The woman was weak, but no one thought about robbing her. First of all, the guards would beat them for fighting — damaged ‘goods’ were harder to sell. And secondly, everyone knew that a desperate mother was more dangerous than any predator.
The woman, after breathing on the lump of snow for a bit to melt it, held it to her daughter’s lips. A young girl of thirteen. Maybe a little more. Wrapped in the same rags as everyone else, she clung to her mother’s chest, who kept trying to cover her with her rags as well.
The guards didn’t let them freeze, but it was still rather cold in the cage. The leader of the caravan, the main scoundrel, assured them that the sooner they got used to the cold, the more they would cost. And the higher the price paid, the better the northerners treated their slaves.
The snowball melted, but the girl still asked for more. Her mother almost wept with helpless frustration.
“Take this,” Sankesh held out a small snowball imperceptibly.
The woman recoiled at first, as if she’d seen a dangerous snake, but then, her hands still trembling, she accepted it gratefully.
“Where did you get this?” She asked in the language of the Sands.
Sankesh turned around, making sure no one was listening to them, and then whispered:
“When snow falls from the sky, it settles on the bars. Collect and crumple it up in your hands. It turns into…” It took Sankesh a moment to remember the right word. “…ice. Then put it on your tongue. It’ll be very cold. It’s bad for her teeth, and even a bit painful… But she won’t suffer from thirst anymore.”
The woman, ragged and sore, blinked a couple of times. Her lash-less eyes looked like ghastly gray hollows. She and her daughter had joined, or rather, been bought from a slave fair in the Imperial city bordering the North. Over the past three months they’d spent in the snowy forests and wastelands, they hadn’t exchanged even a couple of words with their compatriots.
None of those present trusted their fellow slaves much. Moreover, while the guards tried to keep the ‘goods’ intact, some of them still died sometimes. The guards weren’t interested in their possessions, so they were taken either by the nearest or the strongest. It was an unspoken rule — whoever took someone else’s things first was their new owner.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” the woman began to bow to him feverishly. Slaves were taught how to bow by the Empire.
Sankesh grabbed the woman by her shoulders. “Stop that or we’ll get noticed.”
He looked around warily. Fortunately, they were at the very end of the cage. The barbarians and the rest of the desert dwellers were ignoring them. They were breathing hard on their hands, which were red from the cold. The guards, like Sankesh, were looking at the forest. Huge trees blocked their view, and the road wound between snow-covered hills. According to the stories he’d heard, there were monsters in these forests that were even worse than those that roamed the vast expanses of the Sea of Sand. Sankesh didn’t want to encounter any of them even without a slave collar around his throat…
“What’s your name-”
“Here we are!” Another blow of the axe’s haft shook the cage.
Two massive, fair-haired guards approached the bars and removed a heavy chain lock.
“Come out,” they ordered.
Sankesh was the closest slave to the exit. He hadn’t managed to give his name. He gave the woman a sympathetic look and jumped down into the snow. His boots had been replaced by cloth wraps wound around leather scraps. They immediately got wet, and if not for the leather, he clearly would’ve lost his feet to frostbite. Luckily, legless slaves weren’t in demand, so the guards took care of their limbs and didn’t let them lose any.
“You’ll be walking from here,” the caravan leader said.
All the guards, including the leader, put strange shoes on their feet: wood ovals with tight threads woven in the middle. Sankesh didn’t understand what they were for at first, but when he fell knee-deep into the snow with each step he made, but the northerners, thanks to their strange shoes, were able to walk along the snow, everything fell into place.
After half an hour of enduring the cold wind while trudging through the snow, Sankesh regretted the fact that he’d come out first. He hadn’t had much choice, though. Sometimes, he looked around. Not because he was hatching an escape plan. No. The hope of ever escaping this hell had faded after the first month of the journey. Besides, even if he succeeded, where would he go? He didn’t have a home. He didn’t have enough talent to become a mercenary or join the troops of the Empire. He had to be at least at the level of the Transformation of the Mortal Shell to even qualify.
So, he simply looked around out of curiosity. Never before had Sankesh seen such an abundance of trees, their snow-covered branches even reaching above a height of ten yards. Eight adult men working together wouldn’t be able to fully reach around the trunks of these giants.
Sometimes he heard animal sounds he couldn’t recognize in the distance. Whenever that happened, the northerners seized their weapons and forced the slaves to walk ahead of them. That way, if the beasts attacked, the slaves would become meat shields. One’s life was much more important than profit, after all.
They moved through the snow-covered hills and plains. A narrow path cut through the forest led them farther into the snowy maze.
The clear, almost blue sky looked like a cold crystal. It pressed down on his shoulders. The distant sun wasn’t warm at all. The wind constantly blew in his face and brought sharp ice needles with it, scratching his already frozen skin. It felt as if someone had sliced a sharp razor over it.
“That’s it,” one of the guards grunted.
Under another hill, they first saw a wide glade that served as the northerners’ town square, and then they spotted strange houses. Built out of logs, standing on stilts, and with gable roofs, they puffed black smoke into the air, and the yellow light of the hearths shone through the windows.
“I forgot how cold it was here!” One of the guards complained. “By the Fair Warriors, by my ancestors, this is the last time I’ll ever visit this ass end of the world!”
The other guards laughed.
“When you need money, you’ll come back.”
Sankesh stared silently at the crowd gathering in the ‘square’. Over the past few months, they’d almost traversed the entirety of the northern province. They’d passed the capital, the only stone city in the region, and gone even farther to the north, where even the locals didn’t go if they didn’t have to, considering the place to be almost uninhabitable. He couldn’t blame them.
Sankesh looked up. There, hundreds of miles away, was a mountain range. On Rahaim’s maps, it was called the Icy Shield, and beyond it was an ocean. Or rather, there was a lifeless wasteland of ice covering the water for hundreds of thousands of miles from the shore, and only then, after the warm currents finally prevailed, would you reach the Northern Ocean. A very simple name for an area that had barely been studied. The adventurous explorers hadn’t mapped out even half of the icy wasteland, and no ship had ever sailed the Northern Ocean, giving rise to innumerable legends and myths.
“Move!” Sankesh felt a painful poke in his side and he moved toward yet another slave fair.