Chapter two: Unexpected Bastardy
Bonjour mon ami! I have returned once more, my dear reader, aren't you glad? But of course you are, for no doubt you have been in apoplexy, all fingers and thumbs and sweaty brows as you fumble to turn the page and find out what happens next, am I right?
Ah but I have been busy lately and have found that reminiscence must wait. There has been a spot of bother in Industrial. Our dear king Logan has been a rather foolish dolt and let his sister run off to ferment rebellion, which in itself is of no concern to me. I have seen my share of monarchs and rebels come and go, after all. Still to my not inconsiderable annoyance I find that the little madam has seen fit to come and rain upon my parade. Really, it is intolerable. Can a man not run a business empire in peace without idealistic little mavens running hither and thither spreading such lies as equality and freedom to my army of cowed wage slaves? I ask you, what is Albion coming to? A man might think the daft little bint has failed to realise that gold does not grow on trees but instead must be extracted from the blood, sweat and tears of the great mass of unwashed. Off with the little princess' head, I say. Alas Logan remains ridiculously fond of his sibling and will insist on complicating our lives by indulging this pointless and costly rebellion.
C'est le vie, I suppose I shall just have to wait and see. These are the children of my dear friend Sparrow after all. No doubt there are all manner of world saving machinations afoot. I shall just have to endeavour to ensure I am around to profit from it all when this mess resolves itself.
But! This is not what you wish to read about is it, my dearest reader. Of course it is not; such matters as the fate of a kingdom pale into insignificance in comparison to the grand tale of my own origin. Ah and we are getting to a good part too. Yes indeed. Upon perusing my last entry it would seem that we have reached a rather pivotal point in my tale and can now begin in earnest.
So without further ado let us once more peel back the lacquered layers of years piled upon years and return to Oakvale and that puny little lad with his toy crossbow...
In Oakvale the green and golden glow of summer has begun to ebb into the tired burnished hues of autumn already and the spectre of dark chill nights haunts the long shadows of late afternoon. The first frost has fallen and Oakvale prepares itself for a long and wearying winter to come.
The boy Joshua fears the coming of winter as he fears little else. The rectory is always cold, the heath fire unable to banish the damp chill from the corners of the stone hewn room and that chill settles as an invisible weight upon the boy's weak chest. At this particular juncture of time the boy is once again in his bed all but smothered under a snowdrift of blankets and still the chill of the season makes its clammy presence felt. He is feverish and each breath he takes rasps from his raw throat like fire and wood splinters.
Yet today is a special day! His father has deigned it fit to sit with him, a grim revenant of a man, old before his years, with open prayer book settled on his lap, perched like an ugly carrion crow upon the stool. He reads aloud the prayer for the dying in a dull monotone voice, not once looking up from the yellowed pages of the tattered book to lay eyes upon his son.
"...And Avo said unto her flock, be you weak and meek I shall shepherd you to the land of plenty. And thus it was that the sick knew surcease from suffering and..."
"Father," the boy rasps, fingers curling fitfully in the folds of his multiple bed sheets. Outside his bedroom window the cold yet beautiful autumn sun peers in at him, her light worming around the skeletal fingers of a leafless oak tree. A fat, self satisfied raven perches upon one such branch, cawing his freedom loudly. Under the convenient covering of blankets the boy's left hand caresses the curve of his toy crossbow, fingers itching for the trigger.
"...and the poor lay down their burdens and knew the eternal joy of the incorporeal and all was..." Father Terrence continued droning on reciting his sermon as if his child really was dead and in need of last rites. The window is closed tight against the draft and the boy's eyes narrow dangerously as the damned raven, such an ill-omened bird, shows the great audacity to come to perch upon the outer sill. Its liquid black eye winks at him from the safety of the great outside. This will not do at all.
"Father!" The boy raises his voice, surprisingly strident, but alas, there are only so many times a boy with such a thirst for life can listen in meek subservience as his father extols the virtues of the afterlife with the oratory verve and enthusiasm of a walking corpse. Father Terrence pauses mid-dirge as his son wrests a small hand from the confines of his blankets and grasps upon the sleeve of his priestly robes. The man blinks rheumy eyes, pale as a robin's egg, and frowns.
"You must not interrupt me, child. I am shriving for your soul." Father Terrence plucks his son's fingers from his sleeve and finally looks his boy in the eyes. What he sees reflected there is anyone's guess but whatever it is proves enough to cause the man to take notice of his son's corporeal needs and leave his soul in peace for once. "What is it?"
