Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  These days, though, he had fewer things to contemplate. Almost every eatery’s menu had several items scratched out, generally those involving things imported from the mainland of Derlavai. Beef dishes were also fewer than they had been, and more expensive. Cornelu sighed. That didn’t seem to be enough acknowledgment of the war.

  When he saw an eatery offering crab cakes, though, he went inside. For one thing, the Lagoan name was almost identical to its Sibian equivalent, so he had no doubt what he’d be getting. For another, he liked crab cakes, and couldn’t remember the last time they’d served them at the barracks.

  Inside, the place looked anything but fancy, but it was clean enough. A cook with red hair going gray cracked crabs behind the counter. Cornelu sat down. A young woman with a family resemblance to the cook came up to him. “What’ll it be?” she asked briskly.

  “Crab cakes. Rhubarb pie. Ale.” Cornelu could get along in Lagoan, especially on basics like food.

  But the waitress cocked her head to one side. “You’re from Sibiu.” It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t scornful, either, which rather surprised Cornelu: most Lagoans thought well of themselves, not so well of anyone else. At his nod, the woman turned to the cook. “He’s from the old kingdom, Father.”

  “It happens,” the cook said in Lagoan. Then he switched to Sibian with a lower-class accent he wouldn’t have learned in school: “My father was a fisherman who found he was making more money in Setubal than back on the five islands, so he settled here. He married a Lagoan lady, but I grew up speaking both languages.”

  “Ah. I got out when Mezentio’s men overran Tirgoviste town,” Cornelu said, relishing the chance to use his own tongue. He nodded to the waitress, really noticing her for the first time. “And you—do you speak Sibian, too?”

  “I follow it,” she answered in Lagoan. “Speak a little.” That was Sibian, a good deal more Lagoan-flavored than her father’s. She returned to the language with which she was obviously more familiar: “Now let’s get your dinner taken care of. I’ll bring the ale first off.”

  It was strong and nutty and good. The crab cakes, when they came, reminded Cornelu of home. He ate them and the sweet, sweet rhubarb pie with real enjoyment. And speaking Sibian with the cook and his daughter was indeed enjoyable, too. The man’s name was Balio, which might almost have been Sibian; his daughter was called Janira, a name as Lagoan as any Cornelu could imagine.

  ‘This is all wonderful,” he said. “You should have more customers.” He was, at the moment, the only one in the place, which was why he could go on speaking Sibian.

  “It’ll get livelier tonight,” Balio said. “We have a pretty fair evening crowd.”

  Janira winked at Cornelu. “You just have to come back here and eat up everything we’ve got. Then we’ll get rich.”

  She spoke Lagoan, but he could answer in Sibian: “You’ll get rich, and I’ll get fat.” He laughed. He didn’t laugh very often these days; he could feel his face twisting in ways it wasn’t used to. “Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.” Janira laughed, too.

  Qutuz said, “The Marquis Balastro is here to see you, your Excellency.” His nostrils twitched. He ached to say more; Hajjaj could tell as much.

  And, since his visitor was the minister from Algarve . . . “Let me guess,” Hajjaj said. “Has he come to call in what we Zuwayzin would reckon proper costume?”

  “Aye,” his secretary answered, and rolled his eyes. “It’s not customary.”

  “He’ll do it now and again anyhow,” Hajjaj said.

  “I wish he wouldn’t,” Qutuz said. “He’s very pale, the parts of him his clothes usually cover. And—he’s mutilated, you know.” For a moment, the secretary cupped a protective hand over the organ to which he was referring.

  “Algarvians have that done when they turn fourteen,” Hajjaj said calmly. “They call it a rite of manhood.”

  Qutuz rolled his eyes again. “And they reckon us barbarians because we don’t drape ourselves in cloth!” Hajjaj shrugged; that had occurred to him, too, every now and again. With a sigh, his secretary said, “Shall I show him in?”

  “Oh, by all means, by all means,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister answered. “I must admit, I’m not broken-hearted about avoiding tunic and kilt myself. It’s a hot day.” In Bishah, home of hot days, that was a statement to conjure with.

