Rulers of the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  “Oh, maybe we’ll think of something.” Leino pulled his tunic off over his head.

  Pekka didn’t know if either of them had been so ardent even on their honeymoon. They’d spent that at a small hostel in Priekule, and had alternated making love and sightseeing. Now they just had each other, and they were intent on making the most of it before they both had to return to the war.

  “I’m not quite so young as I used to be,” Leino said at some point that morning when, after several days of horizontal exercises, he failed to rise to the occasion.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Pekka said. “You’ve done fine, believe me.” Her body felt all aglow, so that it seemed they would hardly need the bedchamber lamp that evening.

  “I wasn’t worried,” Leino said. “The people who worry about things like that are the ones who think there’s only one way to get from hither to yon. Mages know better—or if they don’t, they ought to.” With fingers and tongue, he showed her what he meant. He was right, too—that road worked as well as the other one.

  When Pekka’s breathing and heartbeat had slowed to something close to normal, she said, “They talk about women wearing men out. This is the other way round.” She ran a hand down his smooth chest—Kuusamans weren’t a very hairy people. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”

  “I hope not,” Leino said. “This is like putting money in Olavin’s bank.” Elimaki’s husband, these days, was keeping the finances of the Kuusaman army and navy straight, but Pekka understood what her own husband meant. He went on, “We don’t get many chances now, so we have to make the most of them, put them away in our memory bank. They may not earn interest, but they’re interesting.”

  “That’s one word,” Pekka remarked. Leino’s hands had started wandering again, too. But when one of them found its way between her legs, she said, “Wait a bit. I really have done everything I can right now. Let’s see what I can do for you.”

  She crouched beside him, her head bobbing up and down. Rather sooner than she’d expected, she pulled away, taking a couple of deep breaths and choking a little. “Well, well,” Leino said. “I didn’t think I had it in me.”

  “You certainly did.” Pekka went over to the sink and washed off her chin.

  “You’ll have to excuse me now,” her husband said, curling up on the bed. “I’m going to sleep for about a week.” He offered a theatrical snore.

  It made Pekka smile, but it didn’t convince her. “A likely story,” she said. “You’ll be feeling me up again before Uto gets home.”

  “Who was just doing what to whom?” Leino asked, and Pekka had no good answer. He stretched out again, then said, “I love you, you know.”

  “I love you, too,” she said. “That’s probably why we’ve been doing all this.”

  “Can you think of a better reason?” Leino said. “This is a lot more fun than being lonely and jumping on the first halfway decent-looking person you find.”

  “Aye,” Pekka said, and wished Fernao hadn’t chosen that moment to cross her mind again.

  Vanai poured out wine and listened to Ealstan pour out excitement. “He is! Pybba is, by the powers above,” her husband said. “Sure as I’m sitting here, he’s funneling money into things that hurt the Algarvians.”

  “Good for him,” Vanai said. “Do you want some sausage? It’s the first time in a while the butcher had some that looked even halfway decent.”

  “Sausage? Oh, aye.” Ealstan’s voice was far away; he’d heard what she said, but he hadn’t paid much attention to it. His mind was on Pybba’s accounts: “If he’s fighting the Algarvians, maybe I’ll finally get the chance to fight them, too. I mean, really fight them.”

  “And maybe you’ll get in trouble, too,” Vanai said. “For all you know, his accounts are like a spiderweb, set up to catch somebody who’s not quite as smart as he thinks he is.” She put a length of sausage on Ealstan’s plate and then set a hand on her own belly. “Please be careful.”

  “Of course I’ll be careful.” But Ealstan didn’t sound as if that were the first thing on his mind, or even the fourth or fifth. He sounded annoyed at Vanai for reminding him he might need to have a care.

  You’re a man, sure enough, Vanai thought. You’ll do whatever you please and then blame me if it doesn’t work out the way you want. She sighed. “How is the sausage?” she asked.

  Ealstan suddenly seemed to notice what he’d been devouring for supper. “Oh! It’s very good,” he said. Vanai sighed again. As soon as Ealstan finished eating, he started going on about Pybba some more. Short of clouting him in the head with a rock, Vanai didn’t know how to make him shut up. But when he declared, “It’s practically my patriotic duty to see what’s going on,” she lost patience with him.

