Through the Darkness

A couple of Unkerlanters--Grelzers, Sidroc supposed they were in this part of the kingdom--stood weeding in a field off to the side of the road. They straightened up and started for a moment at the troopers of Plegmund’s Brigade. “Whoresons,” Sidroc muttered. “As soon as we’ve gone by, they’ll find some way to let the bandits know.”

“Maybe not,” Werferth said, and Sidroc looked at him in surprise: the milk of human kindness had long since curdled in the sergeant. After a couple of strides, Werferth went on, “Maybe they’re bandits themselves. In that case, they don’t have to let anybody know.”

“Oh.” Sidroc trudged along for a couple of paces while he chewed on that. “Aye. How do we do anything about it? If we can’t tell the brigands from the peasants who might be on our side, that makes things tougher.”

Werferth’s shrug had no Algarvian-style extravagance or mirth in it; all it said was that he either didn’t know, didn’t care, or both. “The way it looks to me is,” he said, “we treat ‘em all like enemies. If we’re wrong some of the time, so what? If we treat ‘em like our pals and they stab us in the back, then we’ve got real trouble.”

Again, Sidroc kept marching while he thought. “Makes sense,” he said at last. “They won’t ever love us, most of’em. They’re foreigners, after all.”

Werferth laughed. “As far as they’re concerned, we’re the foreigners. But aye, that’s about the size of it. If we keep ‘em afraid of us, they’ll do what they’re told, and that’s about all anybody can hope for.”

Birds chirped and trilled. Some of the songs were different from the ones Sidroc had heard up in Forthweg. He knew that much, though he would have been hard pressed to say anything more. Except for the most obvious ones like crows, he didn’t know which birds went with which calls. Off in the distance, a dog barked, and then another. That meant something to him, though it wouldn’t have before he came down to Grelz. “Sounds like a village up ahead,” he remarked.

“Aye.” Werferth nodded. “There’s supposed to be one somewhere past that stand of trees there.” His eyes narrowed. “I wonder if the brigands have a surprise waiting for us in those trees. Sort of thing they’d try.”

“Do you want to go in there and try to flush them out?” Sidroc asked. A few weeks before, he would have sounded eager. Now he hoped Werferth would tell him no.

And Werferth did shake his head. “No way to guess how many of those buggers might be hiding in there. No, what we’ll do is, we’ll swing wide through the fields--we won’t stay on the road and give them a clean, easy blaze at us. There are ways to ask for trouble, you know what I mean?”

Before Sidroc could answer, a dark cloud covered the sun. More came drifting up from out of the west. “Looks like rain,” he said. That sparked another thought in him: “I wonder what kind of mushrooms a good soaking rain’d bring out down here.”

“If you don’t know what they are, don’t eat ‘em,” Werferth advised. “You watch--some cursed lackwit’s going to try something he’s never seen before, and it’ll kill him. Silly bugger’ll get what he deserves, too, you ask me.”

Up in Forthweg, people died every year from eating mushrooms they shouldn’t have. Sidroc’s attitude was much like Werferth’s: if they were stupid enough to do that, they had it coming to them. But in Forthweg, everybody was supposed to know what was good and what wasn’t. How could you do that here? Sidroc figured he might take a chance or two. If the Unkerlanters couldn’t kill him with sticks, odds were they couldn’t kill him with mushrooms, either.

Big, fat raindrops started falling about the time the troopers from Plegmund’s Brigade went off the road and into the fields. Sidroc pulled his hooded rain cape out of his pack and threw it on. The ground under his feet rapidly turned to mud. He didn’t like squelching through it. But the raindrops also meant beams wouldn’t carry so far, which would make any attack from the woods harder to bring off. Give a little, get a little, he thought.

No Unkerlanter hordes screaming “Urra!” burst from the trees. No devious Unkerlanter assassins skulked after Sidroc and his comrades, either. He couldn’t prove a single irregular had been lurking in the forest. All the same, he was just as well pleased Werferth gave it a wide berth.

When he came back to the road--which had turned into mud even stickier than that in the fields--he could see the Unkerlanter village ahead. “Is that a friendly village?” he asked. Some few places in Grelz were conspicuously loyal to King Raniero. Even the Algarvians were supposed to leave them alone, though Algarvians, as far as Sidroc could tell, did pretty much as they pleased.

But Werferth shook his head. “No, we can plunder there to our hearts’ content. They’re fair game.”

The villagers must have known they were fair game, too. Through the rain, Sidroc watched them fleeing at the first sight of the men from Plegmund’s Brigade. “They don’t trust us.” He barked laughter. “I wonder why.”