One of the Unkerlanter gang bosses--one of the few captives who ranked as Ceorl’s equal in the cinnabar mine--said, “Why don’t you cut your throat? Then we won’t have to listen to you anymore.” But even he smiled when he said it. He didn’t want trouble from Ceorl. Nobody, not captives, not guards, wanted trouble from Ceorl.
Another Unkerlanter, one less prominent in the camp hierarchy, said, “Why don’t you cut off that ugly beard? Maybe that would do some good. It sure looks like you’ve got the mange.”
“It does not,” Ceorl said indignantly. He was right, too; he had a fine, thick, curly beard. But he could have kissed that Unkerlanter--he’d been waiting for days for somebody to suggest shaving to him. He scratched again, then cursed again. “Powers above, maybe I will cut it off. Anything would be better than what I’m going through now. Who’s got a razor he can lend me?”
The gang boss said, “You’ll need a scissors first, to get that mess short enough so a razor will cut it.”
“If you say so,” Ceorl answered. “I don’t know anything about this shaving business. I really may cut my throat.”
He didn’t get the chance to find out for another couple of days. He carefully spent all that time grumbling about how his face itched. When he got a scissors and a broken piece of mirror to guide his hand, he snipped away at the whiskers he’d never done more than trim before. By the time he set down the scissors, he was shaking his head. “I really do look mangy now.”
The Unkerlanter called Fariulf handed him a straight razor and a cup of water to wet down what was left of his whiskers. “You won’t once you’re done here,” he said.
Ceorl rapidly discovered he despised shaving. He cut himself several times. The razor scraped over his face. Had he really had an itchy skin, he was sure what he was doing would only have made things worse. His hide, in fact, did itch and sting by the time he got done. He shook his head again. “People have to be out of their cursed minds to want to do this every day.” Reaching for the scrap of mirror, he added, “How do I look?”
His Unkerlanter was still foul. He knew that. People mostly understood him now, though. Somebody--somebody behind him, whom he couldn’t note-- said, “You’re still ugly, but not the same way.”
Looking into the mirror, Ceorl had to admit that wasn’t far wrong. A stranger stared back at him: a man with a thrusting chin with a cleft in it, hollows below his cheekbones, and a scar above his upper lip he’d never seen before. He hadn’t shown the world his bare face since he was a boy. He looked as if he’d suddenly got five years younger. He also looked like an Unkerlanter, not a Forthwegian.
“How does it feel?” Fariulf asked.
Lousy, Ceorl thought. But that was the wrong answer. He splashed a little water from the cup onto his abused face and ran the palm of his hand over his cheeks and chin. His skin felt as strange to him as it looked. Making himself smile, he said, “I think it’s better. I’m going to have to keep doing this.”
Acquiring a razor of his own didn’t take long. Unkerlanter miners died all the time. Survivors split what little they had. They weren’t supposed to have razors, but the guards usually winked at that--picks and shovels and crowbars made weapons at least as dangerous. One of those razors ended up in Ceorl’s hands. Little by little, he learned to shave without turning his face into a mass of raw meat.
One afternoon, he took Sudaku aside and said, “When I give you the word, I’m going to want you and the boys to screw up the count.”
“Ah.” The blond from the Phalanx of Valmiera nodded, unsurprised. “Going to disappear, are you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ceorl answered. He slapped Sudaku on the back. “I wish you could come along. But it wouldn’t work, you know.” He wasn’t even lying; Kaunian or not, Sudaku made a pretty good right-hand man.
But Sudaku was a Kaunian, a blond. If he escaped from this mine, from this captives’ camp, he couldn’t possibly pretend to be an Unkerlanter. Ceorl could. “Good luck,” Sudaku told him, and sounded as if he meant it.
“Thanks,” Ceorl said. “I’ll let you know when.” Sudaku nodded. Ceorl knew he was taking a chance by saying even this much, but judged he could trust Sudaku so far. And the longer the head start he and Fariulf got when they broke out of this mining compound, the better the chance they had of getting away clean. If Ceorl hadn’t believed in taking risks, he never would have become a robber or joined Plegmund’s Brigade.
