Through the Darkness d-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “They’re a long way from anything,” Rathar said, which was true enough. “Not even a lot of Unkerlanters down in those parts except for the miners. The hunters and herders in the hills look more like Kuusamans than anything else.”

  “Pack of thieves and robbers,” Major Merovec muttered.

  “Oh, aye.” Like any Unkerlanter, Rather looked down his beaky nose at the alien folk who lived on the edges of his kingdom. After a few moments’ thought, he added, “I hope they stay loyal. They’d better stay loyal.”

  There his adjutant reassured him: “If they don’t, it’ll be the worst and the last mistake they ever make.”

  Rathar nodded at that. Anyone who failed to take King Swemmel’s views on vengeance seriously was a fool. A generation of Unkerlanters had come to take that for granted. Even the hillmen had learned to fear the king’s name. If they went over to the Algarvians, they would be sorry. The other question was, how sorry would they make Unkerlant?

  “Get paper and pen, Major,” Rathar said. “I want to draft an appreciation of the situation for his Majesty.” The sooner Swemmel got Rathar’s views on what was going on, the less inclined he would be to listen to anyone else or to get strange notions of his own … or so the marshal hoped.

  Merovec dutifully took dictation. When Rathar finished, his adjutant rolled the sheets into a cylinder and tied a ribbon around them. Rathar used sealing wax and his signet to confirm that he had dictated the memorial. Merovec took it off to pass to Swemmel’s civilian servitors.

  These days, Rathar did not go home much. His son was at the front in the north, toward Zuwayza. His wife had got used to living without him. He’d had a cot set up in a little room to one side of his office. Legend had it that, during the Six Years’ War, General Lothar had entertained his mistress in the little room-but then, Lothar had been half Algarvian himself, and all sorts of stories stuck to him.

  Someone shook Rathar awake in the middle of the night. “His Majesty requires your presence at once,” a palace servitor declared.

  “I’m coming,” Rathar said around a yawn. Whatever Swemmel required, he got. Had Rathar asked something like, Won’t it keep till morning? — had he been so foolish, Unkerlant would have had a new marshal by sunup. Were Rathar lucky, he would have been ordered to the front as a common soldier. More likely, his head would have gone up on a spear to encourage his successor.

  Since he’d been sleeping in his tunic, the marshal had only to pull on his boots, grab his ceremonial sword, and run his fingers through his hair to be ready. He followed the servitor through the royal palace-quiet now, with most courtiers and soldiers asleep-to Swemmel’s private audience chamber.

  The guards there were wide awake. Rathar would have been astonished to find anything else. After they’d searched him, after he’d set the sword on a wall bracket, the men let him enter Swemmel’s presence. He prostrated himself in front of his sovereign and went through the rituals of abasement till Swemmel decided he could rise.

  And when he had risen, the king fixed him with the glare that turned the bones of every underling in Unkerlant-which is to say, every other Unkerlanter-to jelly. “You have proved wrong again, Marshal,” Swemmel said. “How shall we keep you at the head of our armies when you keep being wrong” The last word was nearly a scream.

  Stolid as usual, Rathar answered, “If you know an officer who will serve the kingdom better than I have, your Majesty, set him in my place.”

  For a dreadful moment, he thought Swemmel would do it. But then the king made a disparaging gesture. “Everyone else is a worse fool than you,” Swemmel said. “Why else do the Algarvians keep winning victories? We are sick to death of being served by fools.”

  Swemmel had put to death a great many men who were anything but fools, in the Twinkings War against his brother Kyot when neither of them would admit to being the younger and in its aftermath and then all through his reign, whenever he suspected an able, ambitious fellow was able and ambitious enough to look toward the throne. Pointing that out struck Rathar as useless. He said, “Your Majesty, we have to deal with what is. The Algarvians are driving again, down in the south.”

  “Aye.” Swemmel glared again, eyes dark burning coals in his long, pale face. “I have here your appreciation. More retreats. I want a general who fights, not one who runs away.”

  “And I intend to fight, your Majesty-when the time and the ground suit me,” Rathar said. “If we fight when and where the Algarvians want us to, do we help ourselves or do we help them? Remember, we’ve got ourselves into our worst trouble by striking at them too soon.”

