The Terror of the Raiders

Chapter Seven - New Voyage (Revamped)

"Heave! Hoe!"

It was the sudden sharp rocking motion, rather than the steady chant of familiar words from unfamiliar mouths that roused Charles. The ship's deck had started jerkily moving under his feet. It would shift forward a small distance, about the length of a grown man's forearm, and then come to an aborted holt. Each movement jostling the kitten.

The men's voices chanted with every shift, and soon the pushes became a little smoother as the sound of scraping stones was joined by splashing water.

They're moving the boat, Charles realized with alarm as his paws were almost knocked out from under him again. His claws ached from digging into the unrelenting wooden planks.

What should he do?

There was nothing left for him in the village, and he couldn't be sure that none of the raiders would attack him if he jumped off the vessel in their sight. Plus, by the sounds around him, the once beached boat had now been fully shoved back into the water.

Charles didn't hate water the way that most felines did, but that didn't mean he liked it either. It made him feel heavy and uncomfortable, not to mention that he would stink of the ocean and taste of salt for days if he jumped now.

So, Charles figured that it would perhaps be best if he just stayed where he were. He didn't think that there was really much other choice.

By some completely unrelated perfect timing, as soon as he had made that decision, the boat stopped jolting about. The splash of the raider's wading footsteps became the only sound in the mid morning air.

Two sets of scarred fingers wrapped themselves around the edge of the boat's side. Then they paled slightly as the man behind them put all his weight into his grip to pull him up, and before the face could join them, Charles had retreated back into the shadows of the bench.

He watched as the man hauled himself onto the deck, and watched some more as the next raider followed suit after him. When they were all stable upon the rocking floorboards, the two of them knelt and leaned over the side with their arms outstretched.

The fur along Charles' back raised as he saw them pulling the dead body of the angry druid into the boat, with the massive ginger tom now curled up tightly on his belly.

Suddenly the taste of sea salt didn't seem so bad. It had to be better than being near the angry druid, dead though he might be.

Charles carefully hurried his way over to the side of the boat, opposite of the fresh body. He made sure to keep to the shadows under the bench though, something inside telling the kitten not to let anyone see him yet. It was slower going than he'd have liked.

But when he got there and slowly peered over the side, his heart sank into his stomach.

Too far.

The strip of stony beach was now too far away for Charles to be confident that he could swim. The combination of his little paws, heavy pelt – short though it might be – and the choppy waves that were reverberating from the boat's hull as the men pushed it and began to climb in, were less than ideal.

Self-preservation ran strong in the back of his mind.

Instead, Charles chose to reluctantly back away and slip under the bench once more. But he was unable to fully relax his muscles as he watched.

Man after man pulled themselves up into the vessel, some of them struggling around their stiffened leather vests. Others cursed with foreign words as their long knives weighed them down or clattered against their knees. The last one to heave himself over the rail was the man that had held the kitten so gently only the day before.

All in all, there were seven breathing and one stilled humans aboard when they lowered the sail and set off into the unknown.

They moved about with more grace than their heavy bodies aught to have on such an unstable surface. Finding benches to sit on and giant wooden spoons to dip into the sea.

All but the one Charles found himself secretly liking, with his kind hands and laughing eyes. He moved to the back of the boat – a ship, he called it – where he grabbed at the strangely carved stick. It was just to the right, and he watched as the raider pulled and pushed at it.

But, like a heavy storm cloud, he couldn't avoid it for long. The body.

It drew his attention away from everything else like a fire did insects. Charles knew that the angry raider-druid was gone. He had watched the brutal ending from the shadows with his own eyes. But something still felt wrong.

The same something that had struck out at the crazy old woman in the field and told him to behave for the village druid was shouting inside his skull now. It strengthened his sense of his fear that had never truly abated. It told him to stay alert and stay away.

So, with the energy regained from his nap, he stared. Unblinkingly he watched the raider-druid's form until the sun was high in the sky and he had to sit completely under the bench to stay hidden. His gaze lost none of its intensity as the light passed ahead and began to fall behind the clouds again.

He barely took notice of when the men put their giant wooden spoons away, other than to dodge the one being tucked under his bench. He didn't care when they shifted about, other than when they moved between him and where his gaze focused.

The time that any other feline would spend sleeping he used to glare with suspicion and terror-born hate. It was because of his unabated retained attention, that he witnessed the impossible.

The haughty ginger tom that had been wrapped around his master's shoulders in the village moved. He casually uncurled his body and bowed a stretch, kneading his claws lightly into the corpse's stomach below him a couple of times. Then he padded onto the wooden deck and into the lap of one of the nearby raiders.

Charles had seen him die.

The giant ginger had been pierced through the belly by the same arrow that had felled the raider-druid. The kitten hadn't paid much attention to the larger cat because the way his body had been wrapped around himself had hidden the wound.

Yet, under his very eyes, Charles watched the nameless tom clean the blood away. Every swipe of his tongue revealed healthy, unbroken flesh underneath.

It was as if he'd never been injured, or killed, in the first place.