Darkness Descending (39 page)

“What they did to us in the years before that was as bad as a massacre,” Balastro said. “For long and long, we fought among ourselves, Kaunian cat’s-paws. Let people wail and moan as they please, your Excellency. I feel not the least bit of guilt.” He threw out his chest and looked fierce.

“I am sorry for you, then,” Hajjaj said sadly, and turned away.

“We grow strong, and you grow strong with us, riding on our backs,” Balastro said. “Are you not ungrateful to complain about the road when you wanted revenge on Unkerlant?”

Hajjaj turned back. That held enough truth to sting. “Who now will want revenge on Algarve, your Excellency, and for what good reasons?” he asked.

Balastro s shrug was a masterpiece of both indifference and Algarvian theatricality. “My dear fellow, it will matter very little once we are the masters of Derlavai. Whoever wants revenge on us will no more be able to have it than a dog howling at the moon can make it come down for him.”

“Surely the lords of the Kaunian Empire, at the height of their glory, thought the same,” Hajjaj replied, and had the doubtful pleasure of seeing Balastro look very indignant indeed.

Cornelu felt no small pride at finally making it down into Tirgoviste town. He even had Giurgiu’s leave to spend an extra couple of days there before returning to the woodcutting gang. He hadn’t had to offer to fight the gang boss again to get it, either. He’d lost their last encounter, but had won a measure of respect.

And so now, bundled up against the icy south wind, he walked along the edge of the harbor. He might look like a rustic in town to sell firewood, but he surveyed the quays with a practiced eye. The Algarvians didn’t have so heavy a naval presence here as Sibiu had, but he wouldn’t have wanted to try breaking into the harbor against what they did have.

He cursed under his breath: cursed the surprise that had let Mezentio’s men overpower his kingdom, and cursed their cleverness, too. How he wished a storm had blown up while their sailing ships were on the sea! But wishes were useless things. No one could change what had been, not the greatest mage ever born.

He ambled along as if he hadn’t a thought in his head and presently paused by the leviathan pens. An Algarvian sailor was tossing fish from a bucket to a leviathan not a quarter so fine as Eforiel had been. Cornelu paused to watch the fellow at his work. He paused too long. The sailor noticed him and growled, “Get moving, you stinking Sib, before we find out how this fellow likes
your
taste.”

Cornelu probably would have understood that without speaking Algarvian. Were he a woodcutter who’d understood it, what would he do? He did it: he nodded, looked frightened, and hurried away. Behind him, the Algarvian laughed. Cornelu knew what a leviathan’s jaws could do to a man. He wished the beast in the pen would do that to the sailor: one more wish he wouldn’t see fulfilled.

Why do I linger here?
he wondered. He’d gathered a little intelligence. To whom could he report it? No one—not a Lagoan, not a Sibian. All he’d done was briefly become the ghost of what he’d once been.

After starting toward a dockside eatery, he checked himself. He’d eaten there too often back in the days when Sibiu was a free kingdom, and he an officer in King Burebistu’s service. Someone might recognize him in spite of his poorly shaved chin and shabby clothes. Most Sibians loathed their Algarvian occupiers. A few, though . . . The posters calling for Sibians to join the fight against Unkerlant were still pasted to walls and fences. King Mezentio had to be drawing recruits from the five islands of Sibiu. That he was shamed Cornelu.

Farther inland, he could crumble twice-baked bread into pea soup at a place where he’d never gone while wearing Sibiu’s uniform. The meal he got showed he’d known what he was doing when he stayed away, too. But it made his belly stop growling like an angry dog. He set silver on the table and stalked out.

Before long, he found himself walking along his own street. That was stupidly dangerous, and he knew it. Old neighbors were far likelier to know him for who and what he was than were waiters at a seaside eatery. He couldn’t help himself, though.

There stood his house. It looked very much as it always had. The flowers in front of it were dead and the grass yellow and dying, but that happened every winter. Smoke rose from the chimney. Someone was at home. Costache? Just Costache? Well, just Costache and Brindza? Or was one of the Algarvian officers quartered there, or more than one, at the house, too?

If one of the Algarvians answered, he could beg and then shamble away.

