Out of the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  The animals were growing frantic now, the rats squeaking in fear and alarm. Pekka knew an abstract pity for them. Better you than so many Kaunians or Unkerlanters or even Gyongyosians who are proud to volunteer their throats to the knife. Glowing blue lines of sorcerous energy stretched between cages of young beasts and their grandparents. Those lines grew brighter by the moment, brighter and brighter and . . .

  All at once, they flashed, intolerably brilliant. Pekka’s eyes were closed against the glare by then, but that flash pierced her to the quick even so. When she opened her eyes afterwards, green-purple lines seemed printed across the world. Slowly, slowly, they faded.

  Corruption’s ripe reek filled the blockhouse, but only for a moment. The older rats and rabbits in the cages aged so catastrophically fast, they went past rotting to bare bones far quicker than the blink of an eye. The younger ones, by contrast, were propelled backwards chronologically, back to the days long before they were born. Had they ever truly existed, then? The mathematics there were indeterminate. But for sawdust and shavings, the cages that had held them were empty now.

  “Divergent series,” Pekka murmured. Sure enough, that was how to get the greatest release of sorcerous energy.

  “We did everything as planned,” Raahe said. “Now we find out if our calculations were right.”

  “That’s the interesting part, or so Ilmarinen would say,” Pekka replied. She hoped the cantankerous old master mage was all right. Losing him on top of all the other disasters of war would have been almost too much to bear. Deliberately forcing the thought from her mind, she turned to the crystallomancer. “Make the etheric connection to the Searaven.”

  “Aye, Mistress Pekka.” The crystallomancer bent over her glassy sphere and murmured the charm that would link the blockhouse to the Kuusaman cruiser gliding along a ley line a few miles off the beaches of Becsehely. Her first attempt failed; the crystal refused to flare with light. She muttered something under her breath, then spoke aloud: “It should have worked. Let me try again.”

  “All right,” Pekka said nervously. The amount of energy they’d released . . . If they’d miscalculated even by a little, it might have come down on the Searaven instead of the empty island at which they’d aimed.

  But then the crystal did light up. After a moment, the flash faded and a naval officer’s face appeared in the globe. “Here you are, Mistress Pekka,” the crystallomancer said. “Here is Captain Waino.”

  “Powers above be praised,” Pekka murmured as she hurried over to stand before the crystal. She raised her voice: “Hello, Captain. Please describe what-- if anything--you and your crew observed on Becsehely.”

  “If anything?” Waino exclaimed. “Mistress, as far as that island’s concerned, it’s the end of the fornicating world--pardon my Valmieran.”

  Pekka smiled. “You’re a naval man, and you talk like what you are.”

  “As you say, Mistress.” Waino sounded like a man who’d just been through an earthquake. “Everything was normal as you please, and then lightning slammed down out of a clear sky and things blew up--it was as though every dragon in the world dropped a couple of eggs on Becsehely at the same time as the lightning hit it. But there weren’t any dragons.”

  Behind Pekka, the other theoretical sorcerers cheered and applauded. Somebody gave her a glass of applejack. She didn’t sip from it, but asked the officer, “What can you see of the island now?”

  “Not forn . . .” Waino caught himself. “Not much. It’s still covered in smoke and dust and steams. We will send men ashore for a further examination as things settle down.”

  “Very well, Captain. Thank you.” Pekka nodded to the crystallomancer, who broke the etheric connection. After a pull at the apple brandy--now she’d earned it--Pekka said, “We can do this thing.” The other theoretical sorcerers cheered again. They had glasses in their hands, too.

  Trapani, Pekka thought again as they walked out to the sleighs to go back to the hostel. Gyorvar, to teach Ekrekek Arpad a lesson he’ll never forget. Cottbus, even, if King Swemmel ever needs the same kind of lesson. She could feel the applejack, but the knowledge of power felt still more intoxicating.

  As she always did, she rode with Fernao. The calendar said spring was here; the landscape wouldn’t listen to the calendar for another month, maybe longer. Fresh snow had fallen the night before. By the low gray clouds overhead, more might come down any time. A reindeer-drawn sleigh remained the best way to get around.

