Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  When more blonds tried to break free of the Algarvian net, Bembo got to stop beating the wounded Kaunian man. Instead of blazing at the fugitives, he ran after them. Rather to his own surprise—he wasn’t especially fast on his feet—he caught up with one of them—a woman—and brought her down with a tackle that surely would have started a brawl on any football pitch.

  “That’s more like it,” Oraste shouted from behind him. “Maybe you’re worth a little something after all.”

  The blond woman, after letting out a shriek of despair when she fell, lay still on the cobbles, her shoulders shuddering with sobs. After a few deep, panting breaths of his own, Bembo said, “See? Running away didn’t do you any cursed good.” To drive the point home—and to look good to Oraste—he whacked her with his bludgeon. “Stupid bitch.”

  “Futter you,” she said in clear Algarvian. Hate blazed from her blue eyes as she glared up at him. “If I hadn’t been big with child, you never would have caught me, you turdfaced tun of suet.”

  Bembo stared down at her belly. Sure enough, it bulged. All his pride at running down anyone, even a woman, evaporated. He raised his club, then lowered it again. He couldn’t enjoy the notion of hitting a pregnant woman, either, even if she cursed and reviled him.

  “Get up,” he told her. “You’re caught now. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “No, there isn’t, is there?” she answered dully as she climbed to her feet. Her trousers were out at both knees; one of them bled. “They’ll take me away, and sooner or later they’ll cut my throat. And if I stay alive long enough to have the baby, they’ll cut its throat, too, or blaze it, or whatever they do. And they won’t care at all, will they?”

  “Get moving,” Bembo told her. It wasn’t much of an answer, but he didn’t have to give her much of an answer. He was an Algarvian, after all. His folk had won the war here. Winners didn’t need to give losers an accounting of themselves. All they had to do was enforce obedience. Bembo brandished the bludgeon. “Get moving,” he said again, and she did. She had no choice—none except dying on the spot, anyhow. Bembo wasn’t sure he could blaze her in cold blood, but he hadn’t the slightest doubt Oraste could.

  Oraste was interested in other things. “How many of them do you suppose we’ve caught?” he asked Bembo as the pregnant Kaunian woman limped away.

  “I don’t know,” Bembo answered. “They’re stuffed in here pretty tight, I’ll tell you that. Hundreds, anyway.”

  “Aye, I think you’re right,” Oraste said. “Well, good riddance to the lot of ’em, and I hope they end up smashing a lot of Unkerlanters when they go.”

  “Aye.” Bembo did his best to keep his voice from sounding too hollow. If the Algarvians were going to sacrifice the Kaunians—and his countrymen plainly were—he couldn’t do anything about it. Didn’t it make sense, then, to get as much benefit from their life energy as possible?

  That seemed logical. And he wasn’t like foolish Almonio, to get in an uproar about something he couldn’t change. But he couldn’t take it for granted the way Oraste did, either.

  Well, what should I do, then? he wondered. The only thing that did any good was not thinking about it at all. That wasn’t easy, not when he was in the middle of rounding up Kaunians to send them west.

  And Sergeant Pesaro didn’t make it any easier, bellowing, “Come on, we’ve got our quota. Let’s get these whoresons over to the caravan depot. The sooner we’re rid of them, the sooner we don’t have to worry about them any more.”

  On the way to the depot, Forthwegians stared at the column of unhappy Kaunians. Some showed no expression whatever. Maybe they, like Bembo, were trying not to think about what would happen to the blonds. A good many, though, knew perfectly well what they thought. Some jeered in their own language. Others, crueler or just more erudite, chose classical Kaunian. Bembo understood bits of that. It was about what Algarvians would have said in the same circumstances.

  Most of the Kaunians just shambled along. A few shouted defiant curses at the folk who had been their neighbors. Bembo supposed he ought to admire their spirit. Admire it or not, though, he didn’t think it would do them a bit of good.

  Now that Sidroc had seen a little soldiering, the whole business appealed to him much less than it had when he joined Plegmund’s Brigade. Along with two squads of his comrades, he tramped along a dusty road that led from one miserable excuse for a village to the next. He yawned, wishing he could fall asleep as he marched.