They’d be none the wiser. But if it was Costache, if it was Costache ... He’d posted a note saying he was coming into town and suggesting they meet tomorrow. To protect her and himself, he’d signed it
Your country cousin
and used a false name. She would know his hand.

All at once, tomorrow seemed impossibly far away. He started up his own walk. Aye, a risk, but one he couldn’t help taking.

He was about to set his foot on the first step leading up to the porch when a man spoke inside the house. Those trilling “r”s could only come from an Algarvian’s mouth. Cornelu hesitated, hating himself for hesitating. But the risk had just gone up.

As he was about to go on despite that risk, Costache laughed. She’d always had an easy, friendly laugh. It had brightened Cornelu’s day whenever he heard it. Now he heard her lightly giving it to one of King Mezentio’s men. That wounded him almost as much as if he’d peeked in their bedroom window and seen her limbs entwined with the Algarvian’s in the act of love.

He turned away, staggering a little, as if he’d taken a beam from a stick. But his stride firmed faster than it would have after a physical wound. He no longer worried about being recognized; who would know him with this black scowl distorting his features?

“Tomorrow,” he muttered under his breath as he hurried away from his neighborhood. Tomorrow, if the powers above were kind, he’d see his wife. Maybe she would have an explanation that satisfied him.

For the life of him, he couldn’t imagine what it would be.

With the remains of naval discipline, he walked past half a dozen taverns. If he started drinking, he would either drink himself blind or drink himself angry. He could easily see himself storming up to his own front door with ale or spirits coursing through him and trying to kill all the Algarvians in his house or maybe trying to slap Costache around for not being distant enough to them. That he could also see the tragedy that would follow immediately thereafter made the picture only a little less tempting.

He bought a sack of crumbs at the edge of a park and tossed them to pigeons and sparrows till late autumn’s early dusk came. A couple of Algarvian soldiers walked by, but they didn’t bother him. He wasn’t the only fellow passing time in the park feeding the birds.

As soon as the sun sank below the northwestern horizon, the wind picked up. It seemed to blow straight through him, and carried the bite of the land of the Ice People, where it had originated. It blew the park empty in short order. Cornelu hoped the others who were leaving had better places to go than he.

He ate fried clams and allowed himself one mug of ale at a tavern that also sold meals. The clams weren’t bad, but the ale had been watered to the point where two or three mugs would have done little to him. Next door stood a rooming house where he bought a cubicle for the night. The tiny chamber barely had room for the bed and the cheap nightstand that held a cup, basin, and pitcher.

The mattress smelled sour when he lay down on it. He might have done better rolled in a blanket in the park. But he might not have, too; the Algarvians might have picked him up for being out after curfew. He didn’t want to fall into their hands for any reason. Eventually, he slept.

It was still dark when he woke. The clouds in the northeast had gone from black to dull gray, though, so dawn wasn’t far away. He scratched, hoping the nasty bed didn’t have bugs in it, then got dressed, went downstairs, and walked out of the rooming house. A new clerk had come on duty sometime in the night, but he looked as sullen and indifferent as the fellow from whom Cornelu had rented his little room.

He went back to the tavern. It was already crowded with fishermen fortifying themselves for the day ahead. The fried bread Cornelu ordered sat like a boulder in his stomach. The only resemblance the murky brown liquid the tavern served bore to tea was that it was hot. He drank it without complaint. On a morning like this, heat sufficed.

After stretching breakfast till sunrise, Cornelu went back to the park. A Sibian constable strolling through looked at him as if he were crazy, even after he displayed the bag of crumbs, still half full. The birds appreciated him, though, and came close to feeding right from his hand.

He stretched out the bread crumbs, too, making them last till nearly noon. Then he got up, brushed his hands on his kilt, and left the park for the short walk to the bell tower at the edge of Tirgoviste’s old market square. He’d asked Costache to meet him there. “She’d better,” he said as he made his way through the square. “By the powers above, she’d better.”

Clang! Clang!
The bells blared out noon just as Cornelu got to the base of the tower. He looked around. The square wasn’t crowded, not the way it would have been before the Algarvians came, but he didn’t see his wife.

