Darkness Descending (93 page)

What made it hard to stay polite, though, was that the Algarvians didn’t mean he was lucky to be alive after the redheaded soldier stabbed him. They meant he was lucky the occupying authorities hadn’t seized him, tied him to a post, put a blindfold on him, and blazed him.

One of Mezentio’s officers wagged a forefinger under Talsu’s nose. “You are a fortunate fellow in that the military governor for this district is an easygoing old man who would sooner swive his pretty young mistress than do his job. With most of his kind ...” And the fellow drew that finger across his own throat.

“Oh, aye, I’m about the luckiest man in the world,” Talsu agreed. By then, he’d said it so often, he managed to sound as if he believed it. The Algarvian captain shut up and left him alone.

But what right did the redheads have to take any woman who struck their fancy? What right did they have to pick a fight with someone who happened to be a Jelgavan woman’s friend? What right did they have to stab someone who didn’t care for their lewdness?

The right of the conqueror.
That was what they would answer. That Algarvian had proved his answer with the point of his knife and had got off scot free. Talsu didn’t have so sharp a counterargument.

“Well, Father, it will be awhile yet before I can run around and get in trouble like I could before,” he told his father that evening as Traku was closing up the shop.

Traku started to slap him on the shoulder, as he would have done before Talsu made the acquaintance of a blade. He stopped awkwardly, the motion half completed. Any jar hurt Talsu these days. Embarrassed at himself, Traku said, “I wouldn’t mind if you did.”

“I wouldn’t mind if I did, either,” Talsu said, “but I can’t, not for a while. I haven’t got the strength to haul rocks or break them, either. But you taught me the needle and scissors, so I can still bring in money.”

“Once upon a time, the way fathers will, I hoped you’d make something better than a tailor of yourself,” his father answered, barring the door. “But you couldn’t hope to rise too far out of your class, and I’m glad you’re content to stay where you are.” That wasn’t exactly what Talsu had said. Before he could tell his father so, Traku went on, “And if you want to right about now, I bet we could fix up a marriage for you that’s in our class, and the arrangements would go like
that.”
He snapped his fingers.

Talsu flushed. “D’you really think so?” he mumbled.

“Aye, I do,” Traku said. “Gailisa’s never hated you, you know, and now that you took on the redheads to keep them from doing whatever they would have done to her, she really thinks the sun rises and sets on your head.”

A slow smile stretched across Talsu’s face. “Aye, I had noticed that. She’s come visiting a lot since I got stuck, hasn’t she?”

“Just a bit,” his father said solemnly. “Pretty girl. Good girl, too, and that counts for more in the long run, though you can’t always see as much when you’re young. She’s grateful to you, sure enough.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. “She shows it, too, in ways that count. “We haven’t eaten this well since before the war. If you end up deciding needle and scissors and tape measure and tailoring magic don’t suit you, you might have yourself a grocer’s shop instead.”

“I’m not going to worry about that right now,” Talsu said. A delicious smell floated down the stairs. He grinned. “I’d sooner worry about supper—stuffed cabbage, or my nose has gone daft.”

“The rest of you, maybe. Your nose, no.” His father held out a hand. “Do you want some help getting up the steps?”

“I can manage,” Talsu said. “It doesn’t hurt as much as it used to.” Going up or down stairs, especially up them, made him raise his legs higher than usual, which meant the healing muscles in his flanks had to work harder. Up he went, slowly. Saying it hurt less than it had was true, but didn’t mean it didn’t hurt at all.

He made it, though, and made it without gritting his teeth more than a couple of times. That was a sizable improvement on the bent-over hobbling he’d done when he first came home. And once, a few days before, he’d stumbled going up the stairs. He’d thought he was going to come to pieces. He’d rather hoped he would, in fact; he hadn’t hurt so much since just after he got stabbed.

He also had to sit carefully. Once he was at the table and had taken a couple of deep breaths, the pain eased. It didn’t go away, but it eased. His sister Ausra set a heaping plate in front of him. He dug in. The sauce, sharp with vinegar and sweet with honey, livened up the cabbage and the mix of meat and barley with which it was stuffed. “Good,” he said enthusiastically—and blurrily, because he didn’t bother swallowing first. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me—thank your lady friend,” his sister answered. “She’s the one who got us the ground mutton and the honey.”

