Through the Darkness

He and Oraste tore through the house with practiced efficiency. They found no one lurking in pantries or behind or under furniture or anywhere else. “Maybe the old bugger was telling the truth,” Oraste said. “Who would have believed it?”

“Stranger things have happened,” Bembo answered. “Did you get anything good when we split up there?”

“This and that,” the other constable said. “Don’t know what all of it’s worth, but some of it’s cursed old, that’s for sure. How about you?”

“About the same,” Bembo told him. “Somebody ought to do something about these books. They’re probably worth a good bit to somebody, but not to anybody I know.”

“Most of ’em are Kaunian garbage, anyway,” Oraste said. “You ask me, the mice and the silverfish are welcome to ‘em. Come on, Bembo. Like you said, he’s not the only stinking blond we’ve got to fetch.”

They did their job well enough to keep Sergeant Pesaro from screaming too loudly at them. By early afternoon, all the Kaunians the constables could flush out were standing in the square. With Evodio translating, Pesaro said, “Now we go back to Gromheort. Have you got that? Anybody who doesn’t keep up will be sorry to the end of his days--and that won’t be a long way off. Let’s go.”

“Curse you, you pox-ridden redheaded barbarian!” a blond shouted in pretty good Algarvian. “Why should we do what you--?”

Oraste pulled his stick off his belt and blazed the Kaunian, with deliberate malice, in the belly. The man fell, shrieking and writhing. A woman--probably his wife--screamed. Over their cries, Oraste shouted, “Anybody else want to get gay with us? We’ll give you what he got.”

Evodio turned that into classical Kaunian, though Bembo didn’t think it needed any translating. Pesaro said, “Get moving.” Evodio translated that, too. All the Kaunians started east except the blazed man. Even his wife, her face stunned and empty, trudged out of Oyngestun.

Some of the Forthwegians who lived in the village jeered as the blonds left. Some waved mocking good-byes. Some had already started going through the houses of the people who’d lived side by side with them for so many years.

Bembo said, “Curse them, they have a better chance to clean out the Kaunians than we got.” He sighed. “Being a constable’s a tough job.” Self-pity came easy to him.

Oraste raised a gingery eyebrow. “You want to go fight the Unkerlanters instead?”

“Powers above, no!” The mere thought was enough to make Bembo turn and curse the Kaunians shambling along the road.

The old Kaunian scholar spoke in his own language. Several of his countrymen smiled. Seeing that Bembo did not follow, he shifted to Algarvian: “It is a proverb from the days of the Kaunian Empire, and still true today, I think. ‘Speech is a mirror of the soul: as a man speaks, so is he.’ “

Bembo yanked his bludgeon off his belt and belabored the old man till blood streamed down his face from a split scalp. “Quote proverbs at me, will you?” he shouted. “I’ll teach you one: keep your lousy mouth shut. Have you got it? Have you?” He raised the bludgeon again.

“Aye,” the Kaunian choked out. Bembo strutted along, feeling better about the world. Oraste slapped him on the back, which made him happier yet.

Garivald woke with the sun in his face. When he looked around, he saw other men--some wrapped in rock-gray Unkerlanter army blankets, some in captured Algarvian tan ones, some in peasant homespun--lying on pine boughs among the trees. He shook his head in slow wonder, as he did almost every morning when he woke. He wasn’t a peasant any more, or not an ordinary peasant. He was an irregular, fighting King Mezentio’s men far behind their lines.

He wriggled out of his own blanket--the redhead who’d carried it into southern Unkerlant wouldn’t need it, not ever again--sat up, and stretched. Then he put on his sandals and got to his feet. His belly rumbled. Not far away, a stewpot was bubbling above a slow fire. He hurried over. “What’s in there?” he asked the fellow stirring the pot with a big iron spoon.

“Barley mush and a little bit of blood sausage,” the cook answered. Like Garivald, like most Unkerlanters, he was stocky and swarthy, with dark hair and a strong hooked nose, but his accent said he came out of the north, not from the Duchy of Grelz. “Want a bowl?”

“Hmm.” Garivald rubbed his chin, as if thinking it over. Bristles rasped under his fingers; chances to shave here in the woods seldom came. His belly rumbled again. He quit being coy. “Aye!”

“Here you go, then.” The fellow tending the pot grabbed a cheap earthenware bowl and filled it full of mush. “Mind you wash it before you give it back.”

“I’ll remember,” Garivald said. He would have to work to remember, and knew it. Back in Zossen, his home village, his wife Annore would have cleaned up after him. Washing things was women’s work, not men’s.