Through the Darkness

The Algarvian muttered something in his own language that sounded like a curse. As the Kaunians from Forthweg had done, he and his comrades ran on.

“They’ll catch a lot of them,” Raunu said out of the corner of his mouth.

“I suppose so. But they won’t do it right away, and it won’t be easy,” Skarnu answered. “And anyone who speaks even a little of the old language will find out what the Algarvians have been doing to our cousins in Forthweg. If we don’t see a lot more people in this part of the kingdom starting to fight the redheads now, we never will.” Raunu thought that over, nodded, and headed back toward the fields. He had more weeding to do.

Four

Every so often, Garivald looked at the little enamelwork plaque--striped red, green, white--set into the butt of his stick. He wondered what had happened to the Algarvian invader who’d once carried it. Nothing good, he hoped.

Not that many Algarvians patrolled the forests through which Munderic’s band of irregulars prowled. Mezentio’s men kept the roads and ley lines leading west open as best they could, and rarely batded the Unkerlanters who hadn’t given up despite being far behind the line. When the redheads wanted to make life difficult for the irregulars, they sent in their pet soldiers from the toy Kingdom of Grelz.

“How can we blaze them?” Garivald asked not long after Munderic and his comrades rescued them from the redheads. “They might be our brothers.”

“Some of them are our brothers, the cursed traitors,” the leader of the fighting band answered. “How can we blaze them? If we don’t, they’ll cursed well blaze us. They aren’t playing games when they come after us. They want us dead; as long as we’re alive and free, it reminds them they live their lives in chains, and they put them on themselves.”

“I don’t follow that,” Garivald said.

Munderic spat. “The Algarvians don’t conscript soldiers into the army that sticks its belly in the air for that pimp of a puppet king named Raniero. They don’t dare send out impressers, because most of the men they’d drag in hate Raniero worse than they hate us. Every bugger in that army volunteered to come after us. Now are you ready to blaze ‘em all?”

“Aye,” Garivald answered, adding. “I hadn’t known that--about the Grelzer soldiers, I mean.”

“All sorts of things you don’t know, aren’t there?” Munderic rumbled.

“I find more every day,” Garivald admitted. He’d known just how to live in Zossen. He’d been doing farm work since he was big enough to toddle around after chickens and chivvy them back to his parents’ house. He’d known the people in the village as long as he or they’d been alive, depending on who was older. A tiny world, but one in which he was completely at home. Now he’d been uprooted, thrown into something new, and each day brought fresh surprises.

“It’ll give you more to sing about,” Munderic said, which was also true.

“Where do we go next?” Garivald asked.

“We’ve been gathering supplies from the villages north of the forest,” the leader of the band of holdouts answered, “so we’ll go south for a while. Next one on the list is a little place called Gartz. The redheads don’t even bother putting a garrison there--they just go through now and again.”

“All right. That sounds easy enough,” Garivald said. Several villages around their forest stronghold kept the irregulars in food and tunics and other things they needed. They avoided a couple of others, whose firstmen favored the Algarvians and the puppet King Raniero of Grelz. Munderic kept threatening to wipe those off the face of the earth, but he and his followers hadn’t done it yet.

The irregulars left the cover of the pines and oaks and birches not long after sunset. The band numbered perhaps fifty all together, of whom half a dozen or so were women. That was one more thing Garivald hadn’t known-- hadn’t imagined--before Munderic and his comrades rescued him from Mezentio’s men.

One of the women fell into stride beside him. Her name was Obilot. “I wish we were raiding tonight, not just bringing back sheep and rye and oats,” she said. The Algarvians had smashed her village on their way west; she thought she was the only one from it left alive. Now she wanted to go out and raid every night. So did all the women in the band. They hated the Algarvians worse than their male counterparts did.

“We’ve got to eat, too,” Garivald said. Like a lot of people who’d gone hungry, he wanted to make sure he didn’t have to.

“You’re soft,” Obilot said. She sounded soft herself; her voice was high and thin. The top of her head barely came up to Garivald’s chin. She looked more delicate and girlish than Annore. But a scar seamed her left arm from elbow to wrist. She bore the mark with pride--she’d cut the throat of the Algarvian who’d given it to her.