The First Rhys Hughes MEGAPACK®

BARBARIAN GRAN

BARBARIAN GRAN

The snowy season had come, and it was snowing now as the light began to fade. It would probably snow all night and in the morning the world would be clean again. But under the freshness, the crispness, the pristine shroud that gleamed in the rising sun, the filth and horror would still be there, waiting for the thaw and the decay of the spring to dissolve the mush and leave only bones. The old woman nodded to herself for a moment as she entertained this thought.

Bones are like icicles, she decided, but they lie horizontally on the ground and don’t hang from the branches of bare trees or from the eaves of crude circular huts. Perhaps icicles really are bones, the bones of frost monsters, stunted giants with colder lives than men. And yet the men were cooling now too, the men strewn on the battlefield beyond the hill. Soon they would be frozen hard, stiff enough to stand up like statues, if one was ever inclined to do so.

She had been preparing for the battle for many days. As soon as the warriors had made the fateful announcement, a declaration of war on a neighbouring tribe, she had groped in the gloom at the rear of her hut for her box of knitting tools, the yarn and needles. There were no windows in these huts. They were stone and wood and bone constructions with a hearth in the centre. They were smoky and small but a barbarian needs no finer luxury, not even an old woman.

The fire had been low and the embers pulsed a deep red as she opened the lid of the crudely carved box in order to reach inside and remove what she sought. She was an expert at knitting but only did it before battles. There was a good reason for this. Out came the needles and yarn, and then began obsessive, almost feverish work, the knitting of what tradition dictated must be knitted. And she revelled in her task, this crone with only one tooth in her wrinkled head.

Some knitters make hats, others socks or gloves, a few cardigans or ties, and it is not entirely unknown, among the annals of knitting history, for trousers to be knitted by one individual over the course of one night. The chronicles of wool are less fierce and b****y than those of swords or spears, and yet there is drama here too, heroism, tragedy and triumph. Are the fates of a knitter always mundane? Knit likely! And the old woman who knitted now was a special one.

She was the grandmother of the most spectacular warrior ever to emerge from the chilly wastes of this blasted land. A warrior who had gone east to ransack the gilded cities of the voluptuous orient, south to hack a kingdom for himself among the vines and creepers of the jungles, west to sail as a pirate the ocean that goes on forever and ever, and even north to the lands where snow is considered warm and men grow hair on the inside of their faces as well as the outside.

Yes, she was special, this hunched hag on her misshapen stool, with her eyes of beady brightness and her gnarled fingers working the knitting needles with incredible dexterity, clacking and drooling and chucking and wheezing as she finished the last of the face coverings, the woollen garment that in future ages would be known as a balaclava and adopted by hikers at night and terrorists by day. She had knitted more than three hundred and her wool was exhausted.

It was done. Her work and the battle, both done. And her work relied on battles to give it meaning. She knitted for the dying men, those who were still in the world of the living but slipping away into the world of the dead. They were in transition, on a final journey, and her task was to care for them. That was the mission of the barbarian grandmothers, and she was the greatest of them, held in awe by the other hags, most powerful and efficient of all the elderly knitters.

She stood up from her stool with a grunt and a creak. It was her spine that creaked and the stool that grunted. She hobbled now but no stick was necessary for her to lean on. Barbarian grandmothers did not use the aids of soft civilisation. Sticks, crutches, frames and other such devices were for weaklings. She would hobble on her own two feet, feet blackened and hardened by a tough life, feet that resembled the claws of an ancient reptilian bird, feet that felt no pain at all.

With slow but precise movements, she collected the balaclavas and put them in a sack. Three hundred of them. Maybe more than would be needed, but why should she care about that? The spares would keep for new battles. There would always be fights and bloodshed in this part of the world. It was a law of the bleak gods of the tribes. A man was only a man when he was killing or being killed. Death by the sword, axe or spear was considered honourable, noble, correct.

She hefted the bag and threw it over one hunched shoulder. Then she shuffled out into the falling snow. She moved with appalling slowness but unstoppable purpose. She had the entire night to complete her task. There was no rush. She was like the very geology she walked on, like the movement of landmasses on a bed of magma. Slow but implacable. A gran on a mission. A barbarian gran fulfilling her destiny. A gradual gran. The snow whipped about her form.

The light flakes flew into her face, perhaps saying hello to the white hairs on her desiccated chin. She blinked away the snow that settled on her hooded eyelids and a dry cackle escaped her infinitely thin lips. She could smell the blood from afar! Truly this had been a great battle, a magnificent struggle, and she would have a wonderful time doing what she planned to do. She barely sunk into the snow, so light was she as she lurched onward, horrid nostrils flared in greed.

