Soul Seekers (4 page)

9

‘Run!’ Cas whispered.

The four of them dashed across an open meadow and into the inky blackness of the forest as a chorus of voices and whistles echoed to and fro behind them. The crackle of a single musket shot burst out and Cas heard the bullet rattle through the trees nearby as they ran.

‘They know where we are!’ Jude yelled.

Cas risked a glanced over his shoulder and through the dense trees he could see the camp fires sparkling like a galaxy in the darkness. Some of the lights were moving and he realised that soldiers were lighting lanterns and moving in pursuit.

‘Keep running!’

The forest was almost entirely black as Cas stumbled over tree roots and through thickets of undergrowth as he tried to keep heading toward Boston. The night air was cold on his skin and the damp foliage was already soaking his clothes. He could hear Siren running just behind him, and further back Jude and Emily struggling to keep pace.

Then, through the darkness he heard what sounded like distant thunder.

Cas slowed and listened, the sound rumbling through the trees behind them.

‘Horses,’ Siren said.

Cas cursed and kept running. The rumbling noise, the thundering of countless hooves, moved out to their left and right. Cas’s eyesight was slowly adjusting to the gloomy darkness of the woods but without a lantern he was unable to travel fast enough to prevent the horses from getting in front of them. Another couple of minutes and they would be encircled and trapped.

Siren’s hand gripped Cas’s shoulder and drew him to a halt in the darkness as Jude and Emily crashed through the undergrowth to join them. They stood in the silence, chests heaving, and watched as the horses thundered past nearby. The riders held lanterns aloft as they rode down a track that weaved through the woods.

‘Let’s stay here for a moment,’ Siren whispered. ‘The horses can’t get this deep into the trees so they’ll have to stay on the main road. It’s called the Concord Turnpike. We stay quiet and wait to see what they do.’

‘They’ll trap us is what they’ll do,’ Cas replied anxiously.

Siren shook her head. ‘No. They’ll need a lot of men for that. We just need to give them the slip before the army gets organised.’

Cas looked behind them. Ranks of glowing lanterns bobbed like stars fallen on the surface of an ocean, twinkling through the trees as soldiers began dispersing into the woods looking for the escaped prisoners. But there were nowhere near enough of them to search the entire forest, especially at night. Cas almost allowed himself the thought that they might get away when Jude pointed at the lights.

‘They’re tracking us,’ he said. ‘Look, they’re all converging on our path.’

Cas watched as the amassed lights began closing up as one or two soldiers followed the trail of crushed foliage and snapped twigs they had left in their wake.

‘They’ll flush us out,’ he realised, ‘and the horses will be waiting.’

‘We need a plan,’ Siren said, ‘fast.’

‘Keep moving,’ Cas said, ‘but tread more carefully. We need to be quiet.’

Cas lead the way, the voices of the pursuing soldiers echoing through the forest. Cas weaved his way carefully between bushes and trees that loomed out of the blackness, feeling his way with every step.

‘They’re gaining on us,’ Emily whispered is despair.

‘Stay quiet,’ Cas insisted.

Something had caught his attention and as he listened so he heard it again, the faint whisper of running water. Cas quickened his stride until he felt the ground start to slope away from him. He slowed and looked down.

In the darkness he could just make out the surface of a lake stretching away to either side of him and a narrow strip of road crossing the lake. The road was little more than an earthen mound, with wooden posts stuck at intervals on either side into the mud and planks of timber lashed together to create a crude road on which horses, carriages and men could cross without getting stuck in the mud.

‘Must be the Charles River,’ Siren said, ‘just outside of Boston.’

Cas couldn’t see the horse riders on the pikeway but he could see the occasional flicker of a lantern through distant trees. The horses were crossing the reservoir on the turnpike, looking to cut them off somewhere ahead on the road to Boston.

‘We can’t get ahead of them,’ Siren said.

Cas turned and looked back through the forest to where the lanterns of the pursuing soldiers were closing in on them, shouts echoing through the night.

‘We’re not going to,’ he said finally. ‘Siren, help me with this.’

Cas ran onto the bridge and selected the first of the road timbers. He yanked the ropes securing it free and heaved it up off the earth and began dragging it to the edge of the water.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Jude uttered. ‘We haven’t got time to build a canoe!’