Then he had to get as ready as he could. Saving food wasn’t easy, not when the captives got barely enough to keep them alive. Still and all, he managed to accumulate a good many little bricks of black bread. They would be stale and hard by the time he made his move, but he would still be able to eat them. He hoped Fariulf was making similar preparations. He hoped so, but he didn’t try to find out. If Fariulf wasn’t ready once they broke out, too bad for him.
Ceorl bided his time. When he did make the move, he knew it would have to succeed. If it didn’t, he would never see a second chance. Fariulf kept asking, “When? When?”
“I’ll tell you when,” Ceorl answered. “Don’t hop out of your tunic.”
Waiting paid off. A couple of weeks after he started shaving, the runs went through the camp. Most of the time, men needed leave to visit the latrine trenches. When they were liable to foul themselves if they waited, the guards waived the rule. It wasn’t for the sake of the miners; Ceorl knew as much. It was so the guards wouldn’t have to smell the stink or watch where they put their feet. Why mattered little to him. The waiver did.
He sidled up to Fariulf in the mine and said, “Tonight, a couple of hours after midnight.” The Unkerlanter nodded without looking up; he’d learned such lessons as a captive’s life could teach him. Later that day, Ceorl managed to whisper a couple of words in Sudaku’s ear: “Tomorrow morning.” The blond didn’t even nod. He just gave Ceorl the sort of wave he would have used in the field to show he’d understood an order. This may work, Ceorl thought, and then, It had better work.
Even in the middle of the night, he wasn’t the only one heading for the latrine trenches. He didn’t want to think about what easing himself would be like in the middle of winter. He didn’t intend to be here to find out.
He didn’t hurry to the stinking trenches. Before long, Fariulf caught up with him. “What now?” the Unkerlanter asked.
“Now you get a guard to pay attention to you,” Ceorl answered. “I don’t care how you go about it--just do it. Once you manage it, we go from there.”
“Right,” Fariulf said. Then he added the same thought Ceorl had had earlier in the day: “This had better work.”
“You aren’t taking any chances I ain’t,” Ceorl said. Fariulf nodded.
Out beyond the slit trenches, guards paced beyond a deadline marked off by a rail fence. Any captive who crossed the deadline got blazed. So camp rules said. Ceorl had other ideas.
Fariulf squatted over a trench and started moaning and grunting in such a good simulation of agony that even Ceorl, who knew better, wanted to do something for him. When a guard drew near, Fariulf moaned, “I want to go to the infirmary! I’ve got to go to the infirmary!”
“Shut up,” the guard said, but his steps slowed. Fariulf didn’t shut up. He kept on giving a splendid impression of a man in distress. The guard never noticed Ceorl sliding under the fence. Ceorl had had practice killing men silently before joining Plegmund’s Brigade, and much more practice since. He slid up behind the Unkerlanter, clapped a hand over his mouth, and drew the razor across his throat. Even he had trouble hearing the whimpering gurgle that was the only sound the fellow made. He eased the body to the ground, picked up the guard’s stick, and started walking his beat.
Fariulf rose and hurried over to him. “Stay down,” Ceorl hissed. “Don’t draw eyes.” Fariulf flattened out on the ground. Ceorl gave him a kick in the ribs to remind him to keep low. “Get going. I’ll be along.”
He marched along till he saw another guard coming out of t
he darkness and made sure the other fellow saw him. Then he turned, as if going back along the beat. He almost went past the spot where he’d killed the guard; Fariulf had dragged the corpse somewhere out of the way. “Efficiency,” Ceorl muttered: nearly too much efficiency.
He hurried out, and soon caught up with the Unkerlanter. The trenches and fences around the mine were designed to keep captives in. Before the war, they probably would have done a good enough job. They weren’t adequate for confining men who’d faced worse barricades, and better manned ones, in Unkerlant and Forthweg and Yanina and Algarve. Ceorl killed another guard on the way out, again without a sound.
“We’re leaving a trail,” Fariulf said.
“Did you want him to nab us?” Ceorl snarled, and the Unkerlanter shook his head.
