Darkness Descending (60 page)

She drew herself up to her full height, which came close to matching his. “I am the Marchioness Krasta, and this is my city.” She sounded as if she were King Gainibu’s queen—although, as she’d seen herself, Priekule wasn’t really even Gainibu’s city anymore.

No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than the Algarvian proceeded to rub it in. Turning back to the Column of Victory, he said, “These cursed carvings tell lies. They make my ancestors, my heroic ancestors”—he drew himself up, too, though with his bulging belly it wasn’t so impressive—”out to be cowards and robbers, which every honest man knows to be a base and vile lie. Now we have the chance to correct this, and correct it we shall.”

“But it’s a monument!” Krasta exclaimed.

“A monument of lies, a monument of curses, a monument of humiliation,” the fat brigadier said. “It does not deserve to stand. Now we are the victors, and it shall not stand. Two days from now, my lads here”—he pointed to the mages—“will set eggs by the base, burst them, and topple it like an old pine.”

“You can’t do that,” Krasta said. The Algarvian brigadier laughed in her face. She started to slap him, but then remembered the unfortunate things that had happened after she was rash enough to slap Lurcanio. This redhead outranked her lover. She spun on her heel and hurried away.

“Do what you can, milady,” the clever-looking Valmieran man called after her. Then he cried out in pain—the Algarvian soldiers had set on him again.

Krasta found her carriage waiting on a side street. Seeing her approach, the driver corked a small flask and stuck it in his pocket. Krasta ignored that. “Take me back to the mansion,” she snapped. “This instant, do you hear me?”

“Aye, milady,” the driver answered, and prudently said no more.

The mansion lay on the outskirts of Priekule; it had been a country estate when it was built almost four centuries before. These days, Algarvian administrators of Valmiera’s conquered capital used and dwelt in the west wing, leaving the rest for Krasta. Her brother would have shared it with her, but Skarnu had never come home from the war. She occasionally missed him.

Now, though, he didn’t enter her mind. She stormed through offices that had been drawing rooms and salons, taking no notice of the Algarvian clerks who filled them. Only when she neared the smaller chamber where Lurcanio worked did she slow. She had to snarl her way past Captain Mosco before she could see him. Snarl she did, and see Lurcanio she did, too.

He looked up from his paperwork—sometimes he reminded Krasta more of a clerk than of a colonel—and smiled. That made his wrinkles shift without removing them; he wasn’t too much younger than the Algarvian brigadier in the park. “Hello, my dear,” he said in his excellent Valmieran. “What is it? It must be something, by your face.”

Bluntly, Krasta answered, “I want you to keep them from wrecking the Column of Victory.”

“I wondered when you would learn of that.” Lurcanio shrugged an extravagant Algarvian shrug. “I can do nothing about it. And”—his voice hardened—”I would not if I could. That column affronts Algarve’s honor.”

“What about Valmiera’s honor?” Krasta demanded.

“Well, what about it?” Lurcanio said. “If Valmiera had honor, you would have held the Algarvian army in check. That we have this conversation here in the heart of a conquered kingdom, that you welcome me to your bed rather than my wife welcoming a Valmieran conqueror to hers, proves whose honor has more weight. Now do please let me work. I have too much to do, and not enough time in which to do it. Close the door when you go out.”

Furious, Krasta slammed the door so hard, the whole mansion shook. Unable to do anything more than that to take out her wrath on Lurcanio, she screamed at her servants instead. That did no good. Two days later, the Kaunian Column of Victory came crashing down. She heard the roar of the bursting eggs and the falling stone and cursed with a fluency a teamster might have envied.

When Lurcanio sought her bed that night, she welcomed him with a barred bedchamber door. She kept the door barred for another week. But then she relented, partly because she craved pleasure and partly because she feared that, if she kept on rejecting Lurcanio, he would simply find someone else. She didn’t care to be without an Algarvian protector, not with Priekule as it was these days. What that had to say about honor never once crossed her mind.

Garivald was well on the way to being drunk when someone pounded on the door to his house. “Who’s that?” he growled irritably. Like most of the peasants in Zossen, he’d managed to hide plenty of spirits from the Algarvians who occupied the village. When winter came, what else was there to do but drink?

