Out of the Darkness

“Thank you so much, Major Simao, for informing me of this,” Lurcanio said, acid in his voice. “Without your telling me, I never should have noticed.”

Simao turned almost as red as his hair. “Your attitude, Colonel, is not helpful,” he said reproachfully.

Pride and annoyance rang in Lurcanio’s voice: “Why should I be helpful? I see the men I commanded being freed from this captives’ camp, and I see myself still confined. What I fail to see is the reason for it. I should like to return to Albenga as quickly as possible. My county is under Unkerlanter occupation, and I want to do everything I can to protect the people from King Swemmel’s savages.”

“You are speaking of my kingdom’s allies,” Simao said, more stiffly than ever.

“The more shame to you,” Lurcanio retorted.

“You are most uncooperative,” the Lagoan said.

Lurcanio threw his arms wide. “I have surrendered. I will not go back to war if you turn me loose. What more do you want? Do you ask me to love you? There, I fear, you ask for too much.”

“That is not the issue,” Simao said. “You spoke of your county under Unkerlanter occupation. My kingdom has a request from Valmiera to return you to Priekule to answer for what you did there while Algarve was the occupying power.”

“How thoroughly barbarous,” Lurcanio said, using scorn to hide the unease prickling through him. “The war is over. Will you blame me for fighting on my kingdom’s side?”

Major Simao shook his head. “No, Colonel. We have investigated that. When you were in the field, you fought as a soldier should fight. When you were on occupation duty, however.. Does the phrase ‘Night and Fog’ mean anything to you?”

That unease curdled into outright fear. How much did Simao know of the quiet, vicious war between occupiers and occupied? How much of it had been war, and how much murder? Lurcanio didn’t precisely know himself. He wondered if anyone else did.

“You do not answer my question, Colonel,” Simao said sharply.

“I’ve heard the phrase,” Lurcanio said. If he denied even that much, he was too likely to be proved a liar. “One heard all sorts of things during the war- don’t forget, I spent four years in Priekule. I fathered a child there, and not, I assure you, in a rape. That may be one reason for the Valmierans’ malice.”

Simao shrugged. “Then you object to being returned to Priekule?”

“Of course I object!” Lurcanio said. “You Lagoans and the Kuusamans- aye, and the Unkerlanters-beat us in battle. You earned the right to dictate to us. But the Valmierans?” He made a horrible face.

“Or is it that Algarve thought she would never have to answer for what she did there?” Simao asked. Before Lurcanio could answer, the Lagoan went on, “And, of course, there were the massacres of Kaunians from Forthweg-and other Kaunians from Valmiera and Jelgava-when you aimed your sorcery across the Strait of Valmiera at my island.”

“I know nothing of any of that,” Lurcanio said, which was a lie he thought he could get away with. He really didn’t know much about such things. He also hadn’t gone out of his way to find out. Better not to ask where groups of people pulled out of gaols were going.

Major Simao scribbled something on a leaf of paper. “I have noted your objection,” he said. “You will be notified as to whether it is heeded.”

“How?” Lurcanio asked. “Will you drag me out of here and haul me off to Valmiera?”

“Probably,” the Lagoan answered. “You are dismissed.”

As Lurcanio left the makeshift office in the captives’ camp, another worried-looking Algarvian officer went in. I wonder what he did during the war, Lurcanio thought. I wonder how much he’ll have to pay for it. We had our revenge on our enemies-and now they’re having theirs on us.

He mooched around the camp. More often than not, time hung heavy here. Even the interview, however unpleasant, had broken routine. He could look up to the sky of his kingdom, but more than a palisade separated him and his fellow captives from the rest of Algarve. Outside the camp, his countrymen had begun to rebuild. Here. .

Lurcanio shook his head. Rebuilding would come here last. Memory and misery reigned here, nothing else. Algarvian soldiers walked as aimlessly as Lurcanio did himself. For close to six years, they’d done everything they could do, and what had it got them? Nothing. Less than nothing. They’d had a thriving kingdom before the war. Now Algarve lay in ruins, and all her neighbors despised her.

“… So we made the feint from the front, and when the Unkerlanters bit on it, we hit ‘em from behind,” one scrawny captive was telling another. “We cleaned ‘em out of that village neat as you please.”

His pal nodded. “Aye, that’s good. Those whoresons never did pay enough attention to anything that wasn’t right under their noses.”

One of them had two bars under his wound badge, the other three. They went on hashing over the fights they’d been through as if those battles still meant something, as if other Algarvian soldiers remained in the field to take advantage of what they’d so painfully learned. Lurcanio wondered how long the war would stay uppermost in their thoughts. He wondered if it would ever be anything but uppermost.

I’m lucky, he thought. I was only in the field for the early campaigns, and then at the end. In between, I had those four civilized years in Priekule. It wasn’t so much that his body had come through unscarred, though he was anything but sorry to have escaped the enormous grinding battles in the west: a great many men had gone from Valmiera to fight in Unkerlant, and precious few ever came back again. But Lurcanio hadn’t had the war branded on his spirit to the same degree as most of his fellow captives.

He shrugged an elaborate, Algarvian shrug. I don’t think I have, anyway. He’d spent most of his nights in Priekule in his own bed or, more pleasantly, in Krasta’s. Instead of warring with a stick, he’d fought his battles against the Valmieran irregulars with a pen.

And I won most of them, he thought. The kingdom had stayed quiet, or quiet enough, under Algarve’s heel till the situation in the west and in Jelgava grew too desperate to let the occupiers stay. For a moment, he took pride in that. But then he shrugged again. What difference did it make? No matter how well he’d done his job, his kingdom had lost the war. That mattered. The other didn’t.

Two days later, he was summoned from the ranks of the captives at morning roll call. His wasn’t the only name the Lagoan guard called out. About a dozen men, most of them officers but with two or three sergeants among them, stepped forward.

Major Simao came out of the administrative center. “You men have been ordered remanded to Valmieran custody for investigation of murders and other acts of cruelty and barbarism inflicted on the said kingdom during its occupation by Algarve,” Simao droned, his mumbling, nasal Lagoan accent making the bureaucratic announcement even harder to follow.

But Lurcanio understood what it was all too likely to mean. “I protest!” he said. “How can we hope to get a fair investigation from the Valmierans? They want to kill us under form of law.”

“How many of them did you kill without bothering with form of law?” Simao said coldly. “Your protest is denied.”

Lurcanio hadn’t expected much else. But the speed-and the relish-with which Simao rejected his appeal were illuminating. He’d known the kingdoms allied against his own hated Algarvians. Seeing that hatred in action, though, showed him how deep it ran.

As the Lagoans marched the captives out of the camp and toward wagons that would, Lurcanio supposed, take them to a ley-line caravan depot, one of the sergeants said, “Well, we’re futtered royal and proper. Only question is whether they blaze us or hang us or drop us in the stewpot.”

“Valmierans don’t do that,” Lurcanio said. But then he added, “Of course, by the look of things, they might make an exception for us.”

“That’s right.” The sergeant nodded. “But I’ll tell you something else, sir: they can only get me once, and I got a lot more’n one o’ those stinking blond bastards.”

“Good for you,” Lurcanio said. Algarvian bravado ran deep. He hoped he would be able to keep it up himself when he needed it most.

Sure enough, the wagon ride-with as many Lagoan soldiers as captives: a compliment of sorts-took them to a small depot. The soldiers stood watch over them till an eastbound ley-line caravan came up and stopped. One of