And then he did. His heart leaped. Here she came, striding with determination across the square. If he could be alone with her, even for a few minutes. . . But he wouldn’t be, for she was pushing the baby carriage ahead of her. Brindza’s head popped up as she looked out. Cornelu knew he shouldn’t hate his daughter, but remembering that wasn’t easy when she kept coming between him and Costache.

He knew better than to show what was going through his mind. He smiled and waved and stepped forward to embrace her. He squeezed her to him. She raised her mouth to his. After a long, breathless kiss, he murmured, “Oh, it’s good to see you again.”
See you
wasn’t exactly what he meant.
Feel you
came closer.

“And you,” Costache said, a quaver in her voice that sent tingles through Cornelu. She looked him over with an expression he recognized: comparing what she recalled to what she saw. After a moment, she clucked in distress. “You’ve got so thin and hard-looking.”

“I can’t help it,” he answered. “I’ve been working hard.”

“Mama,” Brindza said, and then, “Up.” King Burebistu could have given no more imperious command.

Costache picked up her daughter—
my daughter, too,
Cornelu reminded himself. His wife looked tired. He’d thought that the first time he saw her after coming back to Tirgoviste. He said, “I wish you could have found a way to leave her at home.”

She shook her head. “Mezentio’s men won’t take care of her for me, curse them. I’ve asked.”

“Aye, curse them,” Cornelu agreed. He eyed his wife again. “But you were laughing with one of them yesterday.”

“How do you know that?” Costache asked in surprise. When he told her, she went pale. “I’m so glad you didn’t knock!” she exclaimed. “All three of them were there. You’d be in a captives’ camp now.”

“Every day I’m away from you, I feel like I’m in a captives’ camp,” Cornelu complained. “This whole island is a captives’ camp. This whole kingdom is a captives’ camp. What else would you call it?”

Costache gave back a pace before his fury. Brindza stared at him with wide green eyes, the same shade as her mother’s. After a moment, Costache said, “Things are hard, aye, but they’re worse in the camps. When the Algarvians let people out of them, they come back as skeletons. I think half the reason Mezentio’s men turn them loose is to frighten other people.”

She spoke calmly, reasonably, logically. She made good sense. She said not a word Cornelu cared to hear. “Have you any notion of how much I want you?” he burst out.

“Aye,” his wife answered in a low voice, “but I don’t know when we can. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to, not till the war is over, if it ever is.”

Cornelu started to slap her for saying such a thing. Before the motion was well begun, though, he turned it into a quick spin away from Costache. He’d never imagined he could wish he’d stayed up in the hills chopping wood, but he did.

Snow blew into Tealdo’s face. It numbed his left side worse than his right, for he still marched northwest, in the direction of Cottbus, while the wind roared up from the southwest, from the austral continent and the ice-clogged Narrow Sea. He wasn’t used to snow; growing up in the north of Algarve, he’d seen it but seldom before joining King Mezentio’s army. His education in such matters was advancing faster than he’d ever wanted.

Beside him, Trasone let out a chuckle: either that or Tealdo’s friend was starting to come down with pneumonia. “You look like a scarecrow,” Trasone said, raising his voice to be heard over the endless ravening wind.

“Heh,” Tealdo answered. “Nobody’d pinch your bum if you were walking along the streets of Trapani dressed like that, either.”

“Too true,” Trasone said. “Aye, it’s too true. What we both look like is a couple of madmen who bought out a rummage sale.”

“Everybody in the whole regiment looks the same way,” Trasone said. “If we’d had some decent winter gear shipped out to us, we wouldn’t have had to steal from every Unkerlanter village we went through, either.”

An inspecting officer would have had trouble proving he was even in uniform.

He had on a long Unkerlanter tunic over his short tunic and kilt, a horse blanket over that, and a rabbit-fur cap on his head in place of the dapper but not nearly warm enough hat he’d been issued. Trasone s garb was similarly outlandish.

“Winter gear?” Trasone chuckled again, sounding even more ghastly than before. “They’re having trouble shipping Kaunians forward to kill, and you’re worrying about winter gear? Too stinking many Unkerlanters running around loose behind us, and with what they do to ley lines, it’s like the powers below have been eating them.”

“That’s all so, no doubt about it.” Tealdo paused to knock snow—and possibly frozen snot with it—out of his mustache. “But if I freeze to death, I’m not going to care about the miserable Kaunians.”