Into the Darkness (49 page)

Smilsu looked around to see who else might be listening. Talsu had already done that, and hadn’t seen anyone. Maybe Smilsu thought he did, or maybe he felt cautious, for he answered, “I haven’t seen Colonel Balozhu giving us any trouble. Powers above, you hardly know he’s around.”

”
Powers above
is right. That’s trouble all by itself, isn’t it?” Talsu burst out. Maybe the beer he was drinking with his supper had gone to his head. “He’s supposed to be leading us against the enemy, not pretending he’s invisible.”

“Colonel Adomu led us against the enemy,” Smilsu said, still either cautious or contrary. “Are you going to complain about him, too?”

“Not a bit of it,” Talsu answered. “I wish we had more officers like him. I think the Algarvians do have more officers like him.”

Smilsu took a pull at his own beer. “Well, maybe they do. Vartu would say so, anyhow.” He chuckled. “Of course, Vartu was Colonel Dzirnavu’s body servant, so he’s not in the mood to be fair. But no matter what the redheads have, pal, we’re still the ones doing the advancing.”

“So we are, but we ought to be doing more of it,” Talsu said. “You can see the Algarvians don’t have anything more than skeleton forces facing us. We should be in front of Tricarico by now.” He shook his head. “That’s not right—we should be
in
Tricarico by now, and past it, too.”

“I’m so sorry, General Grand Duke Talsu, sir, my lord,” Smilsu said with a snort. “I didn’t know King Donalitu had set you in command of the fight against Algarve.”

“Oh, shut up.” Talsu’s voice was as sour as the beer he was drinking. “Maybe I will go looking for Vartu. You’re no cursed good, not when it comes to making sense you’re not.” He started to get to his feet.

“Sit tight, sit tight,” Smilsu said. “One thing you’ve got to know is that the redheads have some men who are really good with a stick lurking around here somewhere, waiting to see if they can put a beam through a fellow’s ear. You want to give them a clean blaze at you?”

“No, but I don’t want to hang around with a fool, either. It might be catching.” Despite his harsh words, Talsu didn’t get up.

And Smilsu didn’t get angry. He spat out a piece of gristle, then said, “And what if you’re right? What are we supposed to do then? There’s nothing we can do. If the Algarvians don’t get us, the dungeons back of the line will. We’re stuck in the middle. All we can do is hope we win in spite of ourselves.”

“We can hope the Algarvians kill
all
our nobles,” Talsu said savagely. “Then we’d be better off.”

“We’ve been round that barn before—and you want to be careful with what you say, and you want to be careful who you say it to.” Smilsu kept his own voice very low indeed. “Otherwise,
you
won’t be better off, no matter what happens to the rest of us. Do you hear what I’m telling you, my friend?”

“I hear you.” Talsu remained furious at the world in general and at the hidebound Jelgavan nobility in particular.

Because Smilsu kept his mouth shut, the Jelgavan nobility did not take their revenge. The world was another matter. Not ten minutes later, a cold, nasty rain started falling. A couple of weeks earlier in the season or a little higher in the foothills and it would have been snow. Even though Talsu had to make a wet, miserable bed, he didn’t loathe the rain so much as he might have. Like dust and smoke, it cut down the range at which beams were effective. He hoped all those clever Algarvian stick men came down with chest fever from staying out in the bad weather. He wouldn’t grieve a bit.

The Algarvians, unfortunately, found other ways to be troublesome than with sneaky stick men struggling not to sneeze. They started lobbing eggs in the direction of the Jelgavan encampment. They didn’t know exactly where King Donalitu’s men were resting, but they had a fair notion—fair enough to get Talsu and the other Jelgavan soldiers out of their blankets and digging holes in the rocky, muddy soil.

He cursed with every shovelful of dirt he flung aside. “Stinking redheads,” he muttered. “Won’t even let a man get a decent night’s sleep.” An egg burst close by. The flash illuminated the camp for a moment, as a lightning bolt would have done. The suddenly released energy also picked up earth and stones and flung them about. A good-sized rock hissed past, only a foot or two from Talsu’s head. He cursed again and dug harder.

