Darkness Descending (81 page)

He heard shouts within. A moment later, he found himself staring at an older, shorter version of himself. “Father!” he exclaimed.

His father had been holding a boot and a length of leather lacing with which he’d been repairing it. Now he dropped them both. “Istvan!” he said joyfully. Istvan’s name produced more shouts farther back inside the house. His father embraced him. “Ah, by the stars, they’ve gone and made a man of you.”

“Have they?” Istvan shrugged as he came inside. “I’m just me.” Alpri, his father, had the same backwoods accent as everyone else in the valley. Istvan didn’t know why that surprised him so much, but it did.

People boiled forward to hug him and pound him on the back and tell him what a wonderful fellow he was: his mother, uncles and aunts, his sisters, cousins of both sexes, a great-uncle leaning on a stick. Somebody—he didn’t know who— pressed a beaker of mead into his hand. He poured it down. As soon as he did, somebody else took it away and gave him another one. He drank that one straightaway, too. Mead wasn’t the raw spirit for which he’d acquired a taste in the army, but it wasn’t milk, either. After two beakers, sweat broke out on his face. He stopped worrying about people’s accents. Everything anyone said seemed funny.

But not even a couple of beakers of mead could keep him from noticing how dark the inside of the house was after his father shut the door against the chilly drafts outside. And, with so many men just in from long days on the farms around Kunhegyes, the air got thick fast. But that didn’t bother Istvan so much. Barracks weren’t much better, and the field was commonly worse.

As if conjured up, yet another horn of mead appeared in his hand. “Come on.” His mother took him by the arm. “I was about to put supper on the table.”

“Let him stand awhile and talk, Gizella,” his father said. “He’s just got back, after all, and he hasn’t even said how long he can stay. Of course he’ll want to hear everything that’s happened since he’s been gone.”

“As a matter of fact, I am pretty hungry—and I haven’t had proper pepper stew in a long time,” Istvan said. Gizella beamed. Alpri looked surprised and disappointed, but put the best face on it he could. Istvan hurried to the table. To his large and noisy family, things that had happened in this end of their little valley were more important than the Derlavaian War that raged across the continent. The war wasn’t real to them. And the valley hardly seemed real to Istvan any more.

The pepper stew tasted as good as it smelled, as good as he remembered. Istvan said so, over and over, which made his mother flush with pleasure. But sitting down to supper didn’t keep—never had kept—his close kin from going on and on about weather and livestock and the local scandals and the iniquities of the folk who lived in Szombathely, the nearer village down the valley, and the even greater iniquities of the barely human wretches who lived in the next valley over. He wanted to make them quiet down, and he couldn’t.

After what seemed a very long time, Istvan’s great-uncle, whose name was Batthyany, asked, “What’s it like out there, lad? Do the stars still remember you by your right name when you’re so far from home?”

It was, at last, the right question. An expectant hush fell over the table as Istvan’s clanfolk waited to hear what he would say. He looked around. A few of the men, he knew, had been out of the valley, but none had gone too far. They hadn’t seen what he’d seen. They hadn’t done what he’d done.

“Answer your grandfather’s brother, boy,” Alpri said, as peremptory as if Istvan were a child often or so.

“Aye, Father,” Istvan said, and turned to Batthyany. “There’s more world out there than I ever imagined, and it’s a harder world, too. But the stars. . . the stars look down on all of it, Great-uncle. I’m sure of that.”

“Well said,” his father boomed, and everybody else nodded. “And before long we’ll win this war, and everything will be fine.”

Another expectant hush. “Of course we will,” Istvan said. Then he went and got very drunk indeed. Everyone said what a hero he surely had to be.

Springtime in Jelgava carried with it the promise of summer—not the threat of summer, as was so in desert Zuwayza, but a definite assurance that, where the weather was warm now, it would be warmer later. Talsu reveled in the clear skies and the lengthening days. So did some of the Algarvian occupiers in Skrunda; northern Algarve’s climate wasn’t much different from this.

But more of the redheads in his hometown sweated and fumed and fussed as winter ebbed away. The Algarvian heartland lay in the forests of the distant south, where it was always cool and damp. Talsu didn’t understand why anyone would want to live in such weather, but a lot of King Mezentio’s men pined for it. He listened to them grumbling whenever they came into die family shop to have Traku sew their tunics and kilts.

