Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  She couldn’t ask Lurcanio about it, not if he was out. How inconsiderate of him, she thought. Then she realized she couldn’t ask him about it even after he got back. He had a cursedly suspicious mind and a cursedly retentive memory. He would still know the name of that miserable little town, and he was all too likely to figure out why she’d started asking questions about it. No, she would have to stay silent.

  “Curse him!” she snarled, an imprecation aimed mostly at Lurcanio but also at her brother. For Krasta, staying silent was an act far more unnatural than any Lurcanio enjoyed in the bedchamber. Probably even more unnatural than anything Valnu enjoys in the bedchamber, Krasta thought. That was enough to set her giggling again. She never had found out what all Valnu enjoyed in the bedchamber. One of these days, she told herself. Aye, one of these days when Lurcanio infuriates me again. That shouldn’t be too long.

  She’d just reached the upper floor when Malya started howling. Krasta set her teeth. Bauska’s bastard brat wasn’t quite so annoying these days as she had been right after she was born, when she’d screeched all the time. She didn’t look so ugly, either; when she smiled, even Krasta found herself smiling back. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t a nuisance.

  And now Krasta smiled, too, though she couldn’t see the baby. “Bauska! Bauska, what are you doing? Come here at once,” she called, as if she couldn’t hear Malya crying, either. Her servant might had had the little squalling pest, but Krasta was cursed if she would let that inconvenience her. “Bauska!”

  “I’ll be with you in a moment, milady.” Bauska sounded as if she were forcing the words out through clenched teeth. Krasta’s smile got wider. Sure enough, she’d hit a nerve.

  “Hurry up,” she said. No, she wouldn’t make things easy for her maidservant. And here came Bauska, her tunic sleeves rolled up, her expression put upon. But when Krasta got a look at—and a whiff of—Bauska’s hands, her smile evaporated. “Powers above, go wash off that filth!”

  “You did tell me to hurry, milady,” Bauska answered. “I always try to give satisfaction in every way.”

  By the look in her eye, she thought she’d won the round. But Krasta wasn’t easily bested. “If you hadn’t given Captain Mosco every satisfaction, your hands wouldn’t stink now,” she snapped.

  Bauska looked as if she were on the point of saying something more, something that likely would have landed her in real trouble with her mistress. And then, very visibly, she bit it back. After a deep breath, she asked, “How may I serve you, milady?”

  Krasta hadn’t even thought about that. She’d called her maidservant to be annoying, not because she wanted anything in particular. She had to cast about for something Bauska might do. At last, she came up with something familiar: “Go down and tell the stablemen and the driver to get my carriage ready. I intend to do some shopping today.”

  “Aye, milady,” Bauska said. “Have I your gracious leave to wash my hands first?”

  “I already told you to do that,” Krasta said with the air of one conferring a large, undeserved boon. Bauska departed. Not until she was gone did Krasta wonder if she’d been sarcastic. The marchioness shook her head. Bauska wouldn’t dare: she was convinced of it.

  She hadn’t really planned to go into Priekule, but the thought of a day spent on the Avenue of Equestrians, the principal street of shops and fine eateries, was too tempting to resist. Downstairs she went, and stood around fuming till the driver brought the carriage out of the stable. When she decided to do something, she always wanted to do it on the instant.

  But even going into town didn’t make her so happy as it would have in the days before the war. Though she was sleeping with an Algarvian colonel, she didn’t like seeing kilted Algarvian soldiers on the streets, gaping like so many farmers at the sights of the big city or cuddling yellow-haired Valmieran women. The Algarvians had even presumed to put up street signs in their language to direct the soldiers to the principal sights. It was as if they thought Priekule would be theirs forever—and so, by all indications they did.

  Krasta also scowled every time she saw a Valmieran, whether man or woman, in a kilt. In a way, that struck her as even worse than going to bed with the redheads: it abandoned the very essence of Kaunianity. She hadn’t worried about such things till she recognized her brother’s handwriting on that broadsheet. If Skarnu worried about them, she supposed she should, too.

  But, set against the display windows of the Avenue of Equestrians, Kaunianity didn’t seem so important. “Let me off here,” she told her driver.

