Rulers of the Darkness d-4

by Harry Turtledove

  A Forthwegian passing by called, "Hey, you Kaunians!" When a couple of the blonds looked up, he drew his finger across his throat and made horrible gurgling noises. Then he threw back his head and laughed. So did the Algarvian strawbosses. So did about half the Forthwegian laborers. The Kaunians, for some reason, didn't seem to find the joke so funny.

  And Ealstan had to walk on by without even cursing his loutish countryman. He didn't dare do anything that would draw the occupiers' notice. His own fate was of no great concern to him. Without him, though, how would Vanai manage? He didn't want her to have to find out.

  At the doorway to the flat, he gave the coded knock he always used. Vanai opened the door to let him in. After they kissed, they both said the same thing at the same time: "I've got news." Laughing, they pointed to each other and said the same thing at the same time again: "You first."

  "All right," Ealstan said, and told Vanai of Ethelhelm's disappearance. He finished, "I don't know where he's gone, I don't know what he's doing, and I don't much care, not anymore. Maybe he even listened to me- maybe he's gone off to find some quiet little place in the country where nobody will care where he came from or what he used to do as long as he pulls his weight."

  "Maybe," Vanai said. "That would be easier for him if he didn't look as if he had Kaunian blood, of course. Maybe someone got my spell to him."

  "Maybe somebody did," Ealstan said. "For his sake, I hope somebody did. It would make things easier." He paused, then remembered he wasn't the only one with something on his mind. He pointed at Vanai and asked, "What's your news?"

  "I'm going to have a baby," she answered.

  Ealstan gaped. He didn't know what he'd expected her to say. Whatever it was, that wasn't it. For a couple of seconds, he couldn't think of anything to say. What did come out was a foolish question: "Are you sure?"

  Vanai laughed in his face. "Of course I am," she answered. "I have a perfectly good way to tell, you know. I was pretty sure a month ago. There's no room for doubt now, not anymore."

  "All right," he mumbled. His cheeks and ears heated. Talk of such intimate details embarrassed him. "You surprised me."

  "Did I?" Vanai raised an eyebrow. "I'm not surprised, not really. Or rather, the only thing I am surprised about is that it took so long to happen. We've been busy."

  He heard her, but he wasn't really paying much attention to what she said. "A baby. I don't know anything about taking care of babies. Do you?"

  "Not really," she said. "We can learn, though. People do. If they didn't, there wouldn't be any more people."

  "We'll have to think of a name," Ealstan said, and then added, "Two names," remembering it might be either boy or girl. "We'll have to do… all sorts of things." He had no idea what most of them were, but Vanai was right- he could learn. He'd have to learn. "A baby."

  He walked past his wife into the kitchen, opened a jar of red wine, and poured two cups full. Then he went out to Vanai, handed her one, and raised the other in salute. They both drank. Vanai yawned. "I'm sleepy all the time. That's another thing that's supposed to be a sign."

  "Is it?" Ealstan shrugged a shrug meant to show ignorance. "I'd noticed you were, but I didn't think it meant anything."

  "Well, it does," she said. "You sleep as much as you can beforehand, because you won't sleep once the baby's born."

  "That makes sense," Ealstan agreed. "A baby." He kept saying the words. He believed them, but in a different sense he had trouble believing them. "My mother and father will be grandparents. My sister will be an aunt." He started to mention his brother also, started and then stopped. Leofsig was dead. He still had trouble believing that, too.

  Vanai's mind was going down the same ley line. "My grandfather would be a great-grandfather," she said, and sighed. "And he would grumble about miscegenation and halfbreeds as long as he lived."

  Ealstan hadn't cared about that. He didn't think his family would, either. Oh, there was Uncle Hengist, Sidroc's father, but Ealstan wasn't going to waste any worry on him. "The baby will be fine," he said, "as long as-"

  He didn't break off quite soon enough. Vanai thought along with him again. "As long as Algarve loses the war," she said, and Ealstan had to nod. She went on, "But what if Algarve doesn't lose? What if the baby's looks show it has Kaunian blood? Will we have to make magic over it two or three times a day till it can make magic for itself? Will it have to make magic for itself for the rest of its life?"

