Darkness Descending

by Harry Turtledove

  “Answer your grandfather’s brother, boy,” Alpri said, as peremptory as if Istvan were a child often or so.

  “Aye, Father,” Istvan said, and turned to Betthyany. “There’s more world out there than I ever imagined, and it’s a harder world, too. But the stars. . . the stars look down on all of it, Great-uncle. I’m sure of that.”

  “Well said,” his father boomed, and everybody else nodded. “And before long we’ll win this war, and everything will be fine.”

  Another expectant hush. “Of course we will,” Istvan said. Then he went and got very drunk indeed. Everyone said what a hero he surely had to be.

  Springtime in Jelgava carried with it the promise of summer--not the threat of summer, as was so in desert Zuwayza, but a definite assurance that, where the weather was warm now, it would be warmer later. Talsu reveled in the clear skies and the lengthening days. So did some of the Algarvian occupiers in Skrunda; northern Algarve’s climate wasn’t much different from this.

  But more of the redheads in his hometown sweated and fumed and fussed as winter ebbed away. The Algarvian heartland lay in the forests of the distant south, where it was always cool and damp. Talsu didn’t understand why anyone would want to live in such weather, but a lot of King Mezentio’s men pined for it. He listened to them grumbling whenever they came into die family shop to have Traku sew their tunics and kilts.

  “If they don’t care for the way things are here, they can go back where they

  Darkness Descending

  came from,” Traku said one evening at supper, spitting an olive pit down into his plate.

  Talsu paused with a spoonful of barley mush dusted with powdered cheese halfway to his mouth. “They may not like it here, Father, but they like it a lot less in Unkerlant.” His chuckle was deliberately nasty.

  “I wouldn’t want to go to Unkerlant, either,” his younger sister Ausra said, and shivered. “It’s probably still snowing there, and it hasn’t snowed in Skrunda at all for years and years.”

  “There’s a difference, though,” Talsu said. “If you did go to Unkerlant, King Swemmel’s men wouldn’t want to blaze you on sight.”

  “Let’s not talk about any of us going to Unkerlant,” his mother said in a firmer tone than she usually used. “When folk of Kaunian blood go to Unkerlant these days, it’s not of their own free will. And they don’t come back.”

  “Now, Laitsina, let’s not borrow trouble, either,” Traku said. “Nobody knows for sure whether those rumors are true or not.” His words fell flat; he didn’t sound as if he believed them himself.

  “The news sheets say they’re all a pack of lies,” Talsu observed. “But everything in the news sheets is a lie, because the redheads won’t let them tell the truth. If a liar says something is a lie, doesn’t that mean it really isn’t?”

  “Well, the news sheets say we all love King Mainardo, and that’s not true,” Ausra said. “After you read that, you know you can’t trust anything else you read.” She got up from the table. “May I be excused?”

  “Aye,” Laitsina said, “but aren’t you going to finish?” She pointed to Ausra’s bowl, which was still almost half full.

  “No, I’ve had enough,” Ausra answered. “You can put it in the rest crate. Maybe I’ll eat it for dinner tomorrow at noontime.”

  “I’ll put it away,” Talsu said, rising, too. His bowl of mush was empty; the only things on his plate were the rind from a slab of white cheese and a dozen olive pits. He could easily have finished Ausra’s portion, too, but, while he might have wanted it, he knew he didn’t need it.

  “Thank you,” Laitsina said, and, in an aside to Traku, “He really has grown up.”

  “It’s the time he spent in the army,” Talsu’s father answered, also in a low voice.

  Traku had more faith in the Jelgavan army than Talsu did, no doubt because he’d never served in it. Talsu was convinced he would have become reasonably neat without sergeants screaming at him whenever they felt like it. He plucked Ausra’s bowl off the table and carried it into the kitchen, where the rest crate lay beside the door to the pantry.

  The sorcery that made the crate work was based on a charm from the days of the Kaunian Empire: a paralysis spell the imperial armies had used against their foes with great success till those foes found counterspells that rendered it useless. Then, for more than a thousand years, it had been only a curiosity . . . till, with the advent of systematic magecraft, wizards discovered it worked by drastically slowing the rate at which life went on. That made variations on it handy not only in keeping food fresh but also in medicine.

