Into the Darkness (62 page)

Algarve had indeed gravely harmed Unkerlant then. Had the redheads been fighting Unkerlant alone rather than all their neighbors, they might well have paraded through the streets of Cottbus in triumph, as they had just paraded through the streets of Priekule. If the Algarvians fought Unkerlant alone now, they might yet parade through the streets of Cottbus. Rathar understood the danger, which King Swemmel pretty plainly did not.

Again speaking with great care, the marshal said, “Taking vengeance is all the sweeter when it’s certain.”

“All our servants tell us reasons why we cannot do the things we must do, the things we want to do,” Swemmel said testily.

“No doubt this is so: it is the way of courtiers,” Rathar said. “But how many of your servants will dare to tell you there is a difference between what you want to do and what you must do?”

Swemmel looked at him from hooded eyes. Sometimes the king could stand more truth than most people thought. Sometimes, too, he would destroy anyone who tried to tell him anything that went against what he already believed. No one could be sure which way he would go without making the experiment. Few took the chance. Every once in a while, Rathar did.

“Do you defy us, Marshal?” the king asked in tones of genuine curiosity.

“In no way, your Majesty,” Rathar replied. “I seek to serve you as well as I may. I also seek to serve the kingdom as well as I may.”

“We
are
the kingdom,” Swemmel declared.

“So you are, your Majesty. While you live—and may you live long -you
are
Unkerlant. But Unkerlant endured for centuries before you were born, and will endure for hundreds of years to come.” Rathar was pleased he’d found a way to say that without mentioning Swemmel’s death. He went on, “I seek to serve the Unkerlant that will be as well as the Unkerlant that is.”

King Swemmel pointed to his own chest. “We are the only proper judge of what is best for the Unkerlant that will be.”

When he put it like that, Rathar found no way to contradict him without also seeming to defy him. The marshal bowed his head. If Swemmel demanded anything too preposterous from him, he could either threaten to resign (although that was a threat best used sparingly) or pretend to obey and try to mitigate the effects of the king’s orders through judicious insubordination (a tactic with obvious risks of its own).

Swemmel made an impatient gesture. “Go on, get you gone. We do not wish to see your face any more. We do not wish to hear your carping any more. When we judge the time ripe for attacking Algarve, we shall order the assault. And we shall be obeyed, if not by you, then by another.”

“Choosing who commands the armies of Unkerlant is your Majesty’s privilege,” Rathar answered evenly. Swemmel glared at him. His calm acceptance of the king’s superiority left Swemmel’s anger nowhere to light—and left Swemmel angrier on account of it.

Rathar prostrated himself once more. Then he rose and bowed himself out of the audience chamber. He retrieved his ceremonial sword from Swemmel’s guards, who stood between him and the door to the audience chamber while he belted it on. As he left the anteroom, he allowed himself a long sigh of relief. He’d survived again—or thought he had. But all the way back to the office where everyone else in Unkerlant imagined him to be so powerful, he kept waiting for a couple of King Swemmel’s human bloodhounds to seize him and lead the way. And even after he got back there, he still shivered. That Swemmel’s bloodhounds hadn’t seized him didn’t mean they couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

Whenever Leofsig went out on to the streets of Gromheort, he kept waiting for a couple of King Mezentio’s human bloodhounds to seize him and lead him away.
I
won’t go back to the captives’ camp without a fight,
he told himself fiercely, and carried a knife longer and stouter than the Algarvians’ regulations allowed to Forthwegians in the area they occupied.

But the redheaded soldiers who patrolled his city paid no more attention to him than to any other Forthwegian man. Maybe that was because his father knew whom to bribe. No doubt it was, in part. A bigger part, though, was that the Algarvians seemed to have little interest in any Forthwegians save pretty girls, to whom they would call lewd invitations in their own language and in what bits of Forthwegian they’d learned.

That made the girls’ lives harder, but it made Leofsig’s easier. Before entering King Penda’s levy, he had been training to cast accounts, as his father did. These days, Hestan barely had work enough for himself, and none for an assistant even of his own flesh and blood. When Leofsig worked—and he needed to work, for food and money were tight—he worked as a day laborer.

“Coming on! Doing better!” an Algarvian soldier bossing his crew shouted as they cobblestoned the road leading southwest from Gromheort. The fellow spoke Forthwegian in two-word bursts: “Coming on! You lazy! Like Kaunians! Working harder!” Several men in the gang were Kaunians. As far as Leofsig could see, they worked as hard as anybody else.

