Heavier Than a Mountain (Destiny's Crucible Book 3)

by Olan Thorensen

  Carnigan looked taken aback by this sudden change in Yozef. Balwis, jaded though he was, nodded and touched the amulet to God the Militant he wore around his neck. The leader of the wagons looked uncertain but a little fearful at Yozef’s tone. He obviously knew the rumors about this man.

  Yozef figured he might as well play the Septarsh card for all it was worth. He tilted his head sideways and closed his eyes most of the way, as if listening to some faint voice. All of the others remained quiet. Even the women close enough to hear the exchanges kept silent, although, in their case, due to confusion about what was happening.

  After a minute, Yozef opened his eyes and proclaimed in a loud voice, “I do not believe God is pleased by how these women were treated either in their homeland or here in Keelan. I sense that he is close to being angry.” Yozef then changed his voice, so that he sounded like himself and not a prophet of God. “I think we need to get these women food, shelter, and let them clean themselves.”

  By now, the wagon master was pale and eager to appease whatever aspect of God he might have offended. “Yes, yes,” he said. “We need to get to the nearest village.”

  It took twenty minutes for them to arrive at the village of Dilstin. Yozef did his best Old Testament prophet imitation stance, while the initial discourse went on. The wagon master’s explanation to the villagers occasioned surreptitious glances in Yozef’s direction and a few clutches at amulets and hand motions to ward off any present evil spirits.

  Whatever the wagon master said to the village chief elicited an enthusiastic response from the villagers. Faster than Yozef would have predicted, a building, possibly a school, was cleared and bedding for the women laid out on the floor, with cushioning under the bedding. The women of the village led groups of the women to different homes, to return later bathed and in some cases with new, if plain, clothing. Later, Yozef’s party and the women were fed plentiful plain village food.

  Yozef didn’t rush leaving the next morning, letting the women get as much sleep as they needed. The sun was well up when all felt ready to depart. Yozef thanked the villagers and told them he had a dream that God was pleased with them. An audible sigh ran through the seventy to eighty villagers who witnessed their departure. Yozef thought he might as well reinforce the lesson and gave the village chief enough gold coins to more than pay for all they had provided, along with an admonition to remember to practice God’s mercy. Several of the Moreland women cried, as the wagons moved out of the village. It had been the first time in however long that people had been kind to them.

  As Yozef rode to the front of the party of wagons and his travel companions/guards, he got his first real look at the woman who had to be Anarynd. The dirty, bedraggled hair was now clearly the golden blonde Maera had described, tied in a ponytail. He briefly glimpsed blue eyes in a haggard face.

  Because the road paralleled the semaphore line, Yozef sent Maera a message from the next station, saying they were on the way back with the women. He felt undecided about whether to go slow and stop again for two more nights or push on ahead harder. He finally thought it would be best to get the women to St. Tomo’s Abbey in Caernford and the medicants as fast as possible. They stopped once more at another village and repeated the theatrics of the first night. The next day they rose at first light, pushed on to Caernford, and reached the abbey at mid-day. The medicants cared for the women and provided shelter. Anarynd allowed herself to be checked briefly by the medicants and then insisted on traveling on to Maera.

  It was dark when Anarynd and Yozef arrived home in a Keelan carriage sent by Maera and driven by Carnigan. Kerosene lanterns lit the front veranda, where Maera waited. Not a sound came from either woman, as Maera rose from a rocker and Anarynd stood by the carriage after Yozef helped her down. Then, as if in slow motion, Maera came down the steps, as Anarynd walked forward. They met at the bottom of the steps, then slowly, as if afraid to dissipate a dream, their arms encircled each other, and both women broke into deep sobs.

  Yozef thanked Carnigan, who handed the carriage off to a manor worker, and the big man walked back toward Caernford. Balwis watched for several minutes, then headed for the cottage he slept in when staying on the grounds.

  A good ten minutes passed before the torrent of tears slowed, and Yozef guided the women into the house and the parlor, the two women clinging as if afraid of losing the other. Yozef went into the kitchen and brought back water, wine, and glasses. He set them on a table next to the women and retreated to his library and writing in his journals.

