Harry Turtledove: Out of the Darkness

After a while, the wood-chopping shift ended. The Kuusamans collected the axes from the detail, and carefully counted them before dismissing the captives. They tried to take no chances-but they’d let the Gyongyosians turn loose a sorcery that had wrecked big stretches of Obuda, all through not paying quite enough attention to what their captives were up to. Kun said, “You’ve got your nerve, Sergeant, talking about goats to me.”

Istvan looked around nervously before answering, “Oh, shut up.” His voice was rough and full of loathing. Goats were forbidden beasts to Gyongyosians, perhaps because of their lasciviousness and habit of eating anything. Whatever the reason, forbidden they were; it was perhaps the strongest prohibition the folk of Gyongyos knew. Bandit bands and perverts sometimes ate goat to mark themselves off from ordinary, decent people-and when they got caught at it, they were most often buried alive.

Kun, for a wonder, did shut up. But he held out his left hand, palm up and open, so the rain splashed down onto it. Along with a woodcutter’s calluses, he had a scar on the palm, between his second and third fingers. Unwillingly, Istvan held out his hand, too. His palm bore an identical scar. He had a scar on the back of his hand, too, as if a knife had gone all the way through. It had. Kun bore a like scar there, too.

“We’re the only ones left now, I think,” Istvan said. Kun nodded somberly. Neither one said what they were left from. Istvan wished he could forget. He knew he never would, not to his dying day.

Back when the squad he’d led were fighting in the great pine woods of western Unkerlant, they’d ambushed some Unkerlanters in a little clearing, not least so they could take the stew Swemmel’s soldiers were cooking. It turned out to be goat stew. The whole squad had eaten of it before the company commander came up and realized what it was.

Captain Tivadar would have been within his rights to blaze them all. He hadn’t done it. After they’d stuck fingers down their throats to puke up their appalling meal, he’d cut every one of them to atone for their inadvertent sin. Not a man had cried out. They’d all counted themselves lucky. To be known as a goat-eater in Gyongyos.. Istvan shuddered. He hadn’t done it on purpose, but how much difference did that really make? He still often wondered if he was accursed.

Tivadar was dead, killed in those endless woods. So far as Istvan knew, he’d never said a word about what he’d done there in the clearing. The other men in the squad had died in other fights. Szonyi, as good a fighting man as any Istvan had known, had chosen to let his throat be cut here on Obuda. Istvan hadn’t been able to talk him out of it.

Only Kun and me, sure enough, Istvan thought. His eyes slid toward the ex-mage’s apprentice. He wished no one else knew what he’d done. He wished it with all his soul. But, on the other hand, how much difference did a wish like that make? He knew he’d had goat’s flesh on his tongue, and its mark scarred his spirit as Tivadar’s knife had scarred his hand.

Perhaps deliberately changing the subject, Kun said, “Just as well the Kuusamans didn’t ask us too many questions after Frigyes loosed his spell.”

“Why should they have?” Istvan returned. “We didn’t have anything to do with it. We’d both come down with the runs hours before it happened.”

Kun walked a little straighter for a couple of paces. He’d found the leaves that turned their guts inside out. But then he said, “If I’d been the one picking up the pieces after that sorcery, I’d’ve wondered why a couple of men just happened to get sick right then. I’d’ve wondered whether they knew more than they were letting on.”

“By the stars, you’ve got a nasty, suspicious mind,” Istvan said.

“Thank you,” Kun answered, which spoiled the insult. Kun went on, “If I’m the fellow investigating something like that, I’m supposed to have a nasty, suspicious mind, eh?”

“Maybe,” Istvan said. “I guess so. Somehow, I get the feeling Kuusamans aren’t as suspicious as they ought to be.”

“You may be right.” Kun thought it over as they neared their barracks. “Aye, sure enough, you may be right. It doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous, though.”

“I never said it did,” Istvan replied. “We fought them here on Obuda, you and I, but it’s their island now. Most of the islands in the Bothnian Ocean are theirs now.”

“I know,” Kun said. “I can’t help but know, can I? And what does that tell you?”

“What, that you know? It tells me you’re not a complete fool-just mostly.”

Kun gave Istvan a sour look. “You’re being stupid on purpose. You’re not nearly so funny when you do that as when you’re stupid because you don’t know any better. What does it tell you that the Kuusamans hold most of the islands in the Bothnian Ocean, and that we aren’t taking any back the way we would when the war was new?”

The barracks loomed ahead: an ugly, leaky building of raw timber. The cots inside, though, were better and less crowded than had been the cots in the Gyongyosian barracks where Istvan had stayed before while stationed on Obuda. But that wasn’t why the barracks felt like a refuge now. If he got inside, maybe he wouldn’t have to answer his comrade’s question.

Kun coughed sharply. Again acting as if his rank were higher than Istvan’s, he said, “You know the answer as well as I do. Why won’t you say it?”

“You know why, curse it,” Istvan mumbled.

“Is the truth less the truth because you don’t name it?” Kun asked inexorably. “Do you think it will go away? Do you think the stars won’t shine their light on it? Or do you just want me to have to do the dirty work and say it out loud?”

That’s exactly what I want. But Istvan didn’t want anyone to say it out loud, because he did feel that somehow made it more real. But if he’d gone forward against the Kuusamans, if he’d gone forward against the Unkerlanters, couldn’t he go forward against the truth, too? Almost as if he were attacking Kun, he shouted into the smaller man’s face: “They’re taking the fornicating islands because we’re losing the fornicating war! There! Are you fornicating happy now?”

Kun gave back a pace-a couple of paces, in fact. Then he had to rally, and he did. “You’re honest, at any rate,” he said. “The next question is, what do we do if we keep on losing?”

“I don’t know,” Istvan answered. “And you don’t know, either. It’s been a long time since Gyongyos lost a war.” He spoke with the pride to be expected of a man from a warrior race.

“That’s because we haven’t fought a whole lot of them lately,” Kun said. “When you think about what all’s gone on in this one, that’s not so bad, is it?”

Istvan started to reply, then realized he had no good reply to give. What was the point of being a man from a warrior race without any wars to fight? On the other hand, what was the point of fighting a war and losing it? Shaking his head and muttering to himself, Istvan went into the barracks.

Some of the captives already inside nodded to him. Most of the men he’d known best, the men from his own company, were dead thanks to Captain Frigyes. Most of the faces here now, the men lounging on cots, the fellow putting more wood on the stove, were strangers to him. But they were of his kind. They looked like him. They spoke his tongue. Maybe in a captives’ camp he was a sheep among sheep with them, not a wolf among wolves. Still, he was with his own. That would do. It would have to.

Bembo strutted through the ravaged streets of Eoforwic twirling his bludgeon by its leather strap, as if he were the king of the world. Once upon a time, Algarvians on occupation duty in Forthweg might as well have been kings of the world. The constable sighed, pining for the good old days. He put on his show at least as much to keep up his own spirits as to impress the Forthwegians around him.