For all of King Swemmel’s preaching about efficiency, the guards took a long time to realize anything was amiss. Ceorl and Fariulf were out of the enclosure around the cinnabar mine by then, looking around for somewhere to lie up during the approaching day. “I didn’t think it would be this easy,” Fariulf said. “Why doesn’t everybody escape?”
“Most people are sheep,” Ceorl said scornfully. “Would you have tried breaking out if I hadn’t pushed you?” A troubled look on his face, Fariulf shook his head.
But the search, once it started, was not to be despised. No matter how Sudaku muddled the count, two dead guards got noticed. Dragons circled low overhead. Teams of guards swept through the hills. Had Ceorl and Fariulf not learned their trade in a harder school than this, they might have been taken that first day. As things were, they stayed hidden in scrubby bushes, and pushed north after nightfall. Fariulf did have food of his own, which was as well, for Ceorl had no intention of giving him any of his.
To Ceorl’s amazement, Fariulf had no idea where in his own kingdom the Mamming Hills lay. “Once we get over the Wolter, we’ll be back in regular country, without all these bastards snooping around,” Ceorl said.
“Inspectors are everywhere,” Fariulf told him sadly.
The warning made Ceorl fight shy of approaching the few herdsmen he saw in the hills. Perhaps it didn’t make him wary enough, though. He and Fariulf were nearing the Wolter when dogs started baying close behind them. A moment later, men shouted, their voices harsh as crows’ caws. “They’ve seen us!” Fariulf said, panic in his voice.
Ceorl shoved the Unkerlanter away. “Split up!” he said. “It’ll be harder for them to catch us both.” What he expected was that the pursuer would go after Fariulf, for the other man wasn’t so good in open country as he was himself. Maybe Fariulf had been an irregular, but he hadn’t learned enough.
So Ceorl thought. But the men in rock-gray came after him instead. Some of them were veterans, too. He could tell by the way they spread out and came forward in waves, making him keep his head down.
He blazed one at close range anyhow, then whirled and blazed another. When he whirled again, a beam caught him in the chest. As he crumpled, he thought, Maybe living in a cage wouldn’t have been so bad after all. But, as he’d given no second chances, he got none. Darkness swallowed him.
Garivald stared at the Wolter. He’d never imagined a river could be so wide--he hadn’t been able to see out when the ley-line caravan car took him over it to the mine in the Mamming Hills. He wasn’t a bad swimmer, but knew he would drown if he tried to cross it. If he stayed here on the south bank, the guards would hunt him down. He was sure of that, too, even if they hadn’t pursued him after he left Ceorl.
I need a boat, he thought. He saw none, though at night that proved little: a big one might have been tied up a quarter of a mile away, and he would never have known it. He doubted one was; Swemmel’s men knew more about efficiency than to make things easy for their captives. A raft, he thought. A tree trunk. Anything to keep me afloat.
He wondered what he would do even if he got to the far bank of the Wolter. He had no money. He had nothing, in fact, except his boots, the ragged tunic on his back, and a rapidly dwindling store of bread. Before long, he would have to start stealing food from the local peasants and herders. If he did that, he knew he wouldn’t last long.
He wrapped brush around himself--a miserable bed, but better than bare ground--and went to sleep. When I wake up, maybe everything will be all right, he thought. He had no idea why he’d come up with such a preposterous unlikelihood, but if he hadn’t believed it would he have tried to escape with the Forthwegian?
A shout, thin in the distance, threw him out of sleep a little before sunrise the next day. He sprang up, ready to flee. Had they found his trail after all?
But the shout came from the river, not the land: Garivald realized as much when he heard it again, this time fully conscious. He stared out toward the Wolter. His jaw dropped. He began giggling, as if suddenly stricken mad.
Maybe I was, he thought giddily. Maybe I’m not really seeing this. He’d hoped for a tree trunk, to help him cross the river. Never in all the days of the world, he told himself, had such a hope been so extravagantly fulfilled.
Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands--for all Garivald knew, millions--of felled trees floated on the Wolter, drifting downstream toward . . . what? Sawmills, he supposed. He wondered why anyone would have cared to build sawmills on a river sure to freeze up in winter. Maybe those sawmills were like the mines: a scheme to get some use out of captives instead of just killing them outright. Or maybe King Swemmel had simply pointed at a map and said, “Build sawmills here.” If he had, the sawmills would have gone up, regardless of whether the Wolter froze.
