Out of the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  An Unkerlanter officer went into Gromheort under flag of truce to demand surrender one last time. The Algarvians sent him back. He happened to walk past Ealstan’s regiment shaking his head. Somebody called to him, “We’ll have to squash the whoresons, eh?”

  “That’s right,” the envoy answered. Ealstan followed Unkerlanter fairly well these days. The officer added, “We can do it, too.” Maybe he expected the soldiers to burst into cheers. If he did, he was disappointed. They’d seen too much fighting to be eager for more.

  Before dawn the next morning, more dragons swooped down on Ealstan’s poor, beleaguered city. Egg-tossers pummeled Gromheort anew. He grimaced at the chaos and destruction ahead. How could anyone, Algarvian soldier or Forthwegian civilian, have survived the pummeling the Unkerlanters had given the place?

  As soon as the sunrise painted the sky with pink, whistles shrilled all around Gromheort. Officers and sergeants shouted, “Forward!” Clutching his stick, doing his best not to be afraid and not to let himself worry, forward Ealstan went.

  Watching behemoths going forward, too, was reassuring. For one thing, they fought vastly better than individual footsoldiers could. For another, they drew blazes from the enemy, who knew how well they fought at least as well as Ealstan did. If the redheads were blazing at behemoths, they weren’t blazing at him.

  And redheads blazing there were. Regardless of whether Ealstan thought the Unkerlanter pounding should have killed them all, it hadn’t. They plainly intended to make the attackers pay for every inch of the journey into Gromheort.

  Perhaps fifty yards off to Ealstan’s left, a behemoth’s massive foot came down on an egg buried in the ground. The egg burst. An instant later, so did all the smaller eggs the behemoth was carrying. The blast of sorcerous energy knocked Ealstan off his feet and left him half stunned, his ears ringing. When he looked over there, he saw no sign the behemoth or its crew had ever existed except for a crater gouged in the earth.

  “Forward!” The shout seemed to come from very far away now. But Ealstan knew what Swemmel’s men would be yelling regardless of how well he heard them. And, again, he went forward. The Algarvians might blaze him if he did. The Unkerlanters would surely blaze him if he didn’t.

  An Algarvian--a filthy, scrawny fellow in the rags of a tunic and kilt--threw up his hands and came out of his hole as Ealstan and a couple of Unkerlanters drew near. “I surrender!” he shouted in his own language.

  Ealstan’s formal Algarvian was better than his formal Unkerlanter, in which he guessed at the meaning a lot of the time and sometimes guessed wrong. “Keep your hands high and go to the rear,” he told the redhead. “If you are lucky, no one will blaze you.” Mezentio’s trooper knew how lucky he was not to have been blazed down on the spot. Babbling thanks, he hurried off toward whatever captivity might hold for him.

  “You really speak some of their language,” an Unkerlanter said admiringly. “It’s not just ‘Hands high!’ and ‘Drop your stick!’ with you.” He brought out the couple of phrases almost any Unkerlanter soldier could say.

  Ealstan shrugged. “The Algarvians made me learn it in school.”

  “No, no, it’s good you know it,” the soldier in the rock-gray tunic said. “Maybe you can talk more of the whoresons into giving up.” He didn’t want to get blazed, either. The more of Mezentio’s men who surrendered, the fewer who would fight to the end. That made good sense to Ealstan, too.

  He didn’t need long to see that this push was going to be different. Before, when the Unkerlanters probed at Gromheort, they’d eased off on running into stiff resistance. Not now. Now, the behemoths pounded Algarvian strongpoints outside the shattered walls. Footsoldiers pushed forward between those strong-points. Mezentio’s men were brave. Ealstan, who hated them as much as any man in Forthweg did, had seen that for himself, both during the dreadful fighting in Eoforwic and in his involuntary stay in King Swemmel’s army. But courage wasn’t going to do them any good, not this time. A starved cat forced to fight a mastiff might be brave, too. Its bravery wouldn’t do it any good: the mastiff would kill it just the same.

  As he ran toward a wrecked gate, he wondered how many times he’d come this way before. He knew the one he remembered best: walking back to Gromheort after the first time he’d made love with Vanai. He’d been dazed by joy then. He was dazed now, too, but that was because the buried egg and the load on the behemoth’s back had burst too close to him. The oak grove where he’d lain with her was smashed to kindling; he’d been through it.

