Into the Darkness (18 page)

Sabrino’s dragon bellowed its triumph and spurted more flame. He whacked it with the goad to make it stop. It might need that fire in future fights. His head swiveled as he tried to see which of his dragonfliers needed help. He spied none who did. Most of the Forthwegian dragons were falling in flames (so, he was sad to see, were a couple painted in Algarvian colors). A couple of the enemy flew west, off to the shrinking stretch of territory Forthweg still held. And one, its flier blazed off it, struck out at the dragons around it like the wild beast it was till it too tumbled out of the sky.

More dragons were flying in out of the east, these lower, and with eggs slung under their bellies. As the eggs began falling on Wihtgara, Sabrino smiled broadly. “A splendid little war!” he cried, exultation in his voice. “Splendid!”

Occupied. Ealstan had heard the word before the war, of course. He’d heard it, and thought he’d known what it meant. Now he was learning the bitter difference between knowledge and experience.

Occupation meant Algarvian troops swaggering along the streets of Gromheort. They all had sticks at the ready, and they all expected everybody to understand Algarvian. People who didn’t understand the ugly, trilling speech—in Ealstan’s ears, it sounded like magpies’ chatter—fast enough to suit them were liable to get blazed for no better reason than that. No one could punish the Algarvians for doing such things. Their commanders probably praised them.

Occupation meant that Ealstan’s mother and sister stayed inside their house and sent him or his father out when they needed errands run. The Algarvians hadn’t perpetuated that many outrages, but they’d done enough to make decent Forthwegian women uninterested in taking chances.

Occupation meant that Sidroc and his family crowded the house to overflowing. An egg had turned their home to rubble. Ealstan knew it could have been his as easily as not. Sidroc and his father—Ealstan’s father’s brother—still shambled around as if stunned, for his mother and sister had been in the house when the egg burst.

Occupation meant broadsheets written in awkward Forthwegian going up on almost every wall that hadn’t been knocked flat. THE KAUNIAN KINGDOMS YOU LED INTO THAT WAR, some of them said. Others asked, WHY DO FORTHWEGIANS FOR KAUNIANS DIE? Ealstan had never had any particular use for the Kaunians who lived within Forthweg’s borders—except watching the blond women in their tight trousers. If the Algarvians wanted him to hate them, though, there had to be more to them than he’d thought.

Occupation meant having no idea what had happened to his brother, Leofsig. That was worst of all.

And yet, even with Count Brorda fled and an Algarvian officer ensconced in his castle, life had to go on. Ealstan’s sister stuffed a chunk of garlicky sausage, some salted olives, a lump of hard white cheese, and some raisins into a cloth sack and thrust it at him. “Here,” she said. “Don’t dawdle. You’ll be late for school.”

“Thanks, Conberge,” Ealstan said.

“Remember to stop at a baker’s on the way home and bring us more bread,” Conberge told him. “Or if the bakers are all out, get ten pounds of flour from a miller. Mother and I can do the baking perfectly well.”

“All right.” Ealstan paused. “What if the millers are out of flour, too?”

His sister looked a bit harried. “In that case, we all start going hungry. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit.” She raised her voice to a shout: “Sidroc! Aren’t you ready yet? Your masters will beat you black and blue, and you’ll deserve it.”

Sidroc was still running a tortoiseshell comb through his dark, curly hair when he hurried into the kitchen to receive a lunch similar to Ealstan’s. “Come on,” Ealstan said. “Conberge’s right—they’ll break switches on our backs if we’re late again.”

“I suppose so,” Sidroc said indifferently. Maybe he needed a thrashing to bring him out of his funk. Ealstan didn’t, and didn’t want to get one because his cousin remained in a daze. He grabbed Sidroc by the arm and hauled him out on to the street.

No Algarvians were strutting past his house, for which he was duly grateful. The mere sight of kilts set his teeth on edge. Being unable to taunt the Algarvians hurt, too, but he didn’t care to take his life in his hands. Women were not the only ones the occupiers outraged.

Ealstan was sure Leofsig and his comrades had done no such things while on Algarvian soil. No: that Leofsig and his comrades could have done such things never entered his mind. And even if they had, the Algarvians would have deserved it.

When he turned the corner on to the main thoroughfare that led to his school, Ealstan could no longer pretend Gromheort remained a free Forthwegian city. For one thing, the Algarvians had checkpoints every few blocks. For another, signboards written in their script—so sinuous as to be hard to read, especially for someone like Ealstan, who was used to angular Forthwegian characters—sprouted everywhere. And, for a third, heading up the thoroughfare toward the school showed him what a battering Gromheort had taken before it finally fell.