‘It’s not a canoe,’ Cas replied. ‘They’ll float.’

‘Shut up and help,’ Siren growled as she shoved Jude by the collar toward Cas.

Cas grabbed another three of the timbers and with Emily, Jude and Siren dragged them to the edge of the water and set them down. Cas then grabbed the ropes that had lashed the planks into place and tossed them to Siren.

‘Now what?’ Emily asked. ‘I hope you don’t expect us to get into the water, it’s freezing!’

‘We’ll need the ropes,’ Cas said, ‘or we won’t make it.’

From behind them a chorus of shouts erupted and was followed by the sound of running boots crashing through the woods as the soldiers charged toward the reservoir.

Cas turned to them.

‘Into the water, as fast as you can!’

*

The sound of four splashes echoed through the woods and the sergeant leading the troops shouted out as he raised his lantern high above his head.

‘There they are lads!’ he bellowed. ‘On me!’

The troops followed their sergeant and stumbled out of the forest onto the pikeway just as a dozen horses galloped onto the wooden beams and thundered toward them. Many of the soldiers carried their long, heavy muskets, while others held flickering lanterns that lit the rippling surface of the lake in a soft glow.

‘There they are, in the water!’

Lieutenant Silas Du Pont, standing in his saddle, pointed out over the lake at the shape of four swimmers in the water drifting away from them. The armed soldiers raised their muskets and a ripple of flashes briefly lit the pikeway as they fired unison, the gunshots crashing out deafeningly into the night.

Tiny splashes hit the water around the four swimmers, spouts of white foam churning the surface as round after round smacked into the water around them.

‘They’re almost out of range!’ shouted a sergeant.

Lieutenant Du Pont gestured wildly at his troops.

‘Get down the bank alongside them! They’ll have to come ashore before they freeze!’

The soldiers whirled and dashed away, running down the banks of the reservoir as the horses galloped back toward the turnpike and turned east, following their comrade’s progress from the opposite bank. The sound of their hooves faded away until all that could be seen was the twinkling of their lanterns through the distant trees.

‘That was too close.’

Cas looked down from the tree branch on which he lay, some ten feet above the pikeway on the edge of the treeline. Siren lay flat on the thick limb just behind him while on the other side of the trunk lay Jude and Emily.

Cas took his hands off the rope coiled in front of him and dropped it down off the limb. It uncoiled until it almost reached the ground, and one by one they used it to climb back down out of the tree.

Cas grabbed the end of the rope and hurled it up out of sight into the branches.

‘That’s bought us some time,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ Siren admitted. ‘But they’re in front of us now and they’ll soon figure out that they’re chasing four planks of wood.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Cas said. ‘The army’s too big to move until dawn so they’re stuck here. Once they’ve given up the search we’ll head for the city. That way we’ll arrive before they do.’

Emily shook her head.

‘And then what? I’m hungry, thirsty, cold and tired. How are we going to survive?’

Cas thought hard for a moment. ‘We’ll figure that out when we get to Boston.’

A fresh chorus of voices shouted out from somewhere further down the reservoir.

‘Looks like they’ve found the planks,’ Jude said.

‘Let’s move,’ Siren snapped. ‘I don’t want to be here when they get back.’

* * *

10

Boston, Massachusetts

The sound of a very loud bell woke Cas from a deep and dreamless sleep. He blinked his eyes open, fully expecting to see his bedroom wall like he always did, filled with posters of the aeroplanes that his father flew.

Instead, he saw the rickety wall of a barn that was shot through with slivers of bright sunlight that shafted through the musty air. His back tingled from where countless shafts of straw were poking into his skin, his whole body ached from the cold and his stomach rumbled from hunger and thirst.

‘There are people outside.’

Cas turned to see Siren on her knees and peering through gaps in the barn wall. He dragged his weary body up into a sitting position and rubbed his eyes.

‘What time is it?’ he asked.

‘Beats me,’ Siren replied. ‘My watch vanished when we got here.’

Cas looked for at his own watch, a gift from his parents on his eighth birthday that had never lost time or failed him but it was no longer on his wrist, vanished after the accident inside the base had happened. It all seemed so long ago already and yet in reality it wouldn’t happen for more than two hundred years.

