Darkness: Through The Darkness Part 45

It didn't jump, but it did evade him again, almost as if it were playing with him. Longingly, he looked back toward the farmhouse. Merkela would have a big pot of stew bubbling over the fire. He didn't care if it was only barley and peas and beans and cabbage. It would fill him up and warm him from the inside out. As things were, he'd be lucky if he didn't come down with chest fever by the time he finally chased down this pestilential sheep.

"You'd make good mutton," he growled. "You'd make b.l.o.o.d.y wonderful mutton, do you know that?"

He wondered what Merkela would say if he cut the sheep's throat when he finally caught it, gutted the carca.s.s, and dragged it back to the farmhouse. He sighed. No, he didn't really wonder what Merkela would say. He knew. The sheep would live, no matter how much he wished it dead.

In the driving rain and deepening gloom, he didn't see the hors.e.m.e.n coming up the road till they were quite close. They didn't see him, either--and then, all at once, they did. One of them called out in accented Valmieran: "You are being the peasant calling self Skarnu?"

Skarnu didn't wait to admit or deny he was himself. He stood only a couple of strides from the rail fence. He scrambled up over it, dashed across the road, and ran off into the woods.

"Halting!" yelled the Algarvian who spoke his language. But Skarnu had no intention of halting. He could think of only one reason the redheads would want him, the same one that had made him hide in the woods before. He cursed his sister again for betraying him to her Algarvian lover.

Mezentio's men didn't just shout at Skarnu. They started blazing at him, too. Beams sizzled past, boiling raindrops as they went. But in weather like this, the beams weakened rapidly. When one struck him, it had enough force left to burn through his cloak, enough to burn through his trousers, but not enough to do much more than scorch his backside. On a rainless day, it might have brought him down.

As things were, he howled and yelped and sprang in the air and clapped a hand to the singed part, almost as if he were a comic actor up on the stage. He ran on for a couple of steps, wondering how bad the wound was. Then he decided he couldn't be too badly hurt if he could keep on running so fast. He dodged in and out among the trees, trying to put as many trunks as he could between himself and the Algarvians.

They pounded after him on foot, calling to one another in their own language. There were four or five of them; he hadn't bothered to count before fleeing. They all had sticks, and his throbbing right b.u.t.tock proclaimed they weren't shy about using them. But it was getting dark, and he knew the woods, and they didn't. Once he stopped running in blind panic and started using his head, he had little trouble shaking them off.

Hood drawn down over his face, he sheltered in a thick clump of bushes while they ran past. One came within fifteen or twenty feet, but had no idea he was anywhere close by. Once they were all out of earshot, he got up and moved off to the side, away from the track they would have to take going back to their horses.

He was tempted to go back to the horses himself, to ride off on one and lead the others away after it. But he didn't know whether the redheads had left a man to watch the animals. He would have, in their boots. And so, however alluring the prospect of giving them a good tweak was, he decided to content himself with escape.

He spent a long, cold night in the woods. Without the cloak, he might have frozen. With it, he was merely miserable. He slept very little, no matter how tired he was. However much he wanted to, he couldn't go back to the farm. He hoped the Algarvians had only been after him, not after Merkela and Raunu and the two Kaunians from Forthweg who'd joined them. He didn't dare find out, though, not now.

What do I do? Where do I go? The questions ate at him. For the time being, he wasn't going anywhere, not unless he heard the Algarvians coming after him in the darkness. He was too likely to blunder into them. Instead, he waited for dawn or something close to it, and tried to stay as dry as he could. That wasn't easy, not the way the rain kept pouring down.

When at last he could see his outstretched hand in front of his face, he got moving. He struck the northbound road about where he thought he would. A slow smile stretched itself across his face. After a couple of years here, he was starting to know his way around as well as the locals did. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than he chuckled. Any local to whom he was rash enough to say that would laugh himself silly.

The redheads had men posted about where he thought they would: at the main crossroads. Had he been panicked, they would have nabbed him with ease. But he saw them before they spied him, and slipped in among the trees to slide around them.

Before long, he left the road for one of the many little paths that meandered from one farm to another. He stayed on the verge wherever he could; the path was almost as full of water as a creek. It was lower than the surrounding countryside, which made it the drainage channel. He wondered how long people and animals and wheels had been wearing it down. Since the days of the Kaunian Empire? He wouldn't have been surprised.

