Out of the Darkness

He started for Linnich on foot. He didn’t know exactly how far it was: if he’d had to guess, he would have said about twenty miles. It proved farther than that, for he needed a day and a half to get there. He had no trouble cadging a couple of meals along the way. For one thing, there were no works with lots of captives anywhere close by. For another, his Grelzer accent sounded just like everyone else’s hereabouts.

Garivald didn’t go into Linnich, but skirted the town. Maybe Dagulf hadn’t told the impressers where he was working a farm. Maybe. But he didn’t want his former friend--or anyone else--to have another chance at betraying him.

He worried about going back to the farm, too. Did an inspector have an eye on it, wondering if he’d return? How many inspectors did King Swemmel have? Garivald had no idea. Of one thing he was sure, though: Obilot was all he had left in the world. Without her, he might as well have stayed in the mines.

The track leading to the farm was as overgrown as it had been the last time he’d walked it, more than a year before, between the impressers who’d hauled him into the army. What did that mean? He couldn’t know till he got where he was going, which didn’t stop him from worrying. His heart pounded in his chest as he came round the last bend and saw the farm at last.

Crops are getting ripe, he thought. And then he spied Obilot, weeding in the vegetable patch by the farmhouse. He didn’t see anyone else. That had been another worry. He’d been gone a long time, including some little while after the end of the war. How could anyone blame her for thinking he was dead?

She looked up and saw him coming through the fields toward the house. The first thing she did was reach for something beside her--a stick, Garivald thought. Then she checked the motion and got to her feet. Garivald waved. So did Obilot. She ran to him.

She almost knocked him off his feet when she took him in her arms, but her embrace helped keep him upright. “I knew you would come back,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I did.”

“Where else would I come?” Garivald said, and kissed her for a long time. That dizzied him; it felt stronger than spirits. But he couldn’t afford to get drunk on anything, even sensuality, now. He asked, “Do they watch this place?”

Obilot’s eyes narrowed. “It’s like that?” she said. He nodded. “I haven’t seen anybody,” she told him. “Not since Dagulf . . . died, and that was a while ago now.”

“Oh?” Garivald said. “How did that happen?”

“Nobody seems to know,” Obilot answered, not quite innocently enough. “Are we going to have to find another abandoned place and learn new names for ourselves all over again?”

Garivald looked around. She’d done an astonishing job of keeping this farm going. All the same, he nodded. “I’m afraid so. A couple of men ended up dead when I got out of the mines.”

“Mines? Oh.” Obilot nodded, too, briskly and without regret. “All right, we do, then. We can manage. I’m sure of it.”

“We’ll have a chance,” Garivald said, ingrained peasant pessimism in his voice. But then he shrugged. In Unkerlant, a chance was all you could hope for, and more than you usually got.

Istvan climbed down from the wagon near the mouth of the valley that held Kunhegyes and the neighboring villages. “Thank you kindly for the lift, sir,” he told the driver, a gray-bearded man with stooped shoulders.

“Glad to help, young fellow,” the other Gyongyosian replied. “Nothing’s too good for our fighters, by the stars. You’d best believe it.”

“Uh, the war is over,” Istvan said--maybe the wagon driver hadn’t heard. “We lost.” He brought the words out painfully. They hurt, aye, but they were true. No one who’d seen Gyorvar could doubt it even for a moment. He wished he hadn’t seen Gyorvar himself. He wished he hadn’t seen a great many things he’d had to see.

But the driver waved his words away, as if they were of no account. “Sooner or later, we’ll lick ‘em,” he declared. Istvan doubted he had a particular ‘em in mind--any enemy of Gyongyos would do. He wished things still looked so simple to him. They never would again. The driver flicked his whip and said, “Stars shine bright on you, Sergeant.”

“And on you,” Istvan called as the wagon rattled away.

Shouldering the duffel that held his few belongings, he trudged toward Kunhegyes. He wasn’t sure he’d been formally discharged from the army. Back in the coastal lowlands, government had been a matter of opinion since the death of Ekrekek Arpad and the destruction of Gyorvar. No one in all his long journey east had asked to see his papers. He didn’t expect anyone here would, either.