Harry Turtledove - Through the Darkness

“That’d take a bit of explaining, wouldn’t it?” Raunu yawned, there in the darkness. “Getting late for explanations, too.” He shouldered his shovel as if it were a stick and started off toward Merkela’s farm. Skarnu followed.

They hadn’t gone more than a quarter of a mile before Skarnu heard the soft whoosh of a caravan sliding down the ley line. He turned to Raunu in surprise. “Must be a special. They haven’t got anything scheduled for this time of night.” Had the Algarvians had anything scheduled, he and Raunu would have picked a different time to visit the ley line.

Before Raunu could answer, the caravan passed over the egg Skarnu and he had buried. The egg released its energy in a short, sharp roar. The rattles and bangs that followed were caravan cars crashing to the ground. Shouts and screams pierced the nighttime quiet.

Skarnu turned to Raunu. Solemnly, the two Valmieran soldiers who hadn’t given up the fight against Algarve clasped hands. Then they hurried away, moving faster than they had before. King Mezentio’s men would surely flood the area around the ley line with soldiers, both to help the injured on the caravan and to search for the folk who’d planted the egg beneath it.

When they got back to Merkela’s farm, Raunu went off to sleep in the barn, as he always did. Skarnu went into the farmhouse, barred the door behind him, and climbed the stairs to the bedchamber he shared these days with Merkela. She’d been lying in bed, but she hadn’t been asleep. “Did I hear the egg burst?” she asked, sitting up. “I thought I did.”

“You were right,” Skarnu said. “It was a special caravan, too-had to be. That means it was probably packed full of Algarvian soldiers. We might have struck them an even better blow than we’d hoped.”

“Whatever you did to them, it’s less than they deserve.” Merkela’s voice held a purr. She flipped back the blankets that covered her. Beneath them, she was bare. “And so-would you sooner celebrate or sleep?”

Skarnu had swallowed a yawn as he went up the stairs. Now, around another one, he said, “My sweet, I mean no disrespect when I say I’d sooner sleep. We’ll have to get up with the sun, and there’s always too much work to do.”

“This is what life is on a farm,” Merkela said. Skarnu didn’t answer. He knew she knew how ignorant he’d been when he first came to the farm. She also knew he’d been an officer, which meant he was a nobleman-which, she would doubtless think, meant he’d never done any work to speak of before he came to the farm. She wasn’t so far wrong, but he didn’t care to be reminded of it.

He took off his boots, stripped to his drawers, and lay down beside her. The next thing he knew, sure enough, the sun was shining through the window. He dressed again, feeling as if he’d gone to bed only moments before. Bread and honey and a mug of ale sent him out of the house still trying to rub sleep from his eyes. I’ll stumble through the day, he thought, and sleep like a stone tonight.

Raunu looked worn, too. Seeing that salved Skarnu’s pride. The sergeant wasn’t far from twice his age, but had the endurance of granite. If he showed the strain of the night’s work, Skarnu didn’t need to be ashamed of his own exhaustion.

“My day to go weeding, too,” Raunu said mournfully.

“You can tend the livestock, if you’d rather,” Skarnu told him. Minding the cattle and sheep was easier work-or was most days, anyhow.

But Raunu shook his head. He had a stubborn pride of his own. “I won’t fall over,” he said. With that, he went back to the barn and came out with a hoe. As he had with the shovel, he carried it with a military precision he would have used with a stick. By the determined look on his face, he would have taken argument as insult. Raunu waved him out to the fields and went to get a long staff with a crook for himself.

As he drove the animals out to the meadow, he shaded his eyes with his free hand and looked over toward Raunu, who bent his back to grub weeds out of the ground. Skarnu sighed. The sergeant would ache tonight. Skarnu would also have ached had he gone weeding today, but he would have got over it faster than his comrade.

And the animals didn’t look as if they would give him any trouble today. They grazed contentedly, the cows not very far away from the sheep. By all the signs, they’d be content to keep on doing it till Skarnu drove them back into their pens when the sun set. For all they needed him, he could have lain down in the tall, thick grass and caught up on his sleep.

Then the first two men stumbled out of the woods that marked the border of the meadow.

They were both Kaunians: they had yellow hair and wore tunics and trousers, though of a cut that hadn’t been stylish in Valmiera since not long after the end of the Six Years’ War. They were also both filthy and unshaven and so scrawny that their old-fashioned clothes hung loosely on them.

Seeing Skarnu, they hurried toward him, arms outstretched beseechingly. They called out to him, their voices harsh, dry-throated croaks. He stared, clutching the staff, half ready to use it as a weapon, for he understood not a word they said.

But then, after a moment, he did, or thought he did. They weren’t speaking Valmieran. What came from their mouths was classical Kaunian, though with an accent different from the one he’d learned in school. They’re Kaunians from Forthweg, he realized, and a shiver ran through him.

He tried to remember the classical tongue, which he’d used little since his schooling stopped. “Repeat yourselves,” he said. “You are from the caravan?”

“Aye.” Their heads bobbed up and down together. “The caravan.” Then they both started talking at the same time, too fast for Skarnu to follow when they used what was for him a foreign tongue, and one spoken with an intonation he’d hardly ever heard before.

“Slowly!” he said, proud that he’d remembered the word. He pointed to the taller of them. “You. Talk.” Too late, he realized he’d used the intimate rather than the formal pronoun and verb form. His schoolmaster would have striped his back.

But the Kaunian from Forthweg didn’t criticize his grammar. Talk he did, though not so slowly as Skarnu would have liked. Out of the corner of his eye, Skarnu saw Raunu scramble over the fence that kept the livestock out of the crops and trot toward him, the hoe most definitely a weapon now.

After listening for a bit, Raunu asked, “What’s he saying? I can make out a word here or there, but that’s all.” As a sausage-seller’s son, he’d never had occasion to learn the classical language.

“I’m only getting about every other word myself,” Skarnu answered. Distracted by the veteran’s question, he didn’t even follow that much for a couple of sentences. But he thought he had the gist. “Unless I’m wrong, the redheads were sending them somewhere so they could kill them to draw their life energy for magic.”

As he understood bits and pieces of classical Kaunian, so the blonds from Forthweg could follow scraps of Valmieran. “Aye,” they said. One of them drew his thumb across his throat.

Raunu grunted. “Like they did against Yliharma this past winter, eh?” He nodded. “Sounds likely, powers below eat Mezentio and all his people. Wonder if they aimed to have another go at Kuusamo or hit Setubal in Lagoas.”

“They would know. I don’t,” Skarnu answered. His gaze met Raunu’s for a moment. They’d done more and better than they could have guessed by wrecking this ley-line caravan. Skarnu remembered the one he’d seen with Merkela not long before the attack on Yliharma, the one with shutters over all the windows. Had it been hauling doomed Kaunians down to the edge of the Strait of Valmiera?