Into the Darkness (45 page)

She started to add something more, then savagely scratched it out. More pen gnawing followed. She sprang to her feet and slapped the piece of paper on to Captain Erglyu’s desk. He glanced down at it, then said, “I am certain King Gainibu himself will be grateful to you for what you have done here today.”

“Why can’t anyone else in the kingdom think clearly?” Krasta demanded. Without waiting for an answer, she headed out toward her carriage. She noticed she’d got ink on one finger. With a snort of annoyance, she rubbed it off.

Ten

L
EOFSIG WAS becoming, if not thrilled about latrine duty, at least resigned to it. It was nasty, smelly work, but no harder than chopping wood or any number of other assignments in the captives’ camp. Both his Algarvian captors and his Forthwegian superiors seemed content to make him the token Forthwegian on the largely Kaunian latrine crew.

He made the best of it, or tried. His own Kaunian had grown rusty since his escape from school. When he’d first tried speaking it again, the lean blonds had smiled among themselves and, more often than not, replied in Forthwegian. But he’d persisted. He’d never be mistaken for a Kaunian when he opened his mouth, but these days he was even getting a good notion of how to use the optative mood, which had always baffled him even when his masters drilled it into him with a switch.

Having his cot next to Gutauskas in the barracks helped in getting the Kaunian captives on the latrine crew to accept him. So did his continued enmity with Merwit. If Merwit called him a Kaunian-lover, he wore what was meant for an insult as a badge of pride.

One day, as he was covering over a stinking slit trench, Gutauskas came up to him with a gleam in his blue-gray eyes. “You know, stale piss is a good bleach,” the Kaunian said in his own language. Leofsig had not learned the Kaunian word for
piss
in school; latrine duty was educational in all sorts of ways. Gutauskas went on, “Maybe we should dye your hair blond. Do you think you would look like one of us if we did?”

“Oh, indeed—without a doubt,” Leofsig answered. He pointed to the stinking slit into which he was shoveling dirt. “And shit”—another word he hadn’t picked up in school—“will turn your hair brown. Do you think you would look like a Forthwegian if I flung you in there?”

“It could be,” Gutauskas said imperturbably. “We have been known to call Forthwegians dungheels, just as Forthwegians have their own pleasant names for us.” He cocked his head to one side, waiting to see how Leofsig would take that.

With a shrug of his broad shoulders, Leofsig said, “Everyone calls his neighbors names. Why, I would bet even the Unkerlanters aren’t too efficient”—he had to drop into Forthwegian for that, being unable to come up with the Kaunian word—“to call their neighbors names.” He rolled his eyes to show he intended sarcasm.

Gutauskas nodded. “I would bet you are right: you prove it with your own speech, in fact. So tell me, would you sooner dwell in that part of Forthweg occupied by the Algarvian barbarians or the portion occupied by the Unkerlanter barbarians?”

“I would sooner no one occupied Forthweg,” Leofsig answered.

“That was not one of the choices offered,” Gutauskas said in the quietly mocking way that so often set Forthwegians’ teeth on edge.

By then, though, Leofsig had grown used to it. He gave the question serious thought; it was more interesting than what he had been doing. At last, he said, “It is likely easier for your people under the Unkerlanters, for my people under the Algarvians.”

“Aye, I think you are right,” the Kaunian agreed, “for the Algarvians have us to despise, which keeps them from despising you quite so much.” He waited while Leofsig threw a couple of shovels’ worth of dirt into the slit trench, then went on, “Perhaps around midnight tonight, you will need to make a call of nature, as I shall.”

“Will I?” Leofsig scratched his head. “I knew you Kaunians were an orderly, regular folk, but I didn’t realize you were as regular as all that.” Gutauskas said nothing, but kept looking at him with head cocked slightly to one side. Leofsig scratched his own head again. In a romance about the Six Years’ War, he would have figured out right away what the Kaunian was trying to tell him. At least he’d figured out Gutauskas was trying to tell him something. He said, “Well, who knows? Maybe I will.”