  “You are going to do this thing,” she said. “I can tell you’re going to do it, and you won’t listen to me no matter what I say. But I am going to say this: don’t go charging straight ahead, as if you had four legs and two big horns and no brains at all. If you do that, I have the bad feeling you’ll disappear one day, and I’ll never see you again.”

  “Don’t be silly,” he answered, which really made her want to clout him in the head with a rock. But he went on, “I’m my father’s son, after all. I don’t go blindly charging into things.”

  That held enough truth to give her pause, but not enough fully to reassure her. Ealstan was his father’s son, but he was also a red-blooded Forthwegian. Vanai knew that without fully understanding it; Forthweg was her homeland, but she didn’t love it the way Forthwegians did. Why should she? A good part of the overwhelming Forthwegian majority would have been just as well pleased if she and all the Kaunians in the kingdom disappeared. And now a lot of the Kaunians in the kingdom were disappearing, thanks to the Algarvians—and thanks to Forthwegians not sorry to see them go.

  Those thoughts flashed through her mind in a moment. She hardly missed a beat in answering, “I hope you don’t. You’d better not.”

  “I won’t. Truly.” Ealstan sounded perfectly confident. He also sounded perfectly blockheaded.

  Vanai couldn’t tell him that. It wouldn’t have made him pay attention to her, and would have made her angry. What she did say was, “Remember, you’ve got a lot to live for here at the flat.”

  She wondered if she ought to pull off her tunic and skin out of her drawers. That would remind him of what he had to live for if nothing else did. Patriot or no, he was wild for lovemaking—a good deal wilder than she was at the moment, with pregnancy making her desire fitful. But she shook her head, as if he’d asked her to strip herself naked. She had too much pride, too much dignity, for that. She’d been Major Spinello’s plaything. She wouldn’t make herself anyone else’s, not that way.

  Ealstan pointed to her. For a moment, she thought he was going to ask her to do what she’d just rejected. She took a deep breath: she was ready to scorch him. But he said, “Your sorcery’s slipped. You need to set it right. You especially need to keep it strong now. Mezentio’s men have been taking a demon of a lot of people out of the Kaunian quarter lately.”

  “Oh.” Vanai’s anger evaporated. “All right. Thank you.” She always kept the golden yarn and the dark brown in her handbag. She got them, twisted them together, and chanted the spell she’d devised. When she was done, she turned to Ealstan and said, “Is it good?”

  “It’s fine.” Ealstan’s smile was suddenly shy. “I’m sorry you can’t look like yourself—the way you’re supposed to look, I mean—all the time. You’re very pretty when you look like a Forthwegian—don’t get me wrong—but I think you’re beautiful when you look like a Kaunian. I always have, from the day I first saw you.”

  “Have you?” Vanai said. Ealstan’s nod was shy, too. As few things did, that little show of embarrassment reminded her she was a year older than he. He’d been fifteen when they first met in the oak wood between Oyngestun and Gromheort, his beard only darkening fuzz on his cheeks. He looked like a man now, and acted like a man … and he wanted t
o fight like a man. Vanai didn’t know what to do about that. She feared she couldn’t do anything about it.

  She let him make love to her when they went to bed. It made him happy, and that made her happy, though she didn’t kindle. One thing, she thought as she drifted toward sleep, I don’t need to worry about whether I’m going to have a baby. Now I know.

  Her spell had slipped again by the time she woke the next morning. She hastily repaired it while Ealstan ate barley porridge and gulped a morning cup of wine. As it had the night before, his smile reassured her. She could cast the spell with no one checking her, but she’d find out the hard way if she made a mistake.

  Ealstan gave her an absentminded kiss and hurried out the door. By the way he hurried, Vanai was sure he was heading to Pybba’s pottery works, though he didn’t say so. She shook her head. She’d done everything she could to keep him safe. He would have to do something for himself, too.

  She also had to go out, to the market square. While she’d kept her Kaunian looks, Ealstan had done the shopping. Getting out of the flat still seemed a miracle: so much so that she didn’t mind lugging food back. Beans? Olives? Cabbages? So what? Just the chance to be out on the streets of Eoforwic, to see more than she could from her grimy window, made up for the work she had to do.

