The Black Witch of Belfast, Chapter 1
Jul. 13th, 2007 02:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
southernismsBounty hunter Siobhán McScatha reflects on the turn of events in her life: from IRA assassin to prisoner rotting in an English jail to soldier fighting against the Rikti invasion and finally to Paragon City adventurer.
The “Black Witch of Belfast” is what they called me, though how it was said differed between friend and foe. Sympathisers to The Cause spoke the name reverently, enemies like a curse, and both with some fear and awe. Either way was perfectly fine as far as I was concerned – I was a modern legend with the proper accompanying rhetoric, laudatory mentions, and even a few pub songs composed about me. Old wives and other folksy types claimed I am Scáthach Buanand herself, mentor of the champion Cú Chulainn, stepping out of the mists of time and using her shadowy arts to drive the invaders from the Blessed Isle once and for all. But Celtic storytelling has always embellished even the simplest things with a heavy hand, where even a trip to the toilet becomes a grand epic saga. As usual, the truth of it is not nearly so fantastic.
I was born in Glenarm, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland, a small child for these parts. Throughout my childhood I’d been called 'wee one', 'kipper' and other such things that young, foolish children hurl at each other when they don’t realise how much the pain can cost them. My father, disheartened to watch his only child treated like that, and with no mother to temper my feminine side (I had been told she’d died of cancer the year after I was born), he did the best he could, opting to ensure I could 'trade fair' with anyone who dared taunt me. And for those brutish boys who felt they needed to go a little farther...well, my father ensured I could donnybrook as well as they could give, having taught me the family’s hereditary martial arts that we merely referred to as 'The System'. It is a way to manipulate the sorrowful energies of the soul – what Oriental martial artists might call the 'yin reiki'. The System had been developed on the Isle of Skye centuries ago by our ancestors, and though we couldn’t explain it exactly, a colleague of my father said the art looked like a combination of French and Spanish savate, crossed over with Chinese Tai Chi Chuan. I didn’t know anything about that, but I did have to admit back then that those other fighting masters had to be very wise to come up with something that came close to the majesty of the System.
By the time I’d reached my teenage years, suddenly my size wasn’t a problem, and I went from a 'runt' to a 'petite beauty', though I suspect the changes had much to do with puberty and lads’ hormones than any sudden maturity on their parts. But all was not well within my childhood idyll, for the war between the Loyalists and the Royals continued to wage in my little corner of the world. You would have thought that the Royals would have taken steps to ensure that the members of the Irish Republican Army wouldn’t have to spill such mindlessly savage English blood on our lands any more. Well...one day, they did. The Royal Air Force chose to drop a Fuel Air Explosive on a small town just inside the 'border' of 'Great Britain', and everyone in that town – men, women, children – went up in screaming pains of flame. The RAF bastards claimed that the town was a 'den of IRA'. No such thing: the village had been as staunchly against the tactics of the Republicans as they were against the Royals. But there was no one left to protect them from the English, and the blood of all Northern Ireland boiled with hatred.
Well, just about everyone. My father was a rare exception. Though he was a staunch supporter of Northern Ireland’s reunification with the Republic, he claimed to have chosen a better path of peace. He said that despite his political leanings, his responsibilities as a true martial arts master and believed that answering the British occupation with force was not the way to achieve independence. Then he’d told me the truth about my mother – my mother, my dear sainted mother who I had thought all these years to be naught more than a simple schoolmarm whose life had been tragically halted by illness - had in truth been a Republican spy and had been killed in a raid on a Republican compound less than a year after I was born. At the time, my father had been so full of rage that he went and hunted down the man her surviving compatriots had said was guilty for the death of my mother. Having found the soldier safe in his home in Liverpool, he readied himself to kill his first victim. As he stood at the window, ready to break in and snap the man’s neck in two, my father would have done so had it not been for the man turning slightly, revealing a baby in his arms. The man’s wife soon came into the room, and watching the three from the window, my father realized that to kill the man would not only deprive a child of his father just as I had been deprived of my own mother, but that a circle of hate could continue and fester. My father, a righteous and just man, chose to walk away, with the man never knowing he was there. If he could do something as strong as that, he said, surely I could do something as equally as potent.
