The aurochs were bellowing with fright, confused by the sudden explosion of noise and water. Bissette, and her husband Joachim, shouted with fright, Tomase and Pierre swore and Loranne, who was minding the oxen on the western bank of the river, had the great good sense to say “Come UP!” and goad the Aurochs. The wagon bucked and spun in the water, the caulking holding well enough for the moment, but the loose lines ment that it was rocking around almost freely. But under Lorannes steady command, the aurochs walked forward, taking up the slack. There was a horrible moment of tension, literal tension, as the wagon snapped around like a twenty pound trout on a ten pound line. But the rope held. Groaning and creaking, it held. The aurochs bellowed in annoyance, their yoke being pulled around painfully, but they stayed calm enough. They took the weight. Slowly, relentlessly, they pulled the wagon out of the water and up the bank.

Pierre hit the river first, Tomase a bare half step behind him. They dove into the river- and sank, apparently not knowing how to swim. They kicked off the bottom, doing enough to push themselves across without needing a rescue of their own. Then they scrambled up the other bank and rushed into the wagon to check the damage. Bissette and Joachim took longer, sliding down the bank on their bottoms, and yelling at their fool boys to get back down here and throw them a rope. Eventually the whole family made their way to the wagon, their remaining aurochs temporarily entrusted to another family on the eastern bank.

Mazelton didn’t exactly bolt over, but he did discreetly make his way to the Humble’s wagon when the chaos had settled down. For all the kerfuffle, the rest of the wagons still had to cross the river.

The Humble’s wagon was… not great, but better than it might have been. Shale Snake Ridge was on the eastern side of the Ramparts, just a few days past Cold Garden. Since the wagon wasn’t going to cross the mountains, it could be built larger and heavier than the converted farm wagons most of the rest of the emigrants relied on. That meant more durability, but also more pressure on the wheels and axles. And by no coincidence whatsoever, one of the wheels had snapped in half, and the front axle was broken. Which was a serious matter, but not what had pulled Mazelton’s attention.

The heat from the wagon had always been like a hooded light core. After the accident, a crack had formed in the lamp shade, and he was rather afraid someone would die if he didn’t fix it. So he grabbed his stick and grabbed his tools and drifted over. “Walk Casual!” He remembered Mazelta hissing at him, as they slipped back to the dorms. Mother Moon, she was a good kisser. Her kisses made happy little dances happen in his chest as lightning crackled up and down his spine. He could feel his hands running up and down her as she grabbed ahold of his head and bent him back as her little tongue explored his mouth. Oh, he was drifting again. He prayed she got out of the city. She was… assigned to the street lighting division as a punishment, right? So… close to the mobs, but in a good spot to run from the fog. Possibly. Ælfflæd protect her either way. He shook his head. He couldn’t drift, the danger was right here, and right now.

“Knock Knock! Friendly caravan polishing service.” He said with forced cheer and a quieter voice than his tone implied.

“Don’t need you, don’t want you, scram.” Thomase said in one breath.

“You do, doesn't matter, no. Call your folks over.” Mazelton dropped the friendly look. Thomase didn’t like what he saw, because he shortened his neck, bunched up his fists and with narrowed eyes- went and got his parents.

“What do you want, Mazelton?” Bissette sounded as exhausted as she looked.

“To lead a long life of peace and safety with the person I hope to love. Short term, and to that end, I want to stop the heat pouring out of your wagon. It’s not at a lethal level yet, assuming nobody stands in just the wrong place for more than ten minutes or so.”

He discreetly pointed to a spot about half way along the left side of the wagon. Port? The Port side? Was it organized like a boat? Oh he was drifting again. He could smell smoke, even though he knew he didn’t really.

Bissette sagged, then straightened up.

“Is there any oath you would swear that would bind you to secrecy?”

“Not that would prevent me from reporting a danger to the Caravan, no. But I am quite good at selectively keeping my mouth shut. If this is something that I can fix and isn’t a danger, then I will tell anyone who asked that I was worried about you and yours, got tired from the sun, and sat in the wagon for a while.”

He nodded to the inside.

“A cup of cold tea would be just the thing right now, don’t you think?”

