Bone Harvest Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also Available from James Brogden and Titan Books

  Title Page

  Leave us a Review

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One: Prepare The Ground

  1: The Grey Brigade

  2: Bill

  3: Swinley

  4: De-Tusking

  5: The Recklings

  6: Theophagy

  7: Replenishment

  8: The Sixth Sacrifice

  9: 1942

  10: The Sacrament of the First Flesh, 1942

  11: Attenuation

  12: Schism

  Part Two: Sow The Seeds

  1: Dennie

  2: New Neighbours

  3: The Shed

  4: Bruises

  5: The Summoning

  6: Barbecue

  7: Lizzie

  8: Tusk Moon

  9: Grafting

  10: Infection

  11: Snares

  12: Somnambulism

  13: A Nice Neighbourly Chat

  Part Three: Plant Out Seedlings

  1: Boundaries

  2: The Abattoir Shrine

  3: The Wild Side

  4: A Premature Interment

  5: A Blood-Painted Moon

  6: Hot Pot

  7: 3.07

  Part Four: Aggressively Weed

  1: Ashes

  2: Giving Thanks

  3: Hell Weekend

  4: Sunday

  5: The Bone Carnyx

  6: Desertion

  Part Five: Harvest The Crop

  1: Interview

  2: Homecoming

  3: Night Shift

  4: Visiting Hours

  5: Guns and Dogs

  6: The Clearing

  7: Echoes

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  BONE

  HARVEST

  Also available from James Brogden and Titan Books

  Hekla’s Children

  The Hollow Tree

  The Plague Stones

  BONE

  HARVEST

  JAMES

  BROGDEN

  TITAN BOOKS

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  Bone Harvest

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785659973

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785659980

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  www.titanbooks.com

  First edition: May 2020

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2020 by James Brogden. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  FOR JOHN AND GRETA

  The dews drop slowly and dreams gather: unknown spears

  Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes,

  And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries

  Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.

  We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore,

  The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew,

  Being weary of the world’s empires, bow down to you,

  Master of the still stars and of the flaming door.

  From “The Valley of the Black Pig” by William Butler Yeats

  Theophagy (n.): the sacramental eating of a god

  PART ONE

  PREPARE THE GROUND

  1

  THE GREY BRIGADE

  THE DESERTER RAN FROM THE BATTLE, AND HID IN A shell crater in No Man’s Land.

  By the time he felt that it was safe to move, the sun had disappeared in a crimson smear behind the shattered reek of sky. The thunder of the big guns had stopped hours ago, and the popping crackle of rifle shots was dwindling like rain, leaving only the evening chorus of screams, prayers, pleas and curses from men dying unseen, as if the churned earth were bewailing its own torture.

  He was sprawled halfway down the slope of the crater, little more than a water-filled pit with the half-submerged corpses of three other soldiers for company. With their uniforms the same mud-grey as their flesh, it was impossible to tell which side of the line they had originally come from, and the mud also caked him from head to foot, making him one with the dead, all brothers together. He’d spent the hours waiting for nightfall watching the rats eat them, their sleek bodies cruising the crater’s waters like miniature destroyers, graceful in their element. They’d avoided him once an exploratory nibble at his left boot had prompted a kick; there was no need to attack the living when they could glut themselves on the dead. One particularly bold fellow had sat by a corpse’s outflung hand and taken his time to gnaw away the fingers, pausing every so often to look at the deserter as if inviting him to join them. Plenty to go around, chum.

  And despite himself – despite the screaming and the stench of shit and bowels and rot – the deserter’s stomach had been growling before long.

  He wondered how he might go about catching one. It would not be the first time he’d eaten rat, but it might be the first time he’d done so raw, since he had no means of making a fire and to do so would be suicide anyway.

  The attack had been at dawn, of course. The result had been butchery, of course. It was possible that one or other side had gained several yards of ground, but in the noise and tumult he had become so disorientated that he no longer knew in which direction lay his own trenches or those of the enemy. Not that such a distinction had meaning any more. All that mattered was that he had been lying in this crater from sunrise to sunset without food or water. He remembered (or tried to; it was hard, his thoughts darting to and fro like the rats), eating some kind of thin oat porridge in the pre-dawn dark before the attack. He had not eaten since, and what little water he carried had run out before noon. By evening he’d developed a nasty fever, which from the heat of it in his blood felt like it wasn’t going anywhere soon.

