The Miscreant
Page 3
“I need a brazier, coal, crucible, clay, some hard wax, molding sand, and pot metal. I think I can fashion a key from wax, make a mold, and smelt some metal for the final product.”
“Where the hell am I supposed to get all that?” Matt demanded.
“The work site casts all of its simple tools, rivets, and such. You should be able to get everything from there.”
“Now you want me to steal from my work? I’m really starting to remember the crappy things you’ve done to me over the years and wonder if our friendship is that strong.”
“Come on, Matt,” Garran pleaded. “If I don’t meet Claire tonight you know someone else will.”
Matt scratched at his stubble-sprouting chin. “Yeah, she will…”
“Don’t even think about it! She doesn’t like you anyway.”
“She doesn’t like you either, but that’s not stopping her.”
“Of course she likes me!”
“No, she really doesn’t. She told my sister about your first encounter, and that’s the only reason she came back around. She’s using you.”
“Oh no, she’s using me for sex? Whatever shall I do? Come on, please, Matt! Do not parry my thrust.”
Matt grinned up at his friend. “How does it feel to have someone bust your balls?”
“All right, I deserve that. Will you help me?”
“Yeah, I got your back. Don’t go anywhere; I’ll be back in a little while.”
“Ha-ha, real funny.”
Matt darted down the road, and Garran began searching his room for the things he would need. He grabbed the lamp next to his bed, struck his flint and steel onto a sulfur stick, and lit it. He crouched next to the keyhole and used a small mirror to direct light into the hole. After studying the tumblers and dredging up memories of what the key looked like, he sat down and drew it out on a piece of parchment as best he could. Dipping his quill into the inkwell, he could not suppress the grin on his face when he thought about Claire.
***
His mother came up with his lunch around noon. Dwight stood guard just outside the room in case Garran should try to make a break for it. Nina refused to meet his accusing eyes when she set the tray on the small table.
“How long are you going to keep me here?”
“Until we think you’ve learned a lesson.”
“We or Dwight?”
Nina looked away. “It’s for your own good. It’s not as if you give us many choices.”
“Locking up your son and treating him like a criminal is the best of your limited options?”
Dwight grumbled from outside the room, “Don’t get into it, Nina. He’s got his food.”
She straightened her back and said, “It’s the bed you made; now you gotta lie in it.”
Garran glared at her as she walked out. “Not like I have many options but to lie in it, do I?”
The door slammed shut and the lock clicked home, punctuating the end of their argument. Garran ate his food without enthusiasm, lay down on his bed, and waited for Matt’s return. With his lunch weighing down his stomach, he was pulled into a slumber soon broken by the sound of something hitting and skittering across the floor.
He scanned the room for the source of the disturbance and spotted several small stones littering the floor. He rolled out of bed and peered out of the window, only to have a rock clip his forehead.
“Ow, damn it all to hell! Right in my stitches.”
Matt grinned up at him. “Sorry.”
“You don’t look very sorry.”
“Probably because I’m really not. That was for Lefty.”
“Fine, but we’re even now.”
Matt shook his head and smiled. “Not by a long shot. Anyway, I got all the stuff you asked for.”
“Great! Let me find a rope.”
Garran pawed through a chest of knickknacks and found a length of heavy cord. He threaded the twine through the bars, and Matt tied on a sack containing the tools he needed. He could not fit the contents through the bars as a whole, so he pulled the items through one at a time until they were in a pile at his feet.
“Matt, tell Claire I might be a little late for our meeting. Tell her to wait for me.”
“All right, but you have to tell me all about it tomorrow.”
Garran grinned and cocked an eyebrow. “Are you kidding? You won’t be able to shut me up.”
He set up the brazier, piled several lumps of coal in the basin, and lit it with a sulfur stick. He placed a small crucible atop the coals and dropped in several pieces of pot metal. While the coal and the metal heated, Garran pressed a thin coat of molding clay over the teeth of his wax key. Inserting it into the lock, he gently turned it until he met resistance.
Garran removed the key and studied the impressions made in the clay. He carved his wax key where the indentations showed it was striking the lock frame instead of the tumblers. It was a slow and exacting process. He could not put much pressure on his wax key without breaking it. For the fifth time, Garran extracted his makeshift key, whittled it to fit, and checked again.
He studied the impressions left in the veneer of clay and was satisfied all that remained was due to the tumblers. Garran cleaned the residual clay from the wax and pressed it into the box of sand. He then poured the molten metal into the impression, careful not to overfill it. He nearly ruined it when someone pounded on the door with a heavy fist.
“What are you doing in there, boy?” Dwight demanded. “You’re stinking up the whole house!”
“I’m smoking!”
“You best not set fire to my house, or I’ll use your skinny carcass to beat out the flames!”
“I’m not going to set my mother’s house on fire…at least not while I’m in it.”
“Watch your sass, boy! Don’t make me come in there.”
“Don’t make me come out there!”
Garran heard Dwight chuckling through the door. “You think you’re clever, but you ain’t that clever. Your time is coming, and it’s coming soon. I’ll be rid of you, and you’ll be someone else’s problem.”
