Out of the Darkness d-6

by Harry Turtledove

  Behind him, an Algarvian said, “I’m too bloody worn to eat.”

  He won’t last long, Ceorl thought. Men who gave up, who didn’t shovel every bit of food they could into themselves no matter how vile it was, quickly turned up their toes and died. Sooner or later, Ceorl was convinced, everyone in the mines would die; the Unkerlanters had set up the system with extermination in mind. But he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of making it easy.

  The queue snaked forward. Ceorl thrust his tin toward the cooks behind their vats of stew. They were also captives. They had it soft, as far as anyone here did. At the very least, they were unlikely to starve to death. They’d probably had to sell their souls-and, for all Ceorl knew, their bodies, too-to get where they were. He didn’t care. He wanted the same chance.

  “Fill it up,” he said, a phrase similar in Unkerlanter and Forthwegian. And the cook did, digging his ladle deep down into the big pot to give Ceorl the best of what there was. Ceorl hadn’t been here long, but he’d already got a name for himself as a man who wouldn’t tamely yield up his life.

  The luckless Algarvian behind him got mostly water in his mess tin. He didn’t even complain. He just went off to find a spot where he could spoon it up. He would probably leave it unfinished, too. Someone else would get what he left. Before long, he would leave, feet first.

  In the refectory, Sudaku was holding a space for Ceorl. “Thanks,” the ruffian said, and sat down beside the blond from Valmiera. Sudaku had a good thick bowl of stew, too; people knew he was Ceorl’s right-hand man.

  “Another happy day, eh?” Sudaku said.

  “Bugger happy. We got through it.” Ceorl shoveled stew into himself the same way he’d shoveled ore for so long. “It’ll be better tomorrow,” he went on. “The supervisor who’s on then doesn’t know anything. Powers above, he doesn’t even suspect anything. We won’t have to work so hard.”

  “Quota,” Sudaku said doubtfully.

  Scorn filled Ceorl’s laugh. “The Unkerlanters talk about efficiency, but they fornicating lie. They don’t keep quota, either. I know they lie about that.”

  “Something to what you say,” Sudaku admitted. Ceorl wanted to laugh again, this time at the blond. Sudaku was a trusting soul, an honest man or something close to it-not far from a fool, the way Ceorl reckoned things. But he was strong and brave, and he’d had his eyes opened for him in the desperate fighting of the last few months of the war. Anyone who came through that without learning from it would have deserved whatever happened to him.

  “Come on,” Ceorl said. “Let’s get back to the barracks. We’ve got to keep watch on things, or else we’re in trouble.”

  “Right.” Sudaku didn’t doubt that. Nobody in his right mind could doubt it. Only the strong had any hope of lasting here. If you didn’t show your strength, you often couldn’t keep it.

  Bunks in the barracks were in tiers that went up four high. In the warmth of the brief southern summer, where a man slept didn’t matter so much. But Ceorl had been through Unkerlanter winters. He and the gang from Plegmund’s Brigade he headed had taken bunks close by the coal stove in the middle of the hall. They’d taken them and defended them with fists and boots and improvised knives. When they settled down for the night now, nobody troubled them.

  On the other side of the stove, a group of Algarvian captives had carved out a similar niche for themselves. Their leader was a burly fellow whose faded, tattered uniform didn’t quite match those of the soldiers alongside whom Ceorl had fought. That didn’t mean the ruffian was ignorant of what sort of uniform it was.

  “Ha, Oraste!” he called. “Throw anybody in gaol lately?”

  “Futter you, Ceorl,” the redhead replied without rancor. “You’d have done better if somebody had jugged you. Sooner or later, they’d’ve let you out. But let’s see you get out of this.”

  Ceorl gave back an obscene gesture. Oraste laughed at him, though the Algarvian’s eyes never lit up. Like any redhead, Oraste was indeed here for good. Even if he escaped the mines, he’d be hunted down in short order, for he stood out among the Unkerlanters like a crow among sea gulls. Because he couldn’t get away, he naturally thought nobody else could.

