Into the Darkness (47 page)

Gulls, some with white heads, some with dark, rose in angry, skrawking clouds as he and Ramalho drew near. “Miserable beggars,” Ramalho said, his tone halfway between annoyance and affection. “If we fed them, they would love us instead of making such a fuss.”

Cornelu shrugged. The Lagoans fed him. In their offhand way, they tried to be kind to him. He recognized as much. Even so, he could not love them. Ramalho chattered on. If he had any notion what his companion was thinking, he gave no sign of it.

“Well, here we are,” the Lagoan lieutenant said gaily as he led Cornelu up a short wooden staircase and opened the door at the top, standing aside so Cornelu could precede him. Cornelu’s shoulders went back and then forward in a silent sigh. He wondered how, if Lagoas had men like this, Sibiu had ever come out on the short end of their naval wars in centuries past.

When he got a look at the men who stood to greet him, he reluctantly stopped wondering. Here, by all appearances, were Lagoan naval officers who might have stepped from the pages of a Sibian romance: arrogant, aye, but with solid ability underlying the arrogance. “Commander Cornelu,” one of them said, and then went on in his own language: “You speak Lagoan?”

Cornelu understood the question, and could answer “No” in Lagoan—one of the few polite expressions out of the handful of words and phrases he’d picked up.

“Right.” The Lagoan officer spoke good Algarvian, and didn’t try to turn it into Sibian, as Ramalho ineptly kept doing. “We can get along in this tongue, I expect.” He waited for Cornelu to nod, then continued, “I am Commodore Ribeiro; my colleague here is Captain Ebastiao.” After handclasps, the commodore suddenly seemed to remember Ramalho was there. “Run along, Lieutenant,” he said, and Ramalho disappeared.

Ebastiao also handled himself well in Algarvian, saying, “That’s a fine leviathan you rode here. You Sibs have always been good at getting the most out of those beasts.”

“For this I thank you.” Cornelu stiffly inclined his head. “And this is why I have been summoned here, this matter of leviathans?” He realized he was speaking Sibian himself, and started to translate into the language the Lagoan officers had shown they knew.

Commodore Ribeiro made a chopping gesture. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I expect Ebastiao and I can follow your jargon well enough, even if we wouldn’t care to try wrapping our tongues around it.” He poked the other Lagoan officer in the ribs with an elbow. “Eh, Ebastiao?”

“I expect so, sir,” Ebastiao said, nodding. “And if we don’t know what the commander is talking about, maybe he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, either, eh?” He had narrow, slanted eyes; they would have been perfect Kuusaman eyes had they been dark rather than gray. The lid to one of them dipped in an unmistakable wink aimed Cornelu’s way.

Cornelu didn’t know how to respond to that. The Sibian navy enforced almost as much distance between ranks as did those of Valmiera and Jelgava. Cornelu tried to imagine Commodore Delfinu winking at him. He shook his head. Inconceivable. He stood still, waiting to see what the Lagoans would do next. You couldn’t tell ahead of time with Lagoans. That was part of what made them dangerous.

Ebastiao said, “What we have in mind for you, Commander, is working with our leviathan riders, teaching them some of your tricks—bringing them up to speed generally, you might say—and then commencing patrols out from our shores and as close to Sibiu as proves practicable.”

“That’s right.” Ribeiro nodded. “We don’t relish the notion of being taken by surprise, as your kingdom was. We shall have leviathans patrolling as far forward as possible, as Ebastiao told you—we shall do our best to equip the riders with crystals, that they may expeditiously report what they see. We shall have the navy moving along the ley lines. We shall also put yachts to see, to peer in between the lines, so to speak.”

“I doubt you will need them,” Cornelu said bitterly. “Some tricks work only once. This one worked on us.”

“Better to have and not need than to need and not have,” Ribeiro replied. “And we shall have long-distance dowsers out along the coasts—as your kingdom should have done, if I may speak frankly without giving offense.”

“Looking back, you are right,” Cornelu said. “But who could have thought ahead of time that even Algarvians would be mad enough to try such a stunt? Had it failed—” He scowled. It had not failed.

“Let’s go back to your place in this,” Ebastiao said. Commodore Ribeiro looked at the broad picture. His subordinate dealt with details. In that, the Lagoan navy operated like its Sibian counterpart—no, as its Sibian counterpart had done. Ebastiao went on, “You will train our men up to your standards. You will, as circumstances permit, draft a manual of training techniques so others may use them. And you will—you most assuredly will—patrol and, again as circumstances permit, take the war to the foe in and around Sibian waters. Will that put enough on your plate to keep you hopping?”