“My lady friend,” Talsu echoed. “I guess maybe she is.”

His father coughed. His mother smiled. His sister laughed out loud. “Of course she is, you dunderhead,” Ausra said. “She’s as much your friend as you want her to be.”

Traku had said the same thing. Hearing it from another woman, though, made it somehow seem more real, more immediate. (Not that thinking of Ausra as a woman rather than as a brat and a nuisance of a little sister didn’t feel strange.) “Well, maybe,” Talsu muttered.

“No maybes about it—it’s true.” That wasn’t his sister, but his mother—and Laitsina spoke with great certainty.

Traku coughed again. “What I told him was, he could stay a tailor if he chose, or he could go into the grocer’s line if he didn’t. Pass me that pitcher of wine, will you, Ausra?”

Talsu’s ears burned. “Don’t you think it’s rude to run somebody’s life for him right in front of his face?” he asked the rest of his family.

Ausra stuck out her tongue at him. “Would you rather have us run your life behind your back?” she asked.

“I’d rather you didn’t try to run it at all,” Talsu said. “I had enough of that and to spare in the army, even if the food is better here.”

“The food wasn’t much better here till a little while ago,” Ausra said, not about to give in. “And why is it now? Gailisa, that’s why.”

If they’d teased him about Gailisa anymore, he thought he might start hating the grocer’s pretty daughter. Such irks always lasted till Gailisa came into the tailor’s shop, at which point they blew away like fog in the Bratanu Mountains. So it was again the next morning, when she walked in while he was cutting the pieces for an Algarvian officer’s cloak.

“Hello,” she said, and then, “How are you feeling today?”

Waggling the palm of his hand back and forth, he answered, “Not bad. I am getting better.” If he said that often enough, maybe he’d believe it was true.

“That’s good,” she said, nodding, hanging on his every word. “I’m glad to hear it. Those Algarvians have never been back since .. . since the day you had trouble.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Talsu said. “Here’s hoping they get sent to Unkerlant, or maybe to the land of the Ice People.”

His father made a sour face. “They’re winning both places, if you believe the news sheets. Even if you only believe a quarter of what’s in the news sheets, they’re still winning.” Traku opened a drawer, rattled through it, and slammed it shut, then did the same with another. Shaking his head, he muttered, “Must have left the fool thing upstairs. I’ll be back when I find it.” Off he went, leaving his son alone with Gailisa.

Talsu was convinced his father had done that on purpose. By the way she smiled, so was Gailisa. “Your father is a nice man,” she said, which, to Talsu, only proved she didn’t know Traku all that well.

He laughed. Gailisa raised an eyebrow and waited to hear what he had to say. After a moment’s thought, he said it: “I don’t know but what we had more fun when you were snippy all the time. You keep treating me like I’m one of the powers above and I’m liable to start believing it, and then where would we be?”

“Here in Skrunda, probably,” Gailisa answered. “It’s hard to be snippy with you after you did what you did, you know what I mean? I liked you before, and then—” She stopped and turned red.

Before Talsu could say anything to that, his side twinged. He grabbed it and grunted. Sound and movement were altogether involuntary. After it eased a little, he said, “I’m glad it made you like me better, but I’m not so glad as all that, if you hear what I’m telling you.”

“Of course I do,” Gailisa said. “I thought you were going to die, right there on the floor.”

“So did I,” Talsu said. “Thanks for getting help so fast.”

“You’re welcome,” she answered. Then she walked over to him, put her arms around him, and kissed him. “I like this better than being snippy. What do you think of that?”

“I think I like it, too,” Talsu told her. “Kiss me again, so I can find out for sure.” She did. When Traku came downstairs, neither one of them noticed him. He went back up again, chuckling under his breath.

After the narrow valley in which Kunhegyes lay, the vast expanse of western Unkerlant seemed all the more enormous to Istvan. And the forest of pine and spruce and fir ahead looked big enough to cover half the world.

Staring, Istvan said, “We spent more than half a year fighting our way through the mountains and down onto the flatlands, and now we have to go through
this!
We could be another year on the way.” If anything, that was liable to be a low guess. The forest might swallow anything, up to and including a Gyongyosian army.

“It’s not so bad as that, Sergeant.” Captain Tivadar took a map out of a leather map case and pointed at the red lines snaking through the green on the paper. “Here, do you see? Plenty of roads going through.”