The boy's eyes dart from the window and that blasted bird before whizzing back to his father in a lightning fast dance, his nimble little mind forming the rudiments of a plan. "Water," the boy croaks needing to put no effort whatsoever into sounding feeble, "Please father can you get me some water?"
Father Terrence is not a particularly amenable man but he is not a complete monster either, snapping his prayer book closed he rises grumbling from the stool and turns for the door. In an instant the boy has whipped the crossbow out from under the sheets, snagged the big silver nail from under his pillow and loaded it into the toy. His father has barely closed the bedroom door behind him and shuffled off with great solemnity towards the spigot in the back garden before the boy has fired the nail bolt, his aim focused with dead eye intensity upon that damned ugly bird perched upon his windowsill.
Ark! The window glass shatters with a barely audible crunch as the nail punches through it to pierce the raven through its vicious and laughing dark eye. The bird screams as the nail skewers its tiny brain and feathers fly through the air as nail and bird continue along a predetermined path to hit the bark of an apple tree some ten yards beyond the window. The boy watches as the bird twitches in its death throes before gravity sees fit to pull nail and bird free of the tree trunk. The nasty creature lands with a thump and a further moulting of greasy black feathers upon the browned and frosted ground.
"A hit," the boy chuckles, "Got you, you bloody thing."
Carefully the boy slips the crossbow back under the sheets, checks to make sure the rest of his cache of silver nails is secure under his pillow and then pulls forth from inside the pillow case the nub of pencil and the scrap of paper torn from the flyleaf of the prayer book his father gifted him last year but from which he has never willing read. There upon this treasures scrap of paper he adds a new entry to his tally of successfully hit targets. So far, in the few scant few months since his uncle bought him the toy, he has shot forty-nine cockroaches, seventeen mice, three rats and crippled the neighbours' cat with a nail up the arse. Now he can add the raven to his count. He gives himself extra points for the difficulty of the shot, especially as he had to fire through a glass pane to get to the blighter.
Life is a funny thing, as the boy tucks away his precious score sheet his chest is still tight, his skin still damp and itchy from fever sweat, and his muscles still burn from the sheer exhaustion of pervasive sickness, yet in this brief moment of triumph the boy does not feel any of this. In his veins sings the euphoria of his success, his mind aflame with the glorious secret of his own talent. He does not need to be told to know that when he wields his crossbow he becomes, not a tired, wretched child not long for this world, but instead master of life and death. Diseased, haunted by the greedy phantom of the Reaper, this young child is so much closer to grasping a fundamental tenet of life than his pious father could ever hope to be.
The true splendour of living can only be found when extinguishing the life of others.
Still such existential truths remain just beyond the boy's comprehension at this point; it will take many a long year before this boy will embrace the ultimate nihilism of existence fully, and for the moment he is just a child with a new toy.
Just a boy with a new toy...ha, but that is a truth most profound, isn't it?
Suffice to say for the benefits of a pithy narrative that a number of weeks pass by in much the same vein as we have seen. During the day the boy continues to hone his marksmanship in relative secrecy (the infestation of vermin seeking sanctuary from the cold proving to be a blessing in surprise) and at night he sleeps poorly, lungs drowning in a build up of vile fluids no amount of retching heaves can dislodge. The winter inches closer, autumn succumbing to the indigo and grey of this most barren of seasons.
It is on one of these very days, cold and bleak and brittle that the boy huddles in his blankets, chest ablaze, shaking with fever sweats and mewling for release while his mother sits at his bedside mopping his brow and his dear beloved uncle lounges by the window.
"Ah my poor little mite, shh, rest now." The mother, Ginger by name and hair colour, strokes cold fingertips over her son's fever burned cheek watching as his sunken eyes slip closed. Thinking the poor tyke has already faded away into dreams Ginger presses roughened palms to her eyes and scrubs away more dry tears.
"He'll not see spring, Stan." She whispers. "My baby won't make it."
Stan ambles over and slings an arm over his sister's bony shoulders. "Hey now, he's got through worse than this before, ain't he? He's tougher than he looks, Ginny, you see if he ain't."
"I can't...I can't do this anymore Stan!" Ginger shoves her brother's solicitous arm off her shoulders and rises from the stool, crossing the room to the window (boarded up as glass panes are not easy to replace). She hugs her thin arms close to her chest, grasping her elbows through the thin, worn homespun of her sleeves. "Terry says I'm bein' punished. 'E says Josh is sick 'cuz o' the scallywags I used to pal around wit'. Avo's punishing me fer m'wickedness by killin' m'boy wit' this bloody disease."
