Hey Scribers!
I recently published my first novel (A Land of Our Own, August 2013, MatthewRBishop.com) and wanted to set up the first three chapters for free here on the Scribes site.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think
I am not including the prologue, map, dedications, cast of characters, etc. in the preview
ONE PARAGRAPH PITCH:
A Land of Our Own is the story of three children born as slaves in a penal colony and their struggle to be free. This first novel in the series follows the adventures of two boys as they grow into men and enlist in an army fighting to free the slaves. In the course of this book, they will fight in great battles, hide in small hostile villages, spy inside enemy castles, and face death lost and alone in the cold snowy wilderness, stranded without any sense of direction. By the time the army fights its final battle the boys will already be called heroes, but the girl they were forced to leave in the colony, meanwhile, has been fighting a battle of her own, and has a very different story to tell.
You can purchase the book paperback or Kindle http://www.amazon.com/Land-Our-Own-Kingdom-Free-ebook/dp/B00EEDB31E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1389132747&sr=8-1&keywords=a+land+of+our+own
Or direct from my website if you want me to get more royalties
MatthewRBishop.com
====
Part One:
From a Land of Nothing
- Chapter One -
The woman was weak. With all her strength, she held the newborn baby boy in her arms, and forced her voice to come out— for her breath to say something important before it stopped and never started again. She looked into his tiny eyes— but they were so large, compared with the rest of him!— and she broke into a wide smile. The soldiers behind her yelled for her to get up and leave the baby, or they would kill her. They prodded her with their spears and urged her forward, on into that prison land called Gaoln. For a moment she lifted herself away from the noises and the points of those spears, and she let herself become immersed in the innocence of those deep brown eyes. Then she heard her voice cry out faintly, and when at first she started to sing, it was in that broken and hoarse voice of a person who is in the middle of emptying their heart, that giant reservoir of hopes and fears— and in this place within her mind, the infant boy she held would remember this song for all the ages of his life, however long or short.
“All of life,
All of life,
But a wave upon the sand,
And the stars in the sky,
When they no longer shine,
I will be with you here,
Tonight…”
She did not awake from that dreamlike place, where she was alone and at peace with her new child. That faint voice which had sang those words so beautifully had simply faded into some calm and warm wind, which bore tidings of someplace more peaceful, where she could rest. She disappeared into his eyes, she fell into them, and that was it.
The baby boy cried. Before any guards could act, an elderly man stooped down and picked up the infant, and claimed it as his own. And the guards marched him on, into that prison land called Gaoln.
- Chapter Two -
Kamira, the small girl with the dirty blonde hair who was only in her eighth year of life, looked at Gendorn, the slim, lanky young boy of about the same age— but who always said he was older and “better” than the young girl. He was drawing something in the dirt, and Bendoraun, the shorter boy with the dark hair and the voice almost as deep as a man’s, started to laugh. Kamira tried to move beside Gendorn to see what it was, but Gendorn shifted his body this way and that, not permitting Kamira to have a glance.
“Kamira,” Bendoraun said between laughs, “Gendorn drew a picture of you!”
Kamira rolled her eyes. “He draws a picture of me every day! And every day it’s worse!”
“It’s because he’s in love with you,” Bendoraun blurted out. Gendorn jumped up and tackled Bendoraun, and they went rolling down the side of the hill, away from the lonely, barren tree which stood rooted on its crest. When they stopped rolling the two of them were perfectly covered in dirt and dust, and were laughing while Kamira looked down at them. Gendorn fixed Bendoraun with a stare.
“If you tell her that again, I’ll tell Rwaanah that you love her!”
“Rwaanah’s sick,” Bendoraun said, “that’s what her mama said.”
“The next food ships are coming in ten days,” said Gendorn, “Rwaanah will be fine, but she won’t be if you keep telling Kamira that I like her!”
“As if she doesn’t know! Get off me!”
Gendorn let Bendoraun go, and Bendoraun smiled cunningly. He turned and ran up the hill, shouting “Gendorn’s in love! Gendorn’s in love! With you, Kamira!” Kamira laughed, and Bendoraun’s smile stretched across his whole face. “Kamira, don’t let him hurt me!” Kamira fell on the ground laughing.
Gendorn rushed up the hill after Bendoraun. Bendoraun got to the top and started to descend, and Kamira stuck out her leg to trip him. He barreled down the hill, away from Kamira and Gendorn, and when Gendorn got to the top he stood there laughing with Kamira, as Bendoraun sat in the dirt below.
On an impulse, Kamira grabbed Gendorn’s hand, turned him around, and kissed him. Gendorn looked at her, his eyes wide in fear, but before he could do anything Kamira squeezed his hand and spoke: “I like you too, Gendorn.” Gendorn’s wide eyes stood still, but his face broke into a smile, and he squirmed around a bit, unsure of what to do, but altogether happy with the situation.