  "Algarve can't win," Ealstan declared, though he knew no certain reason why not. The redheads seemed convinced they could.

  But Vanai didn't contradict him. She wanted to believe that as much as he did- more than he did. "Let me get supper ready," she said. "It won't be anything fancy- just bread and cheese and olives."

  "That will be fine," Ealstan said. "The way the redheads are stealing from us, we're lucky to have that. We're lucky we can afford it."

  "That's not luck," Vanai answered. "That's because you do good work."

  "You're sweet." Ealstan hurried over to her and gave her another kiss.

  "I love you," she said. They'd both been speaking Forthwegian; they almost always did these days. Suddenly, though, she switched to Kaunian: "I want the child to learn this language, too, to know both sides of its family."

  "All right," Ealstan replied, also in Kaunian. "I think that would be very good." He was pleased he could bring the words out quickly. He pulled out a chair for Vanai. "If it is cheese and olives and bread, you sit down. I can fix that for us."

  More often than not, she didn't want him messing about in the kitchen. Now, with a yawn, she said, "Thank you." After a moment, she added, "You speak Kaunian well. I'm glad."

  Ealstan, of course, hadn't learned it as his birthspeech. He'd acquired it from schoolmasters who'd stimulated his memory with a switch. Even so, he told the truth when he answered, "I am glad, too."

  ***

  Cornelu's leviathan heartily approved of swimming south and west toward the outlet of the Narrow Sea, to the waters just off the coast of the land of the Ice People. He'd expected nothing different; Eforiel, the leviathan he'd ridden for King Burebistu of Sibiu, had also liked to make this journey. The tiny plants and animals that fed bigger ones flourished in the cold water off the austral continent.

  The leviathan cared nothing for tiny plants and animals. Whales fed on those, sieving them up with baleen. But the squid and mackerel and tunny that swarmed where food was so thick delighted the leviathan, delighted it so much that Cornelu sometimes had trouble persuading it to go where he wanted.

  "Come on, you stubborn thing!" he exclaimed in exasperation more affectionate than otherwise. "Plenty of nice fish for you to eat over here, too." Despite taps and prods, the beast didn't want to obey him. If it decided to go off on its own and eat itself fat, what could he do? Every so often, a leviathan-rider went out on a mission that looked easy and was never seen again…

  Eventually- and, in fact, well before he could go from exasperated to alarmed- the leviathan decided there might be good eating in the direction he chose, too. That didn't mean Cornelu could take it easy and not worry on the ride. Algarvian warships prowled the ley lines that ran south from occupied Sibiu. Algarvian leviathans swam in these seas, too. And Algarvian dragons flew overhead.

  Every day was longer than the one that had gone before. And, the farther south the leviathan swam, the longer the sun stayed in the heavens. At high summer, daylight never ceased on the austral continent. The season hadn't come to that yet, but it wasn't far away.

  Ice floating in the sea foretold the presence of the austral continent: first relatively small, relatively scattered chunks, then bergs that loomed up out of the water like sculpted mountains of blue and green and white and bulked ever so much larger below the surface of the ocean. Somehow, leviathans could sense those great masses of underwater ice without seeing them, and never collided with them. Cornelu wished he knew how his beast managed that, but the finest veterinary mages were as baffled as he.

>   In winter, the sea itself froze solid for miles out from the shore of the land of the Ice People. The icebergs Cornelu passed broke off from the main mass as sea and air warmed when the sun swung south in the sky once more.

  He and his leviathan had to thread their way through channels in the ice to the little settlement Kuusaman and Lagoan sorcerers had established east of Mizpah, on the long headland that jutted out toward the island the two kingdoms shared. A Kuusaman mage in a rowboat came out to bring Cornelu the last couple of hundred yards to shore.

  "Very good to see you," the Kuusaman said in classical Kaunian, the only language they proved to have in common. He introduced himself as Leino. "Very good to see anyone who is not a familiar face, as a matter of fact. All the familiar faces have become much too familiar, if you know what I mean."