Every so often through the long night, someone would shriek as he was wounded. The redheads weren’t tossing eggs in enormous numbers—this wasn’t anything like the enormous cataclysms of the Six Years’ War, where battlefields became scorched, cratered wastelands. But the eggs the Algarvians tossed did serve their purpose: they hurt a few Jelgavans and kept the rest from getting the sleep they needed. Had Talsu commanded the Algarvian forces, he would have pinned gold stars on the men tossing them.

At last, sullenly, the darkness lifted, though rain kept pouring down. It had put out all the cookfires during the night. Talsu breakfasted on cold, soggy porridge, on cold, greasy—almost slimy—sausage, and on beer that even insistent rain had trouble making any more watery than it already was. He enjoyed it about as much as he’d enjoyed trying to sleep in the wet hole he’d dug for himself.

Colonel Dzirnavu would have thrown a tantrum because the rain interfered with cooking his fancy breakfast. Colonel Adomu would have eaten what his men did and then led them in an attack on the egg-tossers that had harassed them in the night. Talsu didn’t know what Colonel Balozhu ate. Balozhu did appear at an hour earlier than Dzirnavu would have stirred abroad. He carried an umbrella and looked more like a schoolmaster than a noble who commanded a regiment.

“No point trying to move forward in this,” Balozhu said after peering in all directions. “You couldn’t hope to blaze a man till you got close enough to hit him over the head with your stick. We’ll keep scouts out ahead of us, maybe send forward a patrol, but as for the rest, I think we’ll sit tight till this finally decides to blow over.”

Talsu couldn’t argue with any of that, not even to himself— had he proposed to argue with the colonel and count, jumping off a cliff would have put him out of his misery faster and less messily. But, as he squelched off to stand against a tree, he remained vaguely dissatisfied.
Maybe I’m tired,
he thought, unbuttoning his fly. No doubt he was tired. Was he tired enough for his wits to be wandering? If he was, how could he tell?

He put the question to Smilsu when relieving his friend on sentry-go: “Isn’t the idea behind this war to stamp the cursed redheads into the dirt?”

“You’ve got that look in your eye again—or maybe it’s the rain.” Smilsu thought for a little while, then shrugged. “You really
want
to advance in this stuff?”

“It might catch the Algarvians by surprise,” Talsu said. He added what he thought the final convincer. “Colonel Adomu would have done it.”

Unconvinced, Smilsu said, “Aye, and look what it got him, too. Dead men don’t have a whole lot of fun.”

“We advanced more under Adomu than under Dzirnavu and Balozhu put together,” Talsu said.

Smilsu sent him a quizzical look. “You’re the one who wants the nobles dead, right? So why are you so cursed eager to fight their fight for ‘em?”

Talsu hadn’t looked at it that way. It was his turn to stop and think. At last, he said, “Just because I can’t stand the nobles doesn’t mean I love the Algarvians. No good Kaunian should do that.”

“Tell it to Dzirnavu—but he got his, didn’t he?” Smilsu chuckled, then sobered. “The redheads don’t love us, either, not even a little they don’t.”

“Cursed robbers, cursed thieves, cursed bandits—as if what they love should matter to us.” Talsu grimaced. If Algarvians and what they loved and didn’t love hadn’t mattered to Jelgava, he wouldn’t have been out here in the foothills of the Bratanu Mountains with chilly rain dripping down the back of his neck.

Smilsu put it a slightly different way: “If one of those whoresons points his stick your way and blazes you down, it’ll matter a lot that he doesn’t love you.”

“Aye, aye, aye.” Talsu waved, yielding the point. “I still wish we were giving the redheads a good kick in the balls.” Smilsu started to say something; Talsu shook his head to show he wasn’t finished. “If we don’t, sooner or later they’ll give us one, and you can take that to the bank and turn it into goldpieces.”

“They’re busy,” Smilsu said. “They’ve got the Sibs and Forthwegians to hold down, they’re in a sea fight with Lagoas, and the Valmierans are trying to smash through their lines down south. With all that in their mess kit, they aren’t going to be bothering us any time soon.”