  “Aye, milady.” He reined in. After he handed Krasta down from the carriage, he climbed back into his seat and took a flask from his pocket. Krasta hardly noticed. She’d already begun exploring.

  Not only did she examine the display windows, she also poked her nose into every eatery on the Avenue of Equestrians. Captain Gradasso had said Lurcanio was here somewhere. If he wasn’t with his countrymen but with some little blond tart, Krasta would make sure he remembered it for a long time to come.

  If he was with some little blond tart, he was more likely to be in a hostel bedchamber than in an eatery: Krasta recognized as much. But she couldn’t check bedchambers, while eateries were easy. And Lurcanio liked fancy dining. He might want to impress a new Valmieran girl—or fatten her up—before he took her to bed.

  “Why, hello, you sweet thing!” That wasn’t Lurcanio—it was Viscount Valnu, who sat not far from the door of the fourth or fifth eatery into which Krasta peered. He sprang to his feet so he could bow. “Come on down and take lunch with me.”

  “All right,” Krasta said. And if she and Valnu happened to end up in a hostel bedchamber—well, it wouldn’t be anything that hadn’t almost happened before. Swinging her hips, she walked downstairs and sat beside him. “What are you eating there?”

  “Boiled pork and sour cabbage,” he answered, and then eyed her. “Why? What would you like me to be eating?”

  “You are a shameless man,” she said. She eyed him, too, but just then a waiter came up and asked what she wanted. She ordered the same thing Valnu was having, and ale to go with it.

  “You’re looking lovely today,” Valnu said with another carnivorous smile.

  “I’m sure you say that to all the girls,” Krasta told him, which only made him grin and nod in delight. She didn’t want him to take anything for granted, and so, with a spark of malice, she added, “And to at least half the boys, as well.”

  “What if I do?” Valnu answered with an expressive shrug. “Variety is the life of spice—isn’t that what they say?” He gave her a limp-wristed wave and some malice of his own: “I wouldn’t say it to your precious Lurcanio, I’ll tell you that.”

  Where Krasta had been intent on cuckolding her Algarvian lover, now she found herself defending him: “He knows what he’s doing, as a matter of fact.”

  “What if he does?” Valnu shrugged again, almost as an Algarvian might have done. And he was wearing a kilt—Krasta had noticed when he rose to greet her. Pointing to her, he went on, “But do you know what you’re doing?”

  “Of course I do.” Doubt was not among the things that troubled Krasta. Again, she might have said more without the waiter’s interruption, but he distracted her by setting the ale on the table.

  “Aye, you always know.” Valnu’s smile, instead of being hard as it had been a moment before, seemed strange and sweet, almost sad. “You’re always so sure—but how much good does that do you, with the avalanche thundering down on all of us?”

  “Now what are you talking about?” Krasta asked impatiently. “Avalanches! There aren’t any mountains around Priekule.”

  Viscount Valnu sighed. “No, not literally. But you know what’s happening to us.” Seeing Krasta’s blank look, he amplified that: “To our people, I mean. I know you know about that.” He studied her.

  She didn’t think to wonder how he knew. “It’s pretty bad,” she agreed. “But it’s worse over in the west—and won’t it get better if the miserabl
e war ever ends?”

  “That depends on how the war ends,” Valnu replied, a distinction too subtle to mean much to Krasta. The waiter set her plate of pork and cabbage in front of her. “Put it on my bill,” Valnu said as she dug in.

  “You don’t need to do that,” Krasta said. “I outrank you, after all.”

  “Nobility obliges,” Valnu said lightly. He regained his leer. “And how obliging do you feel like being?”

  “Are you an Algarvian officer, to think you can buy me with a lunch?” Krasta retorted. They flirted through the meal, but she didn’t go to a hostel with him. Mentioning Algarvian officers made her think of Lurcanio again, and she found she simply did not have the nerve to be deliberately unfaithful to him. Someone will have to sweep me off my feet, she thought, and wondered how she could arrange that.