  "I think I do," Cornelu answered. "I suspect you would be even happier to see me if I were a good-looking woman."

  "Especially if you were my wife," the Kuusaman said. "But Pekka has her own sorcerous work, and I know as little about what she is doing as she knows about what goes on here."

  "What does go on here?" Cornelu looked at the miserable collection of huts and camel-hide tents on the mainland. "Why would anyone in his right mind want to come here?"

  Leino grinned at him. "You make assumptions that may not be justified, you know." The mage might smile and joke, but didn't answer the question.

  Cornelu knew he wasn't going to get much of an answer, but he did want some. "Why on earth did they have my leviathan bring you two large egg casings filled with sawdust?"

  "No trees around these parts," Leino replied as the rowboat ran aground on a pebbly beach. "Hard to get a ship through all these icebergs. A leviathan can carry more than a dragon. And so- here you are."

  "Here I am," Cornelu agreed in hollow tones. "Here I may stay, too, unless you get me back to my leviathan before it swims off after food."

  "No worry there." Leino scrambled out of the boat. "We have a good binding spell on the sea hereabouts. You are not the first leviathan-rider to come here, but not a one of them has been stranded."

  "Fair enough." Cornelu got out of the boat, too. With rubber flippers still on his feet, he was as awkward as a duck on land. He persisted: "Why sawdust?"

  "Why, to mix with the ice, of course," Leino replied, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world. "We have plenty of ice here."

  Cornelu gave up. He might hope for a straight answer, but he could tell he wasn't going to get one. He asked a different sort of question: "How do you keep yourselves fed?"

  Leino seemed willing enough to answer that. "We buy reindeer and camel meat from the Ice People." His flat, swarthy features twisted into a horrible grimace. "Camel meat is pretty bad, but at least the camel it comes from is dead. Live camels- believe me, Commander, you do not want to know about live camels. And we blaze seals and sea birds every now and then. They are not very good, either. To keep us from dying of scurvy, the Lagoans are generous enough to send us plenty of pickled cabbage." By his expression, he also didn't care for that.

  "Cranberries fight scurvy, too," Cornelu said. "Do cranberries grow on this part of the austral continent?"

  "Nothing has grown on this part of the austral continent since I got here," Leino replied. He looked around at the green sprouting up here and there. "I must admit, I cannot be quite so sure about what will grow now. See? Even these sorry things yield up a crop."

  He pointed to the shelters, from which emerged a couple of dozen other mages. Most were easy to type as either Kuusamans or Lagoans, but six or eight could have been either and were in fact partly both. Such untidiness bothered Cornelu. In Sibiu, everyone was recognizably Sibian. He shrugged. He couldn't do anything about it here.

  Whatever their blood, the mages were friendly. They gave Cornelu smoked meat and sour cabbage and potent spirits Leino hadn't mentioned. Some of them spoke Algarvian, in which he was more fluent than classical Kaunian. Waving a slice of meat, he said, "This stuff isn't so bad. It's got a flavor all its own."

  "That's one way to put it," said a mage who looked like a Kuusaman but spoke Lagoan when he wasn't using Algarvian or classical Kaunian. "And do you know why it's got that flavor? Because it was smoked over burning camel dung, that's why."

  "You're joking." But Cornelu saw that the wizard wasn't. He set down the meat and took a big swig of spirits. Once he had the spirits in his mouth, he swished them around before swallowing, as if cleaning his teeth. In fact, that was exactly what he was doing.

  The mage laughed. "You've got to get used to eating things cooked with it if you're going to try and live in the land of the Ice People. There isn't much in the way of wood here. If there were, would you be bringing sawdust from Lagoas?"

  "You never can tell," Cornelu answered, which made the mage laugh again.

  "Well, maybe not," the fellow said. "Some of those blockheads in Setubal ought to be ground up for sawdust themselves, if anybody wants to know what I think."

  Cornelu tried again: "Now that you have all this sawdust, what will you do with it?"

  "Mix it with ice," the Lagoan mage answered, as Leino had. "We're trying to make cold drinks for termites, you see."