Bissette looked at him for a long moment. “Yes, it really would. Follow me. Joachim, would you-”

“Already doing it.” Joachim grunted, pulling the spare wheel off the side of the wagon.

The inside of the wagon was dim, packed high as he recalled, and lashed down ferociously well. There was even a cargo net fixed to the floor, holding down the sacks of flour and beans. Along the left side of the wagon, a plow had snapped the bracket holding it in place, dropping down and smacking its metal edge into the floor of the wagon. The heat was streaming out of the crack.

“How old am I, Mazelton?” Bissette asked.

“Mmm… Three score and seven, hard lived?”

“Close. Seventy. Hard lived. But also totally wrong.”

Mazelton tilted his head to the side, most of his attention focused on the leak. It didn’t seem to be spreading, so that was good, but it was soaking into the surrounding wood, which was bad.

“In actual fact, I am a bit over a thousand years old, give or take a bit.”

Mazelton looked over at Bissette. She didn’t appear to be joking. Her face was as still and empty as a stagnant pond.

“I am an anamnesis, Mazelton. I remember some seventeen of my past lives. All this epoch, thank Mother Moon for her protection. And here’s the thing about those lives- In all but the first, I was an anamnesis too. And in each of these eighteen lives, I only come into my memories on my sixtieth birthday, or immediately before my death if I died younger than sixty. Which I did, many times.”

Mazelton looked over at her, waiting patiently.

“I am going to Shale Snake Ridge so my kids can have a better life, it’s completely true. And I have nothing to speak of to leave them as an inheritance. Save one thing. And that one thing is a gift to myself.”

She hobbled over and pried up the floorboards around the leak. Under the boards were a collection of long black rods, some boxes of wood and metal, and sacks of well oiled cloth. A bonfire, a furnace of heat churned in all the hidden parts, with one of the smaller, metal covered cases having a small hole punched through it. Fixable, with care.

“An end for me. A final end to eighteen lives, and a final gift of life to the world. My death shall be a Renaissance.”

It took Mazelton some ten minutes to work a patch over the crack in the casing. It wasn’t great, and he would need to make something more permanent when he had the chance. Not often he got to patch a Holy Beacon. Not ever, in fact. Never even seen one. Not with his limited skills and standing in the Clan. He leaned up against the wagon, mug in hand, staring up at the sky as others worked and sweated.

Holy Beacon is just what Dusties called them, but they had so many names it was pointless to try and keep track. It was one of the core technologies any city sized cache would include. Here is how fire works. Steel. How to breed cereals and vegetables for the best yields. Here is the axle and wheel, and how to make flexible resins and polymers from seaweeds and algae. Here is how you make cement- use it responsibly. And here is how you make the machines to heal the world. And when you build back up to our level, you make damn sure you teach the next generation!

And for epoch after epoch, humanity had. Not evenly. Not everywhere. Definitely some losses and gains in the transmission of knowledge. But after every epoch, those little seeds of restoration remained buried underground. Under the ice, or ash, or bodies of people who agreed with what they heard and killed themselves. They waited, and when conditions were right and humans found them again, they sprouted.

The Ma Clan had designs for them in the archives, of course. All the Great Clans did. The Pi Clan’s were the best, but you needed to rebuild an entire technology base in order to make them. The designs used by everyone else were considerably more basic. The most common ones, the ones used by people in this epoch and this area, were comparatively dirt simple. A bit of metallurgy, a smidge of geology, and a reasonably sophisticated team of polishers, and you could make them. Expensive, damned expensive, but doable for a community.

Mazelton didn’t even taste his tea as he drank it. His arm was aching and he was struggling to stay in the present. He kept thinking back to Old Radler, and wondering if someone would perform a Renaissance there, or would they just wait for the heat to clear? And did West Guardian make it out, or that horrid wretch of an East Guardian? His parents? Aunts, Uncles? Mazelta who tasted like ginger and honey and got posted to charging street light cores because she threw hands with Mazelii outside of the Clan rules? Even though Mazelii was a complete p’takh and everyone knew it?

