If you ever want to find out what you’re truly made of, wait until the middle of a freezing night, look at the wall of a prison you’ve inhabited for six years, and just start walking.
No map. No shoes. No weapons. Just a voice in your head screaming that if you stay, you die.
By the time I hit my twenty-second year on that mountain, I wasn't a boy anymore. I was a ghost. My skin was leather, my ribs were a cage, and my heart had turned into a heavy, ticking stone. I had accepted my fate. I thought I would rot on Mount Slemish and leave nothing behind but a skeleton for the crows to pick clean.
But then the dreams started.
It wasn't a slow build, either. It hit me like a physical blow. One night, while sleeping in a ditch under a lean to of pine boughs, a voice woke me up. It didn't sound like a whisper; it sounded like a bronze bell ringing right inside my skull.
“You have fasted well,” the voice said, cutting through the howling Irish wind. “Soon you will go to your own country.”
I sat straight up, my breath misting in the dark, my heart hammering against my chest like a trapped bird. I thought I was losing my mind. The isolation finally breaking me. But the next night, the voice came back, sharper this time. Louder. It didn't invite me; it commanded me.
“See, your ship is ready.”
The voice told me the ship was waiting on the coast. The problem? The coast was two hundred miles away. Two hundred miles of dense, uncharted forests, deep bogs that could swallow a man whole, and rival clans who would gladly slit a runaway slave's throat for the price of a copper coin.
I looked at my sheep. I looked at the dark silhouette of Miliucc’s fortress in the valley. If I stayed, I had a guaranteed bowl of watery porridge and a slow death. If I ran, I had the open air, a voice I couldn't see, and a tiny chance at freedom.
So, I gripped my ash wood staff, turned my back on the herd, and stepped into the dark.
Let me tell you what it’s like to walk through an Irish forest at night when you’re a hunted man.
The silence is terrifying, but the noise is worse. Every snapping twig sounds like a guard’s boot. Every rustle of the ferns smells like a tracking hound. I didn't dare use the main dirt tracks. I had to push through the briars and the thickets, the sharp thorns ripping into the heavy scabs on my legs, drawing fresh blood that mixed with the mud.
The taste of fear is different from the taste of hunger. Hunger is dull, like chewing on old leather. Fear is electric. It tastes like a iron spike under your tongue. It dries out your throat until you can barely swallow your own spit.
Every mile was a battle against my own body. My feet, calloused as they were from years of shepherding, weren't prepared for the constant, jagged rocks of the lowlands. By the second day, the bottoms of my feet were a mass of raw, peeling flesh. I could feel every sharp pebble, every frozen root, pressing directly into the nerves. I had to rip pieces of my wool tunic away to bind my bleeding heels, the cloth instantly soaking through with dark, sticky blood.
But the physical pain was nothing compared to the paranoia.
Imagine crossing a river in the gray light of dawn, the freezing water swirling up to your waist, numbing your groin, while you scan the opposite bank. You know that if a single scout from a local chieftain spots you, you’re dead. Slaves who ran away weren't brought back for a trial. They were hung from the nearest oak tree as a warning to the others.
I survived on raw roots I dug out of the frozen earth with my bare fingernails, chewing on the bitter, dirt-covered fiber just to give my stomach something to grind against. I drank from the bogs, tasting the ancient, rotting moss and decayed wood, praying it wouldn't twist my gut and leave me to die in a ditch.
For days, the world became a blur of gray mist, bleeding feet, and the constant, internal chant of the few Latin prayers I could remember. I wasn't praying for a miracle anymore. I was just counting steps. One more. Just give me one more.
On the sixth night, I crested a high ridge, the wind shifting violently. And then, I smelled it.
It wasn't the smell of sheep, or wet pine, or bog rot. It was the sharp, clean, massive scent of the open sea.
Down in the bay, cutting through the coastal fog like a dark splinter, was a merchant ship. Heavy timber, square sails tied to the masts, and a crew of rough, bearded men shouting in a language I hadn't heard in six years.
My heart leapt into my throat. The voice hadn't lied. The ship was there.
But as I stumbled down the rocky beach toward the shoreline, my blood soaked rags flapping in the wind, I realized the hardest part wasn't behind me. Getting across the wilderness was a matter of survival. Now, I had to convince a crew of pagan sailors to take a starving, penniless runaway onto their boat.
And as the captain turned his cold, calculating eyes toward me, I knew that if he said no, the two hundred miles of air I had just walked through would become my graveyard.
You’re looking at the saint now, right? The guy who made it.
But put yourself on that beach for a second. Smell the rotting seaweed, feel the freezing salt spray stinging the open cuts on your face, and look at those sailors who view you as nothing more than a piece of stray meat.
I had no money. I had no status. I was a ghost in rags.
But I had something I didn't have six years ago when I was dragged onto this island in chains. I had fire. The boy who cried in the mud on Mount Slemish was dead. The man standing on that beach was dangerous, because he had absolutely nothing left to lose.
I walked right up to the captain, looked him dead in the eye, and prepared to play the highest-stakes game of my life.
Chapter 3