Through the Darkness

Traveling south to Sulingen wasn’t so easy, and on one stretch of the journey Algarvian dragons dropped eggs from on high, trying to wreck his ley-line caravan. They missed, but not by much.

When he did make it to the city on the Wolter, he found that General Vatran had set up his headquarters in a cave in the side of a steep gully that led down to the river. The only light in the place when Rathar ducked inside came from a candle stuck into the mouth of an empty jar of spirits. The jar sat on a folding table, at which Vatran was scribbling orders. He looked up from his work and nodded. “Back from the capital, eh, lord Marshal?” he said. “Well, welcome home, then.”

“Home?” Rathar looked around. The walls of the cave were nothing but dirt. When he looked back through the opening, most of what he saw was rubble and wreckage. Smoke and the smell of death filled the air. He grabbed a folding chair and sat down beside Vatran. “Thanks. What do we need to do here?”

Sergeant Istvan sneaked toward the forest village with nothing but suspicion. Most of these places were only Unkerlanter strongpoints these days. King Swemmel’s soldiers looked to have forgotten about this one, though. Maybe they didn’t never know it was here. Maybe.

Corporal Kun was as delighted to find the village as he was. “If only we had a couple of light egg-tossers, we could knock the place flat without needing to go in there and do the job ourselves. That’s expensive.”

“I know. There’s you and me and Szonyi-I don’t think anything the stars shine on will kill Szonyi any time soon,” Istvan said. “But there’s an awful lot of new fish, too, and they die easier than they should.”

Kun said, “We’re not getting the best of the levies, either. I heard Captain Tivadar grousing about that. They’re sending the men they like best out to the islands in the Bothnian Ocean to fight the Kuusamans. We get what’s left.”

“Doesn’t surprise me a bit,” Istvan said. “Only thing that surprises me is how long it took ‘em back home to figure out this miserable war here isn’t ever going to get anywhere.”

Kun nodded. His spectacles and, somehow, his patchy beard made him look very wise. “Aye, I think you’re right. The trouble is, we still have to fight it.”

“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Istvan peered through a screen of pine saplings and ferns at the village ahead. All at once, he went very still. Voice the tiniest thread of whisper, he said, “Come up here and tell me whether that’s not a real woman drawing water from the well there.”

“Has it been so long you’ve forgotten the differences?” Kun asked, but also in a whisper. Istvan started to plant an elbow in his ribs as he moved up to take a look, but refrained. The noise might give them away. Kun’s lips pursed in a soundless whistle. “That is a woman-may the stars accurse me if I lie. What’s she doing?”

“Drawing water from the well there,” Istvan repeated patiently. “Where there’s one woman, there’ve got to be more, wouldn’t you say?”

“Are the Unkerlanters trying to make them into warriors?” Kun asked. “If they are, they must be running out of men.”

“She doesn’t look like a warrior,” Istvan said. That proved nothing, and he knew it. If Swemmel’s men-no, Swemmel’s soldiers-were setting a trap, the woman naturally wouldn’t look like a warrior.

He kept peering toward the village. It didn’t look like a trap, either. It looked like a village that had been going about its business for a long time. He wondered if the people there even knew Unkerlant and Gyongyos were at war. After a moment, he wondered if the people there had ever heard of Gyongyos. His hand tightened on his stick. If they hadn’t, they would.

A man strolled by. He was an Unkerlanter, of course, but wore a brown tunic, not one of rock-gray. He carried a chicken carcass by the feet. When he came up to the woman, she said something. He paused and answered. She made as if to slosh the bucket of water she’d just drawn up over him. They both laughed. Thin with distance, their voices floated to Istvan’s ears.

He turned to Kun. “If that’s a trap, it’s an accursed good one.”

“The Unkerlanters make accursed good traps,” Kun pointed out, which was inarguably true.

