Into the darkness d 1, p.58
Into the Darkness d-1, page 58
part #1 of Darkness Series
“No.” Ealstan decided to put the best light on things he could: “I was trading mushrooms with a friend, and we ended up trading baskets, too. We didn’t even know we’d done it till we’d both headed for home. Do you think Mother will be angry? It’s as nice as any of our baskets.”
His innocent tones wouldn’t have passed muster even if Sidroc hadn’t been standing there like an egg about to burst. “Trading mushrooms with a friend, were you?” his sister said, raising an eyebrow. “Was she pretty?”
Ealstan’s mouth fell open. He felt himself flushing. Forthwegians were swarthy, but not, he was mournfully sure, swarthy enough to keep a blush like his from showing. Before he could say anything, Sidroc did it for him—or to him: “I saw her. She’s pretty enough—for a Kaunian.”
“Oh,” Conberge said, and went back to sorting through the last few mushrooms.
Her other eyebrow had risen at Sidroc’s announcement, but that wasn’t a big enough reaction to suit him. “Didn’t you hear me?” he said loudly. “She’s a Kaunian. She wears her trousers very tight, too.” He ran his tongue over his lips.
“She does not!” Ealstan exclaimed. He found himself explaining to his sister: “Her name’s Vanai. She lives over in Oyngestun. We swapped mushrooms last year, too.”
“She’s a Kaunian,” Sidroc repeated yet again.
“I heard you the first time,” Conberge told him, an edge to her voice. “Do you know what you sound like? You sound like an Algarvian.”
If that was supposed to quell Sidroc, it failed. “So what if I do?” he said, tossing his head. “Everybody in this house sounds like a Kaunian-lover. You ask me, the redheads are going down the right ley line there.”
“Nobody asked you,” Ealstan growled. He was about to point out that Kaunians had helped his brother escape from the captives’ camp. At the last instant, he didn’t. His cousin had already spoken of something that sounded like blackmail. Ealstan didn’t think Sidroc meant it seriously, but didn’t see the need to give him more charges for his stick, either.
It was Sidroc’s turn to go red. Whatever he might have said then, he didn’t, because someone pounded on the front door. “That will be Leofsig,” Ealstan said. “Why don’t you go let him in?”
Sidroc went, looking glad to escape. Ealstan was glad to see him go before things started blazing again. By her sigh, so was Conberge. She said, “Powers above, but I wish Uncle Hengist would find someplace else to stay. He’s not so bad—in fact, he’s not bad at all, but Sidroc …” She rolled her eyes.
“They’re family,” Ealstan said.
“I know,” Conberge said. “We could be staying with them as easily as the other way round. I know that, too.” She sighed again. “But he is such a …” Her right hand folded into a fist. She’d been able to thump Ealstan right up to the day, a few years before, she’d decided it was unladylike. He didn’t think she could now, but he wouldn’t have cared to make the experiment.
“He knows everything,” Ealstan said. “If you don’t believe me, ask him.”
“He wants to know everything.” His sister’s fist got harder and tighter. In a low, furious voice, she blurted, “I think he’s tried to peek at me when I’m getting dressed.” Ealstan whirled in the direction Sidroc had gone. Maybe he had murder, or something close to it, on his face, because Conberge caught him by the arm and held him back. “No, don’t do anything. I don’t know for sure. I can’t prove it. I just think so.”
“That’s disgusting,” Ealstan said, but he eased enough so that Conberge let him go. “Does Mother know?”
She shook her head. “No. I haven’t told anybody. I wish I hadn’t told you, but I was fed up with him.”
“I don’t blame you,” Ealstan said. “If Father knew, though, he’d wallop him. Powers above, if Uncle Hengist knew, he’d wallop him, too.” He didn’t say what Leofsig might do. He was afraid to think about that it might be lethal. He took death and dying much more seriously than he had before the start of the war.
“Hush,” Conberge said now. “Here they come.” Ealstan nodded; he heard the approaching footsteps, too.
In Leofsig’s presence, Sidroc was more subdued than he was around Ealstan; Leofsig, visibly a man grown, intimidated him in ways Ealstan could not. At the moment, Leofsig was visibly a man grown tired. “Give me a cup of wine, Conberge,” he said, “something to cut the dust in my throat before I go down to the baths and get clean. The water will be cold, but I don’t care. Mother and Father won’t want me around smelling the way I do—I’m sure of that.”