  You’re not as smart as you think you are, Ceorl thought. Thinking themselves more clever than they really were-and than anybody else was-had always been the Algarvians’ besetting vice. But Ceorl looked like anybody else around these parts. Forthwegian wasn’t impossibly far removed from Unkerlanter. If he managed to escape, he thought he could stay free.

  A couple of Unkerlanter thieves swaggered into the barracks, each with some of his followers in train. They waved to Ceorl and to Oraste as equals. Their gangs held the other bunks close by the stove. They’d made as much of their captivity as they could. Even the guards treated them with respect.

  They and their henchmen took their places. Beyond, back toward the walls, came Algarvian captives and Unkerlanters who didn’t belong to any of the principal gangs in the barracks. They were the luckless ones, the spiritless ones, who would soon lose the battle for survival. And as they died off, new men, just as lost, would pour in to take their places. Ceorl knew a sort of abstract admiration for King Swemmel. He made sure he was never short of captives.

  Between supper and lights-out, men gossiped, told stories-told lies-about what they’d done in the war (except for who was talking about whom, and in which language, those of Algarvians and Unkerlanters sounded very much alike, and nobody cared who’d been on which side-here in the Mamming Hills, they were all losers), gambled, and passed around jars of clandestinely brewed spirits. Some of them, especially those beginning to fail, fell asleep as soon as they could and stayed asleep in spite of all the noise the others made.

  Ceorl had learned better than to roll dice with Oraste. He couldn’t prove the redhead’s dice were crooked, but he’d lost to him too often to believe it nothing but chance. He didn’t say anything as Oraste started fleecing a young Unkerlanter too new here to know better than to accept such invitations. Ceorl didn’t care what happened to the Unkerlanter, and he was curious about how Oraste cheated so smoothly.

  He didn’t find out that night, any more than he had when the redhead had taken his money. After a while, even though the sky remained pale-which it would do through most of the night-a guard came in and shouted, “Lights out!”

  That meant shuttering the windows, too, so that something approaching real darkness filled the barracks. Ceorl lay down on his bottom bunk, which boasted one of the thickest mattresses in the building. He’d made himself as comfortable, as well off, as one of Swemmel’s captives could be. Things could have been a lot worse-he even knew that. He also knew it wasn’t remotely close to being enough. He would break out if he ever found the chance.

  As usual, he slept hard. The next thing he knew, the guards were screaming at the captives to get out of their bunks and line up for roll call. Routine there hadn’t changed since the captives’ camp outside of Trapani. Ceorl took his place, waited to sing out when his name was called, and wondered if the Unkerlanters would make a hash of the count, which they did about one day in three. Efficiency, he thought, and laughed a mocking laugh.

  To complicate things, a ley-line caravan full of new captives chose that moment to arrive in the barracks. The guards bringing in the new fish and those trying to keep track of the ones already there started screaming at one another, each group blaming the other for its troubles. Ceorl spent his time eyeing the newcomers.

  Most of them looked to be Unkerlanter soldiers-or rather, former Unkerlanter soldiers. No, Swemmel wasn’t shy about jugging his own people, any more than he’d been shy about murdering his own people when the Algarvians started killing Kaunians. Swemmel wanted results, and he got them.

  No one cared about roll call for a while. The captives just stood there. Had it been winter, they would have stood there till they froze. Nobody dared ask permission to go to breakfast. Eating before roll call and the count were done was unimaginable. In fa
ct, they didn’t have breakfast at all. The delay just meant they went straight to the mines. If they had nothing in their bellies, too bad.

  Ceorl shoveled cinnabar ore into a handbarrow. When it was full, another captive lugged it away. Shoveling wasn’t so bad as chipping cinnabar out of the vein with picks and crowbars. It also wasn’t so bad as working in the refinery where quicksilver was extracted from some of the cinnabar. Despite sorcery, quicksilver fumes killed the men who worked there long before their time.

  Before too long, some of the new fish started coming down into the mine. They would have needed a while to get processed, to have their names recorded and to get assigned to a barracks and a work gang. That was efficiency, too, at least as the Unkerlanters understood it. To Ceorl, it often seemed like wheels spinning uselessly on an ice-slick road. But Swemmel’s men had won the war, and didn’t have to worry about what he thought.

