Darkness Descending

by Harry Turtledove

  Leofsig’s father shrugged. “The Unkerlanters have already gained a lot of ground,” he said in mild tones; his brother enjoyed hearing himself talk more than he did.

  “But the Algarvians haven’t fallen to pieces, the way you said they would a few weeks ago,” Hengist insisted.

  “I didn’t say they would. I said they might,” Hestan answered with a bookkeeper’s precision. “Pretty plainly, they haven’t. You’re right about that.” He nodded to Leofsig, looking to change the subject. “Hello, son. How did it go today?”

  “I’m tired,” Leofsig answered. He could have said that any day and been telling the truth. He raised an eyebrow at his father. Hestan nodded, ever so slightly. He knew about Ealstan, too, then. Neither of them said anything where Uncle Hengist could hear. After what had happened to Sidroc, if he knew where Ealstan was, he might let the Algarvians know, too. Nobody wanted to find out whether he would.

  “If you want to work with me, you may,” Hestan said. “Numbers are as stubborn as cobblestones, but not so backbreaking to wallop into place.”

  “You’d make more money, too,” Uncle Hengist pointed out. His mind always ran in that direction.

  “I still don’t think it’s safe,” Leofsig said. “Nobody pays attention to one laborer in a gang. But the fellow who casts accounts for you, you notice him. You want to be sure he knows what he’s doing. If he saves you money, you tell people about him. After a while, talk goes to the wrong ears.”

  “I suppose that’s wise,” his father said. “Still, when I see you come dragging in the way you do sometimes, I wouldn’t mind throwing wisdom out the window.”

  “I’ll get by,” Leofsig said. Hestan grimaced, but nodded.

  Conberge came in and set stoneware bowls and bone-handled spoons on the table. “Supper in a minute,” she said.

  “It smells good,” Leofsig said. His stomach growled agreement. The bread and olive oil he’d eaten at noon seemed a million miles away. Any sort of food would have smelled wonderful just then.

  “Same old stew: barley and lentils and turnips and cabbage,” Conberge said. “Mother chopped a little smoked sausage into it, but only a little. You’ll taste it more than it will do you any good, if you know what I mean. It’s probably what you smell.”

  Elfryth brought in the pot and ladled the bowls full. As she was sitting down, she asked, “Where’s Sidroc?” Uncle Hengist called his son, loudly. After another couple of minutes, Sidroc came in, sat down, and silently began to eat.

  He was burly as Leofsig had become despite not doing hard physical labor. He looked like Leofsig, too, though his nose was blobbier than Leofsig’s sharply hooked one. It took after that of his mother; she’d been killed when an Algarvian egg wrecked their house, and he and Uncle Hengist had lived, not always comfortably, with Leofsig’s family ever since.

  After finishing his first bowl of stew, Sidroc helped himself to another, which he also devoured. Only then did he speak: “That. . . wasn’t so bad.” He rubbed his temples. “My head hurts.”

  He’d had headaches ever since he’d hit his head in the brawl with Ealstan. He still didn’t remember what the brawl had been about, for which Leofsig and his father and mother and sister thanked the powers above. Ealstan’s disappearance afterwards, though, had left both him and Uncle Hengist suspicious, most suspicious indeed. Leofsig wished his brother hadn’t had to run off. But Ealstan couldn’t have known Sidroc would wake up without remembering. He couldn’t have known Sidroc would wake up at all.

  “Have you finished your schoolwork?” Hengist asked Sidroc.

  “Oh, aye--as much of it as I could do,” Sidroc replied. He’d been an indifferent scholar before the knock on the head and hadn’t got better since. After taking a big swig from his wine cup, he went on, “Maybe I’ll sign up for Plegmunds Brigade after all. I wouldn’t have to worry about poems and irregular verbs there.”

  Everyone else at the table, even Uncle Hengist, winced. The Algarvians had set up Plegmund’s Brigade to get Forthwegians to fight for them in Unkerlant. Leofsig had fought the Algarvians. He would sooner have jumped off a tall building than fought for them. But Sidroc had been talking about the Brigade even before the fight with Ealstan. Maybe he needs another shot to the head, Leofsig thought, and a harder one this time.