  Redheads still fought, using the rubble of the wall and the gateway for cover. Beams scorched tracks of black through the grass near Ealstan’s feet. Behemoths started tossing eggs at the gate. Ealstan saw pieces of a soldier fly through the air. A few more eggs bursting by the gateway meant far fewer blazes came back at the onrushing Unkerlanters.

  With a whoop, Ealstan scrambled over the gray stones of the wall and into Gromheort. “Home!” he yelled. Then a beam flicked past his ear, so close he smelled lightning in the air. So much for exultation. He threw himself down behind another stone and blazed back.

  Nothing was going to come easy. Mezentio’s men had had weeks to fortify Gromheort, and they’d made the most of them. They’d probably used the luckless civilians as laborers. Every street seemed to have a barricade across it every block. Behemoths broke into the city and started knocking down barricades with their egg-tossers, but redheads in the buildings on either side of the street dropped eggs on them from rooftops and upper stories. Ealstan had seen in Eoforwic how expensive street fighting could be.

  He’d thought--he’d hoped--he could simply head for the Avenue of Countess Hereswith, where his family lived. Things weren’t so simple. The way Mezentio’s men were fighting, his home might as well have been on the far side of the moon.

  He was running from one barricade towards another when he got blazed. One second, everything was fine. Next thing he knew, his left leg didn’t want to bear his weight any more. He landed hard, scraping both knees and one elbow.

  At first, those small injuries hurt more than his wound. Then they didn’t, and he let out a raw-edged howl of pain.

  He dragged himself into a doorway, leaving a trail of blood behind him like a slug’s trail of slime. An Unkerlanter soldier crouched by him and started bandaging the wound, which was in the outside of his thigh. “Not too bad,” the fellow said encouragingly.

  “Easy for you to say,” Ealstan answered. “It’s not your fornicating leg.” The Unkerlanter laughed, finished the job, and ran deeper into the city to fight some more.

  Ealstan tried once to get up, but couldn’t manage with the leg limp and useless. Having no other choice, then, he lay where he was and watched the bandage turn red. It didn’t fill with blood too fast, which he found moderately encouraging; if it had, he might have bled to death. Some unknown stretch of time went by. The Unkerlanters drove ever deeper into Gromheort, and the din of battle washed past him.

  Maybe he slept, or passed out. He was certainly surprised when an Unkerlanter soldier started to drag him out of the doorway by his feet. “I’m not dead, you stupid son of a whore,” he snarled. He rather wished he were, for the sudden jerk on his wounded leg made it hurt like fire.

  “Oh. Sorry, buddy,” the soldier said. He called to a pal: “Hey, Joswe! Come give me a hand. I’ve got a live one here.”

  Between the two of them, they got Ealstan upright and lugged him back toward an infirmary Swemmel’s men had set up near the edge of town. He almost wished they’d let him lie where he was; the howls of pain coming out of the place sounded anything but encouraging. But, when they helped him inside, he discovered a couple of Unkerlanter healers were there, working like men possessed along with a bearded Forthwegian they’d probably impressed into their service.

  Ealstan didn’t get a cot. He counted himself lucky not to have to lie on another wounded man: the place was packed, and getting more so by the minute. Healers and Forthwegian women with fresh bandages--also
no doubt pressed into duty--had to walk carefully to keep from stepping on hands and feet.

  After what seemed like forever, a healer got to Ealstan. He stripped off the field dressing and muttered a charm over the wound to keep it from going bad. A Forthwegian healer would have used a spell in classical Kaunian; the Unkerlanter spoke his own language. He said, “You’ll do all right, soldier,” shouted for one of the women to come give Ealstan a fresh bandage, and went on to the next hurt man.

  The Forthwegian woman who stooped beside Ealstan was a couple of years older than he, on the skinny side, and looked weary unto death. She plainly had practice putting on bandages; maybe she’d done it for the Algarvians, too. “Thank you very much,” Ealstan said in Forthwegian; he hadn’t had many chances lately to use his own tongue,

  “You’re welcome,” she replied, one eyebrow rising in surprise. Then she took another, longer, look at him. Her eyes widened; her mouth fell open. “Ealstan?” she whispered.

