Haggis and Circuses
Castle Morrigan, Morriganburgh, Morrigania
(formerly Edinburgh Castle, Edinburgh, Scotland.)
For the three days that they’d occupied the castle formerly known as Edinburgh Morrigan’s thralls had been busy: her cartographers were renaming every part of Scotland (sorry, Morrigania) with different variations of her name, which would make future navigation tricky, at best.
Elsewhere they were building up resources for the big push to the West, planning to eventually isolate Scotland from the rest of the UK, a third of her army (some two hundred thousand archers, calvary and infantry) were training in ways that would have killed the toughest of normal humans.
At the same time, a battalion of engineers cleared one large wood just for longbows and another to make arrows alone whilst others mined flint for the arrow-heads, the need for feathers for the arrow-flights caused all the pigeons to disappear and led to heated henhouses and a lot of bald hens laying eggs.
They also needed trebuchets and supply wagons (which non-combatants or mules would pull as the cavalry had all the horses). At the same time the armourers were melting down all the metal they could find to forge spare weapons for the “recruits” they would pick up along the way.
The tailors were making extra uniforms, but only for the soldiers, the non-combatants were clothed in whatever they had on when they joined, which explained why a young woman was wearing a pink onesie with a rabbit-eared hood as she pulled a cart full of weapons past.
None of that involved Morrigan, and the boredom of waiting for the coming campaign to start was crushing her like a physical weight, which the conversation she was having with one of her Generals, Franklin Quinn (formerly a captain in the Royal Artillery) was doing nothing to alleviate.
He was dressed much like the other soldiers, wearing a bowl-like steel helmet, a knee-length, dark-blue tunic, and leggings tied at his waist with a padded, green vest on top. Light brown, knee-length boots were tied with darker brown laces that wrapped around them from ankle to knee. He had a small, round, wooden shield on his left shoulder with a claymore hanging down his back. The only designation of rank was the green vest, which was usually light brown.
Kneeling on one knee in front of her throne on the ramparts (where her bearers had moved it for the upcoming spectacle below) he spoke nervously in a voice filled with love and devotion, “My liege, we have seized many of the enemy’s weapons, and have everything from bazookas to hand grenades, machine guns to pistols, and the people trained to use them all, why can’t we take them with us when we set out on Friday?”
“And thee wouldst destroyeth mine enemies swiftly, foreshorten the war and bring peace unto the land?” she sneered. “Doth thee and thine progeny not wisheth to bring glory unto me for countless generations to come?”
“But, my liege…”
“The fights starteth soon, joineth the other generals as a spectator, lest thee becomest part of it,” she pointed at the esplanade below, where a crowd was forming in a circle.
What he didn’t understand was that she needed the war to last as long as possible as the only time she ever felt truly alive was when she was watching mortals battle, drinking in the aggression, pain and fear as they died in their thousands.
Most of the time she honestly didn’t care who won or lost, as long as the sides were evenly matched sometimes she would even send her own troops to the slaughter, to avoid a victory that would end the war. A world at peace was literally hell on earth for her, which was what the non-Celtic prisoners were for.
Anyone unlucky enough to be captured by the routine patrols and looting parties were thrown into the vaults under the castle which, over the centuries had been home to everyone from pirates to prisoners of war and was unexpectedly filthy for what had been a tourist attraction only a few days earlier.
Each side of the long, main room had canvas hammocks suspended from wooden frames that they’d packed in three to a row; oil lamps hung down from the ceiling on rough ropes.
An unlit fireplace was at one end with a rough-hewn dinner table in front of it, keeping it as far away from the foul smelling toilet as possible. Once a day a blank-faced kitchen thrall would carry a heavy, boiling-hot pot of porridge oats the length of the vaults without being crushed by the weight or scalded by the bubbling mix. The prisoners would collect the porcelain bowls from their bedding and jostle to fill them. Fights always broke out as there was never enough to go around, and those at the end of the queue would frequently get nothing.
Despite the overcrowding, the vaults were still cold during the day and freezing at night. A few of those who’d been there the longest had fallen ill, been tipped out of their hammocks, had their clothes (and anything else worth taking) stolen, leaving them to die naked on the stone floor.
