Darkness: Through The Darkness Part 16

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 n.o.bility. 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 bra.s.s, 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 aem 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 aem. And who says the Algarvians won't start stealing tin, too, and leave us with nothing but lead?"

"n.o.body," Talsu answered. "I wouldn't put anything past aem. They'd steal anything that wasn't nailed down."

"And now they're stealing the nails, 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 cla.s.sical 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 cla.s.sical tongue.

Talsu flogged his memory and essayed a few words of cla.s.sical 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 aem," he said. "Find out when he wants aem, 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 cla.s.sical 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 cla.s.sical 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 d.i.c.ker, though. Traku must have sensed the same thing Talsu did. He found a pencil and a sc.r.a.p 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 subst.i.tuted 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 cla.s.sical 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 d.i.c.ker. 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 wh.o.r.esons 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 cla.s.sical 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 cla.s.sical 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 wing 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 Grada.s.so, rose, bowed, and spoke in cla.s.sical 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 Grada.s.so would have had a hard time proving it. Grada.s.so, 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 Grada.s.so tell you as much?"

"Who knows what Grada.s.so 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?" Shouldnat you be worrying about me? was what she meant.

By the way Lurcanio raised an eyebrow, he understood her perfectly well. "My sweet, nothing in Valmiera is more important to me than the triumph of my kingdom," he told her. "Nothing. Do you follow that, or shall I draw you a diagram?"

Krasta glared. "I don't know why I put up with you."

"No one requires you to do any such thing," Lurcanio said. "If I do not please you, go find someone else, and I will do the same. It shouldn't be that hard for either one of us."

She kept on glaring, harder than ever. As no Valmieran lover had ever done, Lurcanio used indifference as shield and weapon both. He knew he could find another lover without much trouble; plenty of Valmieran women were looking to form connections with the occupiers. If Krasta went looking for another Algarvian, she would have to compete with all of them. Was she likely to find one as well placed as Lurcanio? She didn't think so. Was she likely to find one as irksome? She doubted that, too, but it counted for less than the other.

"Curse you, you infuriating man!" she snarled.

Colonel Lurcanio bowed in his seat, infuriating her still more. "You are welcome to try," he said. "I doubt you will have much luck. And now, please leave. I will talk to you more later, but that can keep. My work cannot."

"Curse you!" Krasta said again--this time, in fact, she shrieked it. She spun on her heel and stomped out, slamming the door behind her as she went. Captain Grada.s.so stared at her. She made a suggestion she couldn't possibly have translated into cla.s.sical Kaunian. Grada.s.so might not have understood it, but he did realize it was no compliment. That sufficed.

Krasta stalked through the Algarvian functionaries. She made similar incandescent suggestions to the ones who presumed to look at her. Some of them did speak Valmieran, and some of those made suggestions of their own. By the time Krasta got back to her own wing of the mansion, she was in a perfect transport of temper.

She thought about tormenting Bauska, but that was too easy to give her much satisfaction. She thought about going out to the Avenue of Equestrians to wander from shop to shop, but that would make her rage go away. She didn't want it to go away. She wanted to savor it, as she would have savored a fine ale.

And she wanted to do something with it. She wanted to hit back at Lurcanio, who had provoked it in the first place. With that in mind, she paused somewhere she didn't usually stop: in front of the large bookcase downstairs. Most of the volumes there had gone unexamined--certainly by her--since the days when her mother and father were still alive.

She pulled one off the shelf. When she blew on it, she raised a puff of dust. She made a mental note to berate the cleaning women, but that could wait. What she had in mind couldn't. Smiling a predatory smile, she carried the book up to her bedchamber and barred the door behind her.

"Dare me, will he?" she muttered. "Well, I'll teach him, powers below eat me if I don't."

Her heart sank when she opened the volume. All the curses were in cla.s.sical Kaunian, which meant Krasta didn't understand at first glance what they would do to an indifferent lover. And, in fact, she had trouble finding one aimed at an indifferent lover. Plenty cursed faithless lovers, but that wasn't Lurcanio's flaw--or Krasta didn't think it was, anyhow.

Even the headings above the spells were written in an annoyingly antique style, halfway back toward the cla.s.sical language. She considered A conjuring that induceth love between a man and a woman, if it be used in their meats, but then shook her head. She didn't want to restore Lurcanio's ardor through magecraft. She wanted to punish him for not having enough.

That a man may be always as a gelded man seemed more promising, and also seemed easy enough to manage. All she needed to do was give Lurcanio a glowworm in his drink. Plenty of them sparked on and off in the garden during mild summer evenings. "That will teach him," she said, and slammed the book shut.

