Through the Darkness d-3 Read online

  Till he heard that, Sidroc would have bet he was too worn to want anything to do with food. His belly had other ideas. Somehow it propelled him forward, so that he was third in line and had his tin mess kit out and waiting. Ceorl was right behind him, and chuckled a little. “Wiglaf’s going to miss supper, too.”

  “Too bad.” Sidroc had scant sympathy to waste on anyone but Sidroc. “If he’s not worth anything in drills, odds are he won’t be worth anything in a fight, either.”

  He held out the mess tray. A Forthwegian cook filled it with barley mush with onions and mushrooms and with a sharp, rather nasty cheese melted into it. Sidroc hardly cared what the stuff tasted like. He wolfed it down and could have eaten three times as much. He needed fuel for his belly no less than a baker needed it for his ovens.

  Somebody with a soft heart, or more likely a soft head, went off to share his supper with Wiglaf. Sidroc wouldn’t have done that. He didn’t suppose anyone would have done it for him, either. Expecting nothing from those around him, he seldom found himself disappointed.

  After supper came language drills. The Algarvians were even more ruthless than schoolmasters about pounding their language-or standard commands in it, anyhow-into the men of Plegmund’s Brigade. “You’ll be serving alongside Algarvians, likely under Algarvians,” the instructor growled at them. “If you don’t understand orders, you’ll get them killed-and yourselves, too, of course,” he added as if a few Forthwegians were of but small import.

  By the time language lessons ended, it was dark. Sidroc found his cot, pulled off his boots, and was instantly asleep.

  Clamor woke him. “Attack!” someone screamed. He put on his boots again, grabbed his kit, and stumbled, rubbing his eyes, out into the darkness.

  It was only another drill, of course. But he and his comrades had to respond to it as if it were real, and it bit time out of precious sleep as if it were real, too. When shrill whistles summoned the company to assembly the next morning, Sidroc felt more dead than alive.

  After roll call, he ate hard bread and cheap olive oil for breakfast. Breakfast was without a doubt the most relaxed meal of the day. He and his comrades gabbed and complained and told as many lies as they could think of.

  One thing they didn’t do: they didn’t ask why their tentmates, their squad-mates, had joined the Brigade. No one, Sidroc had discovered, did that. The rule was unwritten, but might have been all the stronger for that.

  He had no trouble seeing the reason behind it. Some men had taken service under Algarvian leadership for the sake of adventure or because they hated Unkerlanters. Sidroc knew that; volunteering information wasn’t against the rules. But some of the men in the Brigade were plainly ruffians or robbers or worse-he wouldn’t have wanted to meet Ceorl in a dark alley. For that matter, few people would have wanted to meet him in a dark alley, either.

  One thing united the men of the Brigade-and it, too, was a thing of which they did not speak. Sidroc knew-they all knew, they all had to know- most Forthwegians despised them for the choice they’d made. Sidroc didn’t care what most Forthwegians thought. So he told himself, over and over again. On a good day, he could make himself believe it… for a while.

  “Form up!” an Algarvian drillmaster called: another command delivered in standard form.

  The redhead, who carried a shouldered stick, marched his charges out of the camp. He pointed to a hill overgrown with bushes about half a mile away and switched to Forthwegian: “That’s the place you have to take. You have to be sneaky and sly. Do you understand me?”

  “Aye, sir!” Sidroc shouted with everyone else. “Sneaky and sly!”

  “Good.” The drillmaster nodded approval. “I’m going to turn my back for a while. When I turn around again, I don’t want to see you. If I do see you, I’ll try and blaze you. I won’t try to kill you, but my aim’s not perfect. You don’t want to make me do anything we’d both be sorry for later. Have you got that?”

  “Aye, sir!” Sidroc yelled again. He’d done this drill before. Once, the drill-master had come within a couple of inches of blazing off his nose. He didn’t want to give the Algarvian an excuse for doing it again. When the fellow ostentatiously turned his back, Sidroc dove into the bushes and did his best to disappear.

  He couldn’t just stay there, though. He had to move forward, to get up to the crest of the hill. He scrambled from one bush to another, rarely going from his belly up to his knees, never going from his knees to his feet. Before long, the drillmaster did start blazing. Somebody let out a shriek-a shriek of fear, not one of pain. The Algarvian laughed like a man having altogether too good a time.

