Carack

Carack Chapter one revised and complete

Hi, for those who have read all the parts so far published this is a compilation of all of chapter 1 with revisions based on comments from readers. Many thanks for all the suggestions. :)

Chapter 1    The knoll

Was it six meters or six feet that he was thrown, Gerent wondered? He couldn’t grasp what they were saying. Anyway he knew that the front grill of a car hurt like hell when met at speed and so did the road. He wanted to ask the guy in the paramedic jacket to turn off the wailing noise, but was too tired. Black or a grey car, he couldn’t remember. It had happened so fast, his mind was unable to focus. Gerent hoped it was a Mercedes though, there would be no cudos in telling his mates he’d been hit by a Fiat. Images came and went. Faces appeared, People leaning over him. People speaking at him. But he was too tired to reply. So very tired. The world slipped away from him. His eyes closed. He slept.  

Warm in the dappled summer shade of a large oak tree Gerent was awake. He did not want to open his eyes yet. Lying on his back he could feel the grass under his hands. He made lazy pulls at the pliant waving blades with his fingers. The leaves overhead were rustling in the gentle breeze and there was the sound of a bird singing from its branches. It was peaceful there after everything that had happened. The street noise was quiet. No cars, no tapping heels, no mothers chatting or babies wailing. There were none of those perpetual police or ambulance sirens wailing. It was so bereft of the noises that he was so accustomed to that Gerent began to wonder why. With reluctance he felt he should open his eyes and find out.

He felt a relaxing breeze brush across his face; it was so refreshing in the heat. He wished that he could lie there, in the small back garden of his London home, with his eyes closed, forever. The thought that his mother would appear soon to have a go at him for something or other intruded upon him. Since becoming a teenager he had managed to always be in trouble. This was not a problem experienced by his twin brother Hugh, the real hero of the two of them. Gerent listened to the bird singing and he realised that a bird with such a voice had never perched in their tree, never mind sing there. The only birds he could recall in the garden were starlings.

Gerent flicked his eyes open to catch a glimpse of the unusual creature. He looked up through the leaves of the oak at a powder blue sky with thin white clouds pulled across it. He felt it as if the amount of material they were made from was too little and was being stretched out to fit. He watched the leaves lift in the gentle wind, turning up their undersides to the sky. He tried to make out the location of the bird. A slight turn of his head sent a jarring pain through his body, it all felt stiff and sore.

  ‘That would be because of the accident,’ he told himself.  Gerent sat bolt upright. ‘The accident?’

A wave of dizzy sickness came over him with a flood of pain caused by his movements. He sat still for a few minutes to allow the sensations to subside. When they had his eyes focused on the scene before him. Gerent was not, as he had assumed, in his back garden. Instead he was on top of a hill overlooking a large flat valley. It was criss-crossed by rivers and ditches, with blue hills and the sea in the far distance. Gerent rubbed his knuckles in his eyes and looked again.

‘Oh my God,’ he said, pausing between each word. Then he closed both eyes tight and opened them as quick as he could, but the unfamiliar scene remained the same. He glanced around, away to his left was more of the flat valley with another distant range of hills. Behind him there was a similar view and to the right a coastline and the sea. Rather than being in his familiar enclosed garden Gerent found he was on the very top of a solitary hill. The hill was a lonely steep mound that arose from an otherwise flat plain. The oak he leant against was the one feature on the summit and he was alone.

‘Perhaps I’ve forgot and we’re on a picnic or something,’ he thought. ‘Hugh and mum will come up the hillside at any moment. But where am I?’