The Miscreant (15 page)

“You better. Cranston’s laudanum doesn’t cure all my pains.”

Rose rolled her eyes and kissed him. “You boys are all the same.”

“Hey, I am a man!”

Cranston’s voice preceded him into the ward. “Then get your man ass out of that bunk, and try not to whine as much as you did last time.”

Garran groaned, but he did as the physic ordered and grabbed his crutches. “I wouldn’t complain so much if you weren’t so stingy with the laudanum.”

“I have given you far too much already. Has anyone ever told you that you have an addictive personality?”

“People call me a dick all the time. I’m also susceptible to acquiring bad habits.”

“Clever. Since your body is healing so fast, let’s help it along by getting you some exercise. I want you to hobble around the room as much as you can throughout the day. Take a break when it starts to hurt. I mean really hurt, not just a little ache like you get before begging me for more medication.”

Garran grumbled and gestured rudely at Cranston, but he did as he ordered. Despite his complaining, Garran was set on leaving the sick ward more than anyone. He spent the day making laps around the large tent until his arms and legs ached. It was nice getting outside for some fresh air and being allowed some mobility even as restrictive as it was, but the novelty quickly wore off and he became bored once again.

It was late, but Garran was restless. His knitting bones itched as he lay on his bunk staring up at the dark roof. Colin assured him that his still was running well and that he was dutifully following Garran’s precise instructions, but he needed to see it for himself. More importantly, he needed to see Rose away from the infirmary and its inhibitive lack of privacy.

He grabbed his crutches and hobbled away from his bunk. He was not supposed to leave without Cranston’s permission, but Garran was not the type to waste time seeking it out. The lone soldier posted near the infirmary looked up from his post when Garran shuffled outside.

“You trying to make a break for it, or are you just getting some air?” the soldier asked.

“I need to step out for a bit.”

“I can’t let anyone leave without the doc’s or the commander’s say-so.”

“I need to check on my still. If they mess up the batch, it could make people sick or worse.”

“We wouldn’t want that. I’ll pretend I didn’t hear you mention a still just like I’ll pretend you didn’t give me a bottle of hooch when you came back.”

Garran smiled, raised a crutch in salute, and headed for his crew’s tent. It was only a couple of hours past the supper meal, and most of the men were still up talking, rolling dice, or playing cards. Several pairs of eyes looked up at his entrance.

“What are you doing out of bed, boy?” Trent asked.

“I wanted to check on the brew.”

Colin said, “I told you, I’ve got it covered.”

“I trust you, but this is my baby, and I need to see for myself.”

Garran limped up to the still, checked the boiler’s temperature, and filled a bottle. He took a sip, sloshed it around in his mouth, and swallowed.

“You’ve done a great job, gentlemen. Now to see to my second favorite lady.”

Trent and Colin exchanged nervous glances and Trent said, “You should just get back to bed. There’ll be plenty of time for that when you can do it without risking hurting yourself.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I just need you back on the crew as soon as possible, and I don’t want you to do something that could slow down your progress. I’m pretty sure the doc don’t want you gallivanting around in the middle of the night.”

Garran looked at his friends suspiciously and darted out of the tent. He sneaked past the soldiers guarding the women’s tents and looked for Rose, but he could not find her. On a gut-rending hunch, he followed the trail to their usual rendezvous site. He was a score of paces away when he heard the sounds of someone engaged in a dalliance in the small clearing. When he moved closer, he fought to hold back the rage in his heart and the vomit climbing up his throat when Dominic turned and leered as Garran stood at the edge of the small copse.

“Don’t say a word, Rose,” Garran said. “It’s rude to talk with your mouth full.”

He turned away. He wanted nothing more than to attack Dominic, but even if he were healthy, he knew he could not beat the bigger man in a fight. His hands trembled so violently that it made operating his crutches almost impossible. He flung them away and gritted his teeth against the pain as he fled the clearing.

“Where ya going, boy?” Dominic called out as Garran shambled away. “I’ll finish faster if you stay and watch!”

Garran tried to block the image and Dominic’s foul deeds from his mind, but they seared themselves into his heart and soul. He tried to tell himself that perhaps she was not a willing participant, but he knew as soon as he thought it that it was a fantasy. He had believed her story about the things she did out of necessity and hardship, but his heart told him it was all a lie.

