The cart moved slowly at first, its wheels striking against the stones of the dirt road leading out of the village, Oren sitting at the back among three other young men whose names he didn’t yet know, their hands bound with a thin rope more a formality than any real precaution.
He did not look back.
He tried once, and saw the village rooftops shrinking behind the bend in the road, a small point at the edge of the square that he thought, for a moment, was Marin, then was no longer sure, then the whole village vanished behind a low rise, leaving only the road ahead of him.
Only then did he feel the tears fall.
He didn’t try to stop them at first; they came without warning, almost silently, only a warmth running down his face in the cold of the night.
He wiped them with his sleeve, and looked at the ground between his feet, trying to breathe more slowly than he actually felt.
One of the soldiers sitting near the front of the cart glanced at him for a moment, then turned his face away without comment, as though this were a scene he’d witnessed dozens of times before and needed no more from himself than this measure of gentle indifference.
He stayed like that for a length of time he couldn’t quite gauge, wiping his face now and then, trying to think of something other than the house he’d left behind, other than Marin’s voice asking him to write every day, other than the way she’d stood at the mouth of the alley as they led him away.
He didn’t entirely succeed, but the tears gradually eased, not because the grief had ended, but because the body itself tires of weeping eventually, and needs to settle, if only for a while.
He raised his head at last, wiped his face one final time, and looked at the road ahead.
He had never, in his whole life, gone farther from his village than half a day’s walk, to a neighboring village whose people he knew a little through the records that had passed through his hands at the Archive.
Everything he knew about the world beyond that had been written on paper: names of provinces, administrative borders, population figures but he had never felt the real weight of that knowledge until now, seeing the road stretch before him far longer than he had imagined it while reading about it in a dry ledger.
The cart passed a first village after a few hours, a little larger than his own, its houses taller and closer together, a small market still lit despite the late hour, merchants slowly closing up their goods.
Oren noticed, with a curiosity he couldn’t suppress despite everything, that the rooftops here were slightly different from those of his own village, more sloped, and that the wall construction followed a different way of laying the stones.
He had never once thought that something as simple as a house roof could differ from one village to another, and felt something close to a quiet astonishment, the kind that doesn’t cry out in the mind but settles there silently.
The cart stopped at a small waystation at midnight, where other conscripts joined them from different villages, some looking as tired as he was, some entirely silent, and one or two talking in low voices about things unrelated to what was happening, as though trying to convince themselves that tonight was ordinary.
They continued at dawn, the light gradually revealing what the darkness had hidden: fields far wider than he was used to seeing, large farms stretching almost to the horizon, and merchant carts loaded with grain and wool moving in the opposite direction, and side roads branching off from the main one toward towns whose names he had never heard except in passing, in old comparative records he hadn’t given enough attention to at the time.
He saw, at one of the rest stops, a wooden sign fixed at a crossroads, pointing names in different directions, and realized, reading it, that his own village’s name wasn’t on it at all; his village was too small to warrant a mention on a road of this size.
A simple thought, but one that settled in him with a strange weight: for twenty years, his village had been nearly the entire world to him, and here it was now, a mere point not even worth mentioning on a road sign.
They neared the border by the end of the second day.
Oren had not known exactly where his province’s border lay, and had never once thought that crossing it would appear so organized, on this scale.
The convoy of carts stopped at a wide checkpoint, low stone buildings on either side of the road, movable wooden barriers, and rows of people and carts waiting their turn, some, judging by the faces of those waiting, for hours already.
The soldiers accompanying the conscripts stepped down and spoke with a clerk sitting behind an open table, holding a massive ledger similar to the ones Oren was used to handling at the Archive, but thicker, and more organized in its columns.
Oren watched, with a professional curiosity he couldn’t suppress even at this moment, the way the clerk worked: opening the ledger to a certain page, comparing a name to a paper, marking a small note, then calling the next cart forward.
His own turn passed relatively quickly; one of the soldiers stated his name and number, and the clerk pointed to a page before him, and found the name already there, registered in advance among the list of expected conscripts, and nodded without lifting his eyes much, waving them through.
