He didn’t waste more than a couple of minutes gawping. How long would that seemingly endless stream of trees endure? If it passed without his taking advantage of it, how long would he have to wait till another one came down the Wolter? Too long-he was sure of that.
When he got down to the riverbank, he shed his boots, pulled his tunic off over his head, and plunged into the Wolter. Although it flowed from down out of the warmer north, its waters still chilled him. He struck out toward the immense swarm of logs.
Before long, Garivald wondered if he’d made a dreadful mistake. Going from log to log across the river hadn’t seemed so hard till he tried it. Not getting crushed by all that floating, drifting timber was a lot harder than he’d imagined.
He’d made it perhaps halfway through the logs when one of the men riding herd on them spotted him. “What in blazes are you doing here, you son of a whore?” the fellow bawled.
“Getting away from the mines,” Garivald shouted back. If the log-rider came over to try to seize him, he’d do his best to drown the man.
But the fellow with the pole only waved when he heard that. “Good luck, pal,” he said. “Me, I never saw you. My brother went into the mines almost ten years ago, and he never came out.”
Powers above, there are some decent people in this kingdom after all, Garivald thought as he went on toward the far bank of the Wolter. After the way he’d got dragged into the army-and after the way he’d been seized coming out of it- he’d had his doubts. He couldn’t dwell on that, though, for he had to scramble to keep an oncoming log from crushing him to jelly against the one he was riding.
He went from one log to another. And then, quite suddenly, no more logs remained between him and the far bank, which was now the near bank. He swam till his feet hit bottom. Then he waded ashore and re-donned his sodden tunic and even soggier boots. His belly growled; the bread hadn’t survived the trip across the Wolter. He trudged away from the stream, hoping to find a road or a village.
When he saw a man working in a field, he waved and called, “I’ll do whatever you need for a supper and a chance to sleep in a barn.”
The farmer looked him over. He still wasn’t dry, nor anywhere close to it. “What happened to you?” the fellow asked. “Looks like you fell in a creek.”
“Oh, you might say so,” Garivald agreed dryly-his words made the grade, even if he didn’t.
Or so he thought, till the farmer screwed up his face and said, “You’re not from around these parts, I don’t reckon.”
“No.” Garivald admitted what he could hardly deny-he did sound like a Grelzer. He came out with the best excuse he could: “I’m just anothersoldier who got dumped in the wrong place trying to get back to my own farm and my own woman.”
“Huh.” The local looked toward the Wolter. There was, Garivald realized, bound to be a reward for men who turned in escaped captives. But the farmer said, “So you’ve got a place of your own, eh? Well, prove it.”
After grubbing cinnabar out of a vein with pick and crowbar, farm work wasn’t so bad. When the sun swung to the west, Garivald followed the farmer back to his hut. He got a big bowl of barley porridge with onions and dill and sausage, and a mug of ale to wash it down. Set beside the little bricks of bread and famine stews in the mines, it seemed the best meal he’d ever eaten.
He did sleep in an outbuilding, next to a couple of cows. He didn’t care. When morning came, the farmer gave him another bowl of porridge, a length of sausage to take with him, and a couple of coins. Tears came to Garivald’s eyes. “I can’t pay this back,” he said.
“Pay it forward,” the local told him. “Someday you’ll run into another poor bastard down on his luck. Now go on, before somebody gets a good look at you.”
Day by day, Garivald worked his way north and east, toward the Duchy of Grelz. Most people, he thought, took him for an escapee, but no one turned him in to Swemmel’s inspectors. He got meals. He got money. He got shelter. And he got a good look at what the war had done to this part of Unkerlant. What he’d seen in Grelz suddenly didn’t seem so dreadful.
The city of Durrwangen was still in ruins. Plenty of labor gangs were slowly putting the place back together again. Captives didn’t man all of them. Garivald got the idea that King Swemmel didn’t have enough captives to do all the things he wanted to do. He joined a gang that paid a little-not much, but a little. He’d had plenty of practice in Zossen at making a little stretch. Before too long, he’d saved enough silver for a ley-line caravan fare to Linnich.
And then, when he went to the depot in Durrwangen to buy the fare, he bought it for Tegeler, the next town northwest of Linnich-he remembered the name from his journey back from Algarve. Someone in Linnich might be looking for him. No one in Tegeler would be. The price went up a little, but he reckoned it silver well spent.
When he climbed down from the caravan car in Tegeler, he saw a lounger keeping an eye on people descending. But the lounger had never seen him before, and had no reason to suspect him of anything. Aye, he was ragged and none too clean, but a lot of men on the ley-line caravan could have used a bath and new clothes.
He started for Linnich on foot. He didn’t know exactly how far it was: if he’d had to guess, he would have said about twenty miles. It proved farther than that, for he needed a day and a half to get there. He had no trouble cadging a couple of meals along the way. For one thing, there were no works with lots of captives anywhere close by. For another, his Grelzer accent sounded just like everyone else’s hereabouts.
Garivald didn’t go into Linnich, but skirted the town. Maybe Dagulf hadn’t told the impressers where he was working a farm. Maybe. But he didn’t want his former friend-or anyone else-to have another chance at betraying him.
He worried about going back to the farm, too. Did an inspector have an eye on it, wondering if he’d return? How many inspectors did King Swemmel have? Garivald had no idea. Of one thing he was sure, though: Obilot was all he had left in the world. Without her, he might as well have stayed in the mines.
The track leading to the farm was as overgrown as it had been the last time he’d walked it, more than a year before, between the impressers who’d hauled him into the army. What did that mean? He couldn’t know till he got where he was going, which didn’t stop him from worrying. His heart pounded in his chest as he came round the last bend and saw the farm at last.
Crops are getting ripe, he thought. And then he spied Obilot, weeding in the vegetable patch by the farmhouse. He didn’t see anyone else. That had been another worry. He’d been gone a long time, including some little while after the end of the war. How could anyone blame her for thinking he was dead?
She looked up and saw him coming through the fields toward the house. The first thing she did was reach for something beside her-a stick, Garivald thought. Then she checked the motion and got to her feet. Garivald waved. So did Obilot. She ran to him.
She almost knocked him off his feet when she took him in her arms, but her embrace helped keep him upright. “I knew you would come back,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I did.”
“Where else would I come?” Garivald said, and kissed her for a long time. That dizzied him; it felt stronger than spirits. But he couldn’t afford to get drunk on anything, even sensuality, now. He asked, “Do they watch this place?”
Obilot’s eyes narrowed. “It’s like that?” she said. He nodded. “I haven’t seen anybody,” she told him. “Not since Dagulf. . died, and that was a while ago now.”
“Oh?” Garivald said. “How did that happen?”
“Nobody seems to know,” Obilot answered, not quite innocently enough. “Are we going to have to find another abandoned place and learn new names for ourselves all over again?”