Forged in Blood Read online

  *

  The menacing drawl from men and women at the far end of the beach throbs in my ears, as does the hungered shrieking of infants nearby. There is no let-up right here under my nose, from older children brought to our ship.

  On Drafdrit’s say-so, youngsters able to walk have been made ready to board the Hrafentyr. While these grown children wait, roped in line, separated from their elders, they take it in relays to sing the same weary song: the song of a little girl’s unending search to find her way home to family, shelter, food and fire. One child leads with a verse. The others hum a refrain. One child’s singing ends. Another child’s begins. Verse after verse, and throbbing, hummed refrain, drag out an endless lilt of misery.

  Chapter 4

  I am wakened by the yelling of Brennan. The gang-master barks orders at his men — no mistaking his whooping hola, a boastful, roaring howl of celebration. It disturbs the whole camp. If Brennan is here on the west beach, and in high spirits, it means only one thing. He has returned successful from last night’s search of the caves. Otherwise he wouldn’t dare show his face.

  Had he come back empty-handed, as he did yesterday, Drafdrit would have turned him on his heels. Threatened with a forfeit of hack for the summer’s work, unless he nabbed the runaways, Brennan had no choice but to go out searching, even though light was fading over the sea and the rest of the ships’ crews were settling down with their victuals by a night fire. A gang-master loses face without hack in his purse; his support dwindles; he is lucky if he can drum up a handful of men at his back. Brennan’s thugs had complained of empty bellies, of itchy heads from seaweed flies; of aching feet from clambering on jagged rocks; they had muttered about the isle’s demons bringing them bad luck. But like their luckless gang-master they feared loss of hack more than they feared demons. They followed the iron-smith out of camp in a sullen, vengeful mood to hunt for the missing slaves.

  *

  The whole camp is roused at dawn. Dugfus and I wander off behind the furze to relieve ourselves. While in the cover of the dunes, we listen to the growing furore — the howling of angry protests from captives at the far end of the beach; and in response, from Brennan’s men, foul threats of beatings, unless order returns.

  The captives will not be silenced.

  Brennan barks orders — brisk snatches in the Erse tongue. His tone changes, less curt and snappy. I can’t make out what he says, the words garbled and distant — he is four ships away on the north rise of the beach. Cheered on by his men, Brennan is boisterous, though more vicious than ever. Unbridled laughter, then a fit of coughing, leaves him breathless; the gang-master catches his breath, his voice playful, cruel and mocking.

  A child’s piercing yell of pain!

  I fasten my belt and race up the beach, kicking grit and seaweed at my heels.

  Dugfus shuffles after me, unbalanced by his crutch, sinking in the shingle.

  *

  Five missing hostages — three men, a woman and child — have been captured overnight by Brennan. The three men are being held to the ground and savagely beaten. Brennan’s jeering thugs take it in turns with their staves to lay into the runaways. Repeated blows have shred through the men’s leather jerkins, bruising bared flesh on their backs. Helplessly from their chains, the other prisoners yell and plead for the beating to stop. They are maddened by the punishment meted out on their fellow Erse-men. Men and women strain on the ropes, shake their irons, but are held fast within the skein of their bonds.

  Finn and Drafdrit are among a noisy crowd of Ostmen and crewmen who have gathered to watch the flogging. Our midshipman has the ship’s mallet in hand. With Ragni he has been tapping out the oar-hole covers on the Hrafentyr so that, as soon as Drafdrit gives word, we are ready to row out from shore.

  Finn shouts in Drafdrit’s ear. ‘Enough is enough, man! Can we not get on with the boarding? Who are these fecking men anyway?’

  Drafdrit hollers back to make himself heard. ‘Brennan found them last night hiding in the caves. The chieftain and his son made a break for it. They won’t try again! Brennan’s men will bring them to heel.’

  ‘And the third man — the young lubber?’

  Drafdrit screws up his nose. ‘Slave or demon. Can’t be an Erse-man. Look at him! He has dark skin!’

  *

  The three captives lie slumped on the ground overpowered by the flogging — no longer any need to hold them down — the punishment has taken its toll. The men are motionless, the protest beaten out of them, numbed by sustained assault; and fatigued by their own futile efforts to resist.

