Out of the Darkness

signature.

And so Ceorl had gone to fight in the south. For a while-all the way up through the battles in the Durrwangen bulge-he’d hoped he’d managed to cheat the judge, because Algarve had still had a chance to win the war. After that. . He shook his head. After that, it had been almost two years of hard, grinding retreat. He’d started out somewhere between Durrwangen and Sulingen, and ended up one of the last holdouts in the ruins of King Mezentio’s palace in Trapani.

Even then, the Unkerlanters hadn’t been able to kill him. Along with the other survivors from Plegmund’s Brigade, the blonds from the Phalanx of Valmiera sprinkled in among them, and the Algarvians who’d been stubborn enough to stick it out to the very end, he’d come forth with his hands high, sure enough, but also with his head high.

He turned to Sudaku. Aye, Sudaku was a stinking Kaunian, but he’d fought as well as anybody else this past year. In Algarvian-Sudaku had picked up some Forthwegian, but not a lot-Ceorl said, “The one thing I didn’t figure on was that Swemmel’s whoresons’d go right on having chances to do us in even after we surrendered.”

“Powers below eat me if I know why not,” Sudaku replied. “Did you think they would pat us on the bottom and tell us to go home and to be good little boys from here on out? Not likely.”

“Ah, futter you.” Ceorl spoke altogether without malice. He cursed as automatically as he breathed, and thought no more of one than of the other. He was a brick of a man, stocky even by Forthwegian standards, with bushy eyebrows, a big hooked nose, and a smile that usually looked like a sneer.

“The Unkerlanters are going to futter us all,” Sudaku said. “They can take their time about it now, but they’re going to do it.”

He was right, of course. Ceorl knew it. If he’d been on top of the world, he would have paid back everybody who’d ever done him dirt. He had a long list. But his list, he had to admit, paled beside the one King Swemmel must have been keeping all these years. What Swemmel’s list amounted to was, the whole Kingdom of Algarve and anybody who ever helped it in any way. That was a list worth having, a list worth admiring.

And Swemmel was getting his money’s worth from it, too. Once upon a time, this captives’ camp outside of Trapani had been a barracks complex holding perhaps a brigade’s worth of men. Six or eight times that many soldiers-or rather, ex-soldiers-were crammed into it now. They got just enough food to keep them from starving in a hurry. It was as if the Unkerlanters wanted to savor their suffering.

“Pretty soon,” Sudaku said, “a plague will start, and they will need to bring in a ley-line caravan to carry out the corpses by carloads.”

“You’re a cheery bastard, aren’t you?” Ceorl answered. “I almost hope a plague does start. The stinking Unkerlanters’d catch it, too, and it’d fornicating well serve ‘em right.”

With a shrug, the man from the Phalanx of Valmiera said, “You should want to live. If you get out of this place, if you go back to your own kingdom, you can hope to do what you did before the war. I am not so lucky. For a Valmieran who has fought for Algarve, there is nothing left.”

“Oh, my arse,” Ceorl said. “You ever get back to your own kingdom, pick a new name and pick a new town and start telling lies like a fornicating madman. Tell ‘em about how the redheads, powers below eat ‘em, did you all kinds of dirt. Your people would buy it. Most people are nothing but a pack of fornicating fools.”

Sudaku laughed out loud. “Maybe you are right. It might be worth a try. What a reason to live: to spend the rest of my life telling lies.”

Ceorl poked him in the chest with a forefinger. “Listen, pal, after this war, folks’ll be telling lies for the next fifty years. Anybody who ever had anything to do with the redheads is going to say, ‘No, no, not me. I tried to kick those bastards right in the nuts.’ And all the Algarvians who were the meanest whoresons, they’ll go, ‘No, I didn’t have any idea what was going on. That was those other fornicators, and they’re already dead.’ You think I’m kidding? Just wait and see.”

“No, I do not think you are kidding,” the blond said. “It will happen. Maybe I could do that… if I ever got back to Valmiera. But I do not think I am going to.”