  He took his life in his hands with that last sentence. Swemmel had always been the one who’d urged premature attack. No other courtiers would have dared remind the king of that. Rathar dared. One day, he supposed, King Swemmel would take his head for lese majesty. Meanwhile, if Swemmel heard the truth once in a while, the kingdom stood a better chance of coming through the crisis.

  “We must save the cinnabar mines in the Mamming Hills,” the king said. “We agree with you in this. Without them, our dragons would be greatly weakened.”

  When he said we, did he mean himself or Unkerlant? Did he even separate the two? Rathar didn’t know; fathoming Swemmel’s mind was hazardous at the best of times, which this wasn’t. Pulling his own mind back to the matter at hand, he said, “So they would. And, did the Algarvians have it, their dragon force would be strengthened to the same degree.”

  “They must not have it, then. They shall not have it. They shall not!” Swemmel’s eyes rolled in his head. His voice rose to a shrill shout once more. “We shall slaughter them! We shall bury them! Unkerlant shall be Algarve’s graveyard!”

  Rathar waited till his sovereign regained some semblance of calm. Then, cautiously, the marshal asked, “Having read the appreciation, your Majesty, do you recall my mention of the town called Sulingen, on the northern bank of the Wolter?”

  “What if we do?” Swemmel answered, which might have meant he didn’t recall and might have meant he simply didn’t care. The latter, it proved: “Sulingen is too near the Mamming Hills to suit us.”

  “If we can stop the Algarvians before then, so much the better,” Rathar agreed. “But if they break through at Sulingen, then how can we stop them at all?”

  Swemmel grunted. “It had better not come to that.” He shook his head. “Sulingen. Too close. Too close. But they can’t pass it. They mustn’t pass it.” Rathar didn’t know if he’d won his point or not. He hadn’t lost it in the first instant, anyhow. With Swemmel, that was something of a victory in itself.

  Three

  Leofsig toweled water from his beard and used a hand to slick his damp hair back from his forehead. In summer, he used Gromheort’s public baths more often after a day of road building than he had when tlie weather was cool. The baths weren’t heated so well as they had been before the war, but that mattered less when he would have got sweaty even without a hard day’s labor.

  He grimaced as he re-donned his old, filthy, stinking tunic. No help for it, though. He had only a few tunics, and no prospect of getting more till the war ended, if it ever did. The Algarvians took almost all the wool and linen Forthweg made. Only people with the best of connections sported new clothes these days.

  When Leofsig left the baths, he looked around warily lest he spy Felgilde. He’d seen the girl he’d jilted only once since backing away from their engagement, and that had been coming out of the baths. He didn’t want to see her again. To his relief, he didn’t see her now. That improved his mood as he headed home.

  He turned the last corner and started down his street. He hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps before he stopped in surprise: he’d almost run into a Kaunian. “Are you mad?” he exclaimed. “Get back to your own district before a redheaded constable spots you.”

  The blond-actually, his hair was more silver than gold-touched a scabby scar on the side of his head. When he spoke, he used his own tongue rather than Forthwegian: “I
have already made the acquaintance of those barbarians, thank you.”

  “Then you do not want to make it again,” Leofsig answered, also in Kaunian.

  That got the old man’s notice. “Your pronunciation is not all it should be,” he said, “but what, in these wretched times, is! Since you do speak this language somewhat, perhaps you will not betray me. May I trouble you with a question before I go my way?”

  “Your being here is trouble,” Leofsig said, but then he relented. “Ask. Better you pick me than someone else.”

  “Very well, then.” The Kaunian’s voice, like his bearing, was full of fussy precision. “Ask I shall: am I mistaken, or is this the street on which dwells a young man of Forthweg named Ealstan?”

  Leofsig stared. “I haven’t seen Ealstan in months,” he answered, startled back into Forthwegian. “He’s my younger brother. What’s he to you?” He wondered if he should have said even that much. Could the Algarvians have persuaded a Kaunian to spy for them? He knew too well they could-the promise of a few square meals might do the job. But if the redheads were after anybody in his family, they were after him, not Ealstan-he was the one who’d escaped from an Algarvian captives’ camp. Maybe this would be all right.

