Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  Reluctantly—he didn’t want to do anything the noisy woman suggested—Bembo decided he had to give the Kaunian a lesson. If the blonds got the idea they could shame the Algarvians into leaving them alone, who could guess how much trouble they’d cause? And so, raising the bludgeon, he advanced on the blond.

  He hoped the Kaunian would run. The fellow was skinny and looked agile. The constable wasn’t like to be able to catch him. He could prove his own ferocity and still not beat a man who wasn’t fighting back.

  But the Kaunian just stood there waiting. Bembo didn’t soften. Instead, he got angry. The club thudded down on the Kaunian’s back. The blond grunted, but held his ground. That made Bembo angrier. His next stroke laid open the Kaunian’s scalp.

  And that proved too much for the blond to bear. With a howl of pain, he turned and fled. His trousers flapped at his ankles. Bembo tried to kick him in the backside, but missed. He ran after him for half a block. By then, he was panting; his heart thudded in his chest. He slowed, then stopped. He’d done his duty.

  “You should have blazed him!” the Forthwegian woman shouted. “It would have served him right.”

  “Oh, shut up, you old hag,” Bembo said, but not very loud. He didn’t want her screeching at him any more. What he wanted was a simple, quiet tour on the beat, a tour where he didn’t have to do anything but stop in at some shops he knew to cadge a few cups of wine and some cakes and sausages and whatever else he might happen to crave. He sighed. What he’d been through felt too much like work. And his day wasn’t even half over yet.

  A few blocks later, he came to the park where he and Oraste had met and blazed a drunken Kaunian mage. It was daytime now, not the middle of the night, and all—or at least most—Kaunians were closed up in their own district nowadays. On the other hand, the park was even more decrepit than it had been a few months before. No one had bothered cutting grass or trimming weeds. He could hardly make out the paved paths along which Oraste and he had walked.

  He wanted to go through the park as much as he would have wanted to go fight Unkerlanters alongside the men of Plegmund’s Brigade. He stood at the edge, indecisive. A gust of wind sprang up and wrapped long stalks of grass around his ankles, as if trying to pull him in. He made a disgusted noise and hopped back.

  But that wouldn’t do. He realized as much, however unhappy the knowledge made him. Sergeant Pesaro would have some pungent things to say if he funked the job. And if Pesaro didn’t just ream him out but told his superiors, Bembo knew he was liable to get shipped off to Unkerlant. And so, with a melodramatic sigh, he plunged into the park.

  Dry grass scrunched under his sandals. Sure enough, staying on the paths was next to impossible. Weeds and shrubs grew higher than a man’s middle. Here and there, they grew higher than a man’s head. When Bembo looked back over his shoulder, he could hardly see the street from which he’d come. If anything happens to me in here, he thought nervously, nobody’d find out for days.

  That wasn’t quite true. If he didn’t come back from his shift, people would go looking for him. But would they find him soon enough to do him any good? He had his doubts.

  A Kaunian Emperor from the days of old might have held court on the benches in the middle of the park without anyone outside being the wiser. When Bembo got to them, he found not a Kaunian Emperor but a couple of Forthwegian drunkards. By their unkempt, shaggy beards and filth, they made the park their home.

  Bembo’s hand went not to his bludgeon but to the short stick he carried next to it. The Forthwegians watched him. He nodded to them. They didn’t move. He walked past them. Their eyes followed him. He didn’t want to turn his back on them, but he didn’t want them to see he was afraid, either. He ended up sidling away from them crab-fashion.

  A rustling in the bushes made him whip his head around. Another Forthwegian, as grimy and disreputable as the two on the benches, waved his arms and shouted, “Boo!”

  He laughed like a loon. So did the other two drunks. “You stupid bald-arsed bugger!” Bembo screamed. “I ought to blaze you in the belly and let you die an inch at a time!” As a matter of fact, he wasn’t sure he could blaze the Forthwegian; his hand shook like a fall leaf in a high breeze.

  The fellow who’d frightened him hawked and spat. “Oh, run along home to mother, little boy,” he said in good Algarvian. “You cursed well don’t belong anywhere they let grown-ups in.” He laughed again.

  “Futter your mother!” Bembo was still too rattled to hang on to his aplomb as a proper Algarvian should.

