Out of the Darkness

How can they have lived the way they did when we live the way we do? He wondered about that, too. If the redheads managed such prosperity, why couldn’t his own kingdom? Unkerlant was far bigger than Algarve, and had more in the way of natural riches-he knew how many problems the Algarvians had had because their dragons ran out of quicksilver. But it didn’t seem to matter, not in the way people lived.

Maybe we’ll live like that, too, once the war is done. We won’t have it hanging over us like a thundercloud at harvest time. He could hope that might be so. He could hope, but he had trouble believing it. Mezentio’s subjects had lived better than Swemmel’s before the war, too. Of course, Unkerlant had gone through the Twinkings War while Garivald was a boy. That might have had something to do with it. Or it might not have, too-Algarve, after all, had fought and lost the Six Years’ War.

Garivald shrugged again, yawned, and gave it up. Here, he knew all too well how little he knew. He was a peasant who’d had his letters for less than a year. Who was he to try to figure out why his kingdom had a harder time than the Algarvians at doing so many different things? He could see it was true. Why remained beyond him.

He fell asleep not long after the sun went down. By then, the ley-line caravan had left Algarve and gone into Forthweg. The Forthwegians were better off than his own countrymen, too, but to a lesser degree. He didn’t know why that was so, either, and he refused to dwell on it. Sleep was better. After some of the places he’d slept during the war, a ley-line caravan car might have been a fancy hostel.

When he woke, he was in Unkerlant once more. It wasn’t the Duchy of Grelz, but it was his kingdom. And it had taken a worse battering than either Forthweg or Algarve. The Algarvians had wrecked things coming west, then the Unkerlanters pushing back toward the east. Counterattacks from both sides meant war had touched many places not once, not twice, but three or four times or even more.

As in Algarve, most of the people in the fields were women. Here, though, great stretches of land seemed to have no one cultivating them. What sort of crop would the kingdom have this year? Would it bring in any crop?

Garivald had plenty of time to wonder. He had to change ley-line caravans twice, and didn’t get in to Linnich for another day and a half. A couple of inspectors met the departing soldiers. Garivald didn’t think much of it; someone had to pay the men their mustering-out bonuses. “How long in Algarve?” one of the men asked him.

“Since the minute our soldiers got there,” Garivald said proudly.

“Uh-huh,” the fellow said, and scribbled a note. “You have your letters, Sergeant?”

He’d asked other men that question; Garivald had heard them answer no. More proudly still, he nodded. “Aye, sir, I do.”

“Uh-huh,” the inspector said again. “Come along with me, then.” He led Garivald toward a back room in the depot.

“Is this where you’ll pay me off?” Garivald asked.

Instead of answering, the inspector opened the door. Two more inspectors waited inside, and three unhappy-looking soldiers. One of the inspectors aimed a stick at Garivald’s face. “You’re under arrest. Charge is treason of the kingdom.”

The other sergeant tore the brass squares of rank from Garivald’s collar tabs. “You’re not a sergeant any more-just another traitor. We’ll see how you like ten years in the mines-or maybe twenty-five.”

Hajjaj had never felt so free in his life. Even before he’d gone off to the university at Trapani, he’d had nothing but public service ahead of him-in those long-ago days before the Six Years’ War, service to Unkerlant, and service to his own revived kingdom in the years since. He’d worked hard. He’d been influential. Without false modesty, he knew he’d served Zuwayza well.

And then King Shazli had chosen to go his own way, not Hajjaj’s. Now a new, more pliant, foreign minister served the king. Hajjaj wished them both well. He wasn’t used to not worrying about things outside his own household. Now, though, affairs of state were passing him by. I could get used to that, he thought. I could get used to it very soon.

He had wondered if Shazli would also order him to give Tassi back to Iskakis of Yanina. That hadn’t happened. It didn’t look like happening, either. Propitiating Unkerlant was one thing. Propitiating Yanina was something else again, something over which not even defeated Zuwayza needed to lose much sleep.

“You ought to write your memoirs,” Kolthoum told Hajjaj one blazing summer day when they both stayed within the house’s thick mud-brick walls to have as little as they could to do with the furnace heat outside.