  “What is he to me?” the Kaunian repeated in his own language. “Well, I see I must ask another question beyond the one you gave me: did your brother ever mention to you the name Vanai?”

  “Aye,” Leofsig said in a faintly strangled voice. He pointed at the old man. “Then you would be her grandfather. I’m sorry-I don’t recall your name.”

  “Why should you? I am only a Kaunian, after all.” As Leofsig had gathered from Ealstan, the old fellow carried venom in his tongue. He went on, “In case your memory should by any chance improve henceforward, I am called Brivibas. Tell me at once whatever you may know of my granddaughter.”

  How much to tell? How much to trust? After a few seconds’ thought, Leofsig answered, “Last I heard, she was well, and so was my brother.”

  Brivibas sighed. “There is the greatest weight off my mind. But, you see, one question does indeed lead to another. Where are they? What are they doing?”

  “I’d better not tell you that,” Leofsig said. “The more people who know, the more people who are likely to find out.”

  “Do you think I have a tongue hinged at both ends?” Brivibas demanded indignantly.

  Before Leofsig could answer, somebody threw a rock that missed Brivibas’ head by scant inches and shattered against the whitewashed wall behind him. A shout followed the rock: “Get out of here, you miserable, stinking Kaunian! I hope the Algarvians catch you and whale the stuffing out of you.”

  The look Brivibas sent the raucous Forthwegian should have left him smoking in the street like dragonfire. When it didn’t, Brivibas turned back to Leofsig. “Perhaps you have a point after all,” he said quietly. “My thanks for what you did tell me.” He hurried away, his shoulders hunched as if awaiting blows only too likely to fall on them.

  That could have been worse, went through Leofsig’s mind as he walked on toward his own house. If Cousin Sidroc had come upon them, for instance, it could have been much worse. But Sidroc was away, training in Plegmund’s Brigade with other Forthwegians mad enough to want to fight for Algarve. Or if Brivibas had come to the house and spoken with Uncle Hengist, Sidroc’s father.. Oh, the unpleasant possibilities had few limits.

  When Leofsig rapped on the door, Hengist opened it. “Hello, boy,” he said as Leofsig stepped in. Leofsig was taller than he was, and thicker through the shoulders, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Hello,” Leofsig said shortly. He didn’t mind his father and mother thinking of him as a child; it grated when Uncle Hengist did it. Leofsig strode past his father’s brother and into the house.

  As Hengist shut and barred the door, he said, “The Algarvians are on the move in Unkerlant again, no denying it now.”

  “Huzzah,” Leofsig said without stopping. If all the Algarvians in the world moved into Unkerlant and got killed there, that would have suited him fine. But Hengist, like Sidroc, kept finding reasons not to hate the invaders so much. Leofsig thought it was because the redheads were strong, and his uncle and cousin wished they were strong, too.

  Now, though, Hengist had a new reason for thinking well, or not so badly, of King Mezentio’s men: “As long as the Algarvians move forward, Plegmund’s Brigade won’t be going into such danger.”

  “I suppose not,” Leofsig admitted. If he’d been one of Mezentio’s generals, he would have spent Forthwegians’ lives the way a spendthrift went through an inheritance. Why not? They weren’t Algarvians. But he didn’t say that to his uncle. He couldn’t afford to antagonize Hengist, who knew how he’d got out of the captives’ camp. Muttering to himself, he left the entry hall and went into the kitchen.

  “Hello, son,” his mother said as she pitted olives. “How did it go today?”

  “Not too bad,” Leofsig answered. He couldn’t talk about Brivibas, not with Uncle Hengist still liable to be in earshot. That would have to wait. “Where’s Conberge?” he asked.

  “Your sister is primping,” Elfryth answered primly. “She won’t be having supper with us tonight. Grimbald-you know, the jeweler’s son-is taking her to the theater. I don’t know what they’re going to see. Something funny, I hope.”

  “Most of the plays they put on these days are funny, or try to be, anyhow,” Leofsig said. He paused in thought. “This isn’t the first time Grimbald’s come by for Conberge, is it?”

  His mother laughed at him. “I should say not! And if you’d been paying any attention at all, you’d know how far from the first time it was, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if his father started talking with your father before long.”

