The Outcasts (A Brotherband Fanfic)

Chapter 13

     Twenty-eight boys assembled outside the town in a small field set aside as a training ground. They were the boys who were turning sixteen that year and it was an unusually large number. In an average year, there might be sixteen to twenty boys selected into their brotherbands.

     The brotherbands were a unique Skandian concept, born of the fact that Skandians were traditionally seafarers. Many years ago, they had created a training system in which boys were placed in small groups to practice and learn together. Each group was called a brotherband. Its members would bond as a team while they learned tactics, weapon skills, seamanship, ship handling and navigation.

     The brotherbands replicated the concept of a ship's crew—shipmates had to work together and trust their companions, sometimes with their lives. Quite often, boys who trained in a brotherband together would be recruited into the same ship's crew, and would serve and work and relax together for the rest of their lives. Brotherbands formed bonds and lifelong friendships.

     And they taught their members the value of combining their varying skills to best advantage.
Since a successful ship's crew required a captain, or skirl, to command it, the "brotherband system also developed another vital skill: leadership. Natural leaders tended to come to the fore in the bands. They were the boys with that little extra, that indefinable quality that caused the others to look to them for ideas and direction. Sometimes, at the beginning of their training, a band would elect its most popular member as leader. But popularity wasn't always the most important part of leadership, and quite often, before the training period was over, that leader would have been replaced by someone else—someone who had shown that he had the necessary confidence and ability to command.

     Hal and Stig arrived at the assembly ground together. They were early and there "were only a half dozen or so other boys already there. Most of them greeted Stig, and some nodded vaguely to Hal. He looked around nervously. Tursgud, with his band of followers, hadn't arrived yet. Knowing Tursgud, he'd swagger up at the last possible minute, Hal thought. He rubbed his knuckles absentmindedly. After dinner with his mam and Kari the previous night, the twins had headed back to the shelter where Hal hung Thorn's sack. They'd taken turns hammered away at it for several hours, working to perfect the sequence of punches that Thorn had shown them, doing them over and over again in sequence so that they became instinctive. Finally, shoulders aching and knuckles reddened by the rough canvas, they called it a night, trudged back up the hill to their mam's house and fallen into bed, exhausted.

     "Hope we're picked in the same band," Stig said eagerly. Hal nodded, although he doubted that it would happen. With twenty-eight boys, he suspected there would be three bands formed today. He knew that each brotherband needed at least eight members in order to be able to row the ships they were being trained on.

     Stig was shifting eagerly from one foot to the other, looking around at the other boys as they gradually drifted into the assembly area, waving and responding to their greetings. He was filled with nervous energy and anticipation.

     Brotherband selection was a big day in any boy's life and he was looking forward to it. He didn't see that Hal would have any problem being picked. Hal was smart and intelligent and inventive, he thought—and a good friend. But then, Stig was an optimist.

     Hal, on the other hand, faced the day with a certain sense of resignation. Stig was big and athletic and, perhaps most important, a Skandian. Any brotherband would welcome him as a member despite his hot temper. Whereas Hal knew he would be one of the last to be chosen. It would be embarrassing to stand waiting, while other boys' names were called and they moved to join their bands.

     And he knew that any band who did choose him would do so reluctantly, probably resenting that they had to. He wouldn't be surprised, he thought gloomily, if his was the last name to be called. And then he could look forward to three months of being mocked, insulted, ordered around and given the most boring and menial tasks to carry out.