“Screwing you!” he muttered to Burgred, one of the other young men in the work gang, doing his best to imitate the redhead’s way of speaking.

Burgred chuckled as he let a round stone thump into place. “You’re a funny fellow,” he said, also in a low voice. The laborers weren’t supposed to talk with one another, but the Algarvian, a decent enough man, usually didn’t give them a hard time about it.

“Oh, aye, I’m funny, all right.” Leofsig also dropped a stone in the roadway. “Funny like a unicorn with a broken leg.”

Burgred headed back toward a cart piled high with cobblestones and rubble. The animals that drew it were not unicorns but a couple of scrawny, utterly prosaic mules. Returning with a new stone, Burgred said, “It’s all the cursed Kaunians’ fault, anyway.” He fitted the stone into place. “There we go. That whore’s in good.”

Leofsig grunted. He swiped at his sweaty forehead with a tunic sleeve. “I don’t quite see that,” he said. A moment later, he wished he’d kept quiet. Even so little might have been too much.

“Stands to reason, doesn’t it?” Burgred said. “If it wasn’t for the Kaunians, we wouldn’t have gotten into the war in the first place. If we hadn’t gotten into it, we couldn’t very well have lost it, now could we?”

Broadsheets plastered all over Gromheort said the same thing in almost the same words. The Algarvians had put them up; a Forthwegian who presumed to put up a broadsheet in his own city was liable to be executed on the spot if the redheads caught him doing it. Leofsig wondered if Burgred even knew he was spitting back the pap the Algarvians fed him.

Burgred went on, “And a plague take the Kaunians, anyway. They may live here, but they aren’t Forthwegians, not really. They keep their own language, they keep their own clothes—and their women don’t come close to dressing decently—and they hate us. So why shouldn’t we hate them? Powers above, I haven’t had any use for Kaunians since I first knew they were different than regular people.”

Leofsig sighed and didn’t answer. He saw no point to it. Burgred, plainly, hadn’t needed the redheads to shape his opinion of Kaunians. Like a lot of Forthwegians—maybe even most Forthwegians—he’d despised them long before the Algarvians overran Forthweg.

“You work!” the Algarvian straw boss yelled. “No standing! No talking! Talking—trouble!” He spoke Forthwegian with a horrible accent. He had no grammar and next to no vocabulary. No one ever had trouble understanding him, though.

As the day wound to an end, Leofsig queued up with the rest of the laborers to get his meager pay from an Algarvian sergeant who looked as pained at handing out the silver as if it came from his own belt pouch. At first, the Algarvians hadn’t paid anyone even a copper to work for them. In tones of dry amusement, Hestan had said, “They didn’t take long to discover people will work better if they have some reason to do it.”

Wearily, Leofsig and the others in the gang trudged back toward Gromheort, the Kaunians (who earned only half as much as Forthwegians) a little apart from the rest. Most of the men walked by the side of the cobblestoned road, not on it. “Stupid redheads,” Burgred remarked. “A road like this is harder on people’s feet than a regular one made of dirt. Harder on horses’ hooves, too, and on unicorns’.”

“They can use it during the rain, though, when a regular road turns to mud,” Leofsig said. With a certain sardonic relish, he added, “The Kaunian Empire had roads like these.”

“And much good it did the cursed Kaunians, too,” Burgred said, a better comeback than Leofsig had expected from him. “May it do the cursed Algarvians as much good as it did the blonds however long ago that was.”

Inside Gromheort, the work gang scattered, each man heading off toward his own home—or toward a tavern, where he could drink up in an hour what he’d made in a day. Some of the men who did that were their families’ sole support. Being very much his father’s son, Leofsig looked on them with nothing but scorn.

Not that he would turn down a glass of wine—or a couple of glasses of wine—when he got home. But no one would go without food or firewood because he had some wine. He could even have afforded to spend a copper at the public baths beforehand. But the baths were always short of hot water these days. The Algarvians starved them for fuel—what did they care if Forthwegians stank? Leofsig didn’t care so much as he would have before the war. He’d discovered in the field and in the captives’ camp that no one stank when everyone stank.

Leofsig was almost home when a Kaunian youth in ragged trousers darted out of an alley and past him, plainly running for his life. Four or five Forthwegian boys pounded after him. One of them, Leofsig saw, was his cousin Sidroc.

