Out of the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  “You’d end up sorrier about that than I would,” Andelot said, which was bound to be true. But the young officer didn’t go on with his threat. Instead, he threw his hands in the air. “I still wish I could talk you into changing your mind.”

  “Sir, I want to go home,” Garivald said, stubborn as only an Unkerlanter peasant knew how to be.

  “Curse it, you even learned to read and write here in the army,” Andelot exclaimed.

  “And I thank you for teaching me, sir,” Garivald said. “I still want to go home.”

  “All right,” Andelot said. “All right. I could keep you here regardless of what you want. I expect you know that.” He waited for Garivald to nod, then continued, “But you did serve me, and serve the kingdom, well enough to deserve better than that. If you hadn’t spotted that sorcerously disguised redhead, who knows how much mischief would have come to our bridgehead by Eoforwic? Go home, then, and good luck to you.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Garivald said. Andelot was at bottom a decent fellow, which made him unusual among the officers Garivald had seen--and which put him at a disadvantage when trying to deal with peasant stubbornness.

  “I’ll give you your mustering-out papers tomorrow, and passage on westbound ley-line caravans to ... what’s the name of the closest town to your farm?”

  “Linnich, sir,” Garivald answered. “Thank you very much.”

  “I’m not at all sure you’re welcome,” Andelot told him. “Go on. Get out of my sight. I tell you frankly, I wish I had some good reason to change my mind. If this regiment had been sent west to fight the Gyongyosians . . . But we weren’t, and so you get what you want.”

  Garivald hurried away. Algarvians on the streets of Torgavi hurried to step aside. A couple of bold redheaded women--sluttish redheaded women, in the reckoning of someone from a Grelzer peasant village--made eyes at him. He ignored them; he knew they wanted money or food from him, and cared nothing about himself. He’d visited a brothel a couple of times. There, at least, the bargain was open.

  An Algarvian man in a filthy, threadbare uniform tunic and kilt stared at Garivald, too, and then turned away. Some surrendered soldiers were starting to come back to their home towns. Garivald knew he would have a hard time putting his life together once he got back to the farm. How much harder would it be for the redheads, with their kingdom under Unkerlant’s heel?

  He didn’t waste much sympathy on them. They’d done their best to conquer his kingdom and to kill him. They’d come much too close to managing both, too. That fellow on the street looked as if the war hadn’t ended in his eyes.

  When morning came, Andelot asked, “Have you by any chance changed your mind?”

  “No, sir,” Garivald replied without hesitation.

  “Very well. Here are your orders.” Andelot handed him a folded leaf of paper. “This includes your travel authorization. A westbound caravan leaves from the depot in about an hour. Good luck to you, Sergeant.”

  “Thank you very much, sir,” Garivald said once more. As soon as Andelot left, he unfolded the orders to make sure they were what the company commander had said. He didn’t want to get off the caravan car to find that the orders told whoever checked his papers there to arrest him on sight. But everything was as it should have been. The only mention of his destination was as the place where he was to receive his mustering-out bonus. He wondered if he really would get the money. Getting his back pay would have been plenty to satisfy him.

  Soldiers with duffel bags slung over their shoulders crowded the depot. Most of them made way for him: the sergeant’s emblems he wore on the collar tabs of his tunic still carried weight. He got a seat without trouble, too, and no one presumed to take the space next to his. He put his own duffel there. This wouldn’t be such a bad trip: nothing to do but look out the window till he got home.

  Later than it should have, the caravan left the depot. So much for efficiency, Garivald thought. Unkerlanters spent a lot of time talking about it and not very much practicing it. He shrugged resignedly. That was nothing he didn’t already know.

  Looking out the window proved poor sport. The landscape was battered and cratered. Every time the ley-line caravan glided through an Algarvian town, the place was in ruins. The redheads had done everything they could to hold back his countrymen. They hadn’t been able to do enough.

  Mile after mile of wreckage and devastation and ruin went by. Here and there, in the countryside, Algarvians tended to their crops. Most of the people in the fields were women. Garivald wondered how many men of fighting age the redheads had left. Too many if they’ve got any at all, he thought.