The pounding came again, louder than before. “Opening up or we breaking down!” an Algarvian shouted.

“Open it, Annore,” Garivald said. He was sitting on a bench closer to the door than his wife, but he was also drunker than she. He didn’t feel like getting up and moving just then.

Annore sent him a dark look, but rose and unbarred the door. After a few heartbeats, Garivald did get up after all and stand behind her—you never could tell what an Algarvian might be after. The redheads glaring at him looked miserably cold; their capes weren’t up to the weather here. One of them said, “You coming to die village square.”

“Why?” Garivald asked.

Both Algarvians were carrying sticks. With a chill that had nothing to do with winter, Garivald realized they weren’t men who garrisoned Zossen, but real combat soldiers, mean as wild boars. He wished he hadn’t given them any back-talk. The one who’d spoken aimed his stick at Garivald’s face. “Why? Because I saying so.”

“Aye,” Garivald said hastily, ducking his head in submission as he would have to an Unkerlanter inspector. He took out his fear by shouting at Annore: “Come on, curse it! Don’t just stand there. Grab our cloaks.”

Annore did as he asked without arguing. They threw on the thick wool garments; Garivald hoped the Algarvians wouldn’t steal them. “Syrivald, watch the baby,” Annore said. Syrivald nodded, eyes wide. Leuba, playing happily on the floor, was the only one who didn’t know anything was wrong.

When Garivald and Annore got to the square, it had already started filling. Under the sticks of more Algarvian combat soldiers, several villagers were putting up an odd-looking wooden frame. After a moment, Garivald realized what it was: a gibbet. Another icy pang of fright ran through him.

A couple of Unkerlanter men he’d never seen before stood near the gibbet, their hands tied behind them. They were scrawny and ill-shaven and looked to have seen hard use—blood covered the face of one of them, while the other had an eye swollen shut. More redheads kept watch on them.

Waddo, the firstman, limped into the village square. Close behind him came the Algarvians stationed in Zossen. They looked almost as alarmed at what was going on as the villagers did.

One of the newly come Algarvians proved to speak pretty good Unkerlanter. Pointing to the captives, he growled, “Are these miserable whoresons from this stinking hole of a village? We caught them in the woods. Anybody know them? Anybody know their names?”

For a moment, nobody spoke. Then all the men and women in Zossen started talking at once. With a single voice, they denied ever setting eyes on the men before. They know what happened to a village that harbored men who kept fighting against the Algarvians.

So did the redhead who’d asked the questions. With a sneer, he demanded, “Why should I believe you? You’d lie and say your mothers weren’t whores. We ought to wreck this place just for the sport of it.” By his tone, he wasn’t more than a finger’s breadth away from ordering his troopers to do just that.

Everyone’s eyes swung toward Waddo. The firstman looked about ready to burst into tears. But he did what he had to do—in the most abject tones Garivald had heard even from his lips, he cried, “Have mercy, sir!”

“Mercy?” The Algarvian threw back his head and laughed. He spoke one word in his own language—probably translating for his men. They laughed, too, and their laughter was like the baying of wolves. “Mercy?” the redhead repeated. “What have any Unkerlanters ever done to deserve mercy?”

“These are not men of our village.” Waddo pointed at the captives as the Algarvian had. “By the powers above, they aren’t! If you don’t believe me, ask your own men who have been here for months. They will know.”

“He’s selling those two poor buggers to the Algarvians,” Garivald whispered to his wife.

“If he didn’t, he’d be selling all of us,” Annore whispered back. Reluctantly, Garivald nodded. He wouldn’t have wanted to stand in Waddo’s felt boots, not for all the money in the world.

And he wondered if Waddo’s betrayal of the Unkerlanter irregulars caught in the forest would go for naught. The Algarvian still seemed poised to order his men to start blazing. But the soldiers stationed in Zossen spoke up. They spoke up, naturally, in Algarvian, which Garivald didn’t understand. But his hopes rose when he saw how unhappy the leader of the combat troops looked. Algarvians always seemed to show just what was in their minds—one more reason they struck Garivald as strange, hardly human.

At last, the bad-tempered redhead who spoke Unkerlanter threw his hands in the air. He shouted something in his own language at the garrison troops. They all grinned. Garivald knew they’d helped save Zossen, not least because they wanted to go on living here, but
why
didn’t matter. What they’d done did.

