The Flight of the Aula

I pulled another article of clothing off the line outside, crumpling the fabric in my hand, feeling for any lingering dampness. As I moved to the next piece of clothing, I looked off down the lane to where it met the King’s Road in the distance. All I could see was a stirring of dust, but over the rolling hill further south, where the King’s Road came closer to the property, I could hear a company of soldiers: the groaning of the wagons, clanking of metal, and the boisterous shouts. I could tell from their hollering and laughing that they were new recruits. Experienced soldiers learned to muffle the clanking of metal, and their laughter and exuberance became muffled too.

I knew that the next time this company came back down the road there would be fewer of them. The war on the Northeast boarder had been stealing lives and happiness for longer than I had been alive. For longer than even my grandmother had been alive.

I looked past the fluttering of sheets on the clothes line to the front stoop of the cottage. Grandmother sat there on a bench so worn that the wood had become as smooth as a river stone from each set of hands that lay upon it.

The company of soldiers had caught Grandmother’s attention as well. She was squinting down the lane, though I doubted she could clearly even see me where I stood. Her eyesight had been getting weaker over the years.

I moved to the next article of clothing. It was one of my skirts. The underlining was still a bit damp. I carefully unpinned it, turned it inside out, and repinned it. I then hefted the basket of laundry that had been dry enough to fold up and carried it toward Grandmother.

"Your da will have a message for us, Addie," Grandmother said as I passed by.

"I know Grandmother," I replied.

She could feel it too. There was a stirring in the air, as if something was brewing. It had been pressing at me all morning. I ignored the uncomfortable feeling and continued with my chores. There was nothing to do but wait, and there were underclothing to be put away that had been hung up to dry inside.  No one would have thought the worst of us if we had hung them outside, but Grandmother was from the Hills, and there you didn’t hang your underthings outside.

It was funny some of the customs we followed that she had brought from the Hills. It was a place I had never been to, and that she never wanted to talk about, but we still ate supper far earlier than our neighbors. Then before bed we toasted our deceased ancestors with a bitter drink of Kor, and lit a small fire, even in the heart of summer, to warm the spirits of the dead.

Many of the customs we followed were quite baffling to me, but Grandmother refused to explain them. I was quite fascinated with the land she used to call home, but all entreaties for more information were met with the same response. “I’m from a land where the folk speak softly and the wind screams, Addie. And that’s all you need to know,” Grandmother would say. I had long since stopped asking.