Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  Screams rose. The Forthwegians scattered, leaving wounded men writhing on the cobblestones and one woman who wasn’t moving at all. Before long, the rioters would attack some other Algarvians somewhere else.

  “And I hope they get some more of them, too,” Vanai muttered. But that wasn’t why she worried. Ealstan had left the flat to cast accounts bright and early in the morning. This latest round of riots had broken out a couple of hours later. Vanai had no idea why. Maybe the Algarvians had committed another outrage. Maybe, too, the long, hot summer days were making the people of Eoforwic irritable. Whatever the cause—if there was a cause—how was Ealstan supposed to get home through the chaos?

  As always when things went wrong, Vanai wondered, What would I do without Ealstan? She depended on him far more than she ever had on Brivibas. She also cared for him far more than she’d cared for her grandfather. If Brivibas had fallen over dead one morning, she could easily have gone on with her life. Without Ealstan . . .

  How could I even go out and buy food? How could I make money to buy food? That second question, unfortunately, had an obvious answer. Having sold, or rather traded, her body to keep her grandfather out of a labor gang, she couldn’t dismiss the notion of prostituting herself out of hand. But if the redheads caught her and flung her into the tiny Kaunian quarter or simply shipped her west, even that wouldn’t do her any good.

  “Curfew!” an Algarvian shouted in Forthwegian down below. “Sunset curfew! Anyone on streets after sunsetting, we blazing!” He walked along, then shouted his warning—threat? promise?—again.

  Ealstan hadn’t come back to the flat by the time the sun went down. Dully, mechanically, Vanai went through the motions of getting supper ready. She made enough for two. She always did. Then she lowered the fire in the stove to next to nothing, put some extra water in the stew to keep it from drying out, and settled down to wait.

  Without looking to see what she grabbed, she pulled a book out of one of the cases in the front room. When she found she was holding You Too Can Be a Mage, she made a horrible face and started to thrust it back onto the shelf. If its spell had been worth anything, she could have made herself look like a Forthwegian. Then she wouldn’t have had to worry about going out on the street.

  But instead of putting away the book, she carried it over to the sofa and sat down. She opened it to the spell that had betrayed her. Most of it still looked as if it should have worked. That part that had gone wrong was plainly a botched translation from Kaunian into Forthwegian.

  “All right, then,” she said under her breath. “I know what it’s supposed to do. To do that, how should it have read in Kaunian?” She was using that language; it was hers—where it obviously wasn’t the author’s. If she could reconstruct the original, maybe she could do her own translation into Forthwegian.

  She decided to try. Whether she could or not, it would help keep her from thinking—too much—about where Ealstan might be. She quickly realized she couldn’t get away with rebuilding just the garbled section. She would have to start from the beginning if she was ever going to get anywhere.

  She’d just reached the part that had brought her to grief on trying the spell when she heard the knock she’d been waiting for, the knock she’d feared she wouldn’t hear again. She sprang up from the sofa, sending You Too Can Be a Mage flying one way and her translation another. Only when she reached for the bar on the door did she discover she was still holding her pen.

  “Where have you been?” she exclaimed as Ealstan walked into the flat. Because of her translating, she spoke in Kaunian, not the Forthwegian they used more often. “Are you all right?”

  “I am fine,” Ealstan answered, also in Kaunian. “I am tired and hungry and thirsty, but I am fine. I had to move carefully, to stay away from trouble and also to stay away from the redheaded barbarians.” He brought that phrase out with considerable relish.

  “Powers above, I’m so glad to hear it,” Vanai said. “Come on, sit down, and I’ll get you supper.” Her own belly rumbled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten anything, either. She took the stew off the fire. It wasn’t what it would have been had Ealstan got home on time, but she didn’t care. She poured big cups of rough red wine for both of them.

  “This is all splendid. Thank you,” Ealstan said. When he spoke Kaunian, he did so with a slow seriousness that made everything he said more earnest, more important, than it would have in casual Forthwegian. Only a starving man would have called the overcooked stew splendid in any language, but, by the way he shoveled it down, he came pretty close.

  “Do you know what made things burst this time?” Vanai asked.