Tired though he was, he started running after Sidroc before he quite realized what he was doing. At first, he thought he was mortified because he was Sidroc’s close kin. After a few strides, he decided he was mortified because he was a Forthwegian. That hurt worse.

Because it hurt, he wanted to hurt Sidroc, too. And he did, bringing his cousin down with a tackle that would have got him thrown off any football pitch in Forthweg—or even in Unkerlant, where they played the game for blood. Sidroc squalled most satisfactorily.

“Shut up, you little turd,” Leofsig said coldly. “What in blazes do you think you were doing, chasing that Kaunian like a mad dog foaming at the mouth?”

“What was I doing?” Sidroc squeaked. He was bleeding from both elbows and one knee, but didn’t seem to notice. “What was I doing?”

“Has someone put a spell on you, so you have to say everything twice?” Leofsig demanded. “I ought to beat you so you can’t even walk, let alone run. My father will be ashamed of you when I tell him what you’ve done. Powers above, I hope Uncle Hengist will, too.”

He thought Sidroc would cringe. Instead, his cousin shouted, “You’re crazy, do you know that? The little blond-headed snake cut the belt pouch right off me, curse him, and now I bet he’s got away clean. Of course I was chasing him. Wouldn’t you chase a thief? Or are you too high and mighty for that?”

“A thief?” Leofsig said in a small voice. So often, people chased Kaunians through the streets for no reason at all. That people might chase a Kaunian through the streets for a perfectly good reason had never crossed his mind. If Forthwegians could be thieves, Kaunians certainly could, too.

“Aye, a thief. You’ve heard the word?” Sidroc spoke with sarcasm Leofsig’s father might have envied. He also realized he’d been hurt. “What were you trying to do, murder me? You almost did.”

Since Leofsig had been trying for something not far short of murder, he didn’t answer directly. He said, “I thought you were going after him for the sport of it.”

“Not this time.” Sidroc got to his feet and put hands on hips; blood trickled down his forearms. “You’re worse than your brother, do you know that? He’s a Kaunian-lover, too, but he doesn’t kill people on account of it.”

“Oh, shut up, or you’ll make me decide I’m glad I flattened you after all,” Leofsig said. “Let’s go home.”

When they got home and went into the kitchen, Leofsig’s mother and sister both exclaimed over Sidroc’s battered state. They exclaimed again when he told them he’d had his belt pouch stolen, and once more when he told them how he’d come to get battered. “Leofsig, you should ask questions before you hurt someone,” Elfryth said.

“I’m sorry, Mother—there wasn’t time,” Leofsig said. He realized he hadn’t apologized to Sidroc yet. That needed doing, however little he relished it. “I am sorry, cousin. Kaunians get the short end of the stick so often when they don’t deserve it, I just thought this was once more.”

“Well, I can understand that,” Conberge said. Leofsig sent his sister a grateful glance. Sidroc sniffed loudly.

As she might have to one of her own sons, Elfryth said, “Come here, Sidroc. Let’s get you cleaned up.” She wet a rag and advanced on Sidroc. “This may sting, so stand still.” Sidroc did, but yelped as she got to work.

Drawn by the yelps, Ealstan came in to find out what was going on. “Oh,” was all he said when he found out why Sidroc was bleeding. “That’s too bad.”

Leofsig had expected more from him, and was obscurely disappointed not to get it. After supper, when the two of them went out to the courtyard together, Leofsig said, “I thought you’d figured out that Kaunians were people, too.”

“They’re people, all right.” His younger brother did not try to hide his bitterness. “When they get the chance, sonic of them lick the Algarvians’ boots the same way some of our people do.”

Leofsig had already seen how some Forthwegians were perfectly content to do business with the occupying redheads. That disgusted him, but didn’t especially surprise him. But Kaunians—“Where could you find an Algarvian who’d want a Kaunian to lick his boots?” He could think of some other possibilities along those lines, but forbore from mentioning them in case his brother couldn’t.

“It happens.” Ealstan spoke with great conviction. “I’ve seen it happen. I wish I hadn’t, but I have.”

“You’ve already said that much. Do you want to tell me about it?” Leofsig asked.

His younger brother surprised him again, this time by shaking his head. “No. It’s not your affair. Not mine, either, really, but I know about it.” Ealstan shrugged, a weary motion Hestan might have used. Leofsig scratched his head. Some time after he’d gone into King Penda’s levy, his little brother had indeed turned into a man, a man he was beginning to realize he barely knew.