When they looked back toward Bendoraun, they saw, from their vantage atop the hill, a cloud of figures in the far-off distance, growing thinner as they marched southward across the flat dirt plain. They were carrying their pickaxes and shovels and other tools they used in their labor, but Gendorn and Kamira knew that they were not where they should be, down in the mines. The two of them looked curiously at one another, and then they rushed down the hill to get Bendoraun. “Come on!” Kamira insisted, “Get up and follow us!”
“Where are you going!?” Bendoraun whined.
“We don’t know!” answered Kamira.
“Of course not!” Bendoraun bemoaned, “Why would you?”
“Just come with us!” Gendorn told his friend.
“Don’t think I didn’t see that kiss!”
“Bendoraun!”
“Well I did! Kamira, I told you he was in love with you!”
“She kissed me!” Gendorn proclaimed.
“That’s not true!” Kamira spat, “he told me that if I wouldn’t kiss him, he’d toss me into the ocean!”
“Kamira!”
“I can’t blame him,” Bendoraun said, “You are really pretty.” Kamira blushed.
“Go back to Rwaanah’s house!” Gendorn yelled.
“Guys!” Kamira said tiredly, “let’s go see where these people are going! Come on!”
As the three children drew nearer to the crowd, they noticed more and more people. From every direction they marched, all of them toward the south. They found it rather difficult to keep walking after the first hour, but the sheer volume of people convinced them that this must be an important gathering. They continued past noon, and then into the afternoon, and when they could move no longer they were sunburnt and thirsty and very tired. But they could go no closer— the crowd was thick now, and it was not moving anymore.
There must have been a million of them, the children thought. Kamira, Bendoraun, and Gendorn could not see beyond the thighs of any adult around them, but from the noise and the smell and the fact that the man who was speaking— someone who commanded the silence of all that crowd— had to shout so loud to be heard, they knew that virtually everyone in Gaoln had come to hear this speech. Behind them, other adults were shouting even further back, to relay the words of the speaker to the rest of the crowds. All things considered, it was not very easy to hear what was being said.
“Today,” the speaker began, “the last Skaelin guard inside our territory disembarked for his home country, and they do not dare to oppress us any longer!” The crowd erupted in cheers, and when they quieted down the man resumed. “You see that ocean in front of you? This morning, the waves of that ocean and the wind of our kind fortune carried our enemies away. Never again will we watch our families be torn apart. Never again will we be subjected to arbitrary arrest, arbitrary torture, rape, starvation, imprisonment, murder. We burned this guardhouse today, the one that I am standing on top of!” The crowd erupted again. “And never will we allow anyone enough power to rebuild it!”
“What’s he saying!?” asked Kamira, “I can’t hear!”
“The bad guys are gone,” said Gendorn.
“And they’re not coming back,” said Bendoraun, “’Cause they’re not allowed to.”
“Says who?” wondered Kamira.
“Says that guy!” Gendorn said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Everyone else listens to him,” Bendoraun said with a shrug.
“Well if I could just hear him,” Kamira continued. The figure had started to speak again, and Bendoraun tried to jump up to see, but he could not make it past anyone’s chest.
“Be quiet, Kamira!” he said.
“Shh!” Gendorn said to Bendoraun.
“You shh!” Bendoraun retaliated.
“You’re both being noisy!” Kamira complained. The crowd seemed to be angry about something— they had started to interrupt the speaker. The three children couldn’t make out any of it, but soon the whole place had exploded in yells and shouts. Gendorn took an elbow in the face, and Kamira was pushed over backwards. She grabbed Bendoraun as she fell, taking him down with her. Someone in the crowd was kind enough to take the three of them by the hand and make sure they didn’t get trampled.
“What’s happening?” Gendorn asked the man.
“Gaoln has a king! He stands against the bad guys who run this country, the ones who give us food and water.”
“Why do the bad guys feed us?” Gendorn asked. He had always wondered that, and never understood the response. The man smiled at him.
“Because they can’t let the rest of the world know that they are the bad guys. Only we know. That’s why we’re the ones who have to do something about it.”
Gendorn nodded. “What are we going to do?”
The man smiled again— this boy was quite amusing. “We’re going to escape, child.”
“Where to?”
“To a land called Skaen.”
“Why do we have to go to Skaen?”
“Because things are going to get very bad around here. Things are going to get very bad, very soon. And we would do well to get out of this wretched place before we’ve all been killed.”
“Who would kill us?”
“Those same men who give you your daily food.”
“I don’t understand.”
The man’s smile faded. “No. I don’t think any of us really do.” Gendorn, fully confused, shut his mouth, and let the man lead Kamira, Bendoraun, and himself out of the crowd.
