Out of the Darkness

One of them had two bars under his wound badge, the other three. They went on hashing over the fights they’d been through as if those battles still meant something, as if other Algarvian soldiers remained in the field to take advantage of what they’d so painfully learned. Lurcanio wondered how long the war would stay uppermost in their thoughts. He wondered if it would ever be anything but uppermost.

I’m lucky, he thought. I was only in the field for the early campaigns, and then at the end. In between, I had those four civilized years in Priekule. It wasn’t so much that his body had come through unscarred, though he was anything but sorry to have escaped the enormous grinding battles in the west: a great many men had gone from Valmiera to fight in Unkerlant, and precious few ever came back again. But Lurcanio hadn’t had the war branded on his spirit to the same degree as most of his fellow captives.

He shrugged an elaborate, Algarvian shrug. I don’t think I have, anyway. He’d spent most of his nights in Priekule in his own bed or, more pleasantly, in Krasta’s. Instead of warring with a stick, he’d fought his battles against the Valmieran irregulars with a pen.

And I won most of them, he thought. The kingdom had stayed quiet, or quiet enough, under Algarve’s heel till the situation in the west and in Jelgava grew too desperate to let the occupiers stay. For a moment, he took pride in that. But then he shrugged again. What difference did it make? No matter how well he’d done his job, his kingdom had lost the war. That mattered. The other didn’t.

Two days later, he was summoned from the ranks of the captives at morning roll call. His wasn’t the only name the Lagoan guard called out. About a dozen men, most of them officers but with two or three sergeants among them, stepped forward.

Major Simao came out of the administrative center. “You men have been ordered remanded to Valmieran custody for investigation of murders and other acts of cruelty and barbarism inflicted on the said kingdom during its occupation by Algarve,” Simao droned, his mumbling, nasal Lagoan accent making the bureaucratic announcement even harder to follow.

But Lurcanio understood what it was all too likely to mean. “I protest!” he said. “How can we hope to get a fair investigation from the Valmierans? They want to kill us under form of law.”

“How many of them did you kill without bothering with form of law?” Simao said coldly. “Your protest is denied.”

Lurcanio hadn’t expected much else. But the speed-and the relish-with which Simao rejected his appeal were illuminating. He’d known the kingdoms allied against his own hated Algarvians. Seeing that hatred in action, though, showed him how deep it ran.

As the Lagoans marched the captives out of the camp and toward wagons that would, Lurcanio supposed, take them to a ley-line caravan depot, one of the sergeants said, “Well, we’re futtered royal and proper. Only question is whether they blaze us or hang us or drop us in the stewpot.”

“Valmierans don’t do that,” Lurcanio said. But then he added, “Of course, by the look of things, they might make an exception for us.”

“That’s right.” The sergeant nodded. “But I’ll tell you something else, sir: they can only get me once, and I got a lot more’n one o’ those stinking blond bastards.”

“Good for you,” Lurcanio said. Algarvian bravado ran deep. He hoped he would be able to keep it up himself when he needed it most.

Sure enough, the wagon ride-with as many Lagoan soldiers as captives: a compliment of sorts-took them to a small depot. The soldiers stood watch over them till an eastbound ley-line caravan came up and stopped. One of the cars had bars across the windows. A Lagoan guard favored the captives with a nasty smile. “Like the ones you used for Kaunians you killed, eh?” he said in Algarvian, a comparison Lurcanio could have done without.

After Lurcanio and the other captives and most of the guards boarded the caravan car, it glided away. The bars didn’t keep Lurcanio from peering avidly out the windows. As the caravan drew near the border with Valmiera, he saw long columns of redheaded, kilted men and women and children trudging westward, some pushing handcarts, some with duffels slung over their shoulders, a lucky handful with a horse or a donkey to bear their burdens.

That Algarvian-speaking guard said, “The Valmierans throw you whoresons out of the Marquisate of Rivaroli. No more trouble there. No more treason there, either.”

Algarvians had lived in Rivaroli for more than a thousand years. Even when Valmiera annexed the marquisate after the Six Years’ War, no one had talked of expelling them. But a generation and more’ had gone by since then. These were new times-hard times, too.