She hadn't tried to catch glowworms since she was a little girl, but it didn't turn out to be hard. Since Lurcanio was too busy with his precious work to bother coming to her bedchamber that evening, he had no way of knowing she went out into the garden and gathered half a dozen in five minutes. She carried them back into the mansion in a little marble box that had once held face powder.

When she got up the next morning, she used the handle of a brush to mash the glowworms into a revolting paste. She reasoned that would be easier to mix into a cup of wine or a mug of ale than would whole bugs. Having a pretty good notion of when the cook would be fixing Lurcanio's breakfast, she went down to the kitchens just then.

"Aye, milady, it is ready," the cook said, bowing; Krasta seldom stuck her nose into his domain. "I was setting things on his tray, as a matter of fact."

"I shall carry it to him," Krasta said. "We quarreled yesterday, and I want to show him all is forgiven." The cook bowed again, in acquiescence. If the idea of Krasta forgiving anyone startled him, he gave no outward sign. He simply handed her the tray when it was ready, then held the door open for her so she could take it into the west wing.

Before she got there, she stirred some of the glowworm paste into Lurcanio's ale. Watching him drink it would be revenge in and of itself, even if the spell didn't work. But Krasta wanted it to work. Lurcanio enjoyed mocking her. If she left him impotent, she could do the mocking, and could also enjoy acting as seductive as she could, making him pant for what he couldn't have.

Seeing her with the breakfast tray, Grada.s.so didn't try to keep her out of Lurcanio's office. "What's this?" Lurcanio said when she came in. "Have we got a new maid?"

"Aye." Krasta did her best to sound contrite, which wasn't easy for her. "I was down in the kitchens, and thought I would bring you what the cook had made. And"--she looked down at her toes in pretended maidenly embarra.s.sment--"I thought tonight you might bring me something, too."

"Did you, now?" Lurcanio boomed laughter. "Some sausage, maybe? Is that it?" Still affecting innocence, Krasta shyly nodded. Lurcanio laughed again, and raised the mug of ale in salute. "Well, since you ask for it so prettily, perhaps I shall." He drank. Krasta had to fight hard not to hug herself with glee. She wondered if he would notice anything odd about the taste, but he didn't.

The rest of the day pa.s.sed most happily. Krasta didn't scream once at Bauska, not even when her maidservant's b.a.s.t.a.r.d brat spent half an hour howling like a wolf with a toothache. Bauska eyed her as if wondering what was wrong. Most days, that would have been plenty to anger Krasta by itself. Today, she didn't even notice, which made Bauska more curious and suspicious than ever.

Krasta also ate her own breakfast, and luncheon, and supper, without sending anything back to the cook. By the time evening came around, everyone at the mansion was wondering whether she was really herself--and hoping she wasn't.

For bed, she put on almost transparent silk pajamas, slid under the covers, and waited. Not too much later, someone knocked on the door to the bedchamber. "Come in," Krasta said sweetly. "It's not barred."

In came Lurcanio. He barred the door, and wasted no time taking off his tunic and kilt. When he flipped back the sheets, he paused a moment to admire Krasta in her filmy nightclothes, then got her out of them. And then, with his usual panache, he proceeded to make love to her. He had no trouble whatever. Krasta was so surprised, she let him bring her to her peak of pleasure before she realized she wasn't supposed to be enjoying it.

"How did you do that?" she asked, still breathing a little hard.

"How?" Lurcanio leaned up on an elbow and raised an eyebrow. "The usual way. How else?" But he paid more attention to her tone than she was in the habit of giving his. "Why? Did you think I would be unable? Why would you think I might be unable?"

"Well... er ... I... uh ..." Krasta had seldom made heavier going of an answer.

To her mingled mortification and relief, Lurcanio started to laugh. "Little fool, did you try to curse me with impotence? I told you it was a waste of time. Soldiers are warded against much magic from real mages, let alone from lovers who work themselves into a snit because they don't get enough attention." He reached out and stroked her between the legs. "Did you think I paid enough attention to you just now?"

"I suppose so," she said sulkily.

"If I were younger, I would go another round," the Algarvian said. "But even though I am not so young, I can still pay you more attention." He brought his face down where his hand had been. "Is this better?" he asked as he began. Krasta didn't reply in words, but her back arched. Presently, it was a great deal better indeed.

With a weary sigh, Trasone tramped east, away from the fighting front in southern Unkerlant. "By the powers above, it sure feels good to get pulled out of the line for a few days," he said.

"Enjoy it while it lasts," Sergeant Panfilo answered, "on account of it won't."

"Don't I know it?" Trasone said mournfully. "Aren't enough of us to do all the job that needs doing. I hear tell there are a couple of regiments of Yaninans off on the left of the brigade, because there aren't enough real Algarvian soldiers to hold the whole line."

"I've heard that, too," Panfilo said. "I keep hoping it's a pack of lies."