Jeering laughter broke out along the banks. Frank hauled his aching, ton-weighted head up to see hands clutching at the gunwales, pulling him in closer to the ugly, grinning crowd. Women stood behind the men, and the thought gave him a moment’s relief until he saw that their hands grasped sickles. There were blood stains all down their aprons and a matching red glint in their eyes.
Panicking, Frank dropped the pole and scrabbled for his rifle. It was unloaded, and there was no time to prime the pan and ram home a new shot. The bayonet he had for the weapon was still tucked away in its bag, leaving it no more deadly than a large stick. Still, he reversed it, and smashed it down on the grappling hands as if it were an axe.
The shoulder wound made him cold, shaky, and nauseous, camouflaging his terror from himself. He swiped at an attacker’s dirty face as, with a roar, the man leaped from the bank into the punt, clawing him with the tines of a rake, tearing the coat over his ribs and leaving long, shallow scores, as though from the nails of a giant.
Frank doubled over from the pain of it just as two more men jumped aboard. Outside, other bandits seized the boat’s sides and pulled the whole thing out of the water, grounding it. A hand curled around Frank’s shoulder wound and squeezed, and the merciful anaesthesia lifted like a theatre curtain and showed him agony. His own scream choked him as he was hauled out by many hands and thrown into a ring of thin outlaws with ravenous eyes.
He just had time to close his eyes, to think that finally, finally he was doing something that would please his father, and then all thought fled as they began to kick him. He curled in to keep his stomach and his face from the boots. Here, too, the wound was a mercy. He flapped in agony like a dying fish, but didn’t have the strength to futilely fight back and extend the torment. They beat him with staves, with threshing flails. The first man kicked him in the ribs—heat bursting in his rib cage, as though he’d swallowed coals—and he looked up, mouth open, eyes streaming, in time to see his own rifle butt poised above his forehead.
He tried to say “No!” but could only spit blood, and then someone laughed and the steel-capped rosewood came down. A giant hand tore the world in two, and him with it, and nothing else remained.
Pain. For a long time, pain was everything, a sky of stars against the darkness of the his mind, every agony one more blaze that told him there was something there, something that existed and felt, yet had no other thoughts or wishes or desires.
Then gradually other sensations joined the pain—cold all down one side, a moving cold that stroked him steadily, in contrast with the dry and burning cold of his other side. He became slowly aware that he was shaped like a man, that both sides had arms and legs, some of the bones of which were probably not broken.
There was a pinkness in front of him, and once he had identified eyelids, he opened them to find the sun shining on his face. Other things came more quickly now: the sliding cold was water flowing over his right arm and leg, which hung off the riverbank and waved like weeds in the shingle-bottomed pools at the river’s edge.
Words flooded into his head, welcome and reviving, proving to him that he was man, not animal. That pain in his chest? Broken ribs, perhaps. That taste in his mouth, and the thick fluid that clogged it? Blood.
He spat it out and with infinite caution drew both his arms and legs under him. Tried twice to push up to hands and knees and failed both times. The first time, he slumped down after, and agony exploded under his ribs like a—like a—blocked gun bursting in someone’s hands. He lay whining and weeping while he tried to remember who that someone was.
Once more he tried to rise, dripping tears and snot with each agonising inch, every part of him shaking. He got his knees under him, was able to lever his torso upright, though all it did was make his head split again and the brains run out through his ears. His stomach rebelled, but fortunately he only had to turn his head a little to vomit cleanly in the water and wipe his face after with a wet hand.
Now that he was upright, blood dripped into his eyes. He couldn’t raise his right hand at all, but he felt the wound above his eye with his left hand, and his clumsy touch greyed out the world around him for what seemed like hours. What could he remember about head injuries . . .
What could he remember about himself?
There was a dark, panicky shame in the pit of his belly. It lent him strength—fleeing from it helped drive him to his feet, helped him stand, swaying and sobbing, and lurch away from the water. What had he forgotten? Something important. Something vital had been carelessly lost.