“Aye, sir,” Istvan said. He could hardly disagree, not when he was a sergeant, a cobbler’s son, talking to an officer with a fancy pedigree. He did add, “What do you want to bet, though, that King Swemmel’s men fight at every crossroads?”

“If it were going to be easy, we would already have done it,” Tivadar answered. He pointed ahead, then to the map again, and nodded in satisfaction. “See? There’s the highway we’ve been following.”

“Aye, sir,” Istvan repeated. The alleged highway wouldn’t have been much of a road even in the Gyongyosian valley where he’d just spent his leave. It was narrow, twisting, altogether unpaved, and at the moment muddy. It disappeared among the trees as if it had no intention of ever coming out the other side—if the forest had another side.

“Onward, then,” Tivadar said. “This is splendid timber, some of the finest in the world. If we can find ley lines to take it away, it’ll make Gyongyos rich.”

If there were any ley lines in this stars-forsaken country, the Unkerlanters would have cut down the forest and hauled it away themselves. So Istvan thought, at any rate. Since they hadn’t, ley lines were likely to be few and far between—or perhaps they really were just undiscovered out here on the edge of nowhere. But Tivadar had his orders, and had given Istvan his.

Istvan turned to his squad. “Forward!” he called. “Into the woods. We’re going to take them away from the accursed Unkerlanters.”

“Aye,” the troopers chorused. They were warriors, of a proud warrior race. They would obey. Even bespectacled Corporal Kun, lean and knowing and gratingly sophisticated, said, “Aye,” with the rest as they advanced on the forest.

Szonyi said, “I wonder if they’ve got egg-tossers in there, waiting for us to get right up to the edge of the trees before they let us have it.” He sighed. “Only way to find out is the hard way.”

“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Istvan said, more in resignation than anything else. “Well, they haven’t killed us yet, so we’re still ahead of the game.” As other sergeants and officers were doing, he raised his voice: “Come on, you miserable lugs, get moving. Somewhere in there, we’ve got Unkerlanters to flush out.”

He and his men tramped across the meadow that led to the forest. The grass was a brilliant green, far brighter than the nearly black needles on the trees ahead. Yellow ox-eye gentian and red clover brightened the meadow more. Butterflies flitted from flower to flower. Some sort of ground squirrel, not long out of its burrow after a long winter’s nap, stood up on its hind legs and chattered indignantly at the soldiers marching past.

And then, off to Istvan’s left, the ground erupted in a roar. A trooper shrieked, but not for long. Istvan stared up at the sky. No dragons wheeled there, only a rusty-red jay like the ones he might have seen at home. And no more eggs were flying through the air to land on the advancing Gyongyosians.

Someone else shouted out what flashed through his mind: “Have a care, all! The stinking sons of goats have buried eggs under the meadow. Tromp on one and you’ll never tromp on anything else.”

All at once, Istvan wanted to walk above the grass. His bowels knotted with every step he took. Kun spat and said, “I wonder how much fun we’ll have going down the highway that’s supposed to run through the forest.”

Istvan didn’t like thinking about that, either. “Have we got any mages who can sniff out buried eggs for us?” He asked the question in a loud, hopeful voice. Nobody responded to it. Istvan rounded on Kun. “What about you? You were a mage’s apprentice, after all.”

Kun bared his teeth in what was anything but a smile. “If I could, do you think I’d be stomping along like everybody else?”

“No law against hoping, is there?” Istvan said.

“No, and there’s no law against stupidity, either, though there cursed well ought to be,” Kun retorted. That was insubordinate, but Istvan let it slide. He knew why Kun was unhappy. He was unhappy for the same reason himself.

Another egg burst, this one half a mile over to the right. Istvan couldn’t hear whether the luckless Gyongyosian who’d trodden on it shrieked or not. He ground his teeth and kept going. Half a minute later, yet another burst shattered the morning calm. A magpie screeched annoyance at having its hunt for worms and crickets and maybe mice disturbed.

Higher and higher, the trees loomed ahead. But for the roadway that led into the forest, no one had ever taken an axe to it. Gyongyos had few woods like this, and none so vast. People were scattered thinly over this part of the world; it looked, Istvan judged, much as it had when the stars first shone down on it.