Jaws of Darkness (70 page)

Now … Now, with the Algarvian garrison that had occupied Balvi for four years fled to the more rugged interior of Jelgava, the city was one enormous carnival. Jelgavans had never had a reputation for revelry—if anyone did, it was their Algarvian occupiers—but they were doing their best to make one. Thumping Kaunian-style bands blared on every corner. People danced in the streets. Most of them seemed drunk. And anyone in Kuusaman or Lagoan uniform could hardly take a step without getting kissed or having a mug full of something cold and wet and potent thrust into his hand.

Even though Leino walked through Balvi hand in hand with Xavega, Jelgavan women kept coming up and throwing their arms around him. Jelgavan men kept doing the same thing with Xavega, who seemed to enjoy it much less. When one of the blond men let his hands wander more freely on her person than he might have, she slapped him and shouted curses in classical Kaunian. By his silly grin, he didn’t understand her and wouldn’t have cared if he had.

Looking around at the way most of the Kuusaman and Lagoan soldiers were responding to this welcome, Leino spoke in classical Kaunian, too: “They seem to be having a good time.”

“Of course they do—they are men,” Xavega answered tartly in the same tongue. “And, nine months from now, a good many half-Jelgavan babies will be born. I do not care to have any of them be mine.”

“All right,” Leino said, reflecting that any Jelgavan man who tried to drag Xavega into a dark corner—not that every couple was bothering to look for a dark corner, not in the midst of this joyous madness—would surely get his head broken for his trouble, or else have something worse happen to him.

And then he and Xavega rounded a corner, and he discovered that not all the madness was joyous. There hanging upside down from lampposts were the bodies of several Algarvians and the Jelgavans who had helped them run the kingdom under puppet king Mainardo. The crowd kept finding new horrid indignities to heap on the corpses; everyone cheered at each fresh mutilation. Leino was glad he didn’t speak Jelgavan: he couldn’t understand the suggestions that came from the onlookers.

He glanced toward Xavega. What they were seeing didn’t seem to bother her. She caught his eye and said, “They had it coming.”

“Maybe,” he answered, wondering if anyone could ever have … that coming to him. Or to her: he pointed. “That one, I think, used to be a woman.”

“I daresay she deserved it, too,” Xavega snapped. Leino shrugged; he didn’t know one way or the other. He wondered if the people who’d hung the woman up there with those men had known, or cared.

And then a fierce howl rose from the Jelgavans, for a wagon bearing a blond man with his hands tied in front of him came slowly up the street through the crowd. Leino needed no Jelgavan to understand the roars of hatred from the people. The captive in the wagon shouted something that sounded defiant. More roars answered him. The crowd surged toward the wagon. The fellow with his hands tied had guards, but they didn’t do much—didn’t, in fact, do anything—to protect him. The mob snatched him out of the wagon and beat him and kicked him as they dragged him to the nearest wall. Some of them had sticks. They blazed him. He fell. With another harsh, baying cry—half wolfish, half orgasmic—they swarmed over his body.

“When they find some more rope, he will go up on a lamppost, too,” Leino said. Classical Kaunian seemed too cold, too dispassionate, for such a discussion, but it remained the only tongue he had in common with Xavega.

“Good riddance to him,” she said. “These people knew him. They knew what he should have got, and they gave it to him.”

“I suppose so,” Leino said, and then, after a moment, “I wonder how many in that mob have things of their own to hide, and how many names that Jelgavan did not get to name because they killed him so fast.”

Xavega gave him a startled look. “I had not thought of that,” she said. But then she shrugged. “If they do not get the names from him, they will surely get them from someone else. A lot of these Jelgavans collaborated with the Algarvians.”

That was also likely—indeed, almost certain—to be true. “Some of the same ones will probably end up collaborating with us,” Leino said. The thought saddened him. He wondered why. He’d never labored under the delusion that war was an especially clean business.

A couple of blocks farther on, a fat Jelgavan rushed out of his tavern to press mugs of wine in Leino and Xavega’s hands. Quite impartially, he kissed them both on the cheek and shouted out something in which Leino heard a word that sounded a lot like the classical Kaunian term for
freedom.
Then he bowed and went back into his place, only to emerge again a moment later to give wine to a couple of Kuusaman soldiers. By the way they staggered, they’d already had a good deal.