  His shrill voice made all the Forthwegians start laughing. He thought about blazing them. He thought about blazing the tall grass that choked the paths, too, in the hope of roasting them alive. The only thing wrong with that was, he might end up roasting himself, too.

  Instead, after cursing all the drunks as vilely as he knew how, he pushed on down the path toward the far side of the park. He passed two more Forthwegians, both of them curled up asleep or blind drunk in the grass with jars of spirits or wine beside them. One wore a tattered Forthwegian army tunic.

  Seeing that made Bembo laugh, and he was sure his laugh was last and best. “Worthless clots!” he said, as if the three back by the benches were still close enough to hear. “This is what you get. This is what all of Forthweg gets. And oh, by the powers above, do you ever deserve it.”

  Every time Ealstan saw a broadsheet praising Plegmund’s Brigade, he felt like tearing it from the wall to which it was pasted. He didn’t much care what happened to him afterwards—after what Sidroc had done to his brother, and after Sidroc had got away with it because he’d joined the Algarvians’ hounds, Ealstan ached for vengeance of any sort.

  The only thing that held him back was fear of what would happen to Vanai if he were seized and cast into prison. She depended on him. He’d never had anyone depend on him before. On the contrary—he’d always depended on his father and his mother and poor Leofsig and even on Conberge. He hadn’t thought about everything loving a Kaunian woman meant when he started doing it. He’d thought about little except the most obvious. But now . . .

  Now, very much his father’s son, he refused to evade the burden he’d assumed. And so, in spite of scowling at the broadsheets, he walked on toward Ethelhelm’s flat without doing anything more. Scowling wouldn’t land him in trouble; most of the Forthwegians in Eoforwic scowled when they walked by broadsheets urging them to join Plegmund’s Brigade.

  Most, but not all. A couple of fellows not far from Ealstan’s age stared at one of the broadsheets, their lips moving as they read its simple message. “That wouldn’t be so bad,” one of them said. “Cursed Unkerlanters deserve a good boot in the balls, you ask me.”

  “Oh, aye.” His pal nodded; the sun gleamed off the grease with which he made his hair stand up tall enough to give him an extra inch or so of apparent height. The nasty-sweet odor of the grease didn’t quite cover the reek that said neither he nor his friend had gone to the baths any time lately. Their tunics were grimy, too; if they’d ever had any luck, they were down on it now.

  “I bet they feed you good there,” the first one said, and his friend nodded again.

  Both of them eyed Ealstan as he went by. He didn’t need to be a mage to see into their thoughts: if they knocked him over the head and stole his belt pouch, they might also eat well for a while. He hunched his shoulders forward and let one hand fold into a fist, as if to say he wouldn’t be easy meat. The two hungry toughs turned away to watch a girl instead.

  When Ealstan got to Ethelhelm’s building, the doorman gave him the once-over before letting him in. In this prosperous part of Eoforwic, his own ordinary tunic seemed almost as shabby and worthy of suspicion as those of the young men who’d been looking at the broadsheet. But then the doorman said, “You’re the chap who casts accounts for the band leader, right?”

  “That’s me,” Ealstan agreed, and the flunky relaxed.

  Up the stairs Ealstan went. As usual, he contrasted the stairwell in this block of fl
ats with the one in his own. The stairs here were clean and carpeted and didn’t stink of boiled cabbage or of sour piss. Neither did the hallways onto which the stairs opened.

  After he knocked, Ethelhelm opened the door and pumped his hand, saying, “Come in, come in. Welcome, welcome.”

  “Thanks,” Ealstan said. Ethelhelm lived more splendidly than his own family had back in Gromheort. Living large was part of what made a bandleader what he was, while a bookkeeper who did the same would only make people wonder if he skimmed cash from his clients. Even had his father been a bandleader, though, Ealstan doubted Hestan would have flaunted his money. Powers above knew Ealstan didn’t—couldn’t—do any flaunting of his own.