In the days after that, there were a lot of things very confusing to the children all happening at once. The lithae, those huge flying reptilian birds, whose gorgeous wings and shimmering bodies carried the most important people in the world across countries that would take weeks on foot, were always in the sky. In the dust Gendorn would sit with Kamira and Bendoraun, and up at these creatures and these very important people they would look. What messages did they carry? Where were they going, in such a hurry? Why— why did none of them ever come down to swoop them off their feet, and carry them away to a free land? Could it be that people so powerful and so wise did not even care for them? They passed their days away asking these questions, and never finding their answers.
At night they would wander out to the hill and look at the endless black of the ocean, or watch the waves on the shore when the moonlight revealed them. Except, of course, that tonight it was only Gendorn and Kamira, while Bendoraun was off at Rwaanah’s house by the request of Rwaanah’s father. Despite all the cold which pervaded the dark of a night on the edge of Sen, and in defiance of the bitter winds which came down southward from the Cold Ocean in front of them, Gendorn and Kamira, when their hands and arms interlocked and their legs wove together, felt just warm enough to be alright. Some of the wind was blocked by the hill, anyway, as they sat on the side opposite the ocean, and by the lonely tree. It was, on such nights, the only way to remain warm, and Gendorn, Kamira, and Bendoraun were used to sleeping like this as soon as the winds started to bring tidings of the coming colder weather. It was how they had survived as children. Kamira, who had a mother— Curlieyn— was able to get the comfort of a second blanket on some nights.
So they were content to sit and enjoy their togetherness without any words— but it was far from silent. The wind was harsh and quite loud when it broke against them, but the crash of the water against the rocky shore of Gaoln was even louder. For a long while the two children sat and tried to sleep, but at some sudden moment they both decided that this was a futile attempt and that they would definitely not be sleeping on this night, for some reason or another.
Gendorn began to draw a picture, and Kamira leaned her head over his shoulder. “What is it?” she asked intently.
“A picture.”
“Of what?” she asked most curiously, and a little bit annoyed.
“The other side,” Gendorn answered plainly.
“Gendorn, what does it look like on the other side of the ocean?”
“I just said that I am drawing it right now, Kamira!”
“Okay!”
“There.”
Kamira looked down. In the dirt before them there were three small figures with lines for bodies, lines for arms, lines for legs, and with little dots for heads. They were holding hands. Around them on all sides were these thicker lines which extended upwards and branched out, and there were some scribbles— “they’re leaves” Gendorn insisted— in the sky far above their heads. “It’s a giant forest,” Gendorn told her, “and you can’t even see the top! And you can eat everything. Every tree has fruit, and there are animals everywhere!”
Kamira smiled. “You’re cute.”
“I’m serious!”
Her smile grew. “Okay.”
“Well I will take you there someday, and then I will show you for real.”
Kamira’s eyes lit up and she said, slightly more seriously, “Okay.”
- Chapter Three -
It was on the next market day, ten days after the Governor of Gaoln betrayed the powers of the world and proclaimed that Gaoln would be free from atop the ruins of that guardhouse, when the children truly began to understand what was happening in their big wide world. It was a cold afternoon, for the wind was relentless and neither their thin blankets nor their cracked mud walls could defend them against the gale. It was the first day of Tun-Sen, the coldest period of the cold season Sen, which in this part of the world could sometimes last two hundred days of the year. It was an unfortunately cold time in which to begin the rebellion of Gaoln.
One hundred thousand people were out around the borders of the colony, going to or returning from the collection spots where they were to receive their monthly rations from the prison guards. The hours before the storm had shown no signs of pending disaster— the sun was bright behind the clouds. But the storm rolled in swift as a sloop into home’s harbor, and brought with it great and terrible things.
The children, nestled in their huts, were awaiting the return of Gendorn’s caretaker, an elderly man who had taken to looking after the two young orphans when Kamira’s mother was not able to. He was a generous man whom Bendoraun and Gendorn had known for as far back as either could remember, who seemed to have raised them from infancy. Gulaus, the orphan boys called him— a Gaolnian word for a kind soul who takes the responsibility of others’ lives as his or her own, usually bestowed upon elders who cared for orphans. As there were many orphans in such a difficult place to live, so too were there many such caretakers. Kanel was his real name, but few people called him this any longer, and no one seemed to know where Kanel was from, or why such a kind soul was in Gaoln.
The sky turned dark. When such sudden storms came, the guards in the border markets routinely opened up the barracks for the prisoners to hide in and wait out the snow and wind and rain. So the prisoners gathered around the barracks while the clouds turned black, and waited for the guards to open the doors, as they most certainly would.
