Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  “I will keep up,” the Kaunian said. He stood aside. “Come search. Try not to steal too much.” He shook his head. “What difference does it make? I have spent my whole life here, but I doubt I shall ever see this place again. My empire of knowledge has fallen, just as the great Empire did in times gone by.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Oraste asked.

  “Why do you think I know?” Bembo replied in some annoyance. He pointed at the old man. “Pack what you’re going to take, and be quick about it. Then go to the square. Come on, Oraste. Let’s make sure that gal isn’t hiding here.”

  “Oh, aye.” A murky light sparked in Oraste’s eyes. “If we catch her, I know how to make her pay.”

  When they went inside, Bembo stared in astonishment. He turned to the Kaunian. “What in blazes do you do with all these books?” He’d never seen so many in one place in his life.

  “Read them. Study them. Cherish them,” the blond answered. “I have spent my life seeking understanding. And what has it got me? One sack to carry on the road to Gromheort.” He bowed stiffly. “I suppose I should thank you for paring existence down to essentials.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Oraste repeated. He sounded more irritable this time, more ready to strike out at what he didn’t understand.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Bembo told him. “Come on. Let’s look for the girl. We can’t waste time about it. We’ve got plenty of other Kaunians to shift.”

  He and Oraste tore through the house with practiced efficiency. They found no one lurking in pantries or behind or under furniture or anywhere else. “Maybe the old bugger was telling the truth,” Oraste said. “Who would have believed it?”

  “Stranger things have happened,” Bembo answered. “Did you get anything good when we split up there?”

  “This and that,” the other constable said. “Don’t know what all of it’s worth, but some of it’s cursed old, that’s for sure. How about you?”

  “About the same,” Bembo told him. “Somebody ought to do something about these books. They’re probably worth a good bit to somebody, but not to anybody I know.”

  “Most of ’em are Kaunian garbage, anyway,” Oraste said. “You ask me, the mice and the silverfish are welcome to ’em. Come on, Bembo. Like you said, he’s not the only stinking blond we’ve got to fetch.”

  They did their job well enough to keep Sergeant Pesaro from screaming too loudly at them. By early afternoon, all the Kaunians the constables could flush out were standing in the square. With Evodio translating, Pesaro said, “Now we go back to Gromheort. Have you got that? Anybody who doesn’t keep up will be sorry to the end of his days—and that won’t be a long way off. Let’s go.”

  “Curse you, you pox-ridden redheaded barbarian!” a blond shouted in pretty good Algarvian. “Why should we do what you—?”

  Oraste pulled his stick off his belt and blazed the Kaunian, with deliberate malice, in the belly. The man fell, shrieking and writhing. A woman—probably his wife—screamed. Over their cries, Oraste shouted, “Anybody else want to get gay with us? We’ll give you what he got.”

  Evodio turned that into classical Kaunian, though Bembo didn’t think it needed any translating. Pesaro said, “Get moving.” Evodio translated that, too. All the Kaunians started east except the blazed man. Even his wife, her face stunned and empty, trudged out of Oyngestun.

  Some of the Forthwegians who lived in the village jeered as the blonds left. Some waved mocking good-byes. Some had already started going through the houses of the people who’d lived side by side with them for so many years.

  Bembo said, “Curse them, they have a better chance to clean out the Kaunians than we got.” He sighed. “Being a constable’s a tough job.” Self-pity came easy to him.

  Oraste raised a gingery eyebrow. “You want to go fight the Unkerlanters instead?”

  “Powers above, no!” The mere thought was enough to make Bembo turn and curse the Kaunians shambling along the road.

  The old Kaunian scholar spoke in his own language. Several of his countrymen smiled. Seeing that Bembo did not follow, he shifted to Algarvian: “It is a proverb from the days of the Kaunian Empire, and still true today, I think. ‘Speech is a mirror of the soul: as a man speaks, so is he.’ ”

  Bembo yanked his bludgeon off his belt and belabored the old man till blood streamed down his face from a split scalp. “Quote proverbs at me, will you?” he shouted. “I’ll teach you one: keep your lousy mouth shut. Have you got it? Have you?” He raised the bludgeon again.

  “Aye,” the Kaunian choked out. Bembo strutted along, feeling better about the world. Oraste slapped him on the back, which made him happier yet.

