Out of the Darkness

“We knew,” he said to Corporal Kun as the two of them chopped wood in the midst of a chilly rain. “We knew, and we didn’t do anything.”

“Sergeant, we did what needed doing,” Kun answered. His next stroke buried his axehead in the ground, not in the chunk of pine in front of him. Maybe his conscience bothered him, too, in spite of his bold words. Or maybe he just couldn’t see what he was doing: he wore spectacles, and the rain couldn’t be doing them any good. Indeed, he muttered, “Can’t see a cursed thing,” before going on, “We didn’t get our throats cut, either, and that puts us ahead of the game. Or will you tell me I’m wrong?”

“No,” Istvan said, though he didn’t sound altogether convinced. He explained why: “Half of me feels we should have told the Kuusamans what was coming, so our comrades would still be alive. The other half . . .” He shrugged. “I keep wondering if the stars will refuse to shine on my spirit because I didn’t do everything I could to hurt the slanteyes.”

“How many times have we been over this?” Kun said patiently, as if he had the higher rank and Istvan the lower. “Did Captain Frigyes really hurt the Kuusamans? Not bloody much. You can tell by looking--well, you could if it weren’t raining.” His precision was a hint that he’d been a mage’s apprentice in Gyorvar, the capital, before getting conscripted into Ekrekek Arpad’s army.

Istvan sighed. Kunhegyes, his home village, lay in a mountain valley far in distance and even further in ideas from Gyorvar. He clung to the old ways of Gyongyos as best he could, not least because he hardly knew any others. He was a big, broad-shouldered man with a mane of tawny yellow hair and a thick, bushy beard a shade darker. Like a lot of his countrymen, he looked leonine. So did Kun, but he made a distinctly scrawny lion even when he wasn’t wearing his spectacles. Though he dwarfed the Kuusaman guards, he was neither tall nor wide by Gyongyosian standards, and his beard had always been and probably would always be on the patchy side.

With another sigh, Istvan said, “A pox on it. Let’s just work. When I’m chopping wood, I don’t have to think. Since everything happened, I don’t much feel like thinking.”

“Aye, I believe that,” Kun answered. In a different tone of voice, the words would have sounded sympathetic. Instead, as usual, Kun only sounded sardonic.

“Ahh, go bugger a goat,” Istvan said, but his heart wasn’t in the curse. Kun was as he was, as the stars had made him, and no one could change him now.

“You two lousy Gongs, you talk too much,” a Kuusaman guard yelled in bad Gyongyosian. The guards didn’t usually give their captives as much leeway as Istvan and Kun had; the patter of the rain and the curtain of falling drops must have kept them from noticing what was going on for a while. “To work harder!” the small, dark, slant-eyed man added. He carried a stick, which meant the Gyongyosians had to pay heed to him, or at least pretend they did.

After a while, the wood-chopping shift ended. The Kuusamans collected the axes from the detail, and carefully counted them before dismissing the captives. They tried to take no chances--but they’d let the Gyongyosians turn loose a sorcery that had wrecked big stretches of Obuda, all through not paying quite enough attention to what their captives were up to. Kun said, “You’ve got your nerve, Sergeant, talking about goats to me.”

Istvan looked around nervously before answering, “Oh, shut up.” His voice was rough and full of loathing. Goats were forbidden beasts to Gyongyosians, perhaps because of their lasciviousness and habit of eating anything. Whatever the reason, forbidden they were; it was perhaps the strongest prohibition the folk of Gyongyos knew. Bandit bands and perverts sometimes ate goat to mark themselves off from ordinary, decent people--and when they got caught at it, they were most often buried alive.

Kun, for a wonder, did shut up. But he held out his left hand, palm up and open, so the rain splashed down onto it. Along with a woodcutter’s calluses, he had a scar on the palm, between his second and third fingers. Unwillingly, Istvan held out his hand, too. His palm bore an identical scar. He had a scar on the back of his hand, too, as if a knife had gone all the way through. It had. Kun bore a like scar there, too.

“We’re the only ones left now, I think,” Istvan said. Kun nodded somberly. Neither one said what they were left from. Istvan wished he could forget. He knew he never would, not to his dying day.

Back when the squad he’d led were fighting in the great pine woods of western Unkerlant, they’d ambushed some Unkerlanters in a little clearing, not least so they could take the stew Swemmel’s soldiers were cooking. It turned out to be goat stew. The whole squad had eaten of it before the company commander came up and realized what it was.