He shoved the bottle of booze into the soldier’s hands when he returned to the infirmary. Sleep refused to come no matter how hard Garran willed the darkness to take him from this world of pain and betrayal. First Claire, then his mother, and now Rose; all betrayed him out of a sense of selfish desires.

Unable to sleep, Garran lurched from his bunk and bulled his way into Cranston’s small quarters at the rear of the infirmary. The physic startled awake when Garran kicked his bunk and hissed at the pain it elicited.

Cranston squinted into the darkness. “Garran, is that you? What is it?”

“Laudanum, now, and a lot of it.”

“Garran, I have told you time and time again, I am giving you all I can. I can give you willow bark extract for now, but if it isn’t enough, you will just have to bear the pain a while longer.”

“That’s not the pain I need obliterated. Now, you can go get the laudanum, or you can sleep the rest of your days with one eye open, because if something doesn’t take this ache away this instant, I will drag you down to share in my living hell.”

Cranston sighed and swung his legs over the bed. “Cyril is going to demand why I am getting the laudanum at this hour.”

Garran turned the wick on the oil lamp sitting on the nightstand. “Look at my face and tell me if you think I give a damn about Cyril or anyone else in this world.”

“All right, go back to your bed. I’ll bring you what you want.”

Garran stepped aside and let the physic pass by before returning to his bunk. Every minute he waited felt like an eternity. He was certain Cyril and his soldiers would barge in at any moment to arrest him for threatening Cranston, but when he heard the tent rustle, the physic entered alone.

“I don’t know what has you so upset, but this is not going to cure it.”

Garran snatched the bottle from his hand. “I don’t need a cure; I just need to not feel. What did you tell Cyril?”

“I told him you fell and needed it to get to sleep.”

“Did he believe you?”

“I doubt it, but he didn’t argue. Garran, I don’t know what happened, but this is the only time you will bully me. The next time you need my help, you can go rot in hell.”

Garran downed the laudanum, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and snorted. “I was born there. Hell holds no fear for me.”

CHAPTER 13

The next day was lost in Garran’s semi-dream state as the world flowed by in a hazy, laudanum-induced stupor. Several people came to visit him, but they all wore the wrong faces. His mother came to remind him of his uselessness and what a disappointment he was. Claire sneered at him as he lay immobilized by the powerful drug and told him he deserved all the pain and suffering that came his way for ruining her life. At some point in the day, Colin showed up, but he was wearing Dominic’s face and just loomed over his prostrate form and laughed while Rose pleasured him.

Garran did not care. The laudanum’s ability to block his physical aches worked almost as well for his emotional pain. He saw and heard their hatefulness, but he could not muster the energy to give a damn. It was bliss. The powerful drug was a suit of armor shielding him from everything the world threw at him. He had no concept of the passage of time. Garran vaguely became aware of the light intruding on his senses, waning into darkness, only to return some time later.

His blurry eyes slowly focused on a distinctive shape in the room. Cyril was sitting in a chair near the foot of his bed. At least he thought it was Cyril. It wore the commander’s face, but given his previous delusions, it could well be a coatrack.

“Wake up, you little prick.”

“Mommy, is that you?” Garran felt a vice-like hand clamp down on his injured leg. “Ow, I’m up!”

Cyril did not look pleased. “Get up and grab your crap. Cranston wants you out of his infirmary. He says if you’re well enough to go traipsing through camp and extort drugs from him then you’re well enough to sleep in your own bed.”

Garran scrubbed his face with his hands, felt several days’ worth of chin stubble, and swung his legs over the bed. “I was going to ask to leave anyway. I’m done with all this laying around doing nothing.”

“It seems to me like you’ve done plenty.”

“I haven’t done as much as some people.”

“Yeah, I heard some things. Now maybe you understand why there are rules about fraternizing with the women.”

Garran sat on the edge of his bunk and stared at his feet. “Rose said she was only defending herself when she killed the man. Is that true?”

Cyril shrugged. “It might be. I only get a partial report on the people they send me. I can tell you this; they found her in Merribourne trying to board a ship to Sorne with a trunk full of the man’s valuables.”

Garran sighed and wagged his head. “I’m so stupid.”

“You’re young, but I guess it’s the same thing. Are you up to moving around a bit?”

“Ready or not, I’m going to do it. I need something to distract me, and I’m pretty sure I burned my bridges with Cranston.”

“You not only burned them, you pissed on the ashes. Come on, I’ll set you up with some light duty until you get back into the swing of things.”