Peering through his eyelashes the boy in the bed watches as his uncle's broad and open features contract in an uncharacteristic display of annoyance, "Ginny, luv, Terry's an arse. Always was, always will be." He scoffed and shook his head ruefully. "Never did understand why you married the miserable sod in the first place."
Ginger spun around and her tired, pale and washed out face is suddenly transformed by virtue of anger into something vibrant and alive. The faded ghost of lost youth and beauty can be seen for just a moment in the fire sparking in her eyes. "You know why I married him yer daft git! I 'ad to; not like I could o' made ends meet when I was up the duff and wit' out a man, was it now?"
In the bed the boy is suddenly very still. His heart hammers with that particular fission that comes only from eavesdropping on a conversation he should not be hearing. The very air of his little room is thick with secrets and hidden truths, he can all but smell it, and a strange quiver of excitement builds within him, a warm glow quite different from the dry, aching heat of his fever. He waits, breathless with anticipation instead of sickness for once, for his mother's next words.
"A'ight, luv," Stan holds his hands up placatingly, "I know." He waits, as the boy does, for Ginger's shoulders to drop and that lovely flame of passion to fade back into the embers of exhaustion that have become habitual for this woman. "It's just...ah, Ginny, yer know I'd'a put yer and yer baby up if I'd known. You coulda waited and married a man who treated yer right, instead of a sour old trout like Terry."
Ginger laughed mirthlessly and turned from the window to pace the confines of the small room with all the wild rangy grace and inherent violence of a balverine in a cage. "Yer weren't 'ere then, bruv. Terry was, Avo curse him." Finally Ginger has paced back to the stool by the bed wherein she sinks back down with broken grace, tugging on a stringy lock of once luscious red hair that has escaped the ugly bonnet she wears upon her head even indoors. When she speaks again it is with resignation. "Yer know Terry had a soft spot fer me before I ran off t'tag along wit' Andy an' 'is gang. 'E was sweet at t'beginnin', I guess, an' he really ain't bad wit' Josh...seein' as m'boy ain't even his son an' all."
"Not his son?" The boy in the bed's eyes pop open and suddenly all weakness is forgotten in the face of this most unexpected revelation. Shadowed green eyes, grown huge with shock, fix on his mother's. Ginger's face flushes ashen white as she realises her mistake. The boy reaches for her. "Mam...is father not really my father?"
"Oh Avo save me," Ginger all but yelps jumping up and knocking over the stool, "Yer s'posed t'be asleep, yer sneaky little wretch!" Bursting into tears Ginger flew from the room, wringing her hands. In the sudden silence that follows the sound of the front door slamming seems very loud. The boy turns his wide eyes from the empty space once occupied by his mother to stare, beseechingly, at his uncle.
"Uncle Stan?" the boy's voice quivers, "Is my Da not my real da then?"
Rubbing the back of his neck fiercely his uncle stares fixedly at the flagstone floor for what seems an agonisingly long time. "Uncle?" the boy leaned forward in bed, struggling to sit up against his pillows.
"Aye lad," Stan finally sighed lifting his eyes very slowly from the floor and his own shuffling feet, "I s'pose the cat's out t'bag now, eh?" He smiled ruefully, "Terry, Father Terrence, 'e ain't yer da, Josh m'boy."
The boy can barely comprehend it. His mind conjures the image of Father Terrence before his eyes. He sees again the dour face, the forbidding brow, the sound of that dull, dull voice droning on from the pulpit and the dinner table alike. He thinks again about the man's remarkable ability to suck the life and joy from all he meets. The boy does not know quite how to feel to discover that there is no great bond of blood and paternity between that grim man and himself after all. Obscurely and for a reason he will come to recognise in time is in fact profound relief, the boy begins to giggle. Yet there is one question that he must have answered before he can indulge in the joyous freedom of the soul that this revelation has granted him.
"Who...whose son am I, then?"
Stan's expression creases in an odd mixture of trepidation and some other tincture of emotion the boy cannot identify. "A bandit, lad," His uncle shakes his head mournfully his gaze returning to the safe haven of the floor, "Ah, Josh lad, yer the son of t'leader of the Bloodstone bandits, that's who yer are."