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Brann’s laughter caught in his throat. Moving forward was an effort, as if the air had turned to treacle. He felt detached, as if he was no part of what he was seeing. His head swam and he had to force himself to start breathing again.
His brother tilted slowly sideways, then fell forwards. Brann forced himself to move and lurched into a kneeling position, catching him just before he hit the ground. Callan’s head turned, pressing his cheek into Brann’s arm and revealing the end of a short feathered shaft just above the back of his neck. Brann had been on enough hunts to recognise a crossbow bolt when he saw it. Dark blood seeped rapidly from it, dripping from Brann’s arm and starting to form a pool beside his knee.
Brann was vaguely aware of two figures around twenty yards ahead of them. If Callan had kept running, he would have blundered right into them. For a long moment, however, he was unable to force his eyes away from his brother. When he did turn his head – slowly and feeling as blank as Callan looked – he saw two men crouching in the undergrowth. One, holding a spent crossbow and wearing a garish red scarf on his head, started towards him but, as the crash and barely restrained curse of a falling man came from the wood, the other man grabbed the first and dragged him away. In seconds, they were out of sight, and the occasional receding noise suggested they were not remaining close. In a surreal moment, Brann was left, in the warmth of a glorious summer day, with the sounds of nature returning around him, holding his brother as Callan’s life dried into the hard earth beside him.
‘No!’ he screamed. ‘No!’ he implored to the gods, throwing his head back and roaring at the sky. ‘No, no, no don’t do this!’
Another muffled curse and increased movement from the nearby trees jolted him back to reality. His screams had been a signal to the incoming men that caution was no longer needed.
He needed to move for his own sake as much as the villagers’, but his screams had also been heard among the buildings and concerned village folk began to move towards the source of the sound. They were greeted with the sight of Brann, his tunic and breeches soaked with blood, emerging from the bushes. His chest heaved with sobs and he was raggedly gasping breath from shock and the effort of dragging his brother’s limp body at his side with all the strength left in his arms. A stunned hush fell as the close-knit community stopped on either side and watched, in shock, the boy’s determined progress along the dusty track between the houses. The invaders were gone from his head. All except one thought had left him. He was taking his brother home.
The silence couldn’t last. A woman screamed, breaking the spell, and the air was instantly filled with the sounds of horror and grief, mixed with calls for the boys’ parents. As Brann neared his home, his father emerged from the mill door, his heavy black cloak in his hands, but dread etched in his face. He saw his sons and his legs almost gave way beneath him before he caught himself and stumbled quickly to them. He gently, almost reverently, took Callan into his arms, cradling his son’s body like a small child, the cloak forgotten in the dust at his feet. Relieved of the weight and with his determination not needed anymore to lend him strength, Brann sank to his knees, sobs bursting from him savagely. His father’s features crumpled into sorrow – it was the softest emotion Callan had ever seen from him – and he pulled his eldest son’s head into his shoulder. As he did so, a man in the surrounding crowd noticed the crossbow bolt and realised that this had not been the terrible accident that all had initially assumed.
His cry cut through the assembly. ‘To arms! To arms! We are under attack! Defend yourselves!’
The villagers scattered, men scrambling for whatever could serve as a weapon and women rushing their children to any place of relative safety they could find. Brann and his father were left alone before their home. The man stood, hunched with deep grief, belying the fact that his build was a combination of that of his older sons, with Callan’s height and Brann’s broad shoulders. He slowly fingered the end of the wooden shaft and raised his head, just in time to catch sight of the men emerging from the wood at a run. His eyes darkened with rage and he rounded on the boy sagging on the ground before him.
‘Get off your knees, boy,’ he snarled, the fury that was in every syllable flowing through his muscles and drawing him erect as he pulled his dead son close into him. ‘Go!’ he roared. ‘Go away. Now. Go. Away. From. Here.’
Brann staggered backwards under the force of the rejection, almost falling. ‘Go away!’ his father bellowed, and Brann spun and ran from the words. He could understand. Callan had always been the perfect son. Why had the gods not taken him instead? If he thought that, why would his father not? But the words still stabbed through him with a viciousness that no amount of logic could prevent.