  It was almost three hours later when Maera came into his workroom, tear-streaked, happy, and angry all at once.

  “She’s sleeping in the bedroom next to ours. I got several glasses of wine into her, and she finally relaxed enough to fall asleep. I expect she’ll sleep until tomorrow, and then I’ll see what I can do to care for her.”

  “How is she?” Yozef inquired softly.

  “She was a slave of the Narthani for three months!” Maera snapped bitterly. “How do you think she is!”

  He didn’t know what else to say at that moment, so said nothing.

  Maera slumped into a chair, closed her eyes, and laid her head on the chair back, silent for several minutes, then . . .

  “I’m sorry, Yozef,” she said. “There’s no reason to yell at you. None of this is your fault, and Ana told me how you took care of all the women. Thank you for that. It’s just that . . . I’m so overjoyed that Ana is safe here, but at the same time I want to scream to the heavens that this happened to her.”

  Yozef moved to Maera’s chair, sat on the edge of the cushion, and pulled her to him. She didn’t resist, letting her head rest on his chest, and clutched him. After another quarter hour, Maera turned businesslike once again and insisted they find something to eat in the kitchen before retiring.

  The next morning, Yozef left to meet with Luwis and Kennrick, while Maera waited for Anarynd to waken. She waited until almost midday, checking several times an hour on Anarynd. As soon as her friend woke, a hot bath awaited, followed by a clean robe, and food and wine on a small table under a pergola behind the house. They spoke little until they finished eating. Finally, Anarynd looked into her friend’s eyes, her right hand gripped Maera’s left, and she recounted the previous months. Maera listened without comment, a flood of empathetic emotions coursing through her. She remained silent while Anarynd recounted her escape and return home.

  * * *

  For Ana, the decision to leave her family was easy and heartbreaking. The Stent clansmen had been observing the walls of Hanslow, the Eywellese capital. Twelve hundred Stent and Hewell men had ridden hard to get to Parthmal, the Narthani staging base for the Moreland invasion, before the withdrawing Narthani force arrived back across the Eywell-Moreland border. After surprising and annihilating the two-hundred-man supply base, a scouting party had pushed on to the outskirts of Hanslow. The Stent party of fifty men was about to the leave the forest edge a mile from Hanslow when the ragged, bruised, and terrified trail of women staggered out of the darkness. Half of the women were hysterical with relief when they realized the horsemen were not Eywellese; the other half were too exhausted to talk. It was Anarynd who identified them as slaves escaped from Hanslow. The fifty Stentese needed to return to the main force ten miles away, but there was no question that they would take the women, even if it slowed them and risked an encounter with Eywellese or Narthani mounted patrols.

  Thirty-eight women and children rode double the seventy miles back to Moreland City, stopping only once to sleep on the ground after crossing the Moreland border. A few women were left at their home villages or farms on the way, but most rode all the way to Moreland City, where the Stentese turned them over to the Moreland authority to repatriate to their families, if the families existed. Some women returned to find their immediate families dead or still missing from Eywell raids. These women were sent to their nearest relatives. Other women were Preddi whose families were lost or dead, had disappeared, or had been
shipped off Caedellium to Narthon. Families took in these women or abbeys cared for them, until permanent places could be found. All of these women were, in a way, the fortunate ones, because they knew their status, no matter how bad.

  Not so for many of the Moreland women with still-living families. There, the receptions varied. Ana witnessed one woman embraced by parents, husband, and children, all crying with joy. Her own reception differed dramatically. Word was sent to her family, forty miles from Moreland City, that they needed to come get her. A sixday had passed before her oldest brother, Heilrond, came to claim her. They had never been on the best of terms, and his obvious disgust at seeing her foretold her reception at home.

