Preserving Hope Read online

  “The Halwende?”

  She gave him an odd look. “Yes. That’s the slower-moving of the two rivers surrounding this forest, the one to the east. Surely you crossed that one to get here?”

  Oops. “Of course. I’ve traveled a long way, and have mixed up the names of the two rivers. I thought I remember the Halwende being the one with the more difficult waters.”

  She chuckled. “No, the Ealdor is that one. I suppose if you’ve not lived nearby it might be easy to get the two rivers confused; they are rather close together, and merge together farther north. Where do you come from?”

  “A town far to the west. Or at least, I think it’s to the west. I’ve been in such a deep state of mourning since losing my family that I’m not certain how far I traveled, or even which direction. But I have no expectation of returning.” They continued the slow walk toward the gate, and Will was eager to learn more about their history. “What else did you learn?”

  “While bread remains a staple of our diet, we found that by consuming fresh vegetables and meat each day, we could remain strong, even after long days of exhausting labor. We wash the vegetables after we harvest them; that seems to help as well.”

  Will nodded. He wasn’t much of a history expert, but had gleaned that what he’d consider basic hygiene and food preparation practices were unknown in these times. Such simple techniques could indeed have a profound effect on the overall well-being of anyone who started to follow them, especially given the starting point for most of them in this era. It had clearly done wonderful things for the health of the original ten members of the community, as they’d recruited dozens of others and built an incredibly sophisticated hidden village squirreled away inside a forest. The labor to clear the plot of land of trees alone must have been monumental. “Those seem almost too simple to work, but perhaps what is simple is best.”

  She glanced at him in a calculating way. “Indeed. We find it best to build on the knowledge of others who have already gotten to where we wish to journey, to ask questions and listen carefully to the answer of those who know.” The emotional intent behind that comment was quite clear to Will. She knew that he knew more than he was letting on, and was challenging him to talk to her.

  He could speak in code as well. “Speaking of journeys, when will we be departing on ours?”

  “Once we complete our morning washing and meal, we’ll gather our final supplies for the trip and leave.”

  Gradually, the crowd near the gate grew, with people greeting each other and talking about plans for that day. With the Stores now empty, the crafters would be hard at work generating more goods to sell. The farmers would be out tilling soil in the open fields; they would have fewer horses to pull the plows during the Trading mission, and as such would make slower progress than usual. The carpenters would be working on building new carts for the next Trading mission, and would make sure that at that time Will would have one of his own to drive. Will realized that meant he’d have to learn how to harness and drive a horse-drawn cart, which might prove an interesting challenge for someone accustomed to driving a motor vehicle, and whose definition of horsepower was far different than that of anyone else here.

  Arthur eventually emerged from his home, scanning the crowd. Will sensed he was simply making sure everyone was present. Arthur frowned, muttered something under his breath, and then raised his voice. “Elizabeth! We’re waiting for you, girl! Get out here!”

  The door to the room next to Arthur’s opened, and the girl emerged. She kept her eyes aimed at the ground as she walked toward her father, though Will detected a quick shift of her eyes in his direction as she passed. He also noticed a very brief surge of Energy as she walked by; presumably, she was trying to determine what he knew about the topic by alerting him to her own ability. Will elected to remain patient, though he found himself quietly amused. After all of the issues with his lack of Shielding at the Alliance camp, and after his own decision to hide his abilities and attempt to grow and develop with the others, he’d managed to be discovered for his Energy by two people within the first day. Perhaps one day he’d become better attuned to maintaining his Shield.

  After directing a withering glare at Elizabeth, Arthur unlocked and opened the gate and led the way into the surrounding forest. They headed east, along a well-worn path in the forest, and he soon heard the sound of a river. Will noted as the river came into sight that it was roughly thirty yards across, and he hoped it wasn’t especially deep. The current moved along at a leisurely pace. This was the Halwende; Will made certain he mentally recited the name several times to ensure he wouldn’t forget it if asked about it again.

  Despite the chill, the residents all waded into the frigid water, fully clothed. The waters were dark, and once submerged most removed their clothing. Bars of soap appeared, possibly stored in pockets during the walk, and the residents were soon using them to wash their bodies and clothing. Will hesitated, and then waded into the water to join the others. The cold water was shocking, yet refreshing, and though Will was fully accustomed to hot water showers, he gradually found himself enjoying the experience. Aldus, a man Will had met the day before while loading carts, offered him a bar of soap to use. Will happily accepted it, and used it to scrub away the dirt on his body. He was concerned about what might be swimming in the river, but there was nothing to be done about it.

  Once scrubbed clean, the residents wrung out their clothes as best they could and dressed, then trudged out of the water into the relatively cool morning air. After the brisk chill of the water, Will didn’t notice the early morning chill to the degree he normally would. Still, it was brisk, and he was shivering by the time they arrived back at the gate amidst the lively chatter of his neighbors. The villagers headed to the center of the community, and gathered around as the bakers and chefs fired up the stone hearth ovens and the smiths started up fires needed to heat metal, and soon everyone was drying out with the heat generated by the various blazes. After returning to his room to collect his money bag, Will paid a copper coin to the bakers and chefs and was soon enjoying breakfast. He’d foregone the bread offered to him and instead downed a healthy serving of the vegetable and meat stew offered to him.

  Will wandered back to his room after eating, and retrieved the paper computer from the trunk. He’d been nervous about taking it with him during the trip to the river, primarily out of concern that the device might float away or be spotted by one of the villagers. He headed toward the front gate, patting his pockets one final time to make sure that he had his money bag and the paper scroll computer. After the horses were hitched to the carts, the caravan headed out through the gate on the journey. Will sat with Eva, and deferred to her when she offered to let him drive the horses. They traveled in silence for a few hours, and then stopped to let the horses drink water. The animals wearied quickly due to the heavy loads they were hauling. Will headed into the trees, ostensibly to attend to personal matters, where he took the opportunity to check the computer for messages.

  The Traders are generally trustworthy; follow your instincts. Do not fear to confide in Eva; she is the antithesis of Arthur Lowell. Practice invisibility and flying; flood your cells with Energy and imagine them invisible or weightless to achieve the desired effects.

  With the brief, vague insights from the future internalized, Will climbed back into the wagon seat, where he’d ridden in relative silence the first few hours of the trip, well aware that Eva was casting glances his way. Her Energy, knowingly or not, was trying to gather information on him, but he was blocking her attempts. He wanted to focus on the new skill he’d need to master for the next Trading mission, when he’d need to be able to drive the cart with horses to the town with the rest of the caravan. He’d been running over the steps required to successfully hitch the animals to the carts. It would be an interesting experience trying to handle the task himself and look like something other than a man who’d never been near a horse in his life.

  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, a
nd 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.