Through the Darkness d-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “What could you do?” Vanai asked. She held up her hand, palm out, as if to stop him from doing whatever he was thinking, and she feared she knew what that was. As if to a child, she said once more, “You’re not going out there yourself.”

  “All right,” he said, so readily that she looked at him in surprise and sharp suspicion. But he went on, “I’m a bookkeeper, too, remember? If you read the romances, bookkeepers don’t do their own dirty work. They hire somebody else to do it for them.” He plucked at his beard. “I wonder if I’ve got enough to have a man killed. Maybe Ethelhelm would know.” He still spoke very clearly. The spirits certainly weren’t affecting him much.

  “Are you sure you want to ask him?” Vanai could feel what she’d drunk, which was a good deal less than what Ealstan had put down. She had to form her words with care: “He did go out and play for the Brigade, remember.”

  “Aye, that’s so,” Ealstan said unhappily. “Don’t know who I can trust any more. Don’t know if I can trust anybody any more.” He sounded on the edge of tears again. That might have been the spirits working in him, but it might have been simple grief, too.

  “You can trust me.” Vanai set down her glass and took his hands in hers. “And I can trust you. You’re the only person in the world I can trust, I think. You have your family, anyhow.”

  “What’s left of it,” Ealstan said, and Vanai bit her lip. But then he nodded. “Aye. I know I can trust you, sweetheart.” This time, he reached for her.

  He didn’t use endearments very often, which made them all the more welcome when they came. If he’d wanted to take her back to the bedchamber, to lose himself in her flesh for a little while, she would gladly have given herself to him. But he didn’t. He held her, then let her go. “Can you eat?” she asked, and he nodded. She went back to the kitchen. “I’ll fix something.”

  Bread and olives and cheese and salt fish in oil weren’t very exciting, but they filled the belly. Ealstan methodically ate whatever Vanai set before him, but gave no sign of noticing what it was. She might have fed him earth and ashes and sawdust, and he would have disposed of those the same way. She gave him more spirits, too. Again, they could have been water by the way he drank them and for all the effect they had on him.

  After he’d finished eating, he said, “I wish I could have been there for the memorial service. I can’t believe it’s done-it’ll be a long time done now. Curse the miserable slow post.”

  Had he been able to go to the memorial service, he would have gone without Vanai. She couldn’t go out on the streets without fear now, let alone step into a caravan car. But Ealstan wasn’t even thinking about her. The only person on his mind was poor dead Leofsig.

  She couldn’t blame him for thinking of his blood kin first. She kept telling herself that. He’d known them all his life, and her, really, only a few months. But she wished he would have shown a few more signs of recalling what her special problems were.

  And she cursed the useless, worthless, hope-lifting, heartbreaking author of You Too Can Be a Mage. Had he really known what he was doing, she could have made herself look like a Forthwegian instead of turning Ealstan into a counterfeit Kaunian. She wondered if her curse would bite. She hoped so. She had been able to work some sorcery, even if it hadn’t turned out the way she wished.

  “Do you want anything else?” she asked Ealstan. He shook his head. She got up and carried the few plates to the sink. Washing them took only a handful of minutes. When she turned back to Ealstan, she found him slumped down onto the table asleep, his head in his hands.

  She shook him, but got only a snore. She shook him again, and roused him to a sludgy semi-consciousness, but nothing more: all the spirits had caught up with him at once. Half supporting him, she got him into the bedchamber. It wasn’t easy; she was as tall as he, but not much more than half as wide.

  And when he landed on the bed, he sprawled diagonally across it, still wearing his shoes. That left no room at all for her. She thought about rearranging him, but decided not to bother. Instead, she took her own pillow and curled up on the sofa. It was cramped, but on a warm night she didn’t need a blanket. After a while, she fell asleep.

  Her back creaked when she got up at sunrise the next morning. Ealstan, she discovered, had scarcely moved. She didn’t have the heart to wake him. She didn’t think he would be very happy with the world when he did wake up, and not only because he would have to remember his brother had died. She’d seen plenty of drunken Forthwegians-and, more to the point, hung-over Forthwegians-in Oyngestun. She knew what to expect.