  Ealstan shook his head. “I heard four different tales as I was going through the streets. One person says one thing, another something else.” He got all his case endings right there, and grinned in modest triumph.

  “The Algarvians are blazing to kill out there,” Vanai said. “I saw them. I was frightened for you.”

  “I was a little frightened myself, once or twice,” Ealstan said—no small admission from him. “I took a long time coming home because I did not want to run into the redheads. I already told you that.” Ealstan hesitated, then added, “I saw several bodies in the street.”

  “There was one right outside this block of flats—a woman,” Vanai said, “and some wounded men, too.”

  “That woman’s body is gone. I saw others.” Ealstan changed the subject, and changed languages with it: “What were you doing there when I got home?”

  “Trying to make sense out of You Too Can Be a Mage.” Vanai switched to Forthwegian, too. “I was seeing if I could figure out where that idiot went wrong in translating his transformation spell out of Kaunian and into Forthwegian. If I can figure out how the Kaunian really ran, I can do a better job of turning it back into Forthwegian.”

  “Why bother?” Ealstan asked. “If you’re sure you’ve got the Kaunian right, leave it alone and use it. I guess the next question is, how sure are you?”

  “Pretty sure,” Vanai said, and felt the corners of her mouth turn down.

  Ealstan frowned, too. “You can get into all sorts of trouble using a spell you’re pretty sure is good. Last time, you made me look Kaunian instead of doing anything to yourself. We don’t want that to happen again, and we don’t want anything worse to happen, either.”

  “I know,” Vanai said, “but if only I were free to move around in Eoforwic—well, after things calm down again, anyhow. Earlier today, I was thinking that being caged up here wasn’t so bad. I haven’t thought anything like that for a long time. I don’t think I ever thought anything like that before.”

  Ealstan nodded. “I don’t blame you. It’s . . . pretty bad out there. Some of the fighting came right up to Ethelhelm’s block of flats, and that sort of thing doesn’t usually go on in the fancy parts of town.”

  “What did your singer friend have to say?” Vanai asked. “Was he cheering the rioters on? Anybody with Kaunian blood ought to be.”

  “I don’t quite know.” Ealstan sighed. “He doesn’t like the redheads—we’ve seen that—but he doesn’t want to lose what he’s got, either. To hang on to it, he has to play along with them, at least some. And when he plays along with them, he starts . . .” He groped for a phrase.

  Vanai suggested one: “Forgiving things?”

  “No, that goes too far.” Ealstan shook his head. “Not seeing things, maybe.” He held up a hand before Vanai could say anything. “Aye, I know that’s just about as bad. Maybe not quite, though.”

  “Maybe.” Vanai didn’t believe it, but didn’t feel like starting an argument.

  Again, Ealstan seemed to want to change the subject: “If you can get the magic to work, that would be wonderful. It would mean we’d be safe moving out of this flat, since . . .” He shook his head. “We could move out.”

  What hadn’t he said there? Not since you wouldn’t look like a Kaunian any more. If he’d meant that, he would have said it. What then? Another possibility sprang in
to Vanai’s mind: since Ethelhelm knows where we live and might blab to the Algarvians. Ealstan wouldn’t want to say that out loud. He probably didn’t even want to think it. But maybe he hadn’t changed the subject after all.

  He cocked his head to one side. “I wonder what you’d look like as a Forthwegian. Would you feel different, too?” He used his hands to sketch figures in the air, contrasting her slimness to his own more solid build, which was typical of Forthwegians.

  “I don’t know,” Vanai answered. “I’m not really a mage, remember.” Her grandfather would have been able to say. She was sure of that. Brivibas knew a lot about magecraft, especially the history of magecraft. He’d used sorcery in his own historical research. She wondered how much else he might use if he wanted to. A good deal, she suspected. But would he ever think to do so? That was another question altogether.

  Ealstan’s thoughts had been running along another, and a distinctively masculine, ley line. With a small chuckle, he said, “If you look different and feel different, too, it would almost be like making love to somebody else.”

  “Would it?” Vanai eyed him from under lowered brows. “And do you want to be making love to somebody else?”

