Rulers of the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  Vanai couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a goldpiece, let along held one. Silver circulated far more freely in Forthweg than gold, and Brivibas, back in Oyngestun, had not been the sort of man who attracted any of the few goldpieces the kingdom did mint. “I don’t understand,” Vanai said. “You just sacked Ealstan. Why—this?” She held up the gold coin. It lay heavier in her hand than silver would have.

  “Because I’ve learned some things I didn’t know when I gave him the boot, that’s why,” Pybba replied. “For instance, he’s got—he had—a brother named Leofsig. Isn’t that so?” Vanai stood mute. She didn’t know where the pottery magnate was going with his questions or why he was asking them. Pybba seemed to take her silence for agreement, for he went on, “And some son of a whore from Plegmund’s Brigade killed his brother. Isn’t that right?”

  He didn’t know everything; he didn’t know that the fellow from Plegmund’s Brigade who’d killed Leofsig was Ealstan’s—and poor Leofsig’s—first cousin. But he knew enough. Vanai asked, “What’s this to you?”

  “It’s worth gold to me to see him, that’s what it is. You tell him so,” Pybba said. “Aye, tell him just that. And keep the money whether he decides he wants to see me or not. He’ll be stubborn. I know cursed well he will. Some ways, he reminds me of the way I was back in my puppy days.” He laughed. “Don’t tell him that. It’ll just put his back up. So long, sweetheart. I’ve got work to do.” Without another word, he hurried toward the stairs. Vanai got the idea he always hurried.

  She went through the rest of the day in a daze. She didn’t want to take the goldpiece with her when she went down to the market square to buy oil, but she didn’t want to leave it back in the flat, either. She knew that was foolish; aye, it was worth sixteen times its weight in silver, but the flat already held a good deal more than sixteen times as much silver as there was gold in that one coin. The nervousness persisted even so.

  When she got back with the olive oil, the first thing she did was make sure the gold coin was where she’d left it. Then she had to wait for Ealstan to come home. The sun seemed to crawl across the sky. It was sinking down behind the block of flats across the street when he finally used the familiar coded knock.

  One glance at his face told Vanai he’d had no luck. “About time for me to start paving roads, looks like,” he said glumly. “Pour me some wine, will you? If I get drunk, I won’t have to think about what a mess I’m in.”

  Instead of pouring wine, Vanai brought back the goldpiece and displayed it in the palm of her hand. As Ealstan’s eyes widened, she said, “Things may not be quite so bad.”

  “Where—?” Ealstan coughed. He had to break off and try again. Speaking carefully, he asked, “Where did that come from?”

  “From Pybba,” Vanai answered, and her husband’s eyes got wider still. Handing him the goldpiece, she went on, “He wants to talk with you.”

  Ealstan tossed the coin up into the air. “That means this is probably brass,” he said as he caught it. Vanai shook her head. Ealstan didn’t push it; he knew the heft of gold when he felt it, too. He scowled in bewilderment. “What does he want? What can he want? For me to come in so he can gloat?”

  “I don’t think so,” Vanai said. “He knows about Leofsig.” She explained what Pybba had said, finishing, “He said that whole business with your family was why he wanted to see you again.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ealstan muttered, as if he didn’t want to admit that even to himself. He gave the goldpiece back to Vanai. “What do you think I ought to do?” he asked her.

  “You’d better go see him,” she replied; she’d been thinking about that ever since Pybba left. “I don’t think you have any choice, not after this.” Before he could indignantly deny that and insist that he could do as he pleased, she forestalled him by choosing that moment to get the wine after all, leaving him by himself to think for a minute or two. When she brought it back, she asked, “Can you tell me I’m wrong?”

  “No,” he said darkly, and gulped down half the cup at once. “But powers above, how I wish I could.”

  “Let me get supper ready.” Vanai chopped cabbage and onions and radishes and dried mushrooms, adding crumbly white cheese and shaved bits of smoked pork for flavor. She dressed the salad with spiced vinegar and some of the olive oil she’d bought. Along with bread and more oil and some apricots, it made a quick, reasonably filling meal.

