Out of the Darkness d-6

by Harry Turtledove

  Ealstan said, “I thought so, too. I wasn’t going to ask you for another little while, though. So we’ll have a two-year-old and a baby in the house at the same time, will we?” He looked from his father to his mother. “How did you two manage?”

  “It’s simple enough,” Hestan answered. “You go mad. Most of the time, though, you’re too busy to notice you’ve done it.” Elfryth nodded emphatically.

  Saxburh plucked the spoon from her bowl of porridge and flung it on the floor. “Done!” she announced. Vanai grabbed the bowl before it followed.

  Ealstan surveyed his daughter. “Before we turn her loose, I think we ought to take her to the public baths. They might have enough water to get her properly clean.”

  “She’s not so bad as that,” Vanai said. “A wet rag will do the job just fine.” And so it did, though Saxburh liked getting washed no better than usual. Sometimes washing her face wasn’t much different from wrestling.

  “Another grandchild.” Hestan smiled. “I like that.”

  “So do I,” Elfryth said. “We can enjoy them, but Vanai and Ealstan have to do most of the work. What’s not to like about an arrangement like that?”

  “Ha,” Ealstan said in a hollow voice. “Ha, ha, ha.”

  “What makes you think your mother was joking?” Hestan asked, sounding as serious as he did most of the time.

  No matter how serious he sounded, Vanai knew better than to take him seriously. “You-both of you-have given us lots of help with Saxburh. I know you’ll help some with the new baby, too. Of course we’ll do more-it’s our child, after all.”

  “You married a sensible woman, son,” Hestan said to Ealstan. “My only question is, if she’s as sensible as she seems, why did she marry you?”

  In a lot of families, a question like that would have been the opening blaze in a row. Here, Ealstan didn’t even blink. “I fooled her. I told her I was rich and I came from a good family. She hadn’t met you yet, of course, so she didn’t know what a liar I was.”

  “Well! I like that!” Elfryth said. But her eyes twinkled, too.

  “I’m sorry, Mother,” Ealstan said. “I guess I’m only half a liar.”

  “Oh, stop, all of you,” Vanai said. She’d seen how Ealstan and his family teased one another without angering or hurting anybody. She’d seen it, aye, but she didn’t understand it or fully believe it. Had she and her own grandfather made cracks like that, the air around the two of them would have frozen for days. Brivibas appreciated a certain sort of dry wit, but he’d had no sense of humor to speak of. And I always meant everything I told him, too, Vanai thought. Looking back, some of the things she’d said didn’t make her proud, but her grandfather had always had the knack for infuriating her.

  Saxburh banged both little fists down on the high chair’s tray, interrupting her mother’s gloomy reflections. “Out!” she said.

  “She’s talking very well,” Elfryth said as Vanai turned the baby loose. “She’s going to be smart.” She shook her head. “No, she’s already smart.”

  “Must take after her mother,” Hestan remarked.

  “No doubt,” Ealstan agreed. “Do you suppose I’m an idiot because I got it from you, or just because you raised me?”

  “Both, I’d say,” Hestan answered placidly. He turned to Vanai and shifted from Forthwegian to classical Kaunian: “When do you intend to teach the baby this language along with ours?”

  “My father-in-law, I didn’t do it before because of the occupation,” Vanai said in the same language. “If she’d spoken the wrong tongue while we were sorcerously disguised, that could have been. . very bad.”

  “Of course,” Hestan said. “But you can do it now-and you should, I think. With so many of your people gone on account of the cursed Algarvians, classical Kaunian is in danger of dying out as a birthspeech. After so many generations, that would be very bad, too.”

  “I’ve had the same thought,” Vanai said. That a Forthwegian would feel as she did surprised her. Ealstan would. Ealstan does, she thought. But Ealstan was in love with her. His father wasn’t. But he gets a lot of his ideas from his father. She shook her head, bemused at arguing with herself.

  Hestan plucked at his thick gray beard. “I’m not my brother, and I thank the powers above that I’m not,” he said. “We don’t all hate Kaunians and Kaunianity, even if the war let too many who do run wild.”

  “I know that,” Vanai said. “If I didn’t know that, would I have married your son? Would we have a baby who’s not one thing or the other, with another one on the way?”

