The Outcasts (5 page)
Authors: John Flanagan
Tags: #Fantasy, #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Action & Adventure, #General
And in that second, Karina had a flash of insight. She knew what Thorn needed to hear.
“You can help me. I need you,” she said.
He looked her directly in the eyes then, searching for any sign of dishonesty or falsehood.
“Hal needs you,” she continued. “He needs a man’s influence and guidance. There are things you can tell him that I can’t—about being a warrior and about the bond that forms among shipmates.” She paused to let that thought sink in, and saw that it had reached him. “He’s growing up fast and it’s not easy for him. He’s different from the other boys. He’s half Araluen and half Skandian. And life is hard on people who are different. He needs someone to show him how to stand up for himself. I can’t do that.” She paused. “You could.”
“Maybe … ,” Thorn began. She could see he was thinking about it, starting to accept the idea that he might have something useful to do with his life, instead of drinking it away.
“Or you could just continue to feel sorry for yourself and waste your life,” she said.
He didn’t respond to that immediately. But after several seconds, he asked, “How did you know about the promise?”
“You told me,” she said. “One night when you were drunk.”
He frowned, thinking. “When was that? I don’t remember it.”
She smiled sadly and shook her head. “I can’t remember which one. There were so many, Thorn.”
He nodded. “That’s true.”
Karina could see he was wavering. “Look, I need help around the place here. The eating house is a good business and it’s growing. It’s getting to be more than I can handle on my own. I could use help with things like firewood and the heavy work around the place—cleaning and repairs and painting. They’re all things you can do with one hand. And you can keep an eye on Hal. Teach him the skills he’s going to need as he grows older. You can move in with us. You’d have a warm place to sleep.”
Thorn was shaking his head. “No. I couldn’t live in the house with you. That wouldn’t be proper. People would talk. It’d be bad for your reputation.”
She smiled. “I think I could bear it,” she said. “But if it bothers you, you could fix up the lean-to at the back of the house. That’d stop people gossiping.”
He thought about it and nodded several times to himself.
“Yes. That’d be all right.”
“I’ll pay you, of course,” Karina added. Once again his gaze shot up to meet hers. She could see a sense of pride in his eyes—something that had been missing for years now.
“I don’t want charity,” he said.
She laughed at him. “And you won’t get it! I’ll make sure you earn every kroner I pay you.”
“Well then … maybe this would work out.” Thorn pursed his lips. The idea of working for Karina was an attractive one. And the notion that he might be able to help the boy and guide his steps through early manhood was one that fascinated him. It was not the path he might have chosen for himself, but definitely something that could be worth doing. If he couldn’t use the skills he’d learned anymore, at least he could teach them to someone else, he thought. That would be a useful thing to do. And above all, Thorn wanted to be useful. He’d spent long enough feeling useless.
“One thing,” Karina added. “You’ll have to stop drinking.”
There was no compromise in her voice. Thorn hesitated.
“Sometimes my arm hurts,” he said.
But Karina was firm. “I’m sorry to hear that. But I’m sure there were times when you felt lots of pain before you lost the arm. And you dealt with it.”
“That’s true,” he admitted.
“Then you’ll just have to deal with the pain when it happens—without trying to drink it away.”
He took a deep breath. “I think I can handle that,” he said, committing himself.
She smiled at him. “I’m sure you can.”
“So I might get busy looking at that lean-to today. Might as well get it shipshape and then move in. Then you can give me a list of things you need me to do.”
“There is one thing that’s top priority,” Karina said, and when he looked at her with a question in his eyes, she continued, in a voice that brooked no argument.
“Have a bath. A long one.”
That had been six years ago—it was now twelve years since the raid that had cost Hal’s father his life, and Hal was almost sixteen. In that time, Thorn had become a familiar sight around Karina’s inn. He had moved into the lean-to at the back of the main building, although his idea of “making it shipshape” left much to be desired, in Karina’s eyes. He patched a few leaks in the roof and several of the larger gaps in the walls. But the lean-to remained a dark and forbidding cavern, strewn with his clothes and belongings. And while his personal hygiene had improved somewhat, it still left a good deal to be desired.
“I’m twelve times cleaner than I used to be,” he announced proudly.
When Karina pointed out that this meant his bathing schedule had gone from once a year to once a month, which was nothing to really boast about, he muttered darkly, “I don’t get all that dirty. Baths are for them as is dirty.”
From time to time, he felt the lure of the brandy keg, particularly on those nights when the pain throbbed in his missing hand. But he fought it and overcame it. He knew that Karina had given him a second chance and he knew that would be a one-time thing only. And as he fell into the routine of working round the inn, he realized that he could not afford to risk going back to his old ways.
The work itself was satisfying—particularly to someone who had come to believe that his days of being useful were over. He cut wood for the fire, wielding the heavy ax with his left hand as if it were no more than a small hatchet. He looked after the ongoing maintenance jobs around the inn and, at the end of each day, he felt the satisfaction of having done a worthwhile job. Of being of value to someone.
Perhaps this kind of menial work wasn’t as fulfilling as being a warrior. But it was a long way better than being a drunken, morose wreck.
Best of all, he became part of Hal’s life as the boy grew older. He delighted in Hal’s enthusiasm and energy. And in his imagination and inventiveness. The boy had an affinity for tools, and a natural ability to work with wood. Thorn had been a capable carpenter himself at one stage. Of course, with a missing hand he was no longer able to carry out the fine detailed work he used to do. But he found that Erak had saved his old kit of tools and he presented them to the boy, then patiently taught him how to use each one—adze, chisels, knives, spoon-drills, planes and small shaping axes. With good tools of his own, and under Thorn’s tutelage, Hal’s natural ability grew into real skill.