He was likely right for himself, but Ceorl had some hope of escaping. But for his beard, he looked like an Unkerlanter, and he could make a stab at the language of King Swemmel’s soldiers. If he could murder a guard and get into the fellow’s uniform tunic, he might sneak out of the captives’ camp. And if he could do that, anything might happen.

He was still contemplating ways and means two days later, when the Unkerlanters emptied out the captives’ camp by marching half the men in it-including the survivors of Plegmund’s Brigade-out of the place and through the streets of Trapani.

“Who are those whoresons?” an Unkerlanter lieutenant asked a guard as the captives trudged along. “Traitors from the Duchy of Grelz?”

“No, sir,” the guard answered. “These bastards are Forthwegians: the outfit that called itself Plegmund’s Brigade. And see? They’ve got a couple of Valmieran swine with ‘em. The Algarvians picked up garbage all over the place.” Ceorl followed his words well enough.

“Plegmund’s Brigade, eh?” The officer nodded. “Aye, I ran up against them a time or two.”

“Too futtering bad we didn’t get you, too,” Ceorl muttered.

“Powers below eat you, shut up, Ceorl!” another Forthwegian captive said as they went on their way. “You want to make it worse than it is already?”

“How?” Ceorl asked as they shambled on. The other fellow had no answer for him.

They stopped by the ruins of the central ley-line caravan depot. The queue of captives snaked toward the platforms. Ceorl thought of a way in which things might be worse, and spoke to the other men from Plegmund’s Brigade in Forthwegian: “We better stick together, whatever happens. Otherwise, the fornicating redheads’re liable to come down on us hard, on account of we’re odd men out.” His eyes flicked toward Sudaku. “You catch that?” he asked the blond from the Phalanx of Valmiera, also in his own language.

“Bet your arse I did,” the Kaunian replied in the same tongue. He’d been with the men of Plegmund’s Brigade long enough to have learned to curse in Forthwegian, and had picked up other bits and pieces as well. Ceorl slapped him on the back. The ruffian despised blonds on general principles, but didn’t dislike the handful beside whom he’d fought.

To his surprise, the caravan car to which the Unkerlanter guards steered his lot of captives was one made for carrying passengers. He’d expected to go aboard one that had borne freight, or perhaps animals. To be able to sit down in an actual compartment and watch the landscape go by … That didn’t sound so bad.

It also wasn’t what happened. A compartment was made to hold four people. The Unkerlanters shoehorned a couple of dozen into that space. “You fit!” one of them shouted in bad Algarvian. “You make selfs fit! You no do, we do.”

Men squeezed onto the seats, onto the floor, and up onto the baggage racks above the barred windows. Ceorl saw at once that those racks offered more room to stretch out than anywhere else in the compartment. He swarmed up onto one. An Algarvian had the same idea at almost the same time. Ceorl’s elbow got him in the pit of the stomach. He dropped back into the seething crowd below.

Ceorl hauled Sudaku out of the crowd and up onto the rack with him. “Thanks,” the blond said in Algarvian. “Why did you do that?”

Before Ceorl could answer, the redhead he’d elbowed and a pal rose again like a couple of spouting leviathans and tried to haul him down. Ceorl’s boot got one of them in the face. “Oh no you don’t, you son of a whore!” he said. Meanwhile, Sudaku had driven off the other Algarvian. “That’s why,” Ceorl said. “Everybody’s got to have somebody to watch his back for him.”

“Ah.” The Kaunian nodded. “I see it. We are like too many wolves in too small a cage.”

“I don’t know anything about wolves,” Ceorl said. “All I know about is gaols, but I know them good. Either you eat meat or you are meat. Powers below eat all those other bastards. Nobody’s going to eat me.”

He leaned down from the baggage rack to kick an Algarvian who was wrestling with a man from Plegmund’s Brigade for a space on one of the seats. The Algarvian crumpled. The Forthwegian shoved him aside and waved to Ceorl. Ceorl grinned back. He’d had plenty of practice at this kind of dirty fighting. It was different from soldiering. Here, everyone except a few chums was an enemy. Have to remind the chums who they are, he thought.