Out of the Darkness

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.