  He recognized her voice where he hadn’t known her face. “Conberge?” he said, and reached up to embrace his sister. They both burst into tears, careless of the staring Unkerlanters all around them. Ealstan asked, “Are Father and Mother all right? And”--he felt absurdly pleased with remembering--”your husband?” She hadn’t been married when he fled Gromheort.

  To his vast relief, she nodded. “They all were this morning, anyhow. We’ve spent a lot of time in the wine cellar, but most of the house is still standing. Well, it was, anyhow.”

  “Powers above be praised,” Ealstan said, and let more tears fall. He added, “Mother and Father are grandparents. Vanai and I had a little girl, end of last spring.”

  Conberge set a hand on her own stomach. “They will be again, come wintertime.” She added, “How did you turn into an Unkerlanter soldier? What will they do with you, now that you’re hurt?”

  “They caught me and gave me a stick. As for the other”--he shrugged-- “we’ll just have to find out.”

  Ten

  Sakarnu hadn’t been back to Pavilosta since not long before escaping from Merkela’s farm one jump ahead of the Algarvians. Whenever he’d gone into the village before, he’d played the role of a peasant. No, he’d done more than play the role: he’d lived it. He still had the calluses to prove it.

  Now, though, he and Merkela and little Gedominu wouldn’t be living at the farm. They would be moving into the castle where the traitor Count Enkuru and his son and successor, the traitor Count Simanu, had dwelt. First, though, there was the matter of formally installing Skarnu as the rightful overlord for the marquisate (newly elevated, by royal decree, from a county).

  He asked Merkela, “Are you sure you don’t mind having Raunu take over your farm?”

  She shook her head. “I’m just surprised he wanted it. You city people don’t usually have the first notion of what to do out in the country.”

  She hadn’t had the first notion of what to do in the city, but Skarnu didn’t press her about that. Instead, he said, “Well, you gave Raunu--and me--a good many lessons, and I think this woman he’s sweet on will teach him a good deal more.”

  His old sergeant had found a farm widow, just as he had himself. Raunu’s lady friend was a few years older and a good deal more placid than Merkela. She seemed to suit him well. A lot of widows to choose from, Skarnu thought. Too many to choose from. Too many men dead.

  At the edge of Pavilosta’s market square, an enterprising taverner had set up a table with mugs of ale and a selection of news sheets from bigger towns: the village couldn’t support one itself. He waved to Skarnu, calling, “I always knew you were more than what you seemed.”

  And Skarnu dutifully waved back. That wasn’t easy. He’d been drinking ale at that table and idly going through a news sheet when he saw that his sister was keeping company with an Algarvian. And now I’ve got a bastard for a nephew, he thought with a sigh. And now it will be a long, long time before anybody will be able to look at Krasta without remembering that. How long does disgrace last?

  It had lasted long enough for most of her servants to have deserted her and come out to the countryside with Skarnu and Merkela. That suited Skarnu well. He didn’t know the servitors who’d worked for his predecessors. Maybe they were all right. Maybe they’d collaborated as enthusiastically as Enkuru and Simanu had.

  Of course, the servants from the mansion had had redheads there, too. And Bauska had a little girl with hair the same color as that of Krasta’s baby boy. Not many people in Valmiera had completely clean hands these days.

  I do, he thought. Merkela does. The only trouble is, she doesn‘t want to yield even an inch to anyone who doesn’t. He sighed. He could see years of trouble ahead for the kingdom from quarrels like that.

  But today wasn’t a day to dwell on troubles. “Coming back to Pavilosta feels good,” he said.

  “I should hope so,” Merkela answered. “I don’t see how you stood living in Priekule for so long.”

  “All what you’re used to,” Skarnu said. But he’d had a couple of years to get used to living in this part of southern Valmiera. The thought of spending a good many years here didn’t horrify him, as it would have before the war.