I suspected he thought I would see a strong man who in his greatest moment of weakness, chose to draw upon his utmost strength to do the right thing. No such luck: the child that I was saw a man who wielded great power, yet squandered it by restraining himself. All those years ago, I perceived this as the weaknesses of old age and the master had become a doddering old fool. Even as I rigorously trained under his scrutiny, I harboured resentment towards what his cowardly actions had been, and held my tongue even as he continued to train me, his lone heir, in the arts of the System, now that I was of the age to do so. I learned quickly, and as the more I learned, to more I felt no need to hold back in either sparring or my opinions. My command over the sorrowful energies became more, and the command over the darker nature of my tongue was just as sharp. During my last year at home, rarely did my father and I have a day that went by without a fight. To my surprise, though, he continued to train me, but now I saw through the lies. He trained me merely because he required someone to inherit the arts, not because he believed he could change me (though I suspected somehow he foolishly believed that, too).
Finally, when I was 16, I’d had enough. I left my home in Glenarm for Belfast and to do battle for the Republicans, perhaps even avenge my mother’s death, something that my father should have done. I didn’t tell my father, of course…but he knew what I had done; he knew once legends of the exploits of the 'Black Witch of Belfast' and her brand of Celtic justice started springing up like poisonous mushrooms. I’d heard little of him since the day I left home, though when I was about 19, one of our scouts delivered to me a letter from the old man, saying how much I broke his heart by choosing the path of darkness. I laughed and tore up the paper, never bothering to respond. He’d broken my heart long before by letting my mother’s murderer walk free, so as far as that went, all accounts were squared.
The following year, my twentieth year of life and my fourth year of war, I became such a threat to the Royals that they even had one of their heroes come to hunt me down. In turn, I sent that silly little girl packing, with serious dents in her armour and a broken arm to match. In turn, a platoon of Royal Marines was sent in to capture me with the orders to kill me if they could not make an arrest. That in turn fuelled my own belief in my prowess. The Royal Army had proven to be mighty when it came to slaughtering innocents, but when it came time to deal with someone of real skill, they were as powerless as kittens and had to have 'special' forces come in to arrest me. Well, I’d show these Marines that I was 'special' as well, and that the only force they’d see when coming up against me was the inevitable force of defeat.
That’s usually the way it goes, isn’t it? Hear that you’re powerful and invincible so many times that you begin to believe your own hype. It was this cocky attitude that got me caught. Even my arch-nemesis, one of the few Royals I had any respect for, said that the only reason he was finally able to arrest me was because I had been overconfident. I gambled, believing that I could not possibly lose...and I lost. Though I’d held out for a number of days and taken down a great many of their number, in the end it was that tough old colour sergeant who dealt me a debilitating blow by a stun laser. I was good, he’d told me as they tossed me into a police wagon, cuffed and all like some common bank robber, that while I’d injured a grand amount of their own, he knew my number and my skill, and the moment he saw me in person, he knew exactly how to defeat me – just as he had many other opponents before.
The trial was quick and laughable. Though hundreds called for my head, a 'merciful' judge sentenced me to a life of prison, with the possibility of parole in twenty-five years. I would be as old as my father when I would see the free sky again...and only if that if the whims of the parole board were with me that day. That was the first lesson I had to learn, that I had made enemies over the years, and there are very few gentlemanly opponents out there. There would be no respect for me because I killed no woman or child. There would be no respect for me because I targeted only military and Royalist targets. To them, I was not a just and noble fighter, I was a murderer. And in that lesson I had learned not only was I not the invincible Black Witch of Belfast, but that label would come to haunt me as the years went by.
