Turtledove, Harry - Darkness 04 - Rulers Of The Darkness

by Rulers of the Darkness (lit)

  "What are you talking about?" Amatu sounded impatient, in a way that reminded Skarnu achingly of Krasta. Lauzdonu murmured in the other returned exile's ear. "Oh." Amatu's nod was reluctant, too, even after he got the point. Skarnu wondered what he'd done to make the irregulars hate him enough to saddle himself with these two. Maybe it's their revenge on me for being of noble blood myself. He sighed. The Algarvians were the only people on whom he wanted that much revenge.

  ***

  A Valmieran waiter fawned on Colonel Lurcanio-and, incidentally, on Krasta, too. Krasta expected servile deference from commoners. So did Lurcanio: servile deference of a slightly different sort, the deference of the conquered to their conquerors. Since he got it here, he seemed happy enough. In fact, he seemed happier than he had for quite some time.

  "The war news must be good," Krasta ventured.

  "Better, at any rate," Lurcanio allowed. "Even if the cursed Unkerlanters did keep us from retaking Durrwangen, they won't be doing anything much for some weeks. General Mud has replaced General Winter over there, you see."

  "No, I don't see." Krasta's voice had an edge in it. "What are you talking about? Why do you always talk in riddles?"

  "No riddle," he said, and then paused while the waiter brought him white wine and Krasta ale. When the fellow scurried off again, Lurcanio resumed: "No riddle, I say, merely mud, a great, gluey sea of it. And when the fighting starts again, it will be on our terms, not King Swemmel's." He raised his wineglass. "To victory!"

  "To victory!" Krasta sipped her ale. Part of her-she wasn't sure how much, and it varied from day to day, sometimes from minute to minute-even meant it. An Algarvian triumph in the west would justify everything she'd done here, and the Unkerlanters were surely uncultured barbarians who deserved whatever happened to them. The other things an Algarvian triumph in the west would mean...

  This time, Krasta gulped at the ale. She didn't want to think about that.

  She was relieved when the waiter brought the dinners they'd ordered: beef ribs in a creamy gravy with spinach in cheese sauce and boiled beans for her, a trout sautéed in wine and a green salad for Lurcanio. He stared at her plate in some bemusement, remarking, "I have never understood why Valmierans aren't round as footballs, considering what you eat."

  "You complain about things like that almost every time we go out," Krasta said. "I like the way my kingdom cooks. Why aren't Algarvians all skin and bones, if they eat the way you do?"

  Lurcanio laughed and mimed taking a sword in the chest. Like so many of his countrymen, he had a gift for pantomime. Even though Krasta had been feeling gloomy, his antics made her smile. He had charm when he chose to use it. And he also had frightful severity when he chose to use that. The combination kept Krasta off balance, never quite sure where she stood.

  Before long, he'd reduced his trout to nothing but a skeleton with head and tail still attached. "It's looking at you," Krasta said with more than a little distaste. "Those boiled eyes staring up..."

  "You, milady, have never seen combat," Lurcanio answered. "If you had, you would not let something so small as a fish head get in the way of your appetite." Under the table, his hand found her leg, well above the knee. "Of any of your appetites," he added.

  Krasta sighed. She knew what that meant. Lurcanio never raised a fuss if she kept him out of her bed of an evening. But she didn't dare do it very often. If she did, he was liable to find someone else who wouldn't. That would leave her without an Algarvian protector. Spring was in the air, but the thought filled her with winter. The occupiers answered to themselves, and to themselves alone. Without an Algarvian by her side, what was she? Fair game, she thought, and shivered.

  "Are you cold, milady?" Colonel Lurcanio asked. Startled, Krasta shook her head. Lurcanio's smile put her in mind of that of a beast of prey. "Good. You are well advised not to be cold." She sighed again.

