Out of the Darkness

men in the mines horrible slop. He counted himself lucky when he found bits of turnip in the stew. As often as not, what he got were nettle leaves. He could have done more work with better food, but Swemmel’s men didn’t seem to care about that. And why should they have? They had plenty of people to take his place.

Behind him, an Algarvian said, “I’m too bloody worn to eat.”

He won’t last long, Ceorl thought. Men who gave up, who didn’t shovel every bit of food they could into themselves no matter how vile it was, quickly turned up their toes and died. Sooner or later, Ceorl was convinced, everyone in the mines would die; the Unkerlanters had set up the system with extermination in mind. But he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of making it easy.

The queue snaked forward. Ceorl thrust his tin toward the cooks behind their vats of stew. They were also captives. They had it soft, as far as anyone here did. At the very least, they were unlikely to starve to death. They’d probably had to sell their souls-and, for all Ceorl knew, their bodies, too-to get where they were. He didn’t care. He wanted the same chance.

“Fill it up,” he said, a phrase similar in Unkerlanter and Forthwegian. And the cook did, digging his ladle deep down into the big pot to give Ceorl the best of what there was. Ceorl hadn’t been here long, but he’d already got a name for himself as a man who wouldn’t tamely yield up his life.

The luckless Algarvian behind him got mostly water in his mess tin. He didn’t even complain. He just went off to find a spot where he could spoon it up. He would probably leave it unfinished, too. Someone else would get what he left. Before long, he would leave, feet first.

In the refectory, Sudaku was holding a space for Ceorl. “Thanks,” the ruffian said, and sat down beside the blond from Valmiera. Sudaku had a good thick bowl of stew, too; people knew he was Ceorl’s right-hand man.

“Another happy day, eh?” Sudaku said.

“Bugger happy. We got through it.” Ceorl shoveled stew into himself the same way he’d shoveled ore for so long. “It’ll be better tomorrow,” he went on. “The supervisor who’s on then doesn’t know anything. Powers above, he doesn’t even suspect anything. We won’t have to work so hard.”

“Quota,” Sudaku said doubtfully.

Scorn filled Ceorl’s laugh. “The Unkerlanters talk about efficiency, but they fornicating lie. They don’t keep quota, either. I know they lie about that.”

“Something to what you say,” Sudaku admitted. Ceorl wanted to laugh again, this time at the blond. Sudaku was a trusting soul, an honest man or something close to it-not far from a fool, the way Ceorl reckoned things. But he was strong and brave, and he’d had his eyes opened for him in the desperate fighting of the last few months of the war. Anyone who came through that without learning from it would have deserved whatever happened to him.

“Come on,” Ceorl said. “Let’s get back to the barracks. We’ve got to keep watch on things, or else we’re in trouble.”

“Right.” Sudaku didn’t doubt that. Nobody in his right mind could doubt it. Only the strong had any hope of lasting here. If you didn’t show your strength, you often couldn’t keep it.

Bunks in the barracks were in tiers that went up four high. In the warmth of the brief southern summer, where a man slept didn’t matter so much. But Ceorl had been through Unkerlanter winters. He and the gang from Plegmund’s Brigade he headed had taken bunks close by the coal stove in the middle of the hall. They’d taken them and defended them with fists and boots and improvised knives. When they settled down for the night now, nobody troubled them.

On the other side of the stove, a group of Algarvian captives had carved out a similar niche for themselves. Their leader was a burly fellow whose faded, tattered uniform didn’t quite match those of the soldiers alongside whom Ceorl had fought. That didn’t mean the ruffian was ignorant of what sort of uniform it was.

“Ha, Oraste!” he called. “Throw anybody in gaol lately?”

“Futter you, Ceorl,” the redhead replied without rancor. “You’d have done better if somebody had jugged you. Sooner or later, they’d’ve let you out. But let’s see you get out of this.”

Ceorl gave back an obscene gesture. Oraste laughed at him, though the Algarvian’s eyes never lit up. Like any redhead, Oraste was indeed here for good. Even if he escaped the mines, he’d be hunted down in short order, for he stood out among the Unkerlanters like a crow among sea gulls. Because he couldn’t get away, he naturally thought nobody else could.

