The Moonshawl: A Wraeththu Mythos Novel (31 page)

The desperate savagery of the Mantel/Wyvern attack
was mostly successful and they managed to liberate around twenty boys they
found in a bad state, apparently infected with some kind of wasting disease.
Many of the Wraeththu left behind in the camp were slaughtered, as they’d been
taken by surprise. (This was presumably because they were a fairly neophyte
group, lacking the powerful leaders who would have sensed impending danger.)
During the attack, one of Vivi’s own grandsons – Peredur, almost unrecognisable
– joined the defence put up by the Wraeththu. He had clearly already been
converted. Vivi shot him in the shoulder and had him taken away from the scene
of battle at once, believing that whatever had been done to him could be
reversed.

Unfortunately, Peredur was the
only boy of the Mantel and Wyvern families who was found. The others, it was
assumed, had gone out raiding with the Wraeththu or were dead, or confined
elsewhere.

Just as Vivi had known she’d
have to act swiftly, once the Wraeththu were fully aware of the attack they
reacted equally swiftly, fighting with a ferocity and speed the humans had never
seen before. Reinforcements slunk in from the fields and forests, perhaps part
of that particular tribe or called from other groups by unknown means. Their
unearthly cries instilled terror, and caused many of the Mantel and Wyvern
party to panic and run, or simply drop in their tracks to be butchered.
Eventually, realising they had got the best they could hope for from the raid,
Vivi and Thorne ordered a quick retreat, streaking back across fields and
through forests to their strongholds. They had made rescues, but only one of
their own kin.

Arianne attended to her injured son, along with two
members of the family staff, while Vivi helped with the other boys they’d
brought back. She’d found they were terribly sick with an unknown disease that
was ravaging their bodies and had in fact appeared to have eaten them partially
away. Due to these deformities, it was not immediately apparent what had happened
to them, but to Arianne, caring for Peredur, it was obvious. He barely even
looked the same, more like a beautiful wild animal in the form of a young
person
– she could no longer call him a young
man
. She felt she had been
bleached out of him, for his once golden skin was now white, as was his hair.
He was like no earthly creature. The only way he could be approached was when
drugged, and Arianne kept him in a virtual coma, concealing what she had
learned from other family members and pressing her staff to secrecy. But after
a few days, one of the women told Vivi what she’d witnessed, and Vivi went
herself to see what had happened. Peredur’s gunshot wound had healed already,
but stranger than this were the physical changes to his body. He was no longer completely
male but some kind of ‘intersex freak’, as his grandmother referred to his
condition. Vivi ordered him to be confined in a room in the attics, and that
for now nothing should be further revealed to anyone else. Family members and
household staff must be kept away.

The other boys who had been rescued died in
excruciating agony, their bodies malformed, their flesh rotting upon their
bones. Unknown to their human liberators, these were half-completed inceptions
and without Wraeththu hara to tend them through the change, they had no hope of
survival.

The Wraeththu retaliation, when it came, was
devastating. Only Vivi’s strength of spirit kept the Wyverns fighting. Fairly
soon all contact with the Mantels was lost. Nightly, waves of attacks would come,
with weird screams through the night that sent guards running from their posts.
Many threw themselves over the walls, their hands clasped to their heads, to be
slaughtered by those waiting below. Vivi sought out those who were deaf, either
from birth or through old age and infirmity. These she sent to guard the walls
and in some measure this was successful, since the battle cries did not affect
them. But there were not enough of them to patrol the entire estate.
Experiments with blocking the ears of guards were sometimes effective, while in
some cases seemed to make no difference.

Refugees flooded to the Wyvern
Estate, and despite dwindling supplies, Vivi ordered that all should be allowed
within, after a body search to make sure no Wraeththu attempted infiltration.
To Vivi, this was a means to get more troops rather than an act of charity.
More boys began disappearing without a trace, and Vivi decreed that any who
remained should be drugged and incarcerated to save them from whatever hideous
fate awaited them at Wraeththu hands.