  "Thank you so very much," the Sibian exile said. All that got him was still more laughter from the wizard.

  "Are you feeling refreshed after your long journey here?" Leino asked in classical Kaunian. When Cornelu admitted he was, the Kuusaman mage asked, "Then you will not mind if I row you out to sea again so you can summon your leviathan and so we can bring these casings full of sawdust to the shore?"

  Whatever the mages wanted to do with the sawdust, they were eager to get at it. With a sigh, Cornelu got to his feet again. "After tasting the delicacies of the countryside here, I suppose I can," he answered. The sooner he left the land of the Ice People and its delicacies, the happier he would be. He didn't say anything about that. The mages who were stuck down here at the bottom of the world couldn't leave no matter how much they wanted to.

  Leino handled the oars with ease a fisherman might have envied. As he rowed, he asked, "When you go back to Setubal, Commander, you will take letters with you?"

  "Aye, if you and your comrades give them to me," Cornelu answered.

  "We will." The Kuusaman sighed. "The cursed censors will probably have to use their black ink and knives on them. They have taken too many bites out of the letters my wife sends to me."

  "I can do nothing about that." Cornelu's wife didn't write him letters. The most he could say about her was that she hadn't betrayed him to the Algarvians even after she started giving herself to them. It wasn't enough. It wasn't nearly enough.

  Leino let the rowboat drift to a stop. "This was about where I picked you up, was it not?"

  "I think so, aye." Cornelu leaned out over the gunwale and slapped the water in the pattern that would summon his leviathan if it was anywhere close by. He waited a couple of minutes, then slapped again.

  He got only a brief glimpse of the leviathan's sinuously muscled shape before its snout broke the surface by the boat and sent water splashing up onto the two men in it. Still in his rubber suit, Cornelu didn't mind. Leino spluttered and said something in Kuusaman that sounded pungent before returning to classical Kaunian: "I think the beast did that on purpose."

  "I would not be a bit surprised if you were right," Cornelu answered. "Leviathans seem to think people were made for their amusement." He slid down into the sea and swam over to the leviathan. After patting it and praising it for coming, he undid the egg casings it carried under its belly and brought the two ropes over to Leino. "The cases are of neutral buoyancy," he said as he got back into the boat. "They will not pull you under." Leino made the ropes fast to the stern of the boat.

  When the Kuusaman mage started to row again, he grunted. "They may not sink me, but they are not light. The shore looks a good deal farther away than it did when you were here before."

  "I gather you and your colleagues wanted
a good deal of sawdust," Cornelu replied. "I still do not understand why you wanted it, but you did, and now you have it. I hope you use it to confound Algarve."

  "With the help of the powers above, I think we may be able to oblige you." Leino took another stroke and grunted again. "Assuming my arms do not fall out of their sockets between here and the beach, that is."

  "Would the work not go on either way?" Cornelu asked, as innocently as he could.

  Leino started to say something- perhaps something sharp- then checked himself and chuckled. "Commander, you are more dangerous than you look."

  Cornelu courteously inclined his head. "I hope so."

  Nine

  Tears ran down Vanai's face. She'd just finished chopping up a particularly potent onion when someone knocked on the door to the flat. As she hurried out of the kitchen, whoever it was knocked again, louder and more insistently. Fear blazed through her. This wasn't just a knock. This was liable to be the knock, the one she'd dreaded ever since coming to Eoforwic.

  "Opening up!" The call came in Algarvian-accented Forthwegian. "Opening up or breaking down, by powers above!"

  Vanai wondered if she ought to leap out the window and hope she could end everything quickly. The redheads wouldn't get the use of her life energy that way, anyhow. But she'd just renewed the spell that disguised her Kaunianity- and she was carrying a child. If that wasn't an expression of hope, what was?

  She unbarred the door and worked the latch. The kilted Algarvian in the hall had his fist upraised to knock again. A couple of burly Forthwegian constables flanked him like bookends. He looked Vanai up and down, then said, "You are being Thelberge, wife to Ealstan?"