Dark Tidings

Way back in the medieval mists of time, long before most people counted which century was which, Tung shivered violently on an ice-cold, stone floor.

Dark, dank and putrid were the words an ancient estate agent might have used to glamorise this miserable dungeon. There were no words horrible or nauseating enough to describe what it was really like. To be fair though, it wasn’t all bad, at least the green slime, which oozed like pus from small cracks in the walls, added some colour to the drab greyness.

Tung huddled in the darkest corner of the freezing, granite cell wishing he was dead. He wouldn’t have to wait long for his wish to come true because he was due to be tortured to death the very next day. Now he just prayed for sleep, because sleep would give him merciful nothingness before the excruciating morning.

Roll on death, he thought, it couldn’t come a moment too soon. He was soaking wet, bruised, starving and parched with thirst. Yes, roll on death.

By some miracle his brain dragged his racked body into an uneasy slumber. Thank all the gods for sleep, at least he hadn’t been denied that last sanctuary. His nightmares replayed his pathetic life as his subconscious tried to figure out how he had ended up in this tragic predicament. The work of the devil, no doubt… with a little help from his fiends.

The tortured dreams relived sixteen years of poverty, every day a battle to find enough food to survive. He had been born to a mother who, all through his childhood, had struggled relentlessly on his behalf, trying to stop his father drinking and gambling away whatever meagre wage he had earned. It was a futile struggle, trying to turn beer money into food money. So, most of the time, the family went hungry and, to add real injury to insult, there was usually a beating for anyone daft enough to complain.

Tung had loved his mother dearly, but before he turned twelve, she had lost the will to fight and had either died or run away; he never discovered which. Things got a lot worse after that and then only stealing could put food in both his and his younger sister’s mouths. Without his mother, there was no one to protect him from his father’s drunken wrath, so the beatings increased in regularity and harshness. His childhood descended into a nightmarish hell of torment and deprivation. His deepest distress was that he was helpless to protect his sister from these paternal abuses.

As he slept, his memory began to reconstruct the day of his first theft. That day was destined to determine how the rest of his life would play out.

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He was a tiny child and his victim was a giant of a man whose purse bulged with gold and silver coins. He had watched the man for weeks and deeply resented how he seemed to have an endless supply of money to waste on fripperies. This was to become an enduring theme in his life… resentment. Resentment sprinkled with an unhealthy dusting of jealousy, spite and bitterness.

He had first spotted the man buying a gaudy hat at an up-market market stall. He had followed him for the rest of that day, and on many occasions since. He crept in the shadows, always ten or so steps behind. He tracked him from the market, where he had first spied the man’s money, to the big house where all the ladies lived. It seemed odd to him that so many pretty ladies should all live together, but they seemed to enjoy a lot of men visitors so they were certainly not short of male role models. That was something Tung desperately lacked; the only male in his life was his father and he wasn’t even a good example for the devil to follow.

On the day of his first big heist, he followed the man from the lady-house to the local alehouse. He watched through grimy windows as the man ate mountains of meat and drank tankards of bubbly, brown liquid. He always noticed how the man became increasingly careless the more tankards he sank, and on this particular evening there had been a lot of tankards. Tung watched and waited.

Eventually the man emerged and made his way unsteadily towards the castle area of the town. He did what he always did and took a shortcut through the dark entry that ran along one side of the tavern. Half way down the entry Tung sprung. Starting from a few feet behind, he raced past at full speed and, without so much as a break in step, grabbed the purse. Unfortunately, it was so well attached to the man’s trousers that Tung’s body stopped abruptly, but his feet kept going, ending up flailing in the air. A ridiculous and hilarious sight for the uninvolved bystander, of which, that night in that secluded alley, there were of course none.