  Fifteen

  Officially, Hajjaj was far in the north, up in Bishah. Any number of witnesses would swear at need that the Zuwayzi foreign minister was hard at work in the capital, right where he should be. Hajjaj didn’t want any of them to have to take such an oath. That would mean something had gone wrong, something had made the Algarvians suspicious. Better by far they never, ever come down to Jurdhan.

  He strolled along the main street, such as it was, of the little no-account town: one elderly black man wearing only a straw hat and sandals among many black men and women and children, all dressed, or not dressed, much as he was.

  Nudity had its advantages. By leaving off the bracelets and anklets and gold rings and chains he would normally have worn, Hajjaj turned himself into a person of no particular importance. He would have had a harder time doing that with shabby clothes. When he walked into Jurdhan’s chief--by virtue of being Jurdhan’s only--hostel, no one gave him a second glance. That was just what he wanted.

  He went upstairs (the hostel was one of a handful of buildings in town to boast a second story) and walked down the hall to the chamber where, he’d been told, the man he was to meet awaited him. He knocked once, twice, then once again. After a moment, the latch clicked. The door swung open.

  A short, squat, swarthy man--swarthy, but far from black--wearing a knee-length cotton tunic looked him up and down. “Powers above, you’re a scrawny old bugger,” he remarked in Algarvian.

  “Thank you so much, my lord Ansovald. I am so glad to see you again, your Excellency,” Hajjaj answered in the same language. Speaking Algarvian to the former--and perhaps future--Unkerlanter minister to Zuwayza tickled his sense of irony, which needed little tickling. But it was the one speech they truly had in common. His own Unkerlanter was halting, Ansovald s Zuwayzi as near nonexistent as made no difference.

  If Ansovald noticed the irony, he didn’t let on. “Well, come in,” he said, and stood aside. “If you want to put on a tunic and hide that bag of bones you call a carcass, I’ve got one here for you.”

  That was the usual practice for Zuwayzi diplomats. Hajjaj had grown resigned to wearing a long tunic when calling on envoys from Unkerlant and Forthweg, a short tunic and kilt when seeing a minister from an Algarvic kingdom, a tunic and trousers when meeting with Kaunians, and clothes of some sort, at any rate, when dealing with lands like Kuusamo and Gyongyos, where style of apparel carried less political weight. But growing resigned to it didn’t mean he loved it. He shook his head and answered, “No, thank you. This is unofficial, which means I can be comfortable if I please, and I do.”

  He’d thought about wearing a tunic to this meeting too, thought about it and rejected the notion. Nothing would have drawn stares like a clothed Zuwayzi strolling through Jurdhan--nothing except a naked Unkerlanter strolling through Cottbus. And maybe his nudity would disconcert Ansovald.

  If it did, the Unkerlanter diplomat didn’t show that, either. “Come in, then,” he said. “I told you that already. I’d sooner you were a woman half your age, but I don’t suppose King Shazli would.”

  “No, in a word.” Hajjaj walked into the chamber. Ansovald closed the door behind him, closed it and barred it. From any other kingdom’s minister, Ansovald’s words would have been monstrously rude. From the Unkerlanter, they were something of a prodigy. This was the first time Hajjaj could remember him caring in the slightest for what King Shazli thought.

  The room was furnished Zuwayzi-style, with carpet piled on carpet and with cushions large and small a guest could arrange to suit his own comfort. Hajjaj wasted no time doing that. Ansovald followed suit rather more clumsily. He did not offer Hajjaj wine and cakes and tea, as any Zuwayzi host would
have done. Instead, very much an Unkerlanter again, he bulled straight ahead: “We aren’t going to settle the war between us this afternoon.”

  “I never expected we would,” Hajjaj replied.

  “And you can’t tell me you’re able to make the cursed Algarvians pack up and go home, either,” Ansovald growled. “Aye, you and the redheads are in bed with each other, but I know which one’s the tail and which one’s the dog.”

  Despite the mixed metaphor, Hajjaj followed him. The Zuwayzi foreign minister said, “If Unkerlant hadn’t come up and ravaged us by force, we would likely be neutral now, not allied to King Mezentio.”

  “Oh, aye--tell me another one,” Ansovald jeered. “You’d kick us when we were down, just like everyone else.”

  That held a grain of truth, or more than a grain. But what was true and what was diplomatic often had only a nodding relationship, or sometimes none at all. Hajjaj said, “Wouldn’t you be better off if you had fewer foes to fight?”

