Chapter 158 — A Refugee Settlement
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
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.