Out of the Darkness

“So do I.” The guard’s stick twitched, just a little. Leudast took the hint. Anyone who spent too long watching the plundering of the Algarvian treasury might be suspected of wanting some of the plunder for himself. As a matter of fact, Leudast did want some of the plunder for himself, but not enough to get blazed for it. He left in a hurry.

When he got back to his regiment’s encampment in a park not too far from the palace, it was boiling like an anthill stirred by a stick. “What’s going on?” he asked a soldier from his company.

“Orders, sir,” the man replied.

That told Leudast less than he wanted to know. “What kind of orders?” he demanded, but the soldier had already hurried off. In a way, Leudast got the answer to his question: the orders were of the urgent kind.

“Oh, there you are, Leudast,” Captain Dagaric said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“I’m here, sir,” Leudast answered, saluting. “What in blazes is going on?”

“We’re moving out of Trapani, that’s what,” the regimental commander told him. “Moving out by tonight, as a matter of fact.”

“Powers above!” Leudast exclaimed. “Moving out where?” His first, automatic, glance was toward the east. “Are we going to start the war up again, and take on the Kuusamans and Lagoans?”

“No, no, no!” Dagaric shook his head. “We’re not going east. We’re going west. We’re going a long way west, as a matter of fact. A long, long way west.”

“About as far west as we can go?” Leudast asked.

Dagaric nodded. “That’s right. We’ve got some unfinished business with the Gongs, you know. . What’s so funny?”

“Nothing, sir, or not really funny, anyhow-but strange, all the same,” Leudast said. “Back a million years ago, or that’s what it seems like now-back before the big Derlavaian War started, anyway-I was fighting in the Elsung Mountains, in one of those little no-account skirmishes that don’t matter at all unless you happen to get killed in them. I’ve been through all this, and now I’m going back.”

He wondered how many other Unkerlanters who’d fought in the halfhearted border war against Gyongyos were left alive today. Not many-he was sure of that. Once more, he counted himself lucky only to have been wounded twice. Well, now the cursed Gongs will get another chance, he thought, and wished he hadn’t.

More than his regiment was leaving Trapani: much more than his regiment. Once his men got to the ley-line caravan depot, they had a long wait before they filed onto the cars that would take them across most of the length of Derlavai. “Why did we have to hurry so much, if we’re just standing around here?” somebody grumbled.

“That’s the way the army works,” Leudast said. “And believe me, standing around is a lot better than getting blazed at. Besides, it’ll take us ten days, maybe more, to get where we’re going. You might as well get used to doing nothing.”

He remembered his last passage out to the borders of Gyongyos as far and away the longest, most boring journey he’d ever made, with nothing to do but watch endless miles of flat countryside slip past. But battle, once he got to the uttermost west, hadn’t been boring, however much he wished it were. He didn’t expect it would be this time, either. As he finally filed aboard the ley-line caravan car, he hoped against hope he would prove wrong.

Ceorl had known for a long time that he would get it in the neck. If he hadn’t signed up for Plegmund’s Brigade, a Forthwegian magistrate would have given it to him. The second time they caught you for robbery with violence, they didn’t bother locking you up; they just got rid of you. The judge had been in what passed for a kindly mood for him: he’d been willing to let the Unkerlanters do the job instead of taking care of it himself with a signature.

And so Ceorl had gone to fight in the south. For a while-all the way up through the battles in the Durrwangen bulge-he’d hoped he’d managed to cheat the judge, because Algarve had still had a chance to win the war. After that. . He shook his head. After that, it had been almost two years of hard, grinding retreat. He’d started out somewhere between Durrwangen and Sulingen, and ended up one of the last holdouts in the ruins of King Mezentio’s palace in Trapani.

Even then, the Unkerlanters hadn’t been able to kill him. Along with the other survivors from Plegmund’s Brigade, the blonds from the Phalanx of Valmiera sprinkled in among them, and the Algarvians who’d been stubborn enough to stick it out to the very end, he’d come forth with his hands high, sure enough, but also with his head high.

He turned to Sudaku. Aye, Sudaku was a stinking Kaunian, but he’d fought as well as anybody else this past year. In Algarvian-Sudaku had picked up some Forthwegian, but not a lot-Ceorl said, “The one thing I didn’t figure on was that Swemmel’s whoresons’d go right on having chances to do us in even after we surrendered.”