Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

Uto promised. He always promised. A four-year-old’s oaths were written on the wind. Pekka knew it. She took a duck from the rest crate. The Kaunians had developed that spell, and used it for paralyzing their foes—till both they and their neighbors found countermeasures for it. After that, it lay almost forgotten for centuries until, with greater understanding of exactly how it worked, modern researchers began applying it both to medicine and to preserving food. In the rest box, the plucked and gutted duck would have stayed fresh for many weeks.

Glazed with cranberry jam, it had just gone into the oven when something fell over with a crash. Pekka shut the oven door, splashed water on her hands, and hurried off to see what sort of atrocity Uto had committed this time.

Garivald was weeding—exactly what he was supposed to be doing—when King Swemmel’s inspectors paid his village a visit. The inspectors wore rock-gray tunics, as if they were Unkerlanter soldiers, and strode along as if they were kings themselves. Garivald knew what he thought of that, but letting them know wouldn’t have been efficient. Very much the reverse, in fact.

One of the inspectors was tall, the other short. But for that, they might have been stamped from the same mold. “You!” the tall one called to Garivald. “What’s the harvest going to look like here?”

“Still a little too early to tell, sir,” Garivald answered, as any man with an ounce—half an ounce—of sense would have done. Rain as the barley and rye were being gathered would be a disaster. It would be an even worse disaster than it might have otherwise, because the inspectors and their minions would cart off Swemmel’s share no matter what, leaving the village to get by on the remainder, if there was any.

“Still a little too early to tell,” the short one repeated. His accent said he came right out of Cottbus, the capital. In Garivald’s ears, it was harsh and choppy, well suited to its arrogant possessor. Southerners weren’t in such a big hurry when they opened their mouths. By talking slower, they made asses of themselves less often, too—or so they said when their overlords weren’t around to hear.

“If this whole Duchy of Grelz were more efficient all the way around, we’d be better off,” the tall one said.

If Swemmel’s men, and Kyot’s, hadn’t burned about every third village in the Duchy of Grelz back around the time Garivald was born, Unkerlant would have been better off. Being efficient was hard without a roof over your head in a southern winter. It was even harder with your fields trampled and your livestock stolen or killed. Even now, a generation later, the effects lingered.

The short inspector glared at Garivald, who had stayed on his knees and so was easy to look down on. “Don’t think you can cheat us by lying about how much you bring in, either,” he snapped. “We have ways of knowing. We have ways of making cheaters sorry, too.”

Garivald had to answer that. “I am only one farmer in this village, sir,” he said, genuine alarm in his voice now. He knew villages had vanished off the face of the earth after trying to hold out on Cottbus: that was the excuse King Swemmel’s men used once the dirty work was done, anyhow. He went on, “I have no way of knowing how much the whole village will bring in. The only one who could even guess would be Waddo, the firstman.” He’d never liked Waddo, and didn’t care what the inspectors did to him.

They both laughed, nastily. “Oh, he knows what we can do,” the tall one said. “Never fret yourself about that. But we want to make sure everyone else knows, too. That’s efficient, that is.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Everybody needs to know King Swemmel’s will, not just that ugly lump of a Waddo.”

“Aye, sir,” Garivald said, more warmly than he’d expected. If Swemmel’s inspectors could see that Waddo was an ugly lump, maybe they weren’t asses after all. No. That, surely, gave them too much credit. Maybe they weren’t such dreadful asses after all.

“A lot of men in this village,” the short one remarked. “A lot of young men in this village.” He jotted a note, then asked Garivald, “When did the impressers last visit here?”

“Sir, I don’t really recall, I’m afraid.” The peasant plucked a weed from the ground with altogether unnecessary violence.

“Inefficient.” The inspectors spoke together. Garivald didn’t know whether they meant him or the impressers or both at once. He hoped the village wouldn’t have to try to bring in the harvest with half the young men dragged into the army to go off and fight Gyongyos. He hoped even more that he wouldn’t be one of those young men.

“Does this powersforsaken place boast a crystal?” the tall inspector asked. “I didn’t see one in your firstman’s shack.”

Waddo owned the finest house in the village. Garivald wished his own were half so large. Waddo had even added on half a second story to give some of his children rooms of their own. Everyone thought that a citified luxury—everyone but the inspector, evidently. Garivald answered, “Sir, we don’t. We’re a long way from the closest ley line, and—’

’We know that,” the short inspector broke in. “I’m so saddle-sore, I can hardly walk.” He rubbed at his left buttock.

And we like it just fine, Garivald thought. That was one reason impressers and inspectors didn’t come round very often. Nobody hereabouts missed them. Nobody hereabouts missed anyone from Cottbus. In the olden days, the Duchy of Grelz—the Kingdom of Grelz, it had been then, till the Union of Thrones—had been the most important part of Unkerlant. Now the men from the hot, dusty north lorded it over their southern cousins. As far as Garivald was concerned, they could go away and never come back. Bandits, that’s what they were, nothing but bandits.

He wondered if they were efficient bandits. If they happened to suffer unfortunate accidents, would anyone track them down and take the kind of revenge for which Swemmel had become all too famous? His shoulders worked in a large shrug. He didn’t think the chance worth taking, worse luck. Odds were no one else in the village would, cither.

The inspectors went off to inflict themselves on someone else. As Garivald kept on pulling weeds, he imagined their stems were the inspectors’ necks. That sent him back to the village at the close of day in a better mood than he would have thought possible while the inspectors raked him over the coals.

He never thought to wonder what the place looked like to the men from the capital. To him, it was simply home: three or four lines of wooden houses with thatched roofs, and a blacksmith’s shop and a couple of taverns among them. Chickens roamed the dirt streets, pecking at whatever they could find. A sow in a muddy wallow between two houses looked out at Garivald and grunted. Dogs and children roamed the streets, too, sometimes chasing chickens, sometimes one another. He swatted at a fly that landed on the back of his neck. A moment later, another one bit him in the arm.

In winter, the flies died. In winter, though, the livestock would stay in the house with him and his family. That kept the beasts warm, and helped keep him and his wife and his boy and baby girl warm, too. Winters in Grelz were not for the fainthearted.

Annore was chopping up parsnips and rhubarb and throwing them into a stewpot full of barley and groats when he came into the house. “I’ll put in the blood sausages in a little while,” she said. When she smiled, he still saw some of the pert good looks that had drawn him to her half a dozen years before. Most of the time, though, she just looked tired.

Garivald understood that; he was bone-weary himself. “Any beer left in the bucket?” he asked.