Quintspinner - A Pirate's Quest

Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

A branch! A large friggin’ branch!

He struggled to his feet and fixing his gaze on it, lurched towards it. Living at the edge of the forest as his family did, William knew the different woods on sight, and he also knew their properties – which smelled sweetest when burning, which was strongest for fences, and which wood was flexible enough for bows. Even so, in this dim predawn gray, he could not place from which kind of tree it was. The shape was unlike anything that he was familiar with. He kept his eye on the precious branch as he hurried onward. Upon reaching it, he bent down and froze in mid-reach.

Not a branch.

Wood, yes to be sure, but it was the splintered remains of a broken club, its shattered end darkly stained. William’s nostrils flared as the faint metallic scent wafted up from the dark patch of grass.

‘Heme’ they had called it in the slaughter shed. “It’s the heme ‘o the blood what gives the smell,” his father had once told the boys. Johnny had declared that he smelled only the pigs’ shit, but William had been blessed with a sense of smell more keen than most, and to him the warm blood smelled vaguely like the hot metal in the blacksmith’s shop.

“You’re part wolf, I swear,” his father had declared. “Ya’ see and smell things the rest o’ us can’t. Whatever use that will come to though, I can’t declare.”

William held the broken club to his nose and sniffed. It was the heme alright. Alarmed, he threw it down and it landed with a soft wet thud onto a saturated piece of cloth lying in the crushed grass. William bent closer and peered at the spot. His stomach lurched.

Da’s cap!

Wet with the heavy morning dew. Wet with blood. It laid in the grasses as though already part of the earth.

Oh Jesus! It can’t be! His heart hammered in his chest as cold panic washed over him. Oh God! Wha – what happened? His father was a large man. Determined. Stronger than most. What could possibly have gotten the best of him?

William dropped onto his hands and knees, oblivious to the shrieking pain in his knee. His stomach was heaving. The burn of the bile in his empty stomach filled his mouth. His shoulders hunched high under his ears as he heaved, choking and spitting.

Then suddenly, horribly, his eyes came to rest on a calloused pale hand protruding from the tangled roots of the hawthorn bush beside him, the wrist bent at an odd angle, the entire arm awash with blood.

Oh Christ Almighty!

William strangled a cry in his throat and his stomach heaved anew. The dry heaves tore at his insides and he gasped for breath. The curl of the fingers, the shape of the broad thumb, so much like his own –

Dear God! Let him be alive!

Jerking his head up from the sight of his grisly find, William scanned the area around him. His breath came in ragged gasps. Am I alone? Oh God! Lucas! I need you here, boy! Who did this? A club? It wasn’t an animal! Bandits? Are the attackers still around?

Self-preservation instincts took over. Seeing no one and hearing only his own blood roar in a frantic whoosh in his ears, William reached out for the protruding fingers.

“Da’?” he whispered in the semi-darkness. Clasping the cold finger, he shook it as though to wake its owner. The hand was already stiffening in death.

“Da’!” William’s silent scream was punctuated by the whoosh in his head. His breath came in burning gulps as he reached out and parted the bushes. His eyes travelled from the hand, up the bloodied forearm, to the body, then upward to the face. His vision blurred with hot tears. Oh Da’ –

The words died in his throat. The sightless blue eyes were not his father’s.

The roaring inside his head increased to a high pitched squeal. He felt his thoughts spinning, spinning, as he sank mercifully into blackness. The void sucked him down into nothingness, away from the terror of his discovery.

His head dropped with a soft thump onto the cold chest of his brother’s stiffening corpse.

***

William never felt the rough hands that pulled him from the bush, nor felt the coils of rope splitting his skin as the strands were tightened, cutting into his wrists and ankles, binding them together.