I digested that lesson rather quickly, and it was a good thing that I did, for other lessons came just as rapidly. The second was that the camaraderie I thought I had with fellow idealists was probably the same kind Joan of Arc had: as long as you’re winning, you’re their champion forever, but the moment things aren’t going quite so well, they’re the first to abandon ship like plague rats. After that, you’re only important as a martyr to The Cause. It goes without saying that my cynical nature blossomed during my term in prison. Regardless, I still believed in Irish independence and was not above using terror tactics to achieve that end.
The third lesson that came to me was that I had a long time in this prison with nothing to do other than to sit here and work out, continue practising the arts that were ultimately as valuable as tin. With my skills now curtailed due to my new surroundings, there was nothing left I could contribute to The Cause, and while I no longer trusted many of my former comrades, there were still many out there who I could trust. I could no longer offer my services as a fighter, but I might be able to assist as a battle planner and tactician. But to do that, I would have to have an education, something I left behind me when I left Glenarm.
Fortunately, the prison had a library, and for those prisoners so inclined, a way to further their educations and 'rebuild' themselves towards a better self. I dived into the books with gusto, and when not sleeping, working, or furthering my physical prowess, I was spending exhaustive hours working towards finishing my schooling and applying to one of the universities that had an education program with the prison. After being vouched for by the prison chaplain (who I’ll admit, I lied to just to get him to agree to further my education), I began studies in history, criminology and the law. As the years went by, I was well on my way towards a degree in law, though I could never become a solicitor or barrister due to my past. I wasn’t worried about that, it was all just a cover towards my ultimate goals, regardless.
I should also mention that during all my time, my father wrote me, but I never answered the letters. I was much too filled with anger and disgust at his ways; I had no desire to read a letter of how ashamed he was of me and how much he tried to forget about his jailbird daughter. I didn’t care, and let the letters stack up over time, and as the years passed, I readied for my new-found mission. Nothing would sway me from that, not the chaplains, not the kind words of the warden, not even the letters from 'dear ol’ Da'.
That didn’t change until my fifth year in prison, just after my twenty-sixth birthday, when the Rikti invasion began.
The “Black Witch of Belfast” is what they called me, though how it was said differed between friend and foe. Sympathisers to The Cause spoke the name reverently, enemies like a curse, and both with some fear and awe. Either way was perfectly fine as far as I was concerned – I was a modern legend with the proper accompanying rhetoric, laudatory mentions, and even a few pub songs composed about me. Old wives and other folksy types claimed I am Scáthach Buanand herself, mentor of the champion Cú Chulainn, stepping out of the mists of time and using her shadowy arts to drive the invaders from the Blessed Isle once and for all. But Celtic storytelling has always embellished even the simplest things with a heavy hand, where even a trip to the toilet becomes a grand epic saga. As usual, the truth of it is not nearly so fantastic.
I was born in Glenarm, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland, a small child for these parts. Throughout my childhood I’d been called 'wee one', 'kipper' and other such things that young, foolish children hurl at each other when they don’t realise how much the pain can cost them. My father, disheartened to watch his only child treated like that, and with no mother to temper my feminine side (I had been told she’d died of cancer the year after I was born), he did the best he could, opting to ensure I could 'trade fair' with anyone who dared taunt me. And for those brutish boys who felt they needed to go a little farther...well, my father ensured I could donnybrook as well as they could give, having taught me the family’s hereditary martial arts that we merely referred to as 'The System'. It is a way to manipulate the sorrowful energies of the soul – what Oriental martial artists might call the 'yin reiki'. The System had been developed on the Isle of Skye centuries ago by our ancestors, and though we couldn’t explain it exactly, a colleague of my father said the art looked like a combination of French and Spanish savate, crossed over with Chinese Tai Chi Chuan. I didn’t know anything about that, but I did have to admit back then that those other fighting masters had to be very wise to come up with something that came close to the majesty of the System.
