Through the Darkness

“We ought to see if we can catch a couple and find out why,” Werferth said. But then he shrugged and shook his head. “Not much chance, is there? They’ve got too good a start on us.”

Not everyone had fled, as the troopers discovered when they strode into the village. A handful of old men and women came out to greet them. One geezer, tottering along on a stick, even turned out to speak some Forthwegian. “I was in your kingdom on garrison duty twenty years before the start of the Six Years’ War,” he quavered.

“Bully for you, old-timer,” Werferth said. “Where’s the rest of the people who live here? Why’d they hightail it?”

He had to repeat himself; the old Unkerlanter was deaf as could be. At last, the fellow answered, “Well, you know how it is. People aren’t friendly nowadays.”

Looking at the wrinkled, toothless grannies who’d come out with their menfolk, Sidroc didn’t much feel like being friendly to them. What went through his mind was, If I ever get that desperate, I think I’d sooner blaze myself Maybe Werferth’s mind was traveling along the same ley line, for all he said us, “Give us food and spirits and we won’t give you a hard time.”

After the fellow who’d been in Forthweg translated that into Unkerlanter or Grelzer or whatever they spoke hereabouts, the old men and women hurried to obey. Black bread and pease porridge and smoked pork weren’t very exciting, but they filled the belly. Instead of spirits, Sidroc drank ale. Like any proper Forthwegian, he would sooner have had wine, but the next vineyard he saw in this part of the world would be the first.

“King Raniero good, eh?” he asked the wizened old lady who fetched him his mug of ale. Good wasn’t much different in Unkerlanter from its Forthwegian equivalent.

But the old woman looked at him with beady eyes--one of them clouded by a cataract--and said something in her own language that, coupled with her outspread hands, had to mean she didn’t understand him. Sidroc didn’t believe her for a minute. She just didn’t want to answer, which meant the answer she would have given was no.

Anger surged in Sidroc. He didn’t have to take anything from these cursed Unkerlanters. If they’d been on his side, most of the people in this village wouldn’t have lit out as soon as they found the men from Plegmund’s Brigade were coming. “We ought to have some fun here,” he said, a nasty sort of anticipation in his voice.

One of his squadmates, the ruffian named Ceorl, spoke up: “Can’t have as much fun as we might. Everything’s too stinking wet to burn the way it should.”

“We can always slap these buggers around,” Sidroc said. “Pity none of the younger women hung around. We’d have better sport then.” Nobody was inclined to say no to a man who carried a stick. Sidroc had watched Algarvian soldiers making free with Kaunian women--and with some Forthwegians, too--back in Gromheort. Now that he carried his own stick, he enjoyed imitating the redheads.

As he spoke, he eyed the old woman who’d brought him ale. She couldn’t hide the fear on her face. Even if she wouldn’t admit it, she understood some of what he and his pals were saying. As far as he was concerned, that was reason enough to slap her around ... in a little while. Till then, she could bloody well keep on serving him. He thrust the mug at her and growled, “More.”

She understood that, all right. She hurried off to fill up the mug again. Sidroc poured the ale down his throat. No, it wasn’t nearly as good as wine. But it would do. It put fire in his belly, and fire in his head, too.

He started yet another mug of ale, fully intending to start raising a ruckus when he finished that. He was just draining it, though, when a horseman came splashing up the villages main, and only, street. The fellow called out in unmistakable Forthwegian: “Ho, men of Plegmund’s Brigade!”

Sergeant Werferth was the senior underofficer. He pulled his hood down low over his eyes, stepped out into the rain, and said, “We’re here, all right. What’s toward?”

“We’re all ordered back to the encampment outside Herborn,” the courier answered.

“Now there’s a fine piece of bloody foolishness,” Werferth said. “How are we supposed to hold down this stinking countryside if we sit in that cursed encampment with a thumb up our arse?” Werferth liked fighting, all right.

But the courier gave a blunt, two-word reply: “We’re not.”

That brought not only Werferth but Sidroc and Ceorl and almost all the other troopers from Plegmund’s Brigade out into the rain. “Then what in blazes will we be doing?” Sidroc demanded. Several other men threw out almost identical questions.

“We’ll be getting on a ley-line caravan and heading south and west,” the courier said. “If the lousy Grelzers want to go out and chase their own brigands, fine. If they don’t, the powers below can eat ‘em up, for all we care from now on. They’re sending us off to fight the real Unkerlanter armies, not these odds and sods who sneak through the woods.”