Into the darkness, p.65
Into the Darkness, page 65
part #1 of Darkness Series
“Come back safe, all of you,” Merkela said. Skarnu hurried out into the night. To him, her voice was as sweet and intoxicating as a Jelgavan fortified wine. If he thought about what he was going to be doing out in the woods, he wouldn’t think—so much—about what he wished he were doing up in her bedchamber.
He and Raunu and Gedominu got their sticks out from under the straw in the barn. The farmer looped a long coil of rope over his left shoulder and passed other coils to his comrades. “Let’s go have ourselves some fun,” he said, and chuckled. “Don’t suppose the Algarvians will like it so well, though.”
“Pox take ‘em,” Raunu said, at which Skarnu and Gedominu nodded.
Once they got off Gedominu’s farm, the three men separated. Because he’d dwelt in these parts since the collapse of the Valmieran army, Skarnu had come to know the paths for several miles around the farm. Gedominu still knew them better, of course; to him, they were as familiar as the way upstairs in his own home. They weren’t to Skarnu, and never would be. But he could make his way along them without the farmer, even in the darkness.
As he knew Gedominu and Raunu were doing, he made for the woods. Despite the stick he carried, he felt more like hunted than hunter. If an Algarvian patrol caught sight of him, he intended to run first and fight only if he had to. That wasn’t heroic, but he hadn’t come out here to be a hero. He’d come to be a nuisance, a role with a different set of requirements.
When he found a couple of trees near the edge of the path, he nodded to himself. He tied one end of the rope to the trunk of one tree, then ran it across the road to the other. He tied it to that one, too, cut off the length of rope, and went on his way looking for another spot to set a trip line.
If he was lucky, an Algarvian horse or unicorn would break a leg and have to be put out of its misery. If he was luckier, an Algarvian might break his leg or, if Skarnu was luckier still, his neck. At best, it would be a pinprick against King Mezentio’s forces. If harassing the redheads was the best Skarnu could do right now, though, he would content himself with the knowledge that it was his best.
He chose where to place his trip lines with several different kinds of care. As many as possible went on land belonging to farmers friendly toward the Algarvians. If he got those farmers into trouble with the occupiers, so much the better: they wouldn’t stay friendly toward them for long. And if the Algarvians blamed men who really were well inclined toward them, they wouldn’t look so hard for people who weren’t.
After Skarnu used the last of the rope, he made his way back toward Gedominu’s farm. He was surprised at how confidently he moved in the dark. Once, not too far away, he heard some Algarvians on horseback. He slid off the path and into the bushes. The Algarvians hadn’t heard him. On routine patrol, they chattered among themselves. Their noise faded and finally vanished.
A lamp was still burning downstairs when Skarnu got back to the farm. He glanced that way, sighed, and opened the barn door so he could roll himself in his blanket there. He must have made some noise, for the door to the farmhouse opened, too. Merkela stood silhouetted against the light within. Softly, she called, “Who is it?”
“Me,” Skarnu answered, just loud enough to let her recognize his voice.
“You are the first one back,” she said. “Come inside and drink a cup of hot spiced ale, if you care to.”
“I thank you,” he said, and had all he could do not to run to her side. When she gave him the ale, he held the big mug in both hands, warming them against the earthenware. He sat at the table where he’d eaten supper, sipping slowly. The ale was good. Watching Merkela was better. He didn’t say anything. Had he said anything, the first words out of his mouth would have been too much.
In the dim light, her eyes were enormous. She kept watching him, too, and not saying anything. At last, she took a deep breath. “I think— ” she began. The door opened. In came Gedominu, Raunu only a couple of paces behind him. “I think,” Merkela went on smoothly, “I will pour some more ale.” Whatever else she might have thought, she kept to herself. Likely just as well, Skarnu thought, and wished he could make himself believe it.
A few days later, two squads of Algarvian soldiers tramped up to the farm at first light. In fair Valmieran, the lieutenant leading them said. “We want the peasant Gedominu.” He read the name from a list.
“I am Gedominu,” the farmer said quietly. “Why do you want me?”
