Darkness Descending (5 page)

He had to step smartly; Ilmarinen proved a spry old man. For a moment, Fernao wondered if the Kuusaman was trying to lose him and make off with the bag—it was the one in which he’d brought what little sorcerous apparatus he had. He didn’t think Ilmarinen could learn much from the stuff, but Ilmarinen wouldn’t be able to know—he didn’t think Ilmarinen would be able to know—that in advance.

As they were leaving the large, crowded depot, the Kuusaman theoretical sorcerer looked back, saw Fernao right behind him, and said over his shoulder, “Haven’t managed to make you disappear, eh?” Was he grinning because he was joking or to hide disappointment? Fernao couldn’t tell. He didn’t think Ilmarinen wanted him to be able to tell.

Fernao looked around. Yliharma wasn’t one of the great cities of the world, as Setubal was, but it stood in the second rank. Buildings towered ten, some even fifteen, stories into the air. People dressed in almost as many different styles as they would have been in Setubal crowded the streets. They hurried into and out of fancy shops, sometimes emerging with packages.

As most Kuusaman towns did to Fernao, it all looked very homelike—except that he could not read any of the signs. He spoke Sibian and Algarvian, Forthwe-gian and classical Kaunian. He could make a fair stab at Valmieran. The language of the principality next door to his own kingdom, though, remained a closed book.

“Here,” Ilmarinen said, stilrin. Kaunian, after they’d walked a couple of blocks. “This place isn’t too bad.” The words on the sign hanging above the eatery were unintelligible to Fernao. The picture, though, made him smile: it showed seven reindeer in princely coronets, sitting around a table groaning with food. He followed Ilmarinen inside.

In Priekule, the capital of Valmiera, the waiter would have fawned on his customers. In Setubal, Fernao’s hometown, he would have been more stiffly servile. Here, he might have been Ilmarinens cousin. He addressed Fernao in singsong Kuusaman, a mistake made all the more natural by Fernao’s narrow, slanted eyes—Lagoans, though primarily of Algarvic stock, had some Kuusaman blood in them, too. Fernao spread his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said in Lagoan. “I don’t speak your language.”

“Ah. That makes you easier to gouge,” the waiter answered, also in Lagoan. His grin, like Ilmarinen’s, might have meant he was joking. On the other hand, it might not have, too.

The menu also turned out to be incomprehensible Kuusaman. “Three specialties here,” Ilmarinen said, now deigning to speak Lagoan himself. “Salmon, mutton, or reindeer. You can’t go too far wrong with any of them.”

“Salmon will do nicely, thanks,” Fernao answered. “When I was in the land of the Ice People, I ate enough strange things to put me off them for a while.”

“Reindeer is better than camel, but have it as you will,” Ilmarinen answered. “I’m going for the mutton chop myself. Everyone calls me an old goat, and this is as close to eating my namesake as I can come without horrifying the Gyongyosians.” He waved to the waiter and ordered for both of them in Kuusaman. “Ale suit you?” he asked Fernao, who nodded. Ilmarinen turned back to the waiter, who also nodded and went off.

Fernao said, “I shouldn’t think offending the Gyongyosians would worry you, not when Kuusamo is fighting them.”

“Because we’re fighting them; they’re too easy a target,” Ilmarinen replied, which made an odd kind of sense to Fernao. The waiter returned with a large pitcher of ale and two earthenware mugs. He poured each one full, then left again.

“Good,” Fernao said after a sip. He looked across the table at Ilmarinen. “It struck me as odd that none of the top theoretical sorcerers in Kuusamo has published anything lately. It struck Grandmaster Pinhiero as odd, too, when I pointed it out to him.”

“I’ve known Pinhiero for forty years,” Ilmarinen said, “and he’s so odd himself, it’s the normal that looks strange to him.” He studied Fernao. “I’m too polite to explain what that says about you.”

“No, you’re not,” Fernao said, and Ilmarinen laughed out loud. After another sip of ale, Fernao went on, “And I had expected to see Master Siuntio, not you.”

“He sent me,” Ilmarinen answered. “He said I was better at being rude than he was. Bugger me if I know what he meant.” His chuckle displayed uneven yellow teeth.

“Why would you want to be rude to me?” Fernao asked.

“That’s just it—I don’t need a reason, and Siuntio would.” Ilmarinen’s eyes lit up. “And here’s supper.” For a while, he and Fernao paid attention to little else.