“There—you’ve gone and proved my point,” Talsu said. “If they can’t bother us, what better time to bother them?”

“Ahh, you bother me, so I’m going back to camp.” Off Smilsu went, dripping. Talsu stood in the warm glow surrounding any man who has won an argument. Then he wondered,
What good did it do me?
The glow faded.

Eleven

W
HEN VANAI heard the knock on the door, her first thought was that it meant trouble. She’d grown quite good at telling Kaunians from Forthwegians simply by the way they knocked. Kaunians did it as softly as they could to make themselves heard inside, almost as if they were apologizing for causing a disturbance. The Forthwegians of Oyngestun came less often to the house she shared with her grandfather. When they did, they forthrightly announced themselves.

This knock—it came again as Vanai hurried toward the door—did not seem to fall into either the apologetic or the forthright school. What it said was,
Open up or suffer the consequences,
or, perhaps,
Open up and suffer the consequences anyway.

“What is that dreadful racket?” Brivibas called from his study. “Vanai, do something about it, if you please.”

“Aye, my grandfather,” Vanai said. Brivibas sensed something out of the ordinary, too, which worried her. He paid as little heed as he could to such mundanities as knocks on the door. No ancient Kaunian author Vanai knew and no modern journal of things anciently Kaunian mentioned them; thus, they might as well not have existed for him.

She opened the door, telling herself she was imagining things and a Forthwegian tradesman would be standing there irritably wondering what took her so long. But the man standing there was no Forthwegian. He was tall and lanky, with a red chin beard and mustaches waxed to needle points. On his head, cocked at a jaunty angle, sat a broad-brimmed hat with a bright pheasant feather sticking up from the band. He wore a short tunic above a pleated kilt, and boots and knee socks. He was, in short, an Algarvian, as Vanai had feared from the first.

She thought about slamming the door in his face, but didn’t have the nerve. Besides, she doubted that would do any good. Trying to keep a quaver from her voice, she asked, “What—what do you want?”

He surprised her by sweeping off his hat and bowing almost double, then astonished her by replying in Kaunian rather than the Forthwegian she’d used: “Is this the home of the famous scholar Brivibas?”

Was it a trap? If it was, what could she do about it? The occupiers had to know where Brivibas lived. They didn’t need to waste time on politeness, either. Had they wanted her grandfather for dark reasons of their own, they could have broken down the door and sent soldiers storming in. Despite the obvious truth in all that, she couldn’t bring herself to say anything more than, “Who wishes to learn?” She kept on speaking Forthwegian.

The Algarvian bowed again. “I have the honor to be Major Spinello. Will you do me the courtesy of announcing me to your—grandfather, is that correct? I wish to seek his wisdom in matters having to do with antiquities in this area.” He kept using Kaunian. He spoke it very well, and even used participles correctly. Only his trilled “r”s declared his native language.

Vanai gave up. “Please step into the front hall,” she said in her own tongue. “I will tell him you wish to see him.”

Spinello rewarded her with another bow. “You are very kind, and very lovely as well.” That made her retreat faster than the Forthwegian army ever had. The redhead did keep his hands to himself, but she didn’t let him get close enough to do anything else.

Brivibas looked up in some annoyance when she poked her head into the study. “Whoever that was at the door, I hope you sent him away with a flea in his ear,” he said. “Drafting an article in Forthwegian is quite difficult enough without distractions.”

“My grandfather”—Vanai took a deep breath, and also took a certain amount of pleasure in dropping an egg on Brivibas’s head—“my grandfather, an Algarvian major named Spinello would speak with you concerning antiquities around Oyngestun.”

Brivibas opened his mouth, then closed it again. He tried once more: “An—Algarvian major?” Each word seemed to require a separate effort. “What am I to do?” he muttered, apparently to himself. But the answer to that, even for a scholar, was only too obvious. He rose from his chair. “I had better see him, hadn’t I?”

He followed Vanai back to the hall that led to the street door. Spinello was examining a terra-cotta relief of a cobbler at work hanging there. After bowing to Brivibas and yet again to Vanai, he said, “This is a splendid copy. I’ve seen the original in the museum at Trapani.”