Garran nodded, slipped on his boots, and followed Cyril out of the tent with his spare clothes tucked between his arm and his crutch. The immediate camp was mostly empty, but the sounds of men sawing, chopping, and falling trees echoed through the forest. A fellow named Keith was the sole occupant in the tent. He was laid up claiming a stomachache, but he was really there to ensure the still ran properly.

“It’s good you’re back on the job,” Cyril said. “The swill coming out of here is tolerable, but the quality has dropped.”

“You know I like to add a little something special to your bottles, Commander.”

“Whatever it is, get back to it. Just make sure everyone keeps behaving themselves, or I’ll shut it down in an instant. I can always get some booze from town. That’s the nice thing about being in charge.”

“Will do, Commander.”

Garran spent the remainder of the day tinkering with the still and getting it exactly the way he liked it. His crew greeted him warmly when they filed in at the day’s end.

“It’s about time you quit lying about and got back to work,” Trent said as they sat around the open fire pit in the center of their team’s camp.

“I kind of wore out my welcome at the infirmary.”

“I figured as much, although it took longer than I expected.”

“My injuries slowed me down, and the laudanum made me tolerable.”

“I’m sorry you had to find out about your lady friend that way.”

“You all knew, didn’t you? Why didn’t you warn me?”

“Would you have listened, or would you have gotten mad and told us we were wrong, that you two had something special?”

Garran nodded. “I guess you’re right.”

“A man’s business is his own, and we weren’t going to poke our noses in it.”

“I just thought she really cared about me.”

“Maybe she did, but she is also a whore. You want my advice, keep your relationships all business and you won’t be disappointed. All women are whores one way or another. Some are honest about it and take your coin; others take bits of your soul one piece at a time until you’re nothing but a hollow shell of a man.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“I speak from decades of experience, lad.”

Colin appeared out of the darkness and sat on a log next to Garran. “Rose is outside of camp. She wants to talk to you.”

“She can go rot,” Garran snarled.

***

Garran’s strength and mobility increased over the next several days. He went back to work trimming logs and worked through the pain until he was unable to numb it with alcohol and ignore it. He spent his frequent breaks scouring the forest and found a patch of rapture root. It was a poor substitute for laudanum, but it did the job. Rose continually tried to get his attention when he came through the chow line, but Garran always ignored her. Time was healing his injuries, and hate numbed his pain.

***

Zoran Babcock watched the men clearing the forest and digging the road below. At first glance, the logging crew appeared to have felled trees in a haphazard and unskilled manner, but as he studied the terrain with a soldier’s eye instead of a logger’s, it was clear that it was intentional and quite clever. The logs were dropped throughout the work site, and surrounding the camp all but negated his cavalry. This was a big crew too, and attacking them on foot took away his greatest advantage.

Another problem, he realized after watching them for the past three days, was that this crew maintained their tools instead of securing them with the soldiers like all previous conscription camps had. Normally, he would wait until dark and assault the unarmed camp from horseback, but their commander was obviously a clever man, and his actions took away both of those advantages.

The crisscrossing logs would be a far greater hindrance for his men in the dark than those defending the camp’s perimeter. A night-time assault might give him a small advantage in that most of the men would be asleep, but that edge would likely prove short-lived. That also meant the defenders would be concentrated within the camp, and the darkness made his archers almost useless.

No, it would have to be a day-time assault when they were the most spread out and least expecting an attack. He would lose the benefit of surprise the night gave him, but he would gain the full use of his archers against an enemy who had little ranged capability. He did not have the advantage of numbers that he would like, but his men were killers, armed and armored against a bunch of criminals wielding tools. The attack was going to be costlier than his previous assaults, but not all could be runaway victories. Such were the risks associated with his and his men’s chosen profession.

***

Garran wielded his reaping blade against the fallen tree’s boughs with vigor. His muscles still felt a little sluggish after such a long convalescence, and his mostly mended bones ached a bit, but the exercise appeared to hasten his recovery better than lounging about did. It felt good to get out of the tent and into the fresh air where he could fall deep enough into his work to forget about Rose and everyone else he detested without overindulging in alcohol and laudanum.

“Hey, Holt!” someone shouted a short distance away.

Garran looked up from his work and directed his eyes toward the voice. Dominic was standing on the stump of a recently dropped tree and rubbing a wild rose he had found on his exposed member. He gyrated his hips while caressing his genitals with the flower and laughing uproariously along with everyone else watching the spectacle. Garran tried to summon the energy to hate the man, but he could only chuckle along with the rest of the crew when Dominic began furiously humping the flower.