“As hostage,” the lieutenant answered. “A warrior of King Mezentio’s was killed by a trip line. We take ten for one, to keep this foolishness from happening more. You come.” His soldiers leveled their sticks at Gedominu. “If the one who did this does not yield, we kill you.”
Skarnu stepped forward. “Take me instead.” The words came out of his mouth before he quite knew they would.
“You are brave,” the Algarvian lieutenant said, and surprised him by sweeping off his hat and bowing from the waist. “But his name is on my paper. Your name is not. And so we take him. You and your wife”—his eyes lingered on Merkela, as any man’s might have; he did not know the mistake he was making—“can keep this farm going without two old men here. One will do.” He waved toward Raunu to show which old man he meant, then spoke to his men in their own language.
A couple of them seized Gedominu and hustled him away. The rest kept Skarnu and Raunu and Merkela so well covered that any try at rescuing the farmer would have been suicide. Off the redheads went, Gedominu limping along in their midst. Skarnu stared helplessly after them. They had the right man and didn’t even know it. They didn’t care, either. They would have been just as happy to blaze him had he been the wrong man.
*
Count Sabrino had never imagined he could enjoy victory so much. After Valmiera was vanquished, after Jelgava yielded, he’d been ordered back to Trapani. All the civilians there were sure the results of the Six Years’ War had been overthrown forever, and that peace would soon be at hand.
“How can Lagoas go on fighting us?” If Sabrino heard that once, he heard it a hundred times. “Derlavai is ours.”
Lagoan dragons still dropped eggs on southern Valmiera and Algarve. Lagoan warships still raided the coasts of Valmiera and Jelgava. It was still war, but it was war by fleabites. And Algarve could inflict no more than fleabites on Lagoas, either. Sabrino knew that, whether civilians did or not. He never tried to change their minds. Much of what he knew, he could not speak about. Even if he could have, he wouldn’t. Pretty women were much likelier to throw themselves at the feet of a man who had conquered than one in the process of conquering.
One of the things Sabrino knew was that crushing the Kaunian kingdoms did not mean Derlavai belonged to Algarve. He could read a map. So could a great many civilians, of course. But he did it habitually, as part of his duties. More and more these days, he found himself looking west.
Invitations to the royal palace frequently came his way. He would have been insulted had it been otherwise. Not only was he a noble, he was also an officer who had distinguished himself in three of Algarve’s four fights thus far. And so he would don his fanciest uniform tunic and kilt, put on every glittering decoration and badge of rank to which he was entitled, and swagger off to dance and drink and talk and display himself. He seldom came home alone.
He also went to the palace to listen to King Mezentio. Mezentio fascinated him, as the king fascinated most Algarvians. Unlike the vast majority of his countrymen, who could at most occasionally hear the king when he spoke by way of the crystal, Sabrino got to speak with him as well as listen. He took as much advantage of that as he could.
“It comes down to a matter of will,” Mezentio declared one chilly evening. He waved a goblet of hot brandy punch to emphasize his point. “Algarve refused to admit herself defeated after the Six Years’ War, and so, in the end, she was not defeated. She was split up, she was in part occupied, she was robbed—and she was forced to sign a treating declaring all this was good, all this was as it should have been. But defeated? Never! Not in her heart! Not in your hearts, my friends.” He gestured again, this time in scorn of anyone who could think otherwise.
A marquis clapped his hands. A couple of young women dropped the king curtsies, hoping to make him notice them. He did notice them; Sabrino watched his eyes. But his mind was elsewhere—still on what he had caused his kingdom to do, not on what he might be doing himself.
“What next, your Majesty?” Sabrino asked. “Now that we have come this far, what next?”
He didn’t know how much King Mezentio would say. He didn’t know whether the king would say anything. One of Mezentio’s advisers plucked at his sleeve. Mezentio shrugged the man off. Smiling at Sabrino, he replied, “When we commence, my lord count, the world will hold its breath and make no comment!”
“What does he mean?” one of the young women murmured to the other. The second woman shrugged, a gesture worth watching. Sabrino watched it. So did King Mezentio. Their eyes met. They both smiled.
