Darkness Descending (43 page)

“Maybe, Sergeant, though I haven’t got much,” the mage’s apprentice answered, sounding more respectful than he usually did.

“Tell ‘em you’re a first-rank mage who’ll know if they lie, then ask ‘em if all those cursed ‘
Urrafs
were magic to scare us off,” Istvan said.

“I’ll try.” Kun sounded doubtful, but he spoke to the Unkerlanters. Istvan listened to gutturals going back and forth and watched gestures till Kun returned to Gyongyosian: “That’s what they were doing, all right. They knew the jig was up when they heard our regiment forming for the attack.”

Istvan laughed till tears came. The tears promptly started freezing his eyelashes together. He swiped at his face with his mittens. Then he heard shouts from the west: Captain Tivadar at last, bringing reinforcements against the Unkerlanter host. . . the Unkerlanter host Istvan had just captured. He made his way over to Tivadar. Saluting, he said, “Sir, the enemy position is ours,” and laughed again at the flabbergasted expression on his company commander’s face.

No one came back from the west. That, to Vanai, was the central fact to life in Oyngestun these days. No one came back. No one sent money from the wages the Algarvians had promised to pay. No one sent so much as a scrawled note. That continuing, echoing silence made the worst rumors easier and easier to believe as day followed day.

One chilly afternoon, Vanai went to the apothecary’s to get a decoction of willow bark for her grandfather, who’d come down with the grippe. As Tamulis handed her the small jar of green glass, he remarked, not quite out of the blue, “If you hear the Algarvian constables are on their way here again, you’d be smart to take to the woods before they start yelling, ‘Kaunians, come forth!’ “

“Do you think so?” Vanai asked, and Tamulis nodded vigorously. Then she asked another question: “Is that what you intend to do?”

“Aye, I expect I will,” the apothecary answered. “I’m no woodsman—anyone who know me knows that. I don’t know whether I’d starve before I froze or the other way round. But whatever happens, it has to be better than getting into one of those caravan cars bound for Unkerlant.”

Vanai bit her lip. “You may be right. And thank you for telling me that. You’ve been as kind as... as anyone in Oyngestun.” It wasn’t enormous praise, but she could give it without feeling like a hypocrite.

“Life’s hard,” Tamulis said gruffly. “Life’s hard for everybody, and especially for everybody with yellow hair. Go on, get out of here. I hope your grandfather feels better, the old fool. If he gets well, maybe you won’t have to come in here so often and listen to me complain.”

“It’s not as if there’s nothing to complain about.” Vanai bobbed her head and then turned and went out the door.

A couple of Forthwegian men two or three years older than she leaned against the wall of the apothecary’s shop. Vanai wasn’t too surprised to see them in the Kaunian part of Oyngestun; Tamulis knew three times as much as his Forthwegian counterpart, and had plenty of stocky, swarthy, dark-haired customers.

But one of the Forthwegians pointed at her and said, “So long, blondy!” He drew a thumb across his throat and made horrible gagging, gargling noises. While he was laughing, the other fellow grabbed his crotch and said, “Here, sweetheart. My meat’s got more flavor than an Algarvian sausage any day.”

That the earth did not swallow them proved the powers above were deaf. Vanai stalked past them, pretending they didn’t exist. She’d had plenty of practice doing that with both Forthwegians and Kaunians. But now she had to hide more fear than usual. Since the Algarvians sent that shipment of Kaunians west, Oyngestun’s Forthwegians had grown bolder toward their neighbors. Why not? Would the redheads punish them for it? Not likely!

If these two laid hands on her . . .
I’ll fight,
Vanai thought.
I don’t have to lie there and take it, the way I did with Spinello.
She chose not to dwell on what her odds would be against two men both stronger than she. To her vast relief, they did nothing worse than taunt her. After she slipped round a corner, she breathed easier.

She passed the postman on the way home. He was a Forthwegian, too, but decent enough. “Letter for you,” he said. “Something for your granddad, too.”

“I’ll take it to him,” Vanai said. She almost always took him whatever mail there was; these days, she made a point of getting it first. Holding up the little green bottle, she added, “He’s down with the grippe.”

“Aye, it’s been going around; my sister and her husband have it,” the postman said. “Hope he feels better soon.” With a nod, he went on his way.

