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Jack Cat’s Renegades

by

Chris Page

Introduction
The Romans left Britain in 410 AD. From that point on, the island was caught in a ferment of conflict as myriad local warlords vied with improbable monarchs and unlikely imperators to dominate and rule.

    Marauding tribes of Britons, Picts, Jutes, Saxons, Celts, Angles, and Gauls tore down the more civilized vestiges of the Roman occupation in frenzied attempts to eliminate each other and establish their own dynasties. Succeeding only in establishing a plethora of mini-kingdoms, the slaughter gathered pace. Thus, the period known as the Dark Ages took shape.
    Against this background, a faith called Christianity scrabbled for a foothold. Originally brought by the Romans to these pagan shores, its zealous believers worked tirelessly to establish this strange deity headed by a crucified Nazarene. Untold numbers of these believers were caught up in the pagan flames of warring factions as they ripped across the death-strewn landscape.
    Toward the end of the Dark Ages an even more menacing invader appeared. Indiscriminately slaughtering anyone who got in their way to a level of malevolent barbarism beyond anything previously experienced, they ripped the heart out of every hovel, village, and settlement that stood in their path. Wholesale slaughter, rapine, pillage, and slave-taking had arrived on these shores in the horned helmets of the berserker tribes of the North-men.     Better known as the Viking.
    They had to be challenged, and the only way to do it successfully was through an equal brutality, equal savagery, but with the addition of low cunning. The vaunted Viking savages didn’t do cunning of any sort. Full-on frontal berserker charging with lots of deity-based howling was their stock approach, and, for the most part, it worked until Jack Cat and his delinquent band of misfits came along. And not all the head-cleaving axes and limb-removing double-handed swords belonged to the Viking, either. Jack Cat’s Renegades had a few, and nowhere on this turning earth did low cunning beat to such a harmonious cadence as in every one of their mercenary black hearts.
    Operating under a patina of legality provided by King Alfred’s patronage, the Renegades took their own brand of free-booting brigandage to the heart of the Viking invasion. The precedents, traditions, and principles of honour-bound warrior brotherhoods had no place here; the mangy sinners of Jack’s Renegades didn’t do vainglory, fair play, or heroics. Their only chime was kill by any means, get out, and get paid for it.
    Including the beautiful battle queen Gode, who, apart from holding her own in any swordfight, had a certain way with poisons and energetic sex.
    As Jack said upon hearing of the intended Viking invasion, “My Renegades await, horn-heads know it, turn for home, and weep!”

                                                                              Chapter One
    “I killed my first man when I was ten years old”, said Jack Cat quietly. “Stabbed him through the back of the neck when he was snoring his head off, face down after sex with a kitchen midden. Then, just to make sure, I stabbed him again through the guts as he writhed around.”

    All eyes around the campfire were on their alpha leader.

   “He was my father.”

    The tough, motley-looking bunch sitting around the roaring campfire nodded. It was the sort of statement they could completely identify with.

    “I was a bit older, twelve maybe,” said Patch, scratching his one-eyed head with the mental effort. “Got caught by a castle reeve stealing food from a store room. Dropped a big rock on his head from the ramparts.”

    They all chuckled. Unusual extermination of any human being amused them.

    “How about you, Arrow? Bet you were just as lethal with a bow when you were a boy, eh?”

    Arrow nodded at the memory. “Bout the same age as Patch, although I didn’t shoot him. I couldn’t. The bastard stole my bow and a good quiver of shafts, so I cut his head off with his own axe when he was asleep and got them back.”

    Bullwhip cleared his throat. This would be a good one; nothing this crazy, deviant misfit did was ordinary. He  didn’t disappoint them.

    “Dunno how old I was then, still don’t, but I remember the occasion because it was the All Hallows festival, and they had a big bonfire going in the middle of the settlement. I was creeping around the back, stealing jugs of mead and selling drinks by the mouthful to the other boys when I got caught by the local bully, a long, thin streak of pestilence called Stick. He gave me a beating for stealing the mead and then stole it himself. I waited until he was drunk, then smashed him over the head with a log. Sticks and logs are kindling, so I threw them both on the bonfire when nobody was looking. They burned so well there wasn’t much left of either of them next morning.”

    Everyone howled with laughter.

    “What about you, Baby?”

    Everyone turned to the emotional man mountain called Baby Giant. Seven feet tall with muscles like Heracles, tears would stream down his cheeks at the slightest provocation. The harder he cried, the more he was enjoying whatever violence he was thinking about or inflicting upon others. To call him cry-baby, however, was inviting the most violent of ends.

    “Strangely enough,” replied the giant, ignoring the tears that began to course down his cheeks, “I didn’t kill anyone, at least not on purpose, until I joined this crazy bunch.”

     There were nods around the fire. Being a member of the Renegades did that to a man. It was kill or be killed, no other way.

    “But I’ve certainly made up for it since,” he added as an afterthought.

    “Gode? “

    All eyes turned to Gode, sitting next to Jack Cat, one of only two women belonging to the band and, for those who knew or cared about these things, the most deadly female warrior in post Roman Britain.

    “Much as you’d expect it was a man trying to rape me when I, too, was about ten,” she scoffed, tossing her jet black hair. “I poisoned him the next day with belladonna in his mead. I knew all about poisons by that age. My mother was  a simpler or herb lady, and I used to help her. In her case this involved the relatively innocent occupation and husbandry of growing, understanding, and using herbal plant lore as a balm for bodily disorders. Then she died and I took it to another level. Belladonna, also known as black
nightshade, as well as being a poison is also a powerful sedative. That’s what I put in his mead. As soon as he was unconscious, I sliced his balls off. The pain woke the bastard up for a bit, enough for him to see just who was doing it to him, which was what I wanted. Then I stuffed them inside his ugly, dead mouth “

    There was silence as the hard men around the campfire absorbed this. They all knew that Gode was no chaste warrior queen, but a fierce and highly attractive battlemaid who could hold her own alongside any of them in cursing or a dirty sword fight, added to which she had the courage of a lion. But this revealed a whole new persona. Now she added the moly of a poisoning witch and man-hating viper-in-the-bosom. A hells-broth of an arsenal, especially as most of them in the Renegades regularly fantasized about
bedding her. Or had done until now.

    One or two of them fidgeted and subconsciously felt for the reassuring presence of spherical flesh in their groins.

    “Who was he?” a grinning Bullwhip asked.

    Gode looked at Jack seated next to her.

    “As our leader here has already demonstrated, some fathers are just better off dead.”

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