  Sidroc drew only one beam as he crawled through the brush. It wasn’t even a near miss. He felt good at attracting so little notice. One thing the Algarvians had made very plain during these endless drills: Plegmund’s Brigade would be going where people would do their level best to kill everyone in it.

  From bush to boulder to tree stump to bush to … at last, the top of the hill. Sidroc looked down at himself. He’d got filthy on the way, but he didn’t care. For one thing, that proved he was doing a good job. For another, someone else would have to wash his long tunic.

  Another member of the brigade, a corporal named Waleran, emerged from cover a moment after Sidroc did. He was good; Sidroc hadn’t had the least idea he was there till he showed himself. “That’s a fine exercise,” he said, flicking a drop of sweat from the end of his nose. “They never worked us so hard in King Penda’s levy, and that’s the truth.”

  “No, eh?” Sidroc said. If Waleran was a veteran, that helped explain how he’d got to be a corporal. “If they had, maybe Forthweg would’ve done better.”

  “Aye, it could be so,” Waleran agreed. “It could indeed. But I’ll tell you this, boy-we’ll go through the Unkerlanters like a hot knife through butter.”

  Sidroc nodded. He was sure of the same thing himself. If he’d doubted it, would he have joined Plegmund’s Brigade in the first place? He had no use for Unkerlanters, any more than he did for Kaunians or (except when it came to fighting) Algarvians or anyone else who wasn’t a Forthwegian. But he said, “King Swemmel’s in charge of an awful lot of butter.”

  “Well, what if he is?” Waleran said scornfully. “We’ll just have more to go through, that’s all. And I’ll tell you something else, too.” He waited till Sidroc leaned toward him, then went on, “I don’t think it’ll be long before we get the chance, either.” Sidroc clapped his hands together. He could hardly wait.

  Some of the farms around the village of Pavilosta had a new hand or two working on them. Merkela’s did. As for Skarnu, he was glad to have extra help, and especially glad the help came from Forthwegian Kaunians who’d been on their way to almost certain destruction.

  These days, Raunu slept downstairs in the farmhouse, leaving the barn for Vatsyunas and Pernavai, a husband-and-wife pair who’d managed to stay together when the ley-line caravan carrying them got wrecked. “You’ll have to find yourself a lady friend, too,” Skarnu teased him one day while they were weeding together. “Then you’ll have somewhere better to sleep than a rolled-up blanket in front of the fire. Powers above, if I managed to find somebody, cursed near anyone can.”

  The veteran underofficer snorted. “A blanket suits me fine, Captain,” he answered. “As for the ladies, well, if you know a blind one, she might think I suited well enough.” He ran a hand over his tough, battered features.

  “You’re not homely,” Skarnu said, on the whole sincerely. “You’re … distinguished-looking, that’s what you are.”

  Raunu snorted again. “And I’ll tell you what distinguishes me, too: that none of the ladies wants to look at me.”

  “Shows how much you know,” Skarnu answered. “Take Pernava, now. If she doesn’t reverence the ground you walk on. .”

  “It’s not the same.” Raunu shook his head. “She looks at you the same way. It’s because we took her and Vatsunu in instead of giving ‘em to the cursed redheads, that’s all.
It’s not because she’s hot for us. She isn’t-she’s got him instead.”

  Like Skarnu, he used the Valmieran forms of Pernavai and Vatsyunas’ names, not the classical versions they’d worn in Forthweg. Having ordinary names kept them from drawing Algarvian notice.

  And Skarnu had to admit the justice of Raunu’s comment. “All right,” he said, “but she’s not the only woman around, either.”

  “You’ve got a woman and you’re happy, so you think everybody needs one,” Raunu said. “Me, I’m fine without, thanks. And when the itch gets strong, I can go into Pavilosta and scratch it without spending a whole lot of silver.”

  Skarnu threw his hands in the air. “I’ll shut up,” he said. “This is one argument I’m not going to win-I can see that.” He picked up his hoe, which had fallen down between rows of ripening barley, and beheaded several dandelions growing in a little clump.

  “Don’t just let them lie there,” Raunu warned him. “Merkela’ll use the leaves for salad greens.”