  Sergeant Werferth saw the yawn. As far as Sidroc could tell, Sergeant Werferth saw everything. He didn’t look as if he had eyes in the back of his head, but that was the only explanation that made sense to Sidroc. Werferth said, “Keep your eyes open, kid. Never can tell what’s liable to be waiting for you.”

  “Aye, Sergeant,” Sidroc said dutifully. There were times when a common soldier could sass a sergeant, but this didn’t feel like one of them.

  And, however reluctant he was to admit it even to himself, he knew Werferth was right. The brigands in these parts were sneaky demons. They liked skulking through the woods best, but they’d come out and waylay soldiers in open country, too. Most marches were nothing but long, tedious bores. Terror punctuated the ones that weren’t, with no telling when it might break out.

  A couple of Unkerlanters—Grelzers, Sidroc supposed they were in this part of the kingdom—stood weeding in a field off to the side of the road. They straightened up and started for a moment at the troopers of Plegmund’s Brigade. “Whoresons,” Sidroc muttered. “As soon as we’ve gone by, they’ll find some way to let the bandits know.”

  “Maybe not,” Werferth said, and Sidroc looked at him in surprise: the milk of human kindness had long since curdled in the sergeant. After a couple of strides, Werferth went on, “Maybe they’re bandits themselves. In that case, they don’t have to let anybody know.”

  “Oh.” Sidroc trudged along for a couple of paces while he chewed on that. “Aye. How do we do anything about it? If we can’t tell the brigands from the peasants who might be on our side, that makes things tougher.”

  Werferth’s shrug had no Algarvian-style extravagance or mirth in it; all it said was that he either didn’t know, didn’t care, or both. “The way it looks to me is,” he said, “we treat ’em all like enemies. If we’re wrong some of the time, so what? If we treat ’em like our pals and they stab us in the back, then we’ve got real trouble.”

  Again, Sidroc kept marching while he thought. “Makes sense,” he said at last. “They won’t ever love us, most of ’em. They’re foreigners, after all.”

  Werferth laughed. “As far as they’re concerned, we’re the foreigners. But aye, that’s about the size of it. If we keep ’em afraid of us, they’ll do what they’re told, and that’s about all anybody can hope for.”

  Birds chirped and trilled. Some of the songs were different from the ones Sidroc had heard up in Forthweg. He knew that much, though he would have been hard pressed to say anything more. Except for the most obvious ones like crows, he didn’t know which birds went with which calls. Off in the distance, a dog barked, and then another. That meant something to him, though it wouldn’t have before he came down to Grelz. “Sounds like a village up ahead,” he remarked.

  “Aye.” Werferth nodded. “There’s supposed to be one somewhere past that stand of trees there.” His eyes narrowed. “I wonder if the brigands have a surprise waiting for us in those trees. Sort of thing they’d try.”

  “Do you want to go in there and try to flush them out?” Sidroc asked. A few weeks before, he would have sounded eager. Now he hoped Werferth would tell him no.

  And Werferth did shake his head. “No way to guess how many of those buggers might be hiding in there. No, what we’ll do is, we’ll swing wide through the fields—we won’t stay on the road and give them a clean, easy blaze at us. There are ways to ask for trouble, you know what I mean?”

  Before Sidroc could answer, a dark cloud covered the sun. More came drifting up from out
of the west. “Looks like rain,” he said. That sparked another thought in him: “I wonder what kind of mushrooms a good soaking rain’d bring out down here.”

  “If you don’t know what they are, don’t eat ’em,” Werferth advised. “You watch—some cursed lackwit’s going to try something he’s never seen before, and it’ll kill him. Silly bugger’ll get what he deserves, too, you ask me.”

  Up in Forthweg, people died every year from eating mushrooms they shouldn’t have. Sidroc’s attitude was much like Werferth’s: if they were stupid enough to do that, they had it coming to them. But in Forthweg, everybody was supposed to know what was good and what wasn’t. How could you do that here? Sidroc figured he might take a chance or two. If the Unkerlanters couldn’t kill him with sticks, odds were they couldn’t kill him with mushrooms, either.