“Aye,” Cornelu said hastily. He was indeed a tool to the Lagoans. But, at last, they were seeing he could be a sharp one.

Ealstan and Sidroc had a day free from school. They and some of their classmates were kicking a ball around in a park not far from Ealstan’s home, along with a few boys—some older, some younger—they’d met there. It wasn’t really a game—how could it be, with no goals, no nets, no properly marked pitch? They were just running and shouting and having as good a time as they could in occupied Gromheort.

It had rained the night before. Mud splashed up from under Ealstan’s shoes as he sprinted toward the beat-up old ball. He and his cousin would come home filthy. His mother would shout at them. He knew that, somewhere in the back of his mind, and was vaguely sorry about it—but not enough to stop running.

Here came Sidroc, too, so intent on the ball that he didn’t notice Ealstan. Joy burst through Ealstan like the sun bursting out from behind clouds. He lowered his shoulder and knocked his cousin sprawling. Sidroc went rolling through the muck. With a wild shout of triumph, Ealstan booted the ball toward a little grove of carob trees. The pack of boys dashed after it.

“Curse you, Ealstan!” Sidroc shouted, spitting mud out of his mouth. He scrambled to his feet.

“Powers below eat you!” Ealstan called back over his shoulder. “I got you fair and square.”

Three strides later, somebody—he never saw who—got him fair and square. He was briefly airborne, like a dragon taking wing. Unlike a dragon taking wing, he didn’t stay airborne. He landed on his belly and skidded along the muddy ground for a good ten feet. His mother would yell, all right—the front of his tunic, he discovered as he got up, was nothing but brown and green. It had started out grayish blue.

He charged after the ball, which had gone its own merry way while he was down. As he ran, he brushed mud from his tunic—and from his arms. He was as grimy as some of the ragged men who stood around watching the boys at their sport.

Before the war, Gromheort had been a quietly prosperous town. Oh, it had some derelicts; Ealstan’s father said there was no place in the world that didn’t have some derelicts, which made sense to Ealstan. Now, though, with so many homes and shops destroyed, with so many former soldiers around whom the occupying authorities hadn’t bothered formally capturing, Gromheort seemed full of men—and some women, too—living as they could, cadging what they could, sleeping where they could.

One of them, a scrawny fellow with an unkempt beard who wore a tunic much too small, started to wave when Ealstan ran past. Ealstan saw him only from the corner of his eye. The ragged men often begged for coins. If he happened to have any, he sometimes gave them out. When he did, he thought of Leofsig, who, in the captives’ camp, couldn’t get even that much help. Today, though, Ealstan had left his belt pouch at home; kicking a ball around was as good a way to lose a pouch as any he could think of offhand.

Then the beggar who’d waved called his name.

Ealstan stopped dead. Sidroc, who’d been about to hit him from the side, skidded past and nearly went down in the mud again. Ealstan didn’t even notice his cousin had almost clipped him. He trotted out of the game, staring at the man he’d taken for a derelict.

“Leof—” he began.

“Don’t say it,” his brother cautioned. He coughed a couple of times before continuing. “I’m not exactly here on official business, you know.”

He hadn’t been released, then, as Ealstan had guessed. He’d escaped. The pride Ealstan felt for his brother swelled enormously. “How did you —?”

Leofsig cut him off again. “Don’t ask stupid questions. And speaking of stupid questions—” He pointed with his chin. Sidroc was coming up.

“Found your own level?” Ealstan’s cousin asked with a hard, sour laugh. “Beggars now? It’ll probably be Kaunians next.”

“I should have wrung your neck years ago,” Leofsig said evenly. “Are you trying to show me it’s not too late?”

Sidroc started to get angry. Then, far more slowly than Ealstan had, he recognized Leofsig. “I thought you were in a camp,” he blurted.

“So did the fornicating redheads,” Leofsig said. “And don’t talk about Kaunians like that. You drip ignorance.”

Sidroc rolled his eyes. “You sound like Ealstan.”

“Do I?” Leofsig glanced at his younger brother. “Are you growing up? Maybe you are. Here’s hoping, anyhow.”

“We’ve got to get you home,” Ealstan said.