  Having seen Balastro’s portly, multicolored form undraped before, Hajjaj knew what to expect. Zuwayzin took nudity for granted. Balastro wore bareness as theatrically as he wore clothes. “Good day, your Excellency!” he boomed. “Lovely weather you’re having here—if you’re fond of bake ovens, anyhow.”

  “It is a trifle warm,” Hajjaj replied; he wouldn’t admit to a foreigner what he’d conceded to Qutuz. “You will of course take tea and wine and cakes with me, sir?”

  “Of course,” Balastro said, a little sourly. The Zuwayzi ritual of hospitality was designed to keep people from talking business too soon. But, since Balastro had chosen Zuwayzi costume, or lack of same, he could hardly object to following the other customs of Hajjaj’s kingdom.

  In any case, Balastro seldom objected to food or wine. He ate and drank—and sipped enough tea for politeness’ sake—and made small talk while the refreshments sat on a silver tray between him and Hajjaj. Only after Qutuz came in and carried away the tray did the Algarvian minister lean forward from the nest of cushions he’d constructed. Even then, polite still, he waited for Hajjaj to speak first.

  Hajjaj wished he could avoid that, but custom bound him as it had bound Balastro. Leaning forward himself, he inquired, “And how may I serve you today?”

  Balastro laughed, which mortified him; he hadn’t wanted his reluctance to show. The Algarvian minister said, “You think I’ve come to give you a hard time about the cursed Kaunian refugees, don’t you?”

  “Well, your Excellency, I would be lying if I said the thought had not crossed my mind,” Hajjaj replied. “If you have not come for that reason, perhaps you will tell me why you have. Whatever the reason may be, I shall do everything in my power to accommodate you.”

  Balastro laughed again, this time louder and more uproariously. He wiped his eyes on his hairy forearm. “Forgive me, I beg, but that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time,” he said. “You’ll do whatever suits you best, and then you’ll try to convince me it was for my own good.”

  “You do me too much honor, sir, by giving me your motives,” Hajjaj said dryly, which made Balastro laugh some more. Smiling himself, the Zuwayzi foreign minister went on, “Why have you come, then?”

  Now the jovial mask dropped from Balastro’s face. “To speak plainly, your Excellency, I have come to ask Zuwayza to get off the fence.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Hajjaj raised a polite eyebrow.

  “Get off the fence,” Balastro repeated. “You have fought this war with your own interest uppermost. You could have struck Unkerlant harder blows than you have, and you know it as well as I do. You’ve fought Swemmel, aye, but you’ve also looked to keep him in the fight against us. You would sooner we wear each other out, because that would mean we’d leave you alone.”

  He was, of course, perfectly correct. Hajjaj had no intention of admitting as much. “Did we not hope for an Algarvian victory, we should never have cooperated with King Mezentio’s forces in the war against Unkerlant,” he said stiffly.

  “You haven’t cooperated any too bloody much as is,” Balastro said. “You’ve done what you wanted to do all along: you’ve taken as much territory as you wanted to, and you’ve let our dragons and our behemoths help you take it and help you hold it. But when it comes to giving us a real hand—well, how much of a hand have you given us? About this much, it seems to me.” He thrust out two fingers in a crude Algarvian gesture Hajjaj had often seen and almost as often used in his university days back in Trapani.

  “It is as well we have been friends,” Hajjaj said, his voice even more distant than before. “There are men with whom, were they to offe
r me such insult, I would continue discussions only through common friends.”

  Balastro snorted. “We’d be a fine pair for dueling, wouldn’t we? We’d probably set the notion of defending one’s honor back about a hundred years if we went after each other.”

  “I was serious, sir,” Hajjaj said. One of the reasons he was serious was that the Algarvian minister had once more spoken nothing but the truth. “His Majesty has lived up to the guarantees he gave you through me at the beginning of this campaign, and has done so in every particular. If you say he has not, I must tell you I would consider you a liar.”

  “Are you trying to get me to challenge you, your Excellency?” Balastro said. “I might, except you’d probably choose something like camel dung as a weapon.”

