.
He didn't wait. He hurdled over a burning wicker finger and ran head down, after Sláine. He didn't care if anyone else heard. It was all about surviving, and chasing Sláine offered the best chance of that.
The Lord Weird watched with disgust as his glorious ceremony collapsed in a pyre of wicker and tortured screams.
The dying clawed at the dirt.
The saccharine stench of burning flesh clogged the air.
The screams were delicious. He was surrounded by such sweet suffering. It was heady.
He didn't care about the prisoners, or, at this stage, the bride.
He only had eyes for the warped one.
"A renegade from the tribes of the Earth Goddess? Here? How is this possible? How can this creature warp the earth force through his body like this?"
"It is a wonder," the Babd priestess said in awe.
Slough Feg sneered. "It is indeed. The warped ones are a thing of the past, like the creatures of the cave that walked upright but were too primitive to be called men. This creature is an abomination, a throwback. It has no place in our world. It is a violation of our master Crom-Cruach's divine law. It cannot be allowed. No, no, no. Such a monstrosity cannot be allowed to live!" Then he spoke softly as if the thought had just occurred to him. "It will make a grand sacrifice to our master. Yes, yes, yes. Its tainted blood will give much to Crom. See, the beast of Danu flees into the swamp. It will die there." Slough Feg threw up his withered arms. The skull fetishes hanging from his waist spun slack jawed. "Awake! Awake! Awake you ghouls! Awake you souls trapped still in the unlife between the Land of the Living and the Nations of the Dead! Awake! Rise! Rise my bitter dead and feast on the giblets of Danu's precious warped one!"
The wind answered; a long mournful sigh that curled out of the deepest part of the swamp.
It was the voice of the half-dead answering the Lord Weird's call.
The rotten corpses of the half-dead rose up in front of Ukko as he ran.
Their cries were anguished, worse by far than the cries of the dying behind him. These were the cries of the damned, victims of the Drune Lords' Weird Stones, condemned to a limbo between death and life.
"Sláine! Sláine! Wait for me!" Ukko cried, running for his life.
The half-dead rose between him and the warped one. They came out of the swamp, rising from the very depths, weed and bilge clinging to their bones as the crow-feeders surfaced. Overhead Morrigan's black birds broke into a frenzy, swirling and sweeping low, drawn to the carrion reek of the creatures coming out of the water.
"Soth!" Ukko moaned, scooping up a handful of brackish water and hurling it in the face of an ancient warrior as it surfaced. The creature didn't flinch. It shambled hungrily towards him, spear raised in its skeletal hand. The filth of the swamp clogged in its open ribcage. The rusted tip of the weapon that had killed the creature was still lodged deep in its pelvis where the spear's head had broken off.
Ukko hurled himself forwards, aquaplaning through the shallow swamp water, beneath the half-dead's stabbing spear.
All around him more and more of the wretched souls rose, headless, rotten, broken and bearing the wounds that killed them, eager to answer the Lord Weird's magical call.
Dead voices cried out mournfully:
"We hear you, Lord Weird! We hear you and we come!"
"We come!"
"We answer the call!"
"We who have lain below the water as carrion rise now to feed the Morrigan's crows!"
"We come, Lord Weird!"
"We come, we come, we come!"
"There are too many," Ukko whimpered. There was nowhere to run. The half-dead had surfaced all around him, and still more came, their yellowed skulls breaching the brackish waters of the swamp in a perverted parody of rebirth.
Sláine moved further and further away, splashing through the swamp, the woman, Medb, slung across his shoulder.
Those of the half-dead closest to the warped one surged after him, the water recoiling from their unnatural presence, hissing and sizzling as they splashed on, steam wreathing the walking dead as they waded through the swamp. The others, between Ukko and Sláine, clacked their bones, slack jaws and broken teeth, wailing hideously as they swarmed around the desperate dwarf.
A handful of prisoners from the wicker man splashed into the swamp, fleeing the devastation of the battlefield. They brought skull-swords behind them. The half-dead made no distinction between the living; all were fair game.
The slaughter was brutal, the half-dead dragging the living beneath the surface, downed them in the dead swamp, holding them under until the bubbles had stopped rising and their limbs had stopped flailing.
Ukko squirmed between the legs of a headless warrior, dodging the rhythmic chop-slash-chop of its huge stone axe. He swallowed a mouthful of foul swamp water in the process, almost choking as a spear lanced dangerously close to his side.
He splashed away into the depths of the turgid water, away from the dead, from the fighting and the dying, and away from Sláine.
"Our long iron tongues are thirsty for blood," a half-dead warrior rasped, thrusting his sword clean through a skull-sword's shield and into the soldier's neck, tearing through the heart vein and venting a huge spray of blood. "This pleases us. It pleases Crom! We will sleep if we kill! We will be free!"
Ukko knew of course that they wouldn't. The wyrm god was not a benevolent deity. He was a monstrous one. They would kill, passing their Half-Death on like a plague to all those they fought.
Ukko watched, mesmerised as Sláine turned to fight the risen dead. He had no weapons but he had no need of them. The half-dead surged around the young Sessair, their rusted steel stabbing at his heart, his head, his throat, but Sláine slapped the blows aside as if they were nothing more than flies annoying him.
The others were not so lucky.
Without Danu's power surging through their veins they fell beneath the rusted blades of the half-dead.
Ukko sank beneath the black water, leaning back so that only his nose and lips were exposed, letting him breath as he backstroked slowly further and further away from the carnage.
Sláine felt the rage of the warp-spasm fading as whatever last vestiges of Danu's power that lived in the blasted land dried up.
He stopped running and turned to face the demons that hunted him. He was Red Branch. He did not flee like a coward. He was the mountain. He was the river. He was Sláine Mac Roth.
"Come on then, you stinking corpses! Time to send you back to the death darkness where you belong!"
The emptiness the failing earth power left behind was harrowing. He fought with a savagery that shocked even him. He battered the dead, breaking their bones off to make weapons to club more of their kind back beneath the dark water. He drove one half-dead creature down, grinding its bones with the femur of another.
"Our weapons are useless on this daemon!" a dead warrior with half his face eaten away by the bottom feeders of the swamp railed.
"Then let our teeth gnaw through his flesh mouthful by delicious mouthful!" another mocked.
"Come on then, boys. More dying, less talking!" Sláine said, but they had no answer. Even as the mystical strength was draining from him, the same magic that gave them life faded. Sláine rammed a broken fibula into the shocked face of a collapsing half-dead warrior. The dead, no longer bound by the arch sorcerer Slough Feg's dark magics, came undone in front of Sláine's eyes.