Memoirs of a Fallen God

Chapter 6

When I awoke the next morning the anger remained. It was no longer the raging fire of the night before, but rather a nest of smoldering coals, well banked and slow burning. I still wished to cause Niroko bodily harm, but it was no longer the impatient, scarcely controllable blood lust of the night before. Now, I felt I could wait.

That morning as we worked the wheat fields, I apologized to Scratch, though I made no effort to explain. A shrug was his only response, and things were back to normal between us. We joked a bit about the yesterday's game of breakerball, made sport of Lord Lax's tantrum, made each other hungry with memories of last night's dinner.

The morning faded into afternoon and we drifted apart as we worked.

The day proved long, hot and boring. I was gathering up another bundle of wheat when one of the older boys, a slave of around sixteen, passed close behind me. As he moved within arm’s reach, he set his hands to my back and gave me a shove.

There was no particular malice in the act, it was simply a thing older boys did to the younger as we worked the fields. A way of saying, "I am larger than you, and I am passing," with actions instead of words.

Usually, I was quite adept at avoiding such minor bullying, but that day, my mind busy wandering the unfamiliar and emotional trails of the day before, I was scarcely paying attention. Instead of the slight shove the older boy no doubt intended, he caught me off guard. I stumbled, tripped, and fell face first into a patch of mud.

Had he walked on, then, I believe that would have been the end of it. I would have stood, wiped off the worst of the muck, and gone back to work. Annoyed, yes, but not unduly so. You get used to that sort of thing when most everyone else is larger than you.

But the other boy didn't leave it there. Oh, I'm sure I looked funny enough, lying there covered in mud. It was natural that the boy should stand there looming over me, laughing. I might have even chuckled myself, in his shoes. But however reasonable and justified his reaction, it was a mistake.

The older boy was half again my size, but I caught him by surprise. He went over easy enough as I barreled into him. In a heartbeat I was on top of him. I struck out with fist and foot and tooth and nail, and I held nothing back.

At first he attempted to fight back, but I was so enraged that any pain I felt at his blows simply failed to register. I felt nothing, nothing but an uncontrollable need to cause as much injury as possible to this big stupid bag of meat who had offended me.

"Get 'im off me," the boy started screaming. "Get 'im off me!"

It took three of them to pull me off of him, and these were not children as we were, but full grown men. They held me back, so I fought them, too. Why would they not let me go? The other boy lay there, crying, bleeding, his continued breathing mocking me.

I spat out a chunk of bloody flesh, though I had no memory of where it had come from.

I think I must have come away scarcely less battered and beaten than the other boy. My face was covered in blood, most of it from a nasty gash above one of my eyes. One of my fingers was bent at an unnatural angle and was starting to throb horribly. But my anger sustained me. I wanted more.

I suppose you might say I have a temper.

Abruptly the rage drained out of me, like water from a leaky barrel. The film of red faded and I was myself again, and horrified at what I'd done. The other boy still lay in a heap; a bloody, weeping mess.

I felt terrible that I'd lost control so completely over something so trivial. I felt bad enough, in fact, that I made a step in the boy's direction intent on apologizing. But before I made it a single pace, the image of him standing over me, laughing, flashed anew in my mind's eye, and the desire to make amends vanished.

Maybe he hadn't deserved what he'd gotten--but he'd had some of it coming, anyways.

It is well for me that those closest to the fight had been fellow slaves, and not hired farmhands, or, gods fend, the overseer himself. Fighting between slaves was...frowned upon. Violently. They did not ask questions, they made no attempt to determine who may have been in the right, they just put a stop to it with a bit of indiscriminate club work.

Had the overseer been present, it's likely I would have suffered a beating to leave what injuries I'd already suffered nothing more than soothing memories. But in this, at least, I was fortunate. There were only slaves about, and we tended to look out for our own--even when they were acting fools, as I had been.

Somehow, by the time the overseer appeared in the distance, the other slaves around us had managed to get the other boy on his feet. A bundle of wheat was quickly shoved into our respective hands, and we both had enough sense to hide our discomfort as best we could as that scornful pair of eyes approached.

The rhythmic slap of a whip striking his palm filled the silence as we all put on a show of well-behaved, industrious slavery. He cast a long, suspicious glance over the whole group of us. I felt his gaze hesitate and linger on me. No doubt he noticed the fresh signs of violence, just as I am sure he noted, moments later, the same on the other boy. I tensed, expecting to feel the cruel lick of the whip at any second.

But to my surprise, the only violence the man offered was the sharp crack of his voice. "You lot," he said, pointing in our general direction with the whip, "shut the fuck up."

Then he turned and walked on.

I have no doubt the overseer knew there'd been a scuffle. The screaming had drawn him or he wouldn't have been there, and it was obvious besides. But, as no one seemed unable to work, and there was no evidence of any lingering injury, I gather the man saw little reason to care, or to bother with us further. We were fortunate indeed that the man seemed disinclined to deal out a beating at that particular moment.

The unexpected reprieve left me shaking and weary in a way that even the fight of moments before had not. Blood loss, exertion, and a general bout of pain caught up with me. I swayed, and I might have fallen had not an arm shot out, steadying me.

It was Scratch, of course. He held me by the shoulder until the dizziness was passed.

"I reckon," he said, in that same deadpan tone he always used, "that there was the stupidest thing I ever seen anybody do."

I could only nod my agreement.