  After supper, Lurcanio's driver threaded his way through the dark streets of Priekule to a theater not far from the palace. The play, like so many showing these days, was a comedy of manners from a couple of centuries before: nothing in it that could offend anyone, Valmieran or Algarvian. Nothing political, at any rate; the manners it featured were mostly bad, including an inordinate number of cuckoldings. Lurcanio laughed his head off.

  "Do you think infidelity is funny?" Krasta asked, not without malice aforethought, as they headed for the exit.

  "That depends," Lurcanio replied with a splendid Algarvian shrug. "If it happens to someone else, most certainly. If I give the horns, all the more so. If I have to wear them-and if I have to notice I am wearing them-that is another business altogether. Do you understand me?"

  "Aye," Krasta said coldly. He'd made her very unhappy when he caught her kissing Viscount Valnu. She didn't want that to happen again. If she decided to stray once more, she knew she dared not get caught.

  She was moodily silent on the ride back to the mansion on the edge of town. Lurcanio affected not to notice. Tha t, Krasta knew, was an act. It was a good act, and would have been better had he not been so conscious of how good it was.

  When they got there, Lurcanio went up the stairs to Krasta's bedchamber with the easy familiarity of a man who had visited it many times before. His manner in the bedchamber sometimes struck her as a good act, too, again slightly marred by his being aware of how good it was. But he succeeded in giving her pleasure as well as taking his own. Things could have been worse. Lurcanio occasionally made it plain that they could have been worse. What he'd done with her, to her, after

  catching her with Valnu... Such things had been against the law in Valmiera, and still were, she'd heard, in Jelgava.

  Afterwards, Lurcanio dressed quickly. "Sleep well, my sweet," he said. "I know I shall." Even his yawn was as calculated, as theatrical, as anything she'd seen on the stage earlier in the evening.

  But Krasta, full and sated, did sleep well-until, some time after midnight, a noisy commotion at the front entrance woke her. Someone was pounding on the door and shouting, "Let me in! By the powers above, let me in!" at the same time as the Algarvian sentries out there yelled, "Silence! Stopping! Stopping or blazing!"

  Krasta threw open her window and cried, "No! No blazing! I know this man." Then, in a lower voice, she went on, "This is most unseemly, Viscount Valnu. What in blazes are you doing here at whatever hour this is?"

  "Marchioness, I am here to save my life, if I can," Valnu answered. "If I don't do it here, I won't do it anywhere."

  "I can't imagine what you're talking about," Krasta said.

  "Let me in and I'll tell you." Valnu's voice rose with urgency once more: "Oh, by the powers above, let me in!"

  "Shutting up, noisy maniac," one of the sentries said. "Waking everyone inside, making everyone to hating you."

  "I don't hate him," Krasta said sharply, which was, most of the time, true. As if to prove it, she added, "I'll be right down."

  Her night tunic and trousers were thin and filmy; she threw on a cloak over them. By the time she got downstairs, several servants had gathered in the front hall. Krasta sent them back to bed with angry gestures and opened the front door herself. Valnu darted in and fell at her feet, as if prostrating himself before the king of Unkerlant. "Save me!" he cried, as melodramatically as an Algarvian.

  "Oh, get up." Krasta's voice turned irritable. "I let you into my house. If this is some mad scheme to get me to let you into my bed, you're wasting your time." Anything she said here would get back to Lurcanio, as she was uneasily aware. She hated having to be uneasy about anything.

  But Valnu answered, "I did not come here for that. I did not come here to see you at all, milady, though I bless you for letting me in. I came here to see your protector, the eminent Count and Colonel Lurcanio. He can truly save me, where you cannot."

  "And why should I save you, Viscount Valnu?" Lurcanio strode into the front hall from the west wing. "Why should I not order you blazed for disturbing my rest, if not for any of a large number of other good reason
s?"

  "Because, except in this particular instance, perhaps, you would be blazing an innocent man," Valnu said.

  "My dear fellow, you have not been an innocent for a great many years," Lurcanio said with sardonic glee. "Not even in your left ear."