  Her own appetite was pretty good, and everything looked like staying down. She still had occasional days when she gave back as much as she ate, but they were getting rarer. Ealstan seemed so distracted, she might have set anything at all before him. Halfway through supper, he burst out, “But how am I supposed to trust him after this?”

  Vanai had no trouble figuring out who him was. “Don’t,” she answered. “Do what business you have to or you think you should with him, but that hasn’t got anything to do with trust. Even if you go back to work for him, he’s just your boss. He’s not your father.”

  “Aye,” Ealstan said, as if that hadn’t occurred to him. Maybe it hadn’t. He’d looked for great things from Pybba. He’d looked too hard for great things from Pybba, in fact. Maybe now he would see the pottery magnate as a man, not a hero.

  When they made love later that evening, Ealstan didn’t show quite the desperate urgency he’d had lately. He seemed a little more able to relax and enjoy himself. Because he did, Vanai did, too. And she slept well afterwards. Of course, she would have slept well afterwards even if she hadn’t enjoyed herself making love. Carrying a child was the next best thing to getting hit with a brickbat for ensuring sound sleep.

  In the morning, after more bread and oil and a cup of wine, Ealstan said, “I’m off to see Pybba. Wish me luck.”

  “I always do,” Vanai answered.

  Then she had nothing to do but wait. She’d done so much of that since coming to Eoforwic. She should have been good at it. Sometimes she even was. But sometimes waiting came hard. This was one of those days. Too many things could go very wrong or very right. She had no control over any of them. She hated that.

  The longer she waited for Ealstan, the more worried she got. Waiting all the way into the early evening left her something close to a nervous wreck. When at last he knocked, she all but flew to the door. She threw it open. “Well?” she said.

  “Well,” he answered grandly, breathing wine fumes into her face, “well, sweetheart, I think we’re back in business. Back in business, aye.” He savored the phrase. “And what a business it is, too.”

  The summer before, the fight in the forests of western Unkerlant had been as grand as the attacking Gyongyosians could make it. They’d driven the goat-eating Unkerlanters before them, almost breaking through into the open country beyond the woods. Now … Now Istvan counted himself lucky that the Unkerlanters weren’t driving his own countrymen west in disorder. King Swemmel’s men seemed content to harass the Gyongyosians without doing much more.

  “I’ll tell you what I think it is,” Corporal Kun said one evening.

  “Of course you will,” Istvan said. “You’ve always got answers, you do, whether you know the question or not.”

  “Here, the question’s simple,” Kun said.

  Szonyi boomed laughter. “Then it’s just right for you, by the stars.” He hugged himself with glee, proud of his own wit.

  Kun ignored him and went on talking to Istvan: “Remember how people were saying the Unkerlanters would hit us hard if they got into trouble with Algarve?” He waited for his sergeant to nod before going on, “Since they haven’t hit us, doesn’t it follow that they didn’t get into trouble against the Algarvians?”

  Istvan plucked at his beard. “That sounds like it ought to make sense. But our allies have hammered Unkerlant two summers in a row. Why shouldn’t they be able to do it again?”

  “If you hit a man but you don’t knock him down and kick him till he quits, pretty soon he’s going to start hitting you, too,” Kun said. “That’s wha
t the Algarvians did. Now we’re going to see how well they stand getting hit. That’s my guess, anyhow.”

  Before Istvan could reply, a sentry called a challenge: “Halt! Who comes?” Everybody in the redoubt grabbed for his stick.

  “I, Captain Frigyes,” came the answer, and the Gyongyosian soldiers relaxed.

  “Advance and be recognized,” the sentry said, and then, a moment later, “Come ahead, sir.”

  Frigyes scrambled down into the redoubt. Nodding to Istvan, he asked, “All quiet in front of you, Sergeant?”

  “Aye, sir,” Istvan answered. “Swemmel’s whoresons are sitting tight. And so are we. But you know about that. I guess everything worth having is heading for the islands, to fight the stinking Kuusamans.”

