Read Online Preserving Hope by Alex Albrinck - Free Book Online

here who care about her and are on her side.”
    Will put a hand on her shoulder. “I understand, and I’m sure she appreciates any effort on her behalf. Please, tell me how this came to be.”
    “There were ten of us at the start. Me and my brother, Arthur and Genevieve, and three other men and three other women. My brother has vanished, Genevieve is dead, and six left rather than participate in Elizabeth’s treatment. Only Arthur and I remain from the original group.
    “We call ourselves former serfs because we all believed we were meant for something greater than being someone else’s property. In reality, all of us were born slaves. We worked the lands, the roads, the mines, the fields, the households… and we were all born in the same year.
    “Life was brutish, short, and sickly for us. And that was common. Living for twenty-five years was a miracle, living for thirty years impossible. The baron didn’t like this, because his free labor wasn’t accomplishing much, and before we could develop any true expertise, we’d die. We were often too sick or injured to work, regardless of how many times we were beaten or whipped.
    “The Baron decided that our short lives and poor health were too expensive, and so he decided to try something quite unusual. He’d pull ten of his slaves at a time out of their work environments and use them to figure out the simplest things that could be done to make us healthier and live longer. He didn’t want anything expensive; if he’d been told that giving us all gold bracelets would add five years to our lives, he’d be happy to let us die instead.”
    Will winced.
    The baron put them in one of his smaller homes, and told the servants there to attend to their every need. “We went from being slaves to having servants,” Eva said. “For some, the freedom we lived with, no matter how fleeting, was incredible. But others liked having servants, of having the power to run the lives of others.”
    “Arthur,” Will said.
    She nodded. Arthur had grown to love the power to order others around, and his own megalomania combined with such a rapid change in position made him see himself as royalty in training. Eva noted that Arthur worked very hard to try to push beyond their simple mandate. They were supposed to focus on the simple; they quickly found that eating the produce of the manor — which had been washed — and wearing clean clothes greatly reduced the frequency of illness. “Arthur wondered if, perhaps, being clean in all ways would be healthy, and that’s how we started the tradition of the morning bath in the river every day. Most of us had done little more than washing our faces or hands each day; spending time each day in those cool waters seemed to work wonders.” Arthur had them try other things as well; they found that one of the servants was literate and they had the man teach all of them to read and write and work with numbers, skills no slave ever learned. But they’d all made the decision that they had no interest in returning to their former way of life.
    Two years later, they baron remembered that they’d been tasked with the job, and found that they’d made great progress. The lessons learned were basic; the baron would have scribes compose letters with his orders sent out to all of his slave masters. Arthur overheard him tell a small handful of knights to return the next day with horses to collect the slaves to return them to their previous occupations.
    “But we weren’t there the next day. We moved quickly; we raided his safes for money, his silos for seeds and grains, and his barns for horses and tools. We never considered that we might possibly be stealing; it felt as if we were simply taking back what we’d earned in the past.”
    They stole away in the night, without alerting any of the servants, and rode north, directly into the teeth of the bitter winter. They rarely slept until they were a week’s journey away, only then believing they might