  “Wine?” Ethelhelm asked. When Ealstan nodded, the musician brought him some lovely golden stuff that glowed in the goblet and sighed in his throat. Ealstan wished Vanai could taste it. Calling it by the same name as the cheap, harsh stuff he brought home to their flat hardly seemed fair. Ethelhelm, by all appearances, took it for granted. That hardly seemed fair, either. The bandleader said, “Shall I bring you tea and little cakes, too, so we can pretend we’re naked black Zuwayzin?”

  “No, thank you.” Ealstan laughed. Ethelhelm waved him to the sofa. When he sat down, he sank into the soft cushions there. Fighting against the comfort as he fought against the languor the wine brought on, he asked, “And did this latest tour go well?”

  “I think so, but then I’ve got you to tell me whether I’m right,” Ethelhelm answered. “Everywhere we went, we played to sold-out houses. I’ve got a great big leather sack full of receipts that’ll let you figure out whether we made any money while we were doing it.”

  “If you didn’t make enough to pay me, I’m going to be upset with you,” Ealstan said.

  Both young men laughed. They knew it wasn’t a question of whether Ethelhelm’s band had made money, but of how much. The bandleader and drummer said, “I expect you’ll find enough in the books for that, and who’ll know whether it’s really there or not?”

  To any honest bookkeeper, that was an insult. Hestan would have been coldly furious to hear it, regardless of whether he showed his anger. Ealstan forgave Ethelhelm, reasoning the band leader knew no better. He said, “It’s a wonder the Algarvians let you travel so widely.”

  “They think we help keep things quiet,” Ethelhelm answered. “And I’ll be cursed if I haven’t had a good many Algarvian soldiers and functionaries listening to me this tour. They like what we’re doing, too.”

  “Do they?” Ealstan said tonelessly.

  “Aye.” Ethelhelm didn’t notice how Ealstan sounded. He was full of himself, full of what he and the band had done. “Everybody likes us, everybody in the whole kingdom. And do you know what? I think it’s bloody wonderful.”

  More slowly than he should have, Ealstan realized Ethelhelm had already had a good deal of wine. That didn’t keep his own anger from sparking, and he wasn’t so good at hiding it as his father would have been. “Everybody, eh?”

  “Aye—no doubt about it,” Ethelhelm declared. “Laborers, noblemen’s sons—and daughters—recruits for the Brigade, even the redheads, like I said. Everybody loves us.”

  “Even Kaunians?” Ealstan asked.

  “Kaunians.” Ethelhelm spoke the word as if he’d never heard it before. “Well, no.” He shrugged. “But that’s not our fault. If the Algarvians would have let them listen to us, they would have loved us, too. Or I think so, anyhow. A lot of them aren’t that keen on Forthwegian music, you know.”

  “So I do,” Ealstan said, remembering Vanai’s reaction when he’d smuggled her to a performance of the band.

  “But I’ll bet they would have liked us on this tour.” Ethelhelm rolled on as if Ealstan had sat quiet. “These new songs we’ve been doing—it doesn’t matter who you are these days. You’ll like ’em.”

  Now Ealstan did sit quiet. He didn’t care for Ethelhelm’s latest songs nearly so well as he’d liked the earlier ones. They still had the pounding rhythms that had made the band popular in the first place, but the words were just . . . words. They lacked the bite that had made some of Ethelhelm’s earlier tunes grab Ealstan by the ears and refuse to let him go.

  Sadly, he said, “Let me have that sack of receipts you were talking about, and I’ll see how much sense I can make of it.”

  “Of course.” Even drunk—both on wine and on his own popularity—Ethelhelm remained charming. “Let me get them for you.” He heaved himself up off the sofa and went back into the bedchamber, wobbling a little as he walked. He returned with the promised leather sack, which he thumped down at Ealstan’s feet. “There you go. Let me know where we stand as soon as you have the chance, if you’d be so kind.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Ealstan promised.

  “I’ll see you soon, then,” Ethelhelm said—a dismissal if ever there was one. He didn’t ask about Vanai, not a single, solitary word. He couldn’t have forgotten her; he had an excellent memory. He just—couldn’t be bothered? That was how it seemed to Ealstan.

  He picked up the sack of receipts and headed for the door. The sack felt unduly heavy, as if it were more than leather and papers. Ealstan wondered if he were carrying Ethelhelm’s spirit in there, too. He didn’t say anything about that. After a while—as soon as he got outside Ethelhelm’s block of flats—he decided he was imagining things: the sack weighed no more than it should.