“I didn’t want to go straight there—didn’t know how risky it was.” Leofsig’s face took on a look of bleak, cold calculation: the look of the hunted. “The Algarvians haven’t been paying you any special attention?” He waited for both Ealstan and Sidroc to shake their heads before going on. “All right, we’ll try it. Ealstan, you run ahead. Let them know I’m on the way. Sidroc, you come along with me. Keep me company. It’s been a while.”

Ealstan ran like the wind. He’d never run so hard after a ball, not in all his born days. A couple of Algarvian soldiers gave him fishy looks, but he was young enough to look like someone running for the fun of it, not someone running because he’d just done something nasty to one of their pals. One of the Algarvians shrugged, the other made a mildly disparaging gesture, and they walked on.

He kept running. He pounded on the front door to his house. When his sister unbarred it, alarm filled her face. “Ealstan! You’re filthy!” she exclaimed. “And have you gone crazy? Mother and I thought you were a squad of redheads, come to tear the place apart or worse.”

“They’d better not,” Ealstan panted. All at once, how hard he’d run caught up with him. He pushed past Conberge into the short front hall, closed the door behind him, and barred it again. When his sister began to give him more of a hard time about the way he looked, he said, “Shut up.” That made her start to shout; he wasn’t supposed to speak to her so. He knew how to make her stop, though: “Leofsig is on the way home. He’s coming with Sidroc. He’ll be here in about five minutes.”

Conberge went on for another couple of words before she really heard that. Then she hugged him, regardless of how grubby he was. “Did the Algarvians let him go?” she asked. “Why didn’t they tell us if they let him go?”

“Because they’re Algarvians,” Ealstan answered. “And because they didn’t let him go. But he’ll be here any minute, all the same.”

His sister understood at once what he was saying. “He’ll have to hide, won’t he?” Without waiting for an answer, she went on, “You’d better tell Mother. She’ll know what to do.”

“Of course she will.” Ealstan was just young enough to say that without sounding sardonic. “Is she in the kitchen?” Conberge nodded. She stayed by the door, ready to slam it shut the instant Leofsig crossed the threshold.

When Ealstan burst into the kitchen, his mother looked up from the garlic cloves she was mincing. Her look was much more ominous than the one the Algarvian soldiers had turned on him. “What happened to you?” Elfryth demanded in tones that said he had no possible answer.

He found one anyhow: “Leofsig’s right behind me. He’s coming with Sidroc.”

“Powers above!” his mother said softly. Unlike Conberge, she didn’t think for an instant that the Algarvians had released Leofsig. In tones suddenly brisk and practical, she went on, “You had better go tell your father. He’s casting accounts for Womer —you know, the linen merchant on the Street of the Green Unicorn. Go tell him right now. No—change your tunic first. Then go. You’ll look like a proper human being, so you won’t frighten Womer half to death.”

“Why do I care about frightening Womer?” Ealstan rather liked the idea.

Elfryth looked at him as if he were five years old and none too bright. “We don’t want to draw anyone’s notice to us, not now, not for anything,” she said. “Now go get your father. He’ll know which redheads’ palms we’ll have to grease to stay out of trouble.”

By the time Ealstan had on a clean tunic, Conberge was embracing Leofsig in the front hall. She even hugged Sidroc, and her dealings with her cousin were edgy at best. Ealstan squeezed past them all and out the door. As he started away, he was glad to hear someone bar it behind him.

The Street of the Green Unicorn wasn’t far from Count Brorda’s battered keep. Most of Ealstan’s father’s clients came from the upper crust of Gromheort. Hestan was best at what he did; no wonder he dealt with folk who were best at what they did.

Womer’s secretary was a big, scarred man who looked as if he hated everything and everybody. But when Ealstan said whose son he was and added, “My mother’s been taken ill, sir,” the secretary led him back to the large ledgers his father was poring over with the linen merchant.

Hestan looked up from the books. “Ealstan!” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Mother’s sick, sir,” Ealstan said, as he had to Womer’s secretary. “She wants you to come home.”

What his father’s face showed was terror. Ealstan, fortunately, didn’t quite recognize it. Hestan sprang to his feet. “Your pardon, sir, I pray you,” he said to Womer. “I’ll be back as soon as I may.”

“Go on, go on.” Womer made as if to shove him out the door. “I hope everything turns out well for you.”

Once they were on the street, Ealstan said, “Mother’s not really ill, sir.” Hestan seized his arm. He thought he was about to get a very public thrashing. But, again, he knew the charm to get himself out of it: “My brother’s come home.”