On the Cold Coasts

crawled out to the open west window, the shutters already pulled aside, knowing the bells would soon ring for mass. He cast a glance over the tents on the nearby fields, camps erected for the synod. He looked down and saw his school-mates in front of the church door, animatedly talking amongst themselves. There was no wind, and he could hear that they were talking about him, were vowing to beat him to a pulp the next time they got hold of him, calling him a bloody Skraeling and godforsaken half-Englishman as was their wont, it not being clear which derogatory term disgusted them more.
    Indignantly Michael stuck his hand in his pocket and took out a rock, raising it for the throw, but he changed his mind in time and put it back. Even if he could easily hit one of the boys from this distance, his hiding place was too valuable to sacrifice for the momentary satisfaction of revenge.
    He rummaged through a pile of straw under the east wall and soon found a scrap of dried halibut. He made a face when he saw that the mice had already partaken of the goods and little more than the chewed skin of the halibut remained. Michael cursed his own foolishness, to think he could store even a scrap of food up here, where both feathered and four-legged thieves roamed, snatching and shitting as they pleased. He tossed the halibut skin to one side, annoyed.
    Anyway, he wasn’t particularly hungry, since it was not long past breakfast. There had been a disagreement among the boys at the table for no particular reason, as usual. One wanted more than the allocated ration and took Michael’s bread, saying that since he was younger, he needed less than the rest of them. This was followed with demeaning words about his Skraeling looks. As always, they talked about him in the third person, like he wasn’t there.
    This was how it had been nearly his entire time at Holar. They rarely hurt him physically; instead, they excluded him from their conversations and games, never addressed him directly, talked about him but not to him, and seemed to enjoy winding him up until he lost control and hurled himself with punches and kicks at the boy closest to him. Much of the humiliation was made up of the fact that they rarely fought back. Usually there were a few of them who simply picked him up and put him outside, set him down in the muck near the front door, and closed it. If one of the priests arrived while this was going on, the boys stayed mum in unison, sticking together. He was the only one excluded and had his own side of the story, but no one paid him any attention since he was in almost perpetual conflict with the others and was already known for his quick temper.
    One time he had stared long and hard into the blue-black water of the well, examining his own face reflected in the still surface, struggling to make out the features that they said were like the Skraelings in Greenland. He didn’t really know what he should be looking for, except that he and his mother both had high cheekbones and a fairly wide brow and forehead. But others had that too. Finally he gave up trying to reason away their cruelty, having long since realized that it did not matter the slightest bit what was right and wrong, they would only find something else to tease him about. Their harsh words stung, even though he told himself that those morons were as worthless as the dirt under his shoes.
    Stronger than most things, this need to belong, to be part of something—to be one of the group. At the very least to have your own relatives stand by you, to not be a perpetual outsider, different from the rest; a bastard.
    But even though he hated the boys, he kept quiet about it to his mother. She had her own problems, and besides, he had a secret to think about and plan for. And in any case, it was not all bad at the school—sometimes it was even enjoyable. Astronomy and the movement of the planets were his passion, as were all those other things the priests shared with their pupils about the countries across the sea and all the strange and wonderful things that happened there. Sometimes they heard news about the endless war between the English and the French, and some talked about the great war tools that were used there, called catapults, used during sieges to send torrents of spears and arrows and sometimes even fireballs over castle walls. There were even stranger weapons made of crushed sulphur that made a huge explosion when lit with fire. But of course most of the