As a result, the old sea wolf became a willing accomplice in Hal’s constructions. The boy had become more than a skilled craftsman—he had an inventive streak that, to Thorn, bordered on genius.
“He sees something in his mind, a new way to do something,” Thorn had said on more than one occasion. “Then he just makes it!”
chapter
three
three
“
P
ass me another bucket, Thorn.”
P
ass me another bucket, Thorn.”
Hal was perched on a ladder in his mother’s kitchen, twisting sideways so that he could tip buckets of water into a large cask. He grunted as he took another full pail from the shabby old former sea wolf and lifted it above his shoulder height. As he did so, he noted with one corner of his mind that Thorn was hoisting the buckets up to him without any sign of effort, even though he had only one hand to work with.
As the water splashed into the half-filled cask, there was an ominous groaning sound.
Thorn frowned. “What was that?” he said suspiciously.
Hal handed him down the empty bucket and made a dismissive gesture.
“Nothing. Just the cask staves settling into place under the weight.”
“I know how they feel,” said Stig, entering the kitchen with two more buckets that he had filled from the well in the yard outside the kitchen. “How many more of these will you need?”
Stig was Hal’s best friend. As a matter of fact, aside from Thorn, he was Hal’s only real friend. The other Skandian boys tended to ostracize Hal, taunting him because of his mixed parentage, and because his mother was a former slave. But they never did so in Stig’s hearing. Stig was big and well muscled and was known to have an unpredictable temper. As a result, the others trod warily around him.
There was another ominous creaking sound from the cask.
“You’re sure that’s the staves settling?” Thorn said.
Hal cast an impatient look at him. “It was a dry, empty barrel,” he said. “They always do that. The wood expands, the staves creak against each other.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Thorn said. “My experience has been more with full barrels in the past.”
“You did your share of emptying them, though,” Stig said. He grinned to make sure Thorn knew he was joking, not criticizing. Thorn took the comment philosophically.
“That’s true,” he said, shaking his head in regret over some of the excesses of his past.
The cask was Hal’s latest brain wave. He had decided to install a running-water system in his mam’s kitchen. A zigzag pipe ran down from the cask to the kitchen bench. A spigot at the base of the cask would allow water to run out through the pipe and down to the basin.
“You’ll never need to fetch water from the well,” he had told his mother, not noticing her dubious expression. “Thorn can fill the cask for you each morning.”
He had constructed all the components in his work shed and waited for a day when Karina had gone down the coast to a market some ten kilometers away. Then he’d summoned Thorn and Stig and began to install his new system for her.
After mounting the cask on a bracket he had already set high on the kitchen wall, and attaching the piping, they had begun filling the cask with buckets of water pumped from the well.
Now that the cask was a little over half full, impatience got the better of them.
“Why don’t we try it?” Thorn suggested. He was eager to see the new system working.
As if in response to being mentioned, the cask gave another of those ominous creaks that had been worrying Thorn. He glanced at Hal, who shook his head impatiently.
“It’s the staves settling,” he said. “That’s all.”
He stepped forward, placing a large basin under the end of the pipe. He pulled on a cord attached to one side of the spigot and turned it. The action was a little stiff and the wooden peg squeaked in protest. They heard the soft gurgle of water running out of the cask. It zigzagged down the piping until a silver stream of liquid splashed out of the lower end and began to fill the basin.
Stig and Thorn applauded and Hal beamed.
“It works!” he said triumphantly. Then, realizing that such a reaction might imply that he had feared it might not work, he nodded to himself and said, in a more matter-of-fact tone, “Yes. Excellent. Well done. Just as I thought.”
The water was nearing the brim of the basin and he reached up casually to tug on a second string that would shut off the spigot.
It stuck. The spigot refused to turn.
Water began to spill over onto the surface of the table. He tugged the string again, harder this time. The spigot remained stuck. Water continued to flow. And now it was slopping off the edge of the table and onto the kitchen floor.
He tugged harder.
There was a creaking sound once more.
Thorn frowned doubtfully. “Sounds like those staves are still settling.”
In his haste to drill holes into the wall beams, Hal had gone slightly off line with one. As a result, the nail supporting one side of the bracket and the cask had missed the timber wall beam. It was supported only by the weak plaster covering. As the weight in the cask grew, the nail had lost its tenuous hold. The bracket was gradually tilting to the side, causing the groaning noise that they had all heard. It was now held in place by only the weak, crumbling plaster and Hal’s final attempt to switch off the spigot was enough to break it free.
“Look out!” Thorn yelled. He grabbed Hal by the front of his shirt and heaved him bodily over the table, away from the path of the toppling cask. Stig, sitting to one side, let out a shrill yelp of terror and dived headlong under the sturdy table.
With a resounding crash, the cask hit the edge of the table and disintegrated into its component pieces. Staves and iron hoops flew in all directions, and the thirty-odd bucketfuls of water inside the cask were released in one enormous torrent. Under the table, Stig was momentarily flattened by the weight of water falling on him. He let out a gurgling screech.
The pipes and connecting sections followed the cask, crashing onto the table and the flooded kitchen floor, bouncing and clattering as they disassembled themselves.
Hal, held erect by Thorn’s iron grip on his collar, watched in horror as his beautiful invention, lovingly built over several evenings, destroyed itself in a matter of seconds. The kitchen was a tangle of barrel staves, hoops, pipe sections, bracket timbers and flooding water. The wall in which the bracket had been fastened now displayed a gaping hole where the plaster had been torn loose, exposing the beams beneath it.
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