One night, a couple of months after Vivi and
Thorne’s attack on the Wraeththu, the beacon fire of the Mantels was lit, and
at first the Wyverns believed their neighbours had survived, as they had, and
that this was a signal. But it quickly became evident this was not the case. A
swarm of Wraeththu attacked the wall. They made sure to light the Wyvern
beacon, which Vivi believed would summon even more of them. As her people
fought for their lives against quicksilver attackers who were ferocious beyond
measure, she ordered that the fire should be extinguished as a matter of
priority. This action probably saved the survivors.

Wyvern defenders recognised
Wraeththu who had once been their kin and friends, now not even seeming to know
who they were. Entreaties were met with savagery. Relatives were cut down
without compassion, even the girl children. Boys were spared and taken. But
Vivi would not accept defeat, rallying her ragtag army. Through some miracle,
as the sun was rising, they drove the attackers back. But so much had been lost,
and the soft daylight revealed the extent of the carnage and structural damage.
It was obvious to all that another attack could not be survived.

Enraged and grief-stricken,
after witnessing so many of her family slain, Vivi lost much of her reason. She
believed that Peredur had called the Wraeththu down upon them. She ordered him
to be brought out into the stableyard before the people, along with all the
other incarcerated boys. She had Peredur stripped naked and tied to a stake. Then
she fetched from the kitchen one of her grandmother’s silver desert spoons and
a meat knife. Arianne was locked in the attic, whether to protect her from
seeing what would happen or to prevent her interfering, Vivi did not say.

She mutilated Peredur herself, in
front of everyone. She took out his eyes, hacked off his genitals. To her, he
was no longer her grandson, but a disgusting interloper in his body. She
regarded Peredur as dead, and what lived on was an abomination. Let his fate be
a lesson to all. Any boy who turned traitor in the coming days would be
similarly punished.

After this torture, Peredur was left
in the stableyard of Meadow Mynd, as an example. Arianne was forbidden to tend
to him, or go anywhere near him, although she was released from imprisonment. Vivi
needed her to care for Vere, who would tolerate no one else near him. Often, he
just lay on his bed, screaming, as if all that Peredur had gone through had
happened to him instead. He bled from the eyes. He pissed blood incontinently.

Witnessing all this, sitting
beside Vere’s bed, weeping out her heart, helped Arianne make her decision. The
only regret she had was that she could not reach the yard where Peredur still
hung, nearly dead, but because he was Wraeththu unable to die quickly. Her
husband and daughters had been slaughtered, the fate of three of her sons was unknown.
The last one, Peredur, was dying slowly, in terrible pain and fear.

Two nights after Peredur’s
mutilation, Arianne administered a fatal drug to Vere, as he had asked her. She
sat with him until he died. Then she fled to Dŵr Alarch, and there took
her own life, unable to bear any more of the horror, or to witness the
inevitable, unspeakable end to it all. But then there was no escape and she was
held, as if in some endless nightmare, alive only to her memories.

Until I came to her. Until then.

This was all that Arianne knew. Once she’d finished
speaking, I took her in my arms; she felt like a woman of flesh and blood.

‘I can’t go yet,’ she said, her
face pressed against my chest.

‘But you
are
released,’ I
said.

‘No. I don’t know what happened
afterwards.
That
must be what holds me here. Something else. The horror
didn’t end with my death.’ She pulled away from me, wiped her face. ‘You will
help me, Ysobi.’ This was a simply stated fact. She and I both knew I would.

I left the bathroom, and went
down to the kitchen, where I recorded Arianne’s account in as much detail as I
could recall. When I’d finished, I put my arms upon the table and buried my
face within them. I wept as Arianne had wept. I thought of what I’d seen at the
Pwll Siôl Lleuad, of what had happened in the stableyard of Meadow Mynd, of the
slaughter of the human Wyverns and those who depended on them. How
could
Wyva
still live there, knowing about these atrocities? I thought now that Medoc had
done the right thing in leaving that blighted ground.

I didn’t have the end of the
story – exactly how Peredur had died – although it seemed obvious to me his own
kin, those who had become har, had killed him as an act of mercy. And now it
seemed Peredur lived on in hatred and resentment... or....? The shade I’d seen
hadn’t radiated anything like that. There was so much more I needed to know.

