Out of the Darkness

tramping west through Skrunda. Till they passed, Talsu, like everybody else, had to wait. People took waiting no better than they usually did. Someone behind him in the crowd complained, “We might as well still be occupied by the Algarvians.”

“Nonsense,” somebody else said. Talsu thought he would tell the first speaker what a fool he was, but he didn’t. Instead, he went on, “The Algarvians never wasted our time with this nonsense.”

“That’s right,” a woman said, nothing but indignation in her voice. “My cat is getting hungrier every minute, and here I am, stuck in the road because of all these foreigners going by.”

Talsu rolled his eyes. Powers above! he thought. We don’t deserve to be our own masters any more. We really don’t.

Behemoths lumbered along the street. Their armor seemed different from any that Talsu had seen on Algarvian behemoths or on the few the Jelgavans had put in the field, but he couldn’t put his finger on the difference. The little, swarthy soldiers on the behemoths reminded him more of the redheads than of his own folk. They grinned and joked as they went forward; that was obvious though he knew not a word of Kuusaman. They were men with their peckers up.

They felt like winners, which went a long way toward making them into winners. The Jelgavan army had always gone into a fight looking over its shoulder, wondering what might happen to it, not what it could do to the foe.

At last, the rear of the column went by-footsoldiers stepping carefully to avoid whatever the behemoths had left behind. The Jelgavans on both sides of the road who’d had to wait surged forward and made their own traffic jam. With a judicious elbow or two, Talsu got through it fairly fast. He wished he could have elbowed the woman with the hungry cat, but no such luck.

The Kuusamans heading west to fight the redheads weren’t the only ones in town. A short, slant-eyed fellow who looked to have drunk too much wine lurched down the street with his arm around the waist of a giggling girl who wore a barmaid’s low-cut tunic and tight trousers. A few months before, had she been giving the Algarvians her favors? Talsu wouldn’t have bet more than a copper against it.

In a way, we are still occupied, he thought. Oh, the Kuusamans-and the Lagoans farther south-didn’t treat the people of Jelgava the way the Algarvians had. But if they wanted something-as that drunken trooper had wanted what the barmaid had to give-they were probably going to get it. Talsu sighed. He didn’t know what to do about that, except to hope Jelgava somehow could become strong enough to make foreigners take her seriously.

And how long will I have to wait for that? he wondered. Can we ever do it while King Donalitu sits on the throne? He had his doubts.

A new broadsheet he passed only made those doubts worse, CONCERNING TRAITORS, its big print declared, and it went on to define traitors as anyone who’d had anything at all to do with the Algarvians throughout the four years of occupation. By what it said, practically everyone in the kingdom was subject to arrest if his name happened to come to the notice of Donalitu’s constabulary.

He’ll have to leave a few people free, Talsu thought. Otherwise, who would build the dungeons he’d need to hold the whole fornicating kingdom? He laughed, but on second thought it wasn’t very funny. Captives could probably build as well as free men, if enough guards stood over them with sticks.

“Ah, good,” Krogzmu said when Talsu showed up with the trousers. “Let me just try them on. . ” He disappeared. When he came back, he was beaming. Not only did he pay Talsu the silver he owed without being asked, he gave him a clay jar of olive oil to take home, adding, “This is some of what I squeeze for my own family. This is not what I sell.”

Talsu’s mouth watered. “Thank you very much. I know it’ll be good.” His own father did good tailoring for everyone, but better than good for his own household.

“Good?” He might have insulted Krogzmu. “Is that all you can say? Good! You wait here.” The oil dealer disappeared back into his house. He returned a moment later with a chunk of bread and snatched the jar of oil out of Talsu’s hands. Yanking out the stopper, he poured some oil on the bread, then thrust it at Talsu. “There! Taste that, and then you tell me if it’s just good.”

