The Crippled God

the candles flickered and the shadows leapt!
    Grandma? Your gem of a boy tore himself apart. He had fangs in his flesh and those fangs were his own, and round and round it went. Biting, tearing, hissing in agony and fury. Plummeting from the smoke-filled sky. Lifting upward again, new wings, joints creaking, a sliding nightmare .
    You can’t come back from that. You can’t .
    I touched my own dull flesh, and it was buried under bodies, all that gore draining down. I was pickled in blood. That body, I mean. What used to be mine. You don’t go back, not to that .
    Dead limbs shifting, slack faces turning, pretending to look at me – but I wasn’t the one so rude as to drag them about. No need to accuse me with those blank eyes. Some fool’s coming down, down here, and maybe my soaked skin feels warm, but that’s all the lost heat from all these other corpses .
    I don’t come back. Not from that .
    Father, if you only knew the things I have seen. Mother, if only you’d opened your own heart, enough to bless that broken widow next door .
    Explain it to this fool, will you? It was a mound of bodies. They’d gathered us. Friend, you weren’t supposed to interfere. Maybe they ignored you, though I can’t figure why. And your touch was cold, gods it was cold!
    Rats, nuzzling close, they’d snatched fragments of me out of the air. In a world where everyone is a soldier, the ones underfoot don’t get noticed, but even ants fight like fiends. My rats. They worked hard, warm bodies like nests .
    They couldn’t get all of me. That wasn’t possible. Maybe you pulled me out, but I was incomplete .
    Or not. Grandma, someone tied strings to me. With everything coming down all around us, he’d knotted strings. To my Hood-damned rats. Oh, clever bastard, Quick. Clever, clever bastard. All there, all here, I’m all here. And then someone dug me out, carried me away. And the Short-Tails looked over every now and then, milled as if contemplating taking objection, but never did .
    He carried me away, melting as he went .
    All the butchering going on. They had a way of puttering about whistling some endless song and pausing every now and then to look distracted by a thought, if not thoroughly confused by its very existence. Like that .
    So he carried me away, and where was everybody?
    The pieces were back together, and Bottle opened his eyes. He was lying on the ground, the sun low to the horizon, dew in the yellow grasses close to his face, smelling of the night just past. Morning. He sighed, slowly sat up, his body feeling crazed with cracks. He looked across at the man crouched near a dung fire. His touch was cold. And then he melted . ‘Captain Ruthan Gudd, sir.’
    The man glanced over, nodded, resumed combing his beard with his fingers. ‘It’s a bird, I think.’
    ‘Sir?’
    He gestured at the rounded lump of scorched meat skewered above the embers. ‘Just sort of fell out of the sky. Had feathers but they’ve burned off.’ He shook his head. ‘Had teeth too, however. Bird. Lizard. It’s an even handful of straws in each hand, as the Strike used to say.’
    ‘We’re alone.’
    ‘For now. We’ve not been gaining on them much – you start getting heavy after a while.’
    ‘Sir, you have been carrying me?’ Melting. Drip drip . ‘How far? How many days?’
    ‘Carrying you? What am I, a Toblakai? No, there’s a travois … behind you. Dragging’s easier than carrying. Somewhat. Wish I had a dog. When I was a child … well, let’s just say that wishing I had a dog has been an unfamiliar experience. But yesterday I’d have cut a god’s throat for one single dog.’
    ‘I can walk now, sir.’
    ‘But can you pull that travois?’
    Frowning, Bottle twisted and looked at the conveyance. Two full length spear shafts, the pieces of two or three others. Webbing from the harnesses of leather armour, the strips stained black. ‘Nothing to pull in it, sir, that I can see.’
    ‘I was thinking me, marine.’
    ‘Well, I can—’
    Ruthan picked up the spit and waved it about. ‘A joke, soldier. Ha ha. Here, this thing looks ready. Cooking is the process of making the familiar unrecognizable, and thus palatable. When intelligence was first born, the first question asked was, “Can this thing be cooked?” After all, try eating a cow’s face – well, true enough, people do – oh, never mind. You must be hungry.’
    Bottle made his way over. Ruthan plucked the bird from the skewer and then tore it in