  One of the new men spoke with such a strong Grelzer accent, Ceorl could hardly understand him. “Powers below eat you,” the ruffian said, doing his best to make his Forthwegian sound like Unkerlanter. “I spent a good part of the war hunting whoresons like you.”

  The Unkerlanter followed him. “I was in the woods west of Herborn,” he answered. “A lot of the bastards who hunted me didn’t go home again.”

  “Is that so?” Ceorl threw back his head and laughed. “I hunted through those woods, and you stinking irregulars paid for it when I did.”

  “Murderer,” the Unkerlanter said.

  “Bushwhacker,” Ceorl retorted. He laughed some more. “Fat fornicating lot of good our fight back then did either one of us, eh? We’re both buggered now.” He had to repeat himself to get the Unkerlanter to understand that. When the fellow finally did, he nodded. “Fair enough. We both lost this war, no matter what happened to our kingdoms.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Fariulf.”

  “Well, futter you, Fariulf.” Ceorl clasped it. “I’m Ceorl.”

  “Futter you, too, Ceorl,” Fariulf said, squeezing. Ceorl squeezed back. The trial of strength proved as near a draw as made no difference.

  “Work!” a guard shouted. Sure enough, no matter which of them was the stronger, they’d both lost the war.

  Everything in Yliharma was different from anything Talsu had ever known. The air itself tasted wrong: cool and damp and salty. Even on the brightest days, the blue of the sky had a misty feel to it. And, even in summer, fog and rain could come without warning and stay for a couple of days. That would have been unimaginable in Skrunda.

  The Kuusamans themselves seemed at least as strange to him as their weather did. Even Gailisa was taller than most of their men. Children eyed both Talsu and his wife in the streets, not being used to fair blue-eyed blonds. Adults did the same thing, but less blatantly. To Talsu, little swarthy slant-eyed folk with coarse black hair were the strange ones, but this was their kingdom, not his.

  It wasn’t even a kingdom, or not exactly-somehow, the Seven Princes held it together. The Kuusamans drank ale, not wine. They cooked with butter, not olive oil, and even put it on their bread. They wore all sorts of odd clothes, which, to a tailor, seemed even more peculiar. Their language sounded funny in his ears. Its grammar, which he and Gailisa tried to learn in thrice-weekly lessons, struck him as stranger yet. And its vocabulary, except for a few words plainly borrowed from classical Kaunian, was nothing like that of Jelgavan.

  But none of that marked the biggest difference between his homeland and this place to which he and Gailisa had been exiled. He needed a while to realize what that big difference was. It came to him one afternoon as he was walking back to the flat the Kuusamans had given Gailisa and him: a bigger, finer flat than the one his whole family had used back in his home town.

  “I know!” he said after giving his wife a kiss. “I’ve got it!”

  “That’s nice,” Gailisa said agreeably. “What have you got?”

  “Now I know why, up in Balvi, the Kuusaman minister told us living in Jelgava was like living in a dungeon,” Talsu answered. “Everybody always went around watching what he said all the time.”

  She nodded. “Well, of course. Something bad would happen to you if you didn’t, or sometimes even if you did.” Her mouth twisted. “We know all about that, don’t we?”

  “Aye, we do,” Talsu agreed. “And that’s the difference. We know all about it. The Kuusamans don’t. They say whatever they please whenever they feel like it, and they don’t have to look over their shoulders while they’re doing it. They’re free. We weren’t. We aren’t, we Jelgavans. And we don’t even know it.”

  “Some do,” Gailisa answered. “Otherwise, why would the dungeons be so full?”

  “That’s not funny,” Talsu said.

  “I didn’t mean it for a joke,” she told him. “How could I, after everything that happened to you?”

  Having had no ready comeback for that, he changed the subject: “What smells good?”

  “A reindeer roast,” Gailisa replied. Talsu chuckled. She rolled her eyes. There might have been a few reindeer in Jelgavan zoological parks, but surely nowhere else in the kingdom. She went on, “All the butcher shops here have as much reindeer meat as beef or mutton. It’s cheaper, too.”