  “No, indeed,” Hestan answered. “But sometimes these things do need saying.”

  “Fair enough.” Vanai nodded. Saxburh scrambled up into her lap. The toddler looked curiously from her to Hestan and back again. They were talking, but they were using words she hadn’t heard much before and couldn’t understand. By her wide eyes, that was very interesting.

  Ealstan said, “The next question is, how do I make enough money to feed a wife and two babies and maybe even myself?” He laughed. “After six years of questions like, How do I stay alive? and How do I keep the cursed redheads from murdering my wife? — after worrying about questions like those, thinking of money isn’t so bad.”

  “I’ve never gone hungry, and neither did my children,” Hestan said. “I don’t think yours have much to worry about.”

  “If this were real peace, I wouldn’t worry,” Ealstan said. “But with everything all torn to pieces by the war, business just isn’t what it used to be.”

  “Not now,” his father agreed, “but it’s bound to get better. It could hardly get worse, after all. And we’re still willing to share, you know.”

  “Haven’t we taken enough already?” Ealstan said.

  “We’re a family. This is what families are for.” Elfryth nodded, most vehemently, toward Vanai. From personal experience, Vanai had only a vague notion of what families were for. She didn’t want to shrug, so she just sat still.

  Her husband still seemed unhappy. “You’re not helping Conberge the same way you’re helping us.”

  “So we’re not, and do you know why?” Hestan asked. Ealstan shook his head. His father went on, “Because Grimbald’s parents are helping the two of them-the three of them, soon-that’s why.”

  “Oh,” Ealstan said in a small voice.

  Vanai said, “Thank you very much for everything you’ve done for us. I don’t know what we would have done without you.”

  “This is what families are for,” Elfryth repeated.

  Hestan added, “And if you and Ealstan got by in the middle of Eoforwic in the middle of the war, I don’t expect you would have had much trouble here in Gromheort in peacetime.”

  It’s because he says things like that, Vanai realized, that all his teasing doesn’t pack a sting. Ealstan couldn’t doubt he really was loved, no matter how sardonic his father got. And the ley line ran in both directions. That was obvious, too.

  Saxburh screwed up her face and grunted. No matter how clever she was, she was a long way from knowing how to wait when she needed to go. Vanai eagerly looked forward to the day when she learned. But another baby’s coming, she thought in sudden dismay. Even after Saxburh knows what to do, her little brother or sister won’t.

  She carried her daughter away to clean up the mess. “Come on, you little stinker,” she said. Saxburh thought that was funny. So did Vanai-but only after she’d washed her hands.

  After Saxburh went to bed, Vanai soon followed. In this pregnancy as in the one before, she found herself sleepy all the time. “Another baby,” Ealstan said in wondering tones. “I had thought you might be expecting again-your courses hadn’t come.”

  “No, they hadn’t,” Vanai replied around a yawn. “They won’t, not for a while now.” She laughed a little. “I miss nine months of cramps, and then I get to make up for it all at once, and then some.”

  “If it’s a boy, I’d like to name him Leofsig, for my brother,” Ealstan said.

  V
anai didn’t see how she could quarrel with that, especially not when Leof-sig, from all she’d heard, had got on with Kaunians as well as the rest of this remarkable Forthwegian family did-and when Sidroc, who’d gone into Pleg-mund’s Brigade, had killed him. Nodding, she said, “I would like to give him- or her, if it’s a girl-a Kaunian name, too.”

  “Of course,” Ealstan said.

  He hadn’t quarreled. He hadn’t even hesitated. He’d just said, Of course. Vanai gave him a hug. “I love you,” she told him.

  “I love you, too,” he answered seriously. “That’s what makes it all worthwhile. By the powers above, I do hope I’ll be able to keep feeding everybody.”

  “I think you will,” Vanai said. Ealstan still looked worried. She added, “Your father thinks you will, too. He’s a very sharp man. If he thinks you can manage, he’s likely right.”

  Ealstan kissed her. “You’re the one who always knows the right thing to say.”

