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There were precious few moments when God reached down with gentle hands to remake Arthur’s life. In fact, he often felt such a lack of god's presence in his life that sometimes he believed the slanders of his detractors‐ that England was truly godforsaken.
He can count on his fingers the number of times God's presence made itself known. His birth, his mother's death... events that stirred him deeply. He had not been born the way genius loci usually are, springing up from the earth with dirt-stained limbs or flesh slick with sea-salt. No, he'd come slipping from his mother's womb with a wail on his lips, howling his rage at the world for having been born at all, like any common babe. It was unorthodox for their kind to give birth the human way but not unheard of among the females of their species, should she be so lucky to beget flesh of her flesh, and for so long England coveted such raw power. The ability to create life, to impart a piece of himself onto the world, forever and ever.
He had no such luck. God had seen fit to give his kind immortality, to bend the rules of the universe to bestow upon them powerful abilities, but in all that strange wonder, God had not seen fit to give immortal men the ability to give birth. He remembers reading stories of the Hellensistic variety, tales of Athena bursting clean from Zeus' head, and had hoped that he could mimic such power, if only he willed it. The New World had been his chance but no such luck. He has a child but she did not come from his flesh. Instead she was born in the orthodox way their kind usually are. Fallen from the sky like a dying star before lustfully penetrating the earth to bring about her own conception.
Arthur had never understood why God had seen fit to gift immortals with such great feats all the while burdening them with the limits of men.
His little girl is hungry.
The New World is a harsh place, that he knew from the moment his feet landed upon the virgin earth but in the early days of his sojourn in America, the air had been warm with summer and game roamed without fear of winter's cold breath. Now winter is here and time in its innately cynical nature allows life to wither and die.
His girl is in his arms, her shallow breath slithering in the air like pale-blue ghosts. The meek warmth from the rudimentary hearth of their home (which can only be described as painfully modest by civilized standards), seemingly evades her despite Arthur’s greatest efforts to return some semblance of warmth to her body. When in good health, her cheeks resemble the gentle shades of a golden prairie, but now they're sickly white and hollow, only returning to temporary plumpness when she moans in agony, stomach growling.
With age, their kind can withstand the aching pains of hunger, sometimes they can condition themselves to go without food for long stretches of time. An invaluable skill during times of famine, plague and war, when one learned that warm, sanitary meals were not always a certainty. But his girl is still so young, not even 3 years old though she doesn't look it. She has teeth and can form words that don't resemble the nonsensical babble of a baby's. A common man might peg her as a dainty girl of five, puny and narrow body drowned in puritan white linen. His sweet, hungry, girl. He is hungry himself, though he relented to boiled leather in favor of giving her the lion's share of his rations. He should have saved that leather for her as well. Those are all gone now and their bodies are all that remains as Jamestown starves.
When the starvation first began, the colonists had resorted to rats and dogs and cats. Then, a bit after, the precious few people that remained in the colony who had the good sense to save the bones of the dogs and cats and rats simply cracked them open to scrape the black marrow into a watery stew. When he still had his wits and strength about him, he'd tried to caution them into rationing their makeshift stew. But they did not listen. Here, in the new world, they are no longer his people (they are her people now) and not even his divinity, so far removed from the land it hails from, could sway them in their hungered despair.
A selfish part of himself wishes that he'd simply returned home with Captain John Smith, who'd sailed back to London some time ago for food and supplies. But then Arthur feels the frail frame of his girl, her small hand cradled in his like the bony wing of a fallen baby bird as she whimpers softly against him, and he knows there is no world in which he leaves her here to starve on her own, at the complete mercy of hunger and the red savages beyond who desperately want to smother the life out of the colony. He will suffer this with her, just this once…until Captain Smith returns with provisions, until this little chapter of horror in Virginia, her first, comes to an end.
He thinks about what his mother might have done, in the same situation. Surely there were moments when she could not provide and yet her children, of which there were plenty, needed to eat. He remembers how she'd smelled of milk and knows that would have been her solution. But England is a man, he has nothing of himself to give to his girl-
His mind stutters and then stops, as it is wont to do, when his mind turns toward his father. Wild mane of gold, a long braided beard and crazed blue eyes as pale as winter's heart. Germania had always stunk of steel and blood. Blood, blood...
No male nation can beget children of his own, not in the natural way (though there are rumors that Spain is challenging that theory further south). A male genius loci may conquer a land and fertilize it (her) with his people in hopes that a new country is born from his efforts. Or...if he should favor a human child, he may bestow them with his blood so that it would be as though they came from his own seed. His father had done such with Hengist and Horsa, it was said. The brothers’ drunk the blood of a god and in return were given drops of a gods power, enough to conquer a nation.
Blood, blood, blood. That is all that matters in the end, isn't it? He has enough of it in him that it could last her the winter, and he has spilled blood for less. A mad thought crosses his mind then. He would allow her to consume every last bit of his flesh, down to the bone and marrow, if it meant he could alleviate the burdensome, mortal pain of hunger, if it meant that -through consumption- she would become his flesh, if it meant that his blood would finally run clean through hers, if it meant that she would be of his flesh and blood in truth. A metaphysical birth of sorts.
Jamestown is hungry so she is hungry, on top of her own physical body being hungry. She is deathly pale, her cheeks hollow and a rotten milky white. He needs to feed her. And so he does.
With each bite their bond becomes ocean-deep. Mouthfuls of his flesh slither down her gullet as blood drips hot from her lips. She eats eagerly, a glutton for Arthur's meat. Imparting upon her an ancestral memory stretching back a thousand thousand years. Each bite is a memory, and his mother's memories and the memories of whatever creature that came before his mother, ancient and dead. He imagines the memories of a hundred lifetimes flickering behind his girl's eyelids, shut in sweet flesh-eating bliss and her grip on him grows stronger. He's imparting his strength as well, his divinity.
His own father, Woden, would have sooner swallowed his son whole to stave off his hunger, with the rationale that such cruelty would only make them both stronger. Arthur's mother would have given him her milk. But Arthur has no milk to give, and Arthur is not his father, so he allows his girl, his little one, to feast on his ribs as a baby might feast on its mother's milk swollen breast.
He'd taken a dagger to his body and cut himself clean open, as one does a fish, to make it easier. Whenever the divinity in his blood tries to hurriedly mend the flesh wound closed he opens it back up with the sharp edge of his blade. There is a sensation of small teeth and tiny fingers digging into him, scraping against his rib cage and wrestling with a stubborn bit of tendon but Arthur doesn't even feel the pain. Only the bond between him and his girl. Murky, dark waters as warm as freshly spilled blood and honey sweet on the tongue. It's thick and silky, pulling him deep into paternity.
He has become a father in truth and here feasts Albion's seed upon Albion himself. His fingers curl into her blonde hair, the shade of wheat fields in autumn touched by the misty glow of a dawning sun, and he marvels at the way her cheeks flush red with life.