  Big, fat raindrops started falling about the time the troopers from Plegmund’s Brigade went off the road and into the fields. Sidroc pulled his hooded rain cape out of his pack and threw it on. The ground under his feet rapidly turned to mud. He didn’t like squelching through it. But the raindrops also meant beams wouldn’t carry so far, which would make any attack from the woods harder to bring off. Give a little, get a little, he thought.

  No Unkerlanter hordes screaming “Urra!” burst from the trees. No devious Unkerlanter assassins skulked after Sidroc and his comrades, either. He couldn’t prove a single irregular had been lurking in the forest. All the same, he was just as well pleased Werferth gave it a wide berth.

  When he came back to the road—which had turned into mud even stickier than that in the fields—he could see the Unkerlanter village ahead. “Is that a friendly village?” he asked. Some few places in Grelz were conspicuously loyal to King Raniero. Even the Algarvians were supposed to leave them alone, though Algarvians, as far as Sidroc could tell, did pretty much as they pleased.

  But Werferth shook his head. “No, we can plunder there to our hearts’ content. They’re fair game.”

  The villagers must have known they were fair game, too. Through the rain, Sidroc watched them fleeing at the first sight of the men from Plegmund’s Brigade. “They don’t trust us.” He barked laughter. “I wonder why.”

  “We ought to see if we can catch a couple and find out why,” Werferth said. But then he shrugged and shook his head. “Not much chance, is there? They’ve got too good a start on us.”

  Not everyone had fled, as the troopers discovered when they strode into the village. A handful of old men and women came out to greet them. One geezer, tottering along on a stick, even turned out to speak some Forthwegian. “I was in your kingdom on garrison duty twenty years before the start of the Six Years’ War,” he quavered.

  “Bully for you, old-timer,” Werferth said. “Where’s the rest of the people who live here? Why’d they hightail it?”

  He had to repeat himself; the old Unkerlanter was deaf as could be. At last, the fellow answered, “Well, you know how it is. People aren’t friendly nowadays.”

  Looking at the wrinkled, toothless grannies who’d come out with their menfolk, Sidroc didn’t much feel like being friendly to them. What went through his mind was, If I ever get that desperate, I think I’d sooner blaze myself. Maybe Werferth’s mind was traveling along the same ley line, for all he said us, “Give us food and spirits and we won’t give you a hard time.”

  After the fellow who’d been in Forthweg translated that into Unkerlanter or Grelzer or whatever they spoke hereabouts, the old men and women hurried to obey. Black bread and pease porridge and smoked pork weren’t very exciting, but they filled the belly. Instead of spirits, Sidroc drank ale. Like any proper Forthwegian, he would sooner have had wine, but the next vineyard he saw in this part of the world would be the first.

  “King Raniero good, eh?” he asked the wizened old lady who fetched him his mug of ale. Good wasn’t much different in Unkerlanter from its Forthwegian equivalent.

  But the old woman looked at him with beady eyes—one of them clouded by a cataract—and said something in her own language that, coupled with her outspread hands, had to mean she didn’t understand him. Sidroc didn’t believe her for a minute. She just didn’t want to answer, which meant the answer she would have given was no.

  Anger surged in Sidroc. He didn’t have to take anything from these cursed Unkerlanters. If they’d been on his side, most of the people in this village wouldn’t have lit out as soon as they found the men from Plegmund’s Brigade were coming. “We ought to have some fun here,” he said, a nasty sort of anticipation in his voice.

  One of his squadmates, the ruffian named Ceorl, spoke up: “Can’t have as much fun as we might. Everything’s too stinking wet to burn the way it should.”

  “We can always slap these buggers around,” Sidroc said. “Pity none of the younger women hung around. We’d have better sport then.” Nobody was inclined to say no to a man who carried a stick. Sidroc had watched Algarvian soldiers making free with Kaunian women—and with some Forthwegians, too—back in Gromheort. Now that he carried his own stick, he enjoyed imitating the redheads.

  As he spoke, he eyed the old woman who’d brought him ale. She couldn’t hide the fear on her face. Even if she wouldn’t admit it, she understood some of what he and his pals were saying. As far as he was concerned, that was reason enough to slap her around . . . in a little while. Till then, she could bloody well keep on serving him. He thrust the mug at her and growled, “More.”