He ran, swerving away from the approaching men into the very bushes from which he had so recently emerged. He ran from everything: from the sight of his brother, drained of life; from the wild men charging his village waving swords and axes; from the noise of the screaming women; and, most of all, from his father’s words.
Another, smaller stand of trees lay near the thicket. Pausing as he reached their cover, he looked back at the village. Heavily armed men were fighting with the locals, but were finding that a daily routine of farming and hunting had honed muscles and reflexes that – when combined with spears and bows designed for tackling wild boar and wolves, and scythes and hammers wielded by those who used them every day for a living – provided formidable opposition.
His gaze drifted mechanically to his home, the tidy mill beside the river. His father was fighting in the doorway with the four of the raiders, thrusting and swinging grimly with a hunting spear. As Brann’s empty gaze fell upon him, he inevitably succumbed to the pressure and fell back into the building. The four men poured into the mill but reappeared a few moments later as smoke began to spill from the door and nearby windows. Two other houses were already on fire, and the wooden mill quickly joined them as the blaze took hold. As the raiders started to fall back, villagers raced to the mill as if trying to rescue those trapped inside, but were beaten back by the intensity of the flames.
Suffused with emptiness, Brann’s blank stare watched his life disappear as effectively as his home as the fire consumed it and his family. Overwhelmed by despair and dismay, he turned to flee from the destruction of everything and everyone that meant anything and everything to him… and ran straight into a meaty hand that slammed solidly into his chest, knocking him abruptly onto his back. Dazed as much by recent events as by the blow, he looked up to see a leering face under a garish red bandana looming over him. Amid foetid breath, words drifted down to him. ‘Thought we’d lost you, boy. So good of you to come running back to us. Lovely to see you again.’
Hard hands grabbed him by the arms and jerked him to his feet. Quickly and expertly, his wrists and ankles were tied and a heavy bag was dragged over his head, letting in little air and less light. He was lifted with apparent ease and carried a short distance before being slung face down over the back of a horse.
He had no interest in what was happening to him. All he could see was his brother’s corpse, his burning home and his father’s raging rejection. The horse moved off at a canter. His light-headedness grew. What little light the hood allowed receded, and all went black.
Chapter 3
He shivered. It was cold in his rooms, though the sun had risen high. It was always cold, now. Built to keep out the heat, the design took no account of the heat that the elderly crave once the cold starts to set into their bones. He shuffled towards the balcony, lured by the sunlight. He scanned the floor for dangers under the dust. He had had his fill of falling for a lifetime, no matter what little of that may be left to him. He watched the dust kicked up by the slippered feet poking out from under his ankle-length shift. Dry dust. Lifeless dust. He grunted. Just like his skin. But it had not always been so. Not like this. Far from this.
The heat hit him like a hammer. He had reached the balcony. It was too hot. And bright. He grunted again, the closest he could manage to humour at the irony. He forced himself to endure it, and gripped the heavy balustrade, the sun casting ornate shadows through the carved stonework onto the plain grey of his shift. Squinting against the glare, he peered beyond the gardens, past the high white walls, to the dusty flat area beyond, the sand hard-packed by generations of feet. He saw a rider, galloping in triumph, sword gleaming high as he circled the area, acknowledging the roars of the crowds. Royal crimson lined his billowing cloak, and crimson of another sort soaked into the dust beside the body slumped in the centre of the arena, a riderless horse standing disinterestedly nearby.
His eyes were wet. The sun must be particularly bright today. He blinked to clear his vision, and the scene faded. It seemed so, so long ago. It was so, so long ago. Who benefitted from memories? Would they give strength to failing muscles? Would they ease aching bones? Would they turn white hair brown?
He turned and shuffled back into the cold, taking care not to fall.
****
Brann shivered and spluttered as he was wakened by ice-cold water thrown roughly into his face. Sitting up, he tried to open his eyes but, before he could focus on anything, his stomach heaved and he vomited violently over his legs and lap.