  The western sky grew sullen, and when he felt that it was safe to move the deserter began to inch his way down, lower into the crater, keeping his head below the rim. The rats squealed, reluctant to abandon their feast, and watched him with glittering eyes as he fumbled amongst the dead soldiers’ packs and pouches. He found a few crumbs of salted pork that the rats had somehow missed and some lumps of a dark, waxy substance which could have been chocolate or the remains of a candle but which he ate anyway since experience told him that there would be little difference in taste. There was a letter from a loved one addressed to ‘My darling Everett’, which he k
ept since paper was good for lighting fires. He also found a leather case about the same size and shape as a large notebook, which contained a brush, a few blocks of watercolour paint, and a packet of daubings on pieces of thick cartridge paper. Anaemic landscapes, for the most part – pale hills and flowering trees – this trench-bound Constable’s idyllic memories of his homeland. The deserter tossed them into the stagnant water at the bottom of the crater. None of that existed any more. They were lies. Lies got men killed. Lies like ‘it’ll all be over by Christmas lads!’ and ‘just this one last big push and we’ll break them!’ and ‘for God and the King, boys!’ He peered into the dead man’s face – the half of it that wasn’t a pulped ruin of skull and brain, all that remained of Everett’s loves and artistic aspirations reduced to the one remaining eye rolled up so high in its socket that it looked like a boiled egg.

  His stomach growled again.

  He couldn’t remember anything from before the trenches. Every time he tried to think further back than that – to home and family, assuming that he had either – he was met with the monstrous anger of the guns roaring continuously, like a great standing wave threatening to overtopple and crush him if he got too close. He had tried to point this out to Captain Milburne, but since his memory for killing was intact that was all that seemed to be required, and he’d been ordered to pick up his rifle and return to his post. Both post and rifle were long gone, obliterated by the enemy guns, along with his rank and his name, but they hardly mattered.

  What mattered now were boots, lucifers, field glasses, weapons, and especially ammunition. He was going to need a sufficient tribute if he hoped to be accepted by those whom he had come in search of rather than simply killed out of hand.

  The Wild Deserters.

  The Grey Brigade.

  The No-Men.

  It was said that they lived in the remains of old dugouts and the cellars of shattered buildings in No Man’s Land, and that they emerged by night to scavenge amongst the dead, even going so far as to eat the flesh. Some, it was whispered with ghoulish glee by veterans to wide-eyed new recruits, preferred it fresh rather than bloated and maggot-ridden, and would lure an unwary man away from his post to butcher him like a beast. Others told stories of them appearing like angels out of the drifting smoke to give mercy to the dying and rescue the wounded, returning them to their lines before disappearing. None, that the deserter had ever heard, had been ordered to march to their deaths in a hail of bullets and shrapnel by fat, complacent generals who sat safely distant having their cocks sucked by French whores and dining on three square meals a day. The Grey Brigade had no generals or officers, it was said.

  The deserter shouldered his satchel of loot and set off, coughing like a hag, into the cratered waste to find his new company.

  * * *

  There was a purity to No Man’s Land that the deserter admired, in the way that one might admire a piece of machinery engineered perfectly for its purpose, without fripperies or useless ornamentation. It was a landscape that could not have been better designed to take life, and in this it succeeded beautifully. One did not walk through No Man’s Land – to do so would risk a sniper’s bullet. You squirmed up the slope of one crater and peered over its lip into the other, trying to see what awaited you as you slid down into the next, often half-swimming in mud and blood, and sometimes, if you were lucky, on a more solid carpet of corpses. Every yard of progress was a negotiation with barbed wire, splintered wood and bone, mud so deep it could drown a horse, and scum-covered water that hid razor shards of metal. Entrails garlanded the wreckage. Dying men sobbed and implored him as he passed. Others dragged themselves blindly through the mud, shattered legs trailing behind them like worms. He ignored them all, just one more worm amongst so many. As night deepened, one side or the other would fire off the occasional flare, and in the shifting shadows of its descent the corpses seemed to move too, twisting like things rolling in deep ocean currents.

  There was a place that had once been a wood – the trees now little more than broken, jagged pillars – and he aimed for this as it seemed as good a place as any. A flare was dying behind him, and as it fell with the wind its glare threw long spokes of shadow that swept the ground around him.

  And then, without transition or warning, three of the stumps were men.

  They hadn’t moved an inch or done anything to signal their existence to him; one moment they were simply there, in the same way that a picture of a young woman will be that of a crone, or a candlestick becomes two faces. They were motionless in the light of the falling flare, and there was something breathtaking about the fact that they were actually standing, like men, not crouched and creeping like animals. For all that the No-Men were bearded, unkempt and dressed in rags, they claimed their ground with more authority than any groomed and pressed officer. Despite his earlier confidence, and the fact that he’d brought them tribute, the deserter nevertheless felt that he should drop to his knees, were it not for the fact that he was already lying on his belly. A worm. A corpse lacking the wit to realise it was dead. He could think of no reason why they shouldn’t put a bullet in him and correct the mistake. He would have done so in their position.

