Darkness Descending (86 page)

“I took after my father, too, once upon a time,” Ethelhelm said. “Took after him with a carving knife, as a matter of fact. Didn’t catch him, though.”

Ealstan couldn’t imagine going after his father with a knife. Uncle Hengist? That was a different story. Ealstan wondered how Sidroc was doing, if he was hale, whether he’d gone off to fight for the Algarvians yet. He rather hoped Sidroc had. That would be the easiest on everyone—except perhaps Sidroc.

“I’d better get back,” Ealstan said, rising to his feet. He couldn’t suppress a pang of disappointment at leaving Ethelhelm’s large, airy, elegantly decorated flat and having to go back to his own, which was none of those things. Ethelhelm was a wealthy young man; Ealstan knew to the copper just how wealthy the musician was. He’d made a fortune before the war broke out and had managed to hold onto most of it despite Eoforwic’s occupation first by the Unkerlanters and then by the Algarvians.

What with the business Ealstan had, not only from Ethelhelm but also from his other clients, he could have afforded better than the nasty little flat in which he and Vanai were living. He could have afforded better, but he didn’t dare move. If he went to a better neighborhood, Vanai would draw more notice. That was the last thing he wanted, especially now that the redheads had herded all the Kaunians into one cramped bit of Eoforwic.

Ethelhelm came with him to the door and set a hand on his arm. “You’re a good fellow, Ealstan. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of you—or meeting your lady, either.”

“Thank you,” Ealstan said, and meant it. Not all his father’s clients—probably not even half his father’s clients—dealt with Hestan socially, as opposed to on business matters. And for Ethelhelm to say that about Vanai. . . Ealstan bowed. “We’d like that, too. But with things the way they are, I don’t know how we’d manage it.”

Ethelhelm had never seen Vanai in person, and Ealstan made a point of not referring to her by name. But the musician had shown, as much by what he didn’t say and didn’t ask as by what he did, that he had a good notion she was a Kaunian. “With things the way they are,” he echoed. “Well, here’s hoping they don’t stay that way forever, my friend. You be careful, do you hear me?”

Ealstan laughed; it might have been his father’s laugh coming out of his mouth. “You’re talking to a bookkeeper, remember? If I weren’t careful, what would I be?”

“Who knows what you’d be?” Ethelhelm answered. He hesitated; maybe he was wondering how much he ought to say or whether to say anything. At last, he decided to: “You aren’t careful all the time, or you’d be somebody with a different lady, or with no lady at all.”

“I suppose so,” Ealstan said. “But I’m careful now, by the powers above. I have to be.” He didn’t wait for Ealstan to reply but stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind him. Then he hurried downstairs. These stairs were carpeted, not bare, battered boards. They didn’t smell of cabbage and beans and occasionally of urine. Ealstan sighed. He liked comfort. He’d grown up in comfort. He’d thrown it aside for love—and if that wasn’t the hoariest cliché in bad romances, he didn’t know what was. Vanai made him happy—made him joyful—in ways he’d never imagined before, but that didn’t mean he was immune to missing his comforts.

Out on the streets, Eoforwic had the pallid, threadbare look of every other Forthwegian town in the third year of a war long lost. But Eoforwics was a more genteel, more splendid shabbiness than, say, Gromheorts. The white-bearded man who strode past Ealstan wore a herringbone wool tunic shiny with age at the elbows and seat and with a frayed collar, but a garment that would have cost a lot new.

All the capital was like that. Buildings ruined in one round of fighting or another still showed fine bones. Buildings that hadn’t been ruined also hadn’t been kept up. Brickwork was filthy; weeds pushed their way into the sunlight between paving slabs. But the memory of what had been persisted. If Ealstan let his eyes drift a little out of focus, he could imagine Eoforwic with King Penda ruling it, not an Algarvian governor general.

When he got back to his own neighborhood, he didn’t need to let his eyes go unfocused. This part of town had been grimy and unkempt during King Penda’s reign. Of that he had no doubt whatever. Even the stray dogs on the narrow, winding streets moved warily, as if afraid of having their belt pouches slit.

Sure enough, the stairwell in his block of flats stank of piss. He wondered which neighbor had got drunk and been unable to hold it in. It was curiosity of the most abstract sort; he didn’t really want to find out.