When he looked down to see if he had literally dropped the thing he could no longer bring to mind, he found he had been stripped naked. The ground around him was scuffed with the marks of many feet, but nothing else. He had expected . . .
What had he expected? Bearers, perhaps. Equipment. People who would help him. A way home.
His soul chilled and began to wail with the blind devouring panic of a child. Outside he saw foothills and mountains beyond. Pine forest on the other side of the bank, on his side scrubland. An eagle in the sky above. Scrub bushes and stone, and strange clouds that flowed from the mountains along the river.
He recognised nothing. It was he who was lost, astray in a country he could not remember. And he didn’t even know his own name.
Turning downriver, he limped along the bank through tussocks of coarse grasses and purple mallow. At first, his mind kept returning to the blankness where his sense of self should be, tonguing the absence as he would the socket of a lost tooth. The memories cowered below the surface, but they would not come into shape. Dimly, he felt that help must be available downstream rather than up. He disliked the hills, yet the thought of going back where he had come from awoke a kind of sick hopelessness too.
He began to walk downstream regardless. The nebulous lack of hope troubled him less than the struggle to put one foot before the other. His breath burned in his throat, and his eyes stung with blood and sweat. Agony coiled about his chest, making his knees shake. Though at first whenever he was thirsty, he had stopped to drink from the river, as the day progressed he found it increasingly hard to stand back up. So he abandoned drinking, just stumbled forward with his tongue drying in his mouth.
He began to have periods where darkness bloomed behind his eyes even while he was walking. When these periods cleared he would find he had staggered four or five steps blind and insensible. It could only be a matter of hours before he collapsed and could not rise, and by that time the night would have fallen and the wolves come out from the wood. He would not live to see the morning.
A hedgerow covered in small white flowers stopped him. It was thorny, but he leaned on it anyway, with his eyes closed, sucking in air and luxuriating in the support. It was only when he had bent and picked up a stick that lay under it, something to prop his ailing limbs with, that his mind caught up with what he was seeing: The branches had been cut with billhooks, bent, and interlaced to form a sturdier barrier. This was the work of human hands, meant to keep the flocks inside and the predators out. He had finally come to somewhere inhabited.
Trying not to let his heart race or his breath pick up—it hurt too much—he scanned his world from horizon to horizon. And yes! There, streaky against the paling sky, a trail of grey-white smoke rose from a distant coppice.
“Ah!” he said, and was startled by his own voice—he had forgotten what it sounded like.
The goal gave him strength to find a dead patch in the hedge and scramble through, to go haltingly but unfailingly towards the fire. He wanted to shout for help, but couldn’t bring himself to take a deep enough breath. And when he saw the first human shape in the distance—a woman with a dark scarf around her hair and a long red skirt—he found he didn’t dare. He needed help, but he was afraid.
Something in him even now told him to run, told him the wolves were safer—or that he himself was a threat. Perhaps if he had been in less pain, he would have listened and skulked away. But it had to contend with so many oth
er voices yammering for relief that he was able to grit his teeth and press on, through the coppice and out the other side.
The trees parted, and he came out of their shade into a hay meadow glorious with flowers. In its centre five wagons were drawn up in a circle about a small fire. Dusty ponies, picketed along the edge of the meadow, browsed the coarser weeds and occasionally strained towards the champagne-coloured grass in the field. In the distance, men were working around a small portable forge—turning a sheet of metal into a bulbous, cauldron-like shape.
The wagons seemed ordinary farm wagons, but they had been topped with arching structures of willow withies covered in tarpaulins. As he watched, a couple of naked toddlers tumbled out of one, and out of another came a woman with her flower-embroidered blouse tugged down so she could nurse her child.
It was a toddler who spotted him, bounding to his feet and pointing, though Frank had the strangest feeling that the others had seen him a long time ago and chosen to pretend they had not.