Vanai hurried the rest of the way to the house she shared with Brivibas. Her heart sang within her. A letter for her had to be a letter from Ealstan. No one else wrote to her. She’d feared Spinello would, but he must have realized any letter he sent her would only go into the fire. Ealstan’s letters she cherished. Strange how a few minutes of fondling and grunting and thrashing could make two people open their souls to each other. She had no idea how that happened, but was ever so glad it did.

As far as her grandfather knew, no one sent her letters. That was why she made a point of picking up the mail before Brivibas could. It wasn’t hard; even well, he usually stayed in his study, on the far side of the house from the doorway.

But when Vanai opened the door, no letters shoved in under it lay on the entry-hall floor. She wondered if the postman had delivered them to the house next door by mistake, though he didn’t usually do things like that. Then she heard her grandfather moving about in the kitchen, and she realized she might have a problem.

She had to go into the kitchen anyhow, to mix the bitter willow-bark decoction with something sweet to make it more palatable for Brivibas. “I greet you, my grandfather,” she said when she saw him. “I have your medicine. How are you feeling?”

“I have been better,” he answered, his voice a rasping croak. “Aye, I have been better. I came out here to make myself a cup of herb tea, and heard that ignorant lout of a postman slide something under our door. I went to get it and found—this.” He’d taken Ealstan’s letter out of the franked envelope in which it had come.

“You read it?” Anger pushed fear from Vanai’s mind. “You
read
it? You had no business doing that. Whatever Ealstan says there, it’s not meant for you. Give it to me this instant.”

“Very well, my dearest sweet darling Vanai.” Brivibas quoted Ealstan’s greeting with savage relish. Two spots of color, from fever or outrage or both at once, burned on his cheeks. He crumpled the letter into a ball and flung it at Vanai. “As for its being none of my business, I would have to disagree. I would say, just as a guess from the style, that this is not the first such letter you’ve received.”

“That’s not your business, either,” Vanai snapped, cursing his literary analysis. She bent and picked up the letter and unfolded it far more carefully than Brivibas had wadded it up. Why couldn’t he have stayed in bed till she got back?

“I think it is.” His eyes glittered. “You still live under my roof. How much more shame must I endure on account of you?”

He still thought of what Vanai did in terms of how it affected him, not in terms of what it meant to her. Her chin lifted haughtily, as if she were a noblewoman from the days of the Kaunian Empire. “I don’t propose to discuss it.”

“It’s fortunate that we have no Zuwayzin or Kuusamans close by,” Brivibas said, “or you might seek to slake your lust with them as well.”

Vanai threw the bottle of willow-bark decoction at his head. Rage lent her strength, but not aim. The bottle flew past and shattered against the wall behind him. “If you think I was slaking my lust with the cursed Algarvian, you’re even blinder than I thought,” she snarled. “The only reason I sucked his prong was to keep you alive, and now—”
And now I’m sorry I did it
was in her mind, but she burst into tears before she could say it.

Brivibas took her words in a different direction: “And now this Forthwegian barbarian satisfies you better still, is that it?” he demanded.

When Vanai found herself looking toward the cutlery to see which knife was longest and sharpest, she spun away with a groan and fled to her bedchamber. It was less a refuge than she might have wanted, less a refuge than it would have been a year before. Lying on the bed alone, she couldn’t help thinking of the times when she’d had to lie there with Spinello. If her grandfather thought she’d wanted to lie with the Algarvian . . . If he thought that, he had even less notion of what went on around him than she’d imagined.

She didn’t know what she would have done had Brivibas knocked on her door then or come in without knocking. Luckily, she didn’t have to find out. Her tears—tears of fury rather than sorrow—quickly dried. She sat up and did a better job of smoothing the letter from Ealstan.

“At least someone cares about me,” she murmured as she began to read it. It was, as her grandfather had sneeringly shown, filled with endearments, as were the ones she sent to him. But it was also filled with his doings, and those of his father and mother and sister and his cousin and uncle. She wondered if he knew how lucky he was to have a good-sized family where everyone—except, she gathered, Sidroc and Hengist—got along. Probably not. To him, that would be like water to a fish.