  She poured out a cup of wine. It wouldn’t stop the pain, but might ease it a little. Presently, she heard a groan from the bedchamber. Treading as softly as she could, she carried the wine in to Ealstan.

  Walking through Skrunda, Talsu felt like a man who’d been interrupted in the middle of something important. The whole town had been interrupted in the middle of something important. The townsfolk had been on the point of a major uprising against the Algarvian occupiers when dragons from Lagoan or Kuusaman ships dropped enough eggs on Skrunda to confuse a lot of people about who the true enemy was.

  Talsu wasn’t confused. With that big scar on his flank, he would never be confused. Were the Algarvians not occupying Jelgava, their enemies wouldn’t have needed to drop eggs on Skrunda. That seemed plain enough to him. He couldn’t understand why some of the townsfolk had trouble seeing it.

  Jelgavans cleared debris from ruined houses and shops. The Algarvians made the news sheets trumpet their labors. If Talsu heard one more hawker shouting about air pirates, he thought he would deck the luckless fellow.

  He wanted to shout himself: shout that the news sheets were full of tricks when they weren’t full of lies. But he didn’t, and he didn’t deck any of the vendors, either. Back when he’d fought in the Jelgavan army-and back before that, too, back to the days when he was a child-he’d feared King Donalitu’s dungeons, as had any of his countrymen who presumed to criticize the king and the upper nobility. Had the Algarvians opened all the dungeons, freed all the captives, and taken no more, King Mainardo might have won a good-sized following, redhead though he was.

  They had freed some of King Donalitu’s captives. But, in Mainardo’s name, they’d taken many more. And Algarvian torturers enjoyed a reputation about as black as that of the men who’d served Donalitu before he fled. Silence, then, remained the safest course.

  Going back into the family tailor’s shop made Talsu sigh in relief. Here if anywhere he could breathe free. His father looked up from a cloak he was sewing-for once, for a Jelgavan customer, not for one of the occupiers. “Did you get those hinges I wanted?” Traku asked.

  Talsu shook his head. “I went to all three ironmongers in town, and they all say they’re not to be had for love nor money, not in iron and not in brass, either. The Algarvians are taking all the metal they can out of the kingdom. Before long, we’re liable to have trouble getting needles.”

  Traku looked unhappy. “Your mother’s been after me to fix those cabinets for weeks. Now I’m finally getting around to doing it, and I can’t get what I need for the job? She won’t be very happy to hear that.”

  “You can’t very well put the hinges on if you can’t get them, now can you?” Talsu gave his father a conspiratorial wink.

  “Well, that’s true.” Traku brightened, but not for long. “She’ll say I could have gotten ‘em if I’d gone out and done it right away instead of sitting around on my rump all day long.” He managed to sound a lot like his wife-enough so to land him in trouble if she’d heard him.

  “They’re talking about tin, or maybe pewter,” Talsu said.

  His father made a face. “Not very strong, either one of ‘em. And who says the Algarvians won’t start stealing tin, too, and leave us with nothing but lead?”

  “Nobody,” Talsu answered. “I wouldn’t put anything past ‘em. They’d steal anything that wasn’t nailed down.”

  “And now they’re stealing the n
ails, too,” Traku said. He laughed. Talsu grimaced, annoyed he hadn’t thought of the joke himself.

  Before he had the chance to try to top it, the door swung open and the bell above it jangled. In came an Algarvian officer, swaggering as Mezentio’s subjects had a way of doing. Talsu had practice changing his tone on the spur of the moment. “Good day, sir,” he said to the redhead. “How may we serve you today?” That was what the occupiers wanted: to have the people they’d conquered serve them.

  When the Algarvian answered, it was in classical Kaunian. Talsu and his father exchanged looks of alarm. Talsu remembered scant bits of the old language from his school days, not that he’d had many of those. Traku, further removed and with even less formal schooling, knew only a handful of words. “Do you speak Jelgavan at all, sir?” Talsu asked.

  “No,” the redhead answered-in the classical tongue.

  Talsu flogged his memory and essayed a few words of classical Kaunian himself: “Talk slow, then.”

