Young Mungo

It was the most degrading thing that could happen to a fighting man: to be so publicly skinned by a girl.

Here was yet another person telling him what he needed, how he should act, the person he should be. Another person who didn't think he was enough just as he was.

It was a nothing that felt like an everything.

She had asked for violence out of a gentle soul and it made her feel like she had trampled a patch of fresh snow.

It was a burden to have a trusting soul. Sometimes she just couldn't believe the worst in people.

It was a funny thing to be a disappointment because you were honest and assumed others might be too. The games people played made his head hurt.

Neglectful eating and hard drinking had withered and jaundiced him. There was too much skin over too little fat, his yellow face wrinkling like an overripe apple.

A sharp wind blew across the loch and snapped the fabric of his cagoule in its hurry. The air was clearer than he had ever tasted, and when Gallowgate wasn't watching, he tilted his head back and put his tongue out into the breeze. It tasted green like spring grass, but there was a prehistoric brownnes to it, as though it had searched an entire age through damp peaty glens and ancient forests, looking for its way to wherever it was going.

If he had known the words to describe it, he would have said he could smell the tang of the pine forests, the bright snap of bog myrtle, vetch, and gorse, and then underneath it all, the damp musk of dark fertile soil, the cleansing rain that never ceased. But to Mungo, it was green and it was brown and it was damp and it was clean. He had no words for it. It just smelled like magic.