A thrall with a claymore on her back had arrived two nights before the games taking place above and had herded twenty of the toughest-looking men towards the door. Deciding that the skinny, five foot three tall woman was an easy target, one of them rushed her as another tried to grab the sword off of her back. Despite them both being a lot taller and heavier, the thrall threw one of them twenty feet, bouncing him off the high ceiling, breaking his spine when he hit the ground. As he lay dying, the soldier spun around and punched a hole in the other one’s throat with one stiff-fingered jab.
She wiped the blood off of her hand on the corpse’s clothes, picked two replacements, and led them out as the rest dived on the dead bodies, picking them clean of their possessions, she took them up to the Governor’s House (or Morrigan’s house, as anyone with a passing interest in survival called it) as they blinked at the first sunlight they’d seen in days.
Morrigan’s courtiers had decorated it with paintings and sculptures of the goddess in various heroic and beneficent poses, all stunning masterpieces as they threw anything less over the battlements, followed shortly thereafter by the artist.
They luxuriated in baths and dressed in clean clothes before dining on a sumptuous meal. As they slept that night under silk sheets, phrases like, “Fattened up for the slaughter,” occurred to most of them.
That evening the same soldier pushed and shoved them onto the esplanade and into the circle of baying spectators.
As thralls dragged the dead and dying out, others were carrying in what looked suspiciously like a reinforced wallpaper table covered in weapons.
“Choose,” the soldier said, which was the first time any of them had heard her speak and her voice was surprisingly sweet and gentle.
“We won’t kill each other for your amusement,” one man by the name of Jan Kowalski said as the rest almost emptied the table, leaving him an eighteen-inch long, Scottish, thrusting dagger called a dirk and a Gae Bolg, which looked like a combination spear and oversized Swiss army knife.
What Kowalski didn’t know was that when it came to Celtic ancestry, he was a borderline case he had an insufficient amount of Celtic DNA for Morrigan to control him fully (although he could hear her voice in his head) but still enough to boost his abilities beyond that of a normal human.
Above them on the ramparts, between Morrigan and her generals, stood the grey-haired Ed McCoy dressed in the tuxedo he’d worn before he retired as an American Wrestling master of ceremonies.
Beside him a black-haired young witch, dressed all in black and wearing white make-up with black lipstick and eyeshadow was waiting quietly, eyes cast down.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in a New York accent as the witch boosted his voice by weaving an amplification spell with her wand as she whispered the incantation under her breath.
“Hasn’t our goddess given us a wonderful evening’s entertainment so far? Let’s put our hands together and show our appreciation for the mellifluous, the magnificent, the majestic… Morrigan!” he waited for the tumultuous applause and cheers (which she acknowledged with a queenly wave of the hand) to die down.
She was flushed with happiness after watching a dozen of her soldiers, sentenced for various trivial offences, fight each other to the death (two at a time). She pardoned the winners and had the corpses of the losers thrown over the battlements onto an ever growing, rotten, rat infested heap that buzzed with a cloud of flies.
“But the fun isn’t over yet, ladies and gentlemen, we have the main event coming right up,” he said, pointing an accusatory finger at the esplanade.
“Look at those twenty vile blasphemers, those defilers of hope, rescued from starvation on the streets and taken into our wonderful goddess’s care. See how clean and pampered they are,” he paused for a second before continuing.
“You would think they’d be grateful, but no, they conspire in groups when they think no-one is listening, but nothing escapes our beloved goddess’s ear. They whisper of killing you, you and you,” he said, pointing at three men at random in the front row who all looked genuinely outraged.
“They would murder every one of you good men and rape all of you fine women, if they could,” again he had to wait for quiet before continuing, “our beloved goddess has treated them like they were her very own, keeping them in luxury and well fed, but they still plot to slit her throat as she sleeps!”
The crowd on the esplanade screamed as one in fury, as the twenty wondered what on earth he was talking about. Hundreds them surged forward before a gesture from Morrigan stopped them all dead in their tracks, they fell silent, returning to their previous position.
“Ladies and gentlemen, what should we do about this betrayal, let them walk free to laugh at you?” Ed continued.
“Nooo!” the crowd screamed as one.
“Pamper them, take food out of your children’s mouths for them to feast on?”
“Nooo!”
“Then what can we do? How can we punish them?”
“Fight! Fight! Fight!” echoed off the walls as the entire crowd punched the air.