His knuckles were turning white on the mug. It was a stress reaction, he knew that. The memories and fears came storming in when he got depressed or anxious or afraid. He knew that. But it was hard to breathe through it. Hard to remember that he was here, it was now, and he was not falling forever through the endless blue sky as his city and family burned around him to the sound of screaming rookeries and drums and rubbing knives in the long tunnels of shadow and rot and sewage and he couldn’t breathe!

He staggered back to his wagon, crawled into the back, and curled up under a blanket. Duane, bless him, didn’t say a damned thing.

He had dinner in his tent that night. He drew and drew and drew, sketching out the crash of the wagon into the water, the fear, the stomping aurochs and the endless, pitiless sky overhead. He drew Danae standing behind him, holding him as he watched the wagon buck and twist in the water. It helped enough. He couldn’t say he felt good after doing it, but it helped enough.

That night, he dreamed of Danae and the garden, though he didn’t remember what they said. Little clovers and thyme grew over the ground, and the sky was safely hemmed in by mountains and trees.

Morning found a tired, cranky and altogether fed up Policlitus kicking the caravan into life. Repairs had gone on through the night, and thanks to careful preparation, no wagons were lost. Six died, dozens were injured, but all in all, it was considered a successful crossing. But now they were one day closer to being caught by the snow in the mountains. One, unrecoverable, day. The Caravan had to move, and move now.

The pace was not brutal, simply unrelenting. You could only hurry an auroch so much, and then they would be good for nothing for a long while. The losses outweigh the gains. But an auroch is a steady beast. You just had to keep them going longer than they had been used to. Longer than their humans were used to walking. Not… massively longer. But twenty two miles of flat, open country later, the emigrants had a new definition of the word “grueling.” It was “just” twenty two miles. A reasonably healthy person could walk that in five and a half hours without strain. But when you were driving aurochs and wagons along a dusty, dirty, hot and humid trail, it became something else entirely.

The caravan didn’t so much camp as collapse in place. Then they had to haul themselves up and set to work anyhow, as the camp chores needed doing no matter how tired they were. After all, being lazy was a quick road to being dead. Lamed animals would end your journey quite quickly, after all.

Mazelton washed his feet. He took real pleasure in it too- soaking them in a bucket with a small heat stone. He made the same arrangement for Duane, who wanted to refuse but Mazelton insisted. Judging by the almost audible groans of pleasure, Duane was now convinced. He got some filthy looks from the rest of the caravan, and didn’t care a whit. They had buckets and heat stones too.

Dinner was bean stew livened up with “dehydrated” vegetables and a bit of flatbread. The vegetables were a surreal dining experience for Mazelton. They didn’t look like anything recognizable, and they tasted generically vegital. Maybe a bit of carrot or leek or parsnip or… something. He genuinely had no idea what he was eating, but could completely believe that it was vegetables.

“Cookie, I can’t figure it out. How, exactly, were these vegetables “dehydrated?””

Cookie looked worried that the polisher was speaking to him, then smug that he knew something that the polisher didn’t.

“Short answer is, a big press. They steam a load of vegetables, which draws the water out some, let them get completely dry on wire racks and then it gets interesting.” Cookie grinned and slowly brought his hands together in a pressing motion.

“They squeeze them. Pack them into a mold and press. Some places use a big weight, other places turn a screw to press them down. Either way, they squeeze all the water out of them and pack the whole thing into a tight brick. Coat with fine ground salt, pack in dark waxed paper, and it keeps for ages and ages. Plus, with your purification, there is even less chance of rot.” Cookie smiled, flatteringly.

Bet he wants me to eat him last. There’s one myth that’s not shaking easily, Mazelton thought to himself. He thanked Cookie and started to walk back to his tent. Then paused and looked thoughtfully at the big stew pot.

“You couldn't even fit a whole person in there. You would need to work in chunks. Maybe braise some, roast the more tender cuts and bake the rest in the ashes? A clay wrap or something? I… still don’t really know how to cook.” Mazelton thought to himself. When he looked back over to Cookie, he had gone pale. Apparently he could guess Mazelton’s thoughts exactly.

It was the next night, camped by a shallow seasonal stream already the color of brown glass, that the spirit beasts found them.