The Village-Part 4- The Orphan

                                                            By David Crerand

            I was made in anger. I was not expected to survive the fire that would come with the first dawn after my creation. I was sent to kill, and death was delivered. I killed my intended target, and later that night, my maker, and since that night thousands more. I was eleven years old that night, I am now over six hundred years old. I still appear the child, however, I am vengeance, I am the double-edged sword, I am “Thresher”.

            I was scooped up from a dank, cobblestone alley off of a dead end street in the most dangerous section of Amsterdam. I’d been beaten, raped and left for dead. I was the perfect instrument of death, ready to be wielded by another’s hand. I had already been a member of one of Amsterdam’s notorious gangs of street boys. My parents, long dead and forgotten, I was surviving by thieving, begging, and whoring. I was just another of the countless rats existing in deWallen, the quays, the oldest, most despicable section of the ancient Port City of Amsterdam. Twice during the early sixteen hundreds the city had been ravaged by the Black Death of plague. The pallor and stench of death hung over the city like a shroud that could not be shed.

            It was just after the last days of the reign of Pope Paul III. Dead now but five years, his last, most terrible legacy, ‘The Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition’, was just building its base of strength and power through the regions of central Europe. It was the belief of the inquisitors that punishment did not take place for the correction and the good of the punished, but rather for the public good, that those witnessing the punishments might be terrified of the consequences and therefore weaned away from any evils that they themselves might commit. It was for this reason, and this reason alone, that punishments were designed to be such brutal, grotesque and bloody public demonstrations.