As Conberge poured the wine, she said, “Mother and Father are glad to have you around no matter what—and so am I.”
Being Leofsig’s brother, Ealstan could say, “I’m not so sure I am,” and wrinkle his nose. Leofsig didn’t do anything but punch him in the upper arm, not too hard. But when Sidroc presumed to guffaw, both Ealstan and Leofsig gave him such stony stares, he took himself elsewhere in a hurry.
Leofsig drank down the rough red wine in three or four gulps. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his tunic. It was already so filthy, a little wine would do it no further harm. “That’s good,” he said. “The only trouble with it is, it makes me want to go to sleep, and I do need to bathe first.”
“You’re wearing yourself out, working as a laborer,” Conberge said worriedly. “You know enough to be Father’s assistant. I don’t see why you wear yourself out with a pick and shovel instead.”
“Aye, I know enough to be his assistant—and I know enough not to be, too,” Leofsig answered. “For one thing, he doesn’t really have so much work that he needs an assistant. For another, he’s good at what he does; he even casts accounts for some of the Algarvians in Gromheort these days. Remember, a lot of people quietly know I’m home. I want to make sure it stays quiet. If he takes me along to help him in front of the Algarvian governor, say, it won’t.”
“Well, that’s so,” Conberge admitted with a sigh. “But I hate to watch you wasting away to a nub.”
“Plenty of me left, never fear,” Leofsig said. “Remember how I was when I first got out of the camp? Then I was a nub, not now. Now all I do is stink, and I can take care of that.” He kissed his sister on the cheek and headed out again.
Conberge sighed once more. “I wish he’d stay in more. No matter how well we’ve paid off the redheads, they will notice him if he makes them do it.”
“That’s what he just told you,” Ealstan answered. Conberge made a face at him. He didn’t feel too happy about it himself, because he knew his sister had a point. He said, “If he stayed in all the time, he’d feel like a bear in a cage at the zoological gardens.”
“I’d rather have him be a live bear in a cage than a bearskin rug in front of some Algarvian’s divan,” Conberge said. Ealstan stood there looking unhappy; she’d turned his own figure against him too neatly for him to do anything else.
The metaphorical bear came back about half an hour later, clean but looking thoroughly grim. Before Ealstan or Conberge could ask him what was wrong, he told them: “The Algarvians have hanged a Kaunian in the market square in front of the baths. He was one of the fellows who escaped with me.”
Leofsig reported to his labor gang the next morning wondering if he should be lying low instead. If the redheads had squeezed the Kaunian hard enough before they hanged him, or if the fellow had sung on his own, trying to save his own skin, the new masters of Gromheort would be able to scoop him up with the greatest of ease.
Had the escaped and recaptured captive sung, though, the Algarvians could have surrounded his house and dragged him away in irons the night before. He took that to mean the Kaunian had kept quiet, or maybe that the redheads hadn’t known the right questions to ask.
No kilted soldiers shouted his name and pointed sticks at him. A couple of them, the friendlier ones, nodded as he came up to report. The one who bossed his group gave forth with another of his two-words bursts of Forthwegian: “Working good!”
“Aye,” Leofsig said. He sounded unenthusiastic. The soldier laughed a laugh that said he wasn’t slamming down cobblestones himself.
But Leofsig, unlike a lot of his comrades, honestly did not mind the work. Before he’d gone into King Penda’s levy, he’d been a student and an apprentice bookkeeper: he’d worked with his head, not with his hands and back. In the Forthwegian army, though, he’d discovered, as some bright young men do, that work with the hands and back had satisfactions of its own. A job wasn’t right or wrong, only done or undone, and getting it from undone to done required only time and effort, not thought. He could think about other things or, if he chose to, about nothing at all.
And, in the army and on the labor gang, he’d hardened in a way he’d never imagined. Only muscle lay between skin and bone, but more muscle than he’d dreamt of carrying. He’d been on the plump side before going into the army. His service there and in the gang would have taken care of that even without the intervening months in the captives’ camp. He doubted he’d ever be plump again.
