Chapter 3: Refugee Camp
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 1-28, Month XIII: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 1st to 28th day of the 13th Month
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Temporary Encampment
As the village had predicted, the first batch that arrived last month wasn't the end of it. Some three hundred more refugees arrived over the following days of the current month. The first wave that came at the end of the twelfth month numbered less than twenty by the time it stopped, but the next day another group arrived. Then the day after that, and then another. The camp staff even wondered why it kept coming in this steady trickle instead of all at once. Some groups arrived two days later than expected. As expected with the weather being this harsh, each group that came in was fewer than the last.
It made a kind of grim sense once you thought about it. Different groups had left Arwen at different times, from different parts of the kingdom, walking different stretches of the same highway. They weren't coordinated. They were just all heading the same direction because it was one of the only directions left for them to go to. Some had a head start. Some didn't. The road sorted them out into whatever order the weather and their own endurance decided, and Maya's camp sat at the end of that sorting like a filter that didn't ask anyone's permission.
The current headcount of the temporary encampment near the entrance was now somewhere around three hundred to three hundred and sixty-one people. The count was rough because the people taking care of them couldn't keep an exact tally with this many coming and going (death) and some not making it through the first night. Every morning someone did a walkthrough of the bunkers, partly to check on people and partly just to know who was still there. It wasn't pleasant work but somebody had to do it. The underground housing had grown into separate bunkers connected by dug trenches, so the guards could move between them and pass down rations without going above ground in the worst of the weather.
So far they had managed to keep things from spiraling into chaos, mostly because the people arriving were too weakened by their state to cause much trouble. Only a handful had been punished, given reduced rations instead of the normal portion. The reason was a brawl that broke out after someone tried to steal from another family's share. Calling it a brawl was generous. It was a pitiful thing to watch, a few people throwing weak punches and headbutts that barely landed because none of them had the strength left for real violence. The guards broke it up without much effort and the ones responsible were told plainly that this was a one-time warning. Steal again and the punishment would be worse than reduced rations. Most people understood. A few grumbled but nobody tried to do it again.
Because of the growing numbers, the guards assigned to the camp were increased to fifty, with another twenty on standby near the security checkpoint at the forest entrance. The extra hands were mostly needed for the rationing runs and the constant work of digging out new trench connections as the bunkers expanded. The snow didn't stop those who are working. It just meant the work took longer.
The village ran supply trips every five days or so, bringing rations, clothing, bedding, and medicine. A few support personnel came along on these trips as well, though the village representatives kept some distance from the Arwenian refugees as a matter of caution. Nobody knew what these people had been through or what they might be capable of if pushed, and the history between Maya and Arwen wasn't something anyone had forgotten. August had already told the security force not to extend full trust to everyone who came through. There was a chance, however small, that some of them could be agents sent by the crown. And although he doubted Arwen had the manpower left to spare for something like that, not with a civil war eating up everything they had, but there was no harm in being careful. The village would help. It just wouldn't put its own people at risk doing it.
The supply runs themselves were a small operation in their own right. A wagon, an escort of six, the support personnel, and whatever the village had set aside that week. The trip out wasn't long, but in this weather even a short trip needed planning. Nobody wanted to be the group that got caught in a blizzard halfway between the village and the camp with a wagon full of blankets and no shelter.
Only five support personnel were sent out to the camp itself. Most of the guards stationed there already had basic first aid training, and each group had its own combat support member as well. The five who came from the village were trained medics, the kind who could handle more serious cases, and a few of them had training in human psychology as well. That kind of training was going to matter here. Stress, anxiety, and trauma weren't injuries you could simply bandage, but they were injuries all the same, and these people were full of them.
The family of Rabia became one of the harder cases early on. They had lost their unborn child on the road, and it cost them their two-year-old daughter as well.
The mother only learned about her daughter after they arrived at the camp. She had already been deep in the grief of her miscarriage, barely holding herself together, and finding out about her daughter on top of it broke something in her that the medics weren't sure how to put back. The father, who had carried that second loss alone and in silence for two days, nearly took his own life once it was finally out in the open. The others in the bunker spotted him in time. They held him down while the guards and medics rushed in with calming incense to settle him down. The two of them were separated for now and kept under close watch, given the kind of careful attention reserved for the people the camp staff worried about most.
It wasn't the only case like it. Most families that made it this far had lost someone, sometimes more than one person, and the medics with the psychology training found themselves busier than they had expected to be. The physical injuries were the easy part. Those healed on a schedule you could predict. The other kind didn't work that way. Only time can heal this kind of wounds, not even time is a guarantee to be able to heal such wounds.
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Whispers of Maya
Word about where they actually were began to spread slowly through the camp.
Some of the refugees had heard of this place before, from merchants who had passed through Doroki and other settlements on their trade routes over the years. The stories were vague, half-remembered things, the kind of rumor that traveled faster than facts did. Eventually one of them worked up the nerve to ask one of the healers directly. He wanted to know if this was really the Maya Village he had heard about.