  He was bright enough to recognize the danger in that one, and hastily shook his head. “Of course not,” he answered, and Vanai had to hide a smile at how emphatic he sounded. But he didn’t quite back away from everything he’d said: “It would just be like choosing a different posture, that’s all.”

  “Oh,” Vanai said. Ealstan was fonder of different postures than she was, for Major Spinello had forced them on her. But Ealstan didn’t know about Spinello, for which Vanai was heartily glad. She gave her lover the benefit of the doubt. “All right, sweetheart.”

  And then, while Ealstan worked on columns of figures (“Powers above only know when I’ll be able to get these to my clients,” he said, but kept working anyhow), Vanai went back to picking the Forthwegian spell to pieces and rebuilding it in classical Kaunian. When she noticed her new version had a partial rhyme scheme, her hopes lifted: the original surely would have rhymed, to make memorizing it easier. She tried alternative words to give more rhymes. Some she discarded; others fit as well as a snug pair of trousers.

  “I have it, I think,” she told Ealstan. “Shall I try it?”

  “If you want to,” he answered, “and if you think you can reverse anything that goes wrong.”

  Vanai studied her new text. She wasn’t sure of that, and Ealstan, she had to admit, showed good sense in asking her to be. She sighed. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said, and then, “Can you bring me some books on magecraft?”

  ‘Tomorrow? No,” Ealstan said. “When things settle down? Of course.” Vanai sighed again, but then she nodded.

  Cornelu didn’t like walking through the streets of Setubal. For one thing, he still had trouble reading Lagoan, which reminded him how much a stranger he was in the capital of Lagoas and how much a stranger he’d remain. He had never wanted to be a Lagoan; what he wanted was to be a free Sibian in a free Sibiu.

  But walking through Setubal also reminded him that even a free Sibiu could never hope to measure itself against Lagoas again. That hurt. Setubal alone held as many people, did as much business, as all the five islands of his native kingdom. And, while Setubal was the greatest city in Lagoas, it was far from being the only Lagoan city of consequence.

  How do people live here without going mad? Cornelu wondered as Lagoans streamed past him, every one of them moving faster than he cared to. More ley lines came together at Setubal than anywhere else in the world; that was why the city had blazed into prominence over the past couple of hundred years. And the sorcerous energy seemed to fill the people as well as the place. Cornelu knew that couldn’t be literally true, but it felt as if it were.

  A hawker waved a news sheet in his face and bawled something half comprehensible. He caught the words Ice People, and supposed the headline had to do with the Lagoans’ continuing advances on the austral continent. He was all for those advances, as he was all for anything that hurt the Algarvians, but he didn’t care to spend money on a sheet he could barely puzzle out. The news-sheet vendor said a couple of uncomplimentary things that weren’t much different in Lagoan from what they would have been in Sibian.

  A few blocks later, Cornelu turned the corner and strode up to the ornate neoclassical headquarters of the Lagoan Guild of Mages. No one stopped him from approaching the great white marble pile, and no one stopped him from going inside, either. It wasn’t so much that he looked like a Lagoan; he could have been as hairy as a man of the Ice People and no one would have stopped him. Business was business.

  He knew the way to Grandmaster Pinhiero’s offices. He’d been there before. He hadn’t got what he wanted, but he did know the way. The grandmaster’s secretary, a portly fellow named Brinco, looked up from the papers he was methodically going through. He beamed. “Commander Cornelu! Good to see you again!” He spoke Algarvian, which he knew Cornelu understood.

  “Good day,” Cornelu answered. Brinco had met him only once, and that months before. But the mage remembered him right away. That bespoke either some unobtrusive sorcery or a well-honed recollection.

  When Cornelu said no more, Brinco asked, “And how may I serve you today, your Excellency?”

  He sounded as if nothing would delight him more than doing Cornelu’s bidding. Cornelu knew that to be untrue, but couldn’t decide whether it flattered or irked him. He decided to stick to the business on which he’d come: “I have heard that the mage Fernao, whom I once brought back from the land of the Ice People and who had the misfortune to go there again, was wounded. Is it so?”

  “And where did you hear this?” Brinco asked, nothing in his face or voice giving any sign about whether it was so. Cornelu stood mute. When it became clear he wouldn’t answer, Brinco shrugged, said, “Good to see you again,” once more, and returned to his papers.