  People from Pavilosta, the nearby village of Adutiskis, and the farms on the countryside in the area packed the market square. A good many of them waved to Skarnu as he and Merkela made their way through the crowd toward the traditional seat of installation. Every so often, he would spot someone he knew and wave back. Had he stayed in these parts as a peasant, the locals would have reckoned him that fellow who’s not from around here till the day he died. They would probably say the same thing about him as a marquis--but they might not say it so loud.

  A band struck up a thumping tune. Merkela drew herself straight with pride. “That’s the count’s air,” she said, and then corrected herself: “No, I mean the marquis’ air, don’t I?” She squeezed Skarnu’s hand.

  He leaned over and gave her a quick kiss. “See what you get for taking in strange men who come stumbling out of the woods?”

  “I never thought it would come to this,” she said. Whether that meant marrying him or coming back to Pavilosta in such style, he didn’t know and didn’t ask. The two of them had finally made their way up to the seat, which was in fact two seats, one facing one way, one the other.

  Skarnu sat down in the seat facing west, towards Algarve. That symbolized the feudal lord’s duty to defend the peasantry against invasion. No doubt, in years gone by, it had been only one more formality in this ceremony. But, with the redheads only a few months gone from Valmiera, opposing them took on a new urgency. And people hereabouts knew Skarnu had been part of the underground. He really had done what he could to fight Mezentio’s men. Murmurs of approval and even a few cheers rang out as he took his seat.

  A peasant from just outside of Adutiskis sat in the other half of the ceremonial seat. Counts--and now a marquis--were traditionally installed in Pavilosta, so the other village provided the second actor in the drama. “Congratulations, your Excellency,” the fellow said in a low voice.

  “Thanks,” Skarnu said. “Shall we get on with it?”

  “Right you are,” the peasant replied. “You do know how it’s supposed to go?”

  “Aye,” Skarnu said, a little impatiently. “For one thing, we’ve rehearsed it a couple of times. And, for another, I was here in the square when Simanu, powers below eat him, made a hash of things.” The collaborator had sat in the west-facing seat, but he’d had plenty of Algarvian officers and soldiers in the square to protect him from the folk whose overlord he was supposed to become.

  “That whoreson,” the peasant said. “He deserved every bit of what he got, and more besides. And now, your Excellency, if you’ll excuse me . . .” He got to his feet and pushed through the crowd to the edge of the square.

  Two cows waited there for him, one plump and sleek, the other distinctly on the scrawny side. He led them back to Skarnu, as another peasant--or perhaps this same fellow?--h
ad led them back to Simanu.

  The new overlord was supposed to choose the scrawny cow, showing that he reserved the best for the people living in his domain. Skarnu did. Simanu hadn’t--he’d picked the fat one. Skarnu bent his head and let the peasant give him a light box on the ear, which meant he would attend to the concerns of those who lived under his lordship. Simanu, secure in the knowledge that the Algarvians backed him, hadn’t worried about anything else, and had dealt the peasant a buffet that knocked him sprawling. The riot started immediately thereafter.

  He made the redheads hate him, too, Skarnu thought. They wanted peace and quiet in the Valmieran countryside, not trouble. But he was their tool, and they were stuck with him.. . till his untimely demise. He’d blazed Simanu himself, which was not the way one noble usually acquired another’s domain.

  Loud cheers rang out when Skarnu accepted the lean cow and the buffet. This was the way the ceremony was supposed to go. Skarnu had lived as a farmer long enough to begin to understand how much people who worked the land for a living appreciated it when things went as they were supposed to go.

  Now he had to make a speech. He didn’t want to do that; he would sooner have had another box on the ear. But it was part of the ceremony, too, and so he couldn’t escape it. He stood up on that west-facing seat. An expectant hush fell.

  “People of Pavilosta, people of Adutiskis, people of the countryside, I am proud to become your marquis,” he said. “I’ve lived among you. I know what sort of folk you are. I know how you never believed the redheads would rule here forever, and how you made their lives hard while they were here.”

  He got a nice round of applause. And I know what a liar I am, he thought. Aye, plenty of the locals had opposed Mezentio’s men. But plenty hadn’t. Several women in the crowd still had their hair shorter than most because they’d been shorn after the Algarvians withdrew. A good many men had done a good deal of business with the occupiers. But he didn’t want to dwell on that part of the past.