“If they don’t care for the way things are here, they can go back where they came from,” Traku said one evening at supper, spitting an olive pit down into his plate.

Talsu paused with a spoonful of barley mush dusted with powdered cheese halfway to his mouth. “They may not like it here, Father, but they like it a lot less in Unkerlant.” His chuckle was deliberately nasty.

“I wouldn’t want to go to Unkerlant, either,” his younger sister Ausra said, and shivered. “It’s probably still snowing there, and it hasn’t snowed in Skrunda at all for years and years.”

“There’s a difference, though,” Talsu said. “If you did go to Unkerlant, King Swemmel’s men wouldn’t want to blaze you on sight.”

“Let’s not talk about any of us going to Unkerlant,” his mother said in a firmer tone than she usually used. “When folk of Kaunian blood go to Unkerlant these days, it’s not of their own free will. And they don’t come back.”

“Now, Laitsina, let’s not borrow trouble, either,” Traku said. “Nobody knows for sure whether those rumors are true or not.” His words fell flat; he didn’t sound as if he believed them himself.

“The news sheets say they’re all a pack of lies,” Talsu observed. “But everything in the news sheets is a lie, because the redheads won’t let them tell the truth. If a liar says something is a lie, doesn’t that mean it really isn’t?”

“Well, the news sheets say we all love King Mainardo, and that’s not true,” Ausra said. “After you read that, you know you can’t trust anything else you read.” She got up from the table. “May I be excused?”

“Aye,” Laitsina said, “but aren’t you going to finish?” She pointed to Ausra’s bowl, which was still almost half full.

“No, I’ve had enough,” Ausra answered. “You can put it in the rest crate. Maybe I’ll eat it for dinner tomorrow at noontime.”

“I’ll put it away,” Talsu said, rising, too. His bowl of mush was empty; the only things on his plate were the rind from a slab of white cheese and a dozen olive pits. He could easily have finished Ausra’s portion, too, but, while he might have wanted it, he knew he didn’t need it.

“Thank you,” Laitsina said, and, in an aside to Traku, “He really has grown up.”

“It’s the time he spent in the army,” Talsu’s father answered, also in a low voice.

Traku had more faith in the Jelgavan army than Talsu did, no doubt because he’d never served in it. Talsu was convinced he would have become reasonably neat without sergeants screaming at him whenever they felt like it. He plucked Ausra’s bowl off the table and carried it into the kitchen, where the rest crate lay beside the door to the pantry.

The sorcery that made the crate work was based on a charm from the days of the Kaunian Empire: a paralysis spell the imperial armies had used against their foes with great success till those foes found counterspells that rendered it useless. Then, for more than a thousand years, it had been only a curiosity . . . till, with the advent of systematic magecraft, wizards discovered it worked by drastically slowing the rate at which life went on. That made variations on it handy not only in keeping food fresh but also in medicine.

As soon as Talsu undid the latch and took the lid off the rest crate, he put the spell out of action. The food his mother had stored inside began to age at its normal rate once more. He set the half full bowl of barley mush on top of a coil of sausage links, then returned the lid to its proper place, reactivating the crate. He was just snapping the latch again when Laitsina called, “Make sure you put the cover on good and tight.”

“Aye, Mother,” Talsu said patiently. She might make noises about his having grown up, but she didn’t believe it, not down deep inside. She probably never would.

Afterwards, he played robbers with his father till they were both yawning. He won three games, Traku two. As the tailor put away the board, the men, and the dice, he said, “You’re better at the game than you were before you went into King Donalitu’s service.”

“I don’t know why,” Talsu answered. “I don’t think I played it more than a couple of times. Mostly, we just rolled dice when we felt like swapping money around.”

The next morning, after Talsu finished cutting the pieces for an Algarvian’s summer-weight linen tunic, his mother came downstairs and pressed some coins into his hand. “Go over to the grocer’s and bring me back half a dozen apples,” she said. “I want to make tarts tonight.”

“All right, Mother,” Talsu said, and set down the shears with alacrity.

Laitsina smiled. “And don’t take too long passing the time of day with Gailisa, either.”

“Who, me?” Talsu said. His mother laughed at him. In some ways, she was ready to believe him grown up after all.

Whistling, he hurried over to the grocer’s shop. Sure enough, Gailisa was taking care of the place: she was artistically arranging onions in a crate when he walked inside. “Hello, Talsu,” she said. “What do you want today?”