  The company commander nodded. His every motion was sharp, abrupt. So was the way he thought. He was a good soldier, but Istvan often missed the more easygoing Captain Tivadar—and he didn’t want to think what would have happened had Frigyes been the officer who discovered he’d inadvertently eaten goat.

  “Everything worth having is heading for the islands,” Frigyes agreed. “That includes us. We pull out of line here tomorrow, after sundown, the whole regiment. No, the whole brigade.”

  For a moment, none of the soldiers in the redoubt spoke. Several of them stood there with their mouths hanging open. Istvan didn’t realize he was one of those till he had to shut his before he could start talking: “Where will we go, sir? And who’ll take our places here?”

  Frigyes’ broad shoulders moved up and down in a shrug. “We’ll go where they send us. And I don’t know who’s coming in to deal with Swemmel’s goat-eaters. I don’t care. They’re not my worry anymore. Somebody else will kill them; that’s all I need to know. Anybody here ever fight against the Kuusamans?”

  Istvan stuck up his hand. So did Kun and Szonyi. “Aye, sir,” they chorused. “On Obuda,” Istvan added.

  “I’ll pick your brains as we head west, then,” Frigyes said. “I know the Unkerlanters, but those scrawny little slanteyes who follow the Seven Princes are a closed book to me.” He turned and went up the sandbag steps and out of the redoubt. Over his shoulder, he added, “Have to let the rest of the squads know.” Then he was gone.

  His footsteps were still receding when all the soldiers in Istvan’s squad started talking at once. He let them babble for a little while, but only for a little while. Then he made a sharp chopping motion with his right hand. “Enough!” he said. “The captain told us to be ready to move out tomorrow after sunset, and that’s what we’re going to do. Anybody who can’t get ready by then”—he smiled his nastiest smile, all teeth and flashing eyes—“we’ll leave behind for the Unkerlanters to eat.”

  “They’re pulling the whole brigade out of the line,” Kun said in wondering tones. “They can’t be putting another brigade in. There’d be no point to that—if they had another brigade to put in, they’d have sent that one to the islands instead of us.”

  “The Unkerlanters are quiet,” Szonyi said. “We’ve been talking about how quiet they are.”

  “But how long will they stay quiet once we’re gone?” the youngster named Lajos asked, undoubtedly beating Kun to the punch.

  “Like the captain said, that’s not our worry anymore,” Istvan said. “One way or another, the generals will deal with it. We’ve got to start thinking about the Kuusamans.” He didn’t care for that notion. They’d come unpleasantly close to killing him a couple of times on Obuda. Now they’d get more chances.

  When Istvan thought of the Kuusamans, he thought of going into action against them as soon as he left the redoubt. Reality proved more complex, as reality had a way of doing. Along with the rest of the brigade, Istvan’s regiment pulled out of the line when ordered. He didn’t see any inexperienced young men trudging forward wide-eyed and eager, as befitted a warrior race, to take their places. It was nighttime, of course. Maybe that made a difference. Maybe. He tried to make himself believe it.

  Having left their positions at night—presumably to keep the Unkerlanters from realizing they were going—they got no sleep. They got no sleep the next day, either, but kept tramping west through woods that seemed to go on forever. By the time Istvan finally was allowed to stop and rest, he was readier to fight his own officers than he ever had been to fight the Kuusamans.

  The brigade had to march through the woods for most of a week before they got to a ley line. There might have been others closer, but they hadn’t been charted. This whole stretch of the world was far, far off the beaten track. And then the weary men had to wait till enough caravan cars accumulated to carry them all west.

  “It could be worse,” Kun said as the squad did at last climb aboard one. “They could have decided to make us march the whole way, across the Ilszung Mountains and all. Why not? We fought our way across’em coming east.”

  “Shut up, curse you,” Istvan said. “Don’t let any officers hear you saying something like that, or they’re liable to take you up on it.”

  He didn’t see the ley-line caravan leave the forest; by then he was asleep, his chin on his chest. When he woke again, the mountains were near. And then the caravan traveled over mountains and through mountain valleys for the next couple of days. Much of the terrain reminded Istvan achingly of his own home valley; many of the villages, with their walls and their fortresslike, steep-roofed houses of gray stone, could have been Kunhegyes, where he’d grown up. But Kunhegyes lay far from any ley line.

