Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

And he wasn’t sure he could trust Dagulf, not any more. They hadn’t seen each other for a couple of years. A lot had happened in that time. A lot could have happened, too. The only way to find out would be the hard way.

Filled with such gloomy thoughts, Garivald was glad to lie down on the benches against the wall of the hut he and Obilot had taken for their own and go to sleep. As usual, a day in the fields made him sleep as if he were stuffed into a rest crate till the next morning.

When he woke, he ate more barley porridge and went out to the fields to begin all over again. He might not do exactly the same thing day after day, but he always had plenty to do. No one who lived on a farm ever complained of too little to do, not between planting time and harvest.

He’d just thrown a rock at a rabbit-and, to his disgust, missed, for it would have gone into the pot had he hit it-when three men came up the path leading to Linnich. They were the first men he’d seen on the path since he and Obilot found this farm. Now that spring had come, it was hardly a path at all, being much overgrown. Whoever had used this place before he came hadn’t had much use for company, either.

Those three men saw him, too. One of them waved. Without thinking, Garivald waved back. He cursed himself for a fool afterwards, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered one way or the other. Two of the men carried sticks slung on their back; the third had his in his hand. If they were bandits, Garivald was in trouble. If they served King Swemmel, he was liable to be in more trouble still.

“Hail!” called the one who’d waved. “Are you Fariulf?”

“Aye, that’s me,” Garivald answered with something approaching relief. If they were using his false name, they didn’t want him for the crime of fighting the Algarvians without doing it under King Swemmel’s auspices. He hadn’t done much as Fariulf to get into trouble. “What do you want?” he added as the men came forward.

Obilot was watching from the garden. He wondered if she would get a stick from inside the farmhouse and start blazing. But he stood between her and the three oncoming men, who’d got very close by then.

“Are you hale?” asked the fellow who was doing the talking. He answered his own question: “Aye, I can see you are. Come along with us.”

“Come along with you where?” Garivald asked.

“Someplace you should have been long before this: King Swemmel’s army,” replied the-the impresser, Garivald realized he had to be. “You think you can sit out the war here in the middle of nowhere? That’s not how things work, pal. Come along quiet-like and nothing bad’ll happen to you till the cursed Algarvians have their chance at your worthless hide.” By then, all three aimed their sticks at him.

Considering what they could have done to him, considering what they surely would have done to him had they known his real name, going into the Unkerlanter army didn’t strike Garivald as such a bad bargain. All he said was, “Let me tell my woman good-bye.” He pointed back toward Obilot.

He expected them to refuse; impressers had an evil name. Maybe they were relieved he didn’t put up more of a fuss, for the man who talked for them replied, “Go ahead, but make it snappy.”

“I will.” Garivald beckoned Obilot forward. She came with obvious reluctance, but she came. Her face was hard and closed, showing nothing to the impressers but nothing to him, either. He made the best of things he could: “Bringane, they’re taking me into the army.”

“How will I get the crop in without you?” she cried. But her voice, like his, held a note of relief. This wasn’t good, but it could have been worse. In the army, at least, he’d have a chance to fight back.

With a certain rough sympathy, the impresser said, “Things are hard all over the kingdom, lady.”

“Why are you making them harder for Fariulf and me?” Obilot demanded.

“Because we need men if we’re going to whip the Algarvians,” the impresser replied. “Now let’s get going. We haven’t got all day.”

Garivald squeezed Obilot. He kissed her. He said, “I’ll come back.” She nodded. He hoped she believed him. He tried to believe himself. The impressers snickered. He wondered how often they’d heard the same promises. Then he wondered how often those promises came true. Having done that, he wished he hadn’t.

The impressers led him away. He shook his head at Obilot as he went, warning her not to try to blaze them. One against three-even two against three-wasn’t good odds. Her shoulders went up and down in a sigh, but she finally nodded.

By the time he got into Linnich, Garivald wondered if he shouldn’t have let Obilot try to stop the impressers. He was hungry and tired, and wanted nothing so much as to go back to the farm, forget about the world, and have the world forget about him, too.

Most of the people on the streets in Linnich were women and old men. He wondered who’d told the impressers he was out there on that farm away from the village. If he ever found out, if he ever got his hands on that person… He hoped it wasn’t Dagulf. That would be a terrible thing to think of a man who had been his friend. But he knew he would wonder for a long time to come.

More impressers stood in the market square, along with the men they’d rounded up. He didn’t see Dagulf there, which raised his suspicions. Some of the men who would be going into King Swemmel’s army were hardly men at all, but youths. Others had gray hair and gray stubble on their cheeks. Only a couple were, like Garivald, somewhere in the prime of life.

“Let’s get moving,” an impresser said. He was in the prime of life; Garivald resentfully wondered why he wasn’t out there trying to blaze Algarvians instead of rounding up his own countrymen. The impresser went on, “We’ve got a long way to go to the closest ley-line caravan depot.”

Wherewas the closest ley-line caravan depot? Garivald didn’t know. Ley lines weren’t so dense in this stretch of the Duchy of Grelz. He didn’t think there was one within half a day’s walk of Linnich, though. That gave him a certain amount of hope. With a little luck, he might slip away during the night. He’d had plenty of practice slipping away in his days as an irregular.

But if he knew tricks, the impressers knew tricks, too. Sure enough, they had to halt by the side of the road for the night. They proved to have light leg irons in their packs, and fastened their recruits together before doling out black bread and sausage to them. Garivald sighed. That was the sort of efficiency King Swemmel surely approved of.

Garivald never found out the name of the town with the caravan depot. He was formally taken into the army-as Fariulf son of Syrivald-inside the depot, before boarding the caravan. A bored-looking clerk asked, “Do you take oath to defend the Kingdom of Unkerlant and King Swemmel from all foes, as directed by those set over you?”

“Aye,” Garivald answered, as everyone else surely did. What would Swemmel’s men do to someone who refused to swear that oath? Garivald knew he didn’t want to find out.

Riding the ley-line caravan was something new and exciting. He’d sabotaged them, but he’d never ridden in one before. By the way some of the other new recruits exclaimed, he wasn’t the only one aboard a caravan car for the first time. How the countryside whizzed past as the caravan glided northwest! That was the first thought that struck his mind. The second was how devastated the countryside looked. It had all been fought over at least twice, parts of it more often than that. As he went through one wrecked village after another, he began to realize just how vast the war against Algarve really was.

More recruits-again, mostly boys and older men-boarded at each stop, till they filled his caravan car and, presumably, the others. Food was more black bread; drink was water. He’d never tried to sleep sitting up on a hard bench. He didn’t think he could. When he got tired enough, though, he did.