Insight Into Iyagovos: December 2010

National Novel Writing Month Story

I awoke that morning, sweating. It took me a while to remember that the war was over, along with the horrors that it bought with it. The terrors of thinking I would end up speared on a bayonet or stabbed with a cavalry-men’s sabre. My friends, my brothers, all dead in the Revolution. However, these horrors weren’t what awoke me. I was remembering the week I spent in Lawnshire. Those 8 days will stay with me for the rest of my life. And even if my superiors didn’t believe me, those things happened. The men of my small unit, and me, have the scars to prove it. This is the story of those days.

I had always been fascinated with the supernatural. Witches, vampires, ghosts; my parents, back in Philadelphia had read my stories about them, and I had gobbled them up. I especially loved to read about the Salem Witch Trials, and to learn about all the hatred and piety that was churned up in that small town in Massachusetts. My family was never very religious, in that I wasn’t sheltered from the so-called ‘black arts’. I was allowed to investigate ‘satanic rituals’ and my family never told me not to. They never worked. I got them all from a book that my father bought me, titled ‘The Black Arts and You’, which at the time appeared to be a legitimate book, but now looking back at it, it was simply a scam by a con artist to part my father from his hard earned guineas.

I grew up in the small town of Georgetown, just outside Philadelphia. It’s not there anymore; the British razed it during the war. It had about forty people living in it, all of whom were farmers or tradesmen. My father was a blacksmith, which is where I got the knowledge I had for my time in Lawnshire. My mother was a schoolteacher. No help there. I was never good with my letters or my numbers. Never thought they were useful. Still, I learned them, and that’s how I was able to ascend to my position of sergeant in the Revolutionary Army. The leaders would preach, ‘no point having a man that can’t read orders giving orders.’

When I first joined the Revolutionary Army, it was during a recruitment drive. A man named John Smith came into the village one day, accompanied by two men, who I later learned were named Jeremiah and Russell. This was about when I was 16. I had finished my schooling, surprisingly, and I now was working with my father in his smithy. I understood the affect that the British had on the American people, but I didn’t really care. I just wanted to support my family. My father had come down with a sickness that had blinded him, and while he was still able to direct me and the other workers in his smithy, he was no longer able to work, and therefore out of a job. I needed to get a job, and the Revolutionary Army said that we would all be given land after we ousted the British from the Colonies. I couldn’t not take the chance. I signed up, despite my parents protests, and became an officer in the Revolutionary Army. I left the town the next day, with my new brothers. Two others from the town had signed up as well, my childhood friend, Thomas and his brother, Samuel. Both siblings signed up to be patriotic, and were both proud Christians. Thomas and Samuel didn’t know about my studies of the black arts and what tied the three of us together were our adventures as young men. We all loved to hunt, and would take muskets out to kill animals, not for food, but for fun. That was how I became such a crack shot.

It turned out that I had signed up to be a simple infantry man in the Revolutionary Army, something that didn’t satisfy me. I believed that somebody of my calibre, with the skills that I had, should be placed into a higher rank. We followed John back to a small camp where about another twenty men waited. The three of us newcomers were introduced to the unit, who we found out were known as the Revolutionary Raiders. John was their captain, and he ventured into the town with left and right hand man to recruit replacements, for they had lost men in a British attack about a week before. They had only just reached civilization again, after this attack. The raiders had been running support on an Army raid on a British base. The Army needed supplies, and what better way than to take them from your enemies? It was a successful raid, but at a cost. Men died in the attack, and therefore the army needed new recruits.

While Thomas and Samuel were talking to their new brothers-in-arms, but I had more pressing matters to attend to. My weapons. I couldn’t be a soldier and not have weapons. I approached John, politely mind you, and told him this. He scoffed, the bastard, and told me that they didn’t have a leftover gun to give me. Of course, I became angry, and began to shout. How could they be offering soldiering positions to men, and not have guns to give them? Did they want to be throwing lives away? This didn’t seem to fluster John; apparently he’d seen this before. He waited for me to stop yelling, and pointed me over to a nearby tent. He said that I could find a sabre in there, which would at least help me defend myself until we were able to scavenge up a rifle.

We camped out in this place for three nights, the Raiders recuperating after their loss of men. We moved out on a Sunday, something that made Thomas and Samuel quite angry. They didn’t like that we moved out on ‘the Sabbath Day’, something that both bothered me and pissed off John. He told them that although God was on their side, they had to fight for independence, and the British weren’t going to wait for Monday to come before fighting again. John told me that it was annoying how pious some people are, believing that God would fight all their battles for them. I nodded, but didn’t reveal my anti-Christian sentiments, in case Thomas and Samuel heard me.

A day after we set out, we came upon a small British band, their men wounded, some of whom had large chunks of their flesh ripped out. One man was standing against a tree, his red coat covering one of the men on the floor, stemming the flow of blood from the ripped arteries in his arm. John told us to get down, and made all of the men with muskets get ready to fire on the wounded Redcoats. He whispered to me to go down to the Redcoats and see what attacked them. I nodded, stood and began to walk down to the men. They had rifles, and on seeing me they raised them. What surprised me was the fact that they were shaking while sighting down the rifles. I had heard tales of these men being merciless and cold killers. I yelled out to them to lower their weapons, and that we had men ready to fire on them. I asked what attacked them, and they said it was a group of savage men. Apparently they had attacked the British with no weapons, simply teeth and claw. They had been easily dispatched; rifle shots through the head, or sabres being rammed into their skulls. However, the majority of the band hand gone down. I told the man that we would take their weapons and in return would allow them to take care of their wounded, if they would stay as our prisoners, otherwise they would be killed. The man thought about it briefly, and then nodded. He handed his rifle to me, and I remember how he told me how some of his men were too far gone, and to let his unwounded me carry them to the nearby British town. There wasn’t a garrison there, so we would have been free to take the prisoners as soon as they had buried their men. Little did we know what was awaiting us in that town.

Insight Into Iyagovos

Thursday 9 December 2010

Blog Portfolio

Thursday 2 December 2010

Opening to the novel I'm working on