“Can’t you please at least let me have a blanket?” she begged him, trying to get her chattering teeth to still, gathering the piglet into her robes to be closer to her belly. “I’m going to die of cold.”
He snorted. “Enjoy the cold. All you’ll have is hellfire soon enough…”
She shriveled at his cold inhumanity. “You are the most hateful person I’ve ever known!” she spat.
He pointed to the pig. “Complain to someone who gives a damn,” he told her coldly.
It hadn’t been a bad idea. Not that she complained to the animal, but she found him cuddly and even loveable. She felt at least that the pig wouldn’t turn on her by tomorrow morning.
“Stop,” Rennio called to the soldiers at the front of the carriage that were leading the way. It was now the tenth time the party had needed to stop so that Rennio could find a bush for privacy.
“Christ! My horse doesn’t shit as much as you do!” one of the soldiers, a very sturdy and frightening looking man with a head shaved entirely bald yet a beard down to his chest, groused with a groan. She had a feeling that they had no choice in the matter. Rennio must have outranked them all. “I wanted to get across the river before nightfall!”
“Just camp here,” Rennio said, waving his hand as if he thought the soldier was being ridiculously whiney.
“We can’t camp here! I keep telling you, this is the worst spot to be. There’s nothing for the horses, and there’s no way to protect ourselves from the wood! On the other side of the river there’s far better shelter. Don’t be an idiot, priest!” the man bellowed. “Just hurry this time!”
“Fine, fine,” Rennio sighed, but then he wandered off and didn’t hurry at all. The soldiers left behind were finally beginning to talk amongst themselves about who would go out looking for him before Rennio finally came back just as the sky was getting even darker.
Susanna began to have a bad feeling. The soldiers were very unsettled and upset, and their nervousness permeated the air around them until she was even more worried about the journey than she had been previously, only this time she didn’t even have any idea why. Not until they came upon the river, at least.
As soon as she caught a single glance at the raging, black water, she began to feel just as frightful as the horses who were stomping their feet all around her, making the carriage heave to and fro. She grabbed the wooden bars with her scraped hands, trying to steady herself.
“This looks dangerous,” Rennio stated with annoyance.
She wanted, more than anything, for one of the soldiers to slap him across the face. It was certainly not a far jump to assume that that’s exactly what they wanted to do, anyway.
“That’s why we wanted to go over earlier! So we could see better over the crossing!” the bald soldier all but shouted at Rennio, who seemed unfazed. “Now let’s hurry before we can’t even see our feet!”
As they slowly guided their horses to the edge, their steeds once again stomped and whinnied at what they were going to be forced to do. The water wasn’t very deep—it would probably only go up just past the knee—but it seemed like it was moving far too swiftly to safely cross. Apparently, however, they were going to cross nonetheless. She gripped her piglet tightly against her, ignoring its unhappy snorts.
With a lot of complaining amongst the screaming of unhappy horses, the company slowly entered the fast-moving stream, and the cart jerked violently as the horse reared.
She held her breath, absolutely certain that the cart was going to fall sideways into the water and she was going to drown. The horse slowly settled down and then, suddenly, a huge gust of wind picked up, the water below the carriage wheels surged, and she heard the wheel beneath her body break.
She screamed as the cart, horse and all, heaved onto its side, and the cage immediately filled with ice-cold water that made her scream with pain and fright just before it went up over her head. The cart had gone free somehow, and she was swept below the water in the wreckage.
The piglet screamed and kicked his little feet, trying to climb up on her to get out of the cold water. She held it in her arms and kicked out with her feet as hard as she could. She didn’t think it would have worked as well as it did, because the cage fell into splinters with the first kick, several bars falling out and being swept downstream in huge pieces. She rushed through the bars and into the water, which immediately got deeper. She felt her head sink beneath the waves for a terrifying moment but then she bobbed back up. She tried wearily to swim toward the riverbank, though it seemed like she couldn’t even move an inch in the right direction.
The stream pulled her even faster, spinning her body out of control, andall she could do was kick and try to keep her head above the water, holding onto the squirming pig as they were swept around a bend. She heard the river roar up ahead and even though she couldn’t see, she had an uncanny feeling that they were coming up toward a drop of some sort. The rushing water sounded hollow and expansive, like a waterfall she used to walk under when she was a child… which wasn’t good.
Her arms and legs were so numb with the cold that they felt useless, and her soaking wet dress, underskirts, and cloak made her feel as though someone had tied a sack of stones around her waist.
“Drop the pig!” she heard someone shout from somewhere nearby.
She gripped the piglet tighter as she sputtered and choked, looking desperately around in the darkness while trying to keep her head above the water. She couldn’t see anyone, and she imagined that she had to be far away from the party that was charged with bringing her to Vienna.
Suddenly she felt hands reach around her. “Susanna!” a voice cried out simultaneously. The arms were strong, and warm. The pig screeched. “Drop that bloody pig and hold onto me!” a man’s voice demanded in her ear.
She held her breath, still trying to kick against the current even as the man held her tight. They were both jerked suddenly backwards against the current and she realized that whoever had her was tied to a rope. She gave a choked cry in surprise. “Damn it, I’ve got you. Hold on!”
She wasn’t going to drop the pig. It oinked in her ear unhappily, and she took a deep breath in as her eyes burned from the water. She was able to see now that it was Gerhard that had her held firmly with one strong arm. She was surprised, but her brain refused to wonder at it. It was too concentrated on her survival and the extreme cold all around her.
He slowly pulled them to shore and, as soon as his feet were steady, he picked her up into his arms and carried her up the stream. “Damn that stupid pig,” he said, and she could hear that his breath sounded like he was in the midst of shuddering. Apparently he, too, was cold as could be.
She couldn’t respond. Her chest felt constricted by the cold, and she stayed perfectly still as he pulled her up into a wagon and placed her onto a dry surface. He bent over her and loosened her arms from the pig, which squealed and shook itself off as Gerhard focused on getting her cloak unfastened. As if her clothes were poisoned, he moved quickly, his teeth chattering every bit as much as hers were. “We have to get you dry,” he told her as he peeled off her cold layers. She laid there, feeling numb and paralyzed with confusion and cold. She felt absolutely helpless—she wondered if she could move much more in any contingency. He threw a giant blanket over her, and she curled up into it. She saw his figure shuck his own pants off and then redress. He jumped down from the covered wagon where he had placed her, leaving her nestled among dark shadows of crates or boxes.
There was an unhappy squeal and little hooves hit the boards near herbody, and then the piglet nuzzled into her, nosing its way under the blanket. Less than five minutes had passed since she was rescued from the water, yet already she was in another wagon, and the horses were underway, being directed through the dark.