And then Mezentio’s smile changed from the one any Algarvian man might give after watching a pretty girl to one of a different sort, one of complicity. He asked, “Are you answered, my lord count?”
Sabrino bowed. “Your Majesty, I am answered.” He knew enough to draw his own conclusions from the little more the king gave him. Around him, those who knew less looked puzzled. Some of them looked resentful because Sabrino plainly could see things they could not.
“What did he mean?” one of the young women asked the dragonflier.
“I’m sorry, my sweet, but I can’t tell you,” he answered. She pouted. Sabrino still said nothing. She was plainly unused to not getting her way. When she realized she wouldn’t this time, she poked him in the ribs with an elbow as she flounced away. He laughed, which only made her strides longer and angrier.
“You are a wicked man,” Mezentio said.
“I must be,” Sabrino agreed dryly.
“Oh, you are, never fear,” Mezentio said with a chuckle. “A wicked, wicked man.” Then the smile faded from his face like water flowing out of a copper tub. “But you are not so wicked as the Kaunians, who provoked this war in the first place and have now begun to pay the price for their arrogant folly.”
“Begun? I should say so, your Majesty,” Sabrino exclaimed. “King Gainibu doing whatever we tell him in Valmiera, King Donalitu fled and your own brother on the throne in Jelgava—oh, what a great wailing and gnashing of teeth that must cause the blonds. I don’t know what higher price they could pay, as a matter of fact.”
“They have only begun.” Mezentio’s voice went flat and harsh, the voice of a king who would brook no contradiction. “For a thousand years—for more than a thousand years—they have sneered at us, laughed behind their hands at us, looked down their noses at us. I say that will never happen again. From this war forth, from this day forth, whenever Kaunians think of Algarvians, they shall think of us with fear and trembling in their hearts.”
He’d spoken louder and louder, until at the end he might almost have been addressing a crowd of thousands gathered in the Royal Square. All over the salon, other conversations fell silent. When Mezentio finished, people burst into applause. Sabrino clapped with everybody else. “We’ve owed the Kaunians for a long time,” he said. “I’m glad we’re paying them back.”
“We have owed most of our neighbors for a long time, my lord count,” King Mezentio said. “We shall pay them back, too.” As Sabrino had done from time to time, he turned and looked toward the west.
“Can it be done, your Majesty?” Sabrino asked quietly.
“If you doubt it, sir, I invite you to return to your estate and leave the doing to those who have no doubts,” Mezentio said, and Sabrino’s ears burned. The king continued, “We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.”
Sabrino stared. A couple of high-ranking officers had used those very words not long after Forthweg fell. Then, Sabrino had had no way of knowing what they were talking about. Now, a good many rotten structures already having come crashing down, he could see only one still standing. How long, he suddenly wondered, had Mezentio been preparing for the day when war would break out again? The Kaunian kingdoms had declared war on Algarve, but Algarve was the kingdom that had been ready to fight.
Sabrino raised his goblet high. “To his Majesty!” he exclaimed.
Everyone drank. Not to drink a toast to the king of Algarve would have been unthinkable. But Mezentio’s hazel eyes glinted as he acknowledged the honor Sabrino and the salon full of notables had done him. He studied the dragonflier, then slowly nodded. Sabrino was convinced the king knew what he was thinking, and was telling him he was right. Asking any more would have been asking Mezentio to say too much. Mezentio might already have said too much, for those with ears to hear.
Not everyone had such ears. Sabrino had already insulted one pretty girl close to the king by not explaining what she thought she had the right to know. The other young woman there did not ask him to enlighten her. Instead, she chose an official from the ministry of finance. The fellow was plainly flattered to gain her attentions, but as plainly understood no more of what Mezentio had said and what he’d implied than she did.
Laughing a little to himself, Sabrino slipped off toward a sideboard and took another glass of wine. The pleasure that filled him, though, had little to do with what he’d drunk and what he was drinking. As Mezentio had done, he looked west. Slowly, he nodded. Algarve had been a long time finding her place in the sun. All her neighbors had tried to hold her down, hold her back. Once the Derlavaian War came to a proper end, though, they wouldn’t be able to do that any more.