  She understood that, all right. She hurried off to fill up the mug again. Sidroc poured the ale down his throat. No, it wasn’t nearly as good as wine. But it would do. It put fire in his belly, and fire in his head, too.

  He started yet another mug of ale, fully intending to start raising a ruckus when he finished that. He was just draining it, though, when a horseman came splashing up the villages main, and only, street. The fellow called out in unmistakable Forthwegian: “Ho, men of Plegmund’s Brigade!”

  Sergeant Werferth was the senior underofficer. He pulled his hood down low over his eyes, stepped out into the rain, and said, “We’re here, all right. What’s toward?”

  “We’re all ordered back to the encampment outside Herborn,” the courier answered.

  “Now there’s a fine piece of bloody foolishness,” Werferth said. “How are we supposed to hold down this stinking countryside if we sit in that cursed encampment with a thumb up our arse?” Werferth liked fighting, all right.

  But the courier gave a blunt, two-word reply: “We’re not”.

  That brought not only Werferth but Sidroc and Ceorl and almost all the other troopers from Plegmund’s Brigade out into the rain. “Then what in blazes will we be doing?” Sidroc demanded. Several other men threw out almost identical questions.

  “We’ll be getting on a ley-line caravan and heading south and west,” the courier said. “If the lousy Grelzers want to go out and chase their own brigands, fine. If they don’t, the powers below can eat ’em up, for all we care from now on. They’re sending us off to fight the real Unkerlanter armies, not these odds and sods who sneak through the woods.”

  “Ahh,” Werferth said, a grunt of satisfaction that might almost have come from a man who’d just had a woman. “It won’t get any better than that.” He turned to his troopers. “The Algarvians have decided we’re real soldiers after all.”

  “My arse,” Ceorl muttered to Sidroc. “The Algarvians have lost so many men of their own, they’re throwing us into the fire to see if we can put it out.”

  Sidroc shrugged. “Anybody wants to kill me, he won’t have an easy time of it,” he said. Werferth nodded and slapped him on the back. Rainwater sprayed off his cape.

  Captain Gradasso bowed to Krasta. “An you be fain to closet yourself with Colonel Lurcanio, milady, I am to tell you he hath gone forth into Priekule, but his return is expected ere eventide.”

  Krasta giggled. “You talk so funny!” she exclaimed. “It’s not quite classical Kaunian any more, but it’s not really Valmieran, either. It
’s a mishmash, that’s what it is.”

  Lurcanio’s new aide shrugged. “Bit by bit, I come to apprehend somewhat of the modern speech. Though my locutions be yet archaic, I find also that I make shift for to be understood. An my apprehension gaineth apace, ere o’ermuch time elapseth I shall make of myself a fair scholar of Valmieran.”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Krasta advised him, an idiom which, perhaps fortunately, he didn’t catch. Her expression sharpened. “What’s Lurcanio doing in Priekule?”

  Captain Gradasso shrugged again. “Whatsoever it be, I am not privy to’t.”

  “Privy to it?” That set Krasta giggling once more. Her mirth puzzled Gradasso. She didn’t feel like explaining, and took herself off. When she looked back over her shoulder, Gradasso was staring after her, scratching his head. “Privy to it!” she repeated, and dissolved into still more giggles. “Oh, dear!”

  The Algarvians who helped Lurcanio administer Priekule all eyed Krasta curiously as she threaded her way back past their desks. They often saw her angry, sometimes conspiratorial, but hardly ever amused. Some of them, the bolder ones, smiled and winked at her as she went by.

  She ignored them. They were small fry, not even worthy of her contempt unless they let their hands get bolder than their faces. And her giggles soon subsided. When she thought of the privy, she thought of disposing of the pieces into which she’d torn the broadsheet her brother had written.

  Skarnu’s alive, she thought, and shook her head in slow wonder. She still didn’t know who’d sent her the broadsheet or where it had come from, but she couldn’t have been wrong about her brother’s script.

  As she went upstairs to her bedchamber, something new occurred to her. Some while before, Lurcanio had asked her about some provincial town or other. She frowned, trying to remember the name. It wouldn’t come. She kicked at a stair. But her Algarvian lover—her Algarvian keeper—had seemed to think this town, whatever its name was, had something to do with Skarnu.