Chapter 158 — A Refugee Settlement
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 3
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."