European Tour [642 AD, Remiremont, France] (tag: Ninkasi)
It had been a brutal trip. It was July, and it was expected to be hot, but this was beyond all anticipation. At least during the day, it was. As they crossed over into the mountains, it grew ever colder after the sunsets, and the temperature dipped below the freezing point. It was not uncommon to wake in the morning with frost on top of blankets, joints stiff from lying on the frigid ground, only to have the day warm past a point that was bearable, the air too heavy with heat to breathe. Little sleep was actually had, but it was too dangerous to try to navigate the roads at night even if it was cooler.
The overly hot days were not much better. It was just easier to see the perils that presented themselves. Well, most of them. There were bands of men, those without honor, too greedy and too hungry to try to find it, that were willing to rob and kill for whatever they could find. It was not wise to travel without some kind of protection.
And yet, that's what the pilgrims had attempted to do. Kratos had found them, purely by accident, and when he discovered that they had no one among them that was truly a warrior or a defender, there wasn't really much choice. He had to go with them. There was no talking them out of it; he knew, he'd tried. But they clung to their self-appointed mission to retrieve the body of a former bishop. They would have called him a fairy tale, but how could he have left them to their own devices? They would have been killed their first night on the road.
But as much as he could provide some comfort, there was only so much he could do without revealing his true nature. Which would have definitely upset them. So they had to suffer the heat and the cold. And they slowly ran out of food and drink, though Kratos was taking none for himself. It was rapidly approaching a point where he would have to do something, whether it upset them or not, or they may die. All for the sake of a dead man that wouldn't even notice if they dropped him off the side of a ravine.
Here they sat, in Champigneulles, a tiny, dirty little village that didn't have anything to spare travelers passing through. The horribly hot summer burned the few crops that would grow in the rocky soil where they stood in the fields. Creeks slowed to a trickle or dried up completely. Everyone there, resident or pilgrim, was tired, hungry, miserable and above all, thirsty.
Kratos sighed and looked around. He was going to have to do something. The question was, just what that would be.