  For some vile purpose of belittlement, on orders from Brennan, the men are stripped naked. Their clothing is ripped off, shredded jerkins and felt breeches scattered beside their uncovered bodies. Unbound, the men are senseless, unaware of the shame of their nakedness, face-down on the shingle. A flash of blades — a swopping of knives among the tormentors — Brennan and two others have hunting-knives out, they are putting their blades to work. With ugly strokes they disfigure the backs of their victims and, on the older man, the chieftain — the main target of their ire — they set about, slitting his bared buttocks and thighs, carving on his flesh the same jagged ogham signs that are etched on boundary-stones between tribal lands.

  Watching the mutilations, being made to watch on her knees, is a woman of rank, bound in ropes that cut into her girth swollen with unborn child. Beside the woman, the child — a young girl — is collared like a hound on a leash. A rope has been knotted between the child’s teeth, and shaped like a muzzle around her mouth, nose and eyes.

  A beardless youth, the youngest whelp from Brennan’s gang, tugs at the child with heavy hand. To strain against collar and leash, the girl falls to her knees. The thug braces against her, uses his full weight to drag her back. The child is choked at neck and at mouth, but she pulls on the muzzle-rope as a she-hound pulls on the leash of a feckless master. She crawls forward on crooked, ill-formed legs. She claws shingle with her hands. She edges towards the tortured chieftain. Through muzzle knots across her mouth we hear a muffled cry. ‘Dada! Dada!’

  The woman of rank shouts after the girl. ‘Show no weakness, daughter.’

  ‘But, mama! Aghhh!’ The girl’s cry is stifled by another yank of the thug’s leash. ‘They make lines on Dada — they mark him like a boundary-stone.’

  The other prisoners had turned their heads in shame from the flesh wounds inflicted by Brennan and his thugs. But on hearing the crazed cry and on seeing the child’s distress for her father, they are again on their feet, howling in protest, pulling on their ropes, shaking their chains.

  ‘Be silent, M’lym,’ shouts the woman. ‘Watch and learn! Your father, your brother, and our hawk-servant Conn, they have suffered without shaming us. Child, you must do the same!’

  Brennan’s thug pulls pitilessly on the child’s neck. The muzzle-rope tightens, bloating her cheeks, swelling her brow. Sickness and disgust rise to my throat. Dugfus is at my shoulder, his face in a sweat from the effort of hobbling down the beach. The oarsman lifts his crutch in anger. ‘Look at that cowardly shit. He keeps pulling on the rope. He is going to strangle the girl.’

  I rush forward, shoving Drafdrit and Finn aside. I swing my fore-arm against the beardless whelp. The smack on the nose sends him reeling. Not much of a blow. The thug staggers, dazed, but still standing. The jaw drops; his arm hangs limp; the lout loses grip on the rope. Another fore-arm will finish him, I land it heavier this time, and below the ribs. He topples over, backwards in slow descent; like a tree felled by an axe.

  The girl darts free. Like an unleashed hound, she leaps on the thugs cutting her father.

  Brennan, on his feet, hunting-knife in hand, interrupted from his blade-work on the hawk-servant; the knees of the gang-master’s breeches are soaked in blood. He hauls the girl off the thugs who were holding her father. With his free hand — thick-knuckled, an iron-smith’s hand — he grapples her throat. His strangle-hold lifts her off the ground. The chi
ld falls limp, starved of air. Her head slumps, her arms sag loose, her ill-formed legs hang shapeless like a strangled hare released from a trap.

  On Brennan’s neck a telling blow: Dugi’s knotty crutch comes down on the brute’s neck, the oarsman’s hefty strike breaks the crutch in two and sends Brennan to his knees. The crutch splinters. Brennan’s hunting-knife falls free. The girl flops limp to the shingle. Dugfus moves to free the ropes from the girl’s mouth and throat. His big oarsmen’s fingers fumble frantically at her neck to release tangled knots of the leash.

  Brennan’s thugs, hands red-wet from torturing, stand startled and dumbfounded. They look to the gang-master for some command, in doubt as to what they should do. Some stare at the tortured captives, scratching their heads in puzzlement, as if the bloody mayhem wasn’t their doing, but had been the work of others. The three victims are out cold, their naked tortured bodies spread-eagled and bloodied on the shingle.

