Out of the Darkness

He wondered what he would do even if he got to the far bank of the Wolter. He had no money. He had nothing, in fact, except his boots, the ragged tunic on his back, and a rapidly dwindling store of bread. Before long, he would have to start stealing food from the local peasants and herders. If he did that, he knew he wouldn’t last long.

He wrapped brush around himself-a miserable bed, but better than bare ground-and went to sleep. When I wake up, maybe everything will be all right, he thought. He had no idea why he’d come up with such a preposterous unlikelihood, but if he hadn’t believed it would he have tried to escape with the Forthwegian?

A shout, thin in the distance, threw him out of sleep a little before sunrise the next day. He sprang up, ready to flee. Had they found his trail after all?

But the shout came from the river, not the land: Garivald realized as much when he heard it again, this time fully conscious. He stared out toward the Wolter. His jaw dropped. He began giggling, as if suddenly stricken mad.

Maybe I was, he thought giddily. Maybe I’m not really seeing this. He’d hoped for a tree trunk, to help him cross the river. Never in all the days of the world, he told himself, had such a hope been so extravagantly fulfilled.

Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands-for all Garivald knew, millions-of felled trees floated on the Wolter, drifting downstream toward. . what? Sawmills, he supposed. He wondered why anyone would have cared to build sawmills on a river sure to freeze up in winter. Maybe those sawmills were like the mines: a scheme to get some use out of captives instead of just killing them outright. Or maybe King Swemmel had simply pointed at a map and said, “Build sawmills here.” If he had, the sawmills would have gone up, regardless of whether the Wolter froze.

Here and there, tiny in the distance, insignificant among the countless trunks of the floating forest, men with poles rode logs, somehow staying upright. Now and again, they would use the poles to keep the tree trunks from jamming together. It was one of their shouts that Garivald had heard.

He didn’t waste more than a couple of minutes gawping. How long would that seemingly endless stream of trees endure? If it passed without his taking advantage of it, how long would he have to wait till another one came down the Wolter? Too long-he was sure of that.

When he got down to the riverbank, he shed his boots, pulled his tunic off over his head, and plunged into the Wolter. Although it flowed from down out of the warmer north, its waters still chilled him. He struck out toward the immense swarm of logs.

Before long, Garivald wondered if he’d made a dreadful mistake. Going from log to log across the river hadn’t seemed so hard till he tried it. Not getting crushed by all that floating, drifting timber was a lot harder than he’d imagined.

He’d made it perhaps halfway through the logs when one of the men riding herd on them spotted him. “What in blazes are you doing here, you son of a whore?” the fellow bawled.

“Getting away from the mines,” Garivald shouted back. If the log-rider came over to try to seize him, he’d do his best to drown the man.

But the fellow with the pole only waved when he heard that. “Good luck, pal,” he said. “Me, I never saw you. My brother went into the mines almost ten years ago, and he never came out.”

Powers above, there are some decent people in this kingdom after all, Garivald thought as he went on toward the far bank of the Wolter. After the way he’d got dragged into the army-and after the way he’d been seized coming out of it- he’d had his doubts. He couldn’t dwell on that, though, for he had to scramble to keep an oncoming log from crushing him to jelly against the one he was riding.

He went from one log to another. And then, quite suddenly, no more logs remained between him and the far bank, which was now the near bank. He swam till his feet hit bottom. Then he waded ashore and re-donned his sodden tunic and even soggier boots. His belly growled; the bread hadn’t survived the trip across the Wolter. He trudged away from the stream, hoping to find a road or a village.

When he saw a man working in a field, he waved and called, “I’ll do whatever you need for a supper and a chance to sleep in a barn.”

The farmer looked him over. He still wasn’t dry, nor anywhere close to it. “What happened to you?” the fellow asked. “Looks like you fell in a creek.”

“Oh, you might say so,” Garivald agreed dryly-his words made the grade, even if he didn’t.

Or so he thought, till the farmer screwed up his face and said, “You’re not from around these parts, I don’t reckon.”