Anna had never imagined she might see the king twice! The weight of the cavalcade thrummed through the ground and up into the soles of her feet. She gaped in awe as the king himself, attended by his fine noble companions, rode past. Beside the king rode the young lord who had spoken to them at Steleshame. Although the others laughed and spoke joyfully, Lord Alain looked somber—but at least no harm had come to him. He leaned sideways and for an instant she thought he would see her, but he was only speaking to the thin, dark man beside him.
“Sawn-glawnt!” breathed Gisela’s niece, the phrase more oath than word. She pulled a corner of her scarf up to conceal her face, hiding herself, but Anna did not see see Lord Wichman among the king’s attendants. She could make out none but the king and Lord Alain as individuals; they were too many and too bright to her eyes in their fine clothes and rich trappings.
After the king came soldiers, and after them the long train of wagons bumping along the rutted road. She swallowed dirt chipped up by their wheels and shielded her mouth from dust. After the passage of such an army, though, the road beyond was easier to tread and they made good time, coming to Gent in the late afternoon of the fourth day.
It was odd to cross the bridge into Gent when she had never crossed it going in the other direction to leave. Once within the walls, Gent had changed so completely from those months when they had lived in hiding that it was as if none of that nightmare had ever happened. Few people walked the streets compared to the many who had once lived here, but already the ring of hammers reverberated off the city walls. Carpenters and masons labored to rebuild; lads hauled away trash. Women washed moldering tapestries or hung yellowing linen and moth-eaten clothes out on lines to air. Children dragged furniture out of abandoned houses while the goats they had been set to watch over foraged in overgrown vegetable plots.
Gent smelled of life, and summer, and the sweat of labor.
They went to the tannery first, but it was deserted as was the nearby armory except for a handful of men sorting through the slag for usable weapons. They complained that the king’s forces had looted the armory for spear points and mail and axheads. A few dead Eika dogs lay here and there with flies crawling over them. Their eyes had already been pecked out by the crows.
Matthias found the shed where the slaves had slept, but though he overturned rough pallets and examined every scrap of cloth left behind, he found no trace of Papa Otto. They heard voices outside and hurried out to find Gisela’s niece talking to an ill-kempt man with the telltale stains of leatherwork on his fingers.
“I suppose some of the dead householders may have kin who’ll come to claim an inheritance,” he was saying to her. “Ach, but who’s to say if they’re telling the truth? Or if anything can be known about what was left behind?”
“That’s why I thought it worth the risk,” she replied, eyeing him with interest. Through the dirt Anna saw he was a young man, broad through the shoulders and without the dreary hopeless expression she had seen in so many of the slaves. “I can take a house here in town without worrying I’ll be thrown out for my pains. I saw how few escaped from Gent. Ah.” She saw Matthias and Anna and beckoned them over. Helen clung to Anna’s skirts and sucked on her dirty little finger. “These are the children I spoke of.”
He clucked his tongue and made an almost comical expression of amazement. “You hid here, in this tannery? Ach, now there’s a miracle that you survived and escaped. There were very few of us here at the end….”
“You worked here?” demanded Matthias. “As a slave to the Eika?”
The man spit. “So I did. Savages. I hid when the battle started. The rest of them fled, I suppose. But I’ve nothing to go back to.” He glanced at Gisela’s niece and shifted his shoulders somewhat self-consciously under his threadbare and dirt-stained tunic. “I thought I’d start fresh, here, at the tannery. So, lad, you know the craft?”
“Did you ever—” Matthias stammered while Anna pinched him to make him go on. “Did you know of a slave named Otto?”
“Nay, child, I never heard of such a one, but I only came recently. That’s why I lived.”
Matthias sighed and picked Helen up, hugging the little girl tightly against him as he hid his tears against her grimy shift.
But Anna only set her mouth firmly, determined not to lose hope. That didn’t mean that Papa Otto was dead. He might have fled, he might have been taken elsewhere….
“Come now,” said Gisela’s niece briskly. “You knew it was a slim hope to find him, poor man. But we’d best be moving on.” Here she glanced at their new acquaintance. “Though we’ll be back with Matthias. He’s a good worker, and very clever. But there’s so many folk coming back. We’d best stake out a claim before the best workshops are taken.”