  Thirteen

  Skarnu enjoyed going into Pavilosta with Merkela. In his days in Priekule, he’d scorned such little market towns like any city sophisticate. Had he stayed in Priekule, he was sure he would have gone right on scorning them. After some weeks on a farm out in the countryside, though, Pavilosta’s few bright lights—taverns, shops, gossip in the market square—seemed to shine all the brighter.

  To Merkela, Pavilosta was the big city, or as much of it as she’d ever known. “Look—the ironmonger’s has some new tools in the front window,” she said. She was familiar enough with what he usually displayed to recognize the additions at once.

  Since Skarnu wasn’t, he just nodded to show he’d heard. A couple of doors past the ironmonger’s was a cordwainer’s, but no new boots stood in his window. Nothing at all stood in his window, in fact. But three words had been whitewashed across it, with savage strokes of the brush: NIGHT AND FOG.

  “Oh, a pox,” Skarnu said softly.

  “Aye, curse the Algarvians for taking him off and—” Merkela paused. She glanced over to Skarnu. “It’s worse than that, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “He was one of us, all right. If they made him disappear, that’s one thing. If they squeezed him first, that’s something else—something worse.”

  “Will they come after us next, do you think?” Merkela asked.

  “I don’t know,” Skarnu answered. “I can’t know. But we’d better be ready to disappear or fight before long.” He’d been striking blows at the Algarvian occupiers for a couple of years, ever since he’d sneaked through their lines instead of surrendering. But they could strike back, too. The day he forgot that would be the day of his ruination.

  “I want to fight,” Merkela said, ferocity filling her voice.

  “I want to fight, too—if we have some chance of winning,” Skarnu said. “If they land on us in the middle of the night, though, and paint NIGHT AND FOG on the front door—that’s not fighting. We wouldn’t have a chance.”

  Merkela walked along for a while, kicking at the slates of the sidewalk. She muttered a curse under her breath. Skarnu muttered one even more quietly under his. When she got into one of these moods, sometimes he had everything he could do to keep her from trying to murder the first Algarvian soldier she saw. He understood why, but knew she needed the restraint if she wanted to go on fighting the redheads.

  But then, to his surprise—indeed, to his astonishment—she spoke in much milder tones than she’d used before: “You’re right, of course.”

  Skarnu gaped. He wanted to dig a finger into one ear to make sure he’d heard correctly. “Are you feeling well?” he asked. At first, he meant it for a joke, but after a moment he realized she hadn’t quite been herself lately.

  She walked on for another few paces, head down, hands in her trouser pockets. “I hadn’t meant to tell you so soon,” she said, still looking at the sidewalk and not at him, “but I think I’d better.”

  “Tell me what?” Skamu asked.

  Now she did lift her head and face him. He had trouble reading her smile. Was she pleased? Rueful? Something of each, perhaps? And then all his thoughtful analysis crashed to the ground, because she answered, “I’m going to have a baby. Not much doubt of it now.”

  “A baby?” Skarnu wondered what his own face was showing. Astonishment again, most likely, which was foolish—they’d been lovers a good while. He did his best to rally. “That’s—wonderful, sweetheart.” After a moment, he nodded; saying it helped make him believe it.

  And Merkela nodded, too. “It is, isn’t it? For me especially, I mean—when I didn’t quicken with Gedominu, I wondered if I was barren. When I didn’t quicken with you, I thought I must be. But I was wrong.” Now nothing but joy blazed from her smile.

  Gedominu had been an old man. If anyone was to blame for Merkela’s not getting pregnant, Skarnu would have bet on him, not her. As for himself . . . He shrugged. He’d never fathered a bastard before, but who could say what that meant about his own seed? Nothing, evidently, or Merkela wouldn’t be with child now.

  He also wondered if he should let the child stay a bastard. In the normal course of events, he never would have met Merkela; if he had met her and bedded her, it would have been a night’s amusement, nothing more. Now . . . Thanks to the war, nothing was what it had been. Who would call him a madman if he took a farmer’s widow to wife?

  Krasta would. That occurred to him almost at once. He shrugged again. Once upon a time, he would have cared what his sister thought. No more. Having let an Algarvian lie in her bed, Krasta could hardly complain about whose bed he lay in.

  He took Merkela’s hand. “Everything will be fine,” he said. “I promise.” He didn’t know how he would keep that promise, but he’d find some way.