  Then he wondered how many men of fighting age his own kingdom had left. One of the soldiers in the compartment with him was close to fifty; the other looked at most seventeen. Unkerlant had won a great victory, and had paid a great price.

  For a moment, he wondered if the price had been too great. Only for a moment--then he shook his head. Whatever his kingdom had paid to beat Algarve, it would have paid more had Mezentio’s men overrun all of Unkerlant. He’d seen how the Algarvians had ruled the stretches they’d occupied. Imagining that kind of rule going on and on, year after year, across the whole kingdom made him shiver even though the caravan car was stuffy and warm, almost hot.

  Then he shivered again. No matter how brutally the Algarvians had ruled in Unkerlant, more than a few Grelzers--and, he supposed, more than a few men from other parts of the kingdom as well--had chosen to fight on their side and against King Swemmel. He’d had no love for Swemmel himself, not till the redheads showed him the difference between bad and worse. That anyone could have chosen Mezentio over Swemmel only proved how much better things might have been in his homeland.

  For that matter, things were better in Algarve than they were in his homeland. He wondered why the redheads had tried to conquer Unkerlant. What did they want with it? Their farmers were richer than Unkerlanter peasants dreamt of being. And their townsfolk ... To his eyes, their townsfolk all lived like nobles, and rich nobles at that.

  How can they have lived the way they did when we live the way we do? He wondered about that, too. If the redheads managed such prosperity, why couldn’t his own kingdom? Unkerlant was far bigger than Algarve, and had more in the way of natural riches--he knew how many problems the Algarvians had had because their dragons ran out of quicksilver. But it didn’t seem to matter, not in the way people lived.

  Maybe we’ll live like that, too, once the war is done. We won’t have it hanging over us like a thundercloud at harvest time. He could hope that might be so. He could hope, but he had trouble believing it. Mezentio’s subjects had lived better than Swemmel’s before the war, too. Of course, Unkerlant had gone through the Twinkings War while Garivald was a boy. That might have had something to do with it. Or it might not have, too--Algarve, after all, had fought and lost the Six Years’ War.

  Garivald shrugged again, yawned, and gave it up. Here, he knew all too well how little he knew. He was a peasant who’d had his letters for less than a year. Who was he to try to figure out why his kingdom had a harder time than the Algarvians at doing so many different things? He could see it was true. Why remained beyond him.

  He fell asleep not long after the sun went down. By then, the ley-line caravan had left Algarve and gone into Forthweg. The Forthwegians were better off than his own countrymen, too, but to a lesser degree. He didn’t know why that was so, either, and he refused to dwell on it. Sleep was better. After some of the places he’d slept during the war, a ley-line caravan car might have been a fancy hostel.

  When he woke, he was in Unkerlant once more. It wasn’t the Duchy of Grelz, but it was his kingdom. And it had taken a worse battering than either Forthweg or Algarve. The Algarvians had wrecked things coming west, then the Unkerlanters pushing back toward the east. Counterattacks from both sides meant war had touched many places not once, not twice, but three or four times or even more.

  As in Algarve, most of the people in the fields were
women. Here, though, great stretches of land seemed to have no one cultivating them. What sort of crop would the kingdom have this year? Would it bring in any crop?

  Garivald had plenty of time to wonder. He had to change ley-line caravans twice, and didn’t get in to Linnich for another day and a half. A couple of inspectors met the departing soldiers. Garivald didn’t think much of it; someone had to pay the men their mustering-out bonuses. “How long in Algarve?” one of the men asked him.

  “Since the minute our soldiers got there,” Garivald said proudly.

  “Uh-huh,” the fellow said, and scribbled a note. “You have your letters, Sergeant?”

  He’d asked other men that question; Garivald had heard them answer no. More proudly still, he nodded. “Aye, sir, I do.”

  “Uh-huh,” the inspector said again. “Come along with me, then.” He led Garivald toward a back room in the depot.

  “Is this where you’ll pay me off?” Garivald asked.

  Instead of answering, the inspector opened the door. Two more inspectors waited inside, and three unhappy-looking soldiers. One of the inspectors aimed a stick at Garivald’s face. “You’re under arrest. Charge is treason of the kingdom.”