But the guards hid in their barracks, and did not open the doors. It would have been a quick and easy thing to do, to grant refugee to these almost naked people caught in a great winter hailstorm. And yet no door was opened, no guard stepped outside. The prisoners banged on the wooden doors and the iron knocks, shouted and screamed in hysteria for someone to open the doors, climbed the walls and tried to find ways inside from the rooftops. The cellars along the streets were locked down too. People beat the wooden hatches with their fists until their hands bled and their knuckles opened up. They tried to pry the iron locks until their fingernails tore off. But there was not a door that would budge in these markets. The soldiers were under strict orders from King Seagraul of Laen and King Sendroun of the Skaelin, who were both angered over the collapse of their last guardhouses inside the penal territory. Under no circumstances were the soldiers to open any hatch in any market anywhere on the borders of the colony.
People began to run home, horrified of what might happen. Most made it to the nearby pels, where they huddled close together under mud and thatch roofs, so close that you could hardly get enough air to breathe. But there were almost one hundred thousand prisoners collecting their rations that day, and the pels nearest the markets, though large, could not offer a roof for so great a number. Then it came— the freezing rain. It came from the sky as sudden as a clap of thunder, and with such a roar. It soaked them to their cores in only minutes, through their torn shrouds of cloth that the prison guards called clothes. The wind howled and turned the rain under their skin into ice. Giant drops of hail pounded on them from heaven and knocked them down to the floor of the earth. Huge crowds of people cried frantically and tore at the skin of their fellow prisoners, trying to find a way under the overcrowded roofs. But those under the roofs could only watch, as their huts could not grow any larger, their roofs could not expand.
In several places, there was such a fight to get into the huts that houses were torn down, leaving dozens more out in the rain. The anxious and strong pulled the weak out of homes and took them as their own. Vast groups of people dropped their rations and ran as fast as they could back to their huts when they saw the chaos unfolding in the pels nearest the markets. All through the country that day people under roofs watched as miserable mobs of slaves wailed in the cold, hopeless and without shelter, or tried to make room for themselves at others’ expense. When the freezing rain truly did turn their insides to ice, their voices could no longer find a way out of their constricted throats. Their eyes couldn’t bear to open against the cold wind and rain. Their hearts couldn’t find the strength to keep beating. They fell to the ground and were soaked through. Over the course of the night, their bodies froze as surely as if they had been made entirely of water, and a thin layer of ice covered the piles of corpses the next morning and all through the following day. This was the Death Storm, and the Gaolnians who survived would always remember.
The next market day, thirty days later, Gulaus Kanel took Gendorn, Bendoraun and Kamira with him. Curlieyn, Kamira’s mother, came along, as did Bendoraun’s friend Rwannah and Rwannah’s parents. Altogether they walked through the caked mud toward the market. Gendorn and Bendoraun went off exploring together, running ahead of Kamira and Rwannah. At one point they came to an abrupt stop. Before them there was a corpse. They had seen corpses before, of course— such was a definitive part of growing up in the slave colony of Gaoln. But this corpse’s face was particularly frozen. Its eyes were wide open, and Gendorn did not know that eyes could be so large as this. The mouth was open, as if it had been screaming and frozen in place. It seemed to be alive and shouting at Gendorn, shouting in rage and hysteria and madness. Gendorn stood there, unaware of Bendoraun standing next to him, and listened to the screaming for as long as he could.
The boys ran back to the company of their gulaus. He had taken them with him this day just for that reason, and so he smiled to himself when the boys came running back in terror. He gathered them together with Rwannah and Kamira, and looked across their startled faces. “They did this to us,” he explained to the youngsters, “they gave us mud to build houses, rags for clothes, and dry fruit for food, and they told us to wait in the freezing rain for our bread. When we asked them what they could do to protect us from such a storm, they did not answer by giving us blankets or clothes or homes or food to build our strength and end our hunger. They did not open their doors to let us under their roofs. Do you know what they said, when the Death Storm set in? When people bashed on the walls, opened up their hands clawing at doors, trampled people to death trying to find shelter, and cried with their babies for some safe harbor? Run faster, or go die.”
Nearly ten thousand people died in the storm on that single fateful afternoon.
One week later, ships from Skaen and Laen showed up along the coast, and Lonin soldiers gathered inside of Gaoln on the three edges of the nation not surrounded by water. They waited for Governor Centreal, now calling himself the King of Gaoln, to make a move. Without armor or weapons for his slaves, and unable to receive emergency food supplies through the blockade, the ex-governor surrendered and left his people at the mercy of their masters. The soldiers rewarded the slaves with an extra month of rations, then went home. For seven years, the prisoners waited and did nothing, starving and freezing to death as they slaved in the mines in exchange for rations from their old masters, with little hope that things might change in any lasting or permanent way.