“A fight to the death you say?” his voice boomed out louder, to be heard above the noise of the crowd, as the witch waved her wand furiously, sweat trickling down her face, streaking her white make-up, “And how many of our proud soldiers will it take to beat twenty of those scum, twenty… ten… five?”
“One!” they shouted in unison.
“And will they win their freedom or die?”
“Die!”
Morrigan held up an imperious hand, and the crowd went wild, cheering and whooping.
“Ladies and gentlemen, our goddess has heard, and shown her love for you by granting your wish… so, without further ado, please welcome her champion, the Hammer of Hermiston, the Scourge of Silverknowes, the feared, the fearsome… Timothy ‘Cocktail’ Carmichael!”
There was a lot of sniggering from the twenty at the name until Timothy pushed his way through the crowd. At six two he wasn’t the tallest man there, by a long shot, but stripped to the waist with a body-builder’s physique and an evil expression on his face, he had the look of a man you wouldn’t want to walk past on a crowded street in broad daylight, never mind bump into in a dark alley. He was the captain of Morrigan’s elite bodyguard, the Urraidhean Na Fine, the toughest men in an army of superhumans.
He came from a well-respected, wealthy family, and despite his generous allowance and trust fund, had turned to mugging and bare-knuckle boxing at any early age.
After a few years he became a debt collector for a local loan shark, and was the epitome of the old saying, that if you love your job you’ll never work another day in your life.
He got his nickname when he shoved two cocktail sticks in the eyes of a man on unemployment benefits who couldn’t keep up his weekly payments, saying that the disability allowance he would get for being blind could go towards the debt. He was one of the few people who would have volunteered to join her of his own free will.
The soldier, who was now standing behind them, pushed the back row forwards, sending them all stumbling towards the brutal-looking man. The first one to get close enough hacked at him desperately with a battle-axe. Cocktail ducked and took it off him, swung the axe with one hand, to decapitate two of those following as he put the first one in a headlock and snapped his neck, a smug grin spreading all over his face.
As the rest of them were attacking, and dying, Jan ran around behind him at close to twenty miles an hour, almost touching the crowd who were forbidden to interfere under pain of death (which was the only penalty there ever was) and slashed at Cocktail’s Achilles tendon with the dirk.
The large man bellowed and swivelled around, the axe flying out of his hand, missing as he sped on. It wasn’t a throwing weapon, so it wobbled through the air, before imbedding itself in one of the spectator’s chest, who looked a bit annoyed.
Cocktail turned back around, pulled a sword out his side and thrust it through the heart of the man who put it there. As he killed another six of the twenty, cutting their number in half, some of them literally, he was back where he started.
He picked up the Gae Bolg and sprinted around the circle again. As Cocktail was fighting four men at once, Jan leapt up and rammed the main blade of the spear between his shoulder blades. As Cocktail reached back to pull it out, the swords of the three men in front of him slashed at his neck and chest.
Jan completed the circle again, sweat dripping off of his brow onto the cobblestones as he bent over to pick the dirk back up. He was puffing and panting as he ran behind Cocktail for a third time; he jumped up and drove the blade into the back of the big man’s neck, making him howl and clutch at it. He picked up the Gae Bolg and rammed it into his back over and over, screaming at the top of his voice.
As Cocktail toppled forward, like a felled tree, he saw that he was the only one of the twenty left alive. He held the Gae Bolg above his head and with a ferocious cry, brought it down on Cocktail’s neck, separating his head from his shoulders.
A shocked silence fell over the crowd as they looked on in disbelief, No-one had even come close to beating him in the nightly events and even though it was a tradition that was only a few days old, it seemed unimaginable that the man who’d cut a swath through enemies in battle could be killed like that.
Morrigan was glowing with joy at the carnage she’d witnessed, and it was a few seconds before she could speak. When she did, her voice trembled with emotion, which the spectators mistook for grief for her fallen champion, “He hath won his freedom, release him. But heed my words, human: if we captureth thee again thine head wilt moulder upon a spike on mine gate without the dignity of mortal combat.”
A path opened up in the crowd after she finished speaking and Jan, who didn’t need telling twice, ran out the gate as a patrol escorted a woman in. She was in her late fifties and immaculately dressed in a beige Chanel suit.
“Good evening,” the head of a secretively secret agency said looking up at Morrigan, “my name is Madeleine Mary Yates and I know where Callum Cooper is.”