XIII | Confusion
They’d wondered aloud whether his ferryman’s blood would flow red as their own, and with the third strike of a club they received their answer. The coarse wood lacerated his neck—flayed away the skin so that warm red blood drizzled beneath his collar to soak clean through the black velvet jerkin. He fell to his knees in the middle of the deck and had just begun to feel the rough planks through the fabric of his trousers when he was again borne up and onward by the strong arms of his antagonists.
The attack had come without warning and without mercy, and those ferrymen who had survived the initial onslaught had quickly disappeared—not out of cowardice, he was certain, but to regroup in the face of such overwhelming numbers—leaving the crowd to focus all their bigotry and