By the time I’d reached my teenage years, suddenly my size wasn’t a problem, and I went from a 'runt' to a 'petite beauty', though I suspect the changes had much to do with puberty and lads’ hormones than any sudden maturity on their parts. But all was not well within my childhood idyll, for the war between the Loyalists and the Royals continued to wage in my little corner of the world. You would have thought that the Royals would have taken steps to ensure that the members of the Irish Republican Army wouldn’t have to spill such mindlessly savage English blood on our lands any more. Well...one day, they did. The Royal Air Force chose to drop a Fuel Air Explosive on a small town just inside the 'border' of 'Great Britain', and everyone in that town – men, women, children – went up in screaming pains of flame. The RAF bastards claimed that the town was a 'den of IRA'. No such thing: the village had been as staunchly against the tactics of the Republicans as they were against the Royals. But there was no one left to protect them from the English, and the blood of all Northern Ireland boiled with hatred.
Well, just about everyone. My father was a rare exception. Though he was a staunch supporter of Northern Ireland’s reunification with the Republic, he claimed to have chosen a better path of peace. He said that despite his political leanings, his responsibilities as a true martial arts master and believed that answering the British occupation with force was not the way to achieve independence. Then he’d told me the truth about my mother – my mother, my dear sainted mother who I had thought all these years to be naught more than a simple schoolmarm whose life had been tragically halted by illness - had in truth been a Republican spy and had been killed in a raid on a Republican compound less than a year after I was born. At the time, my father had been so full of rage that he went and hunted down the man her surviving compatriots had said was guilty for the death of my mother. Having found the soldier safe in his home in Liverpool, he readied himself to kill his first victim. As he stood at the window, ready to break in and snap the man’s neck in two, my father would have done so had it not been for the man turning slightly, revealing a baby in his arms. The man’s wife soon came into the room, and watching the three from the window, my father realized that to kill the man would not only deprive a child of his father just as I had been deprived of my own mother, but that a circle of hate could continue and fester. My father, a righteous and just man, chose to walk away, with the man never knowing he was there. If he could do something as strong as that, he said, surely I could do something as equally as potent.
I suspected he thought I would see a strong man who in his greatest moment of weakness, chose to draw upon his utmost strength to do the right thing. No such luck: the child that I was saw a man who wielded great power, yet squandered it by restraining himself. All those years ago, I perceived this as the weaknesses of old age and the master had become a doddering old fool. Even as I rigorously trained under his scrutiny, I harboured resentment towards what his cowardly actions had been, and held my tongue even as he continued to train me, his lone heir, in the arts of the System, now that I was of the age to do so. I learned quickly, and as the more I learned, to more I felt no need to hold back in either sparring or my opinions. My command over the sorrowful energies became more, and the command over the darker nature of my tongue was just as sharp. During my last year at home, rarely did my father and I have a day that went by without a fight. To my surprise, though, he continued to train me, but now I saw through the lies. He trained me merely because he required someone to inherit the arts, not because he believed he could change me (though I suspected somehow he foolishly believed that, too).
Finally, when I was 16, I’d had enough. I left my home in Glenarm for Belfast and to do battle for the Republicans, perhaps even avenge my mother’s death, something that my father should have done. I didn’t tell my father, of course…but he knew what I had done; he knew once legends of the exploits of the 'Black Witch of Belfast' and her brand of Celtic justice started springing up like poisonous mushrooms. I’d heard little of him since the day I left home, though when I was about 19, one of our scouts delivered to me a letter from the old man, saying how much I broke his heart by choosing the path of darkness. I laughed and tore up the paper, never bothering to respond. He’d broken my heart long before by letting my mother’s murderer walk free, so as far as that went, all accounts were squared.