  “What’s your price?” Ansovald was an Unkerlanter, all right: no subtlety to him, no style, no grace. Hajjaj vastly preferred dealing with Marquis Balastro, Algarve’s minister to Zuwayza.

  On the other hand, the urbane and dashing Algarvians had been the ones who’d started murdering Kaunians for the sake of advantage in the war. By all accounts, King Swemmel of Unkerlant had wasted not a moment in imitating them, but Algarve went first. Try as he would, Hajjaj couldn’t forget that.

  “Your Excellency, Unkerlant went to war with us because the Treaty of Bludenz no longer suited your sovereign,” he said.

  “Kyot the traitor signed the Treaty of Bludenz,” Ansovald said, which was true: like Forthweg, Zuwayza had used the chaos reigning in Unkerlant after the Six Years’ War to regain her freedom.

  But Hajjaj said, “And King Swemmel always adhered to it afterwards. He got good results when he did, and bad results when he decided not to any longer and invaded us. Isn’t it efficient to do what works well and inefficient to do the opposite?” Swemmel and, because of him, his countrymen prated endlessly of efficiency, but the talk came easier for them than the thing itself.

  Ansovald’s heavy features were made for scowling, and he scowled now. “You black thieves have stolen more land now than the Treaty of Bludenz ever gave you, and you know it cursed well, too.”

  Hajjaj breathed heavily through his arched nose. “One reason we have is that you tannish thieves stole so much of what you’d honestly yielded in the treaty. Give us the border we had before, give us guarantees that you mean to give what you say you’re giving, and I may persuade King Shazli to be satisfied.” Since the slaughters to power sorcery had started, the Zuwayzi foreign minister kept casting about for ways to get out of the war. He had some hopes for this one, the more so as Unkerlant had requested the meeting.

  Ansovald proceeded to dash them, saying, “King Swemmel will give you the borders you agreed to in Cottbus and not another inch of ground.”

  “I agreed to those because Unkerlant invaded my kingdom,” Hajjaj exclaimed indignantly. “I agreed to them because we stood alone, without a friend in the world. Things are different now, and King Swemmel had better recognize it.”

  “Oh, he does,” Ansovald said. “By even offering so much, he admits--unofficially, of course--Zuwayza has a right to exist. That is more than you have had from him before. Take it and be thankful.”

  The worst of it was, he had a point of sorts. But only of sorts. In tones far more frigid than Zuwayzi weather ever got, Hajjaj said, “It cannot be. Unkerlant got that border after beating us in war. We are not beaten now, as you yourself have said. And if King Swemmel did not recognize that Zuwayza has a right to exist, why were you his minister in Bishah for so long?”

  “He treated with you. You Zuwayzin are here, after all.” Ansovald sounded like a man admitting something he didn’t care for but couldn’t deny. “But being here is not the same as being a kingdom.”

  “This is the bargain for which I spirited myself out of Bishah? This, and nothing more?” Hajjaj asked. When Ansovald nodded, the Zuwayzi foreign minister felt betrayed. He said, “I cannot take it back to my own sovereign--who is King of Zuwayza, whether Swemmel recognizes him or not. I had hoped you might have some room to dicker, considering how much of Unkerlant Algarve holds these days.”

  “Less today than yesterday,” Ansovald said, drawing himself up with touchy pride. “Less tomorrow than today. We will whip them out of our kingdom altogether before spring--and when we do, your turn comes next.”

  Hajjaj did not think that would happen. “It was only weeks ago that Cottbus was on the point of falling,” he pointed out.

  “It’s not on the point of falling now,” Ansovald growled. “By this time next year, Trapani will be on the point of falling to our brave Unkerlanter soldiers. You and your chief who calls himself a king had best bear it in mind and behave yourselves accordingly.”

  With dignity undamaged by creaking knees, Hajjaj got to his feet. Bowing to Ansovald, he said, “I had hoped to be dealing with a reasonable man.” Since the Unkerlanter came as King Swemmel’s envoy, that was probably optimistic, but he had hoped. He went on, “If you truly believe what you just told me, I can only conclude some malignant mage has stolen your wits.”

  “King Mezentio’s armies are falling to pieces on the snow-covered plains of Unkerlant,” Ansovald insisted.

