The Religion Read Free Page A

cursing and struggling to hold her down. Her stark naked skin was marble white and slashed with scratches and blotched with the indigo welts of brutish fingers. Her face was drawn. Her teeth were bloody. Her shocking blue eyes were wild. She didn't see Mattias, and while part of him yearned for those wild blue eyes to meet his own, he knew that the knowledge of his witness would drain her defiance, and her defiance was the last gift she would give him.
    Someone punched her in the head and screamed in her ear and she turned and spit in his face and the sputum was crimson. A fifth man knelt between her legs, his breeches pulled down. And all of them shouting-at one another, at her, one with a twisting finger up his nose-in their yammering alien tongue. They were raping a woman dragged half sleeping from her bed, yet their manner was like herdsmen freeing a stranded calf from a bog: gesticulating, blaming, bellowing encouragement and advice; their faces innocent of malice and vacant of pity. The brute between her legs lost patience, for she wedged her knee against his chest and wouldn't let him take her. He pulled a knife from his boot and pushed up her breast and took aim and ran her through her heart. No one tried to stop him. No one complained. His mother stopped moving and her headflopped back. Mattias wanted to sob-but his breath was frozen in his lungs. The brute dropped his knife and reached for his crotch and he slotted something stiff inside her and started pumping. And someone must have said something funny, for they all of them laughed.
    Mattias held back the tears he hadn't earned. He'd failed his sisters. He'd failed his father. His mother's corpse lay violated by beasts. He alone was left standing, dispossessed and powerless and lost. He came to as he realized that he'd pushed the tip of the dagger into his palm. His blood was bright against the crusting filth on his fingers. His pain was clean and true and it cleared his mind. His mother had denied them what they'd wanted even more than her flesh: her surrender and humiliation. The laying of her pride. The desire to be close to her soul overwhelmed him. The desire for death and in death that companionship he treasured more dearly than life. He clasped the blade against his arm where it wouldn't be seen. Without haste-for if the blade was yet warm, his blood was now cold-he waded into atrocity to claim his share.
    The first creature shuddered and whooped in a bestial spasm and the others cheered, and he rose to his feet and staggered back with his breeches around his knees. A second beast knelt to penetrate his mother and the other three groped her thighs and breasts to arouse themselves for their turn. All but the second looked at Mattias. They saw nothing but a wretched boy. From the direction of the village came the sound of hooves at the canter and this concerned them more, but the hooves concerned Mattias not at all. The darkness rose within him and he felt free.
    He plunged in.
    After hammer and tongs the blade seemed delicate as paper, yet he punched it twice through the first devil's back as if his ribs were woven from straw. The creature sighed and his breeches snared his ankles and he dropped to his hands and knees with his arse in the air and stared at the ground between his elbows and panted like a heat-exhausted dog. Mattias kicked him over in the dirt and plunged on.
    The second creature grunted between his mother's splayed legs. He knew nothing was amiss until Mattias scraped the cap from his skull and grabbed him by the hair and bent him backward. Mattias saw a bewildered sense of injustice in his eyes, as of a child dragged unawares from a pot of jam, then he punched the blade through his upturned cheek and pulled it free and punched again and an eye popped forth and dangledfrom its socket by the string. Working his arm with the rhythm of the forge he plowed the childlike face with bleeding slits, splashing the heel of his fist in the screaming mask