After half a mile or so of hard, wet, slippery going, he walked up to another farmhouse. Rain rivered down the wood shakes of the roof and off the eaves, making a small lake around the house. Skarnu splashed through it, went up the stairs, and knocked on the front door.

For a few minutes, nothing happened. He knocked again, and called: "It's me. I'm by myself." Then he had to wait some more.

At last, though the door, did swing open. The farmer who stood in the doorway had a Valmieran military stick in his hands. Behind him, his hulking son held another. "It's all right," the farmer said, and they both lowered their weapons. The farmer stood aside. "Come in, Skarnu, before you catch your death."

"My thanks, Maironiu," Skarnu answered. "I won't stay long. The redheads were on my trail, but I lost aem. Some food, maybe a chance to rest a little--and whom do you know that lives east of here?"

"Shed your cloak. Shed your boots. Eat some bread," Maironiu said. "You're sure you lost the redheaded b.u.g.g.e.rs?" At Skarnu's nod, he relaxed a little, but not much. His wife brought out the bread, and a mug of ale to go with it. Skarnu tore into the food like a starving wolf. Maironiu asked, "Did they scoop up everybody at old Gedominu's place, the way they do sometimes?"

It would be Gedominu's place till the last man who'd known Merkela's husband died of old age. Skarnu had long since resigned himself to that. He shook his head now. "I don't think so. I think they were after me in particular."

Maironiu scowled. "That's not good. That's not even close to good. How could they know about you? Somebody blab?"

Skarnu nodded again. My sister, he thought. He didn't want to believe it of Krasta, but he didn't know what else to believe. "I don't think they know about anybody else in these parts," he said. "I hope they don't, anyhow."

"They'd better not," Maironiu's son burst out. "Life's hard enough around here as is."

Seeing how Skarnu ate, Maironiu's wife brought him another big chunk of bread. He bowed to her as he might have bowed to a d.u.c.h.ess. He didn't usually show off his court manners. For one thing, he seldom had the need. For another, he was so tired now, he hardly knew what he was doing. Maironiu and his wife exchanged glances; they knew what that bow was likely to mean. Maironiu asked the question with surprising subtlety: "You have enemies in the big city?"

"Huh?" Skarnu needed a moment to figure out what that meant. He'd almost forgotten about his n.o.ble blood; a couple of years of farm work made him think it nothing very special after all. "It could be," he said at last.

"Well, go on out to the barn and curl up for a few hours, whoever you were once upon a time," Maironiu told him. "Then I'll take you east. I do know somebody who's not part of our regular group, but he'll know somebody else. They'll pa.s.s you along, get you away from here."

"Thanks," Skarnu repeated, though leaving Merkela, leaving the child she was carrying, was the last thing he wanted to do. One more reason to curse the Algarvians, he thought. Calling Mezentio's men to mind made him ask, "What'll you do if the redheads come while I'm in the barn?"

"Get you away if we can," Maironiu answered. "If we can't..." He shrugged broad shoulders. "We'll pretend we didn't know you were there, that's all."

"Fair enough." Skarnu didn't think he could have come up with a better response, not when he was endangering Maironiu and his family by being here. He picked up his sodden cloak and put it back on. Maironiu's wife exclaimed at the puddle it left on the floor.

Skarnu hadn't slept on straw for a while, not since he'd started sharing Merkela's bed. Exhausted as he was, he could have slept on nails and broken gla.s.s. He felt deep underwater when Maironiu shook him awake. The farmer had on a cloak much like his. "Hate to do it to you, pal," Maironiu said, "but some things just won't wait."

"Aye." Skarnu hauled himself to his feet. The first few steps he took, out to the barn door, he stumbled like a drunken man. Then the cold rain hit him in the face. That woke him up, and sobered him up, in a hurry. "Where are we going?" he asked as he followed Maironiu away from the farm.

"Like I told you, I know somebody," Maironiu replied. "You don't really want a name, do you?" Skarnu considered, then shook his head. Maironiu grunted approval. "All right, then. Once you're out of this part of the kingdom, you should be pretty safe again, eh?"