  “We shall see,” Hajjaj said politely. “But I cannot tell you that I believe you are right, and I cannot see much point to any further discussions between us so long as we differ so widely.” He bowed again. “Your safe-conduct will carry you back through our lines to your own kingdom.” As a parting jab, he added, “You must remember, though, that it will not protect you from any Algarvian soldiers you may meet on your way back to Cottbus.”

  Ansovald gave him a dirty look. It was also, Hajjaj judged, an alarmed look; Ansovald knew where the lines ran. Gruffly, the Unkerlanter put the best face on it he could: “Less snow up here than in the rest of the kingdom. But we’ll root the whoresons out of these parts, too; see if we don’t.”

  “Good day, sir,” Hajjaj said, and left Ansovald’s chamber. He thought Ansovald said something after he closed the door but didn’t bother going back to find out; the Unkerlanter sounded unhappy with the world.

  Sighing, Hajjaj went downstairs and out of the hostel. He was unhappy with the world, too. Zuwayza wouldn’t be able to get out of the Derlavaian War so easily as he’d hoped. He sighed once more. That, all too often, was the way things worked: easier to get into trouble of any sort than to get free of it afterwards.

  He made his way back to the ley-line caravan depot. Lying on a ley line was Jurdhan’s reason for being. The next northbound caravan wouldn’t be heading back to Bishah for several hours. He didn’t have a special caravan laid on; the Algarvians might have noticed, and he--and his king--didn’t want them to find out he’d been talking with the Unkerlanters. The redheads would seek to become even more overbearing allies than they were already.

  He wished Zuwayza could have gone on without any allies at all. Then he sighed one more time. That wasn’t the way things worked, worse luck.

  Along with the rest of the Lagoan force on the austral continent, Fernao trudged west toward Heshbon, the easternmost colony the Yaninans had carved out for themselves on the northern coast of the land of the Ice People. He’d visited Heshbon before, after spiriting King Penda of Forthweg out of Yanina. He would willingly--eagerly--have forgone visiting the place again, but nobody’d asked his opinion.

  “Well, you were right about one thing,” Affonso said as the two mages kicked their way through the snow.

  Fernao eyed his colleague and tentmate. “I’m right about any number of things,” he said with a sorcerer’s almost unconscious arrogance. “Which one have you got in mind?”

  “I wouldn’t eat camel meat if I had any choice,” Affonso answered, “and neither would anyone else in his right mind.”

  “The Ice People li
ke it.” Fernao paused meditatively. “Of course, that proves your point, doesn’t it?”

  “Aye.” The younger mage’s sigh sent a foggy cloud out in front of him. “Cinnabar.” He made the word into a curse. “No one would ever come here if it weren’t for that. I wish I never had, I’ll tell you that.”

  “There are furs, too,” Fernao said, as the Lagoans did whenever discussions of why anyone bothered coming to the land of the Ice People began. Affonso proceeded to tell him, in great detail, what he could do with the austral continent’s furs. His argument made up in intensity what it lacked in coherence. Fernao laughed loud and long.

  After Affonso regained some of his temper, he said, “Do you suppose the Yaninans will come out and fight us this side of Heshbon?”

  “Trying to figure out what the Yaninans will do is always foolish because half the time they don’t know themselves till they do it,” Fernao answered. That was how Lagoans usually thought of Yaninans. Having been in Patras, the capital of Yanina, Fernao understood how much truth the cliche held.

  “Can they hire enough Ice People to give us a hard time?” Affonso asked.

  That was a better question, and one with a less certain answer. Fernao only shrugged and kept walking. The idea worried him. By what he’d seen in Heshbon, King Tsavellas’ men hadn’t gone out of the way to endear themselves to the natives of the austral continent. On the other hand, gold could be endearing all by itself. And the Yaninans hadn’t had much luck attacking the Lagoan army on their own.

  Two evenings later, just as the Lagoans were making camp, half a dozen Ice People rode up to them on camels plainly a cut above the common stock. One of them proved to speak Yaninan. Not many Lagoans did, so Lieutenant General Junqueiro summoned Fernao to interpret for him. Fernao’s Yaninan was also less than perfect, but he thought he could make himself understood in the language.

  The man of the Ice People who spoke Yaninan said, “Tell your chief I am Elishamma the son of Ammihud, who was the son of Helori, who was the son of Shedeur, who was the son of Izhar, who was the son of...” The genealogy went on for some time, till Elishamma finished, “... who was the son of a god.”