Fernao’s salmon steak was moist and pink and flavorful. He did not enjoy it so much as he might have, though, for he’d become convinced he wasn’t going to learn anything on this journey. He’d also become convinced there were things he badly needed to learn.

“More ale?” he asked Ilmarinen, hefting the pitcher.

“Oh, aye,” the Kuusaman mage answered, “though you’ll not get me drunk.” Fernao’s ears burned, but he poured anyway.

“What would happen if I ignored you and did go to see Siuntio?” he asked.

Ilmarinen shrugged. “You’d end up buying him supper, too. You’d be even less likely to make him drunk than you are me—I enjoy it every now and again, but he’s an old sobersides. And you still wouldn’t find out anything. He’d tell you there’s nothing to find out, the same as I’m telling you now.”

“Curse you both for lying,” Fernao flared.

“If Pinhiero’s curses won’t stick to me—and they won’t—I’m not going to worry about yours, lad,” Ilmarinen answered. “And I say I am not lying. Your own research will prove the truth of it, as the exception proves the rule.”

“What sort of research?” Fernao asked.

Ilmarinen only smiled again, and said not a word.

These days, Vanai feared every knock at the door. Most Kaunians in Forthweg did, and had reason to. She had more reasons, far more than most. Major Spinello had kept his part of the bargain: her grandfather no longer went out to labor on the roads. And she had to keep her part of the bargain, too, whenever the Algarvian officer chose. For Brivibas’ sake, she did.

It no longer hurt, as it had the first time. Spinello was not cruel that particular way. In fact, he kept trying to please her. He would caress her for what seemed like forever before doing what he wanted. She never kindled. She never came close to kindling. She despised him far too much for that. Even resignation wasn’t easy, though at last she managed it.

Instead of by wounding her in the bedchamber, Spinello took his nasty pleasure by ostentatiously leading her to that chamber and closing the door in Brivibas’ face. He didn’t bother barring it. Once, in a transport of impotent fury, Brivibas had burst in. “Come to watch, have you?” Spinello asked coolly, not missing a stroke. Vanai’s grandfather reeled away as if blazed through the heart.

It was after Major Spinello left that the fights would start. “Better you should have let me die than to do such a thing!” Brivibas would shout. Vanai knew he meant it, too, which was twisting the knife.

She always answered the same way: “In a while, this will be over. If you died, my grandfather, that would be forever, and I could not bear it.”

“But how does this make me look?” Brivibas cried one day. “Preserved alive because my granddaughter gives herself to an Algarvian barbarian? How am I to hold my head up in the village?”

He spoke in terms of himself, not in terms of Vanai. His selfishness infuriated her. She said, “I have not been able to hold my head up in Oyngestun since you first grew friendly toward the Algarvian barbarian—which is not what you called him when he began meeting with you—
how
he admired your scholarship! I shared your shame then. If you share mine now, is it not part of the bargain you made?”

Brivibas stared at her. For a moment, she thought she’d made him see things through her eyes. But then he said, “How, after this, will I be able to make a proper marriage alliance for you?”

“How, after this, do you think I would ever want another man to touch me?” Vanai retorted, at which her grandfather flinched and retreated to the safety of his study. Vanai glared after him. He hadn’t thought about how she might feel about being married, only about the difficulties her behavior might cause him. A poisonous thought sprouted in her mind, tempting and lethal as a death-cap mushroom:
I
should have let him labor till he dropped.

She shook her head violently. If she blamed him for thinking only of himself, how could she let herself do the same? By all the logic Brivibas had so carefully taught her, she couldn’t. And once in the open, the thought sickened her. However much she wanted it to, though, it would not go away.

When she had to go out in the streets of Oyngestun, she held her own head high. That stiff, straight carriage—and the trousers she wore, still stubbornly clinging to Kaunian styles—drew howls and leers from the Algarvian soldiers who passed through the village these days, marching west toward the fight with Unker-lant down roads her grandfather had helped pave. The men of the small local garrison, though, stopped bothering her. She wished she could be happy about that, but she understood why all too well: they knew she was an officer’s plaything, and so not for the likes of common soldiers.