  Brennan is knocked half out of his wits by Dugi’s blow. Drafdrit tries to raise him to his feet. Brennan keeps to his knees. Heedless of Drafdrit, baffled by what has befallen him, the gang-master puts a hand behind his head to feel for the bloody wound where the crutch broke over his neck.

  With knives drawn, Dugi and I pick at the ropes that muzzled the girl, trying to cut them loose from her neck. Dugfus, in his haste, draws a spurt of blood from her ear. He had intended no harm to the girl, but — checked by the sight of blood on her cheeks — he drops his knife, puts an ear to her breast; listens for breathing. I stop cutting too. Her face is grey as flint. I fear we are too late to save her.

  Behind Dugi, behind my ears, a dark-skinned hand scoops something bright from the shingle.

  From nowhere, a dark body, arms flailing in the air, takes flight like a bird. The hawk-servant, Conn, bleeding from head to foot, hurls his shadow over us. Barely aware of it, without thinking, I move aside to escape the shadow. Dugi sees nothing. His head bent down, he listens at the child’s breast for a movement that would show a sign of life.

  A shout from the shadow as it falls to ground. ‘You have hurt her! You have hurt M’lym-kun!’

  The shadow falls on Dugfus.

  ‘Do it, Conn. Kill!’ A woman’s voice, in the Erse tongue, rises clear and sharp above the din.

  The captives of Lymn’s Isle urge on the slave: men and women within the spidery skein of ropes, children bound in line at the Hrafentyr, the child’s mother — they all urge on the slave.

  ‘Kill him!’

  ‘Do it, Conn! Cut his throat!’

  Under Dugi’s neck a blade flashes: Brennan’s hunting-knife. A second flash from the knife, close on the first, and then gone; the killer blade, dripping death-blood, drops from a dark-skinned hand.

  The crusted heel of a boot — an oarsman’s boot, the instep worn thin — traps the hawk-servant’s wrist. A ship’s mallet wielded by Finn crushes the skull of Dugi’s killer.

  Ragni yells at me, eyes blazing. ‘What a dumb thing to do, Kregin. Dugi copped it because of you.’

  Drafdrit has me by the throat. Finn and two men are at my back.

  The slave-master spits in my face. ‘You will pay for this, horse-face. If it weren’t for your brother, I’d slit you now and be done with it!’

  SECOND PART

  Chapter 5

  At the sound of the slave-master’s voice the girl stops in her tracks. After hearing his affray with the guards, she darts for cover. She runs into the night shadows under river-oaks, dripping heavy-leafed from weeks of incessant rain.

  Angry exchanges can be heard between Drafdrit and his guards — and violent scuffles, but I am unable to see any of this. The moon, moments before so bright, is trapped in cloud. No trace of the girl in the darkness. Until now she has done exactly as she promised. Fearless of coming face to face with our captors ─ emboldened, poor child, by the death of her mother Ethne — she took the chance at low tide to sneak across the causeway. On the other side of the water, once it turned dusk, she followed the moonlit river downstream, heading north to a bothy where the shackle-keys are kept.

  From my hiding place on the isle — among the alders — I get glimpses of the girl, snatches of her ill-formed limbs, their pale reflections on the river moving more urgently than pulsing summer flood. The river, previously slow-running and placid, surges ever higher into the night. Storm-waters have cut deep under riverbanks, exposing roots of trees, pulling mud and boulders into the swell. If the river flood surges any higher, the shores under my feet will be overrun before tomorrow’s tide rushes inland through the creek, and confronts the flood head-on.

  An unending torrent of abuse from Drafdrit echoes over the waters, threats vile and vicious; everyday oaths now familiar to me in the native tongue of the land. The slave-master’s threats are not hollow words. He recruits local men who are greedy for hacksilver to see to it that there are no runaways from Inis-dubh. Turning up after dark to check his hoard of captives, he found his paid thugs in a drunken stupor, deaf to the world; the unguarded causeway, north or south from the isle, open to freedom. To give each man a bloody nose — done as a matter of course — and to strike fear of the whip into their heads will not have quenched his anger. The guards will answer for their lapse with a lashing on bare flesh, a lashing heavier than is doled out to us. We will be made to watch.

