Out of the Darkness

Ceorl shoveled cinnabar ore into a handbarrow. When it was full, another captive lugged it away. Shoveling wasn’t so bad as chipping cinnabar out of the vein with picks and crowbars. It also wasn’t so bad as working in the refinery where quicksilver was extracted from some of the cinnabar. Despite sorcery, quicksilver fumes killed the men who worked there long before their time.

Before too long, some of the new fish started coming down into the mine. They would have needed a while to get processed, to have their names recorded and to get assigned to a barracks and a work gang. That was efficiency, too, at least as the Unkerlanters understood it. To Ceorl, it often seemed like wheels spinning uselessly on an ice-slick road. But Swemmel’s men had won the war, and didn’t have to worry about what he thought.

One of the new men spoke with such a strong Grelzer accent, Ceorl could hardly understand him. “Powers below eat you,” the ruffian said, doing his best to make his Forthwegian sound like Unkerlanter. “I spent a good part of the war hunting whoresons like you.”

The Unkerlanter followed him. “I was in the woods west of Herborn,” he answered. “A lot of the bastards who hunted me didn’t go home again.”

“Is that so?” Ceorl threw back his head and laughed. “I hunted through those woods, and you stinking irregulars paid for it when I did.”

“Murderer,” the Unkerlanter said.

“Bushwhacker,” Ceorl retorted. He laughed some more. “Fat fornicating lot of good our fight back then did either one of us, eh? We’re both buggered now.” He had to repeat himself to get the Unkerlanter to understand that. When the fellow finally did, he nodded. “Fair enough. We both lost this war, no matter what happened to our kingdoms.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Fariulf.”

“Well, futter you, Fariulf.” Ceorl clasped it. “I’m Ceorl.”

“Futter you, too, Ceorl,” Fariulf said, squeezing. Ceorl squeezed back. The trial of strength proved as near a draw as made no difference.

“Work!” a guard shouted. Sure enough, no matter which of them was the stronger, they’d both lost the war.

Everything in Yliharma was different from anything Talsu had ever known. The air itself tasted wrong: cool and damp and salty. Even on the brightest days, the blue of the sky had a misty feel to it. And, even in summer, fog and rain could come without warning and stay for a couple of days. That would have been unimaginable in Skrunda.

The Kuusamans themselves seemed at least as strange to him as their weather did. Even Gailisa was taller than most of their men. Children eyed both Talsu and his wife in the streets, not being used to fair blue-eyed blonds. Adults did the same thing, but less blatantly. To Talsu, little swarthy slant-eyed folk with coarse black hair were the strange ones, but this was their kingdom, not his.

It wasn’t even a kingdom, or not exactly-somehow, the Seven Princes held it together. The Kuusamans drank ale, not wine. They cooked with butter, not olive oil, and even put it on their bread. They wore all sorts of odd clothes, which, to a tailor, seemed even more peculiar. Their language sounded funny in his ears. Its grammar, which he and Gailisa tried to learn in thrice-weekly lessons, struck him as stranger yet. And its vocabulary, except for a few words plainly borrowed from classical Kaunian, was nothing like that of Jelgavan.

But none of that marked the biggest difference between his homeland and this place to which he and Gailisa had been exiled. He needed a while to realize what that big difference was. It came to him one afternoon as he was walking back to the flat the Kuusamans had given Gailisa and him: a bigger, finer flat than the one his whole family had used back in his home town.

“I know!” he said after giving his wife a kiss. “I’ve got it!”

“That’s nice,” Gailisa said agreeably. “What have you got?”

“Now I know why, up in Balvi, the Kuusaman minister told us living in Jelgava was like living in a dungeon,” Talsu answered. “Everybody always went around watching what he said all the time.”

She nodded. “Well, of course. Something bad would happen to you if you didn’t, or sometimes even if you did.” Her mouth twisted. “We know all about that, don’t we?”

“Aye, we do,” Talsu agreed. “And that’s the difference. We know all about it. The Kuusamans don’t. They say whatever they please whenever they feel like it, and they don’t have to look over their shoulders while they’re doing it. They’re free. We weren’t. We aren’t, we Jelgavans. And we don’t even know it.”

“Some do,” Gailisa answered. “Otherwise, why would the dungeons be so full?”

“That’s not funny,” Talsu said.

“I didn’t mean it for a joke,” she told him. “How could I, after everything that happened to you?”

Having had no ready comeback for that, he changed the subject: “What smells good?”