A grandmother by the fire, white plaits waist-length beneath her head covering, hushed the boy without glancing in Frank’s direction. But now the other toddler had seen him and was shouting, being backed up by an increasing chorus of the younger children.
Frank understood that they didn’t want to help him any more than he wanted to ask for help, but he carried on walking anyway, because he had no other choice. When he had staggered past some invisible boundary that marked the edge of their concerns, all the faces in the camp turned towards him together as if he had suddenly become real.
“Help me,” he choked around the hot sand in his throat. “Please.”
The nursing mother put her child into the older woman’s hands. Both of them wore wary expressions, closed up around private thoughts, but she still came and put a small, calloused hand under Frank’s elbow, held him up with almost a man’s strength, and helped him stagger the final hundred yards to the fire and fold himself down beside it, gasping, shivering, and weeping with relief.
For a long, quiet moment, he did nothing but sob. Someone passed him a glass of hot mint and sorrel tea, and he sipped and sniffled until the fit passed. When it did, the young woman took away his glass and tapped him on the head, making him look up smartly into the older woman’s gaze.
“Who did this?”
He shook his head, then swayed as the movement seemed to dislodge his brains and make the world swirl around him. “I don’t . . . Up in the hills, I think.”
“Who are you?”
The bald question shocked a word out of his mouth before he had time to think. “Frank,” he said, and smiled with brief joy at recovering his own name. Should there be a second with it? A family name? That, he couldn’t recall no matter how he tried. “I . . . They hit me in the head. It’s all . . . I can’t remember.”
“Hm.” She turned to an older girl, who was squatting on her heels under one of the wagons, and spouted something rapid-fire in a language he didn’t recognise. The girl gathered two friends and took off into the largest wagon, returning with a bedsheet, tweezers, a cake of hard soap, and a pot decorated with painted flowers. Her helpers carried more cloth, grey with use and age.
“He looks Saxon.” The younger woman had her hand in his hair, pulling the lengthy curls of it out as if to demonstrate her point. He saw with surprise that he had blond hair, the colour of freshly sawn oak. His bare body was milk pale, very different from his companions’ brown skin, black hair, and dark thoughtful eyes. “A villager? Or a visitor?”
“A foreigner,” said the old woman, drawing water from a barrel into a cauldron and setting it over the fire. “You heard his accent.” She pared a little of the soap on top and gave the remainder back to the child. He gathered it was a treasured thing and felt ashamed that it was being wasted on him.
“Speak some more, stranger, so that we can hear what you are.”
“I . . .” He could think of nothing to say. Even less when the younger woman laid hands on his skin, turning him to examine his injuries, tutting at what she saw. “Is it bad? It feels bad.”
“Where?”
“Here.” He hovered his hand over the worst pain. “They shot me here. I can feel the bullet, lodged inside—I think a few ribs are broken. Apart from that it’s mostly bruises and my head, up here where . . .” a flash of rifle butt descending, and he cringed, “he hit me with a gun. There were lots of them. And they were laughing.”
“Hm.” The old woman gave the hint of a smile. “That game, we know well. It is normally played with our men. Sometimes with our women too, though in those cases the injuries differ. So. It’s not so bad. You’ll live.” She pried apart the edges of his shoulder wound with dirty fingers, took hold of the shot with the tweezers in her other hand, and tugged, pulling it free. Frank bit through his lip at the pain, but managed not to cry out.
Then she wetted a cloth in the soapy water. “This will sting, but it will help the cuts not to fester, so you must bear it.” He felt fragile, as though too hard a breeze might shake him apart, but her matter-of-factness was oddly comforting, telling him that others had survived such things, that all was not yet lost. So he endured the cleaning and the bandaging without protest or flinching.