  Then the flare died completely, and the No-Men must have moved, though how they could have tackled this terrain so swiftly didn’t seem possible, because they were standing around him, three deeper shadows in the blackness, and he felt the prick of a bayonet pressed between his shoulder blades.

  ‘What’s your regiment?’ The whisper was hoarse, and in English.

  ‘Royal Warwickshire Territorials, sir,’ he stammered in reply.

  ‘Don’t sir me.’ The bayonet pressed harder. ‘What do you think I am? I’ll ask you again. Your regiment.’

  ‘Who do you take orders from?’ added a second voice, accented, probably German. A third voice sniggered, thick and low. They were mocking him. Testing him. Then he realised what the first voice had really asked.

  ‘None,’ the deserter answered. ‘No regiment. No orders.’

  ‘So, who are you, then?’ asked the whisperer.

  ‘What are you?’ added the sniggerer.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, and as soon as it was uttered he felt the truth of it lift its burden from his soul. ‘I’m nothing,’ he repeated more confidently, on an outrush of breath as if it were a confession of love. ‘I’m a deserter. A coward. If they catch me they’ll put me up against a wall and shoot me.’

  ‘Funny, that,’ replied the European. ‘What do you think they have been doing to you all this time?’

  The bayonet disappeared from his back, and hands helped him to his feet. It was such a simple act, but it ran counter to months of crouching that he cowered, convinced that a sniper would immediately blow his brains out, but nothing happened. There was no challenge or gunshot, just the screams and tears of the wounded all around them in the darkness. Then another flare soared into the sky, much further off than the last, and the hands that held him up began to guide him.

  They led him deeper into the skeletal wood, to the shell-blasted ruins of what might have been a farmhouse. It seemed so obvious a landmark and rendezvous point for raiding parties that anybody trying to avoid patrols would go nowhere near it, and he said as much.

  ‘Regulars have learned not to come here,’ replied the whisperer. ‘This place belongs to the Grey Brigade.’

  There had been one large room which was now a courtyard with its roof gone, and in one corner a wide trapdoor made of heavy timbers. Two of the No-Men hauled it open to reveal stone stairs descending to what had presumably been the farm’s cellar. Down here there wasn’t even the meagre ambient light of the outside, and the deserter stumbled in absolute blackness. Then a fist thudded on wood, a rattling bolt was withdrawn, and a door opened into light, warmth, and the aroma of food.

  The cellar was long and low-ceilinged, and even though it had collapsed at the far end it was still luxurious compared to the funk-holes he’d slept in and even some of the officers’
dugouts he’d seen. Scavenged kit was stacked in piles all around – rifles, ammunition, boots, blankets, mess kits, tools – between which were makeshift cots for the dozen or so men who called this place home. It was humid with the reek of contained and unwashed men. They lay or sat, picking lice off themselves, mending or making gear, or any one of the dozens of small tasks that kept off-duty soldiers busy. Some stopped what they were doing to stare as he entered, while others carried on as if he didn’t exist. Four were sitting on chairs about a small table, playing cards. Their uniforms were a motley of German feldgrau with red trim and gold buttons, French horizon-blue and British khaki, salvaged and patched from either side of the lines. The only thing they had in common was the lack of any rank insignia – cuffs, collars, and epaulettes were all stripped bare. Light came from stubs of candles set around the room and at the far end where a crude fireplace had been made out of the rubble and the damaged ceiling allowed smoke to vent. Here a man crouched on his haunches by a large cast-iron pot, who turned from regarding the newcomer to resume stirring its contents. As he stood in the doorway gaping, the European and the Sniggerer pushed past him to their own particular corners and started stripping off their gear.

  ‘Welcome to the Wild Deserters,’ said his escort. Seen properly for the first time, he was younger than the hoarseness of his voice had led the deserter to imagine, dressed in the same assortment of gear. ‘I’m Bill. You have a name?’ His voice was still a guttural whisper, which served well enough for survival in No Man’s Land, though it appeared he had little choice since his throat was a scrawled nightmare of scar tissue. Bill, then. No rank, no surname. Probably not even his real name.

  ‘Everett,’ he said, since it was as good a name as any.

  ‘Lads,’ said Bill to the room, ‘meet Everett.’

  There were grunts, a couple of tin cups raised in sardonic welcome, and one cry of ‘Fresh meat!’ which was met with chuckles.