Chapter 158 — A Refugee Settlement

The weather was growing colder.

As the giant sun blazed across the sky, the clouds seemed hazy and unreal; more and more grayish-yellow mottling appeared in the sky at the turn of day and night, while the starlight looked cold and bright. All these signs indicated that this winter would be a little colder even than the last.

And homeless people would find it very hard to survive such a winter.

"Red-nosed Tom" clutched a bundle of firewood he had scrounged with great difficulty and limped along the road back to the settlement. The frost-month wind blew in from the north, sweeping through the sparse woods and low hills around him, biting into his face, pouring into his collar, so that he felt as though his whole body were soaking in a basin of water slowly going cold.

He was a youth of only seventeen. By Ansou law he was already an adult, yet chronic malnutrition had left him as gaunt and short as most of his peers, so that in build he seemed not yet full-grown. Only that rough, darkened face and those eyes that had gradually gone numb could reveal his true age—and the miserable conditions in which he lived.

He could already see the settlement. A settlement, it was called, but in truth it was only a small, crude camp tucked into the hills and woods of the Southern Marches—and even "camp" was a stretch: a few low, tattered tents and piles of stone clustered here, ringed by equally tattered fences and thornbushes. A faint spur of the Tangsan Mine stretched southeast into these parts and formed a low barrier, barely providing the poor souls hiding here with the most basic shelter against the northern wind—making winter arrive a little later, and letting the people here live a little longer.

Tom carried his firewood into the camp and saw pairs of cold, lifeless eyes. Twenty-six households, one hundred and two people, were gathered here—though a few days ago the number had been one hundred and nine. Most were refugees who had fled from Vulture Ridge; a flood there had left them homeless. The rest came from various viscounties of the Southern Marches, poor folk who for one reason or another had lost their land and their protection.

They wandered from city to town to village, driven off, seized, killed by local lords or local beasts, or else dying of cold and hunger. The Southern Marches were barren; most of the land could barely support any more mouths. And to those nobles who knew only how to squeeze sweat and blood from the soil and from their serfs, any vagrant who wandered onto their territory was a loathsome mouth that needed feeding. So in the end the refugees had no choice but to "make their home" in the wilderness.

Tom found his own spot—a wretched little tent. Even so, this was a rather good situation, because not every family had a tent. Many had long since lost nearly everything in their wandering; they could only sleep among tree roots or in rocky hollows, wrapped in ragged clothes or a pile of weeds. And the only reason Tom still had a little tent to keep off wind and rain was that he and his sister still carried their scimitars and bows.

The fire before the tent had gone out, but night had not yet fallen, so Tom carried the firewood inside. After his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw a pair of bright eyes watching him from the gloom.

"Sis," Tom said, looking at the black-haired girl, "I didn't find any mushrooms. Only this firewood."

The black-haired girl only stared blankly, and several seconds passed before she suddenly said, "The two children of the Bom family starved to death."

"...Oh," Tom answered in a low voice, sitting down in the dark. A few seconds later he asked quietly, "Is there... anything to eat today?"

The black-haired girl went blank again, and Tom felt an ominous premonition rise in his heart. But after a short while, she suddenly stirred half her body and groped for something, then tossed it over.

It was a pheasant, not large, still smelling of fresh blood—though in a tent full of every kind of stench, Tom had not noticed it at all.

A scrawny pheasant was nowhere near enough to fill the bellies of two siblings, especially when this was the only meal they could eat all day. Yet it still lifted Tom's spirits: compared with roasted mushrooms and roasted moss, meat could keep a person going longer in this increasingly cold weather. Overjoyed, he said, "You caught something?! We won't have to go hungry today!"

"When you go out later to pluck the chicken, take the hunting knife," the black-haired girl said faintly. "Wear it somewhere conspicuous."

"Mm!" Tom nodded vigorously. But as he grew more accustomed to the darkness in the tent, he finally noticed something wrong with his sister—she had been lying in the corner in a strange posture the whole time, and her voice was clearly weaker than usual. With an ominous foreboding, Tom edged closer, and at last saw the bloodstains near her shoulder, and the arm hanging limply at her side. "Sis, you're hurt?!"

"A wild dog bit me. It tore the tendon," the black-haired girl's voice finally began to tremble. "I... I can't hunt anymore."

It was as if a bucket of ice water had been poured over his head; in an instant Tom was cold from head to foot. She could not hold a knife; she could not draw a bow. The injury to her arm meant that the only one of them who could go into the woods to hunt had lost the ability to get food—and that in turn meant the two of them... were already doomed.

Everyone was starving; there was no one who could possibly help the two of them. For people who had already lost everything, even a small injury to hand or foot, even a short time without the strength to work, was a fatal threat!

What was more, a person bitten by a wild dog was terribly prone to infection—and in conditions like these, once infection set in, there was no saving them.

"I..." Tom gritted his teeth and made up his mind. "Tomorrow I'll take the bow and..."

"Don't go," the black-haired girl said harshly. Her gaze fell on Tom's feet. "If you go, you won't come back. Hunting in the woods is not the same as gathering firewood nearby!"

Tom had not been born lame. His leg had been broken by a knight of the lord's household—because that knight had gone to church to hear a sermon, and the priest of the Blood God sect said that only by breaking a man's leg with one's own hands could one's martial skill and courage break through a bottleneck. So the knight had broken Tom's leg without hesitation—and afterward compensated him with half a sack of wheat.

"I can set traps," Tom insisted. "I remember how to tell bear tracks from wolf tracks, and how to go around them..."

"But if you die out there, I'll certainly die too," the black-haired girl stared hard into Tom's eyes. "Go into the woods and pick mushrooms, look for seeds and berries under the tree roots, and if it truly comes to nothing..."

And if it truly came to nothing, what then? Even she did not know.

Tom bit his lip, thought hard, and finally voiced an idea he had long been turning over: "We could... go to the lord here..."

"Have you forgotten how we were driven out of the Caroll domain?" the black-haired girl said sternly. "It's the frost month now—no more farming, and hard to hunt. The noble lords won't allow a single extra mouth on their land at a time like this!"

"Then..." Tom thought again, and said hesitantly, "Maybe the mines need slaves. The lord of Tangsan Town has a big mine. Even in the frost month, a mine needs slave labor, doesn't it..."

"Can you be a slave laborer?" The black-haired girl stared at Tom's leg. "I can't work now, and neither can you. Even if they want slaves, they won't want the likes of us!"

"Then what about going farther south? I hear that south of the Whitewater River is land newly opened by the Cecil family. Frontier land like that should be short of all kinds of workers... I can at least tan hides."