Very much looking forward to this!
Hello
- John Conway
- To steal something from a better writer than myself, I'm a drunk homosexual with low moral fibre.
Wednesday 27 April 2011
Tuesday 26 April 2011
Tuesday 5 April 2011
But what could it be?
OK, last post for the night then I'll bugger off and read, promise.
Just noticed the other day that SFX have placed a humble request from yours-truly (submitted what feels like years ago, but is I admit probably just months) to their SFXperts column. You can find it here, it's the third one.
Now this series has bugged me for years, for a while I suspected it may be something like Earthfasts, or Children of the Stones, but I'm positive it's neither. And when I say bugged, I really do mean it's driven me loopy.
Just noticed the other day that SFX have placed a humble request from yours-truly (submitted what feels like years ago, but is I admit probably just months) to their SFXperts column. You can find it here, it's the third one.
Now this series has bugged me for years, for a while I suspected it may be something like Earthfasts, or Children of the Stones, but I'm positive it's neither. And when I say bugged, I really do mean it's driven me loopy.
The Snow Spider.
From a very new, very high-budgeted TV fantasy series, to an older, decidedly less highly-budgeted one.
Some wonderful human being has uploaded the old HTV adaptation of possibly my favourite book as a child, Jenny Nimmo's The Snow Spider (starring the ever wonderful Siân Phillips).
And what kind of person would I be if I did not share the love here.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Some wonderful human being has uploaded the old HTV adaptation of possibly my favourite book as a child, Jenny Nimmo's The Snow Spider (starring the ever wonderful Siân Phillips).
And what kind of person would I be if I did not share the love here.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
A Game of Thrones
I've likely come too late to the book, the audio version of which I'm in the early stages of, as HBO's promising new adaption is almost upon us. And very good it's looking too.
Saturday 2 April 2011
Short Story - Fitzwilliam and the God of the Northern Winds
Published in Friction Magazine (Issue 2, 30th March, 2011).
Here’s the thing.
The boy named in the title wasn’t a very nice boy. There are things to recommend his class and things to despise them for, and he had adapted more of the latter traits than the former. Yet still, he didn’t deserve to be so lonely, and he didn’t deserve what happened one dull, brown, autumn day in his parent’s house too far north.
There was no society there, not really, but it was easier to affect lordship with a minor title, a larger house could be theirs. His father had more things to shoot, even if his mother had less conversation.
The house lay between villages in what we now know, well, those of us who know the area, as the fringes of Newcastle's west end. But there’s no trace of a house now, even under the terraces. You can find it on old maps, occasional references in the right documents, but nobody really remembers it. Those few who survived tried to forget.
So, the boy. We wouldn’t think him a nice child, but then those others he encountered weren’t either. He was a child between places, growing up with few boys of the right class to play with, and non of the right age, forbidden from associating with those below. So the children of the servants, the village urchins, the farm brats, those children he made the first tentative steps of friendship with at a young age. They hated him, and he hated them, and it allowed both sides to forget how much they envied one another.
His original governess was despatched post-haste, her name blackened, when it had come to his parent’s notice that he was associating with people outside his class. She was replaced by a tutor, who was ordered to fill the lake of his ignorance with wise and classical ideas, the right sort of knowledge.
It may have worked, they may have found him a man who could inspire the boy, a man who would give the boy company of a kind, who could understand what the boy needed and teach him in a manner that his parents would disapprove of, without them knowing. Had they provided him with that man, the boy needn’t have been such an emotionally crippled thing.
Instead the man they found was a black-hearted and wounded creature, devilishly smart but with no real desire to spread this gift; a man who stuck rigidly to the bare teaching hours and the dreary subjects approved by his parents, a man who made no attempt to help the boy. He did deviate from their wishes in a manner they were clueless of, but not in a way that could do anything but further injure Fitzwilliam, further twist him into a similarly dark hearted, angry creature. To describe it as that tutor might have described it, he abused him in the manner of Laius, and that was that.
