Days past, how many Catherine wasn’t sure. She’d tried to keep count, but it was hard just to not get sick most of the time. The seas were rough and unkind to the ship with its many captives. They were only brought up out of the hold once a day and never at the same time as the men. Catherine looked frantically around for her brothers anyway, but deep down she knew she might never see them again.
When they weren’t up on deck, Catherine spent her time huddled next to Mary, the young fifteen-year-old girl from a village to the north of Kilkenny, where Catherine was from. For the first few nights, the girls barely spoke. Too frightened of what was to come to even form words. Then one night, Mary had woken herself from a fitful sleep and glanced around hopeful, as if she would appear back at home in her bed.
Catherine knew the feeling. She’d woken up many times praying it had all been a nightmare.
“When will it ever end?” she groaned, laying her head back against the rough splintered planks.
“Maybe we’ve died and this is Hell,” Catherine mused, thinking back to all of Father John’s sermons. “Maybe God has decided to punish us.”
“Then he punished me the night they first attacked and I watched my parents killed,” Mary whispered. “Right before my eyes. Killed like sheep.” Her bright green eyes were suddenly staring at something far away on a distant, dark night. “We were such a wee village. There was no reason to attack us, but they did. Snuck out of the shadows like ghosts.”
Catherine closed her eyes remembering the attack on her own village. The screams, the heavy stench of smoke on the air and the blood. Mary kept talking, muttering on and on about the horrors she saw.
“My father, they cut him down when he charged out of our house with a pistol. Sliced his head clean off. And my mother, she screamed and cursed until three men carried her off into the darkness.” Mary’s eyes closed and a tear slipped down her cheek. “I heard her cries until they took me away. But she wasn’t on board when we left.”
“I think they killed my mother too,” Catherine said. “I never even saw what happened to her.”
“Probably for the best,” Mary said. “Then you can’t have nightmares about it.”