Out of the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  “So do I.” The guard’s stick twitched, just a little. Leudast took the hint. Anyone who spent too long watching the plundering of the Algarvian treasury might be suspected of wanting some of the plunder for himself. As a matter of fact, Leudast did want some of the plunder for himself, but not enough to get blazed for it. He left in a hurry.

  When he got back to his regiment’s encampment in a park not too far from the palace, it was boiling like an anthill stirred by a stick. “What’s going on?” he asked a soldier from his company.

  “Orders, sir,” the man replied.

  That told Leudast less than he wanted to know. “What kind of orders?” he demanded, but the soldier had already hurried off. In a way, Leudast got the answer to his question: the orders were of the urgent kind.

  “Oh, there you are, Leudast,” Captain Dagaric said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “I’m here, sir,” Leudast answered, saluting. “What in blazes is going on?”

  “We’re moving out of Trapani, that’s what,” the regimental commander told him. “Moving out by tonight, as a matter of fact.”

  “Powers above!” Leudast exclaimed. “Moving out where?” His first, automatic, glance was toward the east. “Are we going to start the war up again, and take on the Kuusamans and Lagoans?”

  “No, no, no!” Dagaric shook his head. “We’re not going east. We’re going west. We’re going a long way west, as a matter of fact. A long, long way west.”

  “About as far west as we can go?” Leudast asked.

  Dagaric nodded. “That’s right. We’ve got some unfinished business with the Gongs, you know. . . . What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing, sir, or not really funny, anyhow--but strange, all the same,” Leudast said. “Back a million years ago, or that’s what it seems like now--back before the big Derlavaian War started, anyway--I was fighting in the Elsung Mountains, in one of those little no-account skirmishes that don’t matter at all unless you happen to get killed in them. I’ve been through all this, and now I’m going back.”

  He wondered how many other Unkerlanters who’d fought in the halfhearted border war against Gyongyos were left alive today. Not many--he was sure of that. Once more, he counted himself lucky only to have been wounded twice. Well, now the cursed Gongs will get another chance, he thought, and wished he hadn’t.

  More than his regiment was leaving Trapani: much more than his regiment. Once his men got to the ley-line caravan depot, they had a long wait before they filed onto the cars that would take them across most of the length of Derlavai. “Why did we have to hurry so much, if we’re just standing around here?” somebody grumbled.

  “That’s the way the army works,” Leudast said. “And believe me, standing around is a lot better than getting blazed at. Besides, it’ll take us ten days, maybe more, to get where we’re going. You might as well get used to doing nothing.”

  He remembered his last passage out to the borders of Gyongyos as far and away the longest, most boring journey he’d ever made, with nothing to do but watch endless miles of flat countryside slip past. But battle, once he got to the uttermost west, hadn’t been boring, however much he wished it were. He didn’t expect it would be this time, either. As he finally filed aboard the ley-line caravan car, he hoped against hope he would prove wrong.

  Ceorl had known for a long time that he would get it in the neck. If he hadn’t signed up for Plegmund’s Brigade, a Forthwegian magistrate would have given it to him. The second time they caught you for robbery with violence, they didn’t bother locking you up; they just got rid of you. The judge had been in what passed for a kindly mood for him: he’d been willing to let the Unkerlanters do the job instead of taking care of it himself with a signature.

  And so Ceorl had gone to fight in the south. For a while--all the way up through the battles in the Durrwangen bulge--he’d hoped he’d managed to cheat the judge, because Algarve had still had a chance to win the war. After that. . . He shook his head. After that, it had been almost two years of hard, grinding retreat. He’d started out somewhere between Durrwangen and Sulingen, and ended up one of the last holdouts in the ruins of King Mezentio’s palace in Trapani.

  Even then, the Unkerlanters hadn’t been able to kill him. Along with the other survivors from Plegmund’s Brigade, the blonds from the Phalanx of Valmiera sprinkled in among them, and the Algarvians who’d been stubborn enough to stick it out to the very end, he’d come forth with his hands high, sure enough, but also with his head high.

  He turned to Sudaku. Aye, Sudaku was a stinking Kaunian, but he’d fought as well as anybody else this past year. In Algarvian--Sudaku had picked up some Forthwegian, but not a lot--Ceorl said, “The one thing I didn’t figure on was that Swemmel’s whoresons’d go right on having chances to do us in even after we surrendered.”

