Harry Turtledove - Through the Darkness

“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 Mezen-tio’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 went 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.”