“All right!” the Algarvian straw boss shouted. “We go. Work hard. Plenty cobblestones.” Sure enough, he sounded perfectly happy. A lot of people got even more satisfaction from watching others do hard physical labor than from doing it themselves.
Under his two-word bursts of what he thought was enthusiasm, the labor gang tramped down a road leading northwest till they got to the point where the cobbles stopped. They’d worked on the road leading southwest till they’d gone too far for them to march out from Gromheort, do a decent day’s work, and then march back. Laborers—a lot of them probably Kaunian laborers—from towns and villages farther on down that road would be paving it now.
Mule-drawn wagons hauled the labor gang’s tools and the stones with which they would be paving this stretch of road. The wagons’ iron tires rattled and banged over the cobblestones already in the roadway. Leofsig’s comrade Burgred winced at the racket. “Shouldn’t have had so much wine last night,” he said. “My head wants to fall off, and I bloody well wish it would.”
“Wagons wouldn’t make so much noise on a dirt road, sure enough,” Leofsig said, showing more sympathy than he felt—nobody’d held a stick to Burgred’s head and made him get drunk, and if this was the first hangover he’d ever had, then Leofsig was a slant-eyed Kaunian. He went on, “Of course, they’d go hub-deep in mud when it rained. The redheads don’t want that.”
“I wish I’d go hub-deep in mud about now,” Burgred said—sure enough, he was much the worse for wear this morning.
Passing by some meadow mushrooms, Leofsig stepped out into the field in which they grew to pick them and store them in his belt pouch. “Meadow mushrooms are better than no mushrooms at all,” he said to Burgred. He had to repeat himself, because the noise from the wagons was particularly fierce. Burgred looked as if the only mushrooms he would have wanted then were some of the lethal variety, to put him out of his misery.
Like most Algarvians, the straw boss had a low opinion of what Forthwegians and Kaunians reckoned delicacies. “Mushrooms bad,” he said, sticking out his tongue and making a horrible face. “Mushrooms poisonous. Mushrooms disgusting.” He spat on a cobblestone.
“Powers above,” Leofsig said softly. “Even the yellow-hairs know better than that.” Kaunians and local delicacies were both on his mind; he’d heard rather different versions from Sidroc and from his own brother about the Kaunian girl Ealstan had met in the woods while out hunting mushrooms. Sidroc had them all but betrothed, but Sidroc’s mouth generally outran his wits.
Leofsig eyed Burgred. Mentioning Kaunians to him was a calculated jab. He responded to it, sure enough, but not in the way Leofsig had expected, saying, “Ought to hang all the stinking Kaunians, same as the redheads hanged that one bugger back in town. Serve ’em right.”
“They’re not that bad,” Leofsig said, which was about as far as he could go without putting himself in danger. “What did they ever do to you?”
“They’re Kaunians,” Burgred said, which seemed to be the only answer he thought necessary. Several of the men in the labor gang were Kaunians, too, but Burgred didn’t bother trying to keep his voice down. He took it for granted that the blonds would know what he thought of them. Maybe they took it for granted, too, because, while a couple of them must have heard him, they didn’t get angry.
No. In the captives’ camp, Leofsig had got to know Kaunians better than he had before. They got angry. They didn’t show it. Had they dared show it in Forthweg, they would soon have become a tinier minority than they already were.
Before he could take that thought any further, they came to the end of the cobbled stretch of road. When the wagons stopped, Burgred let out a theatrical sigh of relief. The Algarvian soldier pointed dramatically toward the northeast. “Moving on!” he cried. Even in his bits of Forthwegian, he made the prospect of setting stones in the roadbed more exciting than one of Leofsig’s countrymen could do.
Not all the stones in the wagon were proper rounded cobblestones. A lot of them came from the rubble left over from the fighting in Gromheort. Whenever Leofsig picked up one of those, he tried to see if he could figure out from what building it had come. He’d succeeded a couple of times, but only a couple. Most of them were just anonymous chunks of masonry.
He laughed at himself. He couldn’t help thinking, even on a job as mindless as roadbuilding. He watched Burgred carry a stone from the wagon to the roadway, dig out the roadbed so his stone would lie more or less level with its neighbors, and then slam it into place. Was Burgred doing much in the way of thinking while he did that? Leofsig had his doubts. Leofsig doubted Burgred did much in the way of thinking any time.
