John Ringo - There Will Be Dragons

Every day had been the same. After sleeping overnight in their small tent they would get up and make a fire. They had set out snares or fish-lines the night before but with the rain they had gotten little every day. So they would eat a bit of their road-food, flip the tent into its packing form and head off through the woods. Rachel well understood how relatively well-off they were. They had warm, dry clothing designed by specialists at the very tag end of the industrial revolution for exactly these conditions. They had good footwear, excellent foods and water carriers. In this time of madness they were rich.

They had passed others on the trail who were not so well off. Now, as they crossed over another of the simple log bridges there was one slumped and twisted by the side of the trail looking like nothing so much as a pile of torn clothes.

Rachel turned her head away, hardly looking at the body tumbled up against the tree, but her mother stepped over and examined the woman thoroughly, as she almost always did, finally shaking her head and moving back to the trail.

“She had something in her bag that the dogs had been at. She was wearing waterproof clothing. And her face looks as if she wasn’t even starving.”

“She just gave up,” Rachel whispered, slipping again in the mud and grabbing at a tree as she looked at the sky. It was already starting to get dark and it was probably the middle of the afternoon. She looked over at the corpse, then at the swollen river. What was the use of putting out trotlines when nothing ever bit . “I can understand how she felt.”

“Don’t say that,” Daneh said, sharing her glance at the sky. “Don’t even think it. Think about roaring fires, well-tended thatch and beef red at the bone.”

“Food,” Rachel said. They had been traveling on half rations at first, sharing one of the automatically heating packets between them. But as the food had dwindled and dwindled, despite their efforts at foraging, they had switched to quarter rations. They had been subsisting for the last three days on less than a thousand calories a day and with the walking through the mud and the cold, body-heat-leaching rain, snow and sleet it just wasn’t enough.

“Not that much farther,” Daneh said, taking a breath. “I hate to camp by a corpse but there’s a stream right here; maybe we’ll be luckier if we put the snares down by the water. What do you think?”

“What do I think?” Rachel laughed hysterically.

“Stop it,” Daneh said, grabbing her by the collar. “Food. Fires. Warmth. That’s no more than a day or two away.”

“Sure, sure,” Rachel said with another half-hysterical giggle. “Mom, that’s what you said yesterday !”

“I’ve taken this path before,” she said, determinedly, then shook her head. “But… I’ll admit it was a long time ago.”

“Mother, tell me we’re not lost,” Rachel said shakily.

“We’re not lost,” Daneh replied, glancing at her compass. She also had a positional locator but that was only useful if the path was traced in on it. And she hadn’t had it the last time she had been through when she had been very young and stupid enough to think that a trip up to the Faire on horseback would make an idyllic time. In retrospect, it had. The weather had been fair, as scheduled, and Edmund had taken care of ninety percent of the camp chores. It wasn’t this endless slog through a swamp.

“We need to camp,” Daneh continued. “And set out our snares and lines. We’re not getting much, but not much is different from nothing.” She glanced over her shoulder at Azure as the rumpled and foot-sore house lion walked slowly over the bridge. “Maybe Azure will get something.”

The house lion had actually been bringing in most of the group’s protein. He had started off the trip in fine fittle, despite the rain, tail high and off on what looked to be a very interesting long walk. That had lasted most of the first day, but house lions weren’t well designed for long-distance travel and by the end of the day his tail was dragging. Despite that, in the morning he was sitting by the remains of the fire with a dead and only somewhat mangled possum. And he had continued to bring things in from the woods for the entire first week: twice rabbits, three more possums, a female raccoon and on the third day had turned up dragging a spotted fawn.

But by the eighth day the cat was getting as fine drawn as the humans and for all practical purposes had stopped hunting. Cats were obligate carnivores, which meant that they had to eat meat every day. Daneh had shared small helpings of the readimeals, hopefully enough to keep him from having liver damage, but the cat wasn’t getting enough food, even with his own foraging, to keep him in condition.

Daneh looked at the cat and her daughter, who had also lost too much weight, and shook her head. “We’ll rest here tonight, up the road a bit in case any more scavengers come around. We’ll lay out our snares and tomorrow we’ll do nothing but forage. Maybe we can scare some game out of the woods for Azure to catch. We’ll spend a good bit of it just resting, though. And if we don’t find anything, we don’t find anything. Day after tomorrow we’ll go on.”

“Works for me,” Rachel said, shifting her pack. “Couple of hundred meters?”

“Yes.”

Rachel looked around at the rain-sodden woods and shrugged. In another couple of days they’d be up to the Via Appalia and some relative degree of civilization. Surely the worst was over. How much worse could it get?

“Ten more refugees today.”

June Lasker had been one of the first in. She lived in a house not far to the west, up the Via Appalia at the edge of the Adaron Range. It was comparatively well set up for the environment with wood fireplaces and a few items that could be used to cook in a pinch. But she knew there wasn’t going to be anything to cook in it and as a long-time trader at the Faire she knew right how to find Raven’s Mill. She was one of the relatively well-off refugees, having come in on her own horse and carrying the tools that had made her a successful dealer. Her stock in trade was handmade calligraphy, and the reams of parchment, inks, pens and various quills were well received; no one had thought until they were well into the plan that there was no way to keep records.

So June had become the primary archivist and was training two of the refugees as scribes, including how to make inks and paper. As soon as a few of the artisans were freed up she intended to get started on a printing press.

“Anyone we know?” Edmund asked, looking over her shoulder at the lists.

The rain beat steadily against the roof of the tent that had been set up to receive the refugees. Not far behind it was the mess tent and the sound of the chow lines forming was clear. He turned his attention to the sound for just a moment but it was slow and methodical. Sooner or later they were going to have real problems, but the refugees were, so far, just happy to have some food and shelter and people who had some idea what they were doing. Of course, there were many hysterics; the sudden change from a life of peace and perfection was not easy and that had been borne out in much crying and mnany nightmares. But the three day food and rest period seemed to do the trick. At the end of that time, most of the groups had gotten their act together and were now helping around the camp. Some had declined the requirements necessary to stay, instead hoping for something better somewhere else. Well, they could just keep looking for the pot of gold, if there was ever another rainbow.

“No, but they said there were some wagons on the road behind them. I’d guess that’s dealers.”