The coppery disk of a summer sun slid silently into a band of cloud and a night began that would change a small boy’s destiny forever.
In the gathering dusk, a nine-year-old orphan boy and his dog climbed the hill above the Somerset village of Stowey. He was dressed in ragged cast-offs, given him by the villagers and to an outsider, he looked a little like a vagrant, perhaps an outlaw. He was tall for his age, but very thin, he seemed to have a wiry strength, the skin of his face and arms were tanned to a chestnut brown and his mop of dark, almost black hair fell to his shoulders in greasy tails. Near the top of the hill, where it was steepest, the boy stopped and glanced about. There was no one around. Alone, he slid into the familiar protection of a dry, sandy hollow beneath the low branches of an ancient willow.
From his hiding place he had a clear view into the heart of the village that had grown around its small church on the floor of the valley. He saw women gossiping as they took up their water from the spring and he watched the children playing in the shallows of a stream. The boy’s dark, blue-green eyes revealed a sadness, a deep disappointment that was well beyond his years. The damage to his trusting child-innocence had been done two long years before this dusky night, it had come in the shape of a vicious raid by the Norsemen that they called The Vikings.
On that night he had watched as his father was butchered and his gentle mother repeatedly raped by a band of huge men. Then they had killed her with the bright flash of a sweeping sword, before setting fire to the thatch of their simple house, which had once been a happy home.
How those men had howled and laughed. Just like the demons in the nightmares that invaded his head every night since that awful day.
The Reluctant Warrior on Amazon US
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