So it wasn’t the boy’s fault he was hated, really. In a similar way it wasn’t his parent’s fault they were so incapable of loving or raising a child, or his tutor’s fault he was such a bitter and perverted man, or the local children’s fault they despised the lonely boy. They did to him as others had done to them, but I’ll say one thing for the boy, he ended that line.
None of them survived it, you see.
So the event itself, well that was a bad day. It began with cook’s son Iain, he’d played with Fitzwilliam when younger and now felt unaccountably angry that the boy no longer spoke to him. He saw Fitzwilliam had returned from school, his dark eyes in a perpetual frown, and had slunk away from Orkney House in a foul mood.
Down near the river he had met two of the farm brats, hiding because their da’ was due to start the harvest and they were determined to be out of earshot while the sun lasted, and they had cheered him up in a traditional country manner, by throwing stones at some animals for a time.
And they all talked about how much they hated the Fitzwilliam boy; flabby, stuck up and bookish, with a horribly intense stare and few words for anyone, let alone them. And they talked on, and they boisterously joked about how much fun it would be to lure him away, to do him in. The afternoon wore on and idle talk became more serious as they egged one another on. And then they told Gus down at the village, and he told his sister, and soon enough there were eleven of them all in.
So how to get him away from the house? None of them fancied the beating they would get if they were found out, or the even worse beating they would get if their parents were sacked as they very well could be, so they knew it had to be away from the house, and the villages and the farms. They needed the wilder places, still not too distant.
But how to get him there? They tried to think of ways, something they could say to make him come with them, some way they could trick him, but nothing they could think of would work, and everything would give him at least one face, who would have to suffer later on. So they decided to abduct him. Grab him, blind him, stop him from hearing or shouting and get him away from other people. They could figure out the rest as they went along, plenty of places they could go.
By this point Charlie was in charge, one of the bigger farm boys, and very keen to hurt any fucker as lucky as the snobs of Orkney House. Cook’s son, Iain, was beginning to have doubts, but things were rolling on now, He wasn’t prepared to stand up to them, he wasn’t sure that he wanted too.
And they did it the next day, the next morning.
Fitzwilliam was hiding himself, not from farm work, but from dry books and dry, probing fingers. He was out of the house’s grounds, he’d taken a knife and was sitting, stabbing the tip into the thick bark of an oak, not crying, because boys like him didn’t cry.
He was of a mind to use the knife, and was probably capable of it; he didn’t have a high opinion of the worth of others, especially not the children of servant and estate workers, but he didn’t have a chance. Because all of their plans for subtlety were lost when Gus excitedly yelled; “There’s the cunt, ower there!”
Their hopes of anonymity gone, Charlie was already lobbing a rock at Fitzwilliam’s head.
Hours later they were well away from the farms and the villages they knew. They’d had some fun, taking it in turns to kick his face, stamp on his chubby fingers, and punch his well packed gut, and now they were getting bored and worried at the same time.
Thing was, what now? There was no way he wouldn’t tell, not a chance. You could see to look at him he’d run squealing.
They’d tried threatening him with what would happen if he did, and drawn some very genuine sounding promises, but the older boys, especially Charlie, were beginning to realise they may have just, well, fucked up. They were fiery and impassioned yes, and they hated the rich bastard, but they were shrewd enough to have some idea of the status quo, and to wonder just what exactly would happen to them if it came out they’d assaulted the son of the local gentry.
All of them had seen a hanging, the taut noise of the rope didn’t seem so funny any more.
And now they were arguing, an argument that got worse, and attracted attention, because out in the wilderness in those days lurked things that don’t live in this part of the world any more. The spread of corporate religion, atheism and the industrial revolution has since banished them to countries where blood flows more freely, and education is still a luxury. But back then, even during the might of the Empire, they still skulked in the shadows of its provinces.
And something crept into their minds, a thing that feeds on malevolence, and it found its brightest mind not in Charlie, but in Cook’s son Iain. Charlie could be a nasty piece of work, like his dad he was big, and brash, and abusive, but he wasn’t a killer. Cook’s son on the other hand was the type of boy who is far angrier than most boys, an anger dredged down under a placid face that made other mothers smile, he could be a killer perhaps. And the god found him.