He knocked on the door to the flat he shared with Vanai in the rhythm of a Forthwegian children’s verse. She unbarred the door, which she wouldn’t have done had he knocked in an ordinary way. An ordinary knock meant a stranger, and strangers, these days, were deadly dangerous to Kaunians.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Ealstan said, and quickly slipped inside. He barred the door again before Vanai could. The bar was reinforced with iron. The brackets on which it rested and the screws that secured those brackets to the wall were the strongest Ealstan could find, far stronger than the ones the landlord had used in the flat. Anyone who wanted to come in after Vanai wouldn’t have an easy time of it.

“Tell me everything you did,” Vanai said after they’d kissed. “Everything, from the moment you went out the door.” Cooped up in here, she relied on him to be her eyes and ears on the outside world, as a blind man might rely on a cleverly trained dog to take him through streets he could not see.

His arms still around her, Ealstan obliged. Not only did he have a good memory for detail, he also had a most appreciative audience. And, as he talked, his hands wandered, now to the small of Vanai’s back, now farther down, now straying upward to cup her breast. Touching her got him as drunk as wine did, with never a hangover afterwards.

She snuggled against him, too. He’d discovered she didn’t like being surprised by touch. Her face would go hard and tight, and she would stand as stiff as if carved from wood. Something bad must have happened to her back in Oyngestun, but she’d never said what it was, and he didn’t have the nerve to ask. But when she wasn’t taken aback, he pleased her as much as she pleased him.

And what he had to say pleased her this evening. “Ethelhelm said that about me?” she demanded, and made Ealstan repeat it. “He said that? Really? He
is
a good fellow, isn’t he?” She paused and lost a little of her glow. “Of course, he’s also supposed to be part Kaunian himself.”

“Aye—but I think he would have said the same thing even if he weren’t,” Ealstan answered. “You don’t have to be part Kaunian to like Kaunians—I ought to know.” He stroked her hair. She tilted her face up. They kissed for a long time.

At last Vanai broke away. “Let me go take the pot off the fire so supper doesn’t scorch,” she said. She was gone only a moment. Then they went into the bedchamber together.

When they’d finished, they lay side by side for a while, one of her legs hooked over his. He leaned over, taking his weight on an elbow, so he could caress her with his free hand. He knew he would rise again pretty soon; at seventeen, he could make love about as often as he wanted to. But his stomach had other things on its mind, and growled loud enough for Vanai to hear.

She giggled. Ealstan’s ears heated. She said, “Shall we eat now? We can always come back.” With so little else to do and with both of them so young, they spent a lot of time in the bedchamber.

As if to leave no possible doubt about its opinion, Ealstan’s stomach rumbled again. He laughed, which was the easiest way to hide his embarrassment. “All right,” he said. “I’d better, or my belly will shake the building down.”

He spooned up barley and onions and chopped almonds and a few tiny bits of smoked pork, thoughtfully smacking his lips. “You did something different this time.”

Vanai nodded. “You got me that fennel I asked for, so I used it.”

“Is that what it is?” Ealstan said. For Forthwegians, fennel was medicine, especially useful in hemorrhoid preparations. Kaunians did more cooking with it, a tradition that went back to the days of the Empire. Ealstan smacked his lips again. “Tastes better than I thought it would.” Listening to himself, he admired his own calm. He hoped Vanai did, too.

By the way the corners of her mouth twitched, she was trying not to smile, or maybe not to laugh out loud. “You shouldn’t have bought it if you didn’t expect me to put it in the food, you know.”

“I suppose not.” Valiantly, Ealstan kept eating. People did cook with fennel, and they didn’t perish as a result. He
had
bought this particular batch, and it
hadn’t
gone into a hemorrhoid cream. And when you got down to it, it wasn’t so bad. “Interesting flavor,” he admitted. This time Vanai did laugh.

They’d just finished supper when shouts down on the street made them both hurry to the window to find out what was going on. Night had already fallen, and the street was poorly lit, but Ealstan didn’t need long to make sense out of what was happening: a couple of men in kilts were forcing a fellow in trousers along the sidewalk. One of them took a bludgeon off his belt and walloped the luckless Kaunian, who cried out again. No one came to his rescue.

Gently, Ealstan pushed Vanai away from the window. “We have to be careful, sweetheart,” he said. “We don’t want them looking up here and seeing you.”