“I am coming, my darlings!” she croaked, more to herself than to any ear on the battlefield. “Don’t despair! I’ll be there soon...”

Then she shook with silent laughter, a gran in her senescent prime. A gran full of the twilit joys of physical seasoning and emotional erosion. The most barbaric of all barbarian grans! A gran one would not mess with on any level in any circumstance. It even seemed the snow laughed along with her, in the way it whooshed and swirled as the blizzard gathered strength. As for the victorious warriors, the survivors were now coming back to their dwellings and passing her.

They greeted her respectfully, those who were still able to do so, for exhaustion and wounds had made some of them incapable of the little niceties that always helped to smooth barbarian life. They dripped gore, some of it their own. Her feet stamped it into the snow, blending it with the flakes as if she was mixing a cake. But she was a barbarian gran, not a normal one, and did not mix cakes. Onwards she went, and not once did she shift her sack to the other shoulder.

She was strong, this old woman, strong and fierce. She rounded the small hill that had obscured the sight of the battle from the village and now she saw the full extent of the c*****e for herself. Her eyes were still keen enough for that. Hundreds of men sprawled on the ground. Hunks of severed flesh tumbled around them. Limbs at odd angles, mouths agape, entrails uncoiled and exposed like improbable sausages. Some still groaned. These were the ones she longed for.

She moved with accuracy and wisdom, wasting no time with the dead. She was too experienced at this game to make mistakes. She paused by each dying man and reached into her sack, then extracted a balaclava and eased it over his head. She did not differentiate between warriors of her side and those of the other tribe. Her task was to cover the heads of both with woollen garments, to shield the flesh of cheeks and brow and mouth from the snow and icy wind.

The night passed but only occasionally did a gap open in the blizzard to reveal a few stars, twinkling madly, and not once did she look upwards. She concentrated on her chore, the sack growing lighter and lighter as the balaclavas were distributed. At last the sack was empty, the final balaclava had been put on the final head, and now the sky was growing light in the east. By some strange coincidence she had knitted a perfect number of balaclavas with none left over...

She stood up straight for the first time in many months, her hands on her hips, and she stretched her ancient body and revelled in the music of her cracking bone joints. A vast yawn opened up her grotesque head. The snow blew into it and then changed its mind and hurried back out before that horrid portal snapped shut again, the solitary tooth glinting like a dagger of ice for a moment before the thin lips came together. It was done, it was over, and she had excelled herself.

She gazed across the battlefield, the entirety of it, the red and white, and the black stains that were fallen men. The living had gone home, the dead had died and gone to the afterlife, but the dying were here and all wore one of her balaclavas. She smiled. It was good, it was right, it was what the gods had ordained. Not one of the dying had frozen to death overnight. The gods would be pleased with her. And she was pleased with herself, this gran of grans, this astonishing hag.

Still with her hands on her hips, she completed the last stage of the process. She whistled through her hideous lips. It was a high whistle and it carried far. And it was answered by a flapping of distant wings. The crows were coming. They were coming in great numbers. Crows and rooks and ravens. They recognised the signal, they knew what it meant, that she was a friend, a provider, this barbarian gran. And the gran did not stay to watch, for she had seen it all before, often.

The crows were messengers of the gods, agents of the gods, maybe even the gods themselves in disguise. Who knew? But they had tastes and preferences, just like the men and women of the lower world did. They liked eyes. They loved eyes. It was the food they relished most of all. Even eyes that were bigger than their bellies. They had to be fresh eyes, not stale ones, not frozen ones. Fresh healthy eyes that belonged to heads that were still alive, to dying men, not the dead.

Barbarian gran walked away and she whistled again, but this time quietly and for her own pleasure, a primitive but powerful melody she had learned when she was a young girl, a long time ago indeed. Her balaclavas had protected the men from the cold and had preserved their lives through the night. They would preserve the men for the remainder of the day, and possibly even through the following night. The men on both sides of the battle. Keep them warm and dying.

She made no distinction between friend and foe and neither did the gods. Neither did crows. Eyes are eyes and a sacrifice is a sacrifice. If you fight, as a man should, and you are unable to walk away on your feet, this means something. It means your time is over. Accept it. Try not to scream too much as your eye is plucked from its socket by a cruel beak. Balaclavas keep heads warm but expose the eyes. Which is why barbarian grans knit them, and knit them well.