where practicality helps you survive and sentiment kills you. This is the world you now live in, too. Remember that, and you will learn more quickly how to stay alive.’
The Captain moved to the door and sighed wearily. ‘If we can manage it without interruptions this time, I will have Boar take you back below. And, if anyone asks what passed between us, it is none of their business. If they persist, tell them to ask me about it. I do not expect they will do so.’
He opened the door and shouted for Boar. Before the fat bully appeared, the Captain turned to him. ‘And tell them I scared the hell out of you. After all, like Our Lady, I have a reputation to protect.’
The door closed and Brann was left standing on his own. At first, it seemed strange that he, a captive, should be left unattended, but then he thought, Where could I go? Footsteps approached, and his stomach knotted at the thought of Boar. Sure enough, his fear was borne out as the lumbering giant enjoyed bouncing him against every wall and sharp edge he could find on the way back to the hold.
As Boar fastened Brann back into the chains, he knelt beside him and leant close over him. The smell from his body or clothes – or both – was overpowering.
‘Don’t you be thinking you’re the Captain’s pet, maggot,’ he snarled, and Brann flinched as he realised that the smell of his breath was even worse. ‘You’re mine, and mine you’ll stay.’
As Brann jerked back from the stench, Boar mistook the reaction for fear. Satisfied that he had achieved his goal, he grinned, showing the few rotten teeth he had left. ‘Good. Remember that, or I’ll have fun reminding you, maggot.’
He stood with surprising agility for one his size – Brann reappraised his opinion of the proportion of the man that was blubber – and made his way, laughing, back up the dim corridor.
Gerens nudged Brann. ‘I see you have made a friend there,’ he said dryly.
Brann sighed and leant back. ‘Oh, Boar and I, we get on great,’ he replied. ‘You know, the sort of relationship where he makes my life even more of a misery than it already is, and I dream of killing him.’
A boy nearby spoke up. ‘You would have to join a queue for that. Remember, you have only had it from him for a day or so. Some of us have been here for more than a week.’
For the first time, Brann looked around the small room. Fatigue had driven curiosity from his mind when he had been brought in previously, but now he wondered if anyone else from his village, or even the town, had suffered the same fate. A quick glance, however, determined that he had the dubious honour of being alone in being brought on board from his valley. ‘What is it like?’ he asked the boys. ‘What happens to us?’
A second boy snorted. ‘Nothing, and that’s it. We are just left here and fed occasionally. The exciting times are when you get your food and when you use the bucket there, because those are the only parts of the day that you do anything other than sit on the one spot. Apart from once a day when they take us up to walk up and down the deck for a while to keep strength in our legs. Can’t sell us if we can’t walk, can they?’
The first boy barked a hoarse, humourless laugh. He was thin, almost skeletal, with sunken eyes that disappeared into shadow in the gloom and was, Brann realised as his eyes adjusted to what little light was afforded them, at most two or three years older than himself. His laughter turned to coughing and the boy cleared his throat before adding, ‘Sometimes they even stop us talking if any of them are trying to sleep. As if it was not boring enough already down here. But forget your questions. Why were you taken up there? And what in the gods’ names was going on?’
Brann shrugged and made an excuse that he had been asked about the land around his village in case the raiders ever wanted to pay a return visit.
‘I hope you didn’t tell them,’ the thin boy snarled. ‘Bastards.’
‘Not enough time,’ Brann said, and recounted the attack by the pirates, telling as much as he had seen and embellishing the rest. After the excitement of the tale wore off, the others around him were silent as it dawned on them that their fate could have been even worse.
‘I don’t know what I would have preferred,’ the thin boy said. ‘Drowning or being captured by the pirates. Suddenly boredom seems much more attractive.’
A slight, tousle-haired lad with an angelic face at odds with a voice that was deep in anticipation of the man he would become, but layered with the harsh tone of the adolescent he still was, butted in. ‘What about the old woman? What did she want with you?’
Brann shrugged. ‘No idea. She thought I was someone else. Who knows what she wanted?’
The thin boy stared at him, his eyes narrowing in suspicion. ‘Seems strange to me. I think you know more than you are saying. You’d better not be holding out on us, boy.’
Gerens turned his dark glare on the boy. ‘What do you mean? Did you hear the way that woman screeched when they took him in there? Made my blood run cold, so it did, and I was in here. Would you have liked to have shared a room with her? And how do you fancy being marched about in the gentle care of Boar? I know I’d rather be here. Would you have traded places?’
The boy grunted, coughed raspingly and lay back to doze, and the hold fell silent. The musty room was filled only with the creaking of the ship, a noise that was becoming so familiar to Brann that, most of the time, he was no longer aware of it. He leant back himself; he was exhausted again. It was not too long since he had slept, but he assumed the tiredness was due to the effects that the Captain had talked about. He tried occupying his mind, counting the lines of the grain in the floorboard beneath him but, before he had got far, he had drifted off to sleep once more.
He wakened twice and, each time, managed to eat a little. On one occasion, the captives were talking, but he lacked the energy, or will, to do anything more than idly listen before drifting back off to sleep. From what he could hear, the others were the product of raids further north up the coast. It made sense: the ship’s destination would be far to the south, where countries with the slave markets lay, so they would always be headed in that direction after each raid; were they to work their way northwards as they raided, they would be increasing the distance they had to run if anything went wrong, and would be leaving enemies between them and their haven.
The third time he wakened, it was as a result of being shaken roughly by Gerens.
‘At least look as if you are awake, chief, even if you don’t feel it,’ the youth murmured in his ear. ‘Boar approaches – you could tell his tread a mile off. And I would guess it is better not to give him the chance to wake you himself.’
As if to prove his point, Boar appeared in the doorway and casually kicked a sleeping boy in the guts. The boy awoke, coughing in pain, and Brann was thankful for the timely advice and the fact that, for some unfathomable reason, Gerens seemed to have appointed himself to watch over him, like a savage but attentive guard-dog. Still clutching his stomach, the boy lurched to his feet; he was one of several who had previously learnt the folly of staying down long enough to allow Boar a second kick.
‘Captain wants seven of you upstairs now,’ he growled, unfastening those nearest the door – the six in Brann’s group, and the next one along. He stood them in the corridor and looked along the line. His gaze stopped when it fell on the boy who had been sick when they first came aboard. While most of the others had adapted to the movement of the ship – in fact, some, including Brann, had actually found that it lulled them to sleep – the lad had continued to be ill without respite, and looked as weak as he must have felt.
Boar snorted in derision. ‘Captain asked for the seven most recent, ’cause he wants the ones who haven’t been weakened by all the sitting around you maggots do. But you,’ he prodded the sick boy in the chest with a force that rocked him onto his heels, ‘you won’t do, will you? Pathetic little worm.’ He shoved the boy back into the room and fastened him back to the chain, taking instead the next one available: the thin boy who had spoken to them earlier.
‘You’ll do,’ he grunted,