  Though blankets covered them and kept the driver from seeing what they did beneath, Fernao kept his hands to himself. He hadn’t tried pushing things after Leino died. He knew Pekka well enough to understand that nothing would have been likelier to drive her away from him for good. And she’d stayed well apart from him on the trip out to the blockhouse. Now, for the first time since that dreadful day she got the news, she let her head rest on his shoulder. Maybe it’s the applejack, she thought. Even if it isn’t, I can blame it on the applejack.

  Fernao’s narrow eyes widened. He put his arm around her. She discovered she was glad to have it there. She might not have been so glad had he tried to paw her, but he didn’t. He didn’t say anything, either. A Kuusaman would have. Most Lagoans, she thought, probably would. He was wise to keep quiet.

  When they got to the hostel, they went upstairs together. Pekka’s chamber was one floor higher than Fernao’s, but she left the stairway with him. He still didn’t speak, not till they stood inside his room. Then, at last, he said, “Thank you. I love you.”

  Do I really love him? Pekka wondered. Do I love him in a way that might make my life whole again, or at least not ripped to pieces? Do I love him in a way that would make me want him to help raise Uto? Do I want to give Uto a half brother or half sister by him? I don’t know, not for sure. But I think I’d better find out.

  “Before,” she said, “our first times were accidents. This won’t be. I mean it.” Was she telling him or trying to convince herself? She wasn’t sure of that, either.

  Fernao just nodded. He said, “I’ve always meant it.”

  “I know,” Pekka answered, and started to laugh. Men were supposed to be the ones who didn’t want to get tied down. Women were supposed to look for loves that lasted. She and Fernao hadn’t worked that way, though. Maybe we will now, she thought.

  She stepped toward him at the same time as he was stepping toward her. When they embraced, the top of her head didn’t come much past his shoulder. That sometimes bothered her. Today, it didn’t seem to matter.

  It mattered even less when they lay down together. Pekka wondered if she would, if she could, take any pleasure. She wouldn’t have worried if she hadn’t; sometimes having arms around her was enough. But Fernao took his time and paid what seemed like special attention to her. The only thing that could have kept her from eventually arching her back and moaning was. . . She couldn’t imagine anything that could have. Certainly, nothing did.

  As she lay with her legs entwined with his, she wondered how much that truly mattered. Well, she thought, lazy in the afterglow, it can’t hurt.

  All around Krasta, the servants at the mansion bustled like so many scurrying ants, getting the place ready for her brother’s marriage to the horrible, bloodthirsty peasant wench with whom he’d unaccountably become infatuated. That was how Krasta looked at the match, at any rate, and nothing was going to make her change her mind. Hardly anything ever made her change her mind.

  A wedding invitation wouldn’t have done it. She was sure of that. It didn’t matter, though; no invitation had been forthcoming. Skarnu and Merkela expected her to stay in her bedchamber by herself while they celebrated. They had their nerve, as far as she was concerned.

  Worst of all was that they would probably get what they expected. Had she not been enormously pregnant, she might well have done her best to interrupt, to upstage, the ceremony she so despised. Being about the size of a behemoth, though, did put a crimp in such plans. All she wanted to do was have the baby and get it o
ver with. She’d been feeling that way for most of the past month.

  Even Bauska was pressed into the service of Skarnu and Merkela, which infuriated Krasta afresh. Her maidservant did show her a little sympathy when she had time to make an appearance, saying, “Oh, aye, milady, before I finally had Brindza, I would have paid anything to get her the blazes out of there.”

  “I should say so,” Krasta exclaimed. She rested her hands on her enormous belly; her arms seemed too short to go round herself, though of course they weren’t. And she had something else on her mind, too, something Bauska couldn’t have dwelt upon: “And once this baby finally comes out, everyone will see it’s a proper little blond, not some nasty Algarvian’s bastard.”

  Bauska’s mouth tightened. She left, even though Krasta hadn’t told her she could. Krasta snarled something vile under her breath. To her way of thinking, having a normal, Valmieran-looking baby would automatically wash her clean of all the times she’d opened her legs for Colonel Lurcanio. Anyone would be able to look at the child and see at a glance that, when it really mattered, she’d lain with one of her own countrymen--and a nobleman to boot.