I honor you for choosing to stay with your grandfather, even though it means we must be apart,
Ealstan wrote.
Please believe me when I say that. Please also believe me when I say I wish we could be together.

“Oh, I wish we could, too,” Vanai whispered. For the first time, she really thought of leaving the house where she’d lived almost all her life and traveling to Gromheort. She had no idea of what she would do there, or how she would keep from starving, but the idea of being away from Brivibas glowed in her thoughts like a fire catching hold in dry grass.

She shook her head, then wondered why she pushed the idea aside. When she was a child, she and Brivibas had fit together well enough. He did not fit her now, any more than one of the small tunics she’d worn then would. Why not go her own way, then, and leave him behind to go his?

Because if I leave him behind, he’ll die in short order. Because if I wanted him to die in short order, I never would have let Spinello have me. Because, since I did let Spinello have me, I’ve given up too much to let him die in short order. But oh!
—
how I wish I hadn’t!

After a little while, grimacing, she got up and opened the door. She couldn’t even stay and sulk, not if she wanted to—or felt she should, which came closer to the actual state of affairs—nurse her grandfather back to health. She had to go fix his supper and fetch it to him. It wouldn’t be much—vegetable soup and a chunk of bread—but she didn’t trust him to be able to do it for himself.

She’d known all along that he underestimated her. Now she discovered she’d underestimated him, too. Her nose told her as much as soon as she came out of the bedchamber: she smelled cooking soup. When she came into the kitchen, she found the pot over a low fire and a note on the table nearby.

Brivibas’ spidery hand was as familiar to her as her own: far more familiar than Ealstan’s.
My granddaughter,
he wrote in a Kaunian straight out of the glory days of the empire,
judging it wiser that we not impinge on each other for some little while, I have prepared my own repast, leaving enough behind to satisfy, I hope, those bodily wants of yours susceptible to satisfaction through food.

Vanai stared in the direction of his study, where he was probably spooning up soup even now. She had to look at the note twice before she noticed the sting in its tail. “Bodily wants susceptible to food, eh?” she muttered, and the stare turned into a glare. “Why didn’t you come right out and call me a whore?”

In the end, though, she ate the soup Brivibas had heated. She was unhappy doing it, just as, no doubt, her grandfather had been unhappy eating a great many meals she’d made. When she was finished, she washed and dried her bowl and spoon and the ladle she’d used. She went to her bedchamber and started a letter to Ealstan. That made her feel better.

Felgilde squeezed Leofsig’s hand as they walked along the street together. “Oh, this will be fun!” she exclaimed.

“I hope so,” he answered, and then smiled and said, “You look very pretty tonight.”

She squeezed his hand again, perhaps—he hoped—a little less archly than she was in the habit of doing. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s a handsome cloak you have on.”

“Thank
you,”
Leofsig said. He’d borrowed it from his father, but Felgilde didn’t need to know that.

She said, “Ethelhelm’s band is one of the two or three best in Forthweg. I’m so excited! This is the first time since the war they’ve come here from Eoforwic. They’re supposed to have all sorts of new tunes, too—that’s what everybody says, anyway. You were so lucky to be able to get tickets.”

“I know,” Leofsig said. His father had helped there, too; Hestan cast accounts for the hall where Ethelhelm’s band was going to perform. But that was also nothing Felgilde needed to know.

He slid his arm around her waist. She snuggled closer to him. He brought his hand up a bit, so that the top of his thumb and wrist brushed against the bottom of her breast. Most of the time, she slapped his hand away when he tried that. Tonight, she let it stay. His hopes, among other things, began to rise. Maybe he wouldn’t have to keep on being jealous of his younger brother for so long as he’d thought.

The hall was in a part of town that had housed a good many Kaunians. Some of them still remained, looking shabby and frightened. An old man with fair hair stood on the street not far from the entrance to the hall, begging from the people who were coming to hear Ethelhelm’s famous band.

Leofsig let go of Felgilde to rummage in his belt pouch and take out a couple of coins. He dropped them into the bowl at the scrawny old man’s feet. “Powers above bless you, sir,” the Kaunian said in Forthwegian. He’d had little luck till Leofsig came by; only a few other coins, most of them small coppers, lay in the bowl.