Through the Darkness

A hideous screech drifted down from high overhead. Garivald looked up, but couldn’t spy the dragon. He wondered if eggs would start dropping on the irregulars. But somebody said, “They’re flying west.” He relaxed. If the beasts were on their way to the big fight, they wouldn’t worry about a band of raiders deep inside territory Algarve was already supposed to have conquered.

Garivald sniffed. “I smell smoke,” he said. “That will be the village we’re going to, won’t it?”

“Aye,” Munderic answered. “You’d better pay attention to your nose. At night, it’ll let you know you’re coming up on people before your eyes will.”

“I’ve noticed,” Garivald answered. He’d usually taken stinks for granted back in Zossen; when he was among them all the time, he hardly noticed them. Only when he’d been out working in fields upwind from the village had he had its odors of smoke and manure and seldom-washed humanity forced upon his consciousness.

Beside him, Obilot spoke suddenly: “That’s too much smoke for a little place like Gartz. And the dogs should be barking, but they aren’t.”

Munderic grunted. “You’re right, curse it.” His call was soft but urgent: “Spread out. Go slow. We’re liable to be walking into something.”

Obilot caught Garivald in the flank with an elbow. “Get off the path. We’ll go through the fields. And be ready to turn around and run like a rabbit with a ferret on its tail if the redheads have an ambush laid on.”

Heart pounding in his chest, Garivald obeyed her. Most of the irregulars were bypassed soldiers; they knew what to do at times like these. The ones who hadn’t been in King Swemmel’s army had more practice fighting the Algarvians than Garivald did. Before joining this band, the worst fights he’d known were a couple of drunken brawls with fellow villagers. This was different. He might die here, and he knew it.

Peering ahead through the darkness, Garivald saw jagged outlines instead of the smooth, pale surfaces of thatched roofs. “They’ve burnt the place,” he burst out.

“That they have.” Beside him, Obilot’s voice went cold as a blizzard. When she continued, it was more to herself than to Garivald: “You never get used to it.” She started cursing the Algarvians with loathing all the more bitter because it was helpless to change whatever lay ahead.

Gratz hadn’t been much of a village; Munderic had been right about that. Now, Garivald discovered, it wasn’t a village at all anymore. Every house had been burned. Bodies lay everywhere: men, women, children, animals. They didn’t stink yet. “This must have happened today,” Munderic said harshly.

“This is what the Algarvians did to a village near Zossen when it rose against them--this or something like it,” Garivald said.

“Gartz wouldn’t have risen,” the leader of the irregulars answered. “Gartz was supposed to stay nice and quiet, so it could go right on giving us what we needed. We didn’t raid here, any more than we do close to our other villages. Only a fool fouls his own nest.”

“Someone betrayed them,” Obilot said, sounding even more wintry than before. “Someone who lives--lived--here, or maybe someone in a traitor village who figured out what Gartz was doing.”

Garivald started to say something, but held his tongue--he’d just stepped out into the village square. The Algarvians had built a gibbet there. Three bodies hung on it, two men and a woman, their heads canted at unnatural angles. Each corpse had a placard fastened to it: a lighter square in the night. He turned away, fighting sickness. He’d seen such things before, when the redheads hanged irregulars they’d caught outside of Zossen.

Munderic went over and cut down one of the placards. He couldn’t have read it in the darkness. Garivald couldn’t have read it at all; he’d never learned his letters. After a moment, Munderic let the placard fall to the ground. “I don’t care why the Algarvians say they killed them,” he muttered. “They killed them because they don’t want our peasants remembering whose kingdom it really is.”

“Vengeance,” Obilot said softly.

More and more of the irregulars gathered in the square, staring at the bodies swaying every so slightly in the breeze. “Another charge on the bill they’ll pay,” Garivald said. “Another reason they’ll rue the day....” The song built itself, a long, furious call for revenge against the redheads.

When it was through, the irregulars’ gaze had swung from the bodies to him. Munderic came up and patted him on the shoulder. “This is why the Algarvians wanted to hang you, too,” he said.

“They were talking about boiling me alive,” Garivald remarked.

Munderic nodded. “That’s the kind of thing they do.” He pointed to the gibbet. “This is the kind of thing they do. Well, here in Unkerlant they’re finding we’re as fierce as they are. We can war like this, same as them. We can, and we are, and we will, till they all flee.”

“Aye,” the irregulars said, an angry, ragged chorus.

“Aye,” Garivald echoed. He turned to Munderic. “I’ll put that last bit into the song. It deserves to be there.”