"I suppose so." Skarnu kept looking back over his shoulder, not toward Maironiu's farm but toward Merkela's. Old Gedominu's place, he thought. Everything in the world that mattered to him was there, and he couldn't go back, not if he wanted to live. Cursing under his breath, he squelched after Maironiu.

Sixteen.

Sergeant Pesaro glared at the constables lined up before him. Bembo looked back steadfastly, holding out a shield of burnished innocence to cover up whatever he might have done to rouse Pesaro's anger. But Pesaro wasn't angry at him. The sergeant seemed angry at the whole world. "Boys, we've got ourselves a problem," he declared.

"Our problem is whatever's eating him," Bembo whispered to Oraste. The other constable grunted and nodded.

Pesaro pointed to a Forthwegian in a knee-length tunic walking past the barracks. "D'you see that b.a.s.t.a.r.d?" he said. "D'you see him?"

"Aye, Sergeant," the constables chorused dutifully. Bembo made sure his voice was a loud part of that chorus.

Sergeant Pesaro kept right on pointing at the stocky, hook-nosed, black-bearded man. "You see him, eh? Well, all right--how do you know he's not a stinking Kaunian?"

"Because he doesn't look like a Kaunian, Sergeant," Bembo said, and then, under his breath to Oraste, "Because we're not b.l.o.o.d.y idiots, Sergeant." Oraste grunted again.

But Pesaro was unappeased. "Do you know what those lousy blonds have gone and done? Do you? I'll b.l.o.o.d.y well tell you what they've done. They've found themselves a magic that lets aem look like Forthwegians, that's what. How are we supposed to tell who's a stinking Kaunian snake in the gra.s.s if we can't tell who's a stinking Kaunian snake in the gra.s.s?"

Bembo's head started to ache. If that Forthwegian really was a Kaunian-- if you couldn't tell who was who by looking--how in blazes were you supposed to keep the blonds in their own district?

Somebody stuck up a hand. Pesaro pointed to him, as if relieved not to be pointing at the Forthwegian--if he was a Forthwegian--anymore. The constable asked, "Can they make themselves look like us, too, or only like Forthwegians?"

"That's a good question," Pesaro said. "I don't have a good answer for it. All I got told about was Kaunians looking like Forthwegians."

Bembo stuck his hand in the air. "How do we know aem if we do find any? And what do we do if we catch one?"

"The way you know is, snip off some hair. If it turns blond once it's cut, you've caught yourself a Kaunian. If you catch one, you take the b.u.g.g.e.r to the caravan depot and ship his a.r.s.e west. If he's a she, you can do whatever else you want first. n.o.body'll say boo. We've got to stop this."

"Pretty miserable business, all right," Bembo said. "The blonds don't want to go west, so they stop looking like blonds. That's not playing fair."

"Too cursed right it isn't." Pesaro didn't notice the joke. "If we're going to lick the Unkerlanters, we need Kaunians. We can't let aem slip out from between our fingers like snot. And if you nail the wh.o.r.eson who came up with this magic, you can ask for the moon. They'd probably give it to you. Any more questions? No? Get your backsides out there and catch those b.u.g.g.e.rs."

He didn't say how. Then Oraste raised his hand. Pesaro looked at him in some surprise; Oraste didn't usually bother with questions. But when the sergeant nodded his way, he came up with a good one: "What shall we do, take along manicure scissors to snip hair with?"

"If you've got aem, why not?" Pesaro answered. "It's a better idea than people with fancier badges than yours have come up with, I'll tell you that. But listen--don't spend all your time checking the prettiest girls. We want the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds with beards, too. They're likely to be more dangerous. All right? Go on."

Off the constables went. Oraste asked Bembo, "You have a little scissors?"

"Of course I do." Bembo was as vain of his person as most Algarvians. "How am I supposed to keep my mustaches and imperial in proper trim without one?"

"You could gnaw aem," Oraste said helpfully. "Or you could let aem grow out thick and bushy all over your face, the way the Forthwegians do."

"Thank you, but no thank you," Bembo replied with dignity. "If I want fur, I'll buy a ruff." He pointed to the first reasonably good-looking Forthwegian girl he saw and called out, "You there! Aye, you. Stop."

She did, and asked, "What do you want with me?" in pretty good Algarvian.

