The Outcasts (A Brotherband Fanfic)

Chapter 3

     "Pass me another bucket, Thorn."

     Hal was perched on a ladder in the twin's mother's kitchen, twisting sideways so that he could tip buckets of water into a large cask. He grunted as he took another full pail from the shabby old former sea wolf and lifted it above his shoulder height. As he did so, he noted with one corner of his mind that Thorn was hoisting the buckets up to him without any sign of effort, even though he had only one hand to work with.

      As the water splashed into the half-filled cask, there was an ominous groaning sound.

     Thorn frowned. "What was that?" he said suspiciously.

     Hal handed him down the empty bucket and made a dismissive gesture.

     "Nothing. Just the cask staves settling into place under the weight."

     "I know how they feel," said Kari, entering the kitchen with two more buckets that she had filled from the well in the yard outside the kitchen.

     "How many more of these will you need?" Stig asked. He was Hal's best friend. As a matter of fact, aside from Thorn and Kari, he was Hal's only real friend. The other Skandian boys tended to ostracize Hal, taunting him because of his mixed parentage, and because his mother was a former slave. But they never did so in Stig's hearing. Stig was big and well muscled and was known to have an unpredictable temper. As a result, the others trod warily around him.

     There was another ominous creaking sound from the cask.

     "You're sure that's the staves settling?" Thorn said.

     Kari cast an impatient look at him, she had spent many a night coming up with the design and construction of the barrel.. "It was a dry, empty barrel," she said. "They always do that. The wood expands, the staves creak against each other."

     "I'll take your word for it," Thorn said. "My experience has been more with full barrels in the past."

     "You did your share of emptying them, though," Stig said. Kari smacked him upside the head. Stig grinned to make sure Thorn knew he was joking, not criticizing. Thorn took the comment philosophically.

     "That's true," he said, shaking his head in regret over some of the excesses of his past.

     The cask was Kari's latest brain wave. She had decided to install a running-water system in her mam's kitchen. A zigzag pipe ran down from the cask to the kitchen bench. A spigot at the base of the cask would allow water to run out through the pipe and down to the basin.

     "You'll never need to fetch water from the well," she had told her mother, not noticing Karina's dubious expression. "Thorn can fill the cask for you each morning."

     Hal had constructed all the components in his work shed while Kari made the designs and blueprints, and they waited for a day when Karina had gone down the coast to a market some ten kilometers away. Then they'd summoned Thorn and Stig and began to install his new system for her.

     After mounting the cask on a bracket he had already set high on the kitchen wall, and attaching the piping, they had begun filling the cask with buckets of water pumped from the well.

     Now that the cask was a little over half full, impatience got the better of them.

     "Why don't we try it?" Thorn suggested. He was eager to see the new system working.

      As if in response to being mentioned, the cask gave another of those ominous creaks that had been worrying Thorn. He glanced at Kari, who shook her head impatiently.