  Valnu bowed very low. "That you pick the left rather than the right proves how closely you listen to your fellow officers who know me well-know me intimately, one might even say. But I am an innocent in matters concerning your bold Algarvian hounds. By the powers above, your Excellency, I am!"

  "And what matters are those?" Sure enough, Lurcanio had a purr in his voice, almost as if he were talking to Krasta after bedding her.

  "They think I am playing some sort of stupid-some sort of idiotic-double game, looking to tear down everything Algarve's done," Valnu answered. "It's a lie! By the powers above, a lie!" He did not draw attention to the kilt he was wearing. At first, Krasta thought that might be a mistake. Then she decided Valnu was making Lurcanio notice it for himself-not a bad ploy.

  She saw the Algarvian eyeing Valnu's bare, knobby knees. But her lover was first and foremost an officer of his kingdom. "You've called on the powers above twice now, Viscount," he said. "By the powers above, sir, why should I believe you and not my kingdom's hounds? Their task, after all, is to sniff out treason and rebellion wherever they find them. If they turn their noses your way..."

  "If they turn them my way, they turn them in the wrong direction," Valnu insisted. "Ask your lady, if you doubt me."

  That made Colonel Lurcanio laugh out loud. "Considering the embrace the two of you were enjoying when I was so inconsiderate as to interrupt you, I might be inclined to doubt her objectivity." But his eyes swung toward Krasta nonetheless. "Well, milady? What say you?"

  Krasta could have said a good deal. Valnu must have known she could have said a good deal. He was betting his life that she didn't want him dead, no matter how much he'd irked her in days gone by-and he'd irked her a great deal indeed.

  If she spoke against him, he was dead. If she spoke for him too fulsomely, Lurcanio wouldn't believe her. What she did say was, "Whatever his problem may be, I wish he wouldn't bring it here at this ridiculous hour of the morning. And that, Colonel, is nothing but the truth."

  "I wish the same thing." Lurcanio fixed Valnu with a hard stare. "To a certain degree, I admire your nerve-but only to a certain degree. Go back to your home. If the hounds come for you, then they come-but I will have them explain themselves to me before they do anything too drastic. That is the most I intend to give you."

  Valnu bowed low again. "I thank you, your Excellency. It is more than I deserve."

  "I am afraid you may be right," Lurcanio answered. "Now get out."

  "Aye, get out," Krasta said. "Let decent people sleep, if you'd be so kind." For reasons she absolutely could not fathom, both Valnu and Lurcanio started laughing at her.

  ***

  Pekka wished things were as they had been before the Algarvians struck at her comrades and her. Without Siuntio, though, they would never be the same. First and foremost, she missed the master mage more with every passing day. She hadn't realized how much she'd relied on his good sense, his resolute optimism, and his capacity for moral outrage till they were gone.

  Second, and as important in a less personal, less intimate way, Siuntio had been the one mage who could keep Ilmarinen under something vaguely resembling control. Ilmarinen was wild for revenge against Algarve, aye, but he was also wild for experimenting with the nature of time and wild for one of the serving women at the hostel (a passion apparently not returned, which somehow didn't seem to

  bother him in the least) and wild for the birds flocking into the area with the return of spring and wild for...

  "Anything! Everything!" Pekka complained to Fernao in the dining room one morning. "He is supposed to be in charge. He is supposed to be leading us in our work against Mezentio's men. And what is he doing? Running around in all directions at once, like a puppy in a park full of interesting smells."

  The Lagoan mage quirked up a gingery eyebrow. "If you can make similes like that in classical Kaunian, maybe you ought to try writing along with magecraft."

  "I do not want to try writing," Pekka said. "I want to get on with the work we are supposed to be doing. Have we done that under Ilmarinen? He is not the leader I hoped he would be. I hate to say that, but it is the truth."

  "Some people are not made to be either leaders or followers," Fernao observed. "Some people listen only to themselves."