Gods need minds like that, because to be a great god requires servants willing to drench their hands in blood, to raise great love or fear in tribute to an image or a name.
And as the argument rose on, the boys unaware of eyes watching them from the thick boughs of the forest, Iain, the son of cook and a thoroughly respectable boy despite his class, picked up Fitzwilliam’s knife and dragged the bound boy away.
By the time the others noticed, distracted by the site of Charlie kicking the shit out of Gus, they had no idea where the other two boys had gone. And eventually they began to make their way back to the village and the estate.
And as they wandered home, confused, bitter and worried, Fitzwilliam’s eyes watered as the probing fingers of a god drove his one time friend to gut him while he still lived, with his own father’s knife.
They were on stone and in trees now, miles to the west of his home, near the peak of the Tyne valley. Something had been there once, something of a different god, a dead god. Something buried and forgotten before Hadrian had raised his wall, the remnants of which was less than a mile away.
But now it was ruined, and buried under earth and moss, and trees had grown up around. It was thirsty, and it drank the blood, and the new god, who up until then had been little more than a shred of malevolent thoughts in the wilderness, gained a form through sacrifice on a dead rival’s alter. And it birthed a disciple.
Fitzwilliam’s soul was gone, collected by Lady Death for her own master, he at least wasn’t in thrall to this god; the evangelical form of Christianity driven into him over his short life assured that he was taken for judgement like so many others. But Iain gave his soul to that new deity, and became his man, and with the last dredges of Fitzwilliam’s miserable life, he birthed the forest.
Gods have no form, or to be more accurate, a god can look as it wishes. They’re entertainers, they use theatrics and masks, play a part to inspire belief. They link themselves to the sun and moon; to death, life and birth; to wood, bronze, iron; to water, fire, stone; to wind and ice. To something the primitive apes they rule, and are at the same time ruled by, will worship. And they match their form, and let all know that they are that thing.
And so the thing that considered itself heavenly took a simple yet powerful image from Iain’s mind, and overhead the northern winds screamed in obedience to the thing that now called itself their master.
The forest crept and grew for a time, but it did not intend to stay, now was not its time. It allowed itself its glory, minutes, nothing more and then it crept on, its soul blackening earth far below the air, and it followed Iain.
Some people, many of whom were outwardly nastier people than the cook’s son, may have regretted what had happened. But Iain didn’t, he found taking another’s life meant nothing, and he understood he could do it again. Because ten frightened and regretful boys, blanketed with dark fear and darker guilt, would still be making their way home. They had come far after all. And in those days, the days of George the Second, it was possible to do many things if you had a mind.
He ran. He ran until his breath rattled from bloodstained lips, he ran until every muscle was an agony of flame, and he knew that agony was a sacrifice in itself, and it gave the thing that lived in the winds more and more strength. But no form of self sacrifice or prayer can rival a true offering, a sacrifice of blood, death and terror. A sacrifice of that sort is the strongest, that’s the sacrifice that makes a god.
And so Iain Carter ran through his pain, in an ecstasy of religion, and he caught his friends, though they barely would have known it was him. The boy came from encroaching dark as evening fell, and as they neared fields more familiar to them they stared in horror at the tattered, stinking, blood drenched creature waiting for them.
“Well,” the thing said, “he won’t be grassin’ none of us now.”
One of the boys started to cry, and Iain shot him a filthy look.
“Don’t be such a coward,” he said, “or I’ll do you next.”
“Hang on,” Charlie stepped forward. “Do what? You’ve hurt him, fair enough, but I know you Iain Carter, you ain’t got it in you to do someone in, not proper like.”
“You reckon?” Iain spat back, stepping closer to Charlie than Charlie felt comfortable with. “And I know you, Charlie Herbert. Not the man you thought you were, eh? Couldn’t go through with it in the end, can’t do what has to be done. Hardly a man at all, are ye’?”
“Piss off you pan faced little...”
But Iain cut him off by punching him in the stomach, and the knife blade wedged between his fingers punctured the older boy’s gut with a wet, slightly ridiculous noise. It took seconds but the other boys caught on and ran, only to be caught by the twisting limbs and roots erupting from the earth, as the god sent his forest to the aid of his first disciple. The thick, rotten wood looped round legs and bodies, and the screaming boys were caught. It took time for all of them to die, starting with Charlie, and working down to the youngest and smallest, Gus, who had watched the entire thing.