  Her father never spoke to her, and she later learned he had ordered that she never be in his presence. Heilrond left her at a cottage on the edge of the family land and told her not to come to the house. The next day, her mother came to the cottage, and Anarynd described what had happened to her. How she and Aunt Tilda, her mother’s sister, had been taken captive in Lanwith when they had gone the ten miles from the family estate to shop—her aunt’s thoughtful, and fateful, attempt to get Anarynd away from her father’s baleful presence for even a few hours.

  The last Anarynd saw of her aunt was when they, along with all of the other captive Moreland women and children, were herded into a corral to be dispersed to masters, brothels, or slave markets. Anarynd had been pulled out by a Narthani officer—Colonel Erdelin, she later learned, the overseer of Eywell Province and one of the highest-ranking Narthani officers.

  Her mother’s eyes teared up at the news about her sister, but not when Anarynd recounted her own fate as the concubine of the Narthani officer. Anarynd admitted she had done what she had to, in order to survive and not be sent to the brothels, but her mother slowly pulled away from her as more details came out. Anarynd had no thought to hide anything. This was her mother. Only when she finished describing how she had kept from becoming pregnant by taking the root extract given to her by another woman slave, Gwyned, and how they had escaped, did Anarynd notice her mother had moved away from her with a face cold, eyes dry, and arms crossed in front of her.

  She heard no words of consolation or welcome home.

  “You’re our child, and we can’t send you away, but we don’t need to see you more than necessary, and you’re not to come to the house where others might see you and the rest of the family be shamed.”

  Shamed! Anarynd wanted to scream. For this happening to me beyond my control? Merciful God, you’re my mother!

  Without another word, her mother spun and left the cottage. Anarynd didn’t see her mother again until almost a month later. Despite the rejection, her urge to glimpse any family member became too strong, and Anarynd walked along a path that wound through a grove of trees a hundred yards from the family home. She watched the house too closely and didn’t hear approaching laughter until her mother and two brothers rounded a bend. The four of them stood staring, shocked or surprised for several seconds. For a moment, Anarynd thought her mother would come to her, when an anguished expression washed over her mother’s face, and Heilrond grabbed their mother’s arm.

  “You were told not to come near the house! Now get back to where you belong, before we forget our charity for letting you stay even there!”

  It was the last time she saw any of them before deciding. This wasn’t home anymore. Home was where you were wanted, where people cared for you and you them. She had no future here. Out of her distant relatives, none came to see her or intervened on her behalf with her parents.

  She returned to the empty cottage and yelled, “The hell with you all!”

  Where could she go? Only one possibility rose in her mind. Maera. She hadn’t had writing materials to send a letter to Maera, and even if she had, no one would have taken it to the closest registrar office to get in a mail packet. Should she ask neighbors or anyone in the nearby village for ink and paper? She would have to walk to the registrar and had no coin to pay even the small fee.

  Gwyned. Another escaped slave. A Preddi. The one who had sympathetically advised her on how to survive. Gwyned, who had become a friend, a sliver of consolation in her months in Hanslow. Anarynd had said goodbye to Gwyned in Moreland City when distant relatives of Gwyned’s came for her. Anarynd remembered that she lived in a nearby village, only a fifteen-minute walk from the city’s outer wall. A village named something like Halsworth or Halston or something close.

  Anarynd would go to Maera, who certainly wouldn’t turn her away. She hoped. Moreland City was on the way, and she would try to find Gwyned, see how her friend was doing, and say goodbye. Maybe in Moreland City she could send Maera a letter.

  Anarynd packed enough food for three days, almost all she had in the cottage, a wineskin of water, and a change of clothes. She put on her only pair of shoes and started walking at dawn the next morning.

  Two full days later, the tops of Moreland City’s buildings came in view. It was too late to try to find Gwyned that day, so she slept once more on the ground, covered by a cloak. The next morning, she asked and found directions to the village of Halstorn, the closest-sounding village to what she could remember Gwyned telling her. After an hour’s walk to the village of perhaps three hundred, she was told Gwyned lived somewhere in Moreland City. Her distant family in the village had refused to let her stay, unless she got rid of the half-Narthani child she’d borne during her years as a Narthani concubine. Gwyned had refused and left for Moreland City.