Here and there, tiny in the distance, insignificant among the countless trunks of the floating forest, men with poles rode logs, somehow staying upright. Now and again, they would use the poles to keep the tree trunks from jamming together. It was one of their shouts that Garivald had heard.
He didn’t waste more than a couple of minutes gawping. How long would that seemingly endless stream of trees endure? If it passed without his taking advantage of it, how long would he have to wait till another one came down the Wolter? Too long--he was sure of that.
When he got down to the riverbank, he shed his boots, pulled his tunic off over his head, and plunged into the Wolter. Although it flowed from down out of the warmer north, its waters still chilled him. He struck out toward the immense swarm of logs.
Before long, Garivald wondered if he’d made a dreadful mistake. Going from log to log across the river hadn’t seemed so hard till he tried it. Not getting crushed by all that floating, drifting timber was a lot harder than he’d imagined.
He’d made it perhaps halfway through the logs when one of the men riding herd on them spotted him. “What in blazes are you doing here, you son of a whore?” the fellow bawled.
“Getting away from the mines,” Garivald shouted back. If the log-rider came over to try to seize him, he’d do his best to drown the man.
But the fellow with the pole only waved when he heard that. “Good luck, pal,” he said. “Me, I never saw you. My brother went into the mines almost ten years ago, and he never came out.”
Powers above, there are some decent people in this kingdom after all, Garivald thought as he went on toward the far bank of the Wolter. After the way he’d got dragged into the army--and after the way he’d been seized coming out of it-- he’d had his doubts. He couldn’t dwell on that, though, for he had to scramble to keep an oncoming log from crushing him to jelly against the one he was riding.
He went from one log to another. And then, quite suddenly, no more logs remained between him and the far bank, which was now the near bank. He swam till his feet hit bottom. Then he waded ashore and re-donned his sodden tunic and even soggier boots. His belly growled; the bread hadn’t survived the trip across the Wolter. He trudged away from the stream, hoping to find a road or a village.
When he saw a man working in a field, he waved and called, “I’ll do whatever you need for a supper and a chance to sleep in a barn.”
The far
mer looked him over. He still wasn’t dry, nor anywhere close to it. “What happened to you?” the fellow asked. “Looks like you fell in a creek.”
“Oh, you might say so,” Garivald agreed dryly--his words made the grade, even if he didn’t.
Or so he thought, till the farmer screwed up his face and said, “You’re not from around these parts, I don’t reckon.”
“No.” Garivald admitted what he could hardly deny--he did sound like a Grelzer. He came out with the best excuse he could: “I’m just another soldier who got dumped in the wrong place trying to get back to my own farm and my own woman.”
“Huh.” The local looked toward the Wolter. There was, Garivald realized, bound to be a reward for men who turned in escaped captives. But the farmer said, “So you’ve got a place of your own, eh? Well, prove it.”
After grubbing cinnabar out of a vein with pick and crowbar, farm work wasn’t so bad. When the sun swung to the west, Garivald followed the farmer back to his hut. He got a big bowl of barley porridge with onions and dill and sausage, and a mug of ale to wash it down. Set beside the little bricks of bread and famine stews in the mines, it seemed the best meal he’d ever eaten.
He did sleep in an outbuilding, next to a couple of cows. He didn’t care. When morning came, the farmer gave him another bowl of porridge, a length of sausage to take with him, and a couple of coins. Tears came to Garivald’s eyes. “I can’t pay this back,” he said.
“Pay it forward,” the local told him. “Someday you’ll run into another poor bastard down on his luck. Now go on, before somebody gets a good look at you.”
Day by day, Garivald worked his way north and east, toward the Duchy of Grelz. Most people, he thought, took him for an escapee, but no one turned him in to Swemmel’s inspectors. He got meals. He got money. He got shelter. And he got a good look at what the war had done to this part of Unkerlant. What he’d seen in Grelz suddenly didn’t seem so dreadful.
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