  She yawned again. “What I’m going to say now is, ‘Good night.’“ She rolled over onto her side and felt sleep coming down on her like a soft, dark blanket. She yawned one more time. Tomorrow, life would go on. It was an utterly ordinary thought-for anyone who hadn’t been through what Vanai had. To her, the ordinary would never seem so again, not when she compared it to the years just past. Being able to have an ordinary life. . Who, really, could want much more than that? Not me, she thought, and slept.

  Pekka had run the largest, most complex sorcerous project the land of the Seven Princes had ever known. Over in the Naantali district, mages by the dozen had leaped to obey her. Thanks to the project, the Gyongyosians had surrendered and the Derlavaian War was over.

  “Aye? And so?” Elimaki said when Pekka went over her accomplishments.

  “And so? And so?” Pekka threw her hands in the air and scowled at her sister. “And so you’d think I’d be able to put together a simple wedding. That’s and so. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Elimaki said soothingly. “You’re doing fine. Everything will be wonderful. You’re only getting upset because it’s three days away.”

  “And because the caterer and the florist haven’t got a clue-not even a hint-about what they’re supposed to be doing,” Pekka added. “They’re both idiots. How do they stay in business when they’re such idiots?”

  “They’ve both been in business as long as we’ve been alive,” her sister pointed out. “Come the day, everything will be perfect.” Her mouth tightened. “A few years later, though, who knows?” Barristers and solicitors were still gnawing over the remains of her marriage, a marriage as much a wartime casualty as any wounded soldier.

  Pekka wished Elimaki hadn’t said that. “I’m nervous enough as things are,” she said.

  “If you don’t want to go through with it-” Elimaki began.

  “It’s not that,” Pekka broke in, shaking her head. “It’s not that at all.” She hoped she wasn’t trying to convince herself as well as Elimaki. “But how can I help worrying about it? I worry about everything. I have to.”

  “I hope you’re as happy ten years from now as you will be when you say your vows,” Elimaki told her. “Uto thinks the world of Fernao, if that means anything to you.”

  “It means a lot,” Pekka said. “The only question I have is whether it should make me happy or scare me.”

  Elimaki laughed. She knew Pekka’s son as well as Pekka did herself. She might know Uto better than I do, Pekka thought. The past few years, she’s seen a lot more of him than I have. “A little of both,” she said. “You don’t want him not to like Fernao. …”

  “I certainly don’t,” Pekka said.

  “But you wonder what he’s liking if he likes him too much,” her sister went on. “How much of a mischievous little boy can your fiance be?”

  “Some, I expect,” Pekka answered. “Most men can, from everything I’ve seen.” She thought of Ilmarinen, who still had a wide streak of mischievous little boy in him at more than twice her age. He and Uto had recognized each other as two of a kind. That was another frightening thought.

  “If Uto’s content with Fernao, that’s good,” Elimaki said. “A boy should have a man around, I think.” She hesitated, then nodded to herself and went on, “And you don’t have to tell him anything, either.”

  “No,” Pekka said. “That crossed my mind, too.” As far as she was concerned, it was far better that Uto never find out she and Fernao had been lovers before Leino died. Her son would have a much easier time accepting Fernao as a stepfather this way than as someone who might have displaced his real father even if Leino hadn’t died.

  “Simpler,” Elimaki said.

  “Aye.” Pekka nodded. “And the world usually isn’t simple, either.”

  “Don’t I know it!” Elimaki exclaimed. “It’s never simple once the solicitors get their claws into it, believe me it isn’t. Powers below eat Olavin, why didn’t he just walk in front of a ley-line caravan?”

  Pekka thought she understood why Olavin had taken up with his secretary.

  He’d been away from his wife for a long time, so he’d found someone else. She’d done something not far removed from that herself. Since she saw no way to tell Elimaki anything of the sort without making her sister burst like an egg, she prudently kept her mouth shut.

  Elimaki asked, “What sort of trouble is the caterer giving you?”

  That made Pekka want to burst like an egg. “The moron! The idiot! The imbecile! He’s telling me he can’t get enough smoked salmon for the feast.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why? I’ll tell you why! Because his illiterate, crackbrained assistant who does his ordering didn’t order enough, that’s why,” Pekka said. “He knew how much I’d asked for. He just forgot to get it. Incompetent bungler. Powers above, I wish we still took heads, the way our ancestors did in the old days. But his would be empty.”