Beside him Emily and Jude awoke, both looking haggard.

The barn was filled with hay bales and leather saddles, some kind of tannery that they had found in the early hours of the morning. Exhausted, they had staggered into the building and collapsed on to the soft hay and fallen asleep within moments.

‘We need to get out of here,’ Cas said as he remembered the pursuit of the previous night. ‘The army must be close to us by now.’

‘Something big is happening out there,’ Siren said. ‘We should take a look.’

Cas joined Siren beside the doors of the tannery and peeked through a gap.

A large town square was dominated on one side by cattle pens that looked as though they were being used to auction off animals. A man in a red velvet suit and a big white wig was shouting out bids and waving bits of paper in his hand as he did so, a large crowd gathered before him. A huge building with a clock tower loomed over the square, and beyond rows of wooden buildings Cas could see the towering masts and rigging of old sailing ships anchored in the docks.

Across the square marched groups of soldiers, some armed, others off duty.

But it was on the other side of his view that the biggest crowd had amassed, and Cas felt a chill of apprehension rush through him as he recognised what he was looking at.

Boston Common looked bigger than he remembered it, lined on two edges with rows of trees and the estuary of the Cambridge River providing the backdrop. On the common were hundreds of tents. Cas realised that the army they had left behind had marched early and must have arrived in the city at dawn while they slept. The crowd was amassed before a large wooden contraption from which dangled half a dozen loops of thick rope.

‘Nooses,’ Jude Harris guessed as he pressed his nose up against the gaps in the barn wall, ‘for a public hanging.’

Cas could see several Hessian officers on horseback near the gallows, Lieutenant Silas Du Pont among them and running one hand over the glistening dome of his bald head.

‘This is what Kip said would happen,’ Emily whispered in horror. ‘They’re going to hang the prisoners!’

As they watched, two lines of soldiers marched toward the gallows either side of a row of prisoners manacled to each other, their heads hung low.

‘There’s your dad!’ Jude yelped, then fell silent as Siren clapped her hand across his mouth.

‘You want to hang too, just keep shouting you idiot,’ she snarled at him.

‘We’ve got to do something,’ Emily whispered, small tears glistening like glass beads on her eyelids as she turned to look at Cas.

To Cas’s amazement, both Jude and Siren looked expectantly across at him as a new and unexpected weight descended upon his shoulders. In just a few hours he’d gone from being the bullied new boy in the school to a leader and he hadn’t even asked for it. In fact, he didn’t even want it.

Cas looked out across the square and forced himself to think.

‘Follow me,’ he said.

Cas led them out of the tannery, slipping out of the door and latching it behind them. Both of the large crowds were focused on the cattle auction and the prisoners being marched toward the gallows as Cas hurried across the square.

‘What are we going to do?’ Siren whispered anxiously.

‘I don’t know yet,’ Cas admitted. ‘I’m kind of making this up as I go.’

The cattle pens were strong, made of thick timbers bound with iron braces, but the gates were wide and held back by rope latches sitting loosely atop wood pillars. Cas slowed as they moved along behind the crowd. From his viewpoint he could see both the cattle and the gallows. Anxiety pinched at his stomach as he saw his father and several other prisoners being marched up onto the gallows. Among them was old Kip.

‘Hurry, Cas’!’ Emily squealed.

Cas hunted around for a moment longer and then saw what he was looking for.

A lantern was hanging from the frame of a doorway, probably left burning by accident when all others had been extinguished at first light. Cas turned and headed for the lantern even as the booming voice of a town crier echoed across the square.

‘All ye!! All ye!! We are gathered to witness the punishment of criminals and enemies of the courts. Behold the hand of justice before the servants of Queen and Country!
All ye!
’

Cas dashed across the square, Siren right behind him as they skittered to a halt beneath the dangling lantern. Siren boosted Cas and he unhooked the lantern before dropping back to the ground.

‘Oh you’re kidding me,’ Jude uttered, guessing what Cas had in mind. ‘This could go badly wrong.’

Cas turned to Siren and Emily. ‘Get to the cattle pen,’ he said. ‘As soon as I give the signal, open the gates.’

* * *