  As soon as Talsu undid the latch and took the lid off the rest crate, he put the spell out of action. The food his mother had stored inside began to age at its normal rate once more. He set the half full bowl of barley mush on top of a coil of sausage links, then returned the lid to its proper place, reactivating the crate. He was just snapping the latch again when Laitsina called, “Make sure you put the cover on good and tight.”

  “Aye, Mother,” Talsu said patiently. She might make noises about his having grown up, but she didn’t believe it, not down deep inside. She probably never would.

  Afterwards, he played robbers with his father till they were both yawning. He won three games, Traku two. As the tailor put away the board, the men, and the dice, he said, “You’re better at the game than you were before you went into King Donalitu’s service.”

  “I don’t know why,” Talsu answered. “I don’t think I played it more than a couple of times. Mostly, we just rolled dice when we felt like swapping money around.”

  The next morning, after Talsu finished cutting the pieces for an Algarvian’s summer-weight linen tunic, his mother came downstairs and pressed some coins into his hand. “Go over to the grocer’s and bring me back half a dozen apples,” she said. “I want to make tarts tonight.”

  “All right, Mother,” Talsu said, and set down the shears with alacrity.

  Laitsina smiled. “And don’t take too long passing the time of day with Gailisa, either.”

  “Who, me?” Talsu said. His mother laughed at him. In some ways, she was ready to believe him grown up after all.

  Whistling, he hurried over to the grocer’s shop. Sure enough, Gailisa was taking care of the place: she was artistically arranging onions in a crate when he walked inside. “Hello, Talsu,” she said. “What do you want today?”

  “You don’t sell that,” he said with a grin, and she made a face at him. “But my mother sent me over here for some apples.”

  “Well, we’ve got some,” Gailisa answered, pointing to a basket on the counter. “If they’re for eating, though, I’ve got to tell you they’re on the mushy side. The winter was just too mild for them to get as firm as they might.”

  “No, she wants them for tarts,” Talsu said.

  “They’ll be fine for that.” Gailisa went over to the basket. Talsu watched her hips work inside her trousers. “How many does she want?”

  “About half a dozen, she said.”

  “All right.” Gailisa bent over the basket and started picking them up one by one. “I’ll give you the best ones we’ve got.”

  She was still going through them when a couple of Algarvian troopers in kilts strode into the shop. One of them pointed at her and said something in his own language. Laughing, the other one nodded and rocked his hips forward and back. Talsu didn’t understand a word of what they said, but that didn’t stop him from getting angry.

  He turned toward them, not saying anything himself but not trying to hide what he thought of them, either. He wasn’t afraid of Algarvians because they were Algarvians, not when he’d faced them over the sights of a stick. True, his army had lost to theirs, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t hurt and bleed just like Jelgavans.

  They noticed his expression, too, noticed it and didn’t like it. One of them jerked a thumb back toward the door through which they’d come and spoke in bad Jelgavan: “You--going out. Getting lost.”

&
nbsp; “No,” Talsu answered evenly. “I’m waiting for the lady to choose some apples for me.”

  “Futtering apples,” the Algarvian said. “Going out now. Going out now and--uh, or--being sorry.”

  “No,” Talsu repeated.

  “Talsu, maybe you’d better . . .” Gailisa began.

  But it was already too late. The redheads understood what no meant. They were as young and headstrong as he was, and they were the conquerors, and there were two of them. Smiling most unpleasantly, they advanced on him. Gailisa darted around the counter and into the back of the shop, loudly calling for her father. Talsu noticed only out of the corner of his eye; almost all of his attention stayed on the Algarvians.

  The fight, such as it was, didn’t last long. One of the redheads swung at him, a looping haymaker that would have knocked him sprawling had it landed. It didn’t. He blocked it with his left forearm and delivered a sharp, straight right. The Algarvian’s nose flattened under his fist. With a howl, the soldier staggered back into shelves piled high with produce. He knocked them over. Vegetables spilled across the floor.

