Darkness Descending (54 page)

From even farther away, Sergeant Panfilo shouted in despair: “Back! We have to fall back!”

Dimly, Tealdo knew the sergeant was right. Despair filled him, too, despair and anguish. Thalfang wasn’t going to fall. If it didn’t, Cottbus wouldn’t, either. If Cottbus didn’t fall, what would the war look like then?
It’ll look a lot harder, that’s what,
Tealdo thought as he tried to use his arms to crawl back toward the edge of the square from which he’d set out. He left a trail of red behind him in the white.

He looked around for his stick. It was gone . .. somewhere. Color washed out of everything, leaving only gray fading toward black. However the war turned out, he wouldn’t know about it. He lay in the square in burning Thalfang. Unkerlanters on snowshoes shuffled past him, and his countrymen retreated.

Rain pattered down on Bishah and on the surrounding hills. That happened every winter—several times in a wet winter—but always seemed to take the Zuwayzin by surprise. Hajjaj had been through winters in Algarve. He’d even seen winter in Unkerlant. He knew how lucky his kingdom was to enjoy a warm climate, and also knew it needed what rain it got. All the same, watching drops splash down on the flagstones of his courtyard, he wished the rain would go away.

Tewfik came up behind him. Hajjaj knew that without turning his head; no one else’s sandals scraped across the floor the same way. The crusty old majordomo stopped, waiting to be noticed. Hajjaj was not so rude as to keep him waiting. “How now, Tewfik?” he asked, glad to turn away from the wet outside.

“Well, lad, they’ve found another leak in the roof.” Tewfik spoke with a certain morose satisfaction. “I’ve sent a runner down to the city to lay hold of the roofers, provided he doesn’t break his neck in the mud.”

“My thanks,” Hajjaj said. “The trouble is, everyone’s roof leaks when it rains, because no one bothers fixing a roof when the sun shines. Powers above only know when our turn with the roofers will come.”

“It had better come soon, or I’ll have a thing or two to say about it,” Tewfik declared. “Everyone’s roof may leak, but not everyone is the foreign minister of Zuwayza.”

“All the other clanfathers are just as grand as I am,” Hajjaj answered. “And all the rich merchants in the city are closer to the roofers than we are.”

Tewfik’s first sniff said he cared little for the pretensions of Zuwayzi nobles not fortunate enough to have him serve them. His second sniff said he cared even less for any merchants’ pretensions. “I know what’s required, and the roofers had cursed well better, too,” he growled.

Arguing with him was pointless, so Hajjaj yielded: “All right. How are the walls holding up?”

“Well enough,” Tewfik said grudgingly. “The wind’s not too bad, so the eaves keep the water away.”

“They’d better,” Hajjaj said. Like most Zuwayzi houses, his was made of thick bricks baked only by the sun. If they got soaked, they turned back into the mud from which they’d been made. In every rainstorm, people died when their houses fell in on them.

A serving woman came into the chamber where Hajjaj and Tewfik stood. “Excuse me, your Excellency,” she said, bowing to Hajjaj, “but General Ikhshid awaits in the crystal. He would speak with you.”

“Ikhshid himself? Not an aide-de-camp?” Hajjaj asked. The maidservant nodded. One of Hajjaj’s graying eyebrows rose. “Something’s gone wrong somewhere, then. I’ll speak with him; of course I will.”

He hurried to the crystal’s chamber, next to the library, and took care to shut the door behind him; he didn’t want the servants listening in. Sure enough, there in the crystal was the reduced image of General Ikhshid. “Good day, your Excellency,” the plump old soldier said when he saw the foreign minister. “Keeping dry?”

“As best I can,” Hajjaj replied. “Harder now than when I saw you last down in the desert near the old border with Unkerlant. What’s toward?” With crystals, as opposed to face-to-face meetings, coming straight to the point was good form.

Ikhshid said, “It might be best if you drove down to the palace. No matter how tight our control spells are, you never can tell who’s liable to pick up the emanations from a crystal.”

Hajjaj weighed that. “Is it really so bad?”

“If it weren’t, would I ask you out in the rain?” Ikhshid returned.

You’d better not,
Hajjaj thought.
If I come down there and it’s not important, you’ll be sorry.
Ikhshid came from a powerful clan; Hajjaj had known him for upwards of forty years, and judged him a pretty good officer. If the news wasn’t important, he’d make him sorry even so. Meanwhile . .. The foreign minister sighed. “I’m on my way.”

“Good.” Ikhshid’s image disappeared. Light flared, and then the crystal was merely a transparent globe once more.

Tewfik yowled like a scalded cat when he found out Hajjaj proposed leaving the house while it was still raining. “You’ll catch your death, lad, from inflammation of the lungs,” he said. When he found Hajjaj obdurate, he stood out in the rain, naked as any Zuwayzi, lecturing the driver on his responsibility to get Hajjaj to and from the palace safely. Though a good many years older than the foreign minister, he didn’t worry about the possibility of coming down with pneumonia himself.

The driver took longer than Hajjaj would have liked. The roadway, usually rock solid, was full of gluey mud. And once the carriage got into Bishah, it moved slowly even on paved roads. A couple of tangles on rain-slick cobbles had created snarls that would take hours to unknot.