“We’ll still hang these lousy bandits,” the combat leader said. He jerked a thumb toward Waddo. “You! Aye, you, fat and ugly—you with the big mouth. Fetch me a coil of rope and be quick about it.”

Waddo gulped. He had no choice, not if he wanted Zossen to stay standing. “Aye,” he whispered, and limped away as fast as he could go. If he’d said he had no rope, the Algarvian would have blazed him on the spot—him and who could say how many others? He came back in a hurry, clutching a coil.

The hangings were worse than Garivald had imagined they could be. The Algarvians simply fastened nooses around their captives’ necks and tossed the ropes up over the top beam of the gibbet. Then they hauled the captives up off the ground to kick their lives away.

“This is what comes to anyone who tries to fight against Algarve,” the combat leader shouted while the Unkerlanters were still thrashing. “These swine deserved it. You’d better not deserve it. Now get out of here!”

Several people—not all women, by any means—had fainted in the snow. Garivald and Annore didn’t wait to see them revived. They fled back to their own hut as fast as they could. “What was it?” Syrivald asked. “What did they do?” Fear and curiosity warred on his face.

“Nothing,” Garivald mumbled. “They didn’t do anything.” His son would find out it was a lie as soon as he went outside; the Algarvians had been wrapping the ropes around and around the top beam of the gibbet, to keep the corpses hanging on display. But Garivald couldn’t bring himself to talk about what had happened, not yet.

Syrivald turned to his mother. “What did they do? You can tell me!”

“They killed two men,” Annore answered bleakly. “Now don’t ask me any more questions, do you hear?” Her voice warned what would happen if Syrivald did. He nodded. He understood that tone.

Annore found the jar of spirits and took a long pull at it. “Leave some for me,” Garivald warned. He wanted to drink himself into oblivion, too. After another swig, Annore passed him the jar. They kept passing it back and forth till they fell asleep side by side.

When Garivald woke, he almost wished the Algarvians had hanged him. His head pounded like a hammer on the smith’s anvil. His mouth tasted the way it would have if the livestock had fouled it. When he took a sip from the jar, his stomach loudly told him what a bad idea that was.

And, as soon as he was conscious, visions of the dead irregulars came flooding back. He couldn’t find a better reason for drinking himself blind again. He wanted to stay blind drunk till spring came, and maybe after that, too.

Annore looked no happier than he felt when she opened her eyes. She reached for the jar. He handed it to her. She drank as desperately as he had. With a grimace, she wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her tunic. “It really happened,” she said.

“Aye, it did.” Garivald didn’t care for the sound of his own voice. He didn’t care for the answer he had to give her, either.

“I knew we didn’t want them here, but I didn’t think they’d do—that,” his wife said.

“Neither did I,” Garivald answered. “Now we don’t have to listen to the tales people older than we are to tell of the Twinkings War. Now we know, too.”

Another song began to form in his mind, a song of how the two Unkerlanter irregulars had met their deaths without a word. Even more than most of the songs he shaped, he would have to be careful where he sang that one. But those two men had had friends in the woods, friends the Algarvians hadn’t caught. They would want to hear such songs—the dead men were their comrades. And thinking of rhymes and rhythms distracted him from his hangover.

Later that day, when he had to go out, he found more details to add to the song. Having hanged their captives, the Algarvian troop of combat soldiers had pulled out of Zossen. They’d left the gibbet behind. The bodies on it still swayed in the breeze. No one had dared cut them down.

Each corpse had a new placard tied round its neck. The characters were those of the Unkerlanter language. Garivald knew that much, even if he couldn’t read them. They probably told about the dead men, and said what fools they were to fight the Algarvians. He couldn’t think what else Mezentio’s soldiers would have had to say.

He hurried back to his hut, words spinning in his head. Once inside, he barred the door and started drinking again. By her slack features, Annore had hardly stopped. Staying indoors through the winter shielded people from the worst the weather could do, just as staying in the village had shielded them from knowing the worst war could do. But the war had come home to them now. The Algarvians had brought it home.

“Curse them,” he muttered.

His wife didn’t need to ask whom he meant. “Aye, curse them,” she said. “Powers below eat them.”