  Talsu spun toward the other Algarvian. This fellow didn’t waste time on fisticuffs. He yanked a knife from his belt, stabbed Talsu in the side, and then helped his friend get up. They both ran out of the grocer’s shop.

  When Talsu started to run after them, he got only a couple of paces before crumpling to his knees and then to his belly. He stared in dull surprise at the blood that darkened his tunic and spread over the floor. He heard Gailisa’s shriek as if from very far away. The inside of the shop went gray and then black.

  He woke puzzled, wondering why he wasn’t seeing the grocer’s shop. Instead, his eyes took in the iron rails of a bed, and a whitewashed wall beyond it. A man in a pale gray tunic peered down at him. “How do you feel?” the fellow asked.

  Before Talsu could answer, he became aware of a snarling pain in his flank. He bit back a scream, as he might have done were he wounded in battle. “Hurts,” he got out through clenched teeth.

  “I believe it,” said the man in the gray tunic--a healing mage, Talsu realized. “We had to do a lot of work on you while your body was slowed down. Even with the sorcery, it was touch and go for a while there. You lost a lot of blood. But I think you’ll come through pretty well, if fever doesn’t take you.”

  “Hurts,” Talsu repeated. He was going to start screaming in a minute, whether he wanted to or not. The pain felt as big as the world.

  “Here,” the mage said. “Drink this.” Talsu didn’t ask what it was. He seized the cup and gulped it down. It tasted overpoweringly of poppies. He panted like a dog, waiting for the pain to go away. It didn’t, not really. He did: he seemed to be floating to one side of his body, so that, while he still felt everything, it didn’t seem to matter anymore. It might almost have been happening to someone else.

  The mage lifted his tunic and examined the stitched-up wound in his side. Talsu looked at it, too, with curiosity far more abstract than he could have managed undrugged. “He put quite a hole in me,” he remarked, and the mage nodded. “Did they catch him?” Talsu asked, and this time the healer shook his head. Talsu shrugged. The drug didn’t let him get excited about anything. “I might have known.”

  “You’re lucky to be alive,” the healer said. “You’ve got more stitches holding you together inside. If we’d come a little later ...” He shook his head again. “But your lady friend made sure we didn’t.”

  “My lady friend?” Talsu said vaguely, and then, “Oh. Gailisa.” He knew he ought to be feeling something more than he was, but the drug blocked and blurred it. Too bad, he thought, still vague.

  Having been nearly idle through the winter, Garivald was making up for it now that the ground had finally got firm enough to hold a furrow. Along with the rest of the peasants of Zossen, he plowed and sowed as fast as he could, to give the crops as long to grow as possible. He rose before sunset and went to bed after nightfall; only harvest time was more wearing than the planting season.

  Along with everything else he had to do, he still had to go into the forest to cut wood for Zossen’s Algarvian occupiers. How he’d hoped the Unkerlanter advance would sweep them out of his village! But it hadn’t happened, and it didn’t look as if it would, either.

  He hacked at a tree trunk, wishing it were a redhead’s body. When the Unkerlanters in grimy rock-gray tunics let him see them, he kept right on chopping wood. One of his countrymen said, “You’re the singer, aren’t you?”

  “What if I am?” Garivald asked, pausing at last. “What difference does it make?”

  “If you aren’t, we might decide not to let you live,” the ragged soldier answered and made as if to turn his stick in Garivald’s direction.

  “You’ve already spent awhile killing my hopes,” Garivald said. “I thought the Algarvians would be gone from here by now.” Thought probably took it too far; hoped came closer. But the men who skulked through the woods had taken his songs, had promised great victories, and then hadn’t delivered. If they were unhappy with him, he was unhappy with them, too.

  “Soon,” said the soldier who hadn’t surrendered to the redheads. “Very soon. The fight still goes on. It does not always go just as we would have it. But the king will strike another blow against the invaders soon. And when he does, we need you.” Now he pointed at Garivald with his finger, not his stick.