  “Aye, I shall talk slowly,” the Algarvian said, and then proceeded to start talking too fast. Talsu and Traku both waved their hands in something approaching despair. How dreadful to lose a sale because a foreign soldier spoke the grandfather to their language when they had so little of it themselves. For a wonder, the Algarvian understood the problem. “Here. Is this slow enough?”

  “Aye,” Talsu said. “Think so.” He paused again to think. “Want-what?”

  “Kilts,” the officer answered. He patted the kilt he was wearing, in case Talsu didn’t get the idea. “Two kilts.” Numbers hadn’t changed much. The Algarvian showed “two” with his fingers anyhow. Instead of thumb and forefinger, he used forefinger and middle finger; to Talsu, that made him seem to give an obscene gesture.

  After Talsu translated for his father-which he probably didn’t need to do-Traku nodded. “Aye, I can make ‘em,” he said. “Find out when he wants ‘em, though. That’s the other thing I’ve got to know.”

  “I’ll try,” Talsu answered. He looked hopefully at the Algarvian, but the fellow couldn’t have understood a word of Jelgavan. Talsu couldn’t come up with the classical Kaunian word for when, either. He kicked at the floorboards in frustration. But then he had a good idea. Instead of fumbling around for a word he couldn’t find, he pointed to a calendar hanging on the wall behind his father.

  “Ah,” the Algarvian said, and then a spate of the classical tongue too fast for Talsu to follow. But he was nodding and smiling, so he must have understood what Talsu meant. To prove he did, he went over and touched the day’s date on the calendar. Then he touched one two weeks hence. Having done so, he looked a question toward Talsu and Traku.

  Talsu thought the date looked reasonable, but Traku was the man who had to decide. “Aye,” he said, and then, “as long as the price is right.” He’d been talking as much to his son as to the Algarvian. Now he turned toward the Algarvian and named a price he thought right.

  The Algarvian affected not to understand. King Mezentio’s men always overacted in a dicker, though. Traku must have sensed the same thing Talsu did. He found a pencil and a scrap of paper, wrote out the price, and gave it to the Algarvian.

  “No,” the fellow said again-the word remained similar to what it had been in the days of the Kaunian Empire. He had a pencil of his own in the breast pocket of his tunic. He scratched out the figure Traku had written and substituted one half as large.

  Traku shook his head. To emphasize the point, he crumpled up the piece of paper and tossed it into the trash can. He picked up the cloak he’d been working on and got back to it. “Good day,” Talsu told the Algarvian. He would have enjoyed telling him some other things, too, but didn’t know the words for those in classical Kaunian.

  With an exasperated sniff, the redhead opened his belt pouch and took out a sheet of paper of his own. He wrote another price, this one higher. Traku looked at it, shook his head, and kept on sewing. The Algarvian thrust the paper and pencil at him. As if doing the fellow a great favor, Traku wrote a slightly lower price than the one he’d first proposed.

  “Haggling with paper and pencil, Father?” Talsu said. “I’ve never seen the like.”

  “Neither have I, but I won’t worry about it if I can get the deal I want,” Traku said. “If I can’t, I’ll just keep on doing what I’m doing here.” He spoke slowly and distinctly, in case the Algarvian knew more Jelgavan than he let on.

  Pantomime and scribbles took the place of the shouts and insults that often went into a hot dicker. The Algarvian could have taken his act to the stage and made more money than King Mezentio was likely to be paying him. By his agonized grimaces, Traku might have been cutting off his fingers one at a time with pinking shears. Traku’s style was more restrained, but he didn’t bend much. They finally settled on a price closer to his first one than to the redhead’s counteroffer.

  “Half now, half on delivery,” Traku said, and Talsu had to try to get that across to the Algarvian. As the fellow had before, he did a good game job of not understanding. At last, looking as if he were biting down hard on a lemon, he paid. Only then did Talsu take out a tape measure and note down his waist size and the length of his kilt. After the measurements were done, the Algarvian bowed and left.

  “We’ll make some silver off him,” Traku said.

  “Aye,” Talsu agreed. “You fought him hard there.”