  “No, I think I’d prefer royal proclamations,” Hajjaj answered. “They are without question both more odorous and more lethal.”

  “Heh. You’re a witty fellow, your Excellency; I’ve thought so for years,” the Algarvian minister said. “But all your wit won’t get you out of the truth: the war has changed since it began. It is not what it was when it began.” Corpulence and nudity didn’t keep him from striking a dramatic pose. “Now it is plain that, when all is said and done, either Algarve will be left standing or Unkerlant will. You have sought middle ground. I tell you, there is none to be had.”

  “You may be right,” said Hajjaj, who feared Balastro was. “But whether you are right or wrong has nothing to do with whether King Shazli has met the undertakings he gave to Algarve. He has, and you have no right to ask anything more of him or of Zuwayza than he has already delivered.”

  “There we differ,” Balastro said. “For if the nature of the war has changed, what Zuwayza’s undertakings mean has also changed. If your kingdom gives no more than it has given, you are more likely to be contributing to Algarve’s defeat than to our victory. Do you not wonder that we might want something more from you than that?”

  “I wonder at very little I have seen since the Derlavaian War began,” Hajjaj replied. “Having watched a great kingdom resort to savagery that would satisfy the barbarous chieftain of some undiscovered island in the northern seas, I find my capacity for surprise greatly shrunken.”

  “No barbarous chieftain faces so savage and deadly a foe as Algarve does in Unkerlant,” Balastro said. “Had we not done what we did when we did it, Unkerlant would have done it to us.”

  “Such a statement is all the better for proof,” Hajjaj observed. “You say what might have been; I know what was.”

  “Do you know what will be if Unkerlant beats Algarve?” Balastro demanded. “Do you know what will become of Zuwayza if that happens?”

  There he had the perfect club with which to pound Hajjaj over the head. He knew it, too, and used it without compunction. With a sigh, Hajjaj said, “What you do not understand is that Zuwayza also fears what may happen if Algarve should beat Unkerlant.”

  “That would not be as bad for you,” Balastro told him.

  Hajjaj didn’t know whether to admire the honesty of the little qualifying phrase at the end of the sentence or to let it appall him. He wanted to call for Qutuz to bring more wine. But who could guess what he might say if he got drunk? As things were, he contented himself with a narrow, rigidly correct question: “What do you seek from us?”

  “Real cooperation,” Balastro answered at once. “Most notably, cooperation in finally pinching off and capturing the port of Glogau. That would be a heavy blow to King Swemmel’s cause.”

  “Why not just loose your magics against the place?” Hajjaj said, and then, because Balastro had well and truly nettled him, he could not resist adding, “I am sure they would serve you as well as they did down in the land of the Ice People.”

  Algarvian news sheets, Algarvian crystal reports had said not a word about the disaster that had befallen the expeditionary force on the austral continent. They admitted the foe was advancing where he had been retreating, but they never said why. Lagoas, on the other hand, trumpeted the botched massacre—or rather, the botched magecraft, for the massacre had succeeded—to the skies.

  Balastro glared and flushed. “Things are not so bad there as the islanders make them out to be,” he said, but he didn’t sound as if he believed his own words.

  “How bad are they, then?” Hajjaj asked.

  The Algarvian minister didn’t answer, not directly. Instead, he said, “Here on Derlavai, magecraft would not turn against us as it did in the land of the Ice People.”

  “Again, this is easier to say than to prove,” Hajjaj remarked. Even if it did prove true, slaughtering Kaunians still repelled him. He took a deep breath. “We have done what we have done, and we are doing what we are doing. If that does not fully satisfy King Mezentio, he is welcome to take whatever steps he finds fitting.”

  Marquis Balastro got to his feet. “If you think we shall forget this insult, I must tell you you are mistaken.

  “I meant no insult,” Hajjaj said. “I do not wish you ill, as King Swemmel does. But I do not wish quite so much ill upon Unkerlant as Algarve does, either. If only one great kingdom thrives, as you say, what room is there for the small kingdoms of the world, for the Zuwayzas and Forthwegs and Yaninas?”

