Jaws of Darkness

Tolk survived. The Algarvians and their Grelzer puppets hadn’t made a stand there, as they must have at Zossen. Buildings were smashed. Only burnt-out rubble remained of a few whole blocks. But Tolk survived.

Sitting by the fire in a tavern there, Garivald turned to Obilot and said, “Powers above only know what we would have done if this place was gone, too.”

Like him, she had a thick earthenware mug of spirits in front of her. She shrugged as she took a swallow from it. “Gone somewhere else, that’s all. What difference does it make where we are? We haven’t got anything left but each other.”

Garivald still didn’t know exactly what the Algarvians had done to her, and to whatever family she’d had, to make her flee to the irregulars. She’d fought Mezentio’s men longer and harder than he had; she’d been in the band when Munderic, who’d led it before Garivald, rescued him before the redheads could take him to Herborn and boil him alive for making patriotic songs.

He said, “We might have starved before we got anywhere else.” Late winter was the hard time, the empty time, of the year in peasant villages in Grelz, as it doubtless was in peasant villages all over Unkerlant.

Obilot shook her head. She had to bring up a hand to brush dark curls back from her face. She wasn’t pretty, not in any conventional sense of the word: she was too thin, too fierce looking, for anything approaching beauty. But the energy that crackled through her made every other woman Garivald had known, including A

“Well, maybe not,” Garivald said, and drank from his own mug of spirits. In most winters, he’d have stayed drunk much of the time from harvest till planting. How else to while away the long winter with so much time in it and so little to fill that time? As an irregular, he’d found other ways. As a refugee, he was finding other ways still. But, when he put the mug down again, he said, “I don’t feel like a desperate character.”

“No?” Obilot’s laugh held little mirth. “What else are you? What else is anybody in Grelz?” She lowered her voice: “What will you be if the inspectors catch up with you?”

“Dead,” Garivald answered, and drained the mug. He waved it in the air to show the tapman he wanted it refilled. Obilot’s mug was empty, too.

“Let’s see some silver,” the fellow said when he brought a jar of spirits over to their table.

Garivald dug a coin from his belt pouch and set it down on the scarred pine board. “Here. Fill us both up again.”

The tapman scooped it up, looked at it, and made it disappear. He filled both mugs. But then he said, “If you haven’t got the brains to be careful passing money with King Raniero ’s face-Raniero the traitor’s face, I mean- you’ll land in more trouble than popskull can ever get you out of. You’re just lucky I know a jeweler who’ll give me weight for weight-well, almost-in silver. He’ll be able to melt it down and make earrings or something out of it.”

Nobody at the next table could have heard a word he said. He went back behind the bar. Obilot asked, “How long have you been carrying that silver bit around?”

“How should I know?” Garivald shrugged. “Maybe since before King Swemmel ’s soldiers broke into Grelz. But maybe I got it yesterday, chopping firewood for that baker.”

“If you did, he was probably glad to palm it off on you,” Obilot said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Garivald agreed. “But at least in a place like Tolk, I can find odd jobs to do and make a little money. In a peasant village, I would starve. Everybody hates strangers in a village. I ought to know. I did, back when people I hadn’t seen before came into Zossen. For all I knew, they were inspectors or impressers sneaking around.”

“It’s not right,” Obilot said savagely. “With your songs, you did as much as anybody to get the Algarvians out of Grelz. The redheads must’ve thought so, or they wouldn’t have wanted to boil you. But what thanks do you get from your own side? Back in the woods, they were going to arrest you or kill you.”

With another shrug, Garivald answered, “When have you seen a peasant win? Not with our own kings, not with the redheads, not ever.” He didn’t even sound bitter. What point, when he told simple truth?

A youngster who might have been the tapman’s little brother or son brought in more wood and threw it on the fire. A couple of people in the tavern clapped their hands. The young man gri

“We’ve got the right table,” Obilot said, and turned toward the flames. Their reflections danced in her eyes. Garivald was about to do the same when somebody new came in from outside.

“Close the door, curse you,” someone inside said. “You’re letting out the heat.”

Garivald started to chime in, but the words never passed his lips. Instead, he turned his back on the door and leaned toward the fire, as Obilot had done. In a whisper even he had trouble even he had trouble hearing above the crackling flames, he said, “That’s Tantris who just walked in.”

“Tantris! What’s he doing here?” Obilot’s face went hard and feral. “He’s supposed to be off in the woods seventy-five miles east of here. The only reason he’d come to Tolk…”

“Is because he knows what we look like,” Garivald finished for her.

“He knows what you look like, the whoreson,” Obilot said. “He’s got to be after you. I don’t count for anything, not to the likes of him.”

She was bound to be right. When Garivald had slipped out of the woods with her and headed back toward Zossen without pursuit, he’d thought the Unkerlanters were willing to let him alone. That seemed a mistake, a bad mistake.

“I led fighters who didn’t take orders straight from King Swemmel,” he said. “I made songs people liked, songs that made people want to fight the redheads. This is how my own kingdom pays me back.”

Mezentio’s men had been ready to kill him. Now Swemmel’s were, too. The knowledge tore at him, as if he’d set his foot in a trap. And maybe he had. He sipped spirits and watched Tantris out of the corner of his eye.

The soldier didn’t want to be recognized for what he was; he wore a dark blue tunic of civilian cut rather than the rock-gray uniform tunic in which Garivald had always seen him in the woods. He glanced Garivald and Obilot’s way, but gave no sign of knowing who they were. After a moment, Garivald realized the two of them were silhouetted against the flames in the fireplace. He stayed where he was. Tantris bought a beaker of ale and stood at the bar drinking it.

Obilot kept her voice very low. “Is it true,” she said, “that now there are irregulars-Grelzer irregulars, I mean-fighting for the Algarvians in the lands our armies have taken back from them?”

“I’ve heard it, the same as you have,” Garivald answered. “I don’t know whether it’s true… but I’ve heard it.”

“Till that cursed Tantris walked thought the door, I wouldn’t’ve believed it,” Obilot said. “But now, do you know, I almost begin to understand.” Considering how she felt about the redheads, that was no small statement.

“A good many peasants fled east when Mezentio’s men had to retreat,” Garivald said. “I used to think they were the ones in bed with the Algarvians. I guess a lot of them were, but maybe not all.” If he hadn’t got in trouble with the redheads for his songs, his life in Zossen wouldn’t have been too very different under them from what it had been before the war. That was a judgment on Algarve and Unkerlant both, he supposed.

Obilot turned her head ever so slightly toward Tantris. “What are we going to do about him?”

“ Hope he goes away,” Garivald answered. Tantris drank his ale. He bought a chunk of chewy bread and dipped it into the bowl of coarse salt the tapman kept on the bar. Bite by bite, the bread disappeared. He washed down each bite with another swig of ale. Garivald might have done the same. He had done the same, many times.