The laughter died quicker than it started when Dominic stopped his pantomime in mid-thrust and stared stupidly at the crossbow quarrel now sticking out of his left shoulder. There was a moment of numbed confusion before men began shouting and bells clanged as the soldiers and workers shouted an alarm.

Garran stood amongst the chaos erupting all around him and stared as armed men charged down the slope and cut savagely into the road crew. The suddenness of the assault froze him in place, and all he could do was watch helplessly as his friends raised axes, picks, and even shorn tree limbs against the raiders.

Several soldiers guided their mounts between the dropped trees to engage the attackers, but they stood out and made excellent targets for those wielding crossbows. Garran looked on as the guards fell from their horses one after another. His eyes caught a flash of movement coming toward him. He stared dumbfounded as a man in dark leathers raised a sword and was moments away from splitting his head like a melon. An axe flashed in from his left side and buried itself in the man’s face.

Dominic jerked his axe free and punched Garran in the shoulder. “Snap out of it, you stupid little prick!”

Garran nodded, tried but failed to mumble his thanks, and tightened his grip on the reaping blade dangling loosely in his hand. He looked back to where he last saw Colin and found him hunkered behind the tree they had been stripping.

“Colin, are you okay?”

Colin stood and took a step toward him. “Yeah, Garran, I—”

A crossbow bolt struck him low in the gut and cut short his words. Colin’s hand flew to the wound, and all he could do was look from it to Garran with an expression of fear and confusion. The boy fell back onto the ground, his lips moving silently as they tried to finish whatever it was he was about to say.

Garran looked up and saw the killer drop his expended crossbow, pull a short sword from the sheath at his hip, and charge. Garran felt something break loose from deep within him. It was as if his stomach had been holding a raging inferno within his body, and it had just exploded to send fire coursing through his veins. Just as quickly, the flames turned to ice, and a feeling of immense calm washed over him.

The man still came at him, but it was as if he were charging through water. It was not just the man in front of him moving slowly. Everything around him flowed at a glacial pace. Ahead and to his left he saw Dominic swing his axe at another raider in a languid arc that took several seconds to sunder the man’s ribcage and destroy the heart beneath it. A crossbow quarrel sailed at him with the speed of a hurled snowball. Garran tilted his head to the side and felt the air whisper in his ear with the bolt’s passing.

He turned, picked up Colin’s reaping blade with his free hand, and ran at the man who was all but frozen in time. Garran buried the reaping blade in his right hand in the man’s gut, spun around, and sank the left one low into his back. He jerked his blades free and charged up the slope toward the thickest knot of intruders.

Garran was a dervish moving and slashing amongst the men who appeared almost as immobile as the trees towering over them. The only thing fast enough to match his movements were the eyes of those around him, and many of those could do nothing but watch helplessly as death danced within their ranks until it was their turn to fall beneath his flashing blades.

Zoran watched the beginnings of yet another successful assault from atop his mount a couple of hundred yards up the hill, flanked by two of his lieutenants. His smile turned to consternation when he saw a lone figure flashing between his men and leaving carnage in his wake. It took him a full minute to comprehend what was happening, what the young man must surely be, and the undeniable defeat he represented.

“Impossible,” the mercenary captain muttered.

Zoran continued to watch the debacle unfold, praying that luck would rear its ugly head and take down the instrument of death rapidly coming his way. But if luck was taking a part in the battle this day, it had chosen not to side with him.

Zoran turned to one of his lieutenants. “Sound the retreat.”

Garran vaguely heard the muffled blare of a bugle from somewhere up the hill. He spotted a small knot of men gazing down upon the battle from horseback and knew they must be the ones leading the assault that had killed one of the few real friends he had in this world. He would not allow them to live to kill another.

The man he marked as their commander jerked the reins to wheel his horse about, but in the one or two seconds it took him to turn away, Garran had cut the vast distance between them in half. The rider’s spurred boot heels rose and jabbed into the animal’s flanks. The horse’s haunches dipped and flexed to launch itself and its rider away from the battle.

With a roar of defiant outrage, Garran hurled one of his reaping blades. The cumbersome weapon tumbled end over end with the speed of a loosed arrow. The noise it made as it cut through the air was audible even over the din of battle. The stout blade struck true and buried its eight inches of thick steel in Zoran’s back.