Our travel was peaceful as we proceeded west for the next two days until we finally intersected a road that led back to the south. We quickly passed through the villages we encountered, not even stopping to refill our supplies or to sample the local gossip. As soon as we had returned to the road, I had restored my illusion. To all the world, we looked like an overseer traveling with a group of slaves. I overheard more than one comment as we passed through settlements about how tamed or how docile my slaves were. Every time I heard those remarks, they turned my stomach. How depraved was this country? People commented on other people like they were a prized hound or a nice piece of furniture.

Before buried Felaern and the orcs, we had looted them. In addition to a decent amount of wealth, we took their weapons. Felaern’s sword was a unique work of art, and we hid it deep in my wagon until we could get very far away and sell it for a profit. Displaying it here would be tantamount to screaming to the world that we had killed some rich dude, and that would be the kind of thing old James would do. I was new James, though, and not quite that stupid anymore. The swords and daggers from the orcs, however, were plain, utilitarian and serviceable, the kind of items that would be prevalent in guard forces and military forces throughout the country. I claimed one of the swords. I was tired of not having an effective counter to any real amount of armor. Although I would have to practice to adapt my fighting style, the effort would be worth it. I was certain I could become fairly proficient in little time, and I still kept my more comfortable rapier to deal with unarmed opponents.

In order to keep up public appearances, it is not like I could arm my companions. A slave with a weapon in this country universally resulted in that slave’s execution. I did distribute the weapons between both wagons, though. They were kept within easy reach in case our group needed them for battle.

At night, after we pulled off the road and darkness had encroached enough that we would not be easy to spot, everyone did some weapons training. We couldn’t spar because we didn’t have any practice weapons and the light wasn’t good enough, but some training was better than no training. We also worked on language skills, trying to learn a common language. Since some of my companions spoke some variant of English, even as diverged as the vocabulary and syntax had become, we started teaching that. I say we, but it was mostly others doing the teaching, as I never really knew what language I was speaking when I spoke. The gift of tongues was instinctual. Although I always felt like I was speaking and being spoken to in my native language, it was clear I was not, and I had no way to turn it off.

During the rest of the time on the road, I introduced myself to my companions and they made themselves known to me. The middle aged man who was my first purchase was named Jahhaf. He had dark hair and brown skin and a slim, wiry frame. He had spent his entire life working his way up through the restaurant industry in an Earth adjacent reality. Based upon his description, I thought it would be somewhere in the south of Spain on my Earth, but in his world the Reconquista had never occurred and the Iberian peninsula was dominated by Islam. He was devout, praying several times a day. Before he had slipped into this reality, he had started and run a very successful restaurant. He immediately became our cook and our meals were much better for it. Since English was not a dominant language where he came from, he struggled with it and had trouble communicating with most of the others, but the appreciative smiles they gave him when he was serving his creations showed that he was a valuable member of our burgeoning tribe.

Patrick was, in fact, Scottish. He wasn’t from a near Earth, he was from my Earth. Out of all the distant realities that fed this realm, having someone from my home world with me felt like I had won the lottery. The odds dictated that I probably had. Apparently, there was some temporal displacement involved with some transfers here, however, because he told me he woke up here after falling asleep in 1995. I let him keep the pistol. He was much better with it than I was. I also gave him the last ten round magazine that I had for it, cautioning him that when those bullets were gone there would be no others. He was our trump card, limited as that card might be.

Mariam, the old woman who drove the other wagon, was not from an Earth. She was from a world where the Industrial Revolution hadn’t happened yet. In her world, other fantasy-type races lived alongside humanity, their relations usually but not always harmonious. Although she was in her seventies, she was spry and physically active. She had grown up on a farm but moved to a nearby city when she became an adult. She told me she needed more excitement, her eyes twinkling, and I laughed at that. There, she met her husband who was a tailor. Together, they had six children, four boys and two girls, and she worked alongside him in his shop. As the years passed, he became sickly and they sold the shop, retiring to live off the proceeds. His health continued failing, it sounded like he had a massive heart attack to me, and she was taking care of him when she had slipped into this reality. Tears welled in her eyes as she wondered whether he would just think she ran away from her responsibility to him. She was greatly worried about him and wondered who would take care of him.

Mero, the young boy, was from a world somewhat similar to Mariam’s. He came from a loving family, growing up beside his several brothers and sisters. His mother was some sort of government official and before arriving here, he had never known real stress or privation, In our downtime, his face would often be overcome by a sad and wistful look, and he would often cry himself to sleep. Most other people in the group went out of their way to be kind to him, and Mariam appointed herself as a surrogate grandmother. They often rode together, and the few times I saw him smile it was Mariam who somehow coaxed it out of him.

Helvia, the seemingly well put together woman in her forties came from an Earth adjacent world where the Roman Empire had never fallen. She was actually from the Rome of her world, and had lived a life of luxury, having married into a minor patrician family. Surprisingly, even though she had been sold as a slave, she was not against the practice of slavery. I guess it still existed where she came from. She thought, however, that the way slaves were treated here was deplorable. Frankly, her hypocrisy angered me. The height of technology in her world was currently the steam engine, and she spent a lot of time extolling the technological supremacy of her culture. I had to fight the urge to pull out my cell phone or my action camera to see whether either still had enough charge to turn on. In my world, she would have been termed high maintenance. She had become so accustomed to others doing things for her that it was difficult to get her to pitch in and do her share of the work. Finally, I had to sit down and talk to her, telling her that her old way of living was never coming back and that she would need to work hard to survive here. It helped for a little while, but I thought I would have to repeat the conversation several more times before the lesson stuck.

