They walked from the park down a hillside that led toward the center of the community. Shops and businesses replaced homes, and the foot traffic grew thick.
The Dwarves they saw here were engaged in selling and buying, but again they were mostly old and few in number. The streets were clogged with outlanders come to trade. Federation soldiers patrolled everywhere.
Morgan steered the brothers down byways where they wouldn’t be noticed, pointing out this, indicating that, his voice at once both bitter and ironic. “Over there. That’s the silver exchange. The Dwarves are forced to extract the silver from the mines, kept underground most of the time—you know what that means—then compelled to sell it at Federation prices and turn the better part of the proceeds over to their keepers in the form of taxes. And the animals belong to the Federation as well—on loan, supposedly. The Dwarves are strictly rationed. Down there, that’s the market. All the vegetables and fruits are grown and sold by the Dwarves, and the profits of sale disposed of in the same manner as everything else. That’s what it’s like here now. That’s what being a “protectorate” means for these people.”
He stopped them at the far end of the street, well back from a ring of onlookers crowded about a platform on which young Dwarf men and women chained and bound were being offered for sale. They stood looking for a moment and Morgan said, “They sell off the ones they don’t need to do the work.”
He took them from the business district to a hillside that rose above the city in a broad sweep. The hillside was blackened and stripped of life, a vast smudge against a treeless skyline. It had been terraced once, and what was left of the buttressing poked out of the earth like gravestones.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked them softly. They shook their heads. “This is what is left of the Meade Gardens. You know the story. The Dwarves built the Gardens with special earth hauled in from the farmlands, earth as black as coal. Every flower known to the races was planted and tended. My father said it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He was here once, when he was a boy.”
Morgan was quiet a moment as they surveyed the ruin, then said, “The Federation burned the Gardens when the city fell. They burn them anew every year so that nothing will ever grow again.”
As they walked away, veering back toward the outskirts of the village, Par asked, “How do you know all this, Morgan? Your father?”
Morgan shook his head. “My father hasn’t been back since that first visit. I think he prefers not to see what it looks like now, but to remember it as it was. No, I have friends here who tell me what life for the Dwarves is like—that part of life I can’t see for myself whenever I come over. I haven’t told you much about that, have I? Well, it’s only been recently, the last half year or so. I’ll tell you about it later.”
They retraced their steps to the poorer section of the village, following a new roadway that was nevertheless as worn and rutted as the others. After a short walk, they turned into a walkway that led up to a rambling stone-and-wood structure that looked as if once it might have been an inn of some sort. It rose three stories and was wrapped by a covered porch filled with swings and rockers. The yard was bare, but clear of debris and filled with children playing.
“A school?” Par guessed aloud.
Morgan shook his head. “An orphanage.”
He led them through the groups of children, onto the porch and around to a side door set well back in the shadows of an alcove. He knocked on the door and waited. When the door opened a crack, he said, “Can you spare a poor man some food?”
“Morgan!” The door flew open. An elderly Dwarf woman stood in the opening, gray-haired and aproned, her face bluff and squarish, her smile working its way past lines of weariness and disappointment. “Morgan Leah, what a pleasant surprise! How are you, youngster?”
“I am my father’s pride and joy, as always,” Morgan replied with a grin. “May we come in?”
“Of course. Since when have you needed to ask?” The woman stepped aside and ushered them past, hugging Morgan and beaming at Par and Coll who smiled back uncertainly. She shut the door behind them and said, “So you would like something to eat, would you?”
“We would gladly give our lives for the opportunity,” Morgan declared with a laugh. “Granny Elise, these are my friends, Par and Coll Ohmsford of Shady Vale. They are temporarily... homeless,” he finished.
“Aren’t we all,” Granny Elise replied gruffly. She extended a callused hand to the brothers, who each gripped it in his own. She examined them critically. “Been wrestling with bears, have you, Morgan?”
Morgan touched his face experimentally, tracing the cuts and scrapes. “Something worse than that, I’m afraid. The road to Culhaven is not what it once was.”
“Nor is Culhaven. Have a seat, child—you and your friends. I’ll bring you a plate of muffins and fruit.”
There were several long tables with benches in the center of the rather considerable kitchen and the three friends chose the nearest and sat. The kitchen was large but rather dark, and the furnishings were poor. Granny Elise bustled about industriously, providing the promised breakfast and glasses of some sort of extracted juice. “I’d offer you milk, but I have to ration what I have for the children,” she apologized.
They were eating hungrily when a second woman appeared, a Dwarf as well and older still, small and wizened, with a sharp face and quick, birdlike movements that never seemed to cease. She crossed the room matter-of-factly on seeing Morgan, who rose at once and gave her a small peck on the cheek.
“Auntie Jilt,” Morgan introduced her.
“Most pleased,” she announced in a way that suggested they might need convincing. She seated herself next to Granny Elise and immediately began work on some needlepoint she had brought with her into the room, fingers flying.
“These ladies are mothers to the world,” Morgan explained as he returned to his meal. “Me included, though I’m not an orphan like their other charges. They adopted me because I’m irresistibly charming.”
“You begged like the rest of them the first time we saw you, Morgan Leah!” Auntie Jilt snapped, never looking up from her work. “That is the only reason we took you in—the only reason we take any of them in.”
“Sisters, though you’d never know it,” Morgan quickly went on. “Granny Elise is like a goose down comforter, all soft and warm. But Auntie Jilt—well, Auntie Jilt is more like a stone pallet!”
Auntie Jilt sniffed. “Stone lasts a good deal longer than goose down in these times. And both longer still than Highland syrup!”
Morgan and Granny Elise laughed, Auntie Jilt joined in after a moment, and Par and Coll found themselves smiling as well. It seemed odd to do so, their thoughts still filled with images of the village and its people, the sounds of the orphaned children playing outside a pointed reminder of how things really stood. But there was something indomitable about these old women, something that transcended the misery and poverty, something that whispered of promise and hope.
When breakfast was finished, Granny Elise busied herself at the sink and Auntie Jilt departed to check on the children. Morgan whispered, “These ladies have been operating the orphanage for almost thirty years. The Federation lets them alone because they help keep the children out from underfoot. Nice, huh? There are hundreds of children with no parents, so the orphanage is always full. When the children are old enough, they are smuggled out. If they are allowed to stay too long, the Federation sends them to the work camps or sells them. Every so often, the ladies guess wrong.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how they stand it. I would have gone mad long ago.”
Granny Elise came back and sat with them. “Has Morgan told you how we met?” she asked the Ohmsfords. “Oh, well, it was quite something. He brought us food and clothes for the children, he gave us money to buy what we could, and he helped guide a dozen children north to be placed with families in the free territories.”