  “Powers below eat me if I know why not,” Sudaku replied. “Did you think they would pat us on the bottom and tell us to go home and to be good little boys from here on out? Not likely.”

  “Ah, futter you.” Ceorl spoke altogether without malice. He cursed as automatically as he breathed, and thought no more of one than of the other. He was a brick of a man, stocky even by Forthwegian standards, with bushy eyebrows, a big hooked nose, and a smile that usually looked like a sneer.

  “The Unkerlanters are going to futter us all,” Sudaku said. “They can take their time about it now, but they’re going to do it.”

  He was right, of course. Ceorl knew it. If he’d been on top of the world, he would have paid back everybody who’d ever done him dirt. He had a long list. But his list, he had to admit, paled beside the one King Swemmel must have been keeping all these years. What Swemmel’s list amounted to was, the whole Kingdom of Algarve and anybody who ever helped it in any way. That was a list worth having, a list worth admiring.

  And Swemmel was getting his money’s worth from it, too. Once upon a time, this captives’ camp outside of Trapani had been a barracks complex holding perhaps a brigade’s worth of men. Six or eight times that many soldiers--or rather, ex-soldiers--were crammed into it now. They got just enough food to keep them from starving in a hurry. It was as if the Unkerlanters wanted to savor their suffering.

  “Pretty soon,” Sudaku said, “a plague will start, and they will need to bring in a ley-line caravan to carry out the corpses by carloads.”

  “You’re a cheery bastard, aren’t you?” Ceorl answered. “I almost hope a plague does start. The stinking Unkerlanters’d catch it, too, and it’d fornicating well serve ‘em right.”

  With a shrug, the man from the Phalanx of Valmiera said, “You should want to live. If you get out of this place, if you go back to your own kingdom, you can hope to do what you did before the war. I am not so lucky. For a Valmieran who has fought for Algarve, there is nothing left.”

  “Oh, my arse,” Ceorl said. “You ever get back to your own kingdom, pick a new name and pick a new town and start telling lies like a fornicating madman. Tell ‘em about how the redheads, powers below eat ‘em, did you all kinds of dirt. Your people would buy it. Most people are nothing but a pack of fornicating fools.”

  Sudaku laughed out loud. “Maybe you are right. It might be worth a try. What a reason to live: to spend the rest of my life telling lies.”

  Ceorl poked him in the chest with a forefinger. “Listen, pal, after this war, folks’ll be telling lies for the next fifty years. Anybody who ever had anything to do with the redheads is going to say, ‘No, no, not me. I tried to kick those bastards right in the nuts.’ And all the Algarvians who were the meanest whoresons, they’ll go, ‘No, I didn’t have any idea what was going on. That was those other fornicators, and they’re already dead.’ You think I’m kidding? Just wait and see.”

  “No, I do not think you are kidding,” the blond said. “It will happen. Maybe I could do that... if I ever got back to Valmiera. But I do not think I am going to.”

  He was likely right for himself, but Ceorl had some hope of escaping. But for hi
s beard, he looked like an Unkerlanter, and he could make a stab at the language of King Swemmel’s soldiers. If he could murder a guard and get into the fellow’s uniform tunic, he might sneak out of the captives’ camp. And if he could do that, anything might happen.

  He was still contemplating ways and means two days later, when the Unkerlanters emptied out the captives’ camp by marching half the men in it--including the survivors of Plegmund’s Brigade--out of the place and through the streets of Trapani.

  “Who are those whoresons?” an Unkerlanter lieutenant asked a guard as the captives trudged along. “Traitors from the Duchy of Grelz?”

  “No, sir,” the guard answered. “These bastards are Forthwegians: the outfit that called itself Plegmund’s Brigade. And see? They’ve got a couple of Valmieran swine with ‘em. The Algarvians picked up garbage all over the place.” Ceorl followed his words well enough.

  “Plegmund’s Brigade, eh?” The officer nodded. “Aye, I ran up against them a time or two.”

  “Too futtering bad we didn’t get you, too,” Ceorl muttered.

  “Powers below eat you, shut up, Ceorl!” another Forthwegian captive said as they went on their way. “You want to make it worse than it is already?”

