The Warriors Path by Brian Thomas

Author:Brian Thomas [Thomas, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

Zun looked around with interest as their group jostled against the busy flow of traffic. Laulun’s group were entering the village they had been seeking over the last few months, which had since grown into a sizeable town with many new timber buildings part built within the town itself and the surrounding area. Smallholdings had been established immediately surrounding the town, with crops at various stages of growth and new farming plots had been started for as far as he could see. There seemed no central organisation to the town and there were numerous small outlying clusters of buildings in the cultivated land where the dwellers on adjacent plots had haphazardly located their dwellings as they saw fit.

The town was buzzing with activity and there was a continual stream of people busily going about their business. The feeling of excitement was palpable and, to his surprise, somewhat infectious though the disorganised nature of the town’s layout grated on his orderly nature. Drawing closer to the town they had met many more small groups like themselves heading for the same destination, its location apparently a growing open secret amongst the peasants displaced by the various conflicts in the surrounding provinces. Rather than resettle locally, as they would normally have done, an increasing number were heading to this location outside the empire’s existing borders in the hope of establishing a new life from under the heel of their previous masters.

The excited talk between the various groups of travellers along the way fuelled a general sense of purpose amongst the refugees, feeding their dreams of an escape from the thrall of the empire’s masters. Zun shook his head at the scale of the small town which, as yet, avoided detection or interference from the nearest Hansee provinces. These people were naïve in the extreme if they thought they could remain autonomous from the empire indefinitely. Nevertheless, for now it appeared to be as promised, free land without an overlord.

Their group pressed forward, forcing a route against the busy traffic in the streets, though he wasn’t quite sure where to. Now they had arrived at their destination Zun brooded over the months of journeying to get here and what they and he would do next.

The villagers had broken out into wild country rather than stay on the roads and had only recently picked up a track leading to this town. They were a long way from an established province, where a lot of the land between had been farmable but was wild unoccupied terrain. Whichever House might try to lay claim to this new town would be defending an outpost, with extensive supply chains. The town had no defensive walls or regular soldiers and the number needed to provide an adequate defence would be well beyond the town’s commercial or strategic value to the neighbouring provinces.

It was different for these people. The new citizens had lost their homes and were looking for something of infinite value to themselves, a new start and freedom.

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