I recently published my first novel (A Land of Our Own, August 2013, MatthewRBishop.com) and wanted to set up the first three chapters for free here on the Scribes site.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think
I am not including the prologue, map, dedications, cast of characters, etc. in the preview
ONE PARAGRAPH PITCH:
A Land of Our Own is the story of three children born as slaves in a penal colony and their struggle to be free. This first novel in the series follows the adventures of two boys as they grow into men and enlist in an army fighting to free the slaves. In the course of this book, they will fight in great battles, hide in small hostile villages, spy inside enemy castles, and face death lost and alone in the cold snowy wilderness, stranded without any sense of direction. By the time the army fights its final battle the boys will already be called heroes, but the girl they were forced to leave in the colony, meanwhile, has been fighting a battle of her own, and has a very different story to tell.
You can purchase the book paperback or Kindle http://www.amazon.com/Land-Our-Own-Kingdom-Free-ebook/dp/B00EEDB31E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1389132747&sr=8-1&keywords=a+land+of+our+own
Or direct from my website if you want me to get more royalties
MatthewRBishop.com
====
Part One:
From a Land of Nothing
- Chapter One -
The woman was weak. With all her strength, she held the newborn baby boy in her arms, and forced her voice to come out— for her breath to say something important before it stopped and never started again. She looked into his tiny eyes— but they were so large, compared with the rest of him!— and she broke into a wide smile. The soldiers behind her yelled for her to get up and leave the baby, or they would kill her. They prodded her with their spears and urged her forward, on into that prison land called Gaoln. For a moment she lifted herself away from the noises and the points of those spears, and she let herself become immersed in the innocence of those deep brown eyes. Then she heard her voice cry out faintly, and when at first she started to sing, it was in that broken and hoarse voice of a person who is in the middle of emptying their heart, that giant reservoir of hopes and fears— and in this place within her mind, the infant boy she held would remember this song for all the ages of his life, however long or short.
“All of life,
All of life,
But a wave upon the sand,
And the stars in the sky,
When they no longer shine,
I will be with you here,
Tonight…”
She did not awake from that dreamlike place, where she was alone and at peace with her new child. That faint voice which had sang those words so beautifully had simply faded into some calm and warm wind, which bore tidings of someplace more peaceful, where she could rest. She disappeared into his eyes, she fell into them, and that was it.
The baby boy cried. Before any guards could act, an elderly man stooped down and picked up the infant, and claimed it as his own. And the guards marched him on, into that prison land called Gaoln.
- Chapter Two -
Kamira, the small girl with the dirty blonde hair who was only in her eighth year of life, looked at Gendorn, the slim, lanky young boy of about the same age— but who always said he was older and “better” than the young girl. He was drawing something in the dirt, and Bendoraun, the shorter boy with the dark hair and the voice almost as deep as a man’s, started to laugh. Kamira tried to move beside Gendorn to see what it was, but Gendorn shifted his body this way and that, not permitting Kamira to have a glance.
“Kamira,” Bendoraun said between laughs, “Gendorn drew a picture of you!”
Kamira rolled her eyes. “He draws a picture of me every day! And every day it’s worse!”
“It’s because he’s in love with you,” Bendoraun blurted out. Gendorn jumped up and tackled Bendoraun, and they went rolling down the side of the hill, away from the lonely, barren tree which stood rooted on its crest. When they stopped rolling the two of them were perfectly covered in dirt and dust, and were laughing while Kamira looked down at them. Gendorn fixed Bendoraun with a stare.
“If you tell her that again, I’ll tell Rwaanah that you love her!”
“Rwaanah’s sick,” Bendoraun said, “that’s what her mama said.”
“The next food ships are coming in ten days,” said Gendorn, “Rwaanah will be fine, but she won’t be if you keep telling Kamira that I like her!”
“As if she doesn’t know! Get off me!”
Gendorn let Bendoraun go, and Bendoraun smiled cunningly. He turned and ran up the hill, shouting “Gendorn’s in love! Gendorn’s in love! With you, Kamira!” Kamira laughed, and Bendoraun’s smile stretched across his whole face. “Kamira, don’t let him hurt me!” Kamira fell on the ground laughing.
Gendorn rushed up the hill after Bendoraun. Bendoraun got to the top and started to descend, and Kamira stuck out her leg to trip him. He barreled down the hill, away from Kamira and Gendorn, and when Gendorn got to the top he stood there laughing with Kamira, as Bendoraun sat in the dirt below.
On an impulse, Kamira grabbed Gendorn’s hand, turned him around, and kissed him. Gendorn looked at her, his eyes wide in fear, but before he could do anything Kamira squeezed his hand and spoke: “I like you too, Gendorn.” Gendorn’s wide eyes stood still, but his face broke into a smile, and he squirmed around a bit, unsure of what to do, but altogether happy with the situation.
