Darkness Descending

King Swemmel’s soldiers howled in dismay. Some tried to turn and face Istvan’s squad, but they couldn’t do that and hold off the rest of the attackers, too--they lacked the numbers. Some of them died in place. Others began throwing down their sticks, throwing up their hands, and surrendering.

Before long, the only Unkerlanters left in the ruined village were captives and a handful of the trappers and hunters and their womenfolk and children who’d lived there and hadn’t fled east. Captain Tivadar sent them all back toward land Gyongyos held more securely. Then, in front of the whole company, he spoke loudly to Istvan: “Well done, Sergeant.”

“Thank you, sir,” Istvan said. Another few years of tiny victories like this, and the armies of Gyongyos might be in position for something larger. Istvan wondered if he’d live to see it.

As the sun sank below the western horizon, the Algarvian strawboss shouted, “Going home!” Along with the rest of his labor gang, Leofsig laid down his sledgehammer with a weary sigh of relief. The Algarvian strode through the gang handing out the day’s pay: a small silver bit for Forthwegian laborers, half that much in copper for the handful of Kaunians.

A wagon came rattling up to take the gang back to Gromheort over the road they’d been paving; they were too far from the city to walk without adding unduly to their exhaustion. The blonds got the job of rounding up all the tools before the gang boss let them climb into the wagon, too. Like the Forthwegians, they sprawled limply over the wagon bed.

“Here, get off me,” a Forthwegian growled at one of them. “Ought to send the whole lot of you whoresons west. Then we’d be rid of you.”

“Oh, don’t go unbuttoning your tunic, Oslac,” Leofsig said. “We’re all too tired to see straight.”

Oslac glared at him, eyes glittering in the twilight. But Leofsig was bigger, stronger, and younger than the other laborer, whose dark beard was streaked with gray. Leofsig had been conscripted into King Penda’s levy not long before Forthweg began her disastrous war against Algarve and still thought of a man of thirty as one bearing respectable years. Knowing himself outmatched, Oslac did no more than mutter, “Stinking Kaunians.”

“We all stink, too,” Leofsig said, and Oslac could hardly argue with him there. He went on, “Let it alone, why don’t you?”

Had some of Oslac’s comrades backed him, he might have taken it further. Even the laborers who hated Kaunians worse than he did, though, seemed too worn to care. A couple of men had already started snoring. Leofsig rather envied them; no matter how much he’d done during the day, he couldn’t hope to sleep on bare boards in an unsprung wagon jouncing over cobblestones.

An hour or so later--just enough time for him to start to go stiff--the wagon clattered into Gromheort. He helped shake the sleepers awake, then creakily descended from the wagon and started home.

The Kaunian he’d defended, a fellow named Peitavas, fell into step beside him. “My thanks,” he said in his own language, which Leofsig spoke fairly well.

“It’s all right,” Leofsig answered in Forthwegian; he was too spent to look for words in another tongue. “Go home. Stay there. Stay safe.”

“I’m as safe as any Kaunian in Forthweg,” Peitavas said. “As long as I build roads for the Algarvians, I’m more useful to them alive than dead. With most of my people, it’s the other way round.” He turned down a side street before Leofsig could answer.

Leofsig cast a longing look toward the public baths. He sighed, shook his head, and walked on toward his home. His mother or sister would have a basin of water and some rags waiting for him. That wasn’t as good as a warm plunge and a showerbath, but it would have to do. Anyway, with fuel scarce and expensive in Gromheort these days, the plunge more often than not wasn’t warm. And getting into the baths cost a copper, a good part of what he’d spent the day slaving to earn.

Home, then, through the dark streets of the city. Curfew hadn’t come yet but wasn’t far away. Once, an Algarvian constable stopped him and started asking questions in bad Kaunian and worse Forthwegian. He wondered if he’d land in trouble and whether he ought to kick the chubby fellow in the balls and run. But then they recognized each other. Leofsig had helped the constable find his way back to his barracks when he got lost just after arriving in Gromheort. “Going on,” the Algarvian said, tipping his hat, and went on himself.

And so, instead of returning to the captives’ camp from which he’d escaped or having something worse happen to him, Leofsig knocked on his own front door a few minutes later. He waited for the bar to be lifted, then worked the latch and went inside. Conberge waited in the short entry hall. “You’re late tonight,” she said.

“Redheads worked us hard, curse ‘em,” he answered.