But the cart beside them, carrying merchants and a small family, remained standing for far longer.
Oren caught part of the conversation as they passed: missing papers, an unclear seal, a need for further confirmation from another office.
The head of the family stood explaining something to the clerk in a voice carrying suppressed tension, while his wife sat in the cart, calming a child who had begun crying from the long wait.
Oren noticed, looking at the two scenes side by side, something he had never thought about with this clarity before: that his own quick passage was not because he was someone important, but because his status had already been fixed in some record, classified and stamped, while that family, who might carry a far more complicated story, was now caught between endless layers of paper and seals.
He thought, without being able to fully articulate the idea, that the world he was entering was built not so much on people as on records that decided people’s fates.
Past the border, the road gradually changed.
The checkpoints grew more frequent, and the number of military carts passing in the opposite direction increased, some carrying supply crates, and some he saw this only once, but it stayed in his mind more than any other sight carrying men wrapped in bandages, sitting or lying in silence, their eyes on the ceiling more than on anything around them.
They passed a village half of whose houses stood empty, their doors bolted more tightly than usual, and a woman sitting at her doorstep watching the road, without seeming to be waiting for anyone in particular, as though the watching itself had become a habit.
He also noticed a large storehouse surrounded by fencing and more guards than an ordinary grain store would require, and asked one of the conscripts beside him about it in a low voice; the other answered, with the indifference of someone used to it: “Army supplies.
They guard it from thieves more than from anything else.” But life, despite all this, had not stopped.
They passed a crowded market in a mid-sized town, merchants calling out their goods loudly, children playing between the stalls, a man playing a simple stringed instrument at a street corner while two children danced before him with unpracticed, spontaneous movements.
He also saw, close to that same market, a family sitting on the ground near a wall, their few belongings stacked around them, their faces carrying that exhaustion Oren couldn’t mistake, similar to the exhaustion he’d seen once in someone searching for his sick father in a distant city, months before.
He asked no one about their story, but understood, without needing an explanation, that the war pushed people from their homes by different routes than conscription did, though they were the same routes, in the end.
The world, as it began to reveal itself to him, did not resemble the simple picture he had formed of it his whole life: it was not one single place darkened by war, nor one single place living untouched by it.
It was a strange mixture of both together, a market loud with laughter standing side by side with a displaced family only steps away, without either seeming, to those used to seeing them together every day, contradictory to the other.
They reached the capital after three days of travel, at midday, the sun high above buildings that appeared to Oren, from a distance, taller than anything he had seen in his life.
He was not prepared for the sheer volume of noise that greeted them as they approached the outer walls.
Many carts crowding at the main gate, long lines of travelers and merchants, the cries of wandering vendors displaying goods he had never seen before, fabrics in colors whose names he didn’t know, finely made metal tools, fruits that did not grow in his village’s climate.
A small procession of guards in elegant matching uniforms passed, accompanying a closed carriage drawn by horses far better bred than any he had seen at his village’s weekly market, and people stepped out of its way automatically, with no one directing them, as though this were a behavior they had long grown used to.
The cart carrying the conscripts entered through a side gate less crowded, but even this route was crowded enough to make Oren forget, for a few moments, the weight of the past days, absorbed in trying to take in everything his eyes saw: streets paved with polished stones unlike the cracked dirt of his village, shops with glass storefronts displaying goods in a manner he had never seen before, restaurants giving off strange food smells, and cafés where men sat reading printed papers, and music reaching him from somewhere far off, light and cheerful, contrasting with another scene he saw only two streets later: a row of wounded men being carried on wooden stretchers toward a large building bearing a white-and-red mark at its entrance, and nurses moving among them with a silent speed.
He didn’t know how to reconcile the two scenes in his mind, the music and the wounded, the noisy market and the displaced, so he left the thought hanging without trying to resolve it, content only to notice, the way he was used to noticing small details in old records, without forcing upon them any greater meaning than they carried.
