Emily's House: Book 1 of the Akasha Chronicles

Chapter 43: Dughall's Story

Chapter 43: Dughall’s Story

 Dughall remembered his childhood as though he had lived it just yesterday. He could close his eyes and inhabit the body of his youth as easily as if he had slipped on a pair of slippers. It was a trip he had taken many times during his long stay in the Umbra Nihili. While there were many much more pleasant memories he could have dwelled on, Dughall chose to focus his attention on the day that everything changed for him. It was the day that the true Dughall was born.

He peered at the world out of deep brown eyes and watched as his mother gathered water from the town’s well. To say that he was close to her would be an understatement. He felt he was a part of her, and she a part of him. The slave’s life of abject misery can do that to two people who find themselves suffering through it together.

Dughall was born into nobility in a small town in the beautiful Mediterranean countryside. His people grew grapes and olives and made wine known to all as a most excellent elixir. He was born into what could have become a relatively blissful existence, but such was not his destiny.

One fateful day, a marauding band of soldiers came to his village, intent on taking what did not belong to them. Dughall’s father died protecting his family, cut down by a blade to his unarmored chest. Dughall’s mother wielded a small dagger and hid her boy behind her as two marauders approached her. Dughall never knew that his life was spared only because no soldier could bring himself to end the life of such a beautiful creature, Dughall’s own mother.

A quick death may have been preferable to the life that followed. Dughall and his mother were sold to a middling merchant and into a life of slavery. In those days, slavery was rampant. It was not confined to a particular color, creed or town. There were only the conquerors and the conquered. If you were not the conqueror, you were as likely to be sold into slavery as to be killed.

Many slaves toiled in fields or worked in a wealthy merchant’s home doing domestic chores. Still others endured a life far worse than any field hand or household slave. Such was the life of Dughall’s mother whose beauty was sold for the pleasure and use of the highest bidder.

There were many nights that Dughall’s mother lay there, enduring the basest form of indignity and defilement, wishing for death to come rescue her from her horrid existence. The only thing that prevented her from taking the dagger of her nightly ‘companion’ and doing herself in was the knowledge that her son – her only ray of light – laid in the next room.

Her son. He needed her, and that alone kept her alive from day to day.

For Dughall’s part, his heart slowly hardened, day after day, week after week, seeing the suffering endured by his beloved mother at the hands of her master and those he so callously sold her to. She tried to stifle her own tears around Dughall, but he knew that her heart was dying inside her.

The only pleasure of their day was in the quiet moments when no one else was around. Alone in their small quarters, she taught him. They both knew that it was strictly forbidden for her to teach her slave son how to read or write or to provide him any education. But Dughall’s mother used her waning energy to impart to Dughall all that she knew. She would not let her son, born of noble and educated parents, go through life an ignorant.

She also taught Dughall about survival and patience. Even though he had learned to speak in the way of nobles and kings – and surely knew as much about writing and mathematics and astrology as any of them – he spoke to his master and to all others save his mother in the guttural language of peasants and slaves. He followed orders and endured the lash, given frequently not because he disobeyed but merely because it pleased his master to know that he could.

 “Bide your time, my dear son. You will rise above this place, I know that you will. You will grab upon the opportunity when the time is right,” his mother said one day.

“How do you know, dear mother?” asked Dughall. “How do you know I will ever be anything but a slave?”

She took Dughall’s hands in hers and looked deeply into the dark brown eyes of the only one she loved. “When I look in your eyes my son, I do not see the soul of a slave. I see in you a fearsome fire, not one easily extinguished by the lash of a slave master.”

It made Dughall’s heart soar to hear such powerful and hopeful words from his dearest one. He believed in his mother with all his being and so when she stated with such conviction that she believed in him, he instantly believed in himself too.

From that day forward, his spirits were lifted a little higher for he believed wholeheartedly in his mother’s prophetic words. “Bide your time, Dughall,” he would say to himself when times got tough.

But as the years passed, it became more and more difficult to endure what was surely his largest torture. Each night he lay on his small cot beside the hearth while in the next room, he heard brutes use and abuse his mother. The anger welled and his heart blackened. He swore to himself vengeance most cruel on his master who he held responsible for his mother’s daily suffering. And as he grew closer to manhood, he felt the time was coming when he would have his vengeance and he and his mother would escape their brutal bonds.

“Bide your time, Dughall,” he said to himself in the dark. “Bide your time.”