And then they were all done, and the roots drank the blood, but more potently the god drank the sacrifices and the terror and their impotent screams and prayers. The god of the northern winds was pleased, and Iain felt his pleasure. His own almost matched it, he was sure he was a man now.
As night drew in he took the bodies to the river, and left them floating. His house was dark when he got home, were they looking for him? Or had they not noticed he had gone? Either was possible. More likely was that they were looking for little, fat Fitzwilliam. Iain felt a hatred for the people he knew, and realised he was glad he was leaving. He washed and changed, took what little he wanted, then departed his home.
He had been right, many had been called in to search for the missing Fitzwilliam, the other boys held far less importance in the eyes of the right people. But, eventually, most of them returned. Once Iain was sure that Fitzwilliam’s family, and his own, were back at Orkney House, he prayed and begged for the forest once more. It ripped up the grounds around the house and smothered the dour building itself in dark branches. And then inside the boy started a fire, and left through a narrow gap in the boughs that sealed behind him. He watched from a distance as the house and those inside burned, all in the name of his god.
The flames did not touch the roots, but when they eventually sank back into the churned earth only the stone of the walls still stood.
Then Iain left, some distance away he burned his bloodier clothes and walked into his new life.
Things then weren’t as they are now, a few miles away could be foreign parts, out in the provinces, away from the cities and their enlightenment which was spreading slower than some thought. He went east, not far as we would think of it now, but he affected an accent, affected and education and nobody questioned it. He had always known he didn’t look like a servant.
He moved around and eventually settled in a hamlet called Huxton-on-the-Hill, the horrific things he had done did not catch him. In Huxton Iain he founded a religion, birthed a thing that lived in the wilds. He became more secretive when settled, he was older, more cautious, but driven in different ways. He had proved himself, more than proved himself in fact. The god lived now, firmly, secretly. But a god needs more than a man, a god needs a church, and a religion, even if they are to be small and secret. And Iain had to provide those things, to found them.
There had never been any pact or spoken agreement before that point, until then his loyalty had been unconditional and unasked for. But now things changed, he could feel age’s wither at the corners of his flesh, and then, in 1813, he agreed to head the new religion, to build its church in secret, in exchange for a more time, indefinite time.
Iain carter, the boy whom low stock who had done terrible things, did not look like a terrible person. Dark curls framed his pretty face, that curious girls had often called womanly. He liked his looks, and his locks, and his lithe fingers that he had always been sure were suited to fine arts, to music and writing, rather than labour. And with a god and a church behind him, those things could be his. There was no drawbacks to the gift, moralists tell us such a gift should come at a price, but if there was a price he did not see it as such.
He had to guide the church, but he became proficient at those crafts, and his violin playing was much admired. Frequently he would leave, travel the world for a number of years, and return as his own son to further guide the small, secret church that lived so remotely. And occasionally he would make sacrifice of the same kind he had birthed the god with, find someone devout in the church, and manipulate them into helping him. The faithful follower would be goaded by fear and manipulation, and together they would find some innocent victim, some person of pure faith, some person whose bravery could be broken and who could die in miserable fear.
Life would continue, the cook’s son knew that eventually he would be forced to surrender it himself, and he wondered what would happen when that day did arrive. Would he be tired, or would he live with this perpetual joy for his own life, and his perpetual thirst to see and know the world that was unfolding, and his constant, unending desire to worship that young and wild god.
He filled out his compact, he grew a church, a hidden and wiry thing, as tough as the dark briars that loitered beneath the earth. Both growing as the God of the Northern Winds did, gaining true life as he did. Not in a nice way, not in a serene haze of stained glass, noble architecture and harmonious music. Gods and their religions are bathed in the darker deeds of man, they’re vested in death, and a determination to sprout into magnificence and dominance from obscurity in the empty air of the wild places.
They grow from the blood, religions, those that grow strong. Its how we make it, even as we deplore it, and it’s us that suffers for them to be.
