Daygo's Fury Read Free Page A

disobedient whore was raped and tossed out. Not just tossed out of the house but out of her society and all she knew, kicked from the inner city, sent to the slums and told never to return for fear of death. Her face and name were known. She would never be allowed back into the society of the rich or middle class again, condemned to poverty and considered lucky not to be condemned to death.
    It was no matter anyway. Eight months later she gave birth to a baby boy, a boy who exited the womb in silence. A stillborn baby, for the childbirth became complicated. The boy’s cord connecting it to his mother was cut and the child wrapped in swaddling and taken away. Amidst the mother’s pain, anguish added its considerable fuel to her screams. The bleeding would not stop. The makeshift midwifes of the city’s poorest quarter looked at each other with well-known sadness as they tried forlornly to plug the bleeding with dirty towels and cloth. The screams, the thrashing and the pain slowly faded in energy, in vibrant life, until moment by moment the woman fell into a more peaceful slumber, before life faded completely and death’s waiting embrace took her from the world.
    But the boy didn’t die. Inexplicably, among the quiet tears of the midwives as they tried to deal with the gruesome mess, they heard a cry, a baby’s cry. The cry rang out with a strength and velocity unusual from any new born child. The cry sent a chill through the midwives, for it felt as a cry of rage. A rage, perhaps, at being entered into this harsh world, and entered in such a sad fashion.
    The two midwives rushed from the room to the one adjacent, where a small baby boy sat in the swaddling and bloody gore of his birth, crying, mouth open as his tonsils vibrated with his roar. The two women looked at each other in amazement. Finally, one asked of the other “How long …?” The question unfinished was nevertheless enough, for both women were thinking the same thing. “At least ten minutes,” replied the other. Slowly, the women returned from the grasp of shock and did what they had to do. They cleaned the boy up and brought him to the place where such boys go.
    In reality, though the midwives doubted their own words, the boy had been stillborn for over eleven minutes. He had experienced eleven minutes of blissful silence before life inhabited him with more ferocity than the world had ever seen. This boy was infused with a power unheard of by man. He weighed six and a half pounds.
    The impossibility of his body being brought to life continued in the improbability of his survival. There was no surrogate mother at the baby orphanage that he was brought to and none to be found. So in vain hope, in consideration of his unlikely arrival, the orphan keeper persisted with feeding the baby goats’ milk, convinced it was only a matter of time; even though normally, in the cruel reality of the poor in the slums, a baby in such a position would be smothered and buried somewhere as a mercy. But the baby boy was somehow possessed with a life that would not fade or dim. He survived, he continued and he grew.
    This boy became a source of local folklore among the housewives and orphan keepers. His birth and survival afterwards were unprecedented mysteries. Unfortunately for the boy, his fame at birth was as small in stature in comparison to what it would become as the baby was to the later man.

1. Calum
    Liam walked through the slums of Teruel slowly. He had time to take his ease. He was not due to meet up with Calum, Carrick and his men for another hour. He prowled the streets with a predator’s air, despite being only thirteen.
    Dust blew along his bare feet. All moisture was gone from the hard packed clay underfoot from a week of the baking hot sun. The air was thick around him. The refuse in the gutters festering with flies.
    It was still relatively early in the morning, not yet noon, and the streets were busy as usual. Many eyed him suspiciously as he passed.