When they looked back toward Bendoraun, they saw, from their vantage atop the hill, a cloud of figures in the far-off distance, growing thinner as they marched southward across the flat dirt plain. They were carrying their pickaxes and shovels and other tools they used in their labor, but Gendorn and Kamira knew that they were not where they should be, down in the mines. The two of them looked curiously at one another, and then they rushed down the hill to get Bendoraun. “Come on!” Kamira insisted, “Get up and follow us!”
“Where are you going!?” Bendoraun whined.
“We don’t know!” answered Kamira.
“Of course not!” Bendoraun bemoaned, “Why would you?”
“Just come with us!” Gendorn told his friend.
“Don’t think I didn’t see that kiss!”
“Bendoraun!”
“Well I did! Kamira, I told you he was in love with you!”
“She kissed me!” Gendorn proclaimed.
“That’s not true!” Kamira spat, “he told me that if I wouldn’t kiss him, he’d toss me into the ocean!”
“Kamira!”
“I can’t blame him,” Bendoraun said, “You are really pretty.” Kamira blushed.
“Go back to Rwaanah’s house!” Gendorn yelled.
“Guys!” Kamira said tiredly, “let’s go see where these people are going! Come on!”
As the three children drew nearer to the crowd, they noticed more and more people. From every direction they marched, all of them toward the south. They found it rather difficult to keep walking after the first hour, but the sheer volume of people convinced them that this must be an important gathering. They continued past noon, and then into the afternoon, and when they could move no longer they were sunburnt and thirsty and very tired. But they could go no closer— the crowd was thick now, and it was not moving anymore.
There must have been a million of them, the children thought. Kamira, Bendoraun, and Gendorn could not see beyond the thighs of any adult around them, but from the noise and the smell and the fact that the man who was speaking— someone who commanded the silence of all that crowd— had to shout so loud to be heard, they knew that virtually everyone in Gaoln had come to hear this speech. Behind them, other adults were shouting even further back, to relay the words of the speaker to the rest of the crowds. All things considered, it was not very easy to hear what was being said.
“Today,” the speaker began, “the last Skaelin guard inside our territory disembarked for his home country, and they do not dare to oppress us any longer!” The crowd erupted in cheers, and when they quieted down the man resumed. “You see that ocean in front of you? This morning, the waves of that ocean and the wind of our kind fortune carried our enemies away. Never again will we watch our families be torn apart. Never again will we be subjected to arbitrary arrest, arbitrary torture, rape, starvation, imprisonment, murder. We burned this guardhouse today, the one that I am standing on top of!” The crowd erupted again. “And never will we allow anyone enough power to rebuild it!”
“What’s he saying!?” asked Kamira, “I can’t hear!”
“The bad guys are gone,” said Gendorn.
“And they’re not coming back,” said Bendoraun, “’Cause they’re not allowed to.”
“Says who?” wondered Kamira.
“Says that guy!” Gendorn said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Everyone else listens to him,” Bendoraun said with a shrug.
“Well if I could just hear him,” Kamira continued. The figure had started to speak again, and Bendoraun tried to jump up to see, but he could not make it past anyone’s chest.
“Be quiet, Kamira!” he said.
“Shh!” Gendorn said to Bendoraun.
“You shh!” Bendoraun retaliated.
“You’re both being noisy!” Kamira complained. The crowd seemed to be angry about something— they had started to interrupt the speaker. The three children couldn’t make out any of it, but soon the whole place had exploded in yells and shouts. Gendorn took an elbow in the face, and Kamira was pushed over backwards. She grabbed Bendoraun as she fell, taking him down with her. Someone in the crowd was kind enough to take the three of them by the hand and make sure they didn’t get trampled.
“What’s happening?” Gendorn asked the man.
“Gaoln has a king! He stands against the bad guys who run this country, the ones who give us food and water.”
“Why do the bad guys feed us?” Gendorn asked. He had always wondered that, and never understood the response. The man smiled at him.
“Because they can’t let the rest of the world know that they are the bad guys. Only we know. That’s why we’re the ones who have to do something about it.”
Gendorn nodded. “What are we going to do?”
The man smiled again— this boy was quite amusing. “We’re going to escape, child.”
“Where to?”
“To a land called Skaen.”
“Why do we have to go to Skaen?”
“Because things are going to get very bad around here. Things are going to get very bad, very soon. And we would do well to get out of this wretched place before we’ve all been killed.”
“Who would kill us?”
“Those same men who give you your daily food.”
“I don’t understand.”
The man’s smile faded. “No. I don’t think any of us really do.” Gendorn, fully confused, shut his mouth, and let the man lead Kamira, Bendoraun, and himself out of the crowd.
