Through the Darkness

“All right--good. We’ll move forward, then,” Istvan said. Kun nodded. They were oddly formal with each other. All the men who’d eaten goat were like that these days. They had a bond. It wasn’t one any of them would have wanted, but it was there. Feeling it, Istvan understood how and why criminals and perverts sometimes sought out goat’s flesh. It set them apart from the rest of mankind--the rest of Gyongyosian mankind, at any rate. They had to band together, for no one else would have anything to do with them.

“Sergeant?” Kun asked again in that oddly formal tone.

“Aye? What is it?” Istvan wanted to harass the bespectacled mage’s apprentice as he had before they shared the contents of that stewpot, but found he couldn’t. He looked down at his scar again.

Kun saw where Istvan’s eyes went, and he opened his own left hand. He was similarly marked--and, no doubt, similarly scarred on his soul as well. He let out a long, unhappy breath, then said, “Do you suppose the rest of the company knows . . . what happened there, back in that clearing?”

“Well, nobody’s called me a goat-eater, anyhow,” Istvan answered. “A good thing, too--anybody did call me anything like that, I’d have to try to kill him for my honor’s sake: either that or admit it.”

“You couldn’t admit it!” Kun exclaimed in horror. “The stars wouldn’t shine on you if you did.”

“Of course they wouldn’t,” Istvan said. “That’s why I’d have to do what a warrior should do. Maybe people know what happened and they’re keeping quiet because they know what I’d have to do, too. Or maybe they really don’t know. Captain Tivadar was the only one who came up to the clearing, after all, and he wouldn’t blab, not after he cleansed us he wouldn’t.”

Slowly, Kun nodded. “I keep telling myself the same thing. But the other thing I keep telling myself is, that sort of business doesn’t stay a secret. Somehow, it doesn’t.”

Istvan nodded, too. The same fear filled him. Having done what he’d done was bad enough. Having others--people who hadn’t done it, who weren’t linked to one another by that strange bond--know would be far, far worse.

Meanwhile, along with worrying about the state of his sins, he also had to worry about staying alive. Every time he scurried from pine to birch to clump of ferns, he took his life in his hands. Kun hadn’t seen any Unkerlanters in this stretch of the endless forest, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

A flick of motion caught his eye. He swung his stick toward it and blazed without conscious thought. Had it been an Unkerlanter, the fellow would have died. As things were, a red squirrel toppled off a branch and lay feebly kicking among the pine needles. After a minute or so, it stopped moving.

“Nice blazing,” Kun said. “Ought to bring it along and throw it in the pot when we stop. Nothing wrong with squirrel.”

“No,” Istvan said. He didn’t know whether Kun meant that the meat tasted good or that the animal was ritually clean. He didn’t want to ask; that would have involved comparisons with animals that weren’t ritually clean.

As he stopped to pick up the squirrel, he realized he could have blazed a countryman as readily as a foe. If, in some dreadful accident or in the heat of battle, Captain Tivadar went down and did not rise again, who but for Istvan and his equally guilty squadmates would know on what accursed meat they’d supped?

Horrified, he violently shook his head. That was the curse speaking inside him. Tivadar had cleansed when he might have condemned, and Istvan wanted to repay him for that with death? Some part of the goat’s meat had to be working inside him, corrupting him.

“No,” he said aloud.

“No what, Sergeant?” Kun asked. Istvan didn’t answer. A moment later, an Unkerlanter’s beam burned a hole in a tree trunk behind him, and almost burned off part of his beard, too. Throwing himself flat and rolling toward another tree felt more like a relief than anything else. Compared to what had been going through his mind, worries about his own death or mutilation seemed simple and clean.

“Urra!” the Unkerlanters shouted. “Swemmel! Urra!” Either they had an accomplished mage with them, to make a few men sound like a host, or they outnumbered the Gyongyosians approaching them.

Again, Istvan saw something move. This time, a human howl of pain rewarded his blaze. His own men were shouting, too, trying to sound like more than they were. He yelled along with the rest of them: “Arpad! Arpad!” He didn’t know how much good crying out his sovereign’s name would do, but it couldn’t hurt.

And then, as if the stars chose to grant a favor he hadn’t even asked for, eggs began falling on the Unkerlanters. Moving egg-tossers forward along the miserable tracks through these miserable woods wasn’t easy; Istvan hadn’t known the Gyongyosians had any close by. For once, the surprise he got was pleasant.