  The other sergeant tore the brass squares of rank from Garivald’s collar tabs. “You’re not a sergeant any more--just another traitor. We’ll see how you like ten years in the mines--or maybe twenty-five.”

  Hajjaj had never felt so free in his life. Even before he’d gone off to the university at Trapani, he’d had nothing but public service ahead of him--in those long-ago days before the Six Years’ War, service to Unkerlant, and service to his own revived kingdom in the years since. He’d worked hard. He’d been influential. Without false modesty, he knew he’d served Zuwayza well.

  And then King Shazli had chosen to go his own way, not Hajjaj’s. Now a new, more pliant, foreign minister served the king. Hajjaj wished them both well. He wasn’t used to not worrying about things outside his own household. Now, though, affairs of state were passing him by. I could get used to that, he thought. I could get used to it very soon.

  He had wondered if Shazli would also order him to give Tassi back to Iskakis of Yanina. That hadn’t happened. It didn’t look like happening, either. Propitiating Unkerlant was one thing. Propitiating Yanina was something else again, something over which not even defeated Zuwayza needed to lose much sleep.

  “You ought to write your memoirs,” Kolthoum told Hajjaj one blazing summer day when they both stayed within the house’s thick mud-brick walls to have as little as they could to do with the furnace heat outside.

  “You flatter me,” he told his senior wife. “Ministers from great kingdoms write their memoirs. Ministers from small kingdoms read them to find out how little other people remember of what they said.”

  “You don’t give yourself enough credit,” Kolthoum said.

  “There are more problems than you think,” Hajjaj said. “What language should I use, for instance? If I write in Zuwayzi, no one outside this kingdom will ever see the book. If I use Algarvian . . . Well, Algarvian is a stench in everyone’s nostrils except in Algarve, and people there have more urgent things to worry about than what an old black man who wears no clothes has to say. And I’m so slow composing in classical Kaunian, the book would probably never get finished. I can write it, certainly--one has to--but it’s less natural to me than either of the other tongues.”

  “I notice you don’t mention Unkerlanter,” Kolthoum remarked.

  Hajjaj answered that with a grunt. Like anyone else who’d grown up back in the days when Zuwayza was part of Unkerlant, he’d learned some of the tongue of his kingdom’s enormous southern neighbor. He’d taken patriotic pride in forgetting as much of it as he could since. He still spoke a bit, but he wouldn’t have cared to try to write it. And even if he had, hardly anyone east of Swemmel’s kingdom understood its tongue.

  But none of that was to the point. The point was that he wouldn’t have used Unkerlanter to save his life. Kolthoum knew as much, too.

  Tewfik walked into the chamber where Hajjaj and his senior wife were talking. With a short, stiff bow, the ancient majordomo said, “Your Excellency, you have a visitor: Minister Horthy of Gyongyos has come up from Bishah to speak with you--if you’d be so kind as to give him a few minutes, he says.”

  Horthy didn’t speak Zuwayzi. Tewfik didn’t speak Gyongyosian--or a lot of classical Kaunian, either. The Gyongyosian minister to Zuwayza must have had some work to do, getting his message across. But that was beside the point. Hajjaj said, “Why would he want to speak to me? I’m in retirement.”

  “You may leave affairs behind, young fellow, but affairs will take longer to leave you behind,” Tewfik said. That young fellow never failed to amuse Hajjaj; only to Tewfik did he seem young these days. The majordomo went on, “Or shall I send him back down to the city?”

  “No, no--that would be frightfully rude.” Hajjaj’s knees creaked as he got to his feet. “I’ll see him in the library. Let me find a robe or some such thing to throw on so I don’t offend him. Bring him tea and wine and cakes--let him refresh himself while he’s waiting for me.”

  Unlike most Zuwayzin, Hajjaj kept clothes in his house. He dealt with too many foreigners to be able to avoid it. He threw on a light linen robe and went to the library to greet his guest. Gyongyos was far enough away for the political implications of kilt or trousers not to matter much.