  Curse you, Cornelu thought. But Brinco had power and he had none; that was part of what being an exile meant. His stiff-necked Sibian pride almost made him turn on his heel and walk out. In the end, though, he growled, “I was in a tavern with the dragonflier who brought in a man he thought to be Fernao.”

  “Ah.” Brinco’s nod was almost conspiratorial. “Aye, dragonfliers will run on at the mouth. I suppose it comes from being unable to talk with their beasts, the way you leviathan-riders do.”

  “It could be.” Cornelu waited for the Lagoan to say more. When Brinco didn’t, Cornelu folded his arms across his chest and fixed the grandmaster’s secretary with a cold stare. “I answered your question, sir. You might have the common courtesy to answer mine.”

  “You already have a good notion as to that answer, though,” Brinco said. Cornelu looked at him. It wasn’t a glare, not really, but it served the same purpose. A slow flush mounted to Brinco’s cheeks. “Very well, sir: aye, that is true. He was wounded, and is recovering.”

  Cornelu took from his tunic pocket an envelope. “I hope you will do me the honor of conveying this to him: my best wishes, and my hope that his health may be fully restored.”

  Brinco took the envelope. “It would be my distinct privilege to do so.” He coughed discreetly. “You understand, I trust, that we may examine the note before forwarding it. I intend no personal offense in telling you this: I merely note that these are hard and dangerous times.”

  “That they are,” Cornelu said. “Your kingdom trusted me to join in the raid on Dukstas, so of course you would assume I am engaged in sending your mage subversive messages.”

  Grandmaster Pinhiero’s secretary flushed again, but said, “We would do the same, sir, were you his Majesty’s eldest son.”

  “You are—” Cornelu broke off short. He’d been about to call Brinco a liar, but something in the mage’s voice compelled belief. With hardly a pause, Cornelu went on,“—saying Fernao is involved in work of some considerable importance.”

  “I am not saying any such thing,” Brinco
replied. Now he sent Cornelu a look as chilly as the one the Sibian leviathan-rider had given him. “Will there be anything more, Commander?”

  His clear implication was that there had better not be. And, in fact, Cornelu had done what he’d come to do. Bowing to Brinco, he answered, “No, sir,” and turned and strode away. He was not a mage, so he couldn’t possibly have sensed Brinco’s eyes boring into his back. He couldn’t have, but he would have taken oath that he did.

  Outside the Guild building, he paused and considered. He knew, or thought he knew, which ley-line caravan would take him back to the harbor, back to the leviathan pens, back to the barracks where he and his fellow exiles had painfully built a tiny, stuffy re-creation of Sibiu in this foreign land.

  But that satisfied him hardly more than Setubal itself did. Unlike some of his countrymen, he recognized how artificial their life inside the barracks was. He wanted the real thing. He wanted to go back to Tirgoviste town and have everything the way it was before the Algarvians invaded his homeland. Wanting that and knowing he couldn’t have it ate at him from the inside out.

  Instead of lining up at the caravan stop, he tramped down the street, looking for . . . he didn’t know what. Something he didn’t have—he knew that much. Would he even recognize it if he saw it? He shrugged, almost as if he were an Algarvian. How could he know?

  Plenty of Lagoans seemed to have trouble figuring out what they wanted, too. They paused in front of shop windows to examine the goods on display—even now, in wartime, goods richer and more various than Cornelu would have found in Tirgoviste town before the fighting started. Cornelu wanted to shout at them. Didn’t they know how much hardship was loose in the world?

  Here in Setubal, it showed in only one place: the menus of the eateries. Local custom was to post the bill of fare outside each establishment, so passersby could decide whether they cared to come in and buy. Cornelu approved of the custom. He would have approved of it more had he made easier going of the menus. Lagoan names for domestic animals—cows, sheep, swine—came from Algarvic roots, so he had little trouble with them. But the words for the meats derived from those animals—beef, mutton, pork—were of Kaunian origin, which meant he had to pause and contemplate them before he could figure out what was supposed to be what. Similar traps lurked elsewhere.