Out of the Darkness

guards got noticed. Dragons circled low overhead. Teams of guards swept through the hills. Had Ceorl and Fariulf not learned their trade in a harder school than this, they might have been taken that first day. As things were, they stayed hidden in scrubby bushes, and pushed north after nightfall. Fariulf did have food of his own, which was as well, for Ceorl had no intention of giving him any of his.

To Ceorl’s amazement, Fariulf had no idea where in his own kingdom the Mamming Hills lay. “Once we get over the Wolter, we’ll be back in regular country, without all these bastards snooping around,” Ceorl said.

“Inspectors are everywhere,” Fariulf told him sadly.

The warning made Ceorl fight shy of approaching the few herdsmen he saw in the hills. Perhaps it didn’t make him wary enough, though. He and Fariulf were nearing the Wolter when dogs started baying close behind them. A moment later, men shouted, their voices harsh as crows’ caws. “They’ve seen us!” Fariulf said, panic in his voice.

Ceorl shoved the Unkerlanter away. “Split up!” he said. “It’ll be harder for them to catch us both.” What he expected was that the pursuer would go after Fariulf, for the other man wasn’t so good in open country as he was himself. Maybe Fariulf had been an irregular, but he hadn’t learned enough.

So Ceorl thought. But the men in rock-gray came after him instead. Some of them were veterans, too. He could tell by the way they spread out and came forward in waves, making him keep his head down.

He blazed one at close range anyhow, then whirled and blazed another. When he whirled again, a beam caught him in the chest. As he crumpled, he thought, Maybe living in a cage wouldn’t have been so bad after all. But, as he’d given no second chances, he got none. Darkness swallowed him.

Garivald stared at the Wolter. He’d never imagined a river could be so wide-he hadn’t been able to see out when the ley-line caravan car took him over it to the mine in the Mamming Hills. He wasn’t a bad swimmer, but knew he would drown if he tried to cross it. If he stayed here on the south bank, the guards would hunt him down. He was sure of that, too, even if they hadn’t pursued him after he left Ceorl.

I need a boat, he thought. He saw none, though at night that proved little: a big one might have been tied up a quarter of a mile away, and he would never have known it. He doubted one was; Swemmel’s men knew more about efficiency than to make things easy for their captives. A raft, he thought. A tree trunk. Anything to keep me afloat.

He wondered what he would do even if he got to the far bank of the Wolter. He had no money. He had nothing, in fact, except his boots, the ragged tunic on his back, and a rapidly dwindling store of bread. Before long, he would have to start stealing food from the local peasants and herders. If he did that, he knew he wouldn’t last long.

He wrapped brush around himself-a miserable bed, but better than bare ground-and went to sleep. When I wake up, maybe everything will be all right, he thought. He had no idea why he’d come up with such a preposterous unlikelihood, but if he hadn’t believed it would he have tried to escape with the Forthwegian?

A shout, thin in the distance, threw him out of sleep a little before sunrise the next day. He sprang up, ready to flee. Had they found his trail after all?

But the shout came from the river, not the land: Garivald realized as much when he heard it again, this time fully conscious. He stared out toward the Wolter. His jaw dropped. He began giggling, as if suddenly stricken mad.

Maybe I was, he thought giddily. Maybe I’m not really seeing this. He’d hoped for a tree trunk, to help him cross the river. Never in all the days of the world, he told himself, had such a hope been so extravagantly fulfilled.

Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands-for all Garivald knew, millions-of felled trees floated on the Wolter, drifting downstream toward. . what? Sawmills, he supposed. He wondered why anyone would have cared to build sawmills on a river sure to freeze up in winter. Maybe those sawmills were like the mines: a scheme to get some use out of captives instead of just killing them outright. Or maybe King Swemmel had simply pointed at a map and said, “Build sawmills here.” If he had, the sawmills would have gone up, regardless of whether the Wolter froze.

Here and there, tiny in the distance, insignificant among the countless trunks of the floating forest, men with poles rode logs, somehow staying upright. Now and again, they would use the poles to keep the tree trunks from jamming together. It was one of their shouts that Garivald had heard.

He didn’t waste more than a couple of minutes gawping. How long would that seemingly endless stream of trees endure? If it passed without his taking advantage of it, how long would he have to wait till another one came down the Wolter? Too long-he was sure of that.

When he got down to the riverbank, he shed his boots, pulled his tunic off over his head, and plunged into the Wolter. Although it flowed from down out of the warmer north, its waters still chilled him. He struck out toward the immense swarm of logs.

Before long, Garivald wondered if he’d made a dreadful mistake. Going from log to log across the river hadn’t seemed so hard till he tried it. Not getting crushed by all that floating, drifting timber was a lot harder than he’d imagined.

He’d made it perhaps halfway through the logs when one of the men riding herd on them spotted him. “What in blazes are you doing here, you son of a whore?” the fellow bawled.

“Getting away from the mines,” Garivald shouted back. If the log-rider came over to try to seize him, he’d do his best to drown the man.

But the fellow with the pole only waved when he heard that. “Good luck, pal,” he said. “Me, I never saw you. My brother went into the mines almost ten years ago, and he never came out.”

Powers above, there are some decent people in this kingdom after all, Garivald thought as he went on toward the far bank of the Wolter. After the way he’d got dragged into the army-and after the way he’d been seized coming out of it- he’d had his doubts. He couldn’t dwell on that, though, for he had to scramble to keep an oncoming log from crushing him to jelly against the one he was riding.

He went from one log to another. And then, quite suddenly, no more logs remained between him and the far bank, which was now the near bank. He swam till his feet hit bottom. Then he waded ashore and re-donned his sodden tunic and even soggier boots. His belly growled; the bread hadn’t survived the trip across the Wolter. He trudged away from the stream, hoping to find a road or a village.

When he saw a man working in a field, he waved and called, “I’ll do whatever you need for a supper and a chance to sleep in a barn.”

The farmer looked him over. He still wasn’t dry, nor anywhere close to it. “What happened to you?” the fellow asked. “Looks like you fell in a creek.”

“Oh, you might say so,” Garivald agreed dryly-his words made the grade, even if he didn’t.

Or so he thought, till the farmer screwed up his face and said, “You’re not from around these parts, I don’t reckon.”

“No.” Garivald admitted what he could hardly deny-he did sound like a Grelzer. He came out with the best excuse he could: “I’m just anothersoldier who got dumped in the wrong place trying to get back to my own farm and my own woman.”

“Huh.” The local looked toward the Wolter. There was, Garivald realized, bound to be a reward for men who turned in escaped captives. But the farmer said, “So you’ve got a place of your own, eh? Well, prove it.”

After grubbing cinnabar out of a vein with pick and crowbar, farm work wasn’t so bad. When the sun swung to the west, Garivald followed the farmer back to his hut. He got a big bowl of barley porridge with onions and dill and sausage, and a mug of ale to wash it down. Set beside the little bricks of bread and famine stews in the mines, it seemed the best meal he’d ever eaten.

He did sleep in an outbuilding, next to a couple of cows. He didn’t care. When morning came, the farmer gave him another bowl of porridge, a length of sausage to take with him, and a couple of coins. Tears came to Garivald’s eyes. “I can’t pay this back,” he said.

“Pay it forward,” the local told him. “Someday you’ll run into another poor bastard down on his luck. Now go on, before somebody gets a good look at you.”

Day by day, Garivald worked his way north and east, toward the Duchy of Grelz. Most people, he thought, took him for an escapee, but no one turned him in to Swemmel’s inspectors. He got meals. He got money. He got shelter. And he got a good look at what the war had done to this part of Unkerlant. What he’d seen in Grelz