Copyright John Conway - 2011 - john.charles.conway@googlemail.com
Here’s the thing.
The boy named in the title wasn’t a very nice boy. There are things to recommend his class and things to despise them for, and he had adapted more of the latter traits than the former. Yet still, he didn’t deserve to be so lonely, and he didn’t deserve what happened one dull, brown, autumn day in his parent’s house too far north.
There was no society there, not really, but it was easier to affect lordship with a minor title, a larger house could be theirs. His father had more things to shoot, even if his mother had less conversation.
The house lay between villages in what we now know, well, those of us who know the area, as the fringes of Newcastle's west end. But there’s no trace of a house now, even under the terraces. You can find it on old maps, occasional references in the right documents, but nobody really remembers it. Those few who survived tried to forget.
So, the boy. We wouldn’t think him a nice child, but then those others he encountered weren’t either. He was a child between places, growing up with few boys of the right class to play with, and non of the right age, forbidden from associating with those below. So the children of the servants, the village urchins, the farm brats, those children he made the first tentative steps of friendship with at a young age. They hated him, and he hated them, and it allowed both sides to forget how much they envied one another.
His original governess was despatched post-haste, her name blackened, when it had come to his parent’s notice that he was associating with people outside his class. She was replaced by a tutor, who was ordered to fill the lake of his ignorance with wise and classical ideas, the right sort of knowledge.
It may have worked, they may have found him a man who could inspire the boy, a man who would give the boy company of a kind, who could understand what the boy needed and teach him in a manner that his parents would disapprove of, without them knowing. Had they provided him with that man, the boy needn’t have been such an emotionally crippled thing.
Instead the man they found was a black-hearted and wounded creature, devilishly smart but with no real desire to spread this gift; a man who stuck rigidly to the bare teaching hours and the dreary subjects approved by his parents, a man who made no attempt to help the boy. He did deviate from their wishes in a manner they were clueless of, but not in a way that could do anything but further injure Fitzwilliam, further twist him into a similarly dark hearted, angry creature. To describe it as that tutor might have described it, he abused him in the manner of Laius, and that was that.
So it wasn’t the boy’s fault he was hated, really. In a similar way it wasn’t his parent’s fault they were so incapable of loving or raising a child, or his tutor’s fault he was such a bitter and perverted man, or the local children’s fault they despised the lonely boy. They did to him as others had done to them, but I’ll say one thing for the boy, he ended that line.
None of them survived it, you see.
So the event itself, well that was a bad day. It began with cook’s son Iain, he’d played with Fitzwilliam when younger and now felt unaccountably angry that the boy no longer spoke to him. He saw Fitzwilliam had returned from school, his dark eyes in a perpetual frown, and had slunk away from Orkney House in a foul mood.
Down near the river he had met two of the farm brats, hiding because their da’ was due to start the harvest and they were determined to be out of earshot while the sun lasted, and they had cheered him up in a traditional country manner, by throwing stones at some animals for a time.
And they all talked about how much they hated the Fitzwilliam boy; flabby, stuck up and bookish, with a horribly intense stare and few words for anyone, let alone them. And they talked on, and they boisterously joked about how much fun it would be to lure him away, to do him in. The afternoon wore on and idle talk became more serious as they egged one another on. And then they told Gus down at the village, and he told his sister, and soon enough there were eleven of them all in.
So how to get him away from the house? None of them fancied the beating they would get if they were found out, or the even worse beating they would get if their parents were sacked as they very well could be, so they knew it had to be away from the house, and the villages and the farms. They needed the wilder places, still not too distant.
But how to get him there? They tried to think of ways, something they could say to make him come with them, some way they could trick him, but nothing they could think of would work, and everything would give him at least one face, who would have to suffer later on. So they decided to abduct him. Grab him, blind him, stop him from hearing or shouting and get him away from other people. They could figure out the rest as they went along, plenty of places they could go.
By this point Charlie was in charge, one of the bigger farm boys, and very keen to hurt any fucker as lucky as the snobs of Orkney House. Cook’s son, Iain, was beginning to have doubts, but things were rolling on now, He wasn’t prepared to stand up to them, he wasn’t sure that he wanted too.