  Garivald woke with the sun in his face. When he looked around, he saw other men—some wrapped in rock-gray Unkerlanter army blankets, some in captured Algarvian tan ones, some in peasant homespun—lying on pine boughs among the trees. He shook his head in slow wonder, as he did almost every morning when he woke. He wasn’t a peasant any more, or not an ordinary peasant. He was an irregular, fighting King Mezentio’s men far behind their lines.

  He wriggled out of his own blanket—the redhead who’d carried it into southern Unkerlant wouldn’t need it, not ever again—sat up, and stretched. Then he put on his sandals and got to his feet. His belly rumbled. Not far away, a stewpot was bubbling above a slow fire. He hurried over. “What’s in there?” he asked the fellow stirring the pot with a big iron spoon.

  “Barley mush and a little bit of blood sausage,” the cook answered. Like Garivald, like most Unkerlanters, he was stocky and swarthy, with dark hair and a strong hooked nose, but his accent said he came out of the north, not from the Duchy of Grelz. “Want a bowl?”

  “Hmm.” Garivald rubbed his chin, as if thinking it over. Bristles rasped under his fingers; chances to shave here in the woods seldom came. His belly rumbled again. He quit being coy. “Aye!”

  “Here you go, then.” The fellow tending the pot grabbed a cheap earthenware bowl and filled it full of mush. “Mind you wash it before you give it back.”

  “I’ll remember,” Garivald said. He would have to work to remember, and knew it. Back in Zossen, his home village, his wife Annore would have cleaned up after him. Washing things was women’s work, not men’s.

  Sudden tears stung his eyes. To make sure the cook didn’t see them, he bent his head over the bowl and began to eat. How he missed his wife! How he missed his son and daughter, too, and how—oh, how!—he missed the village where he’d spent all thirty-two (he thought it was thirty-two, but he might have been out one either way) years of his life.

  Another Unkerlanter irregular came up to the cook and got a breakfast bowl of barley. After taking it, he nodded to Garivald and said, “How about a song, pal?” By his soft speech, he was a local like Garivald.

  “By now you’ve heard me sing, haven’t you?” Garivald asked, and the other fellow nodded. In some exasperation, Garivald went on, “Then why would you want to hear me again? I’m better at making the words than I am at singing them.”

  He sometimes wished he’d never discovered he had to power to shape words into pleasing patterns. He would still be back with his family then, back in Zossen . . . and back under Algarve’s thumb. Now he was a free man—free, but alone.

  He knew how lucky he was not to be a dead man. Some of the songs he made had been for the irregulars in the woods around Zossen. But the Algarvians had found out who shaped the tunes that helped rouse the countryside against them. They’d seized him and taken him off to Herborn, the capital of the Duchy of Grelz (now the reborn puppet Kingdom of Grelz, with Mezentio’s cousin on the throne) to do away with him. If Munderic’s irregulars hadn’t ambushed the redheads and rescued him, he’d long since have been boiled alive.

  The other irregular paused between spoonfuls of barley porridge to say, “You’re not that bad. And if you’ve got something new, I’d get to hear it first.”

  “Nothing new this morning,” Garivald said, and w
ent back to finishing his own breakfast. He knew he probably wouldn’t have been rescued if it weren’t for his songs, and he did spend time letting people hear his unspectacular voice. But nobody, in his experience, felt like singing early in the morning.

  To his relief, the other fellow didn’t press him, but went back to try to wheedle a second bowl of mush from the cook. He had no more luck there than he’d had with Garivald, and slouched off cursing his fate.

  Garivald rose and hurried away, which didn’t prove the best idea he’d ever had: he almost bowled over Munderic, the leader of this band. “Sorry,” he stammered, and stepped out of the way.

  “It’s all right.” Munderic was burly even by Unkerlanter standards. He’d done a better job of shaving than most of the men who followed him. That should have made him look more pleasant. Somehow, it didn’t. He went on, “I was looking for you, as a matter of fact.”

  “Were you?” Garivald asked in what he hoped wasn’t too hollow a voice. He wasn’t sure he wanted to draw the leader’s notice.

