- Garivald, an Unkerlanter peasant, is perhaps analogous to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, though only in having literary talents and falling foul of the Soviet/Unkerlanter authorities, rather than in any specific biographical details. Garivald is an extremely capable and talented man, of which he himself is not fully aware, and would have gotten much further had he not been born an illiterate peasant under an oppressive regime which often rewards loyal service with severe punishment (especially when said service involved too much of an independent initiative). Specifically, he is from Unkerlant's Duchy of Grelz (analogue of the Ukraine), an area with some smouldering separatist tendencies, which makes the central government all the more suspicious of him. Shortly before the arrival of the invading Algarvian army, Garivald discovered that he has a talent for song and poetry, and once under occupation he applied this talent to composing patriotic songs, rousing the people to struggle, which soon became widely popular throughout the Algarvian-occupied part of Unkerlant. The Algarvians captured him, but on the way to execution he was liberated by a band of irregulars, soon became a renowned fighter as well as poet, and became the leader of the band when the previous leader was killed. Supported and complemented by the central government's emissaries as long as he was under occupation, once his band's area of operations was liberated he fell under suspicion - King Swemmel's "inspectors" (secret police) reasoning that a man who wrote subversive songs and headed insurgent guerrillas under one regime might continue to do so under another regime as well. Garivald slipped away in the night and returned to his original village - only to find it completely destroyed in the war, with his wife and children probably dead. Together with his lover Obilot, a former fellow-irregular who had also lost her entire family, he tried to hide out, the two of them cultivating a small forest clearing. Desperately needing to find the seed hidden by peasants in a ruined village, Garivald designs a magic spell which does the trick - but failed to draw from this any conclusion about his own innate power and ability. (Non-mages can perform some simple magic, but usually they use spells designed by professionals.) The couple's hide-out was discovered by the King's men - who didn't realize that "Fariulf", (as he now called himself) is the fugitive poet Garivald, but they did impress him into the army, then going into the offensive against the Algarvians and needing manpower to compensate for its enormous losses. Though a latecomer to the regular army, his evident ability soon earned him the rank of sergeant (had the war lasted a bit longer, he would have probably become an officer). He carefully refrained from composing any more songs, but the officer who taught him his letters soon noticed that his reports had a literary quality to them. Garivald took part in invading Algarve and cutting it in half, and was present when the Unkerlanters effected juncture with the Lagoan/Kuusaaman (Anglo-American) forces. Subsequently, the senior Kussaaman mage Ilmarinen, at the time a colonel, briefly met Garivald/Fariulf and detected in him "a blazing power, not magical though akin to magic power" whose like even Ilmarinen - one of the greatest mages of his generation - never encountered before. However, the Unkerlanters discovered Ilmarien's identity and, (correctly) suspecting him of espionage, barred him from their territory, so that he (and the reader, and for that matter Garivald himself) tantalisingly never found out more about the nature of Garivald's power. Meanwhile, after discharge from the army Garivald/Fariulf once again fell foul of the "inspectors" - for no more reason than that he had been in Algarve (Germany) long enough to notice how much richer and more highly developed than his own country it was - which could (and in fact, did) lead him to subversive thoughts. He was sent to twenty-five years in the cinnabar mines of the Mamming Hills, which amounted to a slow sentence of death. There he came in contact with Algarvian and Algarvian-allied captives, all feeling that on whatever side they had fought they had lost the war. He and Ceorl, who once fought each other, escaped together - Ceorl being killed by pursuing guards but Garivald managing to escape, helped on the way by sympathetic peasants, and rejoin Obilot - where the book finally leaves him. In the course of his escape, one further hint is given of Garivald's power: with a river too wide to swim in front of him and pursuit close behind, Garivald goes to sleep with the "irrational" belief that things will be okay in the morning - and wakes up to find the river full of logs which can be jumped across. It seems that Garivald is somehow able to manipulate events and even out a bit the enormous odds against him. That is all the reader can know, short of Turtledove writing a sequel.
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