Intro
Intro
It was winter but that didn’t mean much in Burghead. Sometimes it would sprinkle snow, sometimes it would rain, sometimes it’d be slightly cool and sometimes it’d be so cold your legs felt like logs. The weather was unpredictable. There was one thing you could count on though, wind. Or as we liked to call it Satan’s scream, always wailing around you, beating against your body, cutting like ice shards into your face. I wrapped my scarf tighter around my neck. It came from Samarcand. The area Scheppa was from. It was a rich dark blue with gold thread and magenta tassles hanging along the ends. Everytime Scheff went back to Samar he always brought us things.
People from Samarc were brown but not Moorish like me. Cinnamon skinned, I guess you would call it. Scheppa was a hefty guy with a beard and a bald head, always bundling himself up in patched up beat up coats that looked like he’d just pulled it out of a waste pile. His head was always wrapped in a patterned scarf, normally beautifully hued. And since I’d oft admired such scarfs, he gave me one. And it was probably the first time anybody ever gave me anything.
“Are you ready?” Captain Godson asked, his grey beard was wet from the misty rain that was trickling down. He was our leader. A knight from the king’s guard who’d taken us out of the orphanages, brothels, street curbs, and prisons he found us in to train us to be of use to the town, to fight the demons of the Night king until we die.
From when I was 13 til now, we’d lived in this camp, tents in a forest of evergreens and spent our whole days training for battle. And now I was 16. And for the first time in 3 years, we were going to leave this site. Now, was I afraid of fighting the demons, orcs, zombies and dragons that I’d been told nightmarish tales about for the past 7 years? Of course. My knees were trembling and not just from the cold. But, was I ready to get off this god forsaken plot of land? Also yes.
I struggled to get atop my horse. Mellzie of course, climbed atop hers with no trouble and did not look afraid at all. Jaden from the horse over, looked impressed, curling a brow. The only other time I’d been atop a horse was when Godson had pulled me off the street and said, do you want to eat? And I looked down at the bag of bones that I was and said, yes. And then he said “follow me” and it all went downhill from that moment.
So of course, when Godson said, this is your horse now, pack it up and get up on it, I struggled. He looked disappointed and did not try to mask it as he stood there with his hands on his hips and his bushy grey brows flared. He was a big guy, more muscle than fat, thick in the middle but no visible gut beneath his armor. And his whiskery beard often looked like the bottom of an old broom. He never tried to hide his distaste for me. Even now.
“I don’t know how you plan to survive this war,” Godson said. It was because my fingers were frozen twigs and I could barely bend them to pull on the girdle to hoist myself on. I managed it anyway, pulling myself on to lie flat on top of the saddle, readjusting clumsily and finally pulling my leg over so that I was appropriately positioned. The guys frowned as they watched my difficulty.
“Ready,” I still said eagerly despite his chagrin. He walked to the front of the line to climb atop his own horse. And we set off into the night. The horses tromping through the mud as the wind beat at our bodies and freezing rain cut into our faces. My cloak was barely useful, it kept flapping and smacking against my cheek, the sides of my hood. And my face was wet. I was glad to have this scarf now more than ever as we headed down the path we’d been waiting to go our entire lives practically.
We were a sad bunch. Not one of us attractive. Especially not me. They rarely called me by my name, which was Zollie. They called me halfie or moor, or halfie moor. Moors were often black their skin so dark you could only see the whites in their eyes at night. The people of Brodie did not like them. Called them beasts. They did not like their ways, their culture, nothing about them. And it didn’t help that I was half moor. And I only know I’m half moor because of my complexion, if I was full moor I’d be coal black but I have a light caramel color, my hair, perpetually curly and tangled. I keep it cut short to avoid having to do anything to it. Godson’s wife called me the breaker of combs. She’d tried to tame it a time or two and just took to cutting it off whenever I saw her.
And she only came to fix us when the King came around. Which he didn’t do often, I’d seen him twice tho. King Andreas, he was a nice guy, surprisingly for a king. Bald, with a pigeon pea shaped head and two equally plain and dull looking sons. He had a daughter too, they called her Princess Butterface. She had a decent body, was a little thick at the top that added to her large breasts that men like to dream about cupping. But her face…equally as dull as her brothers and her hair, the color of the dirty water that washed up the stream.
Like I said, I was no looker either. If My Moorish roots and short wild hair weren’t enough to scare you off, my pockmarked skin due to my battle with pimples, would. I was thin though, mostly due to years of starvation and the very little food we often ate. We ate whatever we could catch. Mostly meat and sometimes Godson would give us bread or apples. That was one thing I was good at. Hunting. I was good with the arrow, but my swordsmanship was sloppy.