  That rocked Leofsig back on his heels. Thinking of his sister married. . He didn’t want her to be an old maid, but he didn’t want her moving away, either. For the first time in his life, he felt time hurrying him along faster than he wanted to go.

  Quietly, he said, “I have news. It’ll have to keep, though.” He jerked his chin toward the entry hall. He didn’t know that Uncle Hengist was still hanging around there, but he didn’t know that Hengist wasn’t, either.

  Elfryth nodded, understanding what he meant. “Good news or bad?” she murmured. Leofsig shrugged. He didn’t know what to make of it. His mother fluttered her hands, looked a little exasperated, and went back to the olives.

  When someone knocked on the door a few minutes later, Leofsig opened it. There stood Grimbald. Leofsig let him in, gave him a cup of wine, and made desultory small talk till Conberge came out a couple of minutes later. By the way she beamed at Grimbald, she might have invented him. Away they went, hand in hand.

  “Let’s have supper,” Elfryth said after they’d gone. The casserole of porridge and cheese and onions, with the pitted olives sprinkled over the top, filled the pit in Leofsig’s belly. Afterwards, he and his mother and father sat quiet and replete.

  Uncle Hengist tried several times to get a conversation going. He had no luck, not even when he twitted Leofsig’s father about the way the Algarvians were still advancing. After a bit, he rose to his feet and said, “I think I’d need to be a necromancer to squeeze any talk from you people. I’m heading off to a tavern. Maybe I can find some live bodies there.” And out he went into the night.

  Hestan smiled at Leofsig. “Your mother told me you knew something interesting. My thought was that, if we were all dull enough, my brother might get impatient. Hengist has been known to do that.”

  “Well, it worked.” Elfryth rounded on Leofsig. “Now-what happened that you couldn’t tell me about before?”

  Leofsig recounted the meeting with Brivibas. When he’d finished, his father said, “I’d heard they’d brought the Kaunians from Oyngestun to Gromheort. I wondered if Ealstan’s… friend had any relatives among them. He had nerve, coming out of the Kaunian district.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I hope I would have done the same for m
y kin.”

  “Ealstan didn’t much like him,” Leofsig said. “I can see why-he thinks he knows everything there is to know, and he’s one of those Kaunians who’ve never forgiven us for coming out of the west and turning Forthweg into Forthweg.”

  “And now he’s got a Forthwegian in his family,” Hestan said musingly. “No, he wouldn’t much care for that, would he? No more than a lot of Forthwegians would care to have a Kaunian in theirs.” He left himself out of that group, and after a moment continued, “I’ll have to see what I can do for him, poor fellow. I’m afraid it may not be very much, though.”

  “If the Algarvians put him on a caravan and send him west-” Elfryth began.

  “I can’t do anything about that,” Hestan answered. “I wish I could, not just for him, but I can’t. Once I find out where he’s staying, I can send him money. If he has any sense about such things, he’ll be able to pay off the redheads. They can be bought.” He glanced over to Leofsig. Several Algarvians had been bought so they wouldn’t notice his unauthorized return to Gromheort from that captives’ camp.

  “I’m just glad most of the redheads you paid off are out of Gromheort these days, Father,” Leofsig said. “But I don’t know how much sense this Briv-ibas has. Not a lot, maybe, if his own granddaughter and Ealstan both wanted to stay clear of him.”

  Hestan sighed. “You may well be right, but I can hope you’re wrong.”

  “I hope I’m wrong, too,” Leofsig said. “He can put us in danger, not just himself.”

  Vanai sprawled across the bed in the cramped little flat she shared with Ealstan, reading. The flat, which had had only one abandoned romance-and that a piece of hate translated from Algarvian-in it when they started living there, now boasted a couple of rickety bookcases, both of them packed. Ealstan brought home several books a week. He did work hard to keep her as happy as he could.

  But, trained by her grandfather, she’d cut her teeth on the subtleties of Kaunian epics and histories and poetry. Forthwegian romances struck her as spun sugar: straightforward, all bright colors, heroes and villains sharply defined. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy them; she usually did. Still, at least half the time she knew all the important things that would happen before she got a quarter of the way into a book.