Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  But Kugu shook his head. “I doubt it. King Gainibu’s still on the throne down in Priekule, but how much does that do our Valmieran cousins? They’re probably easier to rule than we are, because they haven’t got a foreigner sitting on the throne.”

  By a foreigner, he meant an Algarvian. Several people nodded, taking the point. King Mezentio’s brother wasn’t the man whom Talsu had in mind as a proper King of Jelgava, either, but he just sat there, doing his best to look none too bright. If Kugu was a provocateur, Talsu didn’t intend to let himself be provoked—not visibly, anyhow.

  With a sigh, the silversmith said, “It would be fine if the king came back to Jelgava. After a dose of King Mainardo’s rule, plenty of people would flock to Donalitu’s banner.”

  Again, Kugu got nods. Again, Talsu wasn’t one of the men who gave them. He knew exactly how the redheads would judge such words: as treason. Hearing them was dangerous. Being seen to agree with them was worse.

  Maybe Kugu realized as much, too, for he said, “Shall we go over some sentences that show how the aorist participle is used?” He read a sentence in the sonorous ancient tongue, then pointed to Talsu. “How would you translate that into Jelgavan?”

  Talsu leaped to his feet, clasped his hands behind his back, and looked down at the floor between his shoes: memories of his brief days in school. He took a deep, nervous breath and said, “Having gained the upper hand, the Kaunian army advanced into the forest.”

  Even if he was wrong, Kugu wouldn’t stripe his back with a switch. He knew that, but sweat trickled from his armpits anyhow. Maybe that too was left over from memories of school, or maybe it just sprang from simple fear of reciting in public.

  Either way, he needn’t have worried, for Kugu beamed and nodded. “Even so,” he said. “That is excellent. Let’s try another one.” He read the sentence in classical Kaunian and pointed to the fellow next to Talsu, a red-faced, middle-aged merchant. “How would you translate that?”

  The man made a hash of it. When Kugu set him straight, he scowled. “If that’s what they mean, why don’t they come out and say it?”

  “They do,” Kugu said patiently. “They just do it differently. They do it more precisely and more concisely than modern Jelgavan can.”

  “But it’s confusing,” the merchant complained. Talsu wondered how many more lessons the red-faced man would come to. Rather to his own surprise, he didn’t find classical Kaunian confusing himself. Complex? Aye. Difficult? Certainly. But he kept managing to see how the pieces fit together.

  After everyone had had a crack at translating a sentence or two, the lesson broke up. “I’ll see you next week,” Kugu told his scholars. “Powers above keep you safe till then.”

  Out into the night the Jelgavans went, scattering as they headed for their homes throughout Skrunda. Stars shone down from the clear sky: more stars than Talsu was used to seeing in his home town. Since the raid on Skrunda, the redheads had required the town to stay dark at night, which brought out the tiny sparkling points of light overhead.

  It also made tripping and breaking your neck easier. Talsu stumbled over a cobblestone that stood up from the roadbed and almost fell on his face. He flailed his arms to stay upright, all the while cursing in a tiny voice. Though often ignored and hard to enforce because of the darkness shrouding Skrunda, the redheads’ curfew remained in force. The last thing Talsu wanted was to draw one of their patrols to him.

  He picked his way through the quiet streets. The first time he’d come home from Kugu’s, he’d got lost and wandered around for half an hour till he came into the market square quite by accident. Knowing where he was had let him find his home in short order.

  A cricket chirped. Off in the distance, a cat yowled. Those sounds didn’t worry Talsu. He listened for boots thudding on cobbles. The Algarvians knew a lot of things, but they didn’t seem to know how to patrol stealthily.

  When he got to his house, he let himself in, then barred the door. If an enterprising burglar chose to strike on a night when he was studying classical Kaunian, the thief might clean out the downstairs of Traku’s shop and depart with no one the wiser.

  To make sure Talsu wasn’t a burglar, his father came partway down the stairs and called softly: “That you, son?”

  “Aye,” Talsu answered.

  “Well, what did you learn tonight?” Traku asked.

  “Having gained the upper hand, the Kaunian army advanced into the forest,” Talsu declaimed, letting the sounds of the classical language fill his mouth in a way modern Jelgavan couldn’t come close to matching.