  “How?” Ceorl asked as they shambled on. The other fellow had no answer for him.

  They stopped by the ruins of the central ley-line caravan depot. The queue of captives snaked toward the platforms. Ceorl thought of a way in which things might be worse, and spoke to the other men from Plegmund’s Brigade in Forthwegian: “We better stick together, whatever happens. Otherwise, the fornicating redheads’re liable to come down on us hard, on account of we’re odd men out.” His eyes flicked toward Sudaku. “You catch that?” he asked the blond from the Phalanx of Valmiera, also in his own language.

  “Bet your arse I did,” the Kaunian replied in the same tongue. He’d been with the men of Plegmund’s Brigade long enough to have learned to curse in Forthwegian, and had picked up other bits and pieces as well. Ceorl slapped him on the back. The ruffian despised blonds on general principles, but didn’t dislike the handful beside whom he’d fought.

  To his surprise, the caravan car to which the Unkerlanter guards steered his lot of captives was one made for carrying passengers. He’d expected to go aboard one that had borne freight, or perhaps animals. To be able to sit down in an actual compartment and watch the landscape go by ... That didn’t sound so bad.

  It also wasn’t what happened. A compartment was made to hold four people. The Unkerlanters shoehorned a couple of dozen into that space. “You fit!” one of them shouted in bad Algarvian. “You make selfs fit! You no do, we do.”

  Men squeezed onto the seats, onto the floor, and up onto the baggage racks above the barred windows. Ceorl saw at once that those racks offered more room to stretch out than anywhere else in the compartment. He swarmed up onto one. An Algarvian had the same idea at almost the same time. Ceorl’s elbow got him in the pit of the stomach. He dropped back into the seething crowd below.

  Ceorl hauled Sudaku out of the crowd and up onto the rack with him. “Thanks,” the blond said in Algarvian. “Why did you do that?”

  Before Ceorl could answer, the redhead he’d elbowed and a pal rose again like a couple of spouting leviathans and tried to haul him down. Ceorl’s boot got one of them in the face. “Oh no you don’t, you son of a whore!” he said. Meanwhile, Sudaku had driven off the other Algarvian. “That’s why,” Ceorl said. “Everybody’s got to have somebody to watch his back for him.”

  “Ah.” The Kaunian nodded. “I see it. We are like too many wolves in too small a cage.”

  “I don’t know anything about wolves,” Ceorl said. “All I know about is gaols, but I know them good. Either you eat meat or you are meat. Powers below eat all those other bastards. Nobody’s going to eat me.”

  He leaned down from the baggage rack to kick an Algarvian who was wrestling with a man from Plegmund’s Brigade for a space on one of the seats. The Algarvian crumpled. The Forthwegian shoved him aside and waved to Ceorl. Ceorl grinned back. He’d had plenty of practice at this kind of dirty fighting. It was different from soldiering. Here, everyone except a few chums was an enemy. Have to remind the chums who they are, he thought.

  By the time things in the compartment sorted themselves out, he had a good line on who was strong and who was weak. The weak, the friendless, and the stupid were jammed into the space on the floor between the seats. Some of them were nothing more than footrests for the stronger captives.

  Yells from the compartment down the corridor said the Unkerlanters were filling it the same way. Once the car was full, a door slammed. The ley-line caravan still didn’t move. Plenty of other cars remained to be filled.

  Up in his aerie, Ceorl was comfortable enough. He didn’t want to think about what the poor whoresons folded in on themselves down below were going through. He didn’t want to, and so he didn’t. They hadn’t had the brains or the ballocks to take care of themselves. Nobody else would do it for them.

  After what seemed like forever, the ley-line caravan glided out of the depot. From where he was, Ceorl couldn’t see a great deal, but he did know they were heading west. He shrugged. He’d already got the upper hand on things, and expected he’d be able to keep it no matter where he ended up.

  Rations were hard bread and salted fish that set up a raging thirst in whoever ate them. He got a good-sized chunk of bread and one of the biggest fish. He also got first pull at the cup from the water bucket the Unkerlanters grudgingly allowed their captives.

  When he and his comrades were herded into the compartment, he hadn’t expected to stay there for three days. One man died on the trip. No one noticed till he wouldn’t take his piece of bread. Even after the captives shoved his corpse out into the corridor, the compartment seemed just as crowded as it had before.