A raucous laugh blared in his ear. ‘There we go,’ a voice as rough as his treatment sneered. ‘If I had a gold piece for every time that happened, I’d have my own boat by now.’
Another voice answered him. ‘Can’t have him going on board like that, though, Boar. Captain won’t thank us for attracting disease, and so on.’
The first voice was irritated. ‘I think I know what I’m about after the years I’ve had doing this. Better than someone like you who has never done it before. I don’t need you to tell me.’
‘Like when you released the horses we had taken as soon as we got here?’
The man gave a dismissive snort. ‘We don’t need them any more, do we? They could have been noisy and given away our position.’
The other voice was scornful. ‘If anyone was close enough to hear horses whinnying, we would be found anyway. Our position is much more likely to be given away by a couple of riderless horses roaming around. And where was your vast experience when you shot the other boy?’ he snapped. ‘All we were looking for was food and water. Others were taking what few slaves we need. Did you know what you were doing at that time?’
‘He would have seen us,’ Boar grumbled, although he seemed too wary of the other man to react with any aggression to the withering criticism. ‘I had to do it or they would both have raised the alarm.’
His companion’s tone was contemptuous. ‘That is not true, and you know it. We saw them coming and they were going too fast to notice us. If you had moved just a few yards into the heavier bushes when I told you, they would never have seen us.’ His voice dropped to a low, threatening level. ‘You know what I think? I think you enjoy it. I think you like the killing, just for the sake of it. And you saw the chance for it with the attack on the village. Just like you enjoy the misery of the slaves you take. Well, I don’t care who you sailed with before: you are with us now. And it will stop when you are with me, because the next time it happens you’ll know what it feels like to be on the receiving end, and you’ll have my sword to thank for it.’
‘You better not be threatening me,’ Boar objected hotly, but it was obvious that his tone carried more bluster than menace.
The first man was unconcerned. ‘Take it how you will. But if you know what’s good for you, you will remember it.’
‘Anyway,’ Boar objected, trying to salvage some pride, ‘you have taken as many slaves as I have on this trip, as many as any of us have.’
The first man paused, and when he spoke his voice was heavy and low. ‘That may be true, but none of the rest of us approaches it with your relish. It may be the way of the world in some parts, but not where I come from. If a man’s fate is to be a slave, so be it, but I would prefer not to be a part of fulfilling his destiny, thank you very much. All but you will be glad when we are free of this cursed contract at the end of this trip. Then, if you miss your slaving, you can go back to the pirate ships you came from. Though I’m guessing that whatever reason made you leave them and turn up when our Captain was recruiting might just still apply. What do you think?’
Boar fell silent. Whatever he thought, if anything, was kept to himself. The other man’s voice moved closer to Brann.
I should feel rage, or grief, or something… anything, Brann thought. He had just listened to a description of his brother’s death – and the futility of it. But, instead, all he felt was emptiness. The feeling seemed to grow from a lump in his stomach and spread through every part of him, leaving him light-headed and almost dreamlike. A hand grabbed his tunic between the shoulderblades and hoisted him to his feet. His vision started to clear, and he shook his head as if to try to help his eyes focus more quickly as his feet sank a fraction into rough sand.
He already knew he was beside the sea – the crash and hiss of waves breaking and soaking back into the beach and the heavy salt air in his nostrils had made that obvious from the start. He may have felt completely disinterested in his surroundings, but that did not mean that he was unaware of them.
Rough fingers gently prised at his hands. He looked down and realised he was clinging to a bundle of black cloth, his fingers clamped about it and his arms grasping it tightly against his chest.
The voice of the man was soft, soothing, almost caring. His surprise at the tone caught his attention. ‘It’s all right to let go. You’ll get it back, don’t worry. The gods know you may be glad of it. It’s not so warm out on the water.’