Only little by little did she notice that the Kaunians of Oyngestun were slower to curse her or turn their backs on her than they had been the summer before. When she did notice, she scratched her head. Then all she’d done was eat some of the food Major Spinello lavished on her grandfather and her in the hope of getting Brivibas to say how happy he was with Algarvian rule. Now she was indeed Spinello’s plaything, was the harlot she’d been accused of being then. The villagers should have hated her more than ever.

She got part of the answer one day from Tamulis the apothecary. Brivibas had sent her forth because he was down with a headache—he seemed to come down with headaches ever more often these days—and they had no powders in the house. Handing her a packet, the apothecary remarked, “I’m cursed if I think the old buzzard is worth it.”

“What? Headache powders?” Vanai shrugged. “We can afford them—and, except for food, there’s not much to spend silver on these days.”

Tamulis looked at her. After a moment, he said, “I was not talking about headache powders.”

Vanai felt the flush climb from her throat to her hairline. She couldn’t even say she didn’t know what he was talking about. She did. Oh, she did. She looked down at the dusty slates of the floor. “He is my grandfather,” she whispered.

“By all the signs I’ve seen, that’s his good fortune and none of yours,” the apothecary said, his voice rough.

Tears filled Vanai’s eyes. To her mortification, they began dripping down her cheeks. She was powerless to stop them. She’d spent so long and put so much effort into inuring herself to the villagers’ scorn, sympathy struck her with double force. “I’d better go,” she said thickly.

“Here, lass—wait,” Tamulis said. Blurrily, she saw him holding out a square of cloth to her. “Dry your eyes.”

She obeyed, though she didn’t think it would help. Her eyes would still be red and swollen, her face blotchy. When she handed the cloth back, she said, “These days, we all do what we have to do to get through.”

Tamulis grunted. “You do more for that long-winded old foof than he would ever do for you.”

Vanai had a vision of a statuesque, brassy-haired Algarvian noblewoman demanding that Brivibas—whose own blond hair was heavily streaked with silver—make love to her to keep his granddaughter out of a labor gang. She held that vision in her mind for a couple of seconds. . . but for no more than a couple of seconds, because after that she exploded into laughter almost as involuntary as her tears had been. Try as she would, she couldn’t imagine an Algarvian noblewoman with such peculiar tastes.

“And what’s so funny now?” Tamulis asked.

Somehow, explaining to the apothecary why she’d laughed would have embarrassed Vanai more than having the whole village know Major Spinello spread her thighs whenever the fancy struck him. Maybe it was that she couldn’t do anything about Spinello, not if she wanted Brivibas to stay safe in Oyngestun. But maybe, too, it was that explaining would have meant admitting she’d had a bawdy thought of her own. She took the headache powders and left in a hurry.

“What kept you?” Brivibas demanded peevishly when she gave him the powders. “My head feels as if it were on the point of falling off.”

“I brought them to you as quickly as I could, my grandfather,” Vanai answered. “I am sorry you are in pain.” She kept her voice soft and deferential. She’d been doing that around Brivibas for as long as she could remember. It was harder now than it had been. She sometimes felt he ought to keep his voice soft and deferential around her, considering who owed whom what at the moment.

She shook her head. Brivibas had been father and mother both to her since she was no more than a toddler. All she was doing when she lay still for Spinello or sank to her knees in front of him was paying back a small part of that debt. So she told herself, over and over again.

And then Brivibas said, “Part of my pain, I have no doubt, comes from my grief and sorrow at your fall from the proper standards of Kaunian womanhood.”

Had he said,
at what you are enduring for my sake,
everything would have been well. But that was not how he measured things. To him, the standards were more important than the reason for which they were broken. Vanai said, “I can meet your expectations, my grandfather, or I can keep you alive. My apologies, but I do not seem to be able to do both at once.” She turned on her heel and walked away without giving him a chance to reply.

They did not speak to each other for the next several days.

They might have healed the rift sooner, but Major Spinello chose that afternoon to pay Vanai a visit. Brivibas retreated to his study and slammed the door. Spinello laughed. “The old fool does not know when he is well off,” he said. As if to declare the rest of the house his to do with as he chose, he took Vanai on the divan in the parlor, under the eyes of the ancient statuettes and reliefs displayed there.

Afterwards, sated, he ran his hand along her flank. She wanted to get up, to wash away the feel of his skin slick against hers, but his weight still pinned her to the rather scratchy fabric of the divan. With a wriggle and a twist, she let her exasperation at that show. She’d seen he didn’t mind, or not too much.