Cape Wrath (16 page)

“What matter?” Linda replied, “so long as they feared me too.”

“You are pure evil.”

“No.” She shook her gory head. “Evil is to neglect the gods. And as you can see,” she turned towards the sea, mountainous clouds racing over it on the storm wind, forks of lightning jabbing down, “that is not the case where
I
am concerned. Is this not their approval, their gratitude that centuries on, their glory is re-awakened?”

“This is empty noise and fury!” Alan shouted. “As your entire worthless, monstrous life was.”

She smiled again … those teeth, that red steaming tongue. “My monstrous life was only the beginning. As you shall see. Your wise-woman read my epitaph, did she not? Carved there on that stone behind you by my own brother, Halfdan. ‘Great Ivar,' it says, ‘Great Ivar sleeps here, closed up until the time is right for Ragnarok. Woe unto him who awakens Ivar's wolf-kin, and frees that beast to roam in the world before the first day of the Fimbulvetr. For he shall reap a maelstrom of blood and fire!' ”

For a moment, Alan couldn't answer. He knew that Professor Mercy had read and understood precisely that. It had been nonsense to think she hadn't been able to; there wasn't a Viking inscription in the world that Jo Mercy couldn't translate. She'd understood it all right, and it had terrified her; so much so that she hadn't dared repeat it. It all made sense now, of course, as did the reference to Ragnarok, and to the onset of the Fimbulwinter, the legendary winter at the end of the world.

“It's your fate to be destroyed with the other Norse demons, is it?” said Alan. “That doesn't surprise me.”

Linda's eyes narrowed, but her grin remained; in fact, it broadened, grew even toothier, more vampiric. “Nothing is fixed, Christian. Your simple folk lived in awe of the Final Day, when your White-Christ would come riding through the sky on a ball of flame. How could they have foreseen their own final day, when I, Ivar Ragnarsson, would come instead … and eat them! Those Irish, those Saxons …
I ate them
. In the great name of the Allfather.”

Alan shook his head, not wanting to acknowledge this: formerly the rumour, now the undeniable truth, that Ivar and his fellow berserkers would often devour the hearts and livers of those they slaughtered.

“And now,” she said slowly, almost tenderly, “I eat you.”

Alan gazed up at her, saturated with sweat.

“The first of many,” she added, leaning towards him, drawing something from behind her. “Before we cut the eagle on tearful Edmund's back, we submitted him to the arrow-fest, to see just how great an ordeal a Christian king could endure.”

Alan remembered the arrow ordeal too. Before they split King Edmund open, they hung him from a branch and shot him full of arrows, taking care all the while to penetrate no vital organ, to leave him bristling like a porcupine but still very much alive.

“Alas,” Linda said, “in these uncivil times, we have no arrows. We do, however, have
this
.” She held out Clive's awl: the long steel pin with the handle of leather. And, without another word, she placed it against Alan's shoulder and thrust it deeply in.

He bit down on his tongue in his efforts not to scream. Blood flowed over his lips, but the agony of that was nothing compared to the agony in his shoulder, where the metal sank in like the clumsiest, most heavy-handed hospital injection, yet even then went on and on, running through muscle and sinew, and finally, with a dull
crunch
, pinioning the bone.

It wasn't courage alone that prevented Alan from shrieking. Initially he almost passed out, and hung there in a swoon. When she yanked the blade out again, he came violently round, however, and gave a helpless, chicken-like squawk.

“Weak,” she said. “So weak.”

And she plunged the awl into him again, driving it this time to its very hilt in the thick, meaty part of his right thigh. Now he did scream. It was unavoidable, though half way through he tried to strangle it, and almost choked with the effort.

After the thigh, she went for the right biceps, thrusting the spike clean through it, so the point came out on the other side. Pride forgotten, Alan roared out, struggling frantically with the greasy ravels of gizzard, his entire body now running with blood.

After this, she stuck him in the side of the neck; he gagged as he felt the steel penetrate his trachea; the sensation of air starting to whistle in his violated throat was as much a source of horror to him as pain. Next, it was the turn of both his feet. The awl stabbed violently down, fully transfixing either instep. Then it was his left cheek, the tool forced in through his frothing mouth, then pushed out via the side of his face, gashing teeth and gums on the way. Alan cried and wept, and fought against his bonds, which were now stretching, though not quite enough for him to wriggle free of them.

Linda considered carefully where the next intrusion might be made. Then she took hold of his penis, held it upright and spread the urethra with her fingers. With her other hand, she placed the tip of the awl against it. She eyed his anguished face, amused. “What do you think? A quick downwards thrust, or slow, steady infiltration?”

He shook his head, pleading. “No … no ...”

“It won't kill you,” she said. “But the internal damage will be devastating.”

“Please,” he whispered.

“Courtesy of your final friend, I gave the Allfather new tribute.” She grinned contemptuously. “The brain of Man. Which means the offering is almost complete. Yet there is one thing more. One further, final thing. And you know it.” She bared her teeth savagely. “
His manhood!
”

She drew her arm back to drive the awl down … and a heavy piece of bone struck her across the shoulder and neck, shattering with the impact. It was the length of femur that Linda herself had used to knock Alan out. This time it was less successful. The possessed girl stumbled forwards, but was stung rather than injured. She whipped around with an enraged snarl.

Professor Mercy, unkempt beyond belief and visibly weakened by her own wounds, had crawled out from the entrance to the barrow and now stood there swaying, a fragment of leg-bone in one hand, the corroded mass of Ivar's broadsword in the other.

Linda gave a slow, scornful smile. “You think to challenge me with those broken toys?”

The Professor nodded wearily. By the whiteness of her cheek, she was ready to faint, but she pressed on regardless: “I think … I think to challenge you the way we English always challenged you Danes. In open combat.”