The Algarvians had set gangs to work clearing the wreckage of ruined buildings. “Work, cursing you!” a kilted soldier shouted in bad Forthwegian. The Forthwegians and Kaunians the occupiers had rounded up were already working, throwing tiles and chunks of bricks and shattered timbers into wagons. A Kaunian woman bent to pick up a couple of bricks. An Algarvian soldier reached out and ran his hand along the curve of her buttocks.

She straightened with a squeak of outrage. The soldier and his companions laughed. “Work!” he said, and gestured with his stick. Her face a frozen mask, she bent once more. He fondled her again. This time, she went on working as if he did not exist.

Ealstan hustled past the work gang, lest the Algarvians make him join it. Sidroc followed, but kept looking back over his shoulder. His eyes were wide and staring as he watched the solider amuse himself. “Come on,” Ealstan said impatiently.

“Powers above,” Sidroc muttered, as much to himself as to his cousin. “Wouldn’t you like to do that with a woman?”

“Sure I would, if she wanted me to,” Ealstan answered, even though thinking a woman might one day want him to do such a thing required all the imagination he had. But despite that, he noted a distinction Sidroc had missed: “That soldier wasn’t doing it with her—he was doing it to her. Did you see her face? If looks could kill, she’d have wiped out all those stinking redheads.”

Sidroc tossed his head. “She was only a Kaunian.”

“You think the Algarvian cared?” Ealstan asked, and shook his head to give the question his own answer. “He would have done it to”—he started to say
to your mother,
but checked himself; that hit harder than he wanted to—“to Conberge the same way. Everybody’s fair game to Mezentio’s men.”

“They won,” Sidroc said bitterly. “That’s what you get when you win: you can do as you please.”

“I suppose so,” Ealstan said. “I never thought we could lose.”

“We cursed well did,” Sidroc said. “We might even be worse off, you know? Would you rather we were off in the west, and King Swemmel’s Unkerlanters came stomping through Gromheort? If I had to chose between them and the Algarvians—”

“If I could make a choice, I’d choose to have all of them go far, far away.” Ealstan sighed. “But magic doesn’t work that way. I wish it did.”

They got to the school just as the warning bell clanged, and then ran like madmen to their first class. In spite of his lethargy, Sidroc didn’t want to have his back striped after all. “Why couldn’t the Algarvians have dropped an egg here?” he muttered fretfully as he flung his bottom on to his stool.

But the master of classical Kaunian was not in the chamber to note—and to punish—his tardiness and Ealstan’s. After a heartfelt sigh of relief, Ealstan turned to the scholar next to him and whispered, “Did Master Bede have to visit the Jakes?”

“Don’t think so,” the other youth answered. “I haven’t seen him at all this morning. Maybe the Algarvians have him grubbing stones.”

“He’d be on the other end of the switch if they do,” Ealstan said. Seeing the Kaunian woman molested had bothered him. He could contemplate the master’s being put to hard labor without batting an eye.

A man strode into the classroom. He was a Forthwegian, but he was not Master Bede, even if he did carry a switch in his left hand. “I am Master Agmund,” he announced. “From this day forth, by order of the occupying authorities, all studies in classical Kaunian are suspended, the language being judged useless both because of its antiquated, outmoded nature and because folk of Kaunian blood have wickedly attempted to destroy the Kingdom of Algarve.”

He spoke as if reading from a script. Ealstan gaped. Master Bede and earlier masters of Kaunian had drilled into him—often painfully—that anyone in eastern Derlavai with the slightest claim to culture had to be fluent in the language, regardless of his own blood. Had they been lying? Or did Algarve have its own purposes here?

Agmund answered that in a hurry, saying, “Instead, you shall be instructed in Algarvian, in which subject I am your new master. Attend me.”

One of Ealstan’s classmates, a youth named Odda, thrust his hand in the air. When Agmund recognized him, he said, “Master, can we not learn Algarvian from the soldiers in the city? Why, already I can say ‘How much for your sister?’ just from having heard them say it so much.”

A vast silence fell on the classroom. Ealstan stared, admiring Odda’s defiant bravado. Master Agmund’s stare was of a different sort. He advanced on Odda and gave him the fiercest thrashing Ealstan had ever seen. Agmund said, “My clever little friend, if you were half as funny as you think you are, you would be twice as funny as you really are.”

When the beating was over, the lessons began. Agmund proved himself a capable enough master, and was plainly fluent in Algarvian. Ealstan repeated the words and phrases the master set him. He had no desire to learn Algarvian, but he had no desire to be whipped, either.