  Her womb had been tightening every so often for some weeks. She’d got used to it, though she found it annoying--it squeezed on the baby, which was uncomfortable to her, and it evidently made the baby uncomfortable, too, for the little brat always did some extra thrashing and wiggling after things eased up. Krasta didn’t like that, either; by now, the baby was big enough to kick and poke hard, and didn’t care what tender parts of her it abused in the process.

  Three days before her brother’s wedding, the labor pains started in earnest. They were rhythmic, they were regular, and they were much more irksome than any pangs she’d known before. She cursed before calling for Bauska. She’d hoped the baby would wait till the middle of the marriage ceremony. If she’d started screaming for a midwife then, that would have taken everybody’s mind off the catastrophe befalling her family.

  But no such luck. When she became convinced these pains weren’t going away, she shouted for Bauska. Her maidservant took her own sweet time getting there. When she did, Krasta demanded, “What was the name of that woman?”

  “What woman, milady?” Bauska asked. Krasta had another pang then, and clenched her teeth against it. That told Bauska everything she needed to know. “Oh, the midwife,” she said. “She’s called Kudirka. Shall I have her summoned?”

  “No, of course not,” Krasta snapped. “I just wanted to know her name for no reason at all.” And then, in case the maidservant was a fool or felt like pretending to be one, she made herself perfectly clear: “Aye, fetch her. This is going to be over, and I am going to show everybody what the truth is.”

  Bauska didn’t answer that. She went away, which satisfied Krasta well enough. Presently, the carriage clattered down the walk and away from the mansion. After what was about an hour and seemed much longer, it came rattling back. By then, Krasta’s labor pains had advanced to the point where she hardly noticed its return.

  Kudirka walked into the bedchamber without bothering to knock. She was as broad-shouldered as an Unkerlanter and had a face like a frog, but something in her manner got through even to Krasta. “Take off your trousers, sweetie, and let’s find out what’s going on in there,” the midwife said.

  “All. . . right.” Another pang seized Krasta before she could. Kudirka waited till it was over, then yanked the trousers off the marchioness herself. She proceeded to feel Krasta’s belly and then to probe her a good deal more intimately than any lover ever had. Krasta yelped.

  “Don’t you worry about a thing,” Kudirka told her. “Your hips are nice and wide. You won’t have any trouble at all. A few hours of grunting, then some pushing, and then there’s a baby in your arms. Easy as you please.”

  “Good,” Krasta said. It all sounded simple and straightforward.

  It didn’t turn out to be that way, of course. It turned out to be boring and painful and exhausting. She discovered exactly why the process was called labor. Sweat plastered her hair to her forehead. It seemed to go on forever, and to hurt more and more as it continued.

  At one point, Krasta started cursing every man she’d ever lain with, and cursing Kudirka, too. The midwife took it in stride. “It’s a good sign, honey,” she said. “It means you’ll be ready to do your pushing pretty soon.”

  “There’s more?” Krasta groaned. She’d been going through this for an eternity--it was getting dark outside, and she’d started in the morning. Kudirka only nodded. Then she went to the bedchamber and spoke to someone. Krasta paid little attention till Merkela came in. No matter how far gone she was, that registered. “Get out of here!” she squawked.

  “No,” the peasant woman answered. “I am going to see this baby before you have the chance to do anything with it or to it. If it’s blond, it is. If it’s not... I will know that, too.”

  Krasta cursed her as savagely as she knew how. She had no inhibitions left, none whatever. Merkela gave back as good as she got till Kudirka nudged her. Even she respected the midwife, and fell silent.

  “I have to shit,” Krasta said. “I have to shit more than I ever had to shit in my whole life.”

  “That’s the baby,” Kudirka said. “Go ahead and push it out.”

  Saying that was one thing; doing it turned out to be something else again. Krasta felt as if she were trying to pass a boulder, not a turd. And then, to her disgust, she did pass a turd. Without any fuss, Merkela disposed of the sheet on which it lay. It must come of growing up on a farm, Krasta thought. She knows all about turds.