In the days after that, there were a lot of things very confusing to the children all happening at once. The lithae, those huge flying reptilian birds, whose gorgeous wings and shimmering bodies carried the most important people in the world across countries that would take weeks on foot, were always in the sky. In the dust Gendorn would sit with Kamira and Bendoraun, and up at these creatures and these very important people they would look. What messages did they carry? Where were they going, in such a hurry? Why— why did none of them ever come down to swoop them off their feet, and carry them away to a free land? Could it be that people so powerful and so wise did not even care for them? They passed their days away asking these questions, and never finding their answers.
At night they would wander out to the hill and look at the endless black of the ocean, or watch the waves on the shore when the moonlight revealed them. Except, of course, that tonight it was only Gendorn and Kamira, while Bendoraun was off at Rwaanah’s house by the request of Rwaanah’s father. Despite all the cold which pervaded the dark of a night on the edge of Sen, and in defiance of the bitter winds which came down southward from the Cold Ocean in front of them, Gendorn and Kamira, when their hands and arms interlocked and their legs wove together, felt just warm enough to be alright. Some of the wind was blocked by the hill, anyway, as they sat on the side opposite the ocean, and by the lonely tree. It was, on such nights, the only way to remain warm, and Gendorn, Kamira, and Bendoraun were used to sleeping like this as soon as the winds started to bring tidings of the coming colder weather. It was how they had survived as children. Kamira, who had a mother— Curlieyn— was able to get the comfort of a second blanket on some nights.
So they were content to sit and enjoy their togetherness without any words— but it was far from silent. The wind was harsh and quite loud when it broke against them, but the crash of the water against the rocky shore of Gaoln was even louder. For a long while the two children sat and tried to sleep, but at some sudden moment they both decided that this was a futile attempt and that they would definitely not be sleeping on this night, for some reason or another.
Gendorn began to draw a picture, and Kamira leaned her head over his shoulder. “What is it?” she asked intently.
“A picture.”
“Of what?” she asked most curiously, and a little bit annoyed.
“The other side,” Gendorn answered plainly.
“Gendorn, what does it look like on the other side of the ocean?”
“I just said that I am drawing it right now, Kamira!”
“Okay!”
“There.”
Kamira looked down. In the dirt before them there were three small figures with lines for bodies, lines for arms, lines for legs, and with little dots for heads. They were holding hands. Around them on all sides were these thicker lines which extended upwards and branched out, and there were some scribbles— “they’re leaves” Gendorn insisted— in the sky far above their heads. “It’s a giant forest,” Gendorn told her, “and you can’t even see the top! And you can eat everything. Every tree has fruit, and there are animals everywhere!”
Kamira smiled. “You’re cute.”
“I’m serious!”
Her smile grew. “Okay.”
“Well I will take you there someday, and then I will show you for real.”
Kamira’s eyes lit up and she said, slightly more seriously, “Okay.”
- Chapter Three -
It was on the next market day, ten days after the Governor of Gaoln betrayed the powers of the world and proclaimed that Gaoln would be free from atop the ruins of that guardhouse, when the children truly began to understand what was happening in their big wide world. It was a cold afternoon, for the wind was relentless and neither their thin blankets nor their cracked mud walls could defend them against the gale. It was the first day of Tun-Sen, the coldest period of the cold season Sen, which in this part of the world could sometimes last two hundred days of the year. It was an unfortunately cold time in which to begin the rebellion of Gaoln.
One hundred thousand people were out around the borders of the colony, going to or returning from the collection spots where they were to receive their monthly rations from the prison guards. The hours before the storm had shown no signs of pending disaster— the sun was bright behind the clouds. But the storm rolled in swift as a sloop into home’s harbor, and brought with it great and terrible things.
The children, nestled in their huts, were awaiting the return of Gendorn’s caretaker, an elderly man who had taken to looking after the two young orphans when Kamira’s mother was not able to. He was a generous man whom Bendoraun and Gendorn had known for as far back as either could remember, who seemed to have raised them from infancy. Gulaus, the orphan boys called him— a Gaolnian word for a kind soul who takes the responsibility of others’ lives as his or her own, usually bestowed upon elders who cared for orphans. As there were many orphans in such a difficult place to live, so too were there many such caretakers. Kanel was his real name, but few people called him this any longer, and no one seemed to know where Kanel was from, or why such a kind soul was in Gaoln.
The sky turned dark. When such sudden storms came, the guards in the border markets routinely opened up the barracks for the prisoners to hide in and wait out the snow and wind and rain. So the prisoners gathered around the barracks while the clouds turned black, and waited for the guards to open the doors, as they most certainly would.