  “I know.” Skarnu picked up the dandelions and stuffed them into his belt pouch. “This farm was fine for two, and it’s done pretty well for three. Things are liable to be lean if it’s got to feed five, though. Every little bit helps.”

  “Pemava and Vatsunu don’t eat as much as two regular Valmierans would,” Raunu said. “They look at what Merkela sets out like they’ve never seen so much food in all their born days.”

  “By the look of them, they haven’t seen much food any time lately, that’s for sure,” Skarnu said, and Raunu nodded. Skarnu’s hand gripped the hoe handle as if it were an Algarvian’s neck. “And from what they say about the way the redheads treat our kind back in Forthweg …” He grimaced and hacked down some more weeds, these inedible.

  Raunu nodded, once more. “Aye. If I hadn’t wanted to go on fighting Mezentio’s men before, hearing the stories from Forthweg would tip me over the edge. Tip me? No, by the powers above-it’d throw me over the edge.”

  “Me, too,” Skarnu said. But not everyone felt that way. For the life of him, he couldn’t understand why. Some of the farmers around Pavilosta were only too glad to let the Algarvians have the Forthwegian Kaunians who’d escaped into the countryside when the ley-line caravan was sabotaged. Some of the local peasants let it go at that. Others went out of their way to betray fugitives to the redheads. Vatsyunas and Pernavai weren’t safe even here. If one of those locals should walk by and spy them working in Merkela’s fields. .

  If that happened, the Algarvians were all too likely to learn this farm was a center of local resistance. Logically, Skarnu supposed that meant he and Merkela and Raunu should have sent the Kaunian couple from Forthweg packing when they came out of the woods, lost and hungry and afraid. Somehow, logic hadn’t had much to do with it then.

  With shouldered hoes, Skarnu and Raunu trudged toward the farmhouse when the sun sank in the west. Vatsyunas was feeding the chickens, Pernavai weeding with Merkela in the herb garden near the house. Neither of them had known the first thing about farming. Before war swallowed Forthweg, he’d been a dentist and she’d taken care of their two children and those of several of their neighbors. They didn’t know where the children were now. The two girls hadn’t come out of the wreck of the ley-line caravan. Vatsyunas and Pernavai hoped they still lived, but didn’t sound as if they believed it.

  “And now they are come in, home from their moils and toils,” Vatsyunas said in what he thought was Valmieran. And so it was, after a fashion: Valmieran as it might have been spoken centuries before, when it remained much closer to classical Kaunian than it was these days. Neither the dentist nor his wife had known any of the modern language when they arrived. Now they could make themselves understood, but no one would ever believe Valmieran was their native tongue.

  Merkela got up and dusted off the knees of her trousers. “I’m going in to have a look at the stew,” she said. “I killed that hen-you know the one I mean, Skarnu, the one that wasn’t giving us more than an egg a week.”

  “Aye, that one’s better off dead,” Skarnu said. Merkela had made such calculations before. Now they took on a new urgency. If she was wrong too often, people would go hungry. The farm had less margin for error than before the fugitives came.

  Chicken stew, bread to sop up the gravy, ale. Peasant food, Skarnu thought. That was what he would have called it, the edge of a sneer in his voice, back in Priekule. He wouldn’t have been wrong, but the sneer would have been. It tasted good and filled his belly. Past that, what more could a man want? Nothing Skarnu could think of.

  Vatsyunas said, “I had liefer drink wine at meats, but”-he took a long pull at his cup of ale-”having gone so long without much in the way of either wine or aliment, I’m not fain to play the ungrateful cull the now.”

  Just listening to him made Skarnu smile. His speech improved week by week; eventually, Skarnu hoped, he would sound pretty much like everyone else. Meanwhile, he was a lesson in how the Valmieran language had got to be the way it was today.

  After another long draught, Vatsyunas set the cup down empty. He said, “What I am fain for is vengeance ‘gainst the scurvy coystril knaves, the flame-haired barbarians of Algarve, who used me so.” He looked from Raunu to Merkela to Skarnu. “Can it be done, without foolishly flinging away the life with which you gifted me anew on taking in my lady and me?”

  Pernavai spoke very quietly: “I too would have revenge on them.” She was so pale, she looked almost bloodless. Skarnu wondered what Mezentio’s men had done to her. Then he wondered if Vatsyunas knew everything the redheads had done to her. That was a question to which he doubted he’d find an answer.