Two tears slid down her cheeks. By her expression, they were tears of rage. “No, of course we don’t,” she said, her voice quivering. “As long as I stay inside my trap here, I’m perfectly safe.”

Ealstan didn’t know how to answer her. He didn’t think there was any way to answer all the meanings she’d put into that. He did the best he could: “I love you.”

“I know you do,” Vanai said. “That just leaves the rest of the world out of the bargain.”

Once again, Ealstan found himself without a good reply.

Skarnu felt a certain amount of pride at going into Pavilosta by himself. He’d been staying on the farm once Gedominu’s for going on two years now: long enough for the locals to conclude he’d be around for a while, even if they’d call him things like
the new fellow
the rest of his days.

Silver jingled in the pockets of the homespun trousers Merkela had made for him. He needed a couple of drill bits. He knew more about them than Merkela did, and at least as much as Raunu, so he was the logical one to come and buy them. Even so, he felt small-boy enthusiasm for an outing of a sort he hadn’t enjoyed before.

Down in Priekule, he would have gone into an ironmonger’s, bought what he needed, and left with as much dispatch as he could. In a village like Pavilosta, he’d discovered, that was bad manners. A customer was supposed to pass the time of day rather than brusquely laying down his money. Skarnu found that peculiar, since the country folk were usually much more sparing of words than his old set back in the capital, but it was so.

After gossip about the weather, the way the crops were shaping, and a couple of juicy local scandals, Skarnu managed to make his escape. His time in and around Pavilosta had changed him more than he would have guessed, though, for instead of heading straight back to the farm, he ambled into the market square to see what he could see and hear what he could hear.

Maybe I’ll learn something to help in the fight against the redheads,
he thought. But he was too honest with himself to let that stand for long.
Maybe I’ll pick up something to make Merkela laugh or cluck.
That came closer to the truth, and he knew it.

Somehow or other, he found himself gravitating toward the enterprising taverner who was in the habit of setting out a table at the edge of the square. If he stood around and soaked up a mug of ale, or even a couple of mugs of ale, he wouldn’t look the least bit out of place. So he told himself, at any rate.

As a lure to the men who were both thirsty and curious, the taverner had set out a couple of copies of a news sheet that had come in from some larger town— from Ignalina in the east, Skarnu saw by the masthead. “Full of nonsense and drivel,” the taverner said as the noble picked up the sheet.

“Well, why do you have it, then?” Skarnu asked.

“To give people something to complain about, more than anything else,” the taverner answered. Skarnu laughed. The other fellow held out his hands. “What? D’you think I’m joking? See for yourself—you’ll find out.”

“I don’t need to read it to know it’ll be full of all the things the Algarvians want us to hear and empty of the ones they don’t,” Skarnu said.

“Right the first time,” the taverner said. “Some people believe the manure the news sheets print, if
you
can believe that, pal.” Skarnu nodded but said nothing. He would have bet that, while talking to people who got on well with the redheads, the taverner praised the news sheet to the skies. With him, the fellow went on, “Take a look at this here, for instance. Go on, just take a look at it.”

BALL IN THE CAPITAL CELEBRATES ALGARVIAN-VALMIERAN AMITY, the headline read. The subscription fees for the ball had gone to pay for relief for wounded Algarvian soldiers. Skarnu hoped die redheads needed to collect lots and lots of money for such a worthy cause.

The list of those who attended the ball showed what the Algarvians meant by amity, too. Pointing to it, Skarnu said, “It’s all their officers and our women.”

“Oh, aye—did you expect anything different?” the taverner said with a scornful sneer. “These noblewomen, they’re all whores, every cursed one of ’em.”

Skarnu started to bristle at that slur against his class. He had to remind himself that he wasn’t, at the moment, a member of his class. His eyes kept sliding down the list. It was always Brigadier and Viscount So-and-so, a redhead, coupled with Countess What’s-her-name, a Valmieran. He had no doubt that most of the pairs named were coupled literally as well as metaphorically.

Colonel and Count Lurcanio and Marchioness Krasta.
Skarnu almost missed that one pairing among so many. He stared and stared, wishing his eyes had gone on past without catching his sister’s name. What was she doing? What could she be doing? But that had an all too obvious answer.