Gutauskas still didn’t say anything. He went off and started digging a new slit trench. Leofsig went back to covering over the one at which he’d been working. He didn’t move any faster than he had to. The Algarvians didn’t feed him enough to make him want to move very fast—and latrine duty wasn’t the sort of work that fired a man’s enthusiasm anyhow.

At last, as sunset drew near, he stowed his shovel in the rack and lined up for the meager supper that made a perfect accompaniment to his meager breakfast and meager dinner. He got a small slab of brown bread and a bowl of cabbage-and-turnip soup with a few small floating bits of salt pork so fatty it might as well have been lard. He also got a small cup of what the Algarvians insisted was beer. By the way it tasted, it might have come straight from the latrine trenches.

He drank it anyway. He ate and drank almost anything he even vaguely suspected of containing nourishment. He’d seen men pop their own lice into their mouths. He hadn’t fallen that far himself, but he knew he might. All too often, his belly ached like a rotting tooth. He cherished the hour or so after each meal, when that ache drew back and waited for a while.

After supper, the captives formed up in front of their barracks hall for the day’s final roll call and count. For a wonder, the Algarvian guards managed to get the same number twice running, which satisfied them. Their leader spoke in bad Forthwegian: “You going in now. You no coming out till morning roll call unless you pissing, you shitting. You trying any other come-outings …” He drew a finger across his throat. Leofsig wished that finger were the sharp edge of a knife.

Along with the rest of the men from his barracks, he went inside. Some of them clumped into little groups to talk. Others diced for money or, more often, for food. A few wrote letters or read the handful they’d been allowed to receive. By far the largest number lay down on their cots to rest or sleep away as much time as their captors allowed them.

Merwit glared at Leofsig in the dim lanternlight. Leofsig glared back. They were both too hungry and tired to do anything more than glare -and neither was eager to go up before the Algarvian authorities. That would mean half rations for sure, and whatever other punishments the redheads chose to add. Such delights made good behavior seem sensible even to Merwit.

The bruiser eventually rolled over and started to snore. Leofsig wanted to go to sleep, too; every fiber of his being cried out for it. If he did doze off, he’d miss whatever Gutauskas had in mind for midnight. If he didn’t, he’d be a wreck tomorrow. Which had the greater weight? Not nearly sure he was doing the right thing, he feigned sleep instead of falling headlong into it.

Gutauskas came back to his own cot. He’d been talking in a low voice with the few other Kaunians in the hall, as he usually did before the guards came in and blew out the lanterns. His breathing soon grew slow and regular. Had
he
fallen asleep?

Leofsig watched him out of half-closed eyes that kept wanting to slide all the way shut. No strip of moonlight shone on the barracks floor to let Leofsig gauge the hour even roughly; the moon, nearing new, would not rise till a little before the sun did.
How,
Leofsig wondered resentfully,
is Gutauskas supposed to know when it’s midnight, anyway?

He got angry enough at the Kaunian captive to keep himself a little less sleepy than he might otherwise have been. And at last, at an hour that might have been midnight or might not, Gutauskas rose from his cot and walked toward the barracks door, which was always open—and which, at the moment, let a chilly breeze into the hall.

Heart pounding, Leofsig got to his feet and walked out into the night after Gutauskas. If anyone challenged him, he intended to curse the Kaunian for waking him and making him get up in the middle of the night. But no one did. Yawning, he stumbled toward the latrines.

The one advantage of the cold was that the slit trenches did not stink quite so badly—or maybe it simply numbed Leofsig’s prominent nose. That dim shape ahead had to be Gutauskas. Leofsig yawned again, wishing he were back on his hard cot under his thin blanket: a strange wish, when most of the time he would have given anything to get away from the barracks.

Someone—a Forthwegian—came back from the latrine, tugging at his tunic. He grunted at Leofsig as they passed each other in the darkness.

Several men straddled slit trenches. All, by their silhouettes, were Kaunians. A couple exchanged soft comments in their own language: “They’re here.” “Aye. The last of them.”

Gutauskas set a hand on Leofsig’s arm. “Come. Come quickly. Come quietly. Ask no questions, not now. Soon enough, you will know.”