Garran did not like the sound of Dwight’s ominous words. “What do you mean? What are you going to do to me?”
“You’ll see, and it ain’t just me.”
Dwight clomped back down the stairs leaving his threat hanging in the air like a dark cloud. Whatever. Garran had more important things on which to focus. Predominant amongst them was getting out of his room and meeting Claire in the woods. He sat patiently staring out of the window, waiting for Dwight to make his nightly pilgrimage to the bar. The wait was interminable. He ached to meet up with Claire, and not just in the metaphysical manner.
Light shined through the open door just below his window. Garran watched Dwight disappear into the darkness before snatching up his homemade key and moving to the door. Fitting the key into the lock, he jiggled it around as he turned it to work past the minor flaws in his creation. He smiled when the tumblers surrendered and the bolt retracted.
He eased the door open and crept down the stairs, careful to avoid the squeaky steps, which was difficult as more of them creaked than did not. Garran bent low halfway down to get a glimpse of the sitting room. His mother was sitting at her sewing corner mending a pair of Dwight’s trousers. Her back was to the stairs as it usually was when knitting or sewing to catch the lamplight reflected from the only glass window in the house.
Nina hummed as she sewed, too engrossed in her stitching to notice Garran sneaking down the stairs and out of the front door. She would go to bed long before Dwight staggered home from the bar. That gave him plenty of time to complete his cavorting and get back to his room before anyone noticed he had gone.
Garran jogged across their small town and chose the trail leading to his and Claire’s secret rendezvous spot. His mounting ardor propelled him down the darkened path, heedless of the occasional branch slapping him in the face.
Claire gasped and spun toward him when he broke from the trail and burst into t
he small clearing. “There you are! Matt told me you had gotten into some trouble and might be late.”
“No prison could keep me from you.”
“Look who’s suddenly charming.”
“I’m always charming.”
“You’re a rogue and a scoundrel.”
“The ballads always cast rogues as charming.”
“You are not a rogue from a ballad. You are perhaps a dirty limerick at best.”
Garran wrapped his arm around Claire’s slender waist and pulled her in tightly against his chest. “Dirty is right.”
Claire began to laugh, but Garran stifled her giggles with a kiss. Hands began exploring and fumbling at laces and buttons, and their clothes soon lay in a pile strewn next to their writhing bodies. Claire moaned in rapture. Garran groaned, shuddered, and rolled off to lie next to her. He panted and smiled up at the stars.
Claire propped herself up on her elbows, and her shrill voice cut through the night. “Did you finish?”
“We can call it an intermission if it upsets you so much. I just need a few minutes, less if I can scrounge up some rapture root. I think I saw some around here before.”
“You idiot! What if I get pregnant?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll do the right thing and marry you. I could do worse.”
She slapped at his face and found flesh. “I can’t!”
“Ow, watch my stitches!”
“I am betrothed to Jarred! His family is well-to-do, and his father is the mayor of Westhill. We are to be married this summer!”
“Do you think he’ll still want to if you’re fat with my baby?” Garran took a second blow to the head. “Ow, are you aiming for my stitches?”
Both pairs of eyes turned toward shouting voices and saw the flickering of torches and lamps through the trees.
“Claire!” her father called out.
She grabbed at her discarded clothing, pulled her dress on, and turned a hateful glare on Garran. “You are not going to ruin my future, Garran Holt. Daddy!”
Garran waved his hands spastically. “Shhh, what are you doing?”
“I am going to marry Jarred. It might cost my father a bigger dowry since you have sullied me, but it is better than being labeled a harlot.”
“You do not want to do this.”
Claire gave Garran a tight-lipped grin, grabbed the front of her bodice, and tore it. “Daddy, help! I’m over here!”
“Oh, you evil bitch!”
Garran grabbed as many pieces of his clothing as he could see and ran naked into the woods, away from the oncoming torches and the shouts of several angry men. He tried to don his trousers without stopping, fell twice, and finally got them pulled on while maintaining a hopping, shuffling jog. He cast a glance backward and saw that the torches were much closer now, and they did not all stop upon finding Claire.
“Get that sumbitch!” Mayor Alessi shouted.
Having abandoned his shoes, Garran struggled to race ahead of the pursuing men. It seemed to him that someone had gone out of their way to litter the trail with sticks, thorns, and sharp rocks. With any luck, he might be able to circle around town through the woods and make it back to his house where he had a good alibi. He could claim he had been locked up since morning and that Claire was blaming him to protect some other late-night gentleman caller. There were certainly plenty from which to choose.
Garran wished he could say that he knew these trails like no one else, but it was a fantasy. Everyone knew every path and deer trail for miles around. Such was the problem with living in a small town where generation after generation was born and died, and each person possessed a lifetime of similar knowledge. Two chasers tore through the woods to his left in an effort to get ahead of him, knowing that the path curved and would take their quarry right into their waiting clutches.