  The apothecary’s shop where she’d almost been caught out as a Kaunian, where the proprietor had killed himself rather than letting the Algarvians try to torment answers out of him, was open again. UNDER NEW OWNERSHIP, a sign in one window said. NEW LOWER PRICES, cried another sign, a bigger one, in the other window. I might get medicines there, Vanai thought. I’d never trust this new owner, whoever he is, with anything more. He might be in the redheads’ belt pouch.

  For all she knew, the new owner might be a relative of the dead apothecary. She still wouldn’t trust him, and he still might be in the Algarvians’ pay.

  She didn’t trust the butcher, either, but for different reasons: suspicion that he called mutton lamb, that he put grain in his sausages when he swore he didn’t, that his scales worked in his favor. Writers had complained about such tricks in the days of the Kaunian Empire. Brivibas, no doubt, could have cited half a dozen examples, with appropriate citations. Vanai bit her lip. Her grandfather wouldn’t be citing any more classical authors. Half the distress she felt was at not feeling more distress now that he was dead.

  Marrow bones would flavor soup. The butcher said they were beef. They might have been horse or donkey. Vanai couldn’t have proved otherwise; there, for once, the lie, if it was one, was reassuring. The gizzards he sold her probably did come from chickens—they were too big to belong to crows or pigeons. “I wouldn’t have had’em by this afternoon,” he told her.

  “I know that,” she answered, and took them away.

  When she got out on the street, people were nudging one another and pointing. “Look at him,” somebody said. “Who does he think he is?” somebody else, a woman, added. “What does he think he is?” another woman said.

  Vanai didn’t want to look. She was too afraid of what she’d see: a Kaunian whose magic had run out, most likely. If the fellow had dyed hair, he wouldn’t look exactly like a Kaunian, but he wouldn’t look like a Forthwegian, either. Before long, the cry for Algarvian constables would go up.

  Horrid fascination didn’t take long to turn Vanai’s eyes in the direction of the pointing fingers. The man at whom people were pointing didn’t look just like a Forthwegian, but he wasn’t an obvious Kaunian, either. Halfbreed, Vanai thought. Eoforwic held more than the rest of Forthweg put together. Her hand flattened on her belly. She held one herself.

  Then she gasped, because she recognized the man. “Ethelhelm!”

  The name slipped from her lips almost by accident. In a moment, it was in everyone’s mouth. And the singer and drummer grinned at the crowd that had been so hostile and now paused, uncertain, waiting to hear what he would say. “Hello, folks.” His voice was relaxed, easy. “I often use a little magic so I can go out and about without people bothering me. It must’ve worn off. Can I give you a song to make up for startling you?”

  He’d told a great, thumping lie, and Vanai knew it. The redheads were hungry for Ethelhelm. But the crowd didn’t know that. With one voice, they shouted, “Aye!” They might have mobbed an ordinary Kaunian or halfbreed whose luck had run out with his magic. Ethelhelm wasn’t ordinary. He might have lost his magic, but he still had some luck.

  And he still had his voice. He grabbed a wooden bucket from someone, turned it upside down, and used it to beat out a rhythm as he sang. After one song—he carefully picked one that said nothing about the Algarvians—the crowd howled for another. The impromptu concert was still going on when Vanai left.

  He’ll get away, she thought. He’ll keep playing till he satisfies them, then get off somewhere by himself and renew his spell. And then he’ll be an ordinary Forthwegian … the same way I’m an ordinary Forthwegian. But that wasn’t quite right. The Algarvians wanted Ethelhelm because of who he was, not what he was. Vanai shook her head in slow wonder. She’d finally found somebody worse off than she was.

  When Skarnu had visited Zarasai by himself, he hadn’t been much impressed: it was a southern provincial town without much going for it that a man from Priekule could see. Returning to it with Amatu and Lauzdonu was unpleasantly like torture. The two Valmieran nobles who’d come back from Lagoas seemed to him to be doing their best to get caught.

  His temper didn’t take long to kindle. When he got them alone in the flat the underground had found for them, he snapped, “Why don’t you just carry signs that say WE HATE KING MEZENTIO? Then the constables would nab you and the people who really know what they’re doing could get back to doing it instead of spending half their time saving you. Whenever you go outside, you risk yourselves and everybody who helped you get here in one piece.”