  Every trash bin, every gutter on the way home offered fresh temptation. Somehow, Ealstan managed not to fling the sack away or to drop it and then keep walking. He was sure no beautiful woman, no matter how wanton, could arouse his desires like the sight of an empty, inviting bin. But he resisted, though he doubted Vanai would have been proud of him for it.

  When he gave the coded knock at the door to his flat, Vanai opened it and let him slip inside. “What have you got there?” she asked, pointing to the leather sack.

  “Rubbish,” he answered. “Nothing but rubbish. And I can’t even throw it away, worse luck.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked. “Those are Ethelhelm’s things, aren’t they?”

  “Of course they are. What else would they be?”

  “Why are you calling them rubbish, then?”

  “Why? I’ll tell you why.” Ealstan took a deep breath and did exactly that. The more he talked, the more the outrage and sense of betrayal he’d had to hide while he was at Ethelhelm’s bubbled to the surface. By the time he finished, he was practically in tears. “He’s making all the money in the world—or all the money that’s left in Forthweg, anyhow—and he’s stopped caring about the things that got him rich in the first place.”

  “That’s . . . too bad,” Vanai said. “It’s even worse because he probably does have some of my blood in him. Forgetting his own kind—” She grimaced. “Probably plenty of Kaunians who’d like to forget their own kind, if only the Forthwegians and Algarvians would let them.” She set a hand on Ealstan’s shoulder for a moment, then turned back toward the kitchen. “Supper’s almost ready.”

  Ealstan ate in gloomy silence, even though Vanai had made a fine chicken stew. After sucking the last of the meat off a drumstick, he burst out, “I’ve been afraid this would happen since the first time the redheads asked his band to play for Plegmund’s Brigade when those whoresons were training outside of Eoforwic.”

  Vanai said, “It’s not even treason, not really. He’s looking out for himself, that’s all. A lot of people have done a lot worse.”

  “I know,” Ealstan said. “That’s all Sidroc was doing, too: looking out for himself, I mean. That’s how it starts. The trouble is, that’s not how it ends.” He thought of what had happened to Leofsig. Then he thought about what might happen to Vanai. He had been angry. Now, all at once, he was afraid.

  Nine

  As happened so often when Pekka was intent on her work, a knock on the door made her jump. She came back to herself in some surprise; it was time to head for home, which meant that was likely her husba
nd out there. Sure enough, Leino stood in the hallway. Only after she gave him a hug did she realize how grim he looked. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Sorceries making squibs instead of fires today?”

  “No, the magic went about as well as it could,” he answered. “But they’re closing down my group, or most of it, even so.”

  The sentence made perfect grammatical sense. It still didn’t mean anything to Pekka. “Why would they do that?” she asked. “It’s crazy.”

  “Maybe so, but maybe not, too,” Leino said. “They don’t think so. They’re calling just about every practical mage who’s a man and under fifty into the military service of the Seven Princes—into the army or navy, in other words.”

  “Oh.” Pekka deflated with the word, as a blown-up pig’s bladder might have done after a pinprick. “But how will they make better weapons if they send the sorcerers off to fight?”

  “It’s a good question,” Leino agreed. “The other side of the silverpiece is, how can the soldiers fight without mages at the front to ward them and to use spells against the enemy?”

  “But we haven’t got that big an army,” Pekka said.

  “We haven’t now, no. But we’re going to,” Leino said. “Come on; let’s walk to the caravan stop. No use getting home late because of this, is there? I’m not going in tonight, or tomorrow, either. It won’t be long, though.” He started down the hall toward the door.

  Numbly, Pekka followed. Having Olavin go into the army was one thing. Her brother-in-law would keep right on being a banker. He’d just be a banker for Kuusamo rather than for himself and his partners. If Leino went to war, he would go to war in truth.

  As if reading her thoughts, he said, “You know, sweetheart, we’re only just getting started in this war. We’re going to need a lot of soldiers to fight the Gongs and the Algarvians both, and they’re going to need a lot of mages. When the Algarvians smote Yliharma, that was a warning about how hard this fight would be. If we don’t take it seriously, we’ll go under.”