Bembo took the small scissors from his belt pouch. "I want a little lock of your hair, sweetheart, to make sure you're not a Kaunian in disguise."

"What will you do with it afterwards?" she asked in some alarm. "Make nasty magic against me?" She started to shrink away.

A fat lot of good our sorcery s done in Unkerlant, Bembo thought sourly, but even the Forthwegians are afraid of it. "No, no, no, by the powers above!" he exclaimed. "I'll give it back to you, every single hair. You can dispose of it."

She eyed him, plainly trying to decide whether he was telling the truth. At last, grimacing, she nodded. Bembo came up to her, stroked her cheek on the pretext of brushing the hair back from it, and snipped a lock. The hair he'd cut stayed dark. He handed it back to the girl, as he'd promised. She put it in her belt pouch and went off with her proud nose in the air.

"You see, darling?" Bembo called after her. "I keep my word." She kept walking.

"Nice try, lover boy," Oraste said. Bembo stuck his nose in the air.

They tramped on through the gray, battered, sorry-looking streets of Gromheort. Every so often, they would stop somebody and cut off a lock of hair. Explaining what they wanted was a lot harder when the people they stopped didn't speak Algarvian. Trying to explain in Kaunian was hard for Bembo, to say nothing of the irony he couldn't help feeling while using that language to search for sorcerously disguised blonds. "We should have learned some Forthwegian," he told Oraste.

His partner shook his head. "All those other languages are just a bunch of grunting noises, anybody wants to know what I think. These wh.o.r.esons don't want to understand Algarvian, they'll understand a club smacked into the side of their pot, they will. And you can take that to the bank."

"I like the way you think," Bembo said, halfway between mocking admiration and the genuine article. "Nothing's ever hard for you, is it?"

By way of reply, Oraste grabbed his crotch. Bembo threw back his head and laughed. He couldn't help himself. He and Oraste kept on prowling, kept on snipping, and caught not a single camouflaged Kaunian.

When they got back to the barracks at the end of their shift, though, Bembo had an inspiration. He went up to Pesaro and said, "What are all the crazy b.u.g.g.e.rs in this whole stinking kingdom doing this time of year?"

"Driving me daft," Pesaro said, giving him a sour look. n.o.body from his squad of constables had come up with any Kaunians, and he wasn't very happy about that.

Bembo refused to let himself get too annoyed. He said, "They're all going out into the country to hunt fornicating mushrooms, that's what. The blonds are as wild for those nasty things as the real Forthwegians are. If the gate guards checked everybody who came in and went out. . ."

Slowly, a smile replaced the glower on Pesaro's plump face. "Well, curse me!" he exclaimed. "There, do you see? You're not as foolish as you look. Who would have believed it?"

"I've had good ideas before," Bembo protested indignantly.

"Oh, so you have," Pesaro said. "The one good idea you never could figure out was keeping your big mouth shut." He pondered, stroking the tuft of hair on his chin. "But that is smart, dip me in dung if it's not. Aye, I'll pa.s.s it up the line." He stroked his chin again. "Something else like that, too--if we shut off a whole city block, say, and snipped everybody in it, I bet we'd catch a few blonds by surprise."

"That's good, Sergeant," Bembo said, partly because he meant it, partly because Pesaro was the fellow who told him what to do every day. "That's really good. Maybe we'll both get promoted." He snapped his fingers. "Powers above, why think small? Maybe we'll both get sent home!"

"That is a big thought," Pesaro said. "Too big, most likely. And they won't promote me, not without a drop of n.o.ble blood in my whole line unless I'm descended from some viscount's b.a.s.t.a.r.d back three hundred years or so. They like quality in officers, so they do, even constabulary officers. You might get b.u.mped up, though."

"Lots of officers getting killed these days," Bembo observed. "Not so many in the constabulary, I grant you, but lots and lots of soldiers. They'll run short before too long, and then they'll either promote commoners or they'll b.l.o.o.d.y well do without officers. The Unkerlanters don't fret too much about a man's blood, by all I've heard."

"That's on account of most of their n.o.bles got b.u.mped off a long time ago," Pesaro said. "Besides, who wants to be like the fornicating Unkerlanters?" But the sergeant's tone was thoughtful, almost wistful; Bembo knew he'd put a flea in his ear.

