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skonen_bladesIf they weren’t so far away, we might have gotten there in time.
I looked at the curves and sweeps of the painted letters on the page in my hand. The ink was running in places from the melting snow. It was painting a familiar picture. Devolving chaos. No leadership. Lax managers. A request for help.
They didn’t have enough food for the coming winter and the food that they did have wasn’t properly stored.
This used to be a prison. Now it was a charnel house.
People do desperate things when supplies are running out. First they mutiny. After that, they try to solve the problem of supplies. If the problem of supplies can’t be fixed, they turn their attention to the problem of demand.
The problem of demand was solved. They only had food for a quarter of the inmates. Three quarters of the prison’s population was killed.
We’d received the letter three weeks ago. By caravan, it had taken us a week to get here. It was all over now.
The victors had turned on each other. During the fighting, the windows had been smashed, fuel had been used up as weaponry rather than to keep the fires going, and the survivors had frozen to death.
The tundra was no longer kept at bay from the prison. Snow drifts lapped all the way up to the top lips of the walls. It would be a perfect opportunity to escape if there were any inmates left alive or somewhere for them to escape to.
This building was a mausoleum. A failed experiment. A cold abattoir.
The only help we could offer here was to count the dead, turn our horses around and make the long trek home.
I remembered the warm hard pale curves of my Jenny and saw them echoed in the endless white hills around us.
I told the men to saddle up.
tags
I looked at the curves and sweeps of the painted letters on the page in my hand. The ink was running in places from the melting snow. It was painting a familiar picture. Devolving chaos. No leadership. Lax managers. A request for help.
They didn’t have enough food for the coming winter and the food that they did have wasn’t properly stored.
This used to be a prison. Now it was a charnel house.
People do desperate things when supplies are running out. First they mutiny. After that, they try to solve the problem of supplies. If the problem of supplies can’t be fixed, they turn their attention to the problem of demand.
The problem of demand was solved. They only had food for a quarter of the inmates. Three quarters of the prison’s population was killed.
We’d received the letter three weeks ago. By caravan, it had taken us a week to get here. It was all over now.
The victors had turned on each other. During the fighting, the windows had been smashed, fuel had been used up as weaponry rather than to keep the fires going, and the survivors had frozen to death.
The tundra was no longer kept at bay from the prison. Snow drifts lapped all the way up to the top lips of the walls. It would be a perfect opportunity to escape if there were any inmates left alive or somewhere for them to escape to.
This building was a mausoleum. A failed experiment. A cold abattoir.
The only help we could offer here was to count the dead, turn our horses around and make the long trek home.
I remembered the warm hard pale curves of my Jenny and saw them echoed in the endless white hills around us.
I told the men to saddle up.
tags