  "That may be so," Pekka replied, reflecting that with Ilmarinen it certainly seemed so. "But leading is the job he has been given."

  Fernao sipped from his mug of tea and looked at her over the top of it with his disconcertingly Kuusaman eyes. "If he is not doing it, maybe you should have it instead."

  "Me?" Pekka's voice rose to a startled squeak, one that made Raahe and Alkio, sitting a couple of tables away, turn and stare at her. She fought for quiet, fought and won it. "How could I take it? By what right? Without Siuntio and Ilmarinen, this project would not exist. The Seven Princes would not have supported it."

  "As may be." Fernao shrugged. "But now that they are supporting it, do you not think they expect success to follow from that support?"

  "I couldn't," Pekka muttered in Kuusaman, more to herself than to him. "It would be like throwing my father out onto the street."

  But the Lagoan mage's grasp of her language got better day by day. "Not to do with family," he said in Kuusaman, and then returned to classical Kaunian: "This is not even the business of the kingdom. This is the business of the world."

  "I couldn't," Pekka repeated.

  Now Fernao eyed her with the first open disapproval she'd seen from him. "Why not?" he asked pointedly. "If not you, who? I am an ignorant foreigner. The newcomers?" He lowered his voice a little further. "They are all a step below you and two steps behind you. If it is not to be Ilmarinen..."

  He had confidence in her where she had none in herself. Pekka had never known that from anyone but her husband before. She wished Leino were here now. He would know how to gauge things. In the aftermath of the Algarvians' sorcerous assault, she'd lost her feel.

  And then, when she was hoping Fernao would leave her alone, he found one more question: "How long do you suppose it will be before Mezentio's mages strike us again ? If they do, can we withstand them?"

  "Why should they strike us again?" Pekka asked. "Since they hit us the last time, what have we done that would draw their notice?" She rose from the table and left in a hurry. If she hadn't just made Fernao's point for him, what had she done? He called after her, but she kept walking.

  Going up to her room didn't help. She looked out and saw mud and rock where snow had lain, mud and rock with grass and bushes growing furiously. Here, almost as in the land of the Ice People, everything had to grow furiously, for winter came early and left late, giving life little time to burgeon.

  Buntings and pipits chirped. Insects buzzed. Before long, Pekka knew, there was liable to be a plague of gnats and mosquitoes, again as happened on the austral continent. The bog the countryside became after the snow melted made a perfect breeding ground for all sorts of bugs.

  But the signs of spring did nothing to cheer Pekka. Instead, they reminded her how time was running out, slipping away through her fingers. Experiments should have resumed. They should have been strengthened. They hadn't. The landscape by the blockhouse should have had new craters. It didn't.

  "Curse me if Fernao isn't right," Pekka exclaimed, though no one was there to hear her. "If I don't do something, who will?"

  She left her room and walked down the hall to Ilmarinen's. Her knock was sharp and peremptory. Ilmarinen opened the door. When he saw her, he smiled in something that looked like relief and said, "Oh, good. I thought you were Linna." That was the serving woman with whom he was infatuated. "If she knocked like that, she'd want to knock my block off next thing."

  "I want to knock your block off," Pekka
said. "Why aren't we working more? When Mezentio's mages attacked us, you promised vengeance for Siuntio. Where is it? How far away is it? How long does his shade have to wait?"

  "Well, well," Ilmarinen said, and then again: "Well, well. Who's been feeding you raw meat, my dear?"

  "I am not your dear," Pekka snapped, "not when you sit there and twiddle your thumbs instead of doing what needs doing. If you don't move this project forward, Master Ilmarinen, who will?"

  "I am moving it forward," Ilmarinen answered, a little uneasily, "and we will get back in the field very soon."

  "When is soon?" Pekka asked. "We should have been back weeks ago, and you know it as well as I do. What are the Algarvians doing while we do nothing? How are we remembering Master Siuntio?"