  “Isn’t that posh?” his father said admiringly. “What’s it mean?” After Talsu translated, Traku frowned and asked, “What happened then—after it advanced into the forest, I mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Talsu said. “Maybe the Kaunians kept on winning. Maybe the lousy redheads who lived in the forest ambushed them. It’s just a sentence in a grammar book, not a whole story.”

  “Too bad,” Traku said. “You’d like to know how these things turn out.”

  Talsu yawned. “What I’d like to do is go to bed. I’ll still have to get up and work tomorrow morning. Come to that, so will you, Father.”

  “Oh, aye, I know,” Traku answered. “But I like to be sure everything’s all right before I settle down—and if I didn’t, I’d hear about it in the morning from your mother.” He turned and went back up to the top floor. Talsu followed.

  His room had seemed cramped ever since he came home from the army after Jelgava’s losing fight against the Algarvians. It still did. He was too tired to care tonight. He took off his tunic and trousers and lay down wearing nothing but his drawers: the night was fine and mild. He fell asleep with participles spinning in his mind.

  Instead of advancing into the forest the next morning, he advanced on breakfast: barley bread, garlic-flavored olive oil, and the usual Jelgavan wine tangy with citrus juice. Afterwards, and before his father could chain him to a stool to work on a couple of cloaks that needed finishing, he ducked out and headed over to the grocer’s shop to say hello to Gailisa and to show off the bits of classical Kaunian he was learning. She didn’t understand much of it herself, but it impressed her, not least because she did understand why he was studying it. “I’ll be back soon,” he promised over his shoulder as he left, to keep his father from getting too annoyed at him.

  But he broke the promise. During the night, somebody—more likely several somebodies—had painted DEATH TO THE ALGARVIAN TYRANTS! on walls all over Skrunda: not in Jelgavan, but in excellent classical Kaunian. Talsu might not have been able to understand it before he started studying the old language. He could now.

  Unfortunately, so could the Algarvians. Their officers, as he’d seen, were familiar with the classical tongue. And their soldiers were on the streets with jars of paint to cover up the offending slogan and with wire brushes to efface it. The redheads didn’t aim to do the work themselves, though. They grabbed Jelgavan passersby, Talsu among them. He spent the whole morning getting rid of graffiti. But the more he worked to get rid of them, the more he agreed with them. And he didn’t think he was the only Jelgavan who felt that way, either.

  “New songs?” Ethelhelm shook his head and looked a little sheepish when Ealstan asked the question. “Haven’t got a whole lot. The boys and I have been on the road so much lately, we haven’t had very many chances to sit down and fool around with anything new.”

  Ealstan nodded, doing his best to seem properly sympathetic. He didn’t want to say something like, Hard to write nasty songs about the Algarvians now that you’ve started cozying up to them. Even the last few new songs Ethelhelm had written had lost a good deal of their bite. But Ealstan needed the band leader’s business. And Ethelhelm knew he had a Kaunian lady friend. Ealstan didn’t think the musician would betray him to the redheads, but he didn’t want to give Ethelhelm any excuse for doing something like that, either.

  “Good to have things quiet in Eoforwic again,” Ethelhelm said.
“It got a little livelier than we really wanted for a while there.”

  “Aye,” Ealstan said. No wonder Ethelhelm thought that way: the riots had made it into his district for a change. Ealstan started to remark that the Kaunian district had stayed very quiet; he wanted to remind Ethelhelm of the Kaunian blood the band leader was said to have. In the end, he didn’t say that, either: talking about Kaunians with Ethelhelm might also remind him of Vanai. When Ethelhelm looked to be drifting toward the Algarvians, Ealstan didn’t want to chance that.

  He was my friend, Ealstan thought. And he was more than that—he was our voice, the only voice Forthwegians really had after the redheads overran us. And now he’s not any more. What went wrong?

  Looking around the flat again, Ealstan saw what he’d seen before. Nothing had gone wrong for Ethelhelm. No, too many things had gone right instead. The drummer and songwriter had everything he wanted. He liked having everything he wanted, too. If the price of keeping it was going easy on the Algarvians, he would.