The conscripts were then transported to a vast camp at the eastern edge of the capital, its walls low but long, rows of tents and temporary wooden buildings stretching a great distance, and the sound of military commands echoing from one place to another, some directed at groups drilling in organized marching, some at clerks distributing equipment from a large storehouse.
Oren stood in a long line before a wooden table, waiting his turn among dozens of other young men, some speaking in accents different from his own, some entirely silent, and an aging soldier sitting behind the table, holding a pen, a large ledger open before him.
When his turn came, the soldier opened the file of official lists arriving from the province, and asked him to match the data against the attached page: “Oren?” “Yes.” “Twenty years old?
From the village of…?” “Yes.” “Previous occupation?” “Archive clerk.
Record keeper.” The soldier nodded and transferred the details to the large ledger before him.
Oren noticed, looking at the upside-down page, that his name had been transferred from the conscription order with the same extra letter he had seen before on the tax receipt an old official error, born long ago, that had followed him from the local courthouse all the way to the capital.
He said nothing; he knew, from his own experience at the Archive, that an official misspelling once fixed in the paperwork was not easily erased in a moment like this.
He was then given a small card bearing a number, and sent to another table where he received a blanket, a gray shirt, and a heavy pair of boots whose weight he wasn’t used to, then directed toward a row of wooden buildings designated for sleeping.
He was walking between the rows, carrying his new bundle, when his eyes fell on a face he recognized at once.
A young man of strong build and broad shoulders, whom he had seen being led before the soldiers in the square three days earlier Daren, the blacksmith’s son, whom he was used to seeing working with his father on the other side of the village.
“Daren?” Oren said as he approached him.
The young man turned, looked at him with tired surprise, then nodded.
“Oren…
they took you too?” “Yes.” Oren sat beside him, feeling a slight reassurance at seeing a familiar face from his village amid all this crowding.
Another young man, standing a short distance away carrying his own bundle, approached and stopped when he noticed the conversation between them.
“This is Silen,” Daren said, gesturing toward him.
“From the market he used to sell vegetables near the entrance to the square.
They took him with me.” Silen extended his hand quickly, with a smile he tried to make light.
“I know your face well I used to see you walking past my table at the village market every week.
At least we’re not alone here.” Oren shook his hand, feeling something close to a faint relief amid all this upheaval just two faces he knew something simple about, in a place where he knew no one else.
The three of them sat afterward before one of the wooden sleeping buildings, on a low stone step, as the sun began leaning toward sunset over the sprawling rooftops of the camp, and the voices of the other conscripts gradually thinning as evening drew near.
They didn’t talk much at first; each was more occupied with the exhaustion of the past days than with conversation, but Silen broke the silence after a while, with a simple question about how Daren had been caught, and the latter answered briefly, without much detail, and the talk gradually shifted to the village, to people they all knew, to scattered news each of them had heard before leaving.
Daren asked Oren, in a quiet moment between exchanges, whether he’d left anyone behind, and he answered briefly that he had a sister, and added nothing more, and Daren didn’t press with another question, as though he’d understood from his tone that this was a subject he didn’t want to expand on now.
Oren touched, without full awareness, the small piece of cloth hanging beneath his shirt, and remembered Marin’s voice saying, “Write to me every day,” and wondered, without saying it aloud, whether places like this allowed the sending of letters, and when, and how.
From somewhere far off within the camp, the sound of a metal bell rang out, followed by a man’s voice calling out orders Oren couldn’t make out with full clarity, but whose general meaning reached him without need for explanation: the end of the day, and the beginning of something else with tomorrow’s sunrise.
Silen rose first, stretching and complaining quietly about the weight of his new boots, then went into the wooden building, followed by Daren in a heavier silence, while Oren remained seated an extra moment, looking at the rows of tents stretching before him, the camp’s lights beginning to catch, one after another, as full darkness approached.
He placed his hand on the blue cloth beneath his shirt once more, for no clear reason other than that his hand itself had gone looking for it, then rose at last, and went into the building where a simple wooden bed awaited him, its shape unfamiliar, in a place whose name he had not known even a week ago, and a village he had left behind now far more distant than he had ever imagined any place could be from him.
Your support means everything.”