And they did it the next day, the next morning.
Fitzwilliam was hiding himself, not from farm work, but from dry books and dry, probing fingers. He was out of the house’s grounds, he’d taken a knife and was sitting, stabbing the tip into the thick bark of an oak, not crying, because boys like him didn’t cry.
He was of a mind to use the knife, and was probably capable of it; he didn’t have a high opinion of the worth of others, especially not the children of servant and estate workers, but he didn’t have a chance. Because all of their plans for subtlety were lost when Gus excitedly yelled; “There’s the cunt, ower there!”
Their hopes of anonymity gone, Charlie was already lobbing a rock at Fitzwilliam’s head.
Hours later they were well away from the farms and the villages they knew. They’d had some fun, taking it in turns to kick his face, stamp on his chubby fingers, and punch his well packed gut, and now they were getting bored and worried at the same time.
Thing was, what now? There was no way he wouldn’t tell, not a chance. You could see to look at him he’d run squealing.
They’d tried threatening him with what would happen if he did, and drawn some very genuine sounding promises, but the older boys, especially Charlie, were beginning to realise they may have just, well, fucked up. They were fiery and impassioned yes, and they hated the rich bastard, but they were shrewd enough to have some idea of the status quo, and to wonder just what exactly would happen to them if it came out they’d assaulted the son of the local gentry.
All of them had seen a hanging, the taut noise of the rope didn’t seem so funny any more.
And now they were arguing, an argument that got worse, and attracted attention, because out in the wilderness in those days lurked things that don’t live in this part of the world any more. The spread of corporate religion, atheism and the industrial revolution has since banished them to countries where blood flows more freely, and education is still a luxury. But back then, even during the might of the Empire, they still skulked in the shadows of its provinces.
And something crept into their minds, a thing that feeds on malevolence, and it found its brightest mind not in Charlie, but in Cook’s son Iain. Charlie could be a nasty piece of work, like his dad he was big, and brash, and abusive, but he wasn’t a killer. Cook’s son on the other hand was the type of boy who is far angrier than most boys, an anger dredged down under a placid face that made other mothers smile, he could be a killer perhaps. And the god found him.
Gods need minds like that, because to be a great god requires servants willing to drench their hands in blood, to raise great love or fear in tribute to an image or a name.
And as the argument rose on, the boys unaware of eyes watching them from the thick boughs of the forest, Iain, the son of cook and a thoroughly respectable boy despite his class, picked up Fitzwilliam’s knife and dragged the bound boy away.
By the time the others noticed, distracted by the site of Charlie kicking the shit out of Gus, they had no idea where the other two boys had gone. And eventually they began to make their way back to the village and the estate.
And as they wandered home, confused, bitter and worried, Fitzwilliam’s eyes watered as the probing fingers of a god drove his one time friend to gut him while he still lived, with his own father’s knife.
They were on stone and in trees now, miles to the west of his home, near the peak of the Tyne valley. Something had been there once, something of a different god, a dead god. Something buried and forgotten before Hadrian had raised his wall, the remnants of which was less than a mile away.
But now it was ruined, and buried under earth and moss, and trees had grown up around. It was thirsty, and it drank the blood, and the new god, who up until then had been little more than a shred of malevolent thoughts in the wilderness, gained a form through sacrifice on a dead rival’s alter. And it birthed a disciple.
Fitzwilliam’s soul was gone, collected by Lady Death for her own master, he at least wasn’t in thrall to this god; the evangelical form of Christianity driven into him over his short life assured that he was taken for judgement like so many others. But Iain gave his soul to that new deity, and became his man, and with the last dredges of Fitzwilliam’s miserable life, he birthed the forest.
Gods have no form, or to be more accurate, a god can look as it wishes. They’re entertainers, they use theatrics and masks, play a part to inspire belief. They link themselves to the sun and moon; to death, life and birth; to wood, bronze, iron; to water, fire, stone; to wind and ice. To something the primitive apes they rule, and are at the same time ruled by, will worship. And they match their form, and let all know that they are that thing.