  Anarynd retraced her route back into Moreland City. Even with more than twenty thousand people in the city, news of the escaped women was widely known, and Anarynd needed only an hour to find one of the other women. Not Gwyned, but she knew where Gwyned worked, at a seamstress shop.

  Their reunion was tearful and bitter. Anarynd learned that her experience and Gwyned’s were not unique. While many of the women had been accepted gladly by their families, others suffered rejection or had no families to come back to, because they were from Preddi or even from elsewhere on Anyar and had been brought to Caedellium by the Narthani.

  Anarynd stayed with Gwyned in a corner of the seamstress shop, and in the next sixday, the two of them tracked down all of the escapees living in or close to Moreland City. Anarynd had already asked Gwyned to come with her to Keelan, sure that Maera would help. When seven others eventually asked if they could come, too, and Anarynd told them she couldn’t ensure their reception, most of them asserted that things couldn’t be worse in Keelan Province. When it came time to leave, word had spread, and twenty-two women had showed up, with two toddlers and two babies still nursing.

  The women didn’t have enough coin among the group to pay for transportation, so they started walking. They used what coin they had to buy food on the way and asked for charity when the coin was exhausted.

  A number of the women were weak from hunger or illness, and the children had to be carried. Some days they traveled only five miles. Three times farmers with empty wagons gave them lifts for a few miles, with all of them packed on top of one another and hanging off the wagon beds. On the eighth day, they reached the Keelan semaphore station just across the border. There, Anarynd asked, then begged, then threatened the station agent to send a message to Maera Kolsko-Keelan.

  “It costs twenty-five krun to send a semaphore message. Do you have it?” asked the agent, a disdainful curl to his lips.

  “No,” said Anarynd, “but Maera Kolsko-Keelan will pay it and more. I’m a friend.”

  “You?” said the agent. “Why would the hetman’s daughter and the wife of Yozef Kolsko be a friend of yours? And a Morelander, at that.”

  “Do you want to take that chance?” Anarynd retorted. “If I’m telling the truth and you don’t send it, you’ll risk the anger of both Hetman Keelan and Yozef Kolsko.”

  The threat made the agent pause to reconsider. He looked at the station counter, bare for the moment of messages to be relayed in either direction, so should he risk that this bedraggled woman
had told the truth? He thought for several moments, then decided, Why not?

  “All right,” he said. “What’s the message?”

  Although Anarynd wanted to slump to the ground in relief, she held herself firm. “Just say that Anarynd Moreland is at the border and needs transportation for herself and twenty-one other women.”

  The agent shook his head. “I’ll send it, but you should figure out what you’re going to do if no return message comes, or it comes and Maera Kolsko-Keelan has never heard of you.”

  To the agent’s shock—and relief that he’d wisely sent the message—an answer came to arrange transportation to Caernford. He provided water and enough food for a few bites for each woman and child, and two wagons from a nearby village left the station heading south. He didn’t know what was going on and felt relieved to be rid of them.

  They slept in a barn that night, while the two drivers slept under the wagons. The next midday, a group of riders pushing their horses hard met them. All of the men were armed, and many of the women cowered in the wagon beds. One man rode ahead to the wagons; a hard-looking man with a facial scar. Of the other men, one was a huge, red-headed man with a ferocious countenance. All of the men seemed to defer to a third man, of average height, sturdily built, with brown hair and lighter fine streaks. When he came near the wagons, Anarynd could see that he had unusually light blue eyes, almost gray.

  * * *

  It was well past mid-afternoon when Anarynd got around to talking about herself. “I thought of killing myself. Oh, God, you don’t know how many times I thought about it. I didn’t, because I hoped for rescue or escape. Then, when hope faded, I knew the Word forbids it. I wondered if I believed in God anymore, then another thing stopped me. After what they had done and were doing to my people . . . and after what Erdelin had done to me, if I killed myself, I would let them win. If I died, Erdelin would only take another woman. So, to spare myself, I would condemn another victim to the same treatment. In the end, I couldn’t do it.”