Brann looked at it. His father’s cloak, heavy, black and with a vertical rip near the hem at the back. His mother had urged him to look for a new one when they visited the town for the ball game, but he had resisted. For reasons he never explained, he loved it, and insisted on having it repaired instead. That must have been where he had been heading when he saw his two sons, only one of them alive. In his grief, he had dropped it. And in his grief, Brann must have picked it up. He had no idea why. He had no memory of even doing so. But he had it now. His only link to what already seemed a distant life. And he was not about to give it up.
The man eased at his fingers again. ‘You were the same last night. Nothing I could do short of breaking your fingers would let me get that from your grasp, even when you were out cold.’ Brann tensed, gripping it tighter to him. He sank back to the ground, his knees drawn up protectively in front of him. ‘I don’t want it, boy, fret not. I have my own, and so, if you’re interested, does Boar. I was only going to stow it safe on the horse last night, and now I just want to keep it dry. It is no use to you wet and you need a wash. But we have little time, so if you don’t let go now, it’s going in the water with you.’
This time he did not try to prise Brann’s fingers from the material, but simply held out his hand. Brann, staring only at the hand, slowly placed the cloak in it. The bundle was dropped on the ground at his feet.
The man grunted and stared at the boys around. ‘I keep my word,’ he said. ‘You’ll get it back.’ The instruction to the boys sitting beside it was clear, but they were too cocooned in their own misery to care.
Brann was hoisted to his feet once more. It was fortunate that the man was still grasping his tunic: as soon as he was pulled upright, his knees buckled and his vision began to swim once more. He was half-led, half-dragged into the shockingly cold water and, in only a few paces, he was thigh-deep. He thought the cold of the water might clear his head; it did not, it just left his legs numb.
Abruptly, the hand let go. His legs, with a lack of feeling now added to the weakness, gave way. Before he could even register that he was falling, he crashed into the water. This time, his head did clear. The anonymous hand grasped him again and pulled him up before he managed to swallow too much of the sea. He spluttered, the salt water making his stomach lurch again but, this time, he resisted being sick.
The hand held him up while its partner roughly rubbed his face and clothes with water to clean them. He could force himself to stand under his own strength, and he helped to wash himself. He staggered slightly in the swell, but determination let him catch his balance.
‘A little fighter, are you?’ the voice said. ‘We had to dunk most of the others four of five times before they came to. Keep it up and you might just survive all this.’ All what? Who were these people? And who were the ‘others’? Through the blank apathy in his head, the questions nagged him. But, because of that cold indifference, the answers were not so plain.
He wiped the water from his eyes, the manacles hindering even the simplest of movements. He blinked several times before his vision cleared. He caught his breath at the sight of the man beside him in the water: a mountain of leather, weapons, shaggy black hair and even shaggier beard. As he reached over to start dragging Brann back to the beach, his cloak moved to reveal a lean, muscular build; the cloak, worn over his multitude of weapons, had created a false impression of bulk.
‘I’ll manage,’ Brann croaked, staring down at the water.
The warrior laughed again. ‘We’ll see. Keep that attitude, and you might just.’ He slapped Brann casually on the back, almost launching him face-first into the water. ‘Anyway, you’re clean now, and awake. Enough of this idle chatter. Get back ashore with the others.’
Brann waded back to the beach, where five bedraggled figures huddled together for warmth and, probably, comfort. A quick glance told him no one else from his village had been taken. A quick glance born of cold curiosity, it was, but no more; he found he didn’t care whether or not any of the faces were familiar. Four of them, boys of around his years, were hunched in dejection. His gaze held on the fifth figure: a rangy youth, little more than his own age, with a shock of unkempt and probably untameable black hair that sat every way except flat, the thick tendrils exploding like dark flames from his head. Everything about him seemed angular, from his craggy face to long arms that hung, all bones and corded tendons, and from wide shoulders to legs that seemed as if they would have the co-ordination of a new-born foal. Despite wearing nothing but a rough tunic, he seemed oblivious to the damp chill that was forcing shivers into the others, and he exuded an indefinable strength that ignored the impression given by his gangly build. Most curiously, while the rest of the group exhibited a predictable mix of dejection and shock, he merely stared around him, as if nothing untoward at all had taken place. On closer inspection, an aggressive intensity burned in his glare. It burned, but its fire was cold. The sort of look that Brann had spent his life avoiding. He had preferred to spend his time among those with open personalities, with friendliness that brought none of the intensity or false posturing of those who felt they had to be aggressive in life to hold the respect of others. He had preferred those with personalities like his brother’s. He forced his emotions back into numb emptiness, pushing back the grief that threatened to surge through him.
