Out of the Darkness

In all his life, Garivald had never gone through--had, in fact, never imagined-- a winter without snow. He came from a little village called Zossen, down in the Duchy of Grelz. Blizzards there were so much a fact of life that every peasant hut had its doorway facing north or northeast, away from the direction from which the bad weather was likeliest to come. Even in his time as an irregular in the woods west of Herborn, the Grelzer capital, he’d known no different winters. Zossen, these days, no longer existed. The Algarvians had made a stand there when Unkerlanter armies fought their way back into Grelz, and nothing was left of the village or of the family Garivald had had there. And Swemmel’s impressers, a few months later, had efficiently dragged him into the army, even though he and Obilot, the woman with whom he’d taken up while in the irregulars, were working an abandoned farm well away from any other village.

An Algarvian egg burst, not too far from Garivald’s hole in the ground in the Unkerlanter bridgehead south of Eoforwic. No snow here: just rain through the fall and into the winter. People had told Garivald it would be like that, but he hadn’t believed it till he saw it himself.

Another egg burst. He saw the flash as all the sorcerous energy trapped inside the egg was released at once, and the fountain of mud and dirt that rose. The redheads had tried several times to drive the Unkerlanters back across the Twegen River, tried and failed. They hadn’t mounted any full-scale attacks against this bridgehead lately, but they didn’t let the Unkerlanters rest easy here, either.

From the rear, somebody called, “Sergeant Fariulf!”

“I’m here,” Garivald answered. Swemmel’s impressers hadn’t been perfectly efficient when they swept him into their net. They’d got him into the army, but they didn’t know who they had. As Fariulf, he’d just been one peasant recruit among many. As Garivald the leader of an irregular band, the composer of patriotic songs, he was a target. He’d led men, he’d influenced men, without taking orders directly from King Swemmel. That made him dangerous, at least in Swemmel’s eyes.

“Lieutenant Andelot wants you, Sergeant,” the soldier said.

“I’m coming,” Garivald told him. A couple of more eggs burst in front of his hole as he scrambled out and went back toward his company commander. Even had the Algarvians been pounding the bridgehead just then with everything they had, he still would have had to go. No one in Swemmel’s army got away with disobeying orders.

“Hello, Sergeant,” Andelot said. He was several years younger than Garivald, but he was an educated man, not a peasant, and spoke with a cultured Cottbus accent. Garivald liked him as well as he could like anyone set in authority over him.

“What can I do for you, sir?” Garivald asked now.

Andelot set his hand on some papers. “I just wanted to say, this report you wrote after the last time the redheads tapped us is quite good.”

“Thank you, sir.” Garivald grinned his pleasure at the praise.

With a chuckle, Andelot said, “Anyone could tell you’re new to having your letters. Once you’ve been writing for a while, you’ll come to see what a nuisance putting reports and such together can be.”

“It’s your own fault, sir, for teaching me,” Garivald replied. Only a handful of people in Zossen had been able to read and write; the village had had no school, and not much of anything else. He’d shaped and carried all his songs in his head. He still did, for that matter--putting them down on paper would have put Swemmel’s inspectors on his trail faster than anything else he could think of.

“I don’t think we’ll have the leisure for reports and such for very much longer,” Andelot said.

“Ah?” Garivald leaned toward him. “Are we finally going to break out?”

Andelot nodded. “That’s the idea.”

“Good,” Garivald said. “I’m sick of looking at this same little chunk of Forthweg day after day--especially since it gets more torn up every single day.” His nostrils flared. “If it weren’t winter--or as close to winter as they get around here--we wouldn’t be able to stand the stink. It’s pretty bad even so.”

“Mezentio’s men have hurt us,” the company commander agreed. “But we’ve hurt them, too, and we’re going to hurt them more. When we do break out of here--and out of our other bridgehead north of Eoforwic--the city will fall.”

“Aye, sir.” Now Garivald nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

But Andelot hadn’t finished. “And that’s not all, Fariulf,” he went on, as if Garivald hadn’t spoken. “Once we break the hard crust of their line, we storm eastward with everything we’ve got. And do you know what? I don’t think they can stop us, or even slow us down much, this side of the Algarvian border.”

“The Algarvian border,” Garivald echoed in dreamy tones. Then he asked a question that showed his ignorance of the world outside Zossen and the Duchy of Grelz: “How far is it from here to the Algarvian border?”