Gold light shot from the windows and open doors of the cottages that made up the main thoroughway of Wurmgloath. A few people were still out and about. Their movements were nervous. Each of them was a mere shape of darkness against the soft light behind.
He walked on, passing squat buildings in haphazard rows. Caps of old thatch as thick as the boy’s whole thigh gave off foggy vapours in the fading heat. As he moved among the houses he realised how it was all so homely, so familiar, so awfully old and part of his everyday life… was he in his right state of mind? Running away in the night… what did he know of the world out there? But no. He shook his head. He had no choice. This was it. He had to.
He did his best to swallow the hard slippery sensation that now caked the roof of his mouth. A few more steps. A turn around the old smithy, guttered by fire years back, never rebuilt. Past the wreckage of a pile of barrels, and one big, old broken wagon. It did not feel right that a place as small as Wurmgloath should have a poor end of the village. But people like to sort themselves into betters and not-so-betters. They will find a way to do it. And it was in the poor end of Wurmgloath that the boy and his father lived: in a hovel of a cottage, sheltered under rotting thatch, the daub peeling from the walls, the air stinking of stale beer and dirt and the heady reek of rats.
The door was ajar, and creaking ever so slightly. The boy paused and looked inside. All was silent. All was dark. Was his father back? He pushed at the door and heard a snort from the darkness. Some words growled. They sounded like, “Who’s that?” or something close to it.
“Just me,” murmured the boy. He said it clearly but softly. If his father was mostly asleep, he had no reason to wake him.
“Close the door.” A clunk of something falling to the floor, a scrape of the stool by the table. “Where’re you been? Thought you’d run off. Close the door you stupid ingrate!”
“Yes, sir.”
The hinges made horrible rust-on-rust sounds as the door closed, but he didn’t latch it shut. A thin blade of moonlight lanced a line through the gap.
The muttering and mumbling in the darkness subsided.
Listening intently, the boy waited… and he waited. He waited so long that the line of moonrise light on the floor shifted a good quarter of finger’s width. All the while he listened, ready to spring forward and sprint, grab the scarf, run.
The heavy breathing in the darkness quietened, slowed, grew steady.
When the boy was sure his father was deeply asleep, he crept over the hard packed floor. Clay bottles lay all about on their sides, some broken.
He edged around the shapeless mass slumped on the table, then found his sleeping cot by finger-and-grope. Without fuss, he drew out the scarf, unravelled it, and put it on. There was one terrible moment when his father snorted suddenly, sat up bolt-straight, and looked around, his face lit up by a bar of light from the crack in the doorway.
“Stupid child. Can’t even close a door. Stupid, stupid. Worthless.” But then he slumped forward again, grinding his teeth. Which he did when he was worried or angry. He slipped off to sleep, bubbling and snorting with soft hiccups-snores.
The boy allowed himself a short, relieved out-breath. He was more silent than moonbeams as he crept back to the door. But just as he reached his escape, he heard his father’s voice rise again, though now the words were much more sleep-muffled, only half-clear. He was talking in his sleep: “I’m sorry… I’m… I’m… No… Sorry… And what’ya expect me to do? Boy’s useless… He’ll be better off anyway… Better off…” mumbling, mumbling, “off…”
The boy closed the door behind him. Then he paused, and thought about how the slavers had given his father money before getting their hands on a slave… he thought about how obvious it was that his father was a drunk, and a thought plopped into his mind, like a big heavy stone into a dark pond. “Ah no,” he said. They were preparing for war. They wanted men and boys to do weapon-work. An old smith, even a drunk broken-down smith would be worth taking. And a hungover man would be easier to chain up, come morning.
He stood there for a good minute. Then, soft as he could, he opened the door again. In the square of darkness, his father’s voice rumbled and sputtered. The old man woke with a start. The light caught his eyes and they were the only living thing in the room: two blinking, fiery wet points in the foetid stink of the cottage.
“What’re you doing?”
“I’m leaving,” said the boy. “I’ll run if you try to stop me, and I’m quicker than you. You’re sloshed too. You’ll not catch me.”
“Ingrate,” hissed his father. “I live my whole life looking after you, just to have you run off? Shoulda known. Shoulda always known it would come to this.”
He felt a temptation to say nothing, but he couldn’t. “You know they’re coming to put you in chains in the morning? You keep drinking the night away, and they’ll do it. That’s why they gave you the purse. They want you drunk. Maybe they don’t care about a skinny little ‘un like me at all? Thing is, maybe they were after you all along. You thought of that?”
Laughter rolled out of the old man then. Bellicose, angry, blasphemous sounding. “You think I don’t know that? I’m no idiot, boy. I’m no idiot.” There was a scrape of something heavy on wood, and the boy realised that his father was dragging something across the table: it was his last smithing hammer. All the others had been hocked for drinking money long ago. “Let them try to put me in chains. I’ll cave a skull or three. Let them try.” He grinned then, teeth glistening in the moonglow. “And what can I do if my stupid good-for-nothing boy has run off? They paid me coin. I’ll not give it back. It’s not my fault.” He sniffed. “Not my fault at all.”
The boy nodded. “Good bye, Da’. I don’t expect we’ll ever meet again.”
The old man shrugged. “Best that we don’t.” An awkward stretch of silence hung in the air between them. It might have been a trick of the light, but the old man’s eyes seemed to soften. “You know, I loved you and your Ma’, way back, whenever it was.” He waved a meaty hand. “I did. Once. But life rasps us from the inside. Life is hard and it rasps. It’ll happen to you. Don’t you think it won’t, boy. Don’t you go thinking you’re better than me. Life’ll hollow you out too. Life does to everyone. Grinds us down. Makes us into… into…” he wafted his fingers around, “this, I suppose.”
With the scarf warming his neck, the boy let the door swing shut. He walked away from the cottage, away from the village, away from his old life and the people that filled it. He wondered if the slave-buyers would demand their coppers back? He wondered if his father really would smash their skulls with a huge hammer. It was only as he was walking away, that he realised his father had genuinely sounded honest at the end. When he claimed he’d once loved them both, mother and son. It hadn’t sounded like a lie at all.
He couldn’t help himself then. He sniffed to keep back the wetness in his eyes and nose, but it came anyway. As he walked out of the village and into the woods, up the old deer path and to the hollow oak where he’d stashed his kit for running away, more than one damp streak ran down his dirty cheeks.
“Bastard,” he said to the darkness. “You did that on purpose.”