I woke up around nine in the morning, still at the
kitchen table, roused by the scent of cooking bacon and toasting bread. Groggily,
I lifted my head, expecting Rinawne to be there, but no. Arianne was at the
stove, as if she was living a normal life, as if she’d come to the tower all
those decades ago, not to die but merely to live here, safe. I was astounded.
This was no ghost.

‘Good morning, Ysobi,’ she said,
turning to me. ‘You see, I remember your name. I didn’t want to wake you.
You’ve been up nearly all night, haven’t you?’ She smiled, even though sadness
would always be etched into the history of her face.

‘How...?’

‘I don’t know. After you left
me, I wanted to sleep. Yes. Real sleep. I think it was in your bed. I hope you
don’t mind.’

‘This is... I can’t believe you
can leave the bathroom. Arianne... is it possible you are again alive?’

‘How
can
that be
possible?’ She grimaced. ‘It isn’t, but here we are. How do you like your tea?’

‘Strong... very strong. And
sweet.’

She placed a full cooked breakfast
on the table before me. ‘Eat. You know, I’m going to think of you as a woman,
if that’s all right with you. It will make this easier for me.’

‘Of... of course.’ My mind was
in such a whirl, I couldn’t decide if I was awake or dreaming. I reached out
and grabbed Arianne’s arm. Yes, felt real enough.

‘Come with me,’ I said.

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Before
breakfast? I haven’t eaten for a hundred years.’

‘Please... just a moment.’

She gave me a quizzical glance,
appearing less unnerved by this inexplicable situation than I was. I led her
onto the stairs and down to the front door. ‘Open it,’ I said.

She did so, still looking at me.

‘Now go outside. Just onto the
step.’

I could see she tried to, but it
didn’t work. She couldn’t put a foot outside the tower. Bizarrely, this
reassured me. I couldn’t accept a woman coming back from the dead and taking up
life as if she’d never left it. Strangely, it seemed I
could
accept a
woman coming back from the dead and being stuck in a building like a regular
ghost, if there is such a thing.

Arianne frowned. ‘Perhaps I can
only...
be
here.’

‘I just needed to know,’ I said.
‘Maybe you did too.’

She hugged me briefly, and I
realised how much I liked her already. Whitemane woman. Incredible.

We went back upstairs and ate
breakfast together. ‘One thing is better now,’ Arianne said. ‘Today I feel like
all I told you last night happened to someone else. I’m me, yet
not
. It’s
like I’ve just been away, but have forgotten all about my travels. This is my
tower. I always used to come here.’ She looked around herself, smiling, then
back at me with an arrow of a glance. ‘So... what are
you
doing living
in it?’

‘There is so much to tell you,’
I said. ‘And I really don’t know where to start. Purely about me...?’ I
shrugged. ‘I work for your family, your descendants. This tower came with the
job. I’m like a... priest, a doctor and a teacher combined. That’s the work I do.’

‘And everyone is a Wraeththu
now?’

‘Just about, yes. Humanity has
all but died out, although some hara seek to preserve them.’

She grimaced. ‘How grotesque.
Like in a zoo?’

I laughed. ‘No, not like that.
Communities. Some humans live among hara in the great cities.’ I took a breath.
‘Arianne, I have to tell you something. One of your sons is still alive.
Medoc.’

Her eyes widened, and she
flushed, perhaps uncomfortably reminded of all she was trying to forget in
these pleasant moments at the breakfast table. She swallowed. ‘How?’

‘Well, hara have much longer
lifespans than humans, if that’s what you mean. Other than that, he survived
the early days. He doesn’t live here now, but in the next county. He has sons.’

‘You...
breed
?’

‘Well, yes. We’re androgynes,
Arianne. We’re quite capable.’

‘That’s...
something
,’
she said, clearly not sure whether to be disgusted, amazed, delighted or all
three. ‘So I’m the Neanderthal,’ she concluded. ‘All but extinct, and this
newer race came to replace me.’

‘That’s about it, yes.’

‘And I’m still a mother.’

‘Won’t you always be that?’

‘You know what I mean, but it’s
all so...
distant
to me now. That has to be a blessing under the
circumstances.’ She shook her head. ‘This is like being drunk. How can I feel
this good? How can I
be
at all? It’s as if I’ve come back as I was
before everything bad happened.’