Black Feathers

59

Within seconds of being conscious, Grimwold wished he were dead.

It was still night, darker than it had been before he entered the boy’s tent. Every part of his body hurt but his agonies were worst around his temples, eyes and groin. He already had a creeping sense of what the boy had done to him but his mind could only scream denials.

For a while he didn’t move. Dawn’s arrival would make an inspection easier. At least he wouldn’t have to move his hands around and hurt himself in the darkness. But dawn, if it was coming at all, was taking all the time in the world. Suffering took him into other rhythms of existence in which his body’s natural painkillers flowed. Not enough to take the pain away, but enough to let him travel away from it. In this half awareness it was easy to ignore the truth: that he was so badly hurt he could barely move.

The boy had battered so hard on his ears Grimwold didn’t think he could hear any more. The only sound was a continuous metallic whine. Listening to it was another distraction from a pain that engulfed his nerves like flames. He became aware of other noises, timeless beats behind the constant echoing in his head. It took a while to register that these noises were coming from outside of him. He recognised the call of blackbirds, sparrows and tits. They must have been in the hedgerows all around him. It was soothing and diverting to hear them until he realised their deeper significance:

Daybreak had come and still his world was black.

Now he had to move, had to explore himself regardless of the pain it caused him. He reached up to his face, new agony awakening along his arms. It felt as though he’d been smashed by a claw hammer, not the fists of a boy. Something was wrong with his hands; his fingers wouldn’t move properly. Still he brought his palms to his face. Before they touched the place where his eyes should have been they met a thin, splintery resistance and the touch sent lances into his head.

Oh no. No, no, no. What has he done?

He tried to touch the things in his eyes with just his fingers but his fingers had grown spines. He brought one hand to his mouth to find it barbed. He began to whimper. Suddenly he needed to do this very quickly and it hurt so very much. Several long straight thorns had been pushed right through every finger. Grimwold had to find the broader end of each one, bite on it and pull his hand away to extract it. None of them came out easily. His palms had also been impaled many times, from front to back and back to front. The effort of turning his smashed arms and wrists first one way and then the other in order to allow extraction of each thorn was almost as bad as each removal. All the while the hedgerow birds trilled their chorus in the black dawn.

When his right hand was free of piercings, he brought it trembling to his face. Again, the sharp, prickly resistance and the skewering pain deep into his eye only confirmed what he’d suspected for a while. The boy had put out his eyes with spikes of hawthorn. Nearby, a murder of crows cawed and cackled before taking off and flying away. The sound drew a rattled gasp of terror from his throat. He heard their laughter fade as they left him. He had a sense they’d been watching.

Grimwold removed both thorns, damaging his eyeballs further. They leaked onto cheeks already wet with tears. He made no attempt to stifle his crying. He doubted he could have stopped himself even if he’d tried. Whimpering and sobbing, he removed the thorns from his left hand and then the ones from his genitals and the soles of his feet.

Ruined, bleeding and exhausted, he slept until the cold woke him. The boy had stripped him to perform his operations and he shivered as he regained consciousness. Grimwold wished for death again, but death did not come and he sensed it would not. He stood up, so much pain in his body it was hard to isolate where it began and ended. He began to stumble, mud pressing into the many wounds in his feet and everything he touched with his outstretched hands sending lightning bolts of agony all the way to his spine. After an hour of faltering reconnaissance, he had a vague idea of where he was in the field where the boy had camped. The tent and the boy were gone but Grimwold’s night persisted.

Through its darkness he tried to find a way home.