The wind was whistling as it reamed around us. My cloak flapped behind me like a cape as we rode on. It might not seem wise to ride in this weather. More than often people died from sicknesses caught when being wet and cold like this. But Godson didn’t care about us, well he didn’t care about me. If your skin wasn’t ghostlike and porcelain odds were, you’d be disliked greatly by everyone. Around us all you could hear were the thuds of the horse hooves slapping into the wet mud and Satan’s scream crying in your ears.
“Maybe we should stop,” Jaime said. He was the only looker out of all of us, Godson’s son. How someone who looked like something a cat choked up, created that beautiful man, I don’t know. He had the blonde hair, square jaw and his dad’s mixed grey green eyes, like the color of a frog’s back speckled in mud. But he was the kind that was so good looking you didn’t even bother. Just shrugged and moved on. Besides, I had no feelings for the kid, he was the one who always called me halfie or moor and never bothered to say my name. in fact, he probably didn’t even know my name, because he didn’t care to know.
I’d say the only other person who didn’t look like a troll was Jaden. He looked like he should be a knight with the long dark hair often tied into a knob and the beard. But he was too skinny to look threatening. His legs looked like branches. But that was his only flaw.
The only other girl was Mellzie. She wasn’t ugly, but she wasn’t pretty either. Far as I knew. She was short, which people thought was cute, had a bit of a thick girth, and this coppery brown hair she kept cut to her shoulders. Her head was kind of big and weirdly shaped, but she had thick pink lips, a wry smile, blue eyes. I often saw Jaden pause when he looked at her. And often, it made me sad when he did. But I couldn’t expect anyone to love me in this world, not being the way that I am. So all I could do was move on. Admire guys from afar and keep hiding in my thick scarves and hooded cloaks. Sometimes at night, people couldn’t tell that I was brown.
Sometimes I think, I should go up to the Moors, in the foggy mountain land where the dark skins lived. To be there at that place where people would accept me, where maybe I could find a man that would like me. But Godson always tells me horrible tales of that place, calls those people savages.
They’ll eat off your ears, he’d say, and then they’d rape you. Each of them taking turns pumping you full of cum until you bleed.
And he’d laugh and some of the others would too, except for Jaden who never laughed at me, always looked at me with pitied eyes.
I was gonna die in this war, I knew, and everyone knew. But it was my fate. And everyone dies in the end. My only hope was that I’d get to know a man before I did. At this point, rape might be welcome.
The rain stopped eventually and then we just rode soaking wet in the freezing wind. We only stopped as the sun was rising for a piss break. The sky was still a dark slate blue, a small sliver of gold separated it from the trees. We always went in separate directions. The boys to the west the girls to the east. I guess so no one would go peeksies at anyone’s private parts. I doubted any man would want to watch a girl take a piss but there were freaks out there.
I’d seen what all the guys had to offer anyway, they freely showed their cocks even sometimes while we were eating dinner. Scheppa had the largest, could hit someone over the head and knock them out with that thing. Jaden’s was skinny and long. Jamie’s was most modest sized. Not freakishly small so that you would laugh at it but not large enough to be turned on either. Not that I knew anything about that.
The hardest part about pissing was trying not to get any on your skirt as you crouched down and the creative way in which you held on your piling skirt flaps. A few drops and you’d walk back smelling like pee. And of course I did. No wonder the guys were breaking down my door.
Mellzie of course always smelled like flowers. Just kidding. We both looked like a fate worse than death due to our travels, her hair now hung damply.
“Your nose halfie,” Jamie said, his own nose curled up in disgust. I reached to touch above my lip finding that it was wet, from snot instead of rain. He threw a hankerchief at me, and I caught it with my face. It landed in the dirt afterwards.
“Thanks,” I groaned, bending over for the scarf. He tilted his head to check out my bottom.
“Thanks for the view,” he said. Wasn’t even flattering, he found sexually harassing me as entertaining as just plain harassing me most of the time.
“You know, you’d be a fine woman if you weren’t a moor, or had the marks,” he said, gesturing to the whole of my face.
I wiped the snot from my nose and threw the hankerchief back at him it hit him in the chest.
“Disgusting,” he said and thought to repay me by kicking mud onto my dress.
“Leave her alone,” Godson said. He wasn’t even facing us and he knew his son was harassing me. Because he always was. The only good thing about going to Brodie castle was that once I got there, I’d probably never see Jaime again.
Another day of riding and watching evergreen trees sitting in fog.