  “Sorry,” said Lauzdonu, who had some vestiges of sense. “The kingdom’s changed a lot more than we thought it had since we flew our dragons south instead of giving up.”

  “Aye.” Amatu had a sharp, rather shrill voice that would have irritated Skarnu no matter what he said. When he said things like, “It’s changed for the worse, that’s what it’s done,” he irritated Skarnu all the more. And then he went on, “It looks like nine people out of every ten are stinking traitors, that’s what it looks like. And I’m not so bloody sure about the tenth chap, either.” He looked Skarnu full in the face as he made that—perhaps impolitic—remark.

  I’m not supposed to bash him in the head, Skarnu reminded himself. We’re on the same side. We’re supposed to be, anyhow. “People are trying to live their lives,” he said. “You can’t blame them for that. What’s a waiter to do if an Algarvian comes into his eatery? Throw him out? The poor whoreson’d get arrested, or more likely blazed.”

  “And who’d arrest him?” Lauzdonu put in. “Not the redheads, most likely. It’d be a Valmieran constable. You bet it would.”

  “They’re the real traitors,” Amatu snarled. “They all need shortening by a head, powers below eat’em.” He was quick to condemn. “And the waiters, too. If an Algarvian comes into their eatery, the redhead ought to go out with a case of the runs or the pukes. That’d teach him a lesson.”

  “So it would,” Skarnu agreed, “the lesson being that something dreadful ought to happen to the waiter who messed with his stew or his chop. You haven’t got any sense, Amatu.”

  “You haven’t got any balls, Skarnu,” retorted the noble returned from exile.

  Lauzdonu had to step between them. “Stop!” he said. “Stop! If we quarrel, who laughs? Mezentio, that’s who.”

  That was enough to halt Skarnu in his tracks. Amatu still seethed. “I ought to call you out,” he snarled.

  “Aye, go ahead—imitate the Algarvians,” Skarnu said. That brought the other noble up short, where nothing else had done the job. Pushing his edge, Skarnu went on, “Can we look for ways to hurt the enemy instead of each other?”

&nb
sp; “You don’t seem to know who the enemy is.” But now Amatu only sounded sulky, not incandescent.

  “We do what we can,” Skarnu answered. “We came here, remember, because a lot of ley lines run south through Zarasai. We want to keep the redheads from sending Kaunians to the seashore and slaughtering them to strike at Lagoas and Kuusamo.”

  Amatu’s lip curled. “Maybe you came here for that. I came here to strike at the Algarvians and their lickspittle lapdogs. Who cares what happens to the kingdoms on the far side of the Strait of Valmiera?”

  Doing his best to be reasonable, Lauzdonu said, “Except for Unkerlant, they’re the only two kingdoms still in the fight against Algarve. That counts for something.” All he got was another sneer from Amatu.

  Skarnu said, “My lord, if you’re not interested in doing the job you were sent here to do, if you’d sooner do what you think best, you can do that. But you’ll have to move out of this flat and find one on your own, and you’ll have to strike at the redheads on your own, too. No one from the underground will help you.”

  “Find a flat on my own?” Amatu looked horrified. Without a doubt, he’d never had to look for lodgings in his whole life. Skarnu wondered if he had any idea how to go about it. By his expression, probably not.

  “The fight against Algarve is bigger than any one man.” Skarnu knew he sounded like a particularly gooey kind of recruiting poster, but he didn’t much care. Anything to get some use out of Amatu.

  “All right. All right!” The returned exile threw his hands in the air. “I’m yours. Do with me as you will. And once you’re done, once I have time of my own, have I got your gracious leave to go after the Algarvians in my own way?” He bowed himself almost double.

  He really did want to go after the redheads. Skarnu recognized as much. The trouble was, he made almost every Valmieran commoner and a lot of nobles want to go after him. When betrayal was as simple as a word whispered in the ear of a Valmieran constable, that wouldn’t do. Skarnu had to remember to bow back, lest Amatu think he was offering a deadly insult. “Of course you may, as long as you try not to do anything that’ll get us killed or captured and tortured. Betraying our friends isn’t what we’ve got in mind, either.”