Out of the Darkness

Things were moving too fast for Talsu. That morning, he’d been in the dungeon, with no particular hope of ever getting out again. Now he was not only out of the dungeon but also, evidently, on his way out of his own kingdom. He tried to make himself sorry or angry or anything of the sort. He couldn’t. All he felt was joy. “Thank you, sir,” he said, and bowed again. “I feel like--like I’m escaping.”

“And so you are,” Master Tukiainen said. “To us, this whole kingdom is like a dungeon. In my opinion, you are well out of it.”

“I’ll have to learn Kuusaman,” Talsu said. That, at the moment, was the least of his worries.

Thirteen

Leudast marveled that he could walk through the streets of Trapani without being ready to dive into a hole at any moment. The Algarvians’ formal surrender in the city hadn’t quite ended the fighting. Diehards and soldiers who hadn’t got the word kept blazing at the Unkerlanters for several days more. Even King Mainardo’s announcement of a general Algarvian surrender hadn’t quite done the job. By now, though, all the redheads had either laid down their sticks or were lying down themselves--lying down and not about to get up again.

A skinny Algarvian woman came out of a battered house. “Sleeping with me?” she called in bad Unkerlanter, and twitched her hips in case Leudast hadn’t been able to understand her.

He shook his head and walked on. He hadn’t turned the corner before she called the same invitation to another Unkerlanter soldier. Leudast got propositioned a couple of times a day. Some of his countrymen said it proved all Algarvian women were whores. Leudast didn’t know whether it proved they were whores or just that they were hungry.

Everybody--everybody Algarvian, anyhow--in Trapani was hungry these days. Leudast couldn’t see that the Unkerlanter authorities were working very hard to keep the redheads fed. He lost no sleep over it. When Mezentio’s men held big stretches of Unkerlant, they hadn’t done much to keep the peasants and townsfolk there fed, either. Let ‘em get a taste of empty, he thought. Let ‘em get more than a taste, by the powers above.

He had to stop then. A column of captives came shambling by: glum, hollow-cheeked men in filthy, tattered Algarvian uniforms, the stubble on their faces almost but not quite grown out into beards. Most of them were redheads, but he spotted a knot of men who looked like Unkerlanters, though they wore tan tunics and kilts like the Algarvians. Their dark beards were thick and full.

“Who are those whoresons?” he called to a guard. “Traitors from the Duchy of Grelz?” He was a lieutenant nowadays because he’d captured the Algarvian calling himself King of Grelz. Some of the men from the duchy in the southeast of Unkerlant kept fighting against King Swemmel even after that.

But the guard shook his head. “No, sir,” he 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.” He laughed at his own wit.

“Plegmund’s Brigade, eh?” Leudast nodded. “Aye, I ran up against them a time or two.” He hadn’t cared for the experience; the Forthwegians had been tough and nasty.

One of them, a fellow who looked as if he’d been a robber before joining Plegmund’s Brigade, must have understood him, for he spoke in his own language: “Too futtering bad we didn’t get you, too.”

Having come from northeastern Unkerlant, not far from the Forthwegian border, Leudast followed Forthwegian better than most of his countrymen would have. He also heard another captive say, “Powers below eat you, shut up, Ceorl! You want to make it worse than it is already?”

“Where are these men going?” Leudast asked the guard.

“Sir, I don’t know for certain, but I think they’re off for the Mamming Hills,” the fellow replied.

“Ah,” Leudast said, and said no more. Ceorl’s comrade had been wasting his time worrying. If these captives were bound for the Mamming Hills, it was already about as bad as it could be. He didn’t need to fret about making it worse.

More captives cleared debris from a broad square in front of the royal palace. Leudast scowled at the burnt and shattered wreckage of King Mezentio’s residence. He’d been in on some of the fighting there, and the Algarvians had battled room by room, corridor by corridor. And then, when his own side had finally cleared them out, they’d found Mezentio already dead. If that wasn’t a cheat, what was? Capturing Mezentio’s cousin Raniero had made Leudast an officer. What would capturing Mezentio himself have gained some lucky Unkerlanter? Colonel’s rank? A duchy? Anything this side of the sky itself seemed possible.