  “I wish I could have done it with a stick in my hand,” his father answered. Having been too young to fight in the Six Years’ War and too old to be called out with Talsu, Traku imagined army life as being more exciting than the terror-punctuated boredom Talsu had known as a soldier.

  “It wouldn’t have made much difference,” Talsu told him, which was undoubtedly true. After a moment, he went on, “Doesn’t seem right, listening to one of Mezentio’s whoresons spouting the old language when we can’t hardly speak it ourselves.”

  “That’s a fact,” his father said. “I’m cursed if I know what we can do about it, though. I couldn’t stay in school; I had to buckle down and make a living. And it worked out the same way for you.”

  “And if anybody thinks I miss school, he’s daft,” Talsu said. “Still and all, if the Algarvians can speak classical Kaunian, there’s got to be something to it, wouldn’t you say? Otherwise, they wouldn’t have it in their schools.”

  “Who knows what the redheads would do?” Traku said.

  But Talsu wouldn’t be pushed off his ley line, not even by scorn for the Algarvians. “And they’re wrecking all the monuments from the Kaunian Empire, too,” he persisted. “They know classical Kaunian, and they don’t want us to know anything about the old days. What does that say to you?”

  “Says we used to be on top, and they don’t want us knowing about it now that we’re on the bottom,” Traku answered.

  Talsu nodded. “That’s what it says to me, too. And if they don’t want me to know it, seems like I ought to, doesn’t it? There’d be people in town who could teach me the old language without putting stripes on my back if I did a verb wrong, I bet.”

  His father gave him an odd look. “I thought you were the one who just said he didn’t miss school.”

  “It wouldn’t be school, exactly,” Talsu said. “You go to school because you have to, and they make you do things whether you want to or not. This would be different.”

  “If you say so.” Traku sounded anything but convinced.

  But Talsu answered, “I do say so. And do you know what else? I’d bet plenty I’m not the only one who thinks the same way, either.”

  Traku went back to work on the cloak once more. No, keeping the past alive didn’t matter that much to him. It hadn’t mattered to Talsu, either, not till the Algarvian showed greater knowledge of an important part of that past than he had himself. And if other people in Skrunda felt the same way… Talsu didn’t know what would happen then. Finding out might be interesting.

  As Krasta was in the habit of doing, she made her way through the Algarvian-occupied west wi
ng of her mansion toward Colonel Lurcanio’s office. She ignored the admiring looks the redheads gave her as she walked past them. No: she didn’t ignore those looks, though she affected to. Had the clerks and soldiers not glanced up as she went past, she would have been offended.

  Lurcanio’s new aide, Captain Gradasso, rose, bowed, and spoke in classical Kaunian: “My lady, I am sorry, but the colonel has given me specific orders to the effect that he is not to be disturbed.”

  Krasta could be devious, especially where her own advantage was concerned. “I don’t understand a word you’re saying,” she replied in Valmieran. That wasn’t quite true, but Gradasso would have had a hard time proving it. Gradasso, for that matter, would have had a hard time understanding the modern language. Krasta strode past him and into Lurcanio’s office.

  Her Algarvian lover stared up from the papers strewn across his desk. “I don’t care to see you right now,” he said. “Didn’t Gradasso tell you as much?”

  “Who knows what Gradasso says?” Krasta replied. “The old language is more trouble than it’s worth, if anyone wants to know what I think.”

  “Why would anyone want to know that?” Lurcanio sounded genuinely curious.

  “Why don’t you care to see me now?” Intent on her own thoughts, Krasta paid no attention to his.

  “Why?” Lurcanio echoed. “Because, my rather dear, I have been far too busy, and I will be for quite some time.”

  “Doing what?” Krasta demanded. If it didn’t have to do with her, how could it possibly be important?

  “Running enemies of my kingdom to earth,” Lurcanio answered; his tone reminded her why she feared him.

  Still, she tossed her head, as if deliberately tossing aside the fear. “Why do you need to waste your time doing things like that?” she asked. “Valmiera is yours, after all. Don’t you have more important things to worry about?” Shouldn‘t you be worrying about me? was what she meant.