“You don’t need to ask me twice.” Talsu took a big bite. It was either that or get olive oil smeared all over his face. The next sound he made was wordless but appreciative. The oil was everything he could have hoped it would be and then some: sharp and fruity at the same time. It made him think of men on tall ladders in the autumn plucking olives from green-gray-leafed branches to fall on tarpaulins waiting below.

“What do you say to that?” Krogzmu demanded.

“What do I say? I say I wish you’d given me more,” Talsu told him. Krogzmu beamed. That apparently satisfied him. To Talsu’s disappointment, the praise didn’t get him a second jar of that marvelous oil.

He headed home. Again, he had to wait in the middle of town. This time, though, the procession wasn’t Kuusaman soldiers heading west to fight King Mezentio’s men. It was hard-faced Jelgavans in the uniform of King Donalitu’s elite constabulary leading along a motley collection of captives. The captives weren’t Algarvians; they were every bit as blond as the constables, as blond as Talsu was himself.

A chill ran through him. Maybe Donalitu and his henchmen wouldn’t have any trouble finding enough dungeons after all.

Ealstan had imagined a great many ways he might return to Gromheort. He might have come after the war ended, bringing Vanai and Saxburh to meet his mother and father and sister. He might have come back to make sure Elfryth and Hestan and Conberge were all right, and then returned to Eoforwic to bring his wife and little daughter to them. He might even have come as part of a triumphant Forthwegian army, driving the Algarvians before him.

Coming to Gromheort as part of a triumphant Unkerlanter army that cared little, if at all, for anything Forthwegian had never once crossed his mind. Nor had he thought the Algarvians would do anything but pull out of Gromheort once they faced overwhelming force. That they might pull back into his home town and stand siege there. . No, he hadn’t thought of that, not in his wildest nightmares.

But that was just what the redheads had done, and they’d thrown back several Unkerlanter efforts to break into Gromheort. By now, Mezentio’s men trapped inside the city couldn’t retreat into Algarve even if they’d wanted to. The Unkerlanter ring around Gromheort was twenty miles thick, maybe thirty. The Algarvians had only two choices: they could fight till they ran out of everything, or they could yield.

Unkerlanter officers under flag of truce had already gone into Gromheort twice, demanding a surrender. The Algarvians had sent them away both times, and so Ealstan sprawled in a field somewhere between Oyngestun and Gromheort, peering toward his home town.

Gromheort’s wall had been more a formality than a defense for several generations. He knew that perfectly well. But seeing so many chunks of the wall bitten away by bursting eggs still hurt. What hurt worse was being unable to tell his comrades why it hurt. For one thing, they had trouble understanding him, and he them. Forthwegian and Unkerlanter were related languages, but they were a long way from identical. And, for another, they wouldn’t have cared anyhow. Gromheort was nothing to them but one more foreign town they had to take.

Whistles shrilled. Officers along the line shouted, “Forward!” That word wasn’t much different in Unkerlanter from its Forthwegian equivalent. Even if it had been, Ealstan would have been quick to figure out what it meant.

He didn’t want to advance. He wanted to go back to Eoforwic, to Vanai and Saxburh. But one Unkerlanter word he had learned was the one for efficiency. In their own brutal way, Swemmel’s men did their best to practice what they preached. Hard-faced fellows with sticks in their hands waited not far behind the line. Any soldier who tried to retreat without orders got blazed on the spot. Soldiers who went forward had at least a chance of coming through alive. The argument was crude, but it was also logical.

“Up!” a sergeant screamed. Sergeants didn’t get whistles, but soldiers had to do as they said anyhow. Ealstan got up and trotted forward with the rest of the men in rock-gray.

Rock-gray dragons swooped low overhead, eggs slung under their bellies. The eggs burst in front of and inside Gromheort. Ealstan didn’t know what to think about that. It made him more likely to live and his kinsfolk more likely to die. He wanted to give up thinking altogether.

“Behemoths!” That shout came in Unkerlanter. The word was nothing like its Forthwegian equivalent, which