But Istvan shook his big, shaggy head even so. “It doesn’t feel like a trap,” he said, which was a harder argument to knock over the head. “It feels like a village that hasn’t thought about anything but its own concerns since-since the stars first shone down on it.”

He waited for Kun to mock him. Mockery was one of the things the city man, the mage’s apprentice, the sophisticate, was good for. But when Kun answered, he too sounded wondering: “It does, doesn’t it?”

“It’s. .” Istvan groped for a word, and found one: “It’s peaceful, that’s what it is. Maybe peace is a magic.” That wasn’t the sort of thing that should have come from a man of a warrior race, but it was what lay in his heart.

Kun only nodded. He’d seen enough war to know what it was, enough war to have had a bellyful of it himself. He said, “You don’t suppose that woman would laugh for us if we came out of the woods and tried to chat her up?”

“She’d laugh if we tried doing it in Unkerlanter, that’s certain sure,” Istvan said. Wistfully, he went on, “I haven’t even seen a woman since that Unkerlanter I blazed in the mountains this past winter.”

“No sport in her,” Kun said. “Well, Sergeant, what do we do?”

“Let me think.” Istvan plucked at his beard and tried to do just that. What he wanted to do was what Kun had said: show himself, walk up to the villagers, and say hello. He knew he had a better than even chance of getting blazed if he did; he wanted to do it anyhow.

Safest would be to bring the whole company forward and crush the village under an avalanche of Gyongyosian might. But if the village really was just a village, he would be wrecking something he might enjoy.

He let out a soft sigh. He’d long since come to understand the difference between what he wanted to do and what he needed to do. “Go back to the company encampment,” he said with a sigh. “Let the captain know what we’ve found, and tell him we want reinforcements to make sure we take it out.”

“Aye, Sergeant.” Kun looked as if he hated him, but obeyed. Silent as a cat, he slipped off into the woods.

Is this part of the curse of eating goat’s flesh? Istvan wondered. Must I worry for the rest of my days? Or am I simply being led astray now? He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. But he feared that, sooner or later, the curse would bite down hard. Ritual cleansing went only so far. The stars had seen what he’d done.

Maybe thinking about the goat’s flesh was what made him step out of the forest and into the clearing that held the village. If somebody there grabbed a stick and blazed him, it would be expiation for what he’d done. If no one did, maybe the stars had forgiven him after all.

Behind him, his men let out startled gasps. “Get back, Sergeant!” Szonyi hissed from a few trees away. Istvan shook his head. They’d already seen him, there in the village. Oh, he could still duck back into cover but, oddly, he didn’t want to. Whatever would happen would happen, that was all. The stars already knew. They’d known for as long as they’d been shining. Now he would find out, too.

Startled cries rang out. The woman at the well stared and pointed toward Istvan. People came tumbling out of houses and a bigger log building that might have been a tavern. They all pointed and exclaimed. Plainly, strangers here were a prodigy, which proved the Unkerlanter army didn’t know this place existed. Nobody aimed a stick at him. Nobody was holding one. They have to have them, Istvan thought. There isn‘t anybody who doesn‘t know about sticks. . is there?

Like a man in a dream, he walked toward the villagers. Some of them came toward him, too. He still had hold of his stick, but didn’t raise it. It was too light to see the stars, but they were always there. Eclipses proved it. If you want me to make amends for what I did, that can happen. I’m ready.

One of the villagers spoke to him in guttural Unkerlanter. It wasn’t Hands high! or Surrender! or Throw down your stick! — about all he knew of the enemy’s language. “I don’t follow,” he said in his own language, and then, because being polite seemed wise in a dream, he added, “I’m sorry.”

To his surprise, the Unkerlanter, a gray-haired man, answered in accented, halting Gyongyosian: “Not try to talk this talk many years. Sometimes-past times-you people come, trade for furs. You want trade for furs? We have furs to spare.”

They didn’t know there was a war. They didn’t recognize his uniform for what it was. “Maybe I will… trade for