Preserving Hope (7 page)

The caravan resumed its journey, with Eva and Will in the lead. Will wondered if there was some type of hierarchy revealed in the order of the carts. But that could wait. As the carts reached traveling speed and a natural distance developed between them, Will glanced at Eva. “You might as well ask what you want to ask.”

Eva looked startled. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Will sighed, and dropped his Shield a bit. He could sense her shock as she felt the Energy from him, though she attempted to stay stony-faced. “Nobody will hear a thing. Ask.”

She looked at him with that penetrating stare. “Who are you?”

“Will Stark.”

She sighed. “Then
what
are you?”

He laughed. “I’m a man. Ask better questions, and you’ll get better answers.” He smiled.

Eva faced forward, focusing on directing the horses over the dirt road. A moment passed in silence. Finally, she glanced his way, looked back to the road, and said, “What is the sensation I’m feeling?”

He nodded. “I’ve come to call it Energy. It’s something your body produces and collects naturally. It will go wherever you concentrate, and do what you ask. You’ve done enough to clear your body of distractions so that you can sense it in yourself and others.” He glanced at her. “There
are
others, at least one inside the community besides you.”

Eva wouldn’t look at him. “Why did you come here?”

Will glanced her way, trying to determine the intent behind the question. He sensed fear, not so much of the Energy he possessed, but what his arrival meant. He was already far along the path they were all striving to travel. Was he here to stop them? She wanted to trust him and learn from him, but the experiences of the Travelers — whoever they were — suggested she had reason to believe he might be there to sabotage their efforts.

He elected to go with an honest answer, with a bit of embellishment. “I was sent here to protect someone very important. I have no desire to restrain the development efforts of anyone, if that’s your concern. So long as you bear no malice towards the one I wish to protect, then I am happy to help you.”

“It’s Elizabeth, isn’t it?”

She was quick. “Yes,” he answered simply.

Eva nodded. “She needs all the help she can get.”

V

Regrets

Will was stunned at Eva’s statement. “She’s in danger?”

Eva gave him an odd look. “If you were sent to protect her, surely you’re aware of that fact.” Her smile did not reach her eyes.

“I know only that she
needs
protection,” Will said. “I don’t know what she needs to be protected
from
.”

Eva sighed, and her voice was tinged with misery. “You need to know our true history, then. If you knew our history, you’d know her biggest threat isn’t people like Arthur. It’s people like
me
.”

Will nearly jumped off the cart. “
You’re
threatening her?” Had his computer from the future gotten things so obviously wrong so early?

She shook her head. “Worse. I’ve stood by and let her be hurt, and said nothing, at a time when it might have made a significant difference in her life. Now I try to protect her as best I can, but the numbers and the odds are against me. I’m but one person, but I do what I can on her behalf. Perhaps you’re the one who can turn things in her favor.”

Will relaxed a bit. “Maybe you need to tell me how she came to be in such danger, and what form that danger takes. She seems of unusually poor health compared to others in this community. That strikes me as… odd.”

“Not odd, Will. Intentional. Or more to the point, an acceptable occurrence to those causing it with their direct behavior.”

She took a deep breath. “You’re not going to like this, and you’ll likely be angry with me. I cannot make up for my cowardice and selfishness as it relates to Elizabeth, but I know I’ve done her wrong, and I’ll give everything I have to try to make it right. Most of the Traders are of a similar mind, but that’s it. Still, it’s probably lessened her suffering, and let her know that there are a few people living here who care about her and are on her side.”

Will put a hand on her shoulder. “I understand, and I’m sure she appreciates any effort on her behalf. Please, tell me how this came to be.”

“There were ten of us at the start. Me and my brother, Arthur and Genevieve, and three other men and three other women. My brother has vanished, Genevieve is dead, and six left rather than participate in Elizabeth’s treatment. Only Arthur and I remain from the original group.

“We call ourselves former serfs because we all believed we were meant for something greater than being someone else’s property. In reality, all of us were born slaves. We worked the lands, the roads, the mines, the fields, the households… and we were all born in the same year.

“Life was brutish, short, and sickly for us. And that was common. Living for twenty-five years was a miracle, living for thirty years impossible. The baron didn’t like this, because his free labor wasn’t accomplishing much, and before we could develop any true expertise, we’d die. We were often too sick or injured to work, regardless of how many times we were beaten or whipped.

“The Baron decided that our short lives and poor health were too expensive, and so he decided to try something quite unusual. He’d pull ten of his slaves at a time out of their work environments and use them to figure out the simplest things that could be done to make us healthier and live longer. He didn’t want anything expensive; if he’d been told that giving us all gold bracelets would add five years to our lives, he’d be happy to let us die instead.”

Will winced.

The baron put them in one of his smaller homes, and told the servants there to attend to their every need. “We went from being slaves to having servants,” Eva said. “For some, the freedom we lived with, no matter how fleeting, was incredible. But others liked having servants, of having the power to run the lives of others.”

“Arthur,” Will said.

She nodded. Arthur had grown to love the power to order others around, and his own megalomania combined with such a rapid change in position made him see himself as royalty in training. Eva noted that Arthur worked very hard to try to push beyond their simple mandate. They were supposed to focus on the simple; they quickly found that eating the produce of the manor — which had been washed — and wearing clean clothes greatly reduced the frequency of illness. “Arthur wondered if, perhaps, being clean in all ways would be healthy, and that’s how we started the tradition of the morning bath in the river every day. Most of us had done little more than washing our faces or hands each day; spending time each day in those cool waters seemed to work wonders.” Arthur had them try other things as well; they found that one of the servants was literate and they had the man teach all of them to read and write and work with numbers, skills no slave ever learned. But they’d all made the decision that they had no interest in returning to their former way of life.