The healer didn't see any reason to hide it.
"Yes, though not in the technical sense," she told him. "Where we are right now is outside the village's territorial boundaries, and outside the Great Forest of Lonelywood as well. In proper terms, this is no man's land, the buffer zone between the Great Forest and the territories around it. This camp sits in that buffer zone. But yes, we are personnel from Maya Village."
The answer spread through the camp the way most things did, by word of mouth, bunker to bunker, until almost everyone had heard some version of it. Most of the reaction was positive. Some of it wasn't negative exactly, but it carried real concern underneath it. The biggest one came from a rumor that had been circulating even back in Arwen, that the crown had sent assassins toward Maya Village at some point in the past. If that was true, people wondered, what did that mean for a kingdom's worth of refugees being fed and housed by the very village their king may have tried to have killed?
That concern didn't get the chance to fester. Captain Alphonse, the man sent to be in charge of the camp, addressed it directly before it could spread any further.
"I've heard some of the doubts going around," he said, standing where most of the camp could hear him. "And honestly, I don't blame you for having them. It's human nature not to trust help that comes freely, especially from people whose kingdom has history with yours. But I'll be straight with you. We're doing this because it's the right thing to do, not because we expect anything from you. We understand what you've been through. That's exactly why we're here.
"If you want to leave once the season turns, you're free to go, no questions asked. If you want to stay, you'll go through the same process everyone who comes to Maya goes through, and you'll earn your place the same way everyone else has. If that doesn't sit right with you, we can point you toward Ogind instead. I know that's not an easy option either, given the history there, but it's an open option. Either way, the choice is yours. We don't force anyone, and we don't need your thanks.
"All we ask is that you don't cause trouble for us. Keep that in mind. I won't tolerate anyone bringing harm to this village, not after everything that's already been done to get you this far."
That was the end of it, at least for now. The camp went quiet for a while after that, people sitting with what he'd said and what it meant for them. Some had already started thinking that far ahead, that this aid wouldn't last forever and that whatever came next was on them to figure out. Others were content to take what was given for as long as it kept coming. That was just how people were, and nobody in the camp judged them too harshly for it. Not when everyone there had walked the same road to get here.
Alphonse himself didn't think much more about the speech once he'd given it. He'd said what needed saying and the camp could do what it wanted with it. He had bunkers to check and a supply run to plan for, and there wasn't much point standing around waiting to see how people felt about things. That was Theressa's department, not his.
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The Camp Grows
By the end of the second week the camp had grown to five hundred and thirty-nine people.
More arrived almost daily, and new areas had to be built to house them. These weren't as solid as the first bunkers. There hadn't been time for that. At this point everything being built was purely for survival until the storm passed, nothing more. Space was running short, and even the original quarters were starting to feel cramped. Food was rationed to twice a day now, though there wasn't an actual shortage. Everyone understood that winter meant the body needed more fuel just to stay warm, so the portions stayed reasonable even as the variety shrank. The meals were simple but balanced. What was running thinner was additional clothing and bedding. There were still enough thick blankets to go around, but that was about the limit of what the camp could provide beyond the basics.
There were still small fights from time to time, but nothing serious. Even the newer arrivals learned the camp's rules quickly and mostly kept to them. People who had survived what they have been through to get here weren't looking for more reasons to suffer. A few of the older refugees, the ones who had clearly done some organizing back home before everything fell apart, started helping the guards keep order on their own. Nobody asked them to. They just did it, the way people who are used to responsibility tend to find some version of it wherever they end up.
The camp had grown to a size nobody had expected this early, and it was still only the middle of winter. Everyone wondered how many more would come once the worst of the cold passed and travel became a little more survivable for the people still in Arwen. That was going to be the real test. The village would need to talk to Millhaven, to Baron Kirka, and likely request an audience with Marquis Gremory, who oversaw the Principality of Ogind and sat closest to all of this.
None of it was going to be easy. Not for food, not for shelter, and not economically, especially if a meaningful number of these people ended up staying as new villagers. And even then, nobody was getting a pass on the Vetting Process. That was the rule for everyone, and it wasn't going to change just because the circumstances were different this time. That was a problem for the future, though, and hopefully the village leadership would have something worked out before winter ran its course.
For now the village stayed hunkered down in their homes against a cold that was harsher than most of them remembered. They could only imagine what these people had gone through to get here, and all they could do for now was keep helping in whatever way they could.
Out at the camp, Captain Alphonse made his rounds each evening the same way he had every night since the first group arrived. Checking the bunkers, checking the trenches, making sure the fires hadn't gone out and the watch was awake. He didn't think of it as anything special. It was just the job. But every night he walked past people who had lost everything and were still here, still breathing, still waiting to see what tomorrow looked like, and he figured that was worth something even if nobody ever wrote it down anywhere.
How this would end depended on how the refugees accepted their situation quickly, and how they chose to adapt to it from here on out.
The year was ending. But what waited for them in this storm was anyone's guess.