  When Hajjaj entered the library, Horthy was leafing through a volume of poetry from the days of the Kaunian Empire. He was a big, burly man, his tawny beard and long hair streaked with gray. He closed the book and bowed to Hajjaj. “A pleasure to see you, your Excellency,” he said in musically accented classical Kaunian. “May the stars shine upon your spirit.”

  “Er, thank you,” Hajjaj replied in the same language. The Gyongyosians had strange notions about the power of the stars. “How may I serve you, sir?”

  Horthy shook his head, which made him look like a puzzled lion. “You do not serve me. I come to beg the boon of your conversation, of your wisdom.” He sipped at the wine Tewfik had given him. “Already you have gone to too much trouble. The wine is of grapes, not of the--dates, is that the word?--you would usually use, and you have taken the time to garb yourself. This is your home, your Excellency; if I come here, I understand your continuing your own usages.”

  “I am also fond of grape wine, and the robe is light.” Hajjaj waved to the cushions piled on the carpeted floor. “Sit. Drink as much as you care to, of wine or tea. Eat of my cakes. When you are refreshed, I will do for you whatever I can.”

  “You are generous to a foreigner,” Horthy said. Hajjaj sat and used pillows to make himself comfortable. Rather awkwardly, Horthy imitated him. The Gyongyosian minister ate several cakes and drank a good deal of wine.

  Only after Horthy paused did Hajjaj ask, “And now, your Excellency, what brings you up into the hills on such a hot day?” As host, he was the one with the right to choose when to get down to business.

  “I wish to speak to you concerning the course of this war, and concerning possible endings for it,” Horthy said.

  “Are you sure I am the man with whom you should be discussing these things?” Hajjaj asked. “I am retired, and have no interest in emerging from retirement. My successor would be able to serve you better, if you need his help in any official capacity.”

  “No.” Horthy’s voice was sharp. “For one thing, my being here is in no way official. For another, with due respect to your successor, you are the man who knows things.”

  “You honor me beyond my deserts,” Hajjaj said, though what he felt was a certain amount--perhaps more than a certain amount--of vindication.

  “No,” Horthy repeated. “I know why you resigned. It does you honor. A man should not abandon his friends, but should stand by them even in adversity-- especially in adversity.”

  Hajjaj shrugged. “I did what I thought right. My king did what he thought right.”

  �
��You did what you thought right. Your king did what he thought expedient,” Horthy said. “I know which I prefer. Therefore, I come to you. The Kuusamans have threatened us with some new and titanically destructive sorcery. Unkerlant masses men against us. How may we escape with honor?”

  “Do you believe the threat?” Hajjaj asked.

  “Ekrekek Arpad does not, so Gyongyos does not,” Horthy replied. “But there has been so much dreadful magic in this war, more would not surprise me. I speak unofficially, of course.”

  “Of course,” Hajjaj echoed.

  “Do you know--have you heard--anything that would lead you to believe the Kuusamans either lie or speak the truth?” the Gyongyosian minister asked.

  “No, your Excellency. Whatever this magic may be--if, in fact, it is anything at all--I cannot tell you.”

  “What of Unkerlant?”

  “You already know that. You are the last foe still in the field against King Swemmel. He loves you not. He will punish you if he can. The time has come that he thinks he can.”

  Horthy’s broad, heavy-featured face soured into a frown. “If he should think that, he may find himself surprised.”

  “So he may,” Hajjaj agreed politely. “Still, your Excellency, if you thought your own kingdom’s victory certain, you would not have come here to me, would you?

  He wondered if he’d phrased that carefully enough. Gyongyosians were not only touchy--which bothered Hajjaj not at all, coming as he did from a touchy folk himself--but touchy in ways Zuwayzin found odd and unpredictable. Horthy muttered something in his own language, down deep in his chest. Then he returned to classical Kaunian: “There is, I fear, too much truth in what you say. Can Gyongyos rely on your kingdom’s good offices in negotiating a peace with our enemies?”

  “You understand, sir, that I cannot answer in any official sense,” Hajjaj said. “Were I still part of his Majesty’s government, I would do everything I could toward that end: of that you may be certain. You might have done better to consult with my successor, who can speak for King Shazli. I cannot.”