Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

Seen through spatters of rain, the village did look distinctly unappetizing. The thatch-roofed cottages weren’t much different from the ones in the village where he’d lived till the impressers dragged him into King Swemmel’s army. Two buildings were bigger than the rest. He knew what they’d be: a smithy and a tavern. The whole place, though, had a dispirited, rundown look to it. No one had bothered painting or whitewashing the houses for a long time. Sad clumps of dying grass stuck out of the ground here and there, like surviving bits of hair on the scalp of a man with a bad case of ringworm.

“Powers above,” Gernot muttered. “Why would anyone want to live in a dump like this?” Unlike his comrades, he hadn’t been dragged off a farm, but from the streets of Cottbus. He was vague about what he’d done on the streets of Cottbus, which naturally made Leudast figure he had good reason to be vague.

Magnulf said, “It’ll be better than spending time under canvas, anyway.”

“Aye, so it will,” Leudast said, and wished he sounded more as if he believed it. Maybe it’s the rain, he thought. With the sun shining, the place had to look better. It could hardly have looked worse.

A dog started barking as the Unkerlanter soldiers drew near the village, and then another and another, till they sounded like a pack of wolves in full cry. One of them, about as big and mean-looking as a wolf, stalked toward the soldiers stiff-legged and growling. They shouted and cursed at it. Somebody threw a glob of mud that caught it on the end of the nose. The dog let out a startled yip and sat back on its haunches.

“That was well done,” Magnulf said. “We’d have had to blaze the cursed cur if it kept coming on.”

None of the other dogs seemed quite so bold, for which Leudast was duly grateful. They kept on barking, though. Doors in the peasants’ huts opened. Men and women came out—not far, staying under the protection of the overhanging eaves—to stare at the soldiers. Save only that the men let their whiskers grow, they might have been Unkerlanter peasants.

Leudast shook his head. Now that the Twinkings War was over, peasants would have looked at the soldiers with pity in their eyes, not the sullen hatred on the faces of these people.

Magnulf nudged him with an elbow. “You can make more sense of their language than the rest of us. Let ’em know what we’re here for.”

“Aye, Sergeant,” Leudast said resignedly. More often than not, speaking a dialect of Unkerlanter close to Forthwegian came in handy. He had no trouble making taverners understand what he wanted. In the last village where the squad had been stationed, he’d talked a reasonably pretty girl into sleeping with him. But he sometimes got more work to do, too, as now. Turning to the villagers, he asked, “Who is the firstman here?”

No one said anything. No one moved. “Do they know what you’re saying?” Magnulf asked.

“They know, Sergeant. They just don’t want to give me the time of day,” Leudast answered. “I can fix that.” He spoke to the Forthwegians again: “We will stay here. Tell me who the firstman is. We will put more men in his house.”

Magnulf chuckled. So did a couple of other men. Leudast had never known an Unkerlanter village where very many people loved their firstman. From what he’d seen, the Forthwegians weren’t much different there.

And, sure enough, several of them looked toward a stern-faced fellow with an iron-gray beard. He glared at them and at the Unkerlanters in turn, as if trying to decide whom he hated more. His wife, who stood beside him, had no doubts. Could her eyes have blazed, she would have knocked down all her neighbors.

“You are the firstman?” Leudast asked.

“I am the firstman,” the Forthwegian said. “I am called Arnulf.” It might have been an Unkerlanter name. “What do you want with us?” Now that he had decided to speak, he spoke slowly and clearly, so Leudast could follow. He sounded like a man of some education, which was not what Leudast would have expected from anyone in a place like this.

“We are to stay here,” Leudast answered. “Show us houses where we can stay.” He said no more about billeting extra men on Arnulf.

“How long are you to stay here?” the firstman asked.

Leudast shrugged. “Until our officers order us to go.”

Arnulf’s wife wailed and turned that terrible scowl on the firstman. “It could be forever!” She tugged at Arnulf’s sleeve. “Make them leave. Make them go away.”

“And how am I to do that?” he demanded in loud, heavy exasperation. She spoke a couple of sentences in Forthwegian too quick and slangy for Leudast to follow. Her husband made a fist and made as if to thump her with it. She snarled at him. Several of the Unkerlanter soldiers behind Leudast laughed. They, or men in their villages, kept women in line the same way.

“Show us houses where we can stay,” Leudast repeated. “Otherwise, we will pick the houses ourselves.” Arnulf’s face stayed blank. Leudast tried again, substituting choose for pick. The firstman got it then. He didn’t like it, but he got it.

Scowling more darkly than ever, he asked, “How many houses?”

Leudast had to relay that to Magnulf, who answered, “Five houses,” and held up his hand with the fingers spread. To Leudast, he said, “Two of our boys in each house and they won’t get tempted to try anything cute.”

“You will want food, too,” Arnulf said, as if hoping Leudast would contradict him. Leudast didn’t. Sighing, the firstman said, “The whole village will share in feeding you.” He started pointing at villagers.

All five of the ones he picked shouted and cursed and stomped their feet, none of which did them any good. Arnulf’s wife screeched something at them that Leudast, again, couldn’t quite follow. The villagers did, though, and fell silent. They might not like the idea of having Unkerlanters quartered among them, but they didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Arnulf’s wife, either.

“This village will go hungry if we have to feed you through the winter,” Arnulf said.

“Something worse will happen to you if you don’t,” Leudast told him. He got another vicious glare for that.

The villager whose hut he and Gernot went to take over had sons too young to have fought in the war. His wife was severely plain. However unhappy they looked, however hard they pretended not to understand Leudast’s stabs at Forthwegian, they would have been more worried and surly still had they had daughters. Leudast was sure of that. Maybe Arnulf hadn’t chosen only people he disliked.

Gernot complained about the porridge and cheese and black bread and almonds and salted olives they got to eat. “What’s wrong with this stuff?” Leudast asked, puzzled. “Better than our rations, and that’s the truth.” He’d grown up eating just this sort of food.

“Boring.” Gernot rolled his eyes. “Very boring.” Leudast shrugged. His belly was full. He’d never found that boring.

After a few days, he might have been living back in his own village, except he didn’t have to work so hard here. No one had to work so hard as a peasant, not even a soldier. The squad patrolled the surrounding countryside—they weren’t far from Algarvian-occupied Forthweg—and returned to eat and rest and amuse themselves. The villagers didn’t love them, but their loathing grew less overt.

Leudast liked that. Magnulf didn’t. “It’s like they’re waiting for something to go wrong,” the veteran sergeant said. “When it does…”

A couple of days later, it did. A Forthwegian girl stood in the village square, screaming that one of the Unkerlanter troops had forced her to lie with him. Rather to Leudast’s surprise, she didn’t accuse Gernot but a common soldier named Huk who’d always seemed too lazy to violate anyone. And Huk denied it now, saying she’d freely given herself to him and started screaming only when he wouldn’t pay.