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Then there was Lapina, the stoic, stone-faced woman who wouldn’t say three worlds to me when I tried to talk to her. Once I actually got her talking, she would not shut up. She had no filter, chattering endlessly any time a thought flitted through her mind. That was not what I expected. She was from a non-Earth planet from a culture that sounded a bit like Russia during the reign of Peter the Great. Some things she described were certainly twisted ninety degrees or more from my reality, but that was the closest cultural reference I could come up with. She was well-educated by the standards of her time, and would often spout endless comparisons of what she was seeing to things that were familiar to her. Her loquatiousness made sense when I found out that she had worked as a tour guide at a prominent museum. Still, when hard work was called for, she was onboard without hesitation or complaint. Even though she irritated me at times, I kind of liked her.

Aleyda was the athletic younger woman that I though might have been a gymnast. Once again I was wrong, so very wrong. Standing maybe five feet tall and weighing no more than 120 pounds due to her well-developed musculature, Aleyda was a badass. She had grown up on a world where the one constant was war. In her society, inequality between the sexes was not a thing, and she had spent every day since she was six years old training as a warrior, learning to fight and kill. Given little time and effort was dedicated to technological innovation due to all the slicing and stabbing, her world’s level of development had been stuck in the late bronze age for hundreds of years. She was fascinated by the steel weapons and armor people wore here, and badgered me endlessly to commit to buying her some. With or without a weapon in her hand, she was fearsome. She moved expertly, taking the most direct path to murder and mayhem in the least amount of time. She would have whipped my butt in a fight, be it with a sword or fighting hand to hand. Eventually, I just threw up my hands and let her take control of our weapons training, and we all benefited greatly from the decision.

Bowen, the weasel-faced man, clearly had the most mercenary attitude among my companions. He came from an Earth-type world ruled by inefficient puppet governments. The real power in his world, the kingmakers, were the criminal syndicates. He was born poor, and worked his way up through a mafia-style syndicate, eventually running the organization in a small town. He was used to telling other people what to do, not being told what to do. He had clearly gotten his hands dirty in his earlier years, and placed little stock in the sanctity of life. Driven and ambitious, I would have to watch him because if I showed any weakness his instinct would be to jump on it and take advantage of it. While I could see him making a power play, if I could get him dedicated to our cause against a common enemy, I thought his organizational skills and ruthless efficiency would be invaluable.

The seemingly dimwitted huge man who had saved me from being pounded into paste by an enraged orc was named Xeng. The named sounded Asian to me, but he didn’t look Asian. He had dark skin and a shaved head. From the descriptions he provided, I got the sense that he was from an Earth, but all the names for countries and continents were different and he was not very well educated, so I couldn’t be sure. In his world, just like mine, there was a stereotype that big muscly and plodding men must be dimwitted. He wasn’t, but he purposefully played into that stereotype, using it so others would underestimate him. Although poorly educated, when we talked he proved to be quite intelligent with a charming natural curiosity. One thing that we had in common was that he, too, had worked in a warehouse, loading and unloading cargo trains all day. He said that if he played dumb, he wouldn’t get assigned to more complex tasks and didn’t have to work as hard because of it. I could respect that. Immensely strong, with a natural protective instinct, if we could get him trained up he would be a fearsome fighter.

And finally there was Werner. Ah, Werner. What you see is what you get. He was still an ingratiating, pedantic and condescending suck up. Getting him to work on anything was difficult as instead of applying himself to the work he would start an endless diatribe about the things that he could build that would make the process faster and more efficient. He was positively inept at weapons training, and I thought Aleyda was going to yank all the hair out of her head in frustration just trying to get him to learn the basics. He often complained that the training made his hands hurt. Suck it up, buttercup. Still, his knowledge and experience would be very important to us, if I could get him to focus on something and actually apply himself to work on building it.

All in all, even though it was blind luck, I thought I had done fairly well. There were a lot of solid skills in the group and hopefully we would be able to expand further to fill in the gaps. My immediate priority was to get Bowen dedicated to the cause, but I wasn’t certain how I would accomplish that. Everyone else seemed to believe in what we were doing to a greater or lesser extent. I really didn’t want to wake up one morning in the middle of a coup. I needed to keep Bowen and Helvia away from each other as much as I could. Those two would feed each other’s delusions. Thankfully, most of the strong fighters in the group -- Patrick, Aleyda and Xeng -- seemed to be firmly in camp James, so if it came down to a straight up fight, I should have the upper hand.

The oxen continued to stolidly plod down the road at a pace a fit man walking could keep up for hours. A couple of hours after noon, I saw a village up ahead, nestled on a familiar river. Moving through it as quickly as we could, we intersected the road that I had spent the majority of my time in this world walking back and forth on. Turning west again, we started our long journey towards Shroud Hallow.

Up ahead I could see storm clouds gathering. The sky looked angry. Perhaps we would have to make camp early that day before the storm broke. If I remembered correctly, there was another village a few hours up the road. Maybe we could reach it in time and weather the storm there.