Never again, Sabrino thought, echoing Mezentio. He was old enough to remember the humiliation and the chaos that followed the loss of the Six Years’ War. Never again, he thought once more. Victory was better. Whatever victory required, he wanted Algarve to do.
You can’t make war halfheartedly, he thought. As if that needed proving, Valmiera and Jelgava had proved it to the hilt. And now, as King Mezentio had said, they were paying the price. Well, Algarve had paid. It was their turn.
Someone not far away shouted angrily. Sabrino turned his head. A Yaninan in shoes with decorative pompoms, tights, and a puffy-sleeved tunic was waving his finger in an Algarvian’s face. “You are wrong, I tell you!” the Yaninan said. “I tell you, I was up by the Raffali River myself last week, and the weather was sunny—warm and sunny.”
“You are mistaken, sir,” the Algarvian said. “It rained. It rained nearly every day—quite spoiled the horseback ride I had planned.”
“You call me a liar at your peril,” the Yaninan said; his folk took slights even more seriously than Algarvians did.
“I do not call you a liar,” the redheaded noble replied with a yawn. “A senile fool who cannot recall today what happened yesterday: that, most assuredly. But not a liar.”
With a screech, the Yaninan flung his drink in the Algarvian’s face. Among Algarvians, their friends would have made arrangements for them to meet again. The Yaninan was too impatient to wait. He hit his foe in the belly, and then a glancing blow off the side of his head.
The Algarvian grappled with him, pulled him down, and started pummeling him. The Yaninan didn’t like that so well, as his foe was about half again as big as he was. By the time Sabrino and the other men pulled the Algarvian off him, he was more than a little worse for wear.
“You would be well advised to learn some manners,” the Algarvian told him.
“You would be well advised to—” the Yaninan began as he climbed to his feet.
“Shall I give you another lesson on why you would be well advised to learn manners?” the Algarvian asked, as politely as if he were offering another glass of brandy punch rather than another punch in the eye. The Yaninan did not lack spirit, but he didn’t altogether lack sense, either. Instead of starting up the fight again, he took himself elsewhere.
Sabrino bowed to the Algarvian victor, saying, “Well done, sir. Well done.”
“You do me too much honor.” His countryman returned the bow. “All these westerners—if you take a firm line with them, they are yours to command.”
“Aye.” Sabrino laughed. “That is the way of it, sure enough.”
Marshal Rathar strolled through King Swemmel Square, which was said to be the largest paved-over open space in the world. He had no idea whether that was true, or whether everything associated with King Swemmel had to be the biggest or the most of whatever it was simply because of its association with the king. He wondered whether anyone had actually measured all the great plazas of the world and compared them one to another. Then he wondered why he worried his head about such unimportant things. It wasn’t as if he had not important things about which to worry.
A wind howling up from the south blew little flurries of snow into his face. He pulled his cloak more tightly around him, and tugged the hood down low on his forehead. The cloak was the rock-gray of Unkerlanter army issue, but, unlike the long tunic beneath it, did not show his rank. Thus swaddled, he could have been anyone. He enjoyed his few minutes of anonymity. All too soon, he would have to return to the palace, return to his work, return to the knowledge that King Swemmel might order him dragged off to the headsman at any time.
Statues of past Unkerlanter kings, some in stone, some in bronze, marked the outer boundary of the square. One statue towered twice as tall as any of the others. Rathar did not need to glance at it to know it was made in King Swemmel’s image. Swemmel’s successor would no doubt knock it down. Maybe he would replace it with one to match the others in size. Maybe, having knocked it down, Swemmel’s successor would not replace it at all.
Under the shielding hood, Rathar shook his head. He might have been a man bedeviled by gnats, but no gnats could withstand Cottbus’s winter weather. No, he knew what he was: a man bedeviled by his own thoughts. Those were harder to shake off than gnats, and more dangerous, too.