  “I’m not complaining,” Talsu said. “You’ve picked it up before, and it tastes fine.” He kissed her again to show her he meant it-and he did. He went on, “I wish the language were easier. I can’t get started in business till I can talk to my customers at least a little.”

  “I know,” Gailisa said. “When I buy things, I either read what I want off the signs-and I know I make a mess of that, too, because some of the characters don’t sound the same here as they do in Jelgavan-or else I just point. It makes me feel stupid, but what else can I do?”

  “Nothing else I can think of,” Talsu said. “I do the same thing.”

  The next day, though, Talsu and Gailisa found a parcel in front of their door when they came back from their language lesson. Unwrapping it, he pulled out a Jelgavan-Kuusaman phrasebook. It looked to have been made for Kuusaman travelers in Jelgava, but it would help the other way round, too. Gailisa unfolded a note stuck in the little book. “Oh,” she said. “It’s in classical Kaunian.” She knew next to none of the old language, so she handed Talsu the note.

  His own classical Kaunian was far from perfect, too, but he did his best. “ ‘I hope this book will help you,’“ he read. “ ‘It helped me when I visited your kingdom. I am Pekka, wife to Leino, whom you helped, Talsu. I am glad I could help you leave your kingdom. My husband was killed in the fighting. I was pleased to do anything I could for his friends.’ “

  “He’s the one I wrote to,” Gailisa said.

  “I know,” Talsu answered. “I didn’t know he’d got killed, though. She must have been the one who helped me get out of the dungeon, too, then.” He blinked. “It’s something-that they paid attention to a woman, I mean.”

  “Maybe she’s important in her own right,” Gailisa said. “She must be, in fact. The Kuusamans seem to let their women do just about anything their men can. I like that, if you want to know the truth.”

  “I’m not sure it’s natural,” Talsu said.

  “Why not?” his wife demanded. “It’s what you were talking about before, isn’t it? It’s freedom.”

  “That’s different,” Talsu said.

  “How?” Gailisa asked.

  In his own mind, Talsu knew how. The kind of freedom he had in mind was no more than the freedom to say what you wanted without fear of ending up in a dungeon because the wrong person heard you. Surely that was different from the freedom to do what you wanted regardless of whether you were a man or a woman. Surely it was. . and yet, for the life of him, he found no way to put the difference into words.

  “It just is,” he said at last. Gailisa made a face at him. He tickled her. She squealed. They weren’t equal there: she was ticklish, and he wasn’t. He took unfair advantage of it.

  After the next language lesson a couple of day
s later, the instructor-a woman named Ryti, whose standing went some distance toward proving Gailisa’s point-asked Talsu and his wife to stay while the other students were leaving. In slow, careful Jelgavan, she said, “We have found a tailor who is looking for an assistant and who speaks classical Kaunian. Would you like to work for him?”

  “I’d like to work for anyone,” Talsu answered in his own tongue. “I’d like to work for myself most, but I know I don’t speak enough Kuusaman yet. I couldn’t understand the people who’d be my customers.”

  “How much will this fellow pay?” Gailisa asked the practical question.

  When Ryti answered, she did so, of course, in terms of Kuusaman money. That still didn’t feel quite real to Talsu. “What would it be in Jelgavan coins?” he asked. Ryti thought for a moment, then told him. He blinked. “You must be wrong,” he said. “That’s much too much.”

  After a little more thought, the language instructor shook her head. “No, I do not believe so. One of ours is about three and a half of yours, is it not so?”

  It was so. To Talsu, Kuusaman silver coins were big and heavy, but not impossibly big and heavy. Things cost more in Yliharma than they had back in Skrunda, but not a great deal more. The money this fellow offered a tailor’s assistant would have made an independent Jelgavan tailor prosperous. “How much does this man make for himself?” Talsu asked.

  “I cannot answer that,” Ryti answered. “But he does make enough to be able to pay you what he says he will. We have looked into that. We do not want people going into bad situations.”

  “Tell me his name. Tell me where his shop is,” Talsu said. “Tell me when I need to be there, and I’ll be there at that time tomorrow.”