Hope

Chapter Five: Forbidden Subjects

The next few days consisted of making camp, sleeping for the night, waking up the next day, clearing camp, and hopping onto the wagon to ride who knows how many miles only to repeat the process again. There was little to do except talk. I had much to learn about humans, though, so I welcomed the opportunity.

"How did all these problems with the soldiers get started?" I asked the day after we fled town.

Rebecca instantly stopped picking at her nails and glowered at me. "That's not something many people want to talk about, you know."

"I have to know. It'll be easier to solve the problem if one knows how it got started."

Rebecca gave a deep sigh and shifted on her crate so she was facing me. "Well, the whole thing got started when some idiot set fire to some barracks some hundred years ago. The person who was king back then decreed that the soldiers would be allowed to find and punish those responsible for such crimes by any means necessary. This measure predictably turned out to be unpopular among the people, so a whole bunch of them got together and decided to make things more difficult for the soldiers. So they stole food, threw stones, set fires, and set horses free. Unfortunately, this only served to escalate the problem. The king then made a decree that said the soldiers were above the law in such attacks and could use any means to stop the attacks. Back then, the generals were able to keep everyone in line and the commanding officers were generally honorable men. Soon after this law was passed, there was a war and all the soldiers went off to fight it. The last seventy-five years or so have been spent with the soldiers stationed around the borders of the kingdom so no one could get in who wasn't supposed to. But in recent years, the border patrol has been called back so all the soldiers wound up sitting around and doing nothing. It's been getting really bad lately, because they've been roaming the countryside and hurting people they don't like. Those rules that were made that allowed them to get away with it were essentially our fault. Those rules were the result of us, the people, doing things we shouldn't."

"But you didn't do it personally," I argued. "So why should you be pinned with the blame for the crimes of your ancestors? Jing's ancestors weren't even involved, so why does she have to pay for it?"

Rebecca shrugged helplessly. "We pay for the sins of our fathers and for the sins of our friends. It is assumed that civilians hate soldiers, so those rules are used to 'protect' the soldiers. The only problem is, it allows them to hurt us and it just goes on into a cycle of resentment and revenge. It's nasty, but there's nothing we can do about it except suffer through it and hope something changes."

"So, you're saying that soldiers were a convenient target in the past for resentment against royal authority, only it backfired in a major way and caused all the problems we have today," I said. "It's sort of like racism between humans, I suppose. There's no such thing as different human races, yet humans insist that it exists and humans with different colored skin deliberately try to hurt each other because of that. I find it really strange, because it's like hating someone for being blonde or a redhead. Of course, we don't have trouble with that in our tribes. Our pelts are all mixed colors and they're more diverse than yours. To pick on one would be to pick on all."

Jing looked up from the piece of bread she was dissecting. "That's actually kind of an interesting idea, but you shouldn't go spreading that around. People might get mad. Though about the soldier thing, it doesn't really matter anymore. We're all being labeled anyway, so what's the use of fighting one more label?"

"It matters to some people," Stan said. "Unfortunately, those of us that want to get rid of those labels usually get punched in the face by those that say the labels matter. I think that until we are judged for who we actually are, we're going to get accused of things we didn't do, no matter how stupid it is."