A second warrior – presumably the one called Boar – comparatively shorter than the first and this time genuinely broad, crouched beside them, smirking and enjoying their discomfort and dismay with obvious pleasure. At the sight of the smirk, memories of foul breath flooded Brann’s senses and he massaged the bruise on the centre of his chest. Even without the sight of the red scarf on the man’s head, he would have known he was looking at the man who had murdered Callan and rage and fear rose in equal violent measure, threatening to make him vomit again. Pushing the emotions deep down and locking them away, Brann stumbled the last few steps from the water, a receding wave dragging at his feet and, guided by an unsubtle shove from behind, he joined the group. A chain was looped quickly through his manacles; he saw that it ran similarly through the bonds of the others, linking them in simple, but effective, fashion.
He sat, watching, listening, but still feeling detached, as if he were not a part of the scene. Two of the boys whimpered softly; the rest, despite their differing demeanours, were silent, staring down at the sand in their collective misery and despair. Only the dark-haired boy looked up, his burning gaze locking for a long moment with Brann’s. Then he nodded at him, once, and looked ahead once more. It seemed appropriate to his situation that the one with the character he would normally avoid was the one who had connected with him. He spat the remnants of salt water into the beach between his feet. What did it matter? What did anything matter now?
Strangely, Brann felt lucid, to a heightened level. He could understand the reactions of the others, but not his own. Although distant, he was coldly logical, absorbing everything around him with frank clarity. He was an emotional boy (his father had often chided him for letting his heart rule his head, in the days before he had so quickly rejected him and sent him running into the clutches of the men who had murdered his brother) and it was an alien experience to find himself as he was now, without fear, nerves, anger, despair, horror: all of the feelings that he thought should be overwhelming him.
Instead, he felt a calm assurance with, perversely, a tinge of bitter amusement. Perhaps this is how you feel when you accept you are going to die, he mused. Or maybe I can’t be hurt any more. Or maybe both.
His mind turned back to Callan, replaying the images of his brother’s death. It must have happened so quickly yet – at the time and, now, in his mind – it seemed to take an eternity. Then, as a misplaced background to that picture, he saw his home ablaze, with his family inside.
Why am I not crying? Where is the pain? he asked himself, over and over. It seemed as if the boy he had been was a stranger, as if he had awakened beside the sea a new person.
You’re not you any more. You can’t afford to be. Face it, this is what you’ve got from now on. Get used to it. A hint of an ironic smile twitched one corner of his mouth, a distant relation of the broad grin that had always sprung so readily to his face. Oh, gods, I’m going mad. I’m talking to myself like an idiot.
One of the boys tried to speak, failed and cleared his throat. He tried again. ‘It’s freezing. Can we not have a fire?’ He indicated a bundle of wood and dry leaves that had been piled together just a few yards further up the beach from them.
Boar cuffed him roughly across the side of the head, knocking him into the sand. ‘Keep it shut, maggot,’ he snarled. ‘Speak again and you’ll get worse than that.’
The taller man inserted a foot under the boy’s shoulder and lifted him until the youngster took the hint and sat himself up once more.
‘Don’t lie down, boy,’ he growled. ‘It’s damp. You’ll only get colder.’ He looked back across the beach. ‘There will be no fire. We’re not exactly wanting to invite guests to our party, are we? Don’t worry, you’ll be dried off soon enough.’
His burly companion grumbled, ‘You talk too much, Galen. Leave them alone – they’re nothing but your next wage.’ His voice turned mocking. ‘You sound as if you’re starting to care for them. First rule of slavery: they’re nothing but pieces of meat.’