Naturally, questions flooded into Leofsig’s head. When he started to ask the first one, Gutauskas’s hand closed tight enough to hurt. Leofsig’s mouth stayed closed, too. Gutauskas jerked his chin toward the small knot of Kaunians ahead. Leofsig followed him over to them without another word.

As he came up, one of the Kaunians spoke in quiet Forthwegian: “An advantage to digging trenches is that there is digging, and then there is digging.”

A light shone in Leofsig’s dark, sleepy mind, bright as if an egg had burst in front of his face. Gutauskas said, “Come. It will be noisome. We could not keep everyone from using this trench. But will you set filth on your feet against the chance for freedom?”

“By the powers above, no!” Leofsig said in the best classical Kaunian he could muster.

“Hmm. As well we do take him, Gutauskas,” said the Kaunian who’d spoken a moment before. “Some of them, in truth, can be decent.” By
them,
Leofsig realized, he meant
Forthwegians.
He himself was the only non-Kaunian here.

Gutauskas said, “We can all be caught if we stand around here much longer.”

By way of answer, the other Kaunian scrambled down into the stinking trench. He yanked at the side—and pulled up a tiny square door covered with dirt and muck. “Go, my friends. Crawl as fast as you may. Crawl on one another’s heels. Never stop. There is an opening at the other end. Go to it.”

One by one, the six or eight men slid down into the trench and into the mouth of the tunnel. Gutauskas gave Leofsig a tiny shove. “Go before me,” he murmured. Leofsig got into the slit trench as quietly as he could. The muck at the bottom tried to suck the sandals off his feet. He scrambled through the doorway. It was barely wide enough for his broad Forthwegian shoulders.

Outside, it had been dark. In the tunnel—shored up here and there with boards that caught Leofsig in the head when he raised up too far, but mostly dirt, like a grave—it was black beyond black. The air felt dead. He crawled on, crawled for his life. A tiny thump came from behind him as the last Kaunian let the door fall. With luck, it would be filthy enough to keep the Algarvians from noticing it for a while.

Leofsig crawled. Sometimes he touched the feet of the man in front of him. Sometimes Gutauskas bumped his. How far had he come? How far to go? He had no idea. He kept crawling. He aimed to keep crawling till he came out, even if that were in Gyongyos or Lagoas. Blackness and dirt and shoving one knee past the other.

Fresh air, live air, ahead. He smelled it, as a hound would. The tunnel rose a little under his shins. A Kaunian pulled him out. The night looked like a hazy day to his light-starved eyes. Gutauskas came up behind him, and then the last man. “Now,” Gutauskas said in quiet but businesslike tones, “we all piss.”

“Why?” Leofsig asked—at last, a question he could put.

One of the other Kaunians answered, mirth in his voice: “To put running water between us and the Algarvians’ searching sorceries.”

Hot piss splashed out of them, there near the mouth of the tunnel, hidden from the captives’ camp by a grove of olive trees. Leofsig laughed, silently but with great joy, as he shook himself. He was filthy and stinking and liable to be recaptured or blazed on sight, but not one bit of that mattered, not now. Now—for the moment—he was free.

Bembo strolled along the streets of Tricarico, swinging his club and doing his best to make people notice him. Like most Algarvian towns, Tricarico was, among other things, a center of display. Even the most outrageously swaggering constable got less notice than he craved.

Still, Bembo would rather have been swaggering along the street than marching and countermarching in the park. He didn’t care for the weight of the dummy stick on his shoulder, and he especially didn’t care for the way that monster of a sergeant screamed at him and at everybody else in the makeshift militia. If any screaming went on, he wanted to give it, not to be on the receiving end.

He glanced nervously toward the east. The real army, or such part of it as Algarve could spare on this part of the frontier, was still holding the Jelgavans in the foothills of the Bradano Mountains. Bembo couldn’t quite figure out how the army was holding them there. The news sheets made it sound like strong sorcery, but no sorcery was
that
strong. He just hoped the regulars could keep doing it. If they couldn’t, he would have to try. He relished that notion not at all.