  *

  Last night, Ethne’s daughter had almost given me cause for hope. To think that I had depended on a child — on one as defenceless as M’lym-kun! The whiteness of the little girl’s crooked limbs, their paleness reflected on the river, her movements so vivid and so purposeful until Drafdrit appeared, were at once lost to my eyes, and with them all thought of escape. There is no sign of M’lym returning on the causeway. If she can’t make it before high tide, if she is not back on the isle by daylight in time for the muster, they will catch her; beat her within a pinch of her life. After that — with the child dead or dying — there is no one to help me.

  A fugitive moon overcast by clouds, a morning too wet even for marsh gulls to greet the dawn; on this hell of Inis-dubh, on this black isle of mud enclosed by storm-flood and incoming tide, nothing can be heard but a rush of peaty water towards the bigger, darker watercourse — towards an-Ruirthech. When storms break on the mountains; when swollen rivers and bursting streams spill head-long into ‘the mighty-runner’, folk from hereabouts are apt to say: ‘That’s Wild Roarty on the run! Nothing on earth can hold him while he gallops to the sea.’

  *

  Ma’s hand rests cool on my brow. Da leans over her shoulder and whispers. ‘A bad fever, Audeen, will the nipper pull through?’

  Before Ma can answer, another voice — a child’s — breaks into my dream. The hand on my brow is not Ma’s but M’lym-kun’s. The girl shakes me; she is excited and breathless. ‘Snatched the keys. Told you I’d get them. What’s wrong with you, Ostman? Wake up!’

  While staring all night at the surging, moonless river, scanning the murky gloom for any sign of Drafdrit; waiting anxiously for the return of the girl, I had fallen into a wakeful dream, a dream of childhood, Ma with me, Da still alive. I had been sitting up asleep, chin sunk on my chest — no man forced into a slave-collar can bear to rest on his back. My jaw is stiff from wearing the iron shackle. My neck aches. Dull-headed from sleep, I croak a reply. ‘You made it, child? But I heard Drafdrit on the causeway. How did you get past him?’

  ‘Never mind. I did it! I grabbed both keys at the bothy: biggest one, like you said, for the collar, the other with a two-way hook that will open your ankle-irons.’

  M’lym-kun holds the keys above her head, one in either hand, like trophies taken in battle.

  ‘Which one first?’ she asks.

  I stare at her, lost for words. Barely awake after a restless night, I am confused by her brisk chatter. Moments ago, before she turned up with the keys, I had been all too certain of her failure.

  Well?’ The girl urges me to answer. ‘Which key first?’

  I rub under my we
t beard, where the iron has been chafing my skin.

  ‘This one, this first — I can’t reach the key-hole. It’s somewhere behind the ear. Can you do it?’

  As M’lym-kun struggles to release the lock, I sit in silence. I hadn’t the heart to be honest with the child, to admit the truth; that she has returned too late; that her dash to snatch the keys has been in vain; that, whether or not my irons are opened, it has ceased to matter. Our break for freedom had to be in darkness or not at all. We missed our chance last night to take the highway south.

  Daylight has broken through the grey sky. It is bright enough to see the mischief done by our once sluggish river. Two skin-wrapped hulls — flimsy fishing-curachs used for fixing trap-nets at midstream, or punting cross-river — have been flung over the causeway by the flood. Butter-tubs, harvest flails, horse harnesses and other flotsam race past our eyes. Estuary-bound, they toss on the churning surface — floating by on both sides of the isle — where the river widens into the creek.

  Dawn drizzle is now morning downpour. At the beaching-ground, near the head of the creek, a sea-harr has gathered over the ships’ masts. Nothing can be seen beyond that — where the creek narrows into rapids and meets an-Ruirthech. Here on Inis-dubh our peat fires send spirals of vapour into the damp air. At the women’s fire I hear coughing; see shapes moving; from the men’s fire not a sound. A third fire on the northern tip of the isle has gone out. Up-shore is flooded, swamped by incoming tide, the long, sandy spit under water. That is where the ‘broken’ and the sick among us are wont to gather. I see their shadows, displaced from the fire, taking shelter on higher ground under drooping alders — the only trees, stony-barked and spare of leaf, that grow on this black, salty mud.