  Had some redheaded officer come up to Ethelhelm and told him straight out that he’d better go easy or he’d end up in trouble? Ealstan didn’t know, and could hardly ask. He had his doubts, though. The Algarvians were smoother than that—unless they were dealing with Kaunians, in which case they didn’t bother.

  Oblivious to his bookkeeper’s thoughts, Ethelhelm leaned forward and tapped the ledgers Ealstan had opened on the table in front of him. “Everything here looks very good,” he said—no small compliment, not when he’d been casting his own accounts before hiring Ealstan. He knew his way around money almost as well as he knew his way around drums and lyrics.

  “You haven’t got all the silver in the world,” Ealstan told him, “but you surely do have a good chunk of it.”

  “I never thought I’d end up with so much,” Ethelhelm said. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  Ealstan managed to nod. He’d been comfortable—looking back on things, he’d been more than comfortable—in his father’s house in Gromheort. It certainly was nicer than the humbler circumstances in which he lived now. He’d saved a good deal of money here in Eoforwic, but what could he spend it on? Not much. And Ethelhelm didn’t seem to have a hint about the sort of life Ealstan lived these days. He didn’t act interested in learning, either.

  But then the band leader flipped the ledgers closed, one after another. And he took a goldpiece from his belt pouch and set it atop one of them. “There you go, Ealstan,” he said. “Aye, a job well done, no doubt about it, especially considering the state of the receipts I gave you. Bloody leather sack!”

  Ealstan picked up the coin and hefted it. It was, he saw, an Algarvian goldpiece, not a Forthwegian minting. It was almost worth more than twice what his fee would have been. “Here, I can make change,” he said, and reached for his own belt pouch.

  “Don’t bother,” Ethelhelm told him. “You can use it, and I can afford it. Always good to know I can rely on the people close to me.”

  By the powers above! Ealstan thought. He’s buying me, the same way he buys off the Algarvians. He wanted to throw the coin in Ethelhelm’s face. If it hadn’t been for Vanai, he would have. Of course, if it hadn’t been for Vanai, he’d still be living back in Gromheort. He put the goldpiece in his pouch and contented himself with saying, “Bookkeepers don’t blab. They wouldn’t keep any customers if they did.”

  “I understand that,” Ethelhelm said. “You’ve certainly shown it to me.” He could still be gracious. He could, in fact, still be very much what he had been, except when it came to the Algarvians. Somehow, that was particularly distressing to Ealstan. Ethelhelm went on, “There, you’ve taken it even so. Good.”

  “Aye, and thanks,” Ealstan said. He got to his feet and tucked the ledgers under his arm. “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks, then, and odds are you’ll be richer.”

  “There are worse problems to have,” Ethelhelm said complacently, and Ealstan could hardly disagree with him.

  Since the latest round of riots, the doorman at Ethelhelm’s block of flats had taken to staying inside, in the lobby. He didn’t position himself out where people could see him, as he had before—maybe he’d had a narrow escape. One more question Ealstan didn’t feel like asking. The doorman got up and held the door open for him. “See you again,” he said.

  “Oh, that you will,” Ealstan said. The prospect should have made him glad, especially if it meant he’d see more goldpieces. And it did—to a degree. But it saddened him, too, because Ethelhelm inarguably wasn’t what he had been.

  Only a block and a half away from Ethelhelm’s elegant flat, a labor gang was clearing away the rubble of a burnt-out building. The laborers were Kaunians, some men, some women. Had their overseers been Algarvian soldiers or constables, Ealstan would have been angry but unsurprised. But the men holding the Kaunians to their tasks were Forthwegians armed with nothing more than bludgeons—and the certainty that they were doing the right thing.

  Ealstan wanted to curse them. He wanted to persuade them they were wrong. He wanted to tell them they were playing into their conquerors’ hands. In the end, he did none of that. He simply walked on, free hand curled into a fist tight enough to make his nails bite into his palm, belly churning with rage he dared not show.

  More wrecked, burnt-out buildings lay in the poorer parts of Eoforwic. No one had started clearing them away. Ealstan wondered how long that would take. He also wondered if it would ever happen. He didn’t intend to hold his breath.