By this time the youths of the group had begun to return from every direction: girls from the riverbank, laden with herbs and the roots of reeds, boys from the fields with slingshots through their wide belts and rabbits dangling from their hands. There was a great deal of talk in that language he couldn’t follow, and more staring. If he tried to catch any one person’s eyes, he found their gaze slid away; not obviously enough to give offence, but implacably letting him know they were not interested in making friends.
“What are your names?” he asked, belatedly, as the young mother helped him into the clothes they’d brought for him: a big, baggy, once-white shirt and flimsy once-white trousers. “I should know who to thank.” He put together the scrupulous care with their soap and the fact that their young people had been out scavenging in hedgerows for their food, and guilt gnawed him again. They had so little, and he was making them give it to him. “I should know who to repay.”
“We are nobody.” The old woman smiled, wise and harsh. “We belong to Văcărescu. We are his slaves, and slaves have no need of names or payment. It is enough that we are permitted to live and to serve.”
Did she say this because she thought him some kind of spy? She thought that after receiving all this help, after they had saved his life, he would give them up to punishment? “I can carry no tales except of kindness,” he insisted. “To whom would I betray you? I have nowhere to go. I have no one to turn to. No family, no nation, barely a name.”
“I am Constanta.” The younger woman handed him a rabbit and a knife with which to skin and gut it. It made him feel included, forgiven, and he smiled at her as she picked up her infant, who was fretting beside her on the ground. She held the child in her lap while she stripped the reeds to get at the tubers in their roots. These were tipped into boiling water in another pot. “And this, our mother, is Lyuba who is married to—”
Lyuba cut her off in a flood of angry speech that made him lean in and pay attention to the rhythm. Something practiced in him stirred with interest, trying to pick out individual words, to listen for repetition and patterns. She saw him doing it and snapped her mouth shut, hard, giving him the first overtly hostile glare he’d had from these people. But he understood it better now—he was a master stumbled defenceless among slaves. Whatever he individually had done or not done, they must look at him and see the enemy.
“You will not be alone for long,” Lyuba said sternly. “You are not a person whose death is shrugged over like a dropped pot. They will come searching for you. When they do, you will tell Văcărescu that we are good servants and loyal. That is all the payment we wish or need. You will not give him cause to punish us, and you will not give him our names.”
“I swear it,” he said, holding his hand palm down, as though it res
ted on a book. “I have so much to thank you for, I will say nothing to harm you. I swear it.”
After this, he chopped meat for a while, in an ever increasing daze. He was just awake enough to eat a bowl of the resulting stew and to drink another cup of brackish tea before someone snorted at his obvious fatigue, and he was picked up, walked carefully across the camp, and put to bed in one of the wagons. The mattress was stuffed with straw, laid out over a bench of small cupboards, painted like the pot with vivacious flowers. He gazed idly at overlapping canvas that billowed slightly with passing breezes, and a moment later—or so it seemed—he opened his eyes to find everything around him had grown dim. The light of the campfire threw silhouettes of angry men against the bowed top of the wagon and there was shouting. Lyuba and Constanta were arguing with two or three men.
Had the fathers of the camp returned from their day’s labours around the forge? Gingerly, Frank peeled off the blankets that covered him, struggled to sit up. He felt better, more solid, more connected to himself, but at the same time he had stiffened, exchanging the hurts of injury for the hurts of healing. If this wasn’t the camp’s menfolk—if it was the forces of this master, Văcărescu, who they feared—Frank didn’t know what he could do to protect his saviours from intimidation and violence, but he could not simply lie here and allow it to happen.
As his feet hit the floor, a memory returned as though it was being bellowed in his ear. “You are a disgrace to my name and to all our ancestors! Yes, be gone with you. And Frank? I am not expecting you to return. Do you understand? You are no longer welcome in this house.”
He breathed in sharply. Seized up as the incautious movement struck through his rib cage like a sabre. His eyes prickled, and he pressed the heels of his palms to them to hold the tears in, devastated at the memory and still not sure why. Who had said that? What terrible thing had he done to deserve all this?
Sons of Devils Page 2