And so the thing that considered itself heavenly took a simple yet powerful image from Iain’s mind, and overhead the northern winds screamed in obedience to the thing that now called itself their master.
The forest crept and grew for a time, but it did not intend to stay, now was not its time. It allowed itself its glory, minutes, nothing more and then it crept on, its soul blackening earth far below the air, and it followed Iain.
Some people, many of whom were outwardly nastier people than the cook’s son, may have regretted what had happened. But Iain didn’t, he found taking another’s life meant nothing, and he understood he could do it again. Because ten frightened and regretful boys, blanketed with dark fear and darker guilt, would still be making their way home. They had come far after all. And in those days, the days of George the Second, it was possible to do many things if you had a mind.
He ran. He ran until his breath rattled from bloodstained lips, he ran until every muscle was an agony of flame, and he knew that agony was a sacrifice in itself, and it gave the thing that lived in the winds more and more strength. But no form of self sacrifice or prayer can rival a true offering, a sacrifice of blood, death and terror. A sacrifice of that sort is the strongest, that’s the sacrifice that makes a god.
And so Iain Carter ran through his pain, in an ecstasy of religion, and he caught his friends, though they barely would have known it was him. The boy came from encroaching dark as evening fell, and as they neared fields more familiar to them they stared in horror at the tattered, stinking, blood drenched creature waiting for them.
“Well,” the thing said, “he won’t be grassin’ none of us now.”
One of the boys started to cry, and Iain shot him a filthy look.
“Don’t be such a coward,” he said, “or I’ll do you next.”
“Hang on,” Charlie stepped forward. “Do what? You’ve hurt him, fair enough, but I know you Iain Carter, you ain’t got it in you to do someone in, not proper like.”
“You reckon?” Iain spat back, stepping closer to Charlie than Charlie felt comfortable with. “And I know you, Charlie Herbert. Not the man you thought you were, eh? Couldn’t go through with it in the end, can’t do what has to be done. Hardly a man at all, are ye’?”
“Piss off you pan faced little...”
But Iain cut him off by punching him in the stomach, and the knife blade wedged between his fingers punctured the older boy’s gut with a wet, slightly ridiculous noise. It took seconds but the other boys caught on and ran, only to be caught by the twisting limbs and roots erupting from the earth, as the god sent his forest to the aid of his first disciple. The thick, rotten wood looped round legs and bodies, and the screaming boys were caught. It took time for all of them to die, starting with Charlie, and working down to the youngest and smallest, Gus, who had watched the entire thing.
And then they were all done, and the roots drank the blood, but more potently the god drank the sacrifices and the terror and their impotent screams and prayers. The god of the northern winds was pleased, and Iain felt his pleasure. His own almost matched it, he was sure he was a man now.
As night drew in he took the bodies to the river, and left them floating. His house was dark when he got home, were they looking for him? Or had they not noticed he had gone? Either was possible. More likely was that they were looking for little, fat Fitzwilliam. Iain felt a hatred for the people he knew, and realised he was glad he was leaving. He washed and changed, took what little he wanted, then departed his home.
He had been right, many had been called in to search for the missing Fitzwilliam, the other boys held far less importance in the eyes of the right people. But, eventually, most of them returned. Once Iain was sure that Fitzwilliam’s family, and his own, were back at Orkney House, he prayed and begged for the forest once more. It ripped up the grounds around the house and smothered the dour building itself in dark branches. And then inside the boy started a fire, and left through a narrow gap in the boughs that sealed behind him. He watched from a distance as the house and those inside burned, all in the name of his god.
The flames did not touch the roots, but when they eventually sank back into the churned earth only the stone of the walls still stood.
Then Iain left, some distance away he burned his bloodier clothes and walked into his new life.
Things then weren’t as they are now, a few miles away could be foreign parts, out in the provinces, away from the cities and their enlightenment which was spreading slower than some thought. He went east, not far as we would think of it now, but he affected an accent, affected and education and nobody questioned it. He had always known he didn’t look like a servant.