  He didn’t quite know what to tell the escaped Kaunians from Forthweg, who didn’t know he’d been one of the people who’d wrecked the ley-line caravan that carried them. Cautiously, he said, “All of Valmiera cries out for vengeance against the Algarvians.”

  “No!” Pernavai and Vatsyunas spoke together. Her golden hair flew round her head as she shook it. Vatsyunas was bald, but somehow managed to look as if he were bristling even so. He said, “Did you speak sooth, why would the countryside not seethe with strife? Why are so many here so glad to give over to the red wolves their kinsfolk from the distant Occident?”

  “Why, an what we hear be true, do so many here give themselves to the conquerors body and soul?” Pernavai added.

  Her words were bitter as wormwood to Skarnu, who remembered the news sheet listing his sister with that Algarvian colonel. What did the whoreson call himself? Lurcanio, that was it. One day, Skarnu thought, I’ll have a reckoning with Krasta, But that would be true only if Lurcanio had no reckoning with him. Meanwhile-

  Meanwhile, Merkela spoke up while he was still contemplating his own embarrassment: “We have traitors, aye. When the time comes, we’ll give them what they deserve.” She raised her proud chin, drew a thumbnail across her throat, and made a horrible gargling noise. “Some have gotten it already.”

  “In sooth?” Vatsyunas breathed, and Merkela nodded. The dentist from Forthweg asked, “Know you, then at whose hands these treacherous wretches of whom you speak lie dead? Right gladly would I join with them, for to commence the requital of that which can never be requited.”

  “And I.” Pernavai spoke less than her husband, but sounded no less determined.

  Before either Skarnu or Merkela could answer, Raunu said, “Even if we knew anything about that, we’d have to be careful about saying very much. What people don’t know, nobody can squeeze out of ‘em.”

  “Think you we’d betray-?” Vatsyunas began angrily, but he fell silent when his wife touched his arm. They spoke back and forth in quick classical Kaunian, for them a birthspeech. As usual, Skarnu could make out words, but rarely sentences: as he seized one phrase, two more would slip past him. After perhaps half a minute, Vatsyunas returned to his archaism-littered version of Valmieran: “I am persuaded you have reason. I crave you pardon for mine earlier hasty speech.”

  “Don’t worry about
it.” Skarnu spoke as he might have in his days as an officer on pardoning a soldier for some minor offense.

  Vatsyunas gave him a measuring stare. Only then did he realize the Kaunian from Forthweg might have recognized that tone for what it was, and might have drawn his own conclusions from it. Skarnu decided that wasn’t so bad. If he could trust any man, he could trust Vatsyunas.

  If I can trust any man. Someone-someone who wore patriot’s mask-had betrayed the meeting of resistance leaders at Tytuvenai. No one knew who-or if anyone did, Skarnu hadn’t heard about it. He praised the powers above that no Algarvian patrol had swept down on this farm.

  Having Vatsyunas and Pernavai here made such a visit more likely. He knew as much. So did Merkela. So did Raunu. Skarnu poured himself more ale from the pitcher. Some risks weren’t just worth taking. Some had to be taken.

  Seven

  Colonel Lurcanio chucked Krasta under the chin. She hated that; it made her feel as if she were a child. But, from Lurcanio, she endured it. As the carriage rolled toward Valmiera’s royal palace, Lurcanio said, “This should be a gay gathering tonight.”

  “For you, maybe,” Krasta replied; Lurcanio gave her a longer leash for what she said than for what she did. “I don’t see the sport in watching King Gainibu crawl into a brandy bottle nose-first.”

  “Do you not, my sweet?” Lurcanio sounded genuinely surprised. “His father presided over Algarve’s humiliation after the Six Years’ War. Since the father is no longer among the living, we have to avenge ourselves on the son.” He chuckled. “With the way Gainibu drinks, I must say he helps.”

  The driver had no trouble tonight picking his way through Priekule’s dark avenues. As they pulled up in front of the palace, the redheaded soldier spoke to Lurcanio in their own language. Lurcanio laughed and said something back.

  He turned to Krasta. “He says he’s going to do some drinking, too, while he waits for us to come out. I told him he had my leave; it’s not as if he were a king, to do it on his own.”