  Want it or not, he had it. Munderic nodded briskly. “Aye. High time you were blooded. Songs are all very well, but you ought to be able to fight, too. The Algarvians are moving a couple of squads between Lohr and Pirmasens. We’re going to make sure they don’t have a happy time on the road.”

  Back in Zossen, fifty or sixty miles away, Garivald had heard of Lohr and Pirmasens, but he couldn’t have told where they lay. He still couldn’t, not exactly; he was too new to what seemed to him a vastly distant part of the world. “Give me a stick and I’ll do what I can,” he said.

  Munderic slapped him on the back. “I know you will.” His grin showed a couple of broken teeth. “It’ll make your songs better, too, because you’ll know more of what you’re singing about.”

  “I suppose so,” Garivald answered. He nodded to Munderic as he might have to a schoolmaster—not that he’d ever had any schooling himself. “How do you know the Algarvians will be moving?”

  “I have ears in Lohr. And I have ears in Pirmasens,” the leader of the irregulars answered. He had ears in half a dozen villages around this stretch of wood; Garivald already knew as much. Munderic continued, “If I hear the same thing in both places, it’s likely true.”

  “Or it’s an Algarvian trick to draw you out,” Garivald said.

  Munderic pondered that. “You’ve got a nasty, suspicious mind,” he said at last. “I won’t tell you you’re wrong, because the redheads could be doing that. But I don’t think they are this time.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Garivald told him.

  “I’m betting my life on it,” Munderic said, “for I’ll be along, you know. I don’t send people out to do what I won’t.” Now Garivald was the one who had to ponder and nod.

  At Munderic’s order, the irregulars gave him a stick captured from some Algarvian. It bore a small enamelwork shield of green, white, and red, and was a bit shorter, a bit lighter, than the Unkerlanter military model. Hefting it, Garivald said, “Feels more like a stick for blazing rabbits than one for people.”

  The man who gave it to him wore a filthy, tattered rock-gray tunic that had probably been on his back since the Algarvians’ advance the summer before overran this part of Unkerlant and left him a soldier stranded in enemy-held territory. “Don’t be a bigger fool than you can help,” he said, and pulled up his left sleeve to show the long, straight scar left behind after a beam burned a chunk of meat from his arm. “A stick just like that did this.” He laid his right finger on the scar. “It can happen to you, too—or it can happen to an Algarvian. Try and see that it does. You’ll be happier afterwards, believe me.”

  “Aye, you’re bound to be right about that.” Garivald remembered the captured irregulars the Algarvians had hanged in Zossen. Who had they been? Just a couple of men nobody’d ever heard of. If they caught him and hanged him in Pirmasens or Lohr, who would he be there? No one at all, just a stranger without any luck. He didn’t want to end his days like that, or on the wrong end of a stick, either.

  Munderic led his raiders out of their woodland shelter in the dark, quiet hours between midnight and dawn. Garivald yawned and yawned, trying to make himself wake up. “This is our time,” Munderic said. “The Algarvians think they can do as they please during the day, but the night belongs to us.”

  Despite that proud boast, the irregular leader and the rest of the band moved like hunted animals when they emerged from the forest and came out into the open country bordering it. Once, a dragon screeched high overhead. They stopped moving altogether, freezing as rabbits will when an owl hoots.

  At last, Munderic said, “Come on. It’s gone.” Garivald looked up into the sky. He didn’t see the dragon, but he hadn’t seen it before, either. He wondered how—or if—Munderic knew it had flown on.

  Even at night, he could see good farmland was going to waste around these parts. Rank weeds overran fields that hadn’t been planted in barley or rye. Grass grew tall in meadows where cattle and sheep hadn’t grazed. Sadly, Garivald shook his head. So many things would be a long time going back to the way they had been, if in fact they ever did.

  Where the road ran through one of those ungrazed meadows, Munderic halted and held up a hand. “We wait here,” he said. “We’ll dig ourselves in along both sides of the track, and when the redheads come by, we’ll make them pay. Be sure they can’t spy any spoil from your digging, mind. It’s not an ambush if they know it’s there.”

  Garivald had nothing with which to dig. He stood there feeling useless and helpless till another Unkerlanter let him borrow a short-handled spade: a soldier’s tool, not a farmer’s, one with which a man could dig while on his knees or even on his belly. “Heap up some of the dirt in front of your hole,” advised the fellow whose spade he was using. “It’ll help block a beam.”