Two years later, they baron remembered that they’d been tasked with the job, and found that they’d made great progress. The lessons learned were basic; the baron would have scribes compose letters with his orders sent out to all of his slave masters. Arthur overheard him tell a small handful of knights to return the next day with horses to collect the slaves to return them to their previous occupations.

“But we weren’t there the next day. We moved quickly; we raided his safes for money, his silos for seeds and grains, and his barns for horses and tools. We never considered that we might possibly be stealing; it felt as if we were simply taking back what we’d earned in the past.”

They stole away in the night, without alerting any of the servants, and rode north, directly into the teeth of the bitter winter. They rarely slept until they were a week’s journey away, only then believing they might be safe from any type of tracking or hunting from the baron. They moved at a more casual rate, until they came to the place where the Ealdor and Halwende rivers forked, with the gentle Halwende taking the more easterly route, and the rapid-filled Ealdor flowing from the west. Between the rivers was a dense forest, and the weary travelers were suddenly encouraged. They could live within the seclusion of those trees without fear of discovery; the lands between the rivers would likely be quite fertile, though certainly chilly.

“We traveled into the forest beginning in the early morning, and found a small clearing where the water was bubbling up to the surface. We made camp there, and the next day, using the tools we’d borrowed, we began constructing a large building, large enough to house everyone, including the horses. A few days later, we built a second structure, and this time it was just for the people.”

Will nodded. “Those buildings were the stables and the Schola, weren’t they?”

She nodded as well. “The name on the building came early. Arthur said that we needed a vision to guide us, something that would compel us to keep working hard even when we were bone-tired and cold and aching. He spoke of a vision of this tiny set of buildings evolving into a village of like-minded people, each plying their trade in relative anonymity, quietly growing our own personal wealth. Personal growth, in Latin, can be written as
alio incrementum
. As our village grew and we built personal rooms for shelter, we left that large room specifically free to store any books we might come across in our travels or Trading missions, or anything else that might educate us. We wanted to continue to perfect our ability to read and write, and that’s really what we used it for initially. It was, in a sense, a school. So, it got the
alio incrementum schola
label, after a few of our best educated neighbors learned bits of Latin."

It was a noble beginning, it seemed, to a word that would later provide Will with so much pain, separate him from his family, and take the lives of many innocent people. He promised himself that he’d use his far advanced abilities and technology to promote the original aims of education and improvement of self, rather than the eventual aims to limit those concepts only to a chosen few.

Eva told of their first two years, challenging years. The winters were harsh, and they were often hungry, but gradually they were able to exchange the money they’d taken from the baron for supplies and tools they could use to create goods. They started weaving fabrics into clothes, and used the profits from selling over time to branch out into nearly everything else, including carpentry, the forging of swords, daggers and knives, and even brewing beer. They eventually added more people to the community, extending invitations to those as they met who seemed capable of sharing their ideas. People like Will Stark.

“During one of those Trading runs to sell goods, Arthur heard travelers from distant lands telling tales of people doing what he called magic, feats like flying and turning invisible and reading the thoughts of others with perfect accuracy. Arthur and others applauded the man for such a wonderful and compelling tale, but the man stated with deep sincerity that they’d seen such feats with their own eyes, and even told Arthur where. He came back and told all of us that we should send two or three of our number to investigate. What if, he said, we learned what enabled those people to do what those travelers had seen them do? What if we could repeat that process here, and develop those same abilities? Could we imagine that success? As it turned out, we could imagine only too well, and Arthur, Genevieve, and my brother departed. They returned six months later, and the detail we found most notable upon their return was that Arthur and Genevieve had been married abroad and she was three months pregnant.”

Will blinked. It sounded almost as if the couple had eloped. “That… must have been a shock.”

“It was more than a shock, Will. In our community, it was, for lack of a better term, illegal.”

Will tried to avoid gasping with shock, until he realized it was a perfectly natural reaction to the statement. “It was…
illegal
… to get married?”

“We’d agreed that until such time as our village was well-established, until there we had time for true leisure, that we’d all abstain from such relationships, for any child would be unable to provide some useful service for the rest, or make crafts we could sell for a profit. Some of the villagers performed services in the community. We have farmers who tend fields to the east; we have hunters and foragers who gather berries, nuts, roots, and small game for everyone to eat. We have a couple of cooks and bakers who make soups and bread for everyone to eat. Everyone has a means to make money and develop wealth. Everyone who could perform such a service or make such goods for sale, that is. A pregnant Genevieve could not tend her share of the fields for several months during our critical planting season; her child would be unable to help with anything for many years after that. They were, essentially, forcing the community’s internal economy and way of life into a massive disruption, and people weren’t happy.”

Was this the cause of the future rules against marriage and children? Were the lessons of the transgressions by Arthur and Genevieve the cause of his own future suffering?

Arthur, who had been a driving force in getting the community to where it was, found himself shunned and rapidly losing his modest wealth as he paid for his new wife and daughter to eat. For a man who believed himself royalty, who believed himself deserving of tribute and honor, such shunning was a humiliation he’d never forget. Or forgive.