“You don’t sell that,” he said with a grin, and she made a face at him. “But my mother sent me over here for some apples.”

“Well, we’ve got some,” Gailisa answered, pointing to a basket on the counter. “If they’re for eating, though, I’ve got to tell you they’re on the mushy side. The winter was just too mild for them to get as firm as they might.”

“No, she wants them for tarts,” Talsu said.

“They’ll be fine for that.” Gailisa went over to the basket. Talsu watched her hips work inside her trousers. “How many does she want?”

“About half a dozen, she said.”

“All right.” Gailisa bent over the basket and started picking them up one by one. “I’ll give you the best ones we’ve got.”

She was still going through them when a couple of Algarvian troopers in kilts strode into the shop. One of them pointed at her and said something in his own language. Laughing, the other one nodded and rocked his hips forward and back. Talsu didn’t understand a word of what they said, but that didn’t stop him from getting angry.

He turned toward them, not saying anything himself but not trying to hide what he thought of them, either. He wasn’t afraid of Algarvians because they were Algarvians, not when he’d faced them over the sights of a stick. True, his army had lost to theirs, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t hurt and bleed just like Jelgavans.

They noticed his expression, too, noticed it and didn’t like it. One of them jerked a thumb back toward the door through which they’d come and spoke in bad Jelgavan: “You—going out. Getting lost.”

“No,” Talsu answered evenly. “I’m waiting for the lady to choose some apples for me.”

“Futtering apples,” the Algarvian said. “Going out now. Going out now and—uh, or—being sorry.”

“No,” Talsu repeated.

“Talsu, maybe you’d better . . .” Gailisa began.

But it was already too late. The redheads understood what no meant. They were as young and headstrong as he was, and they were the conquerors, and there were two of them. Smiling most unpleasantly, they advanced on him. Gailisa darted around the counter and into the back of the shop, loudly calling for her father. Talsu noticed only out of the corner of his eye; almost all of his attention stayed on the Algarvians.

The fight, such as it was, didn’t last long. One of the redheads swung at him, a looping haymaker that would have knocked him sprawling had it landed. It didn’t. He blocked it with his left forearm and delivered a sharp, straight right. The Algarvian’s nose flattened under his fist. With a howl, the soldier staggered back into shelves piled high with produce. He knocked them over. Vegetables spilled across the floor.

Talsu spun toward the other Algarvian. This fellow didn’t waste time on fisticuffs. He yanked a knife from his belt, stabbed Talsu in the side, and then helped his friend get up. They both ran out of the grocer’s shop.

When Talsu started to run after them, he got only a couple of paces before crumpling to his knees and then to his belly. He stared in dull surprise at the blood that darkened his tunic and spread over the floor. He heard Gailisa’s shriek as if from very far away. The inside of the shop went gray and then black.

He woke puzzled, wondering why he wasn’t seeing the grocer’s shop. Instead, his eyes took in the iron rails of a bed, and a whitewashed wall beyond it. A man in a pale gray tunic peered down at him. “How do you feel?” the fellow asked.

Before Talsu could answer, he became aware of a snarling pain in his flank. He bit back a scream, as he might have done were he wounded in battle. “Hurts,” he got out through clenched teeth.

“I believe it,” said the man in the gray tunic—a healing mage, Talsu realized. “We had to do a lot of work on you while your body was slowed down. Even with the sorcery, it was touch and go for a while there. You lost a lot of blood. But I think you’ll come through pretty well, if fever doesn’t take you.”

“Hurts,” Talsu repeated. He was going to start screaming in a minute, whether he wanted to or not. The pain felt as big as the world.

“Here,” the mage said. “Drink this.” Talsu didn’t ask what it was. He seized the cup and gulped it down. It tasted overpoweringly of poppies. He panted like a dog, waiting for the pain to go away. It didn’t, not really. He did: he seemed to be floating to one side of his body, so that, while he still felt everything, it didn’t seem to matter anymore. It might almost have been happening to someone else.

The mage lifted his tunic and examined the stitched-up wound in his side. Talsu looked at it, too, with curiosity far more abstract than he could have managed undrugged. “He put quite a hole in me,” he remarked, and the mage nodded. “Did they catch him?” Talsu asked, and this time the healer shook his head. Talsu shrugged. The drug didn’t let him get excited about anything. “I might have known.”