  “Need me for what?” Garivald asked in some alarm. If they wanted him to raise the village against the Algarvian occupiers, he was going to tell them they were out of their minds. As far as he could see, that would only get his friends and relatives--and maybe him, too--killed without accomplishing much. Zossen wasn’t on a ley line; a rising here wouldn’t keep the redheads from moving reinforcements wherever they pleased. Zossen, in fact, wasn’t even near a power point, which was why Bang Swemmel’s men had had to keep sacrificing condemned criminals to gain sorcerous energy to make their crystal function.

  The crystal. . . Garivald’s hand tightened on the handle of his axe. Even before the ragged soldier spoke, Garivald guessed what he would say. And say it he did: “You have something we want, something buried in the ground.”

  Garivald had thought about digging up the crystal and passing it on to the Unkerlanters who kept resisting behind Algarvian lines. He’d thought about it, but he hadn’t done it yet in spite of “Waddo’s urgings. Even trying to do it was risky. But having so many people know about it was also risky. He hadn’t said a word to anyone. Somebody else in the village must have. And what got to the irregulars’ ears also got to the Algarvians’.

  “I’ll get it for you,” he said quickly. The irregulars could probably arrange to whisper into the redheads’ ears if he proved recalcitrant.

  “Good.” All the ragged soldiers nodded. The fellow who was doing the talking for them went on, “When will you get it for us?”

  “When I find it,” Garivald snarled. “Powers above, dogs can’t find the bones they bury half the time. I didn’t leave any special marks to point the way to the cursed thing. If I would have, the Algarvians’d have it by now. I’m going to have to find it.”

  “Don’t waste too much time,” one of the other Unkerlanters warned him. “We need it, and no mistake.”

  “If you think you can get it faster than I can, go ahead and dig for yourselves,” Garivald said. “Good luck go with you.”

  “Don’t play games with us,” the irregulars’ leader said.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Garivald retorted.

  He wondered if he’d pushed his countrymen too far. He tensed, ready to rush them with his axe if they tried to blaze him. He might be able to take one of them with him before he fell. But after glancing back and forth among themselves, they slipped away deeper into the protecting woods without another word.

  Garivald lugged his load of firewood back to the Algarvians. The only thanks he got were a grunt and a tick against his name so he wouldn’t have to do it again for a while. Had the redheads w
orked to make people like them, they would have had no small following in the Duchy of Grelz. Garivald knew as much; the peasants hadn’t had an easy time of it during Swemmel’s reign. Some folk clove to the Algarvians because of that, regardless of how they were treated. Most, like Garivald, saw they were getting no better bargain and stayed aloof.

  “Took you long enough,” Annore said when he came into their hut.

  “Don’t you start on me,” Garivald growled. He looked around. Syrivald was outside doing something or other, while Leuba was occupied with a cloth doll stuffed with buckwheat husks. Lowering his voice, Garivald went on, “They want it.”

  His wife’s eyes widened. “Can you get it?”

  “I’m going to have to try.”

  “Can you get it without getting caught?” Annore persisted. “Do you even know exactly where it is?”

  “I’m going to have to try,” Garivald repeated. “I think I can, and maybe I’ll be able to find out where it is.”

  “How?” Annore asked. “You’re no mage.”

  “And I don’t need to be one, either,” Garivald said. “Everybody knows a lode-stone will draw iron, and rubbed amber will draw feathers or straw. Haven’t you ever heard that limestone will draw glass the same way?”

  His wife snapped her fingers in annoyance at herself. “I have, by the powers above, but it slipped my mind. Lodestone and amber are toys to make children laugh, but how often does anyone need to draw glass to him?”

  “Not very,” Garivald replied. “And there’s not much glass in Zossen to draw-- the stuff’s too expensive for the likes of us. But if that crystal isn’t glass, I don’t know what it is.” If that crystal wasn’t glass, the limestone wouldn’t work. In that case, he’d have to start probing the plot where the crystal lay buried. He’d have to be lucky to find it so, and it would surely take a long time. Somebody was bound to find him first, to find him and to ask a great many questions he couldn’t answer.