  On the morning of the third day, the ley-line caravan finally stopped. “Out!” the guards shouted in Unkerlanter and Algarvian. “Out!”

  A lot of the captives had trouble moving. Not Ceorl, whose fettle was about as fine as it could be. He sprang down from the caravan car and looked around. Not far away stood ramshackle wooden barracks. Low, rolling hills dotted the countryside. The air smelled of wood smoke and something else, something with a harsh, mineral tang to it.

  “Where in blazes are we?” he said.

  “These are the Mamming Hills.” A guard pointed to a black hole. “Cinnabar mine. We’ll work you till you die, you whoreson.” He threw back his head and laughed. “It won’t take long.”

  Count Sabrino lay on his cot. He’d been on his feet--no, on his foot--a few times by now, but moving around while upright still left him not only exhausted but in more pain than he’d known when dragonfire set his leg alight. The healers talked about fitting him with a jointed artificial leg one day, but he didn’t take that seriously--not yet. The only thing he took seriously these days was the decoction of poppy juice that pushed aside the worst of the pain.

  He knew he’d started craving the drug for its own sake as well as for the relief it brought. One of these days, I’ll worry about that, too, he thought. If the pain ever goes away, I expect I’ll find a way to wean myself from the decoction.

  What he hadn’t expected was that the missing leg still hurt, even though it wasn’t there anymore. The healers told him such things were normal, that most people who lost limbs kept a sort of phantom memory and perception of what they’d once had. He didn’t argue with them: he was hardly in a position to do so. But that phantom presence struck him as the strangest thing about being mutilated.

  Or so it did till the afternoon when a healer came up to him and said, “You have a visitor, Count Sabrino.”

  “A visitor?” Sabrino said in surprise. No one had come to see him since he was injured. He could think of only a couple of people who might. “Is it Captain Orosio? Or my wife, perhaps?” He didn’t know if either of them was alive. If they aren‘t, they won’t come, he thought, and la
ughed under his breath.

  “Uh, no, your Excellency,” the healer replied. “No and no, respectively.” The fellow coughed a couple of times, as if to say Sabrino was very wrong indeed.

  “Well, who in blazes is it, then?” the colonel of dragonfliers demanded. As he got more used to the decoction of poppy juice, more of his own temper pierced the haze it gave his wits.

  Instead of answering straight out, the healer said, “I’ll bring in the gentleman. Excuse me, your Excellency.” He hurried away. When he came back, he had with him a white-haired Unkerlanter officer with a chestful of medals. “Your Excellency, I have the honor to present to you General Vatran. General, Count Sabrino.”

  “You speak Unkerlanter?” Vatran asked in Algarvian.

  Sabrino shook his head. “Sorry, but no.” He started at the Unkerlanter. “What are you doing here? You’re Marshal Rathar’s right-hand man.”

  “That is why I am here,” Vatran went on in Algarvian. He wasn’t fluent, but he could make himself understood. Catching the healer’s eye, he jerked a thumb at the door. “You. Get lost.” That got through, sure enough. The healer fled.

  “What... do you want with me?” Sabrino asked. He still had trouble believing he wasn’t imagining this.

  Vatran walked over and shut the door the healer had just used. That bit of melodrama done, he came back to Sabrino’s bedside and said, “How you like to be King of Algarve?”

  “I’m sorry.” Sabrino burst out laughing. “You know I’m hurt. You know I’m taking a pretty strong decoction for the pain.” Vatran nodded curtly. Sabrino went on, “It does some strange things sometimes. I thought you just asked me if I wanted to be King of Algarve.”

  “I do say that,” General Vatran replied. “You want to be King of Algarve, you be King of Algarve. So say King Swemmel.”

  “But Algarve already has a king,” Sabrino said. “King Mainardo.” He’d almost said Mezentio, but remembered hearing Mezentio was dead.

  In his own guttural language, Vatran said something pungent about Mainardo. Sabrino followed part of it. He didn’t speak Unkerlanter, not really, but years in the west had taught him something about swearing in that language. Vatran was plainly a master of the art. In Algarvian, the general continued, “Powers below eat Mainardo. He is trouble. King Swemmel want a man he can trust for king.