  “In the days of the Kaunian Empire, the blonds had no room for us Algarvians,” Balastro answered. “We made room for ourselves.”

  Somehow, in the person of a plump, naked envoy, Hajjaj saw a fierce, kilted barbarian warrior. Maybe that was good acting from Balastro—or maybe the barbarian warrior never lay far below the surface in any Algarvian. Hajjaj said, “And now you condemn Zuwayza for trying to make a little room for ourselves? Where is the justice in that?”

  “Simple,” Balastro said. “We were strong enough to do it.”

  “Good day, sir,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister said, and Balastro departed. But, watching his broad retreating back, Hajjaj nodded and smiled a little. For all Balastro’s bluster, Hajjaj didn’t think the Algarvians would abandon Zuwayza. They couldn’t afford to.

  But then Hajjaj sighed. Zuwayza couldn’t abandon Algarve, either. Hajjaj would have been willing to make the break, provided he could have got decent terms from Swemmel. But Swemmel didn’t care to give decent terms. Hajjaj sighed again. “And so the cursed war goes on,” he said.

  Twelve

  A stack of small silver coins and another of big brass ones, almost as shiny as gold, stood in front of Talsu. Similar stacks of coins, some larger, some smaller, stood in front of the other Jelgavans sitting at the table in a silversmith’s parlor. A pair of dice lay on the table. If Algarvian constables burst into the parlor, all they would see was gambling. They might keep the money for themselves—being redheads, they probably would—but they’d have nothing to get very excited about.

  So hoped Talsu and all the other men, some young, some far from it, at the table. The silversmith, whose name was Kugu, nodded to his comrades. He peered at the world through thick spectacles, no doubt because he did so much close work. “Now, my friends,” he said, “let’s go over the endings of the declension of the aorist participle.”

  Along with the others, Talsu recited the declensions—nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative—of the participle for singular, dual, and plural; masculine, feminine, and neuter. He got through all the forms without a hitch, and felt a certain modest pride at managing it. Despite getting through them, he wondered how his ancient ancestors had managed to speak classical Kaunian without pausing every other word to figure out the proper form of adjective, noun, or verb.

  Jelgavan, now, Jelgavan was a proper language: no neuter gender, no dual number, no fancy declensions, a vastly simplified verb. He hadn’t realized how sensible Jelgavan was till he decided to study its grandfather.

  Kugu reached out and picked up the dice on the table. He rolled them, and got a six and a three: not a good throw, not a bad one. Then he said, “We are gambling here, you know, and for more than money. The Algarvians want us to forget who we are and wh
o our forefathers were. If they know we’re working to remember . . . They knocked down the imperial arch. They won’t be shy about knocking over a few men.”

  “Curse ’em, the redheads have never been shy about knocking over a few men, or more than a few,” Talsu said.

  Somebody else said, “They can’t kill all of us.”

  “If what we hear coming out of Forthweg is true, they’re doing their best,” Talsu said.

  Everyone stirred uncomfortably. Thinking of what had happened to Kaunians in Forthweg led to thoughts of what might happen to the Kaunian folk of Jelgava. Somebody said, “I think those stories are a pack of lies.”

  Kugu shook his head. Lamplight reflected from the lenses of his spectacles, making him look for a moment as if he had enormous blank yellow eyes. He said, “They are true. From things I’ve heard, they are only a small part of what is true. Algarve doesn’t aim to kill just our memories. We are in danger ourselves.”

  Then why aren’t we fighting back more? Talsu wanted to shout it. He wanted to, but he didn’t. Aye, these men were here to study classical Kaunian, which argued that they had no use for the redheads. But Talsu didn’t know all of them well. He hardly knew a couple of them at all. Any of them, even Kugu himself, could have been an Algarvian spy. Back before the war, King Donalitu had had plenty of provocateurs serving him—men who said outrageous things to get others to agree with them, whereupon those others vanished into dungeons. A man would have to be insanely foolhardy to think the Algarvians couldn’t match such ploys.

  “We’d be better off if the king hadn’t fled,” said someone who might have been thinking along with him, at least in part.