Temple Sword

Chapter 149

1322, Lent (March)
匈牙利

-

Another gloomy, hopeless, seemingly endless day in a cramped, dirty, dark compartment.

Where are they now?Paige, Kosice, Buda, or Gyor?There was no way of judging when peeping through the palm-sized, barred window on the door.

They sat on benches soaked in various liquids, leaning against rotting planks, and not so long ago, all were huddled together and no one could stretch, not even the children.

Ire, Sepke, and Corta sat silently for a long time, listening to the rattle of the wheels on the uneven road.Sitting across from the two older twins, Elay began to cry.

"Don't cry, did you hear?" Sepke said to him angrily.

Ealy didn't answer, but just started crying harder.His tears flowed down, soaking his dirty face into a stream.

Sepke looked away from him, and Corta said in a more gentle tone: "Be quiet, master, or we will be beaten again!" There was an involuntary reproach in his voice, "Did you Haven't you been beaten enough?"

"I told you to be quiet and do what they say, and then we can get out of here as soon as possible," Sepke grumbled angrily, thinking of the hardships of the past few months, with a bitter lump stuck in his throat "But you don't listen..."

"How could I... listen to you...?" Ireh sobbed. "He's going to sell...us! I can't be...sold as a...slave!"

The poor little boy could barely speak as his cries and tears were shaking his tortured body, Corta walked up to him and tried to reason with him, now in the wooden box of the small prison van There was no one else but the three of them.

"Listen, Master Ire!" Corta said in his most eloquent voice possible, "if these criminals are finally able to sell us, it will be our first step toward freedom. At least we don't Will be locked in this smelly cage again, understand?"

"We'll still be like... like prisoners!" Ealy objected.

"You're totally mistaken," Corta shook his head, sighed deeply, his chest almost trembling, "no matter who they sell us to, we can get out of here.

We're finally not locked up in this filthy place, who knows, maybe it's child's play for us to escape, maybe we can sleep in a good place where we'll have a bed.

But even if we don't, we can start thinking about our next move. "

"Don't you want to go back to your father?" Sepke asked. "Don't you want to see your mother again?"

"Of course," Yi Lei wiped his tear-stained face, "Of course I thought about it..."

"Then you have to pretend to accept your fate!" Corta explained in a pleading tone. "As soon as you shout or resist, they beat you again and lock you up again.

We've been here long enough!Everyone in the team has been sold long ago, only we are still suffering. "

The twins are right, they seem to have it all figured out.But Ireh, who was a few years younger than ten, always followed his stubborn instincts more than reason in times of difficulty.

Until now, whenever they dragged him out of the wagon and sold him in a suburban slave market, he would immediately start kicking, biting, yelling angrily and yelling to the world that his father was a king A knight who will take revenge on anyone who touches him.

Even if they managed to beat him down, tie him up, and silence him, Olivier's business would have been screwed.

He always explained to customers that the boy was just making things up, but they would have preferred the safer option.They didn't want to get in trouble, and if there was even an iota of truth in this little boy's story, they would suffer.

And Sepke and Corta also made up their minds, they would not go anywhere without their little master.They themselves began to shout that they were servants of the boy's father, and that these slavers were dastardly kidnappers.

Olivier and his men would then always put up their tent poles, herd the boys into the carriages, and drag them out once they were out of the crowd, beating them until they were unconscious.

Sepke and Corta quickly learned how to cope, faking fainting after a few hard blows, but the stubborn Ire always held on until he was actually knocked out.

Olivier's men were masters of abuse, they could inflict excruciating pain without breaking bones or bleeding a drop, so even after beatings their wares didn't lose their value.

They don't attack above the neck, but they can strike on the torso, arms and legs.

They were usually beaten with belts, fists wrapped in rags, or thin sticks, sometimes with thicker sticks, depending on the severity of the punishment.

And the body covered with purple-red beating marks can always be covered by rough linen, which was not found during the auction.