He and Sidroc took turns telling the story around the supper table that evening. “The boy did a brave thing,” Sidroc’s father said.

“He certainly did, Uncle Hengist,” Ealstan agreed.

“Brave, aye,” his father said. Hestan looked from Ealstan to Sidroc to Hengist. “Brave, but foolish. The lad suffered for it, as you and your cousin said, and his suffering is not over yet, either, unless I miss my guess. And his family’s suffering will barely have begun.”

Hengist grunted, as if Hestan had hit him in the belly. “You are likely to be right,” he said. “Of course this new master is an Algarvian lapdog. What he hears, the redheads will hear.” He pointed to Sidroc. “We have suffered enough already. Whatever you think of this new language master, keep it locked in your head. Never let him suspect it, or we will all pay.”

“I don’t mind him so much,” Sidroc said with a shrug. “And Algarvian looks to be a lot easier than classical Kaunian ever was.”

That wasn’t what Hengist had meant. Ealstan understood as much, even if Sidroc didn’t. Understanding such things went with being occupied, too. If Sidroc didn’t figure them out pretty soon, he would be sorry, and so would everyone around him.

Ealstan’s mother understood. “Take care, all of you,” Elfryth said, and that was also good advice.

The next morning, Odda was not in the Algarvian class. He was not in any of his classes that day. He did not return to school the next day, either. Ealstan and Sidroc never saw him again. Ealstan understood the lesson. He hoped his cousin did, too.

King Shazli nibbled at a cake rich with raisins and pistachios. He licked his fingers clean, then glanced at Hajjaj from lowered eyelids. “It would seem King Swemmel did not purpose attacking us after all,” he said.

When his sovereign decided to talk business, Hajjaj could with propriety do the same, even if his cake lay on the tray before him only half eaten. “Say rather, your Majesty, that King Swemmel did not
yet
purpose attacking us,” he replied.

“You say this even after Unkerlant and Algarve have split Forthweg between them, as a man will tear a peeled tangerine in half that he might share it with his friend?”

“Your Majesty, I do,” the foreign minister said. “If King Swemmel intended to leave Zuwayza alone, we would not see these continual proddings along the border. Nor would we see his envoy in Bishah lyingly denying that any fault attaches to Unkerlant. When Swemmel is ready, he will do what he will do.”

Shazli started to reach for his teacup. At the last moment, his hand swerved and seized the goblet that held wine. After drinking, he said, “I confess I am not sorry that King Penda chose to flee south instead of coming here.” Hajjaj drank wine, too. Thinking of the King of Forthweg as an exile in Bishah was enough to make any Zuwayzi turn to wine, or perhaps to hashish. “We could not very well have turned him away, your Majesty, not if we cared to hold our heads up afterwards,” he said, and then, before Shazli could speak, he went on, “We could not very well have kept him here, not if we cared to hold our heads on our shoulders.”

“You speak nothing but the truth there.” Shazli gulped the goblet dry.

“Well, now he is Yanina’s worry. I tell you frankly, I am more glad than I can say that King Tsavellas has to explain to Unkerlant how Penda came to go into exile in Patras. Better him than me. Better Yanina than Zuwayza, too.”

“Indeed.” Hajjaj tried to make his long, thin, lively face look wide and dour, as if he were an Unkerlanter. “First, King Swemmel will demand that Tsavellas turn King Penda over to him. Then, when Tsavellas tells him no, he’ll start massing troops on the border with Yanina. After that”—the Zuwayzi foreign minister shrugged—“he’ll probably invade.”

“If I were Tsavellas, I’d put Penda on a ship or a dragon bound for Sibiu or Valmiera or Lagoas,” Shazli said. “Swemmel might forgive him for harboring Penda just long enough to palm him off on someone else.”

“Your Majesty, King Swemmel never forgives anyone for anything,” Hajjaj said. “He proved that after the Twinkings War—and those were his own countrymen.”

King Shazli grunted. “There, I judge, you speak nothing but the truth. Everything he has done since seating himself firmly on the throne of Unkerlant goes toward confirming it.” He reached for his wine goblet again, so abruptly that a couple of his gold armlets clashed together. Discovering the goblet was empty, he called for a servant. A woman came in with a jar and refilled the goblet. “Ah, thank you, my dear,” Shazli said. He watched her sway out of the antechamber, then turned his attention back to Hajjaj: Zuwayzin saw too much flesh to let it unduly stir them. “If, as you seem to think, we are next on Swemmel’s list, what can we do to forestall him?”