  “Aye,” Garivald said. “Thanks.” By the time he finished, the eastern sky had gone from gray to pink. Starlings started their metallic twittering. In the gray morning twilight, Munderic strode along the road to see what an Algarvian footsoldier would spy. He had a couple of men pull up grass and weeds to hide their holes better. He didn’t criticize Garivald, which made the peasant proud.

  At last, Munderic pronounced himself satisfied. “Now we wait,” he said.

  The sun rose. Garivald peered through the plants ahead out toward the road. It was empty. It stayed empty a long time. Bugs and spiders crawled on him. As the day turned warm, flies started biting. He slapped and cursed and wished he were home. Sweat poured off him. As Munderic had ordered, he waited.

  A couple of Unkerlanters came by on foot, and one riding a sad little donkey. The irregulars let them go. The sun was well past its high point in the north when the Algarvians marched up the road from the direction of Lohr. They were singing as they marched, a rollicking tune in their own language. As usual, they seemed convinced they owned the world. Garivald knew his job was to teach them otherwise.

  Munderic had threatened death and destruction for any man who started blazing too soon and so warned the redheads of the trap before they were all the way into it. Garivald let three or four of them past him before he started blazing. Everyone else seemed to have the same idea, so half the Algarvians went down in the space of a few heartbeats.

  But the rest proved tougher. Shouting and cursing, they dove for cover behind the bodies of their fallen friends and into the tall grass of the meadow. With the irregulars on both sides of the road, though, finding a safe spot wasn’t easy. They kept blazing till they were blazed down—a beam from one of their sticks passed close above Garivald’s head, singeing the weeds and leaving the scent of lightning in the air.

  One Algarvian started running back toward Lohr: not out of cowardice, Garivald judged, but to try to get help. The fellow hadn’t gone far when a beam caught him in the middle of the back and stretched him facedown in the dirt of the roadway.

  “Gather up their sticks,” Munderic called. “Cut the throats of any of ’em still breathing. The
n we’d better get out of here. All safe?” The irregular who’d asked Garivald for a song didn’t come out of his hole. Somebody went to check, and found he’d taken a beam just above the ear. He was as dead as the Algarvians. Munderic stamped his foot “Curse it, I wanted a clean job. Almost, but not quite.”

  “We did what we set out to,” Garivald said, “and the redheads aren’t about to.” He started off toward the forest with two sticks on his back and two lines for a new song going through his mind.

  Sabrino’s dragon raced east through the crisp, cold air of the austral continent. The Algarvian commander could look left and see the waves of the Narrow Sea crashing against the rocky shore of the land of the Ice People. He could look to the right and see the dazzling glitter of the Barrier Mountains, still sheathed in snow and ice even though spring was rounding toward summer.

  He wondered what lay beyond the Barrier Mountains. The Ice People traveled beyond them at this season of the year. So had a few intrepid explorers from civilized kingdoms. He’d read some of their accounts. They differed so wildly, he wondered if the explorers had all gone to the same country. Tempting to think about turning his dragon to the south and flying and flying and flying . . .

  “But there’s a war to be fought,” he muttered, and looked ahead once more. The Lagoan army was still retreating, though not much pursued it: a few battalions of Yaninans stiffened by even fewer Algarvian footsoldiers and a couple of companies of behemoths. But the Lagoans did not have the dragons to be able to stand against the force he led.

  That the Lagoans had any dragons at all had come as a nasty surprise the first time his fliers ran up against them. But the enemy, outnumbered four to one by his wing and Colonel Broumidis’ beasts, could scout and warn their ground forces when danger was on the way, but could not block that danger.

  A beam from a heavy stick down on the ground blazed up at the Algarvian dragons. Even had it struck one, it would have done no more than infuriate the beast. But it was a warning: come no lower. Sabrino nodded to himself. The Lagoans were playing their half of the game as well as it could be played. He leaned to one side and peered down past his dragon’s scaly neck. As he’d expected, King Vitor’s men were digging in like so many moles. He nodded again. Aye, the Lagoans had plenty of professional competence. Without enough dragons, though, how much good would it do them?