When a new adult is thrown in a car, there is usually two or three customary beatings and a week of confinement, and they generally understand that it is best to keep quiet and wait for the time when they are sold.

Perhaps no one had been in the car as long as Ealy and the twins, or had been beaten as badly as the three of them.

"It was so stupid to join that team," Sepke grumbled, recalling their escape from the estate last summer. "That was the stupidest thing we could do!"

"How could we have known that?" Corta shook his head. "At the time, joining them seemed like a good idea..."

They couldn't remember which of them had come up with the idea, only that they had been walking for days, hungry, thirsty, exhausted, and nine-year-old Elay couldn't walk.when
When they spotted the caravan resting in the woods by the roadside, they didn't hesitate to call for help from the scavengers.

The strangers were kind to them, gave them food and drink, and even gave them a good rest, which they had not had since they escaped from the secret passage.

They also told the stranger that they were going to Timisoara, to the palace to find the commander of the army of the royal banner, and thanks to the ancient underground passages they were able to escape from the besieged estate.

The leader of the party assured them that he would take them to Timisoara, and that the boys would just have to wait a few days before the return of others who had been sent hunting, fishing, scouting and collecting handouts.

It sounds simple, once everyone is back, they will set off for the capital.

The leader said it would take a few days, or a week, but the boys waited there for a month, or even longer, and the caravan would not leave.

Whenever Sepke and Corta brought this up to them, they were always reassured by the people at the camp that they would be leaving soon, and when they said they would wait until Christmas, they just thought the whole thing was a joke.

"Christmas?" the twins asked in disbelief, "but we've been living here since the middle of summer, and our master doesn't even know what's going on in his house!"

It was Halloween month (October) and the little ones slowly understood: strangers don't believe what they say, and even if they did, they wouldn't take them to Timisoara, they would have Time to run away.

Their other, worse guess, was that the group, for some mysterious reason, didn't want them to go.

The boys didn't want to wait for these people to make their situation more dangerous, so at the end of Halloween, they decided to pack up all their belongings and make a sneaky escape in the middle of the night.

That night, as the three were preparing to leave, Olivier raided the camp, and things have only gotten worse since then.

It all happened five long months ago, and the boys felt like they had been struggling for years in the smelly, dirty compartment, enduring long hours of horrific beatings.

"I heard them say last night," said Corta in a low voice, "that we'll be back soon... er... somewhere, I don't hear the name of the town, but they're very enthusiastic about it , I think there must be a big slave market there, because they only get so excited when it comes to money."

"But now," Sepke looked at him sullenly, "we are the only ones here, and they have no slaves to sell."

"Exactly," Corta stared at Ire, "it's time to cheer up, little master, and follow our advice! Do you understand?"

"I... I understand." The little boy replied not very firmly. "But...you have to promise me..."

"Promise what?"

"You will not leave me," Elay said with trembling mouths, "we will be together and plan our next escape."

"We're not going anywhere without you," Corta promised. "Right, Sepke?"

"We won't take a step without you," another person nodded, "If you do what we say, we'll get out of here together."

This idea finally calmed Eli Barto, and after months of persuasion, he finally believed that being trafficked was a good thing for him.

After so much beating and adversity, Sepke and Corta's ideas started to make sense.

This evening was indeed different from previous evenings.Olivier and his men were delighted, and in their festive spirit they offered the boys some roasts and even gave them each a tall glass of wine.

Elay didn't know how much the twins drank, but he was directly dazed by the weird taste of the drink.The light slowly dimmed before his eyes, the voice became dull in his mind, and soon he fell into endless blackness and deep sleep.

When he awoke the next day, the carriage was already rumbling down the road, and Elay was lying on the floor between two rotting benches.

His head hurt, that was the first thing he realized.

Uncuffed hands and feet, he raised his elbows in amazement and knelt in the darkened compartment, the second thing he realized.

Then, the twin brother disappeared, which was the third and scariest thing he realized.

(End of this chapter)