  Then she stopped thinking altogether, stopped everything except struggling to force the baby out of her. She hardly heard Kudirka’s encouragement. The world, everything but her labor, seemed very far away. She took a deep breath, then let out an explosive noise somewhere between a grunt and a squeal.

  “That’s it!” the midwife said. “Do that twice more, three times at the most, and you’ll have yourself a baby.”

  Krasta didn’t know how many times she made that desperate effort. She was beyond caring by then. At last, though, just when she seemed certain to split in two, everything suddenly got easier. “The baby’s head is out,” Merkela said.

  “A couple of more pushes and it’s done,” Kudirka added. “The head is the big part. Everything else will be easy.”

  For a miracle, she was right. She guided out the baby’s shoulders and torso and legs. She and Merkela tied off the umbilical cord. Merkela cut it with a pair of shears. Krasta hardly noticed that. She was busy passing the afterbirth, a disgusting bit of business no one had told her about, and one that cost her the undersheet on her bed.

  “You have a boy,” Merkela said. She held the squalling baby in the crook of her arm with practiced ease. Not so long before, her son by Skarnu had been so tiny.

  Through a haze of exhaustion, Krasta said, “I’ll name him Valnu, for his father.”

  Kudirka said nothing at all. Merkela laughed and laughed. The wolfish quality in the peasant woman’s mirth made Krasta shiver no matter how weary she was. Merkela held the baby under her nose, so close her eyes almost crossed. “You were an Algarvian’s whore. I don’t care who else you might have spread your legs for, but you were an Algarvian’s whore, and by what comes out of your own twat you prove what went into it.”

  As newborns often are, Krasta’s baby son was born almost bald. But the fine fuzz on his head was of a strawberry tinge no purely Valmieran baby’s head would have had. It was, in fact, nearly identical in color to the hair of Bauska’s bastard half-breed daughter, Brindza.

  Laughing still, Merkela said, “If you’re going to name it for its father, you stinking slut, you can call it Lurcanio.”

  The weariness Krasta knew then had nothing to do with the ordeal she’d just been through. She’d spent so much time and effort trying to convince everyone, including herself, that the child she was carrying was indeed Valnu’s. She’d-- mostly--made herself believe it. Sh
e’d made everyone else wonder. And now, to be betrayed by something as trivial as a few strands of hair on the baby’s oddly cone-shaped head (she presumed that would change, even if the brat’s wretched hair color never did) ... It all seemed most unfair, as did anything that didn’t go just the way she wished it would have.

  “I--” she began.

  “Shut up.” Merkela’s voice was flat and hard and vicious, the voice of a wildcat seeing prey it had long stalked at last helpless before it. She gave the baby to Kudirka, then grabbed the scissors she’d used to cut the cord. “I’ve waited too cursed long for this, by the powers above, but now you get what’s coming to you.” She grabbed a shock of Krasta’s hair and hacked it off not a finger’s breadth from her scalp.

  “Powers below eat you, you can’t--” Krasta said.

  Merkela slapped her in the face. Only Lurcanio had ever dared do that to her before. “Shut up, I told you,” Merkela snapped. She closed the shears and aimed them at one of Krasta’s eyes. “What I’m doing is the least of what you deserve-- the least, do you hear me? You can take it, or I’ll give you plenty more. I’d love to, do you hear me? You don’t know how much I’d love to.” The shears jerked closer.

  Krasta closed her eyes and flinched. She couldn’t help herself. At any other time, she would have fought, regardless of whether she had a weapon of her own. Exhausted as she’d never been exhausted, sick in spirit as well, she kept her eyes closed and let Merkela do as she would. At last, though, the hateful snip-snip of the shears made her exclaim, “Futter you!”

  “A Valmieran futters me,” Merkela retorted. Snip-snip. “I didn’t have a stinking redhead leave silver on the dresser every time he stuck it in.” Snip-snip.

  It wasn’t like that. But Krasta didn’t say it. What point? Merkela wouldn’t have believed her, and wouldn’t have cared even if she had believed her. At last, it was over. Kudirka set the baby--the half-Algarvian bastard, just like Bauska’s-- on Krasta’s breast. It rooted and began to suck. Krasta didn’t burst into tears. She was too worn for that. But, one after another, they trickled down her cheeks.