Xavega let out a scornful sniff. “If the Algarvians knew what things were like here, they could run us out of Balvi with about a regiment and a half of men.”

“Maybe.” Leino raised an eyebrow. “Would you have said the same thing if you had seen a couple of drunken Lagoan soldiers?”

“Our men have too much discipline for …” But Xavega’s voice trailed away. Not even she could bring out that claim with a straight face. Too much evidence to the contrary was not just visible but blatantly obvious. Leino laughed. She contented herself with giving him a sour look. That only made him laugh more.

More shouts of savage glee came from up a side street.
They’ve caught another collaborator,
Leino thought with something between joy and alarm. Watching a man, even an enemy, die as that one Jelgavan had done was nothing to face with equanimity.

But these collaborators—there were about a dozen of them—were not going to their end, only to their humiliation. They were women who must have had Algarvian lovers. They’d been stripped to the waist and had red paint smeared in their hair. People shouted curses at them and pelted them with eggs and overripe summer fruit, but no one aimed a stick their way.

“Little whores,” Xavega said.

“Most of them are taller than I am,” Leino said.

Xavega snorted again. “You know what I meant,” she said, and this time he had to nod.

They passed an empty square half overgrown with rank grass, not something Leino would have expected to see in the middle of a large, crowded city like Balvi. At the edge of the square sprouted a small brickwork of memorial tablets, all of them obviously new. Leino tried his classical Kaunian on a few of the locals: “Excuse me, but whom do these tablets remember?”

On his third try, he found a man who could answer him in the old language. “Not ‘whom,’ man from another kingdom, but ‘what,’ “ the fellow said, his accent odd in Leino’s ears but understandable. “Once an assembly hall from the days of the Kaunian Empire stood here. But the Algarvian barbarians, may the powers below eat them, destroyed it. We could not mourn it as we should have while false King Mainardo ruled here. Now that he is gone, we show we remember.”

“Thank you,” Leino said. He’d heard about Algarvian wrecking in the Kaunian kingdoms, but this was the first he’d seen of it himself.

“I thank you, man from another kingdom,” the Jelgavan replied. In classical Kaunian, the usual word for
foreigner
also meant
barbarian
—that was the word the man had applied to the Algarvians. He found a politer substitute for Leino. After bowing, he added, “I thank you for setting us free and for giving us back our own true and rightful king.”

“Er—you are welcome,” Leino said, and got away in a hurry. From everything he’d seen of King Donalitu aboard
Habakkuk,
the Jelgavans were welcome to him.

Here and there in Balvi, signs in the Algarvians’ slithering script remained; no doubt they told garrison troops and soldiers on leave from the horrors of the west how to get about in the city. Even as that thought crossed Leino’s mind, he noticed a couple of Jelgavans busily tearing down one of those signs.

A Lagoan soldier wearing the silver gorget that marked a military constable held up his hand. He spoke in his own language. Xavega angrily answered. He shrugged and said something else. She answered even more angrily.

“What does he want?” Leino asked: he had next to no Lagoan of his own, just as Xavega had never bothered learning Kuusaman.

In classical Kaunian, she replied, “He says all mages are to report to a center they have set up near the palace. He says we cannot enjoy ourselves here even for a day, but that we have to report at once so we can return to duty once more.”

“It makes sense,” Leino said. Xavega kept right on grumbling; whether it made sense or not, she didn’t like it.

Perhaps noting as much, the military constable came up and spoke in Lagoan. Then, to Leino’s surprise, he added a few words in Kuusaman: “Come with me. I take you there.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Leino said.

This time, the Lagoan surprised him by laughing. “I think maybe I do have to do that. You come with me.” Leino shrugged and nodded. Xavega looked ready to bite nails in half once the military constable put that into Lagoan, but she nodded, too.

At the center, a bored-looking Kuusaman clerk checked their names off a duty roster. In his own language, he said, “The two of you haven’t had the special training, isn’t that right?”

“Aye, that’s so,” Leino answered. He translated for Xavega, who looked miffed at not hearing Lagoan or at least classical Kaunian. She grudgingly nodded again.

“All right.” The clerk went right on speaking Kuusaman, and made a couple of more check marks. “I’ll assign you to the training center north of here. Shall I billet the two of you together?”