Leofsig was carrying a stone—another anonymous bit of rubble—of his own to what would be its place in the roadbed when the Algarvian straw boss let out a furious shout. “Who doing?” he demanded, pointing to a stone some ten or twenty feet away from the present border between paving and dirt. “Who doing?” From his point of view, he had a right to be exercised: the stone jaggedly projected half a foot above its fellows.
No one in the labor gang said anything. No one had been close to the stone when the Algarvian noticed it. Any one of four or five different men might have set it there. Nobody’d paid any attention.
“Must have been one of the Kaunians,” Burgred said. “Hang ’em all.”
“Sabotage bad,” the straw boss said. Sabotage was a fancy word, but one that tied in with his job. He shook his head. “Very bad. Killing sabotagers.”
“Oh, aye,” Leofsig murmured. “That’s clever, isn’t it? Now whoever did it is sure to admit it.”
“Hang a couple of Kaunians,” Burgred repeated loudly. “Nobody will miss the whoresons, and then we can get on with the fornicating road.”
One of the blond men in the labor gang took a couple of steps toward him. “I have a wife,” he said. “I have children. I have a mother. I have a father. I know who he is, too, which is more than you can say.”
Burgred needed a bit to get that. For a couple of heartbeats, Leofsig thought he wouldn’t, which would have been convenient. Probably because it would have been convenient, it didn’t happen. “Call me a bastard, will you?” Burgred roared, and started toward the Kaunian.
Leofsig brought him down with a tackle as fierce and illegal as the one he’d used to level Sidroc. He’d regretted that one, because he should have let his cousin keep going. He wasn’t the least bit sorry about knocking Burgred over. Burgred wasn’t very happy about it, though. They rolled on the cobbles and then off the cobbles and on to the dirt, pummeling each other.
“You stopping!” the Algarvian yelled at them. They didn’t stop. Had either of them stopped, the other would have gone right on doing damage. The straw boss turned to the laborers. “Stopping they!”
The men from the work gang pulled Leofsig and Burgred apart. Leofsig had a cut lip and a bruised cheek. Burgred, he saw, had a bloody nose and a black eye. Leofsig’s ribs ached. He hoped Burgred’s did, too.
“Kaunian-lover,” Burgred snarled.
“Oh, shut up, you cursed fool,” Leofsig answered wearily. “When you start talking about hanging people, you can’t really be surprised if they insult you. Besides”—he spoke quietly so the Algarvian soldier wouldn’t follow—“when we quarrel, who laughs? The redheads, that’s who.”
Had he just talked about Kaunians, he never would have got Burgred to pay him any attention. But Burgred did glance over at the straw boss. When he shrugged off the hands that restrained him, it wasn’t so he could get at either Leofsig or the Kaunian. “A pestilence take ’em all,” he muttered.
“No pay.” The Algarvian pointed at Leofsig. “No pay.” He pointed at Burgred. “No pay.” He pointed at the Kaunian who’d questioned Burgred’s legitimacy.
“I don’t lose much,” the Kaunian said.
Ignoring that, the Algarvian went on, “No treason. No sabotage.” He’d learned the Forthwegian words he needed to know, all right. He pointed back at the offending chunk of stone. “Fixing that. One more? Losing heads.” This time, he pointed to everyone in the work gang in turn. By the expressions on the laborers’ faces, none of them, Forthwegians or Kaunians, thought he was joking.
A tall, blond Kaunian and a couple of stocky, swarthy Forthwegians broke up the offending stone. They didn’t quarrel about who did what. In the face of the straw boss’s threat, that didn’t matter. Getting the work done mattered, and they did it. Leofsig watched them with a certain sour satisfaction. Under the threat of death, they might have become brothers. Without it…? He sighed and went back to work.
17.
When he served the Sibian Navy, Cornelu had rarely ridden Eforiel to the south, toward the land of the Ice People. Sibiu had worried—and had had reason to worry—about Algarve. Almost all the time he’d spent aboard his leviathan had been in the channel between his island kingdom and the mainland of Derlavai to the north.
