Through the Darkness

Rual waved to the fellow behind the bar, who wore not only a mustache but also a ridiculous little strip of chin beard, as if he hadn’t been paying attention while he shaved. “Two mugs of ale here,” Rual called, and set a shiny, newly minted silver coin on the table.

Garivald picked it up and looked at it. “So that’s what King Raniero looks like, is it?” he remarked. “Hadn’t seen him before.” In his opinion, Raniero had a pointy nose. He didn’t think Rual would care about his opinions in such matters.

“Aye.” Rual waited till the tapman brought him his ale, then raised his mug. “And here’s to Raniero.” Having expected such a toast, Garivald had no trouble drinking to it. Rual added, “Good to have a king in Grelz again.”

“That’s the truth,” Garivald said, though Swemmel was the only king in Grelz he acknowledged. After a pull at his ale--which was pretty good—he added, “I wish we hadn’t had to have a war to get one, though.” He also wished the king Grelz had got weren’t an Algarvian, one more opinion he kept to himself.

“No, we should have had one of our own all along,” Rual said. “But I’d sooner be tied to the redheads than to Cottbus.”

The Algarvians in here were surely listening to him, as he was listening to Garivald. Garivald wondered what they’d think of his wanting a Grelzer king rather than Mezentio’s cousin. “I never worried about things like this before the fighting started,” he said at last. “I just wanted life to go on the way it always had.” He wasn’t even lying.

Rual gave him another sympathetic look, though the last thing Garivald wanted was his sympathy. “I understand what you’re saying--powers above know I do,” Rual assured him. “But weren’t you sick of inspectors stealing your crops and impressers liable to drag you off into the army if you looked at ‘em sideways or even if you didn’t?”

“Well, who wasn’t?” Garivald said, making it sound like an admission Rual had dragged out of him. Again, he wasn’t lying. Again, it didn’t matter, which Rual didn’t seem to understand. The Algarvians had done worse in Zossen-- and, no doubt, elsewhere in Unkerlant--than Swemmel’s inspectors and impressers. Garivald decided to make his own comment before Rual could ask another question: “This looks like a pretty happy place now, I’ll tell you that.”

“Oh, it is,” Rual assured him. “Raniero makes a fine king. So long as we don’t trouble anything, he leaves us alone. You could never say that about Swemmel, now could you?”

“No, indeed.” Garivald laughed a particular kind of laugh, one that suggested a lot of things you could say about King Swemmel. He would have enjoyed saying them, too--to his wife, or to his friend Dagulf back in Zossen. Saying them to Rual would have been blackest treason.

“Well, there you are,” Rual said, as if certain Garivald agreed with him in every particular.

“Aye, here I am--at the bottom of my mug of ale.” Garivald set coins-- old coins, coins of Unkerlant, not Grelz--on the table and waved to the Unkerlanter with the preposterous mustache and strip of beard behind the counter. When he caught the fellow’s eye, he pointed to his mug and Rual’s. The tapman brought them refills.

“My thanks,” Rual said. “You’re a man of your word. Too many drifters coming through Pirmasens these days want to grab what they can and then slide out again. This is a nice, quiet place. We want to keep it that way.”

“Don’t blame you,” Garivald said. “Almost tempts a fellow into wanting to settle down here for good.” He drank some more ale, to get rid of the taste of the lies he was telling.

“You could do worse, Liaz,” Rual said, and the curse of the war Unkerlant and Algarve were fighting was that he was probably right. “Aye, it’s right peaceful here.” He didn’t mention--maybe he even didn’t consciously notice--the Algarvian soldiers drinking at a table not ten feet away from him. If they’d been back in Algarve where they belonged, he would have come closer to telling the truth.

Garivald finished his ale. Now came the tricky part: sliding out of Pirmasens under the noses of those Algarvian soldiers, and under Rual’s, too. He got to his feet. “Good to find a friendly face,” he said. “Aren’t many of ‘em left these days.”

“Where are you heading?” Rual asked.

“Somewhere that got hurt worse than you seem to,” Garivald answered. “Maybe somewhere I can find a farm nobody’s working and get things going again. That’d keep me too busy to worry about anything else for a while, I expect.”

“And I expect you’re right,” Rual said. “Good luck to you.”

“Thanks.” Garivald took a couple of steps toward the doorway. One of the redheads sitting in the tavern spoke to him in Algarvian. He froze in alarm entirely unfeigned. Turning to Rual, he asked, “What did that mean? I don’t know any of their language.”

“He told you to count yourself lucky you’re still breathing,” Rual said.