Linda's snarl curved into a grimace of glee. She at once struck a menacing martial arts pose, the awl still in her right hand, now clasped like a knife. “It will be the greatest pleasure,” she said.

“And the greatest folly,” Alan growled, falling upon the girl from behind, looping the length of gut he'd finally slipped out of, around her neck, and pulling it tight as he dragged her down to her knees, then over onto her back.

Linda was taken completely by surprise. She thrashed madly, hissing, spitting, driving her elbows backwards, stabbing the awl over her shoulder at the face and throat of the man now struggling beneath her.

“Jo!” Alan gasped. “Hit her … the sword …”

Professor Mercy came forwards uncertainly. Still fuddled, it took her several moments to comprehend what he was saying. She then threw down the piece of bone and raised the rusty sword over her head with both hands. Linda, meanwhile, had wriggled free of the intestine loop. She turned herself over and began to slam blow after blow into Alan's tortured, blood-soaked body. The awl punctured his ribs several times more, before the ancient sword came sweeping down and landed on the girl's skull with
thunking
impact.

The finely honed edge that had once hewn Christian limbs like matchsticks, had now dulled to a lumpy bluntness, and in fact it cut Linda only where pieces of it broke away. It was still a phenomenal blow. The girl fell heavily sideways, though she wasn't fully unconscious. Her hands clawed and clutched at the turf as though trying to draw strength from the Earth. For all that, the stroke had left a small furrow in the mussed, sticky mop of her hair, which was now filling up with blood of its own.

Professor Mercy lifted the sword above her head a second time. It was now bent at an alarming angle, and loose in its rotted hilt, but it was heavy and jagged, and still might kill if driven down hard enough. This time, though, she lacked the strength. Enfeebled by everything that had happened to her, she tottered sideways and dropped the blade to the grass.

Seizing her chance, Linda tried to crawl drunkenly away, but Alan scrambled in pursuit and began twisting coils of entrails around her. First he wound them around her torso, then he drew her arms behind her back and knotted her wrists together.

The Professor shook her head. “She'll escape from that.
You
did.”

“By then we'll be gone,” Alan said, now binding the girl's legs. “McEndry must be here soon; any time now.”

The Professor sank down onto her knees as she watched. Linda, though vaguely aware of what was happening, still lacked the power to resist effectively. Despite this, she was moving about ever more vigorously, attempting to look up, mouthing guttural curses. Alan continued to bind her as securely as he could, but all the while the wind was rising to hurricane velocity. The thundering of the waves below the cliff was now incredible. With such forces unleashed, it seemed unlikely anything could survive in the open for long, but still it got worse … for then the lightning reached them, and began to strike with dread proximity. The first bolt hit the megalith. A searing zigzag of energy, it fleetingly split reality apart in a sizzling, fiery glare. The megalith burst asunder as though dynamited, splinters of stone flying in all directions. The heavens then erupted, and the rain began to fall in relentless, icy sheets.

“Enough, Alan,” the Professor cried, dragging at his arm. “We have to get away from here …”

He nodded, climbing painfully to his feet. Lightning flashed again, scorching the slope beside them, briefly igniting the grass, though the thrashing rain immediately doused it.

“Hurry,” the Professor shouted. “She's the strongest among us, she's the one he wants. But if you've bound her too well, she'll be of no use to him
… he'll come after one of us!
”

Despite the mayhem engulfing them, that terrible thought made sense, and Alan allowed the Professor to steer him from the now writhing, bucking form of the girl, down the suddenly treacherous slope and into the flimsy cover of the trees.

Even down there, the rain found them, bucketing through the evergreen canopy with astonishing force. They struggled on regardless, both still naked. Much of the blood had washed from Alan's white, rain-drenched body, but he leaned in agony against the woman, limping on feet that hurt like hot coals. All over the island, burning spears of electricity were crackling down, detonating among the tree-tops, glaring wetly on the high rocky massifs. The colossal booms of thunder set the very earth rocking.

“I can't see McEndry will even have set out in this,” Alan cried, as they stumbled past the blown-down remnants of their tents and along the side of the bog-pools, their waters overflowing as gallons of rain fell into them.

“It's come up from nowhere,” the woman replied. “I've seen these Hebridean storms before. With luck, he'll already have set off. Let's just hope he made it.”

Once they broke out of the cover of the trees onto the open glen, the rain came down in a deluge so fierce it was nearly impossible to make headway against it. Cape Wrath was indeed aptly named. Yet amid all this noise and chaos, the real terror was still Ivar. As the fugitives ploughed along, finally moving uphill away from the marsh but plunging to their shins in brackish, peaty quagmires, Alan glanced continually back, expecting at any moment to see Linda's naked form, still painted in barbarous hues, come lithely out of the woods in pursuit. That thought alone drove him on. Even as the gradient steepened, and the rocks and stones cut into his feet, and the breath was like a knife in his wheezing lungs, he pushed himself as hard as he could. His pin-cushioned body was ravaged with pain, but escape was now all that mattered. And for the first time in as long as he could remember, escape suddenly seemed a possibility, for the head of the Stair was at last before them.

The swampy ground hardened and levelled out, and then they were tramping over flat rocks, and found themselves on top of the island's eastern bluffs. Directly in front of them, the ground fell away into a precipitous gully, at the base of which, explosions of foam revealed the point where rocks met sea, the noise of it vastly amplified up the great limestone chimney, the gale howling in their faces as though coming through a wind-tunnel. Still leaning against each other, they began to clamber down, buffeted, drenched, feet slipping and skidding among boulders not only loosely packed but now awash with rainwater.

“I can't … I can't see McEndry!” Alan shouted.

“Keep going,” the Professor urged. “He
must
be here.”