“What’s he saying?” Xavega asked. Leino translated again. She nodded once more and told the clerk, “Aye, put us together,” in classical Kaunian. He evidently followed that language even if he chose not to speak it, for he made more checks still.

Leino had left
Habakkuk
to find a painless way to break things off with Xavega. He still didn’t know exactly why she’d left—to get at the Algarvians, he supposed. And she’d seen having him around as one more comfort she’d grown used to.

And you
—
you really hate the idea of going to bed with her,
Leino thought. He didn’t care for most of Xavega’s opinions or for large chunks of her rather bad-tempered character, but when they lay down together …

If I had any gumption, I would say, “No, put us apart. “
He said not a word. He let the clerk finish the paperwork. The fellow pointed to a bench. “Wait there. Before long, a carriage or a wagon will take you to the ley-line caravan depot for your trip to the center. Things are a little crazy now.” Leino went over and sat down. Xavega perched beside him. With an inward sigh, he slipped his arm around her waist and drew her close. For once most obliging, she snuggled up against him.

“Are you almost ready?” Colonel Lurcanio called up to Krasta from the foot of the stairs. “This is a reception at the royal palace, remember. King Gainibu will probably behead you if you are late.”

Krasta looked at herself in the bedchamber mirror. She tugged at the waistband of her trousers. Her pregnancy still didn’t show, not quite, but she knew she was heavier than usual. Her trousers should have been snug, but not
this
snug. But they would have to do.

“I’m coming,” she said. She and Lurcanio hadn’t been invited to the palace for some months. She didn’t want to offend King Gainibu by being late, even if she didn’t worry about the headsman’s axe. As she grabbed a handbag, she wondered if she was fretting over nothing. Probably. Odds were, Gainibu would be too drunk to care, or even to notice, who arrived when. He’d stayed drunk most of the time since the Algarvians occupied Priekule.

By the way Lurcanio’s eyes lit up, she knew the trousers weren’t too snug the wrong way. And she also knew that she had rather more on top than she’d had before Lurcanio (or, curse it, was it Valnu?) put a baby in her. With men, that never went to waste.

Lurcanio handed her up into his carriage. His driver—another redhead, of course—picked his way through evening twilight and then through darkness toward the palace. No lights showed. Lagoan and Kuusaman dragons flew over the capital of Valmiera all too often these days. If patrolling Algarvians or the Valmieran constables who served them saw lights, they would sometimes start blazing without warning.

After getting lost a couple of times and grumbling in his incomprehensible language, the driver finally found the palace. Lights gleamed inside, with dark curtains making sure no stray beams leaked out.

“Colonel the Count Lurcanio!” a flunky bawled out. “His companion, the Marchioness Krasta!” On Lurcanio’s arm, Krasta strode into the reception hall.

She’d gone into that reception hall on Lurcanio’s arm a good many times. At first, everything seemed the same as usual: Algarvian officers with their good-looking Valmieran companions, along with the Valmieran nobles who inclined toward Algarve and their ladies. King Gainibu stood in a receiving line with Grand Duke Ivone, the redhead who really ran Valmiera these days.

But something in the hall was different tonight. Krasta sensed it at once, though she needed a little while to realize just what it was.  Far fewer Valmieran nobles had come than would have been true a couple of years before: only those who’d most closely tied their fate to the occupiers. Krasta hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to the news sheets—she never did—but she knew the war news for Algarve wasn’t good.

The fair-weather friends are flying,
she thought. She almost said it aloud, but caught herself in time. Lurcanio would not have taken it kindly; his temper had a way of slipping when some Algarvian position in Unkerlant or Jelgava did some slipping of its own.

Krasta got her second surprise when she and Lurcanio greeted the King of Valmiera in the receiving line. As usual, Gainibu had a glass in his hand. But it held only wine, not the stronger spirits he’d preferred since yielding to the redheads.

“Good evening, Colonel,” Gainibu said when Lurcanio made his polite bow. Krasta dropped a curtsy. “And a good evening to you, Marchioness,” the king added. His voice and his eyes seemed clearer than they had for years. As Lurcanio started to go on, Gainibu remarked, “There are a few things I should like to discuss with you tonight, Colonel.”