  Elimaki went out to the kitchen. When she came back, she was carrying two mugs of brandy. “Here.” She handed one of them to Pekka. “Drink this. You’ll feel better.”

  “In the old days-”

  “In the old days, this would have been fermented reindeer milk,” her sister said firmly. Pekka found herself nodding. She took a sip, and nodded again. Sure enough, civilization had made progress in the past thousand years. Elimaki went on, “Everything will be fine at the wedding. You’ll see. And I hope everything will be fine afterwards, but that’s up to you-you and Fernao, I mean.”

  “We’ll do the best we can,” Pekka said. “That’s all anybody can do.”

  By the time she’d finished the brandy, she did feel better. Her sister had poured her a hefty tot. She also felt sleepy, and let Elimaki put her to bed. She was sure she would be worried again in the morning, but she wasn’t-only frantic, which wasn’t quite the same thing. Frantic seemed to do the job. She approached the caterer with blood in her eye, and not only got a promise of all the smoked salmon she’d ordered, but got it at a reduced rate. “To make up for the problem our error caused you,” the fellow said. To get you out of the shop before you murder someone, was what he probably meant.

  The day of the wedding dawned fair and mild. Pekka let out a long sigh of relief. With summer past and autumn beginning, weather in Kajaani was always a gamble. Aye, a canopy behind Elimaki’s house would have shielded the guests from the worst of it, but she didn’t want everyone to have to come swaddled in furs, and she especially didn’t want to bring the ceremony indoors. Old, old custom said weddings belonged outside, under the sun and the wind and the sky. If caught between old, old custom and an early snowstorm. .

  I don’t know what I would have done, Pekka thought. I’m glad I don’t have to worry about it. We might almost be Gyongyosians talking about the stars.

  She was just getting into her leggings and elaborately embroidered tunic, a good hour before people were supposed to start arriving, when somebody knocked on the front door. “If that’s Fernao, you can keep him,” she called to Elimaki.
“Otherwise, hit him over the head and drag him off to one side.”

  But it wasn’t Fernao, and Elimaki didn’t hit him over the head. “I need to speak to Pekka,” Ilmarinen declared.

  Pekka threw her hands in the air, thinking, I might have known. Fastening the last couple of bone toggles, she went out to the front room. “What is it?” she snapped. “It had better be interesting.”

  “Aren’t I always?” he asked, with one of his raffish smiles.

  She folded her arms across her chest. “What you always are, without fail, is a nuisance. I haven’t got time for you to be a nuisance right now, Master Ilmarinen. Say your say and come back when you’re supposed to, or you’ll make me sorry I invited you.”

  “Here. Let me show you.” He pulled a leaf of closely written calculations from his beltpouch and handed it to her. “It proves what I’ve been saying all along.”

  “I really haven’t got time for this now.” But Pekka took the paper-it was either that or throw him out bodily. She glanced through it… and stopped after a moment. It went from straight sorcerous calculation to purporting to prove by the same kind of calculations that she and Fernao would have a happy marriage. Not a dozen people in the world could have followed all of it-and she could imagine only one who could have written it. She wondered how much labor and thought had gone into it. In spite of herself, she couldn’t stay annoyed. “Thank you very much,” she told him. “I’ll treasure it.”

  “Do better than that,” Ilmarinen said. “Make it come true.” He ducked out of the house. Pekka hoped he’d remember to come back at the right time.

  Fernao did show up a few minutes later, along with the burgomaster of Kajaani, who would recite the marriage vows. The burgomaster, who was a plump little man, only a couple of inches taller than Pekka, looked odd standing beside her tall, lean Lagoan fiance. “I hope you’ll be very happy,” the man kept saying.

  “Oh, I expect we will,” Pekka answered. “In fact, I have proof.” She passed Fernao the paper Ilmarinen had given her.

  He started looking through it, then did the same sort of double take she had. “Who gave you this?” he said, and held up a hand. “No, don’t tell me. I’m a Zuwayzi if it’s not Ilmarinen.” Pekka nodded. Fernao got down to the bottom and shook his head. “There’s nobody like him.”