  Some of the men from the mountains of eastern Gyongyos had never seen the plains that led down to the Bothnian Ocean. The only flat ground they’d ever known was that of the great woods of western Unkerlant, and they exclaimed in wonder to see farmland stretching from one horizon to the other.

  Kun looked at Istvan over the tops of his spectacles. “I thought you’d be oohing and ahhing with the rest of the backcountry lads,” he remarked.

  “Then you’re not as smart as you like to think you are,” Istvan retorted. “Didn’t I come this way before, when they threw me onto a ship and sent me to Obuda?”

  Kun thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Aye, of course you did, and I’m a natural-born idiot. I must be.”

  Down in the flatlands, towns got bigger and closer together. Istvan had all he could do not to marvel at the sight of so many buildings all in the same place, and at the sight of tall towers climbing toward the stars. “How do so many clans live together in one place without feuds tearing them to pieces?” he asked Kun. “You’re a city man, so you ought to know.”

  “What you have to understand is, a lot of people move to the cities from out of the countryside,” the former mage’s apprentice answered. “Some of them are younger sons and the like—men who won’t get a fair share from their family plots. And others are the men who want to find out if they can get rich. The odds are slim in town, stars above know that’s so, but it’ll never, ever happen on a farm.”

  “I suppose you’re going somewhere with this, but I’m not following you, not yet,” Istvan said.

  “Bear with me,” Kun told him. “In your valley, your clan’s been living next to its neighbors for hundreds of years. Everybody remembers who did what to whom, and why, since the stars first shone. Some of the clan quarrels are that old, too. Am I right, or am I wrong?”

  “Oh, you’re right, of course,” Istvan said. “That’s how things are.”

  “Ha!” Kun pounced. “But it’s not how things are in the cities, or not so much. If you move away from most of the people in your clan, you move away from most of the old squabbles, too. You get to know a man for what he is himself, not for whether his grandfather’s great-uncle stole three hens from your cousin’s great-grandma. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  “What it sounds like is the army, except without the discipline in the army,” Istvan said. “Here, I do what I do because the officers tell me to, and you do what you do because I tell you to, and the troopers do what they do because you tell them to. Back in my vall
ey, my place in the clan tells me what to do. I always know what’s expected, if you understand what I’m saying.” He waited for Kun to nod, then went on, “But if you’re living in the city away from your clan, how do you know what to do or how to act? Who tells you?”

  “I tell myself,” Kun answered. “That’s what cities are all about: making your own choices, I mean. They’re changing the face of Gyongyos, too.”

  Istvan disapproved of change on general principles. In that, he reckoned himself a typical Gyongyosian. His eyes slid over to Kun, who smiled as if knowing what he was thinking. As far as Istvan was concerned, Kun was no typical Gyongyosian—and a good thing, too, he thought. What Kun might be thinking of him never entered his mind.

  They slid through Gyorvar the next morning, heading down to the docks. All the chief rivers watering the Gyongyosian plain came together at Gyorvar and went down as one to the not far distant sea. Istvan didn’t think about that. He craned his neck to get a glimpse of Ekrekek Arpad’s palace. Before his first trip through the capital, he’d imagined it as a tower taller than any mountains, a tower from which the Ekrekek could reach out and touch the sacred stars if he so desired. It was nothing of the sort, being pavilions of gleaming marble scattered across parkland, but lovely nonetheless. He’d remembered that.

  And then, after Istvan got his glimpse, the ley-line caravan stopped at the docks, which were anything but lovely. He’d remembered that, too. The battered transports waiting to take his comrades and him across the sea were even more unlovely than the ones he remembered from his last trip through Gyorvar. He didn’t know what that meant. Nothing good, probably.

  Little by little, Cornelu was learning to read Lagoan. He’d never thought he would do that, but he turned out to have a powerful incentive: the better he read, the more readily he could learn of Unkerlant’s advances in the west. Anything that told him of Algarve’s troubles was worth investigating in detail. He might not have liked Lagoas’ language, but he liked what was being said in it.