You’re not as smart as you think you are, Ceorl thought. Thinking themselves more clever than they really were-and than anybody else was-had always been the Algarvians’ besetting vice. But Ceorl looked like anybody else around these parts. Forthwegian wasn’t impossibly far removed from Unkerlanter. If he managed to escape, he thought he could stay free.

A couple of Unkerlanter thieves swaggered into the barracks, each with some of his followers in train. They waved to Ceorl and to Oraste as equals. Their gangs held the other bunks close by the stove. They’d made as much of their captivity as they could. Even the guards treated them with respect.

They and their henchmen took their places. Beyond, back toward the walls, came Algarvian captives and Unkerlanters who didn’t belong to any of the principal gangs in the barracks. They were the luckless ones, the spiritless ones, who would soon lose the battle for survival. And as they died off, new men, just as lost, would pour in to take their places. Ceorl knew a sort of abstract admiration for King Swemmel. He made sure he was never short of captives.

Between supper and lights-out, men gossiped, told stories-told lies-about what they’d done in the war (except for who was talking about whom, and in which language, those of Algarvians and Unkerlanters sounded very much alike, and nobody cared who’d been on which side-here in the Mamming Hills, they were all losers), gambled, and passed around jars of clandestinely brewed spirits. Some of them, especially those beginning to fail, fell asleep as soon as they could and stayed asleep in spite of all the noise the others made.

Ceorl had learned better than to roll dice with Oraste. He couldn’t prove the redhead’s dice were crooked, but he’d lost to him too often to believe it nothing but chance. He didn’t say anything as Oraste started fleecing a young Unkerlanter too new here to know better than to accept such invitations. Ceorl didn’t care what happened to the Unkerlanter, and he was curious about how Oraste cheated so smoothly.

He didn’t find out that night, any more than he had when the redhead had taken his money. After a while, even though the sky remained pale-which it would do through most of the night-a guard came in and shouted, “Lights out!”

That meant shuttering the windows, too, so that something approaching real darkness filled the barracks. Ceorl lay down on his bottom bunk, which boasted one of the thickest mattresses in the building. He’d made himself as comfortable, as well off, as one of Swemmel’s captives could be. Things could have been a lot worse-he even knew that. He also knew it wasn’t remotely close to being enough. He would break out if he ever found the chance.

As usual, he slept hard. The next thing he knew, the guards were screaming at the captives to get out of their bunks and line up for roll call. Routine there hadn’t changed since the captives’ camp outside of Trapani. Ceorl took his place, waited to sing out when his name was called, and wondered if the Unkerlanters would make a hash of the count, which they did about one day in three. Efficiency, he thought, and laughed a mocking laugh.

To complicate things, a ley-line caravan full of new captives chose that moment to arrive in the barracks. The guards bringing in the new fish and those trying to keep track of the ones already there started screaming at one another, each group blaming the other for its troubles. Ceorl spent his time eyeing the newcomers.

Most of them looked to be Unkerlanter soldiers-or rather, former Unkerlanter soldiers. No, Swemmel wasn’t shy about jugging his own people, any more than he’d been shy about murdering his own people when the Algarvians started killing Kaunians. Swemmel wanted results, and he got them.

No one cared about roll call for a while. The captives just stood there. Had it been winter, they would have stood there till they froze. Nobody dared ask permission to go to breakfast. Eating before roll call and the count were done was unimaginable. In fact, they didn’t have breakfast at all. The delay just meant they went straight to the mines. If they had nothing in their bellies, too bad.

Ceorl shoveled cinnabar ore into a handbarrow. When it was full, another captive lugged it away. Shoveling wasn’t so bad as chipping cinnabar out of the vein with picks and crowbars. It also wasn’t so bad as working in the refinery where quicksilver was extracted from some of the cinnabar. Despite sorcery, quicksilver fumes killed the men who worked there long before their time.