No trips back to Tricarico came from either Bembo's suggestion or Pesaro's. No promotions came from them, either. Bembo cursed his superiors till the next time he got paid, when he found a two-goldpiece bonus. He wasn't even too resentful to find out that Pesaro's was twice as big. Pesaro was a sergeant, after all.

A few days later, he and Oraste stretched a rope dead line across a narrow street. The rope had a sign on it, written in Algarvian and Forthwegian: CLIPPING STATION. At the other end of the street, two more Algarvian constables stretched out another rope with an identical sign attached. All the Algarvians drew their sticks. "n.o.body goes by without getting snipped!" Bembo yelled in his own language. One of the other pair spoke Forthwegian and translated. "Line up!" Bembo added. Again, his opposite number turned the words into Forthwegian.

Oraste spoke up: "Form your line. Over the rope one at a time. Get clipped. Anybody gets out of line, he gets blazed." Once more, the Forthwegian-speaking constable did the honors.

Grumbling, the people trapped between the two ropes queued up. Bembo gestured them forward one by one. Oraste clipped. "This is all a waste of time, you know," a Forthwegian told Bembo in excellent Algarvian.

"Mind your own business." After a moment, Bembo recognized the fellow: the one who'd lost a son to a man from Plegmund's Brigade. He's a fine one to tell us what to do and how to do it, the plump constable said. Aloud, he said, "Fat lot you know about it, anyhow."

"I know you're looking for hair that turns yellow when it's cut," the Forthwegian answered; gossip was nothing to be sneezed at. "I also know any Kaunian with half a wit would dye his hair black before he risked a trap like this."

Bembo stared. Back in Tricarico, folk of Kaunian blood had dyed their hair red to fit in with the Algarvian majority. Black hair didn't make Kaunians look like Forthwegians--but this chap was right: it could further ward Kaunians sorcerously disguised to look like their neighbors. "Get out of here," Bembo snarled, and the Forthwegian with the graying beard disappeared in a hurry.

A man three people after him in line did turn out to be a Kaunian with undyed hair. Bembo and Oraste beat the blond with their bludgeons. Oraste covered him while the rest of the line went through. He was the only Kaunian the constables caught. But even as they frog-marched him off toward the ley-line caravan depot for what would likely be his last journey, a question kept echoing and reechoing in Bembo's mind: how many blonds had they missed?

The dye had an acrid reek Vanai found distasteful. She applied it twice, as the directions on the jar told her to do. Then, again following the directions, she combed her hair without drying it. Flicking her eyes to right and left, she could see the dark locks that fell damply to her tunic--and would probably end up staining it. Instead of going for a mirror, she asked Ealstan, "What do I look like now?"

"Strange," he answered, and then found a word that meant the same thing but sounded nicer: "Exotic. There aren't any black-haired folk on Derlavai with fair skin and light eyes. Maybe on some of the islands in the Great Northern Sea, but I don't know of any even there."

"There are plenty of Kaunians in Forthweg with dark hair now, or I hope there are," Vanai said. "I wonder what went wrong and tipped off the Algarvians that we'd found a magic to let us look like everybody else."

"Somebody must have stayed out too long, and had the magic wear off when a redhead was looking," Ealstan said. "Something like that, anyhow."

"Aye, you're likely right," Vanai agreed after a little thought. "But can you blame whoever did it? Trapped in that little district, never knowing if Mezentio's men were going to haul him away and send him west? Wouldn't you want to grab as much freedom as you could?"

"Likely so," Ealstan said. "But I wouldn't want to do anything that could put anybody else in danger."

The answer was very much in character for him. He thought of others ahead of himself; Vanai had seen that for as long as she'd known him. It was unusual in someone so young. It was, from what she'd seen, unusual in people of any age. It was one of the things that had drawn her to him. It drew her to him now: she got up, went over to him, sat down beside him on the worn sofa, and gave him a kiss.

"What was that for?" he asked.

"Because I felt like it," Vanai answered.

"Oh, really?" This time, Ealstan kissed her. "What else do you feel like?"

"We ought to wait till my hair is dry," Vanai said. She lifted a lock from her shoulder and nodded. "See? It's just what I thought--the dye's stained my tunic. I don't want to have to try to get it out of the bedclothes, too."