He moved around and eventually settled in a hamlet called Huxton-on-the-Hill, the horrific things he had done did not catch him. In Huxton Iain he founded a religion, birthed a thing that lived in the wilds. He became more secretive when settled, he was older, more cautious, but driven in different ways. He had proved himself, more than proved himself in fact. The god lived now, firmly, secretly. But a god needs more than a man, a god needs a church, and a religion, even if they are to be small and secret. And Iain had to provide those things, to found them.
There had never been any pact or spoken agreement before that point, until then his loyalty had been unconditional and unasked for. But now things changed, he could feel age’s wither at the corners of his flesh, and then, in 1813, he agreed to head the new religion, to build its church in secret, in exchange for a more time, indefinite time.
Iain carter, the boy whom low stock who had done terrible things, did not look like a terrible person. Dark curls framed his pretty face, that curious girls had often called womanly. He liked his looks, and his locks, and his lithe fingers that he had always been sure were suited to fine arts, to music and writing, rather than labour. And with a god and a church behind him, those things could be his. There was no drawbacks to the gift, moralists tell us such a gift should come at a price, but if there was a price he did not see it as such.
He had to guide the church, but he became proficient at those crafts, and his violin playing was much admired. Frequently he would leave, travel the world for a number of years, and return as his own son to further guide the small, secret church that lived so remotely. And occasionally he would make sacrifice of the same kind he had birthed the god with, find someone devout in the church, and manipulate them into helping him. The faithful follower would be goaded by fear and manipulation, and together they would find some innocent victim, some person of pure faith, some person whose bravery could be broken and who could die in miserable fear.
Life would continue, the cook’s son knew that eventually he would be forced to surrender it himself, and he wondered what would happen when that day did arrive. Would he be tired, or would he live with this perpetual joy for his own life, and his perpetual thirst to see and know the world that was unfolding, and his constant, unending desire to worship that young and wild god.
He filled out his compact, he grew a church, a hidden and wiry thing, as tough as the dark briars that loitered beneath the earth. Both growing as the God of the Northern Winds did, gaining true life as he did. Not in a nice way, not in a serene haze of stained glass, noble architecture and harmonious music. Gods and their religions are bathed in the darker deeds of man, they’re vested in death, and a determination to sprout into magnificence and dominance from obscurity in the empty air of the wild places.
They grow from the blood, religions, those that grow strong. Its how we make it, even as we deplore it, and it’s us that suffers for them to be.
Copyright John Conway - 2011 - john.charles.conway@googlemail.com
Friday 1 April 2011
Titus Awakes.
Will be released 7th July it would appear. Alongside a new, illustrated edition of the sequence's first three books.
And very pretty they both look, too.
And very pretty they both look, too.
A bit of a refresh.
As Editred sadly disappeared some time back most of the story entries on here had stopped working, so I decided a spot of spring cleaning might be in order.
They were mostly old versions of stuff I have much improved, and a few that should never have seen the light of day.
However expect more to come.
The lovely folk at Friction Magazine have just been in contact to tell me they will publish one of my more recent efforts, Fitzwilliam and the God of the Northern Winds, in their next issue. This is due online any day now, and I shall of course provide a link when I do.
I'm also whittling away at my entry for this year's Northern Writer's Awards, which will be the first 3000 words of the book I am working on, The Cuckoo In Winter (which I hope will be the first in a sequence of books to be called A Northern Wind Is Blowing). I think that too might make an appearance, as I am increasingly pleased with it.
They were mostly old versions of stuff I have much improved, and a few that should never have seen the light of day.
However expect more to come.
The lovely folk at Friction Magazine have just been in contact to tell me they will publish one of my more recent efforts, Fitzwilliam and the God of the Northern Winds, in their next issue. This is due online any day now, and I shall of course provide a link when I do.
I'm also whittling away at my entry for this year's Northern Writer's Awards, which will be the first 3000 words of the book I am working on, The Cuckoo In Winter (which I hope will be the first in a sequence of books to be called A Northern Wind Is Blowing). I think that too might make an appearance, as I am increasingly pleased with it.
I Write Like...
I like this result. Means I might even stop taking the piss out of things like these now.
Or possibly not.
Or possibly not.
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