  Here and there, people went through the wreckage. Some were folk who’d lived and worked in those buildings, doing their best to salvage what they could. And some, no doubt, were nothing but scavengers. Ealstan glared at the gleaners, which did no good at all: it might have angered the people who had a right to search for what was theirs, but bothered the looters not at all.

  He stopped in a baker’s shop and bought two loaves of bread. It was nasty stuff, and had got nastier since the latest riots. He’d long since grown used to wheat flour cut with barley and rye. They made loaves thicker and chewier, because they rose less readily than wheat, but they didn’t taste too strange. Ground-up peas and beans and buckwheat groats, on the other hand . . .

  “What’s next?” he asked the baker. “Sawdust?”

  “If I can’t get anything else,” the fellow answered, adding, “Listen, pal, I eat the same bread I sell. Times aren’t easy.”

  “No,” Ealstan agreed. Did the baker really eat the same bread he sold his customers? Ealstan doubted it. From everything he’d seen, anyone who got a position privileged in any way took advantage of it as best he could. Ealstan chuckled mirthlessly. If that wasn’t an Algarvian way of looking at the world, he didn’t know what was.

  When he got back to his own part of town, he paused and marveled that all the buildings on his block had come through intact. Oh, some new windows on the bottom couple of stories were boarded up, but a lot of windows had been boarded up for a long time; glass, these days, was expensive and hard to come by.

  Feet and hooves and wheels had worn away the fresh bloodstains from the crowns of the cobbles, but the redbrown still lingered between the gray and yellow-brown stones. Someone had left a bloody handprint on the wall of the building next to Ealstan’s, too. He wondered what had happened to that fellow. Nothing good, he feared.

  He paused in the lobby to get his mail from the brass bank of boxes against the wall opposite the door. The lock on his box was as stout and fancy as he could afford; he had one key, the postman the other. The rest of the boxes sported similar impressive pieces of the locksmith’s art. Few people hereabouts trusted their neighbors’ good intentions.

  When Ealstan saw his father’s precise, familiar script on an envelope, he grabbed it with a mixture of excitement and alarm. He didn’t hear from home very often, and wrote back even less. But news, he’d discovered when he got the letter telling of Leofsig’s death, could be bad as easily as good.

  I’ll open it upstairs, he told himself. I
won’t be able to do anything about it down here, anyhow. He laughed at himself, again without amusement. He wouldn’t be able to do anything about it after he got up to his flat, either.

  He had to set down the ledgers so he could knock on the door. Vanai let him in. “What have you got there?” she asked, pointing to the envelope.

  “It’s from home,” he answered. “That’s all I know right now.” He held up the envelope to show her he hadn’t opened it, then added, “I didn’t have the nerve to do it down in the lobby.”

  Vanai bit her lip as she nodded. “Let me pour some wine.” She hurried off to the kitchen. Ealstan clenched his jaw. He’d needed numbing after other letters from home, and knew too well he might need it again.

  He waited till Vanai came back with two full glasses before he tore open the envelope and took out the letter inside. He unfolded it, started to read—and let out a chuckle that was shaky with relief. “Oh!” he said. “Is that all?”

  “What is it?” Vanai asked, awineglass still in each hand.

  “My sister’s married,” Ealstan answered. That seemed strange—Conberge had been a part of the household his whole life—but he’d known it was likely to happen one day. “My father says everything went very well. Powers above be praised for that! Wouldn’t it have been fine if Sidroc walked in right in the middle of the ceremony?”

  “No,” Vanai said, and handed him one of the glasses. She raised the other. “Here’s to your sister. May she be happy.”

  “Aye. Conberge deserves to be happy.” Ealstan drank. The wine was nowhere near so fine as the fancy vintages Ethelhelm served, but it would do. He finished reading the letter, then winced in sympathy. “My father says he and my mother are just rattling around in the house. They never expected it to empty out so soon.”

  Vanai stepped up and held him for a moment. He’d had to flee Gromheort, his brother was dead—at least Conberge had left the way she should have.

  And something else occurred to him: something, he realized, he should have thought of quite a while before. He slipped his arm around Vanai. “I wish I could marry you properly,” he said. “If I ever get the chance, I will, I promise.”