Garran did likewise and cut through the trees. Branches slapped at his face, and pinecones stabbed at the soft arches of his feet. He barely managed to get ahead of the pair trying to flank him.
“Stop running, boy! You’re just making it worse on yourself!”
Garran doubted there was anything he could do to make it worse, but that wouldn’t stop him from trying. A half-fallen tree, perhaps six inches wide at its base, lay across the rabbit trail he was following. Grabbing the slender end, he heaved it back as far as he could. The wood cracked beneath the strain and fought to free itself from his grip. The two men closest to catching him sprinted into view seconds later. Garran released the tree, letting it snap forward like the arm of a massive ballista. The pursuers could not even cry out before the tree caught them both in the stomach and hurled them backward.
Neither man looked to be getting back up with any haste, but Garran wasn’t about to tarry. The other group was closing fast, and he needed to vanish. He ran only a hundred yards before he heard voices calling out in the darkness ahead of him in the direction he needed to go.
The mayor and his posse were spreading out into a circle and closing the noose. Garran looked up at the tall tree next to him and decided it might be best to simply hide and wait for his pursuers to move on. Hopefully, they would think he slipped through their ring, and he could get home when they moved their search farther away.
Garran hugged the tree, ignored the pain of the bark stripping away the topmost layer of skin on his chest and the inside of his arms, and shinnied up until he could reach the lowest branches. He pulled himself up out of the illuminated sphere of light produced by the torches and lanterns and waited. Several men, including the mayor, gathered beneath the very tree in which he was perched.
“He must have slipped past us, probably north and deeper into the woods,” Mayor Alessi said. “Douglas, go wake up Henry and have him bring out his dogs. The rest of us will sweep north and see if we can find the bastard.”
Garran watched Douglas split off and head for town while the others began spreading out in a long cordon to begin their sweep. The fugitive watched the men as they started to move away, silently chortling and thanking God for the stupidity of rural townsfolk. His humor vanished when the limb upon which he sat cracked ominously and dropped him a few inches. He now cursed the very same god for providing him the only rotten tree in the area for him to climb up.
He let out a sharp bark of surprise when the limb gave way. Garran plummeted, his fall only temporarily arrested by the branches below him. He struck the ground with a massive expulsion of air and lay there struggling to maintain consciousness and recover his breath.
Garran opened his eyes and stared up at half a dozen scowling faces. “I can explain this.” Feet pummeled his legs and sides, and fists rained down on his head. “Ow, not in my stitches!”
The beatings stopped after a minute, and they dragged him back into town. Wooder’s Bend did not have a real jail, but on the occasions that they needed to lock someone up, they had a small building made of raw timbers with a thick door padlocked from the outside. They tossed Garran through a door onto the ground. There was not even a bed in the room, so he stretched out on the dirt floor. He tried to sleep, but it seemed as though the bumps in the floor perfectly coincided with the bruises dotting his body. Since he was more bruise than flesh, Garran figured it was just coincidence.
He dreaded what the morning would bring, but dwelling on it was not going to change the future. He whispered a final prayer that the truth would come out in the end. The past day had been a series of regretful events, but none more so than the destruction of Finney’s still. He could really use a hit of the fiery brew about now. Exhaustion finally trumped pain, and he was able to close his eyes and sleep.
CHAPTER 3
Zoran Babcock spied on the group of men carving large stones from the cliffside where another group of workers used chisels and sledgehammers to pulverize them into gravel. They loaded the crushed rock into stout wagons pulled by oxen to construct the king’s road. It was his job to ensure their attempts were as costly as possible without completely shutting the operation down.
This was a big crew. Quarrying stone was backbreaking, intensive labor, and the workers needed to rotate out to maintain efficiency. Of the fifty or more men comprising the labor force, half of them were sitting idle or performing less strenuous tasks until it was time to relieve the other shift.
Two dozen soldiers stood watch to ensure none of the workers ran off and to protect them from groups like his. Most of the men below were convicts who received a reduction in their sentences in exchange for labor. A few were paid volunteers, and a greater minority were young men whose parent or legal guardian essentially sold them into servitude until they came of age.
It was this last decree that had some of the population up in arms, and The Guild was doing a fine job of fanning those sparks into flames. Men and women went from town to town decrying that the king’s edict was little more than legal slavery while The Guild vocally demanded fair pay for hard work. Zoran appreciated the irony.
With three dozen men in his unit, numbers favored the work crew. Only a third of them were soldiers, but a pick or sledgehammer to the skull was just as lethal as an arrow or sword thrust, so he could not discount the laborers. Being convicts, many would flee instead of fight. He had seen it on three separate assaults he had led over the past year. But all of them would fight if their life depended on it, and for most of them, it did.
“Georgo, we’ll wait until nightfall to launch our attack,” Zoran informed his subordinate. “This is a bigger group than we’ve hit in the past, and we’ll need surprise to minimize our risks.”
“Where do you want to stage the men until then?”
Zoran studied the terrain. “Move them down through that gully to the east. Once the sun sets, we’ll quietly move to the south and trap them against the cliffs.”