The mist and icy drizzle turned back into flurries of snow-flakes for the next week. With food and rest, the two prisoners slowly regained some strength. For company they had only each other. Neither their guards nor their fellow captives would speak to them in more than monosyllables.
Still, it wasn’t hard to learn some things about life in the Holnist realm. Their meals were brought by silent, cowering drudges from the nearby shanty town. The only figures they saw who weren’t emaciated—besides the earringed survivalists themselves—were the women who served the Holnists’ pleasure. And even those worked by day: drawing water from the frigid stream or currying the stable of well-fed horses.
The pattern seemed well established, as if this was an accustomed way of life. And yet Gordon became convinced that the neofeudal community was in a state of flux.
“They’re preparing for a big move,” he told Johnny as they watched a caravan arrive one afternoon. Still more frightened serfs trudged into Agness, pulling carts and setting up camp in the swelling warren. Obviously, this little valley could not hold such a population for very long.
“They’re using this place as a staging area.”
Johnny suggested, “That mob of people might offer us an advantage, if we find a way to bust out of here.”
“Hmm,” Gordon answered. But he didn’t hold much hope for aid from any of the slaves out there. They’d had any spirit beaten out of them, and had problems enough of their own.
One day, after the noon meal, Gordon and Johnny were ordered to step out of their pen and strip naked. A pair of shabby, silent women came and gathered up their clothes. While the northerners’ backs were turned, buckets of cold river water were thrown on them. Gordon and Johnny gasped and sputtered. The guards all laughed, but the women’s eyes did not even flicker as they left, heads bowed.
The Holnists—dressed in green and black camouflage, their ears arrayed with golden rings—competed in lazy knife practice, flipping their blades in quick, underhand arcs. The two northerners clutched greasy blankets in front of a small fire, trying to stay warm.
That evening their cleaned and patched clothes were returned to them. This time one of the women actually looked up briefly, giving Gordon a chance to see her face. She might have been twenty, though her lined eyes looked far older. Her brown hair was streaked with gray. She glanced at Gordon for only a moment as he dressed. But when he ventured a smile, she turned quickly and fled without looking back.
The sunset meal was better fare than the usual sour gruel. There were scraps of something like venison amidst the parched corn. Perhaps it was horsemeat
Johnny dared fate by asking for seconds. The other prisoners blinked in amazement and cringed even farther into their corners. One of the silent guards growled and took their plates away. But to their surprise he returned with another helping for each of them.
It was full dark when three Holn warriors in floppy berets marched up behind a stoop-shouldered servant bearing a torch. “Come along,” the leader told them. “The General wants to see you.”
Gordon looked at Johnny, standing proud again in his uniform. The young man’s eyes were confident. After all, they seemed to say, what did these jerks have that could compare with Gordon’s authority as an official of the Restored Republic?
Gordon remembered how the boy had half-carried him during the long journey south from the Coquille. He had little heart anymore for pretenses, but for Johnny’s sake he would try the old scam one more time.
“All right, postman,” he told his young friend. Gordon winked. “Neither sleet, nor hail, nor gloom of night . . .”
Johnny grinned back. “Through bandit’s hell, through firefight . . .”
They turned together and left the jail shed ahead of their guards.