The following year, my twentieth year of life and my fourth year of war, I became such a threat to the Royals that they even had one of their heroes come to hunt me down. In turn, I sent that silly little girl packing, with serious dents in her armour and a broken arm to match. In turn, a platoon of Royal Marines was sent in to capture me with the orders to kill me if they could not make an arrest. That in turn fuelled my own belief in my prowess. The Royal Army had proven to be mighty when it came to slaughtering innocents, but when it came time to deal with someone of real skill, they were as powerless as kittens and had to have 'special' forces come in to arrest me. Well, I’d show these Marines that I was 'special' as well, and that the only force they’d see when coming up against me was the inevitable force of defeat.
That’s usually the way it goes, isn’t it? Hear that you’re powerful and invincible so many times that you begin to believe your own hype. It was this cocky attitude that got me caught. Even my arch-nemesis, one of the few Royals I had any respect for, said that the only reason he was finally able to arrest me was because I had been overconfident. I gambled, believing that I could not possibly lose...and I lost. Though I’d held out for a number of days and taken down a great many of their number, in the end it was that tough old colour sergeant who dealt me a debilitating blow by a stun laser. I was good, he’d told me as they tossed me into a police wagon, cuffed and all like some common bank robber, that while I’d injured a grand amount of their own, he knew my number and my skill, and the moment he saw me in person, he knew exactly how to defeat me – just as he had many other opponents before.
The trial was quick and laughable. Though hundreds called for my head, a 'merciful' judge sentenced me to a life of prison, with the possibility of parole in twenty-five years. I would be as old as my father when I would see the free sky again...and only if that if the whims of the parole board were with me that day. That was the first lesson I had to learn, that I had made enemies over the years, and there are very few gentlemanly opponents out there. There would be no respect for me because I killed no woman or child. There would be no respect for me because I targeted only military and Royalist targets. To them, I was not a just and noble fighter, I was a murderer. And in that lesson I had learned not only was I not the invincible Black Witch of Belfast, but that label would come to haunt me as the years went by.
I digested that lesson rather quickly, and it was a good thing that I did, for other lessons came just as rapidly. The second was that the camaraderie I thought I had with fellow idealists was probably the same kind Joan of Arc had: as long as you’re winning, you’re their champion forever, but the moment things aren’t going quite so well, they’re the first to abandon ship like plague rats. After that, you’re only important as a martyr to The Cause. It goes without saying that my cynical nature blossomed during my term in prison. Regardless, I still believed in Irish independence and was not above using terror tactics to achieve that end.
The third lesson that came to me was that I had a long time in this prison with nothing to do other than to sit here and work out, continue practising the arts that were ultimately as valuable as tin. With my skills now curtailed due to my new surroundings, there was nothing left I could contribute to The Cause, and while I no longer trusted many of my former comrades, there were still many out there who I could trust. I could no longer offer my services as a fighter, but I might be able to assist as a battle planner and tactician. But to do that, I would have to have an education, something I left behind me when I left Glenarm.
Fortunately, the prison had a library, and for those prisoners so inclined, a way to further their educations and 'rebuild' themselves towards a better self. I dived into the books with gusto, and when not sleeping, working, or furthering my physical prowess, I was spending exhaustive hours working towards finishing my schooling and applying to one of the universities that had an education program with the prison. After being vouched for by the prison chaplain (who I’ll admit, I lied to just to get him to agree to further my education), I began studies in history, criminology and the law. As the years went by, I was well on my way towards a degree in law, though I could never become a solicitor or barrister due to my past. I wasn’t worried about that, it was all just a cover towards my ultimate goals, regardless.
I should also mention that during all my time, my father wrote me, but I never answered the letters. I was much too filled with anger and disgust at his ways; I had no desire to read a letter of how ashamed he was of me and how much he tried to forget about his jailbird daughter. I didn’t care, and let the letters stack up over time, and as the years passed, I readied for my new-found mission. Nothing would sway me from that, not the chaplains, not the kind words of the warden, not even the letters from 'dear ol’ Da'.
That didn’t change until my fifth year in prison, just after my twenty-sixth birthday, when the Rikti invasion began.