But the guards hid in their barracks, and did not open the doors. It would have been a quick and easy thing to do, to grant refugee to these almost naked people caught in a great winter hailstorm. And yet no door was opened, no guard stepped outside. The prisoners banged on the wooden doors and the iron knocks, shouted and screamed in hysteria for someone to open the doors, climbed the walls and tried to find ways inside from the rooftops. The cellars along the streets were locked down too. People beat the wooden hatches with their fists until their hands bled and their knuckles opened up. They tried to pry the iron locks until their fingernails tore off. But there was not a door that would budge in these markets. The soldiers were under strict orders from King Seagraul of Laen and King Sendroun of the Skaelin, who were both angered over the collapse of their last guardhouses inside the penal territory. Under no circumstances were the soldiers to open any hatch in any market anywhere on the borders of the colony.
People began to run home, horrified of what might happen. Most made it to the nearby pels, where they huddled close together under mud and thatch roofs, so close that you could hardly get enough air to breathe. But there were almost one hundred thousand prisoners collecting their rations that day, and the pels nearest the markets, though large, could not offer a roof for so great a number. Then it came— the freezing rain. It came from the sky as sudden as a clap of thunder, and with such a roar. It soaked them to their cores in only minutes, through their torn shrouds of cloth that the prison guards called clothes. The wind howled and turned the rain under their skin into ice. Giant drops of hail pounded on them from heaven and knocked them down to the floor of the earth. Huge crowds of people cried frantically and tore at the skin of their fellow prisoners, trying to find a way under the overcrowded roofs. But those under the roofs could only watch, as their huts could not grow any larger, their roofs could not expand.
In several places, there was such a fight to get into the huts that houses were torn down, leaving dozens more out in the rain. The anxious and strong pulled the weak out of homes and took them as their own. Vast groups of people dropped their rations and ran as fast as they could back to their huts when they saw the chaos unfolding in the pels nearest the markets. All through the country that day people under roofs watched as miserable mobs of slaves wailed in the cold, hopeless and without shelter, or tried to make room for themselves at others’ expense. When the freezing rain truly did turn their insides to ice, their voices could no longer find a way out of their constricted throats. Their eyes couldn’t bear to open against the cold wind and rain. Their hearts couldn’t find the strength to keep beating. They fell to the ground and were soaked through. Over the course of the night, their bodies froze as surely as if they had been made entirely of water, and a thin layer of ice covered the piles of corpses the next morning and all through the following day. This was the Death Storm, and the Gaolnians who survived would always remember.
The next market day, thirty days later, Gulaus Kanel took Gendorn, Bendoraun and Kamira with him. Curlieyn, Kamira’s mother, came along, as did Bendoraun’s friend Rwannah and Rwannah’s parents. Altogether they walked through the caked mud toward the market. Gendorn and Bendoraun went off exploring together, running ahead of Kamira and Rwannah. At one point they came to an abrupt stop. Before them there was a corpse. They had seen corpses before, of course— such was a definitive part of growing up in the slave colony of Gaoln. But this corpse’s face was particularly frozen. Its eyes were wide open, and Gendorn did not know that eyes could be so large as this. The mouth was open, as if it had been screaming and frozen in place. It seemed to be alive and shouting at Gendorn, shouting in rage and hysteria and madness. Gendorn stood there, unaware of Bendoraun standing next to him, and listened to the screaming for as long as he could.
The boys ran back to the company of their gulaus. He had taken them with him this day just for that reason, and so he smiled to himself when the boys came running back in terror. He gathered them together with Rwannah and Kamira, and looked across their startled faces. “They did this to us,” he explained to the youngsters, “they gave us mud to build houses, rags for clothes, and dry fruit for food, and they told us to wait in the freezing rain for our bread. When we asked them what they could do to protect us from such a storm, they did not answer by giving us blankets or clothes or homes or food to build our strength and end our hunger. They did not open their doors to let us under their roofs. Do you know what they said, when the Death Storm set in? When people bashed on the walls, opened up their hands clawing at doors, trampled people to death trying to find shelter, and cried with their babies for some safe harbor? Run faster, or go die.”
Nearly ten thousand people died in the storm on that single fateful afternoon.
One week later, ships from Skaen and Laen showed up along the coast, and Lonin soldiers gathered inside of Gaoln on the three edges of the nation not surrounded by water. They waited for Governor Centreal, now calling himself the King of Gaoln, to make a move. Without armor or weapons for his slaves, and unable to receive emergency food supplies through the blockade, the ex-governor surrendered and left his people at the mercy of their masters. The soldiers rewarded the slaves with an extra month of rations, then went home. For seven years, the prisoners waited and did nothing, starving and freezing to death as they slaved in the mines in exchange for rations from their old masters, with little hope that things might change in any lasting or permanent way.