  And Merkela nodded. “I know it,” she told him. “And . . . the child will grow up free. By the powers above, it will.” Skarnu nodded, too, though he wasn’t sure how that vow would come true, either.

  Holding hands, they walked into the market square. Farmers displayed eggs and cheeses and hams and preserved fruit and gherkins and any number of other good things. The eye Skarnu and Merkela turned on those was more competitive than acquisitive. Their own farm—which seemed much more real to Skarnu than the mansion he hadn’t seen for so long—supplied all they needed along those lines, and they sometimes sold their surplus here in the square, too.

  But Pavilosta’s cloth merchant and potter—aye, and the ironmonger, too—had stalls of their own in the market square. Merkela admired some fine green linen, though she didn’t admire the price the cloth merchant wanted for the bolt. “You might get that from a marchioness,” she said, “but how many noblewomen will you see here?”

  “If I sell it for less than what I paid for it, I won’t do myself any good,” the merchant said.

  “You won’t do yourself any good if you don’t sell it at all, either,” Merkela retorted. “I think the moths will get fat on it before you move it.” Off she went, nose in the air as if she were a marchioness herself—indeed, Krasta could hardly have done it better. Skarnu followed in her wake.

  Pavilosta’s townsfolk sneered at the goods the farmers had brought to market. The farmers who’d come to shop and not to sell disparaged everything the local merchants displayed. Some of them were much louder and ruder than Merkela.

  Algarvians prowled through the square, too: more of them than Skarnu was used to seeing in Pavilosta. Put together with the cordwainer’s disappearance, that worried him. Weren’t the redheads supposed to be throwing everything they had into the fight in Unkerlant? If they were, why bring so many soldiers to a little country town where nothing ever happened?

  But Pavilosta wasn’t quite a little country town where nothing ever happened. Count Enkuru, who’d been hand in glove with Mezentio’s men, had been assassinated here. A riot had broken out at the accession of his son Simanu, another noble who’d been too cozy with the Algarvians. And Simanu was dead, too; Skarnu had blazed him. So maybe the redheads had their reasons after all.

  One of their officers practically paraded through the square, his uniform kilt flapping around his legs as he hurried this way and that. Me
rkela noticed him, too. “He’s trouble,” she whispered to Skarnu.

  “Any time a colonel starts poking his nose into things, he’s always trouble,” Skarnu whispered back. An overage lieutenant headed up the little garrison in Pavilosta; he trotted along after the graying colonel, hands waving as he explained this or that.

  Whatever he was saying, he failed to impress the senior Algarvian officer. At one point, the colonel said something that had to be downright cruel, for the lieutenant recoiled as if a beam had wounded him. Striking a dramatic pose, he cried, “Do please be reasonable, Colonel Lurcanio!”

  Whatever the colonel answered, the lieutenant got no satisfaction from it. Whatever it was, Skarnu couldn’t hear it. He wasn’t quite sure if the Algarvian word he had heard meant reasonable or fair, his command of Algarvian, never great, was badly rusty these days. But that didn’t matter, either.

  As soon as he could, he took Merkela aside and murmured, “I had better make myself scarce. If they’re not after me in particular, I’d be amazed.”

  “Why do you say that?” Merkela asked.

  He didn’t point. He didn’t want to do anything to draw the Algarvian officer’s notice. Quietly still, he answered, “Because that fellow over there is my dear sister’s lover.”

  Merkela needed a moment to realize what that meant. When she did, her eyes flashed fire, almost as if she were a dragon. “The whore didn’t just sell her body to the Algarvians—she sold you, too!”

  Skarnu didn’t want to believe that of Krasta. Of course, he didn’t want to believe his sister gave herself to the redhead, either, but he had no choice there. He said, “Whether she sold me or not, this Lurcanio’s not likely to be here by accident.”

  “No, not likely at all.” Merkela frowned, then grew brisk. “You’re right—you’d better disappear. Vatsyunas and Pernavai have to go with you, too. They can’t sound like proper Valmierans. Raunu can stay—if the redheads come to the farm, I’ll be a widow making ends meet with a hired man.”