At last, Hajjaj raised an umbrella—far more often used as a parasol—above his head and walked into the palace. Several servitors exclaimed in surprise at seeing him there. He didn’t tell them why he’d come. Of course, they would start guessing, but he couldn’t do anything about that.

He made his way through the winding corridors that led to General Ikhshid’s office (and past a couple of pots with water dripping into them, proving not even the royal roof was exempt from leaks). Then he went through the inevitable ritual of tea and wine and cakes, until, finally, he could ask, “And what is it you would not speak of through the crystal?”

Ikhshid wasted few words: “The Algarvians have begun falling back from Cottbus.”

“Have they?” Hajjaj murmured. For a moment, ice ran through him, as if an Unkerlanter winter lived in his belly. Then he rallied: “Is it very bad?”

“Well, your Excellency, it’s not what you’d call good,” the general answered. Like most Zuwayzi soldiers, he felt more passion for the alliance with Algarve than did Hajjaj, who saw the need for it but, these days, found little more to love in King Mezentio’s followers than in King Swemmel’s. Ikhshid went on, “If Cottbus doesn’t fall, Unkerlant doesn’t fall, you know.” He gave Hajjaj an anxious glance, as if uncertain whether the foreign minister really did know that.

“Oh, aye,” Hajjaj said absently. “The fight just got harder, in other words.” General Ikhshid nodded. He’d served in the Unkerlanter army in the Six Years’ War; he knew about hard fighting. At the moment, he looked thoroughly grim. Hajjaj found another question: “How do we know this? Are you sure it’s true?”

“How?” Ikhshid said. “The Unkerlanters are trumpeting it so loud, it’s a bloody wonder you need a crystal to hear them, that’s how.”

“The Unkerlanters,” Hajjaj observed with delicate understatement, “have been known to trifle with the truth.”

“Not this time.” Ikhshid sounded positive. “If they were lying, the Algarvians would be yelling even louder than they are. And the redheads aren’t. Except for saying there’s heavy fighting, they’re keeping real quiet.”

Hajjaj clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Quiet from the Algarvians is never a good sign. They boast even more than Unkerlanters.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Ikhshid checked himself; he was at bottom an honest man. “Well, maybe I would, but they aren’t so obnoxious to listen to.”

“Something to that,” Hajjaj said. “They’re more like us—they want to impress with how they say things, too. But never mind that. If we start talking about why foreigners are the way they are, we’ll be at it for the next year. We have more important things to worry about. For instance, have you told his Majesty yet?”

Ikhshid shook his head. “No. I thought you’d better find out first.”

Hajjaj made another clicking noise. “Not good, General. Not good. King Shazli needs to know these things.”

“So do you, your Excellency,” Ikhshid said. “It could even be that you need to know more than he does.”

That had truth written all over it, no matter how impolitic it was. But truth, Hajjaj was convinced, held many layers. “Would your heart be gladdened if I undertook to tell him?”

“It would, I’ll not deny,” Ikhshid replied at once.

“I’ll tend to it, then,” Hajjaj said, trying not to sound too resigned. Getting him to tell the king of the Algarvians’ misfortune was liable to be more than half the reason the general had summoned him down from his hillside home in the rain.

Being who he was, he had no trouble gaining audience with King Shazli. “Beastly weather, isn’t it?” the king said after Hajjaj had bowed before him. He sent his foreign minister a curious look. “What brings you down from your nice, dry house on a day like this, your Excellency?”

“My house leaks, too, your Majesty,” Hajjaj answered. “When duty called, I answered—which seems to be more than one can say of roofers.”

“Heh,” Shazli replied. The curious look hadn’t gone away. “And what sort of duty was it?” He shook his head. “No, don’t tell me now. Let’s refresh ourselves with tea and wine and cakes before you get into it.”

Being the king, Shazli had the right to interrupt the rituals of hospitality. The foreign minister wished he would have exercised it. Holding in such important news felt wrong.

But, as Hajjaj nibbled on a cake flavored with honey and pistachios, as he sipped first tea and then date wine, he decided it didn’t matter so much after all.

Shazli was no fool. He would realize the duty that had brought Hajjaj down from the hills didn’t involve good news. Presently, the king repeated his earlier question.

“General Ikhshid summoned me on the crystal,” Hajjaj told him. “He convinced me I ought to hear his news straight from his mouth to my ear.”

“Did he?” King Shazli still had wine left in his goblet. He drank it off now. “Let me guess: Mezentio’s men have fallen short of Cottbus.”

“So it would seem, your Majesty.” Hajjaj inclined his head to the king. No, Shazli was not a fool. “The Unkerlanters have declared it and the Algarvians haven’t denied it, which means it’s likely true.”

Shazli let out a long sigh. “Things would have been so much simpler if they’d driven King Swemmel howling into the uttermost west of Unkerlant.”

“That they would,” Hajjaj said. “Things are seldom so simple as we would wish, though.” He wondered if King Shazli really understood that. Not only was Shazli still a young man, he’d had whatever he wanted since he was very small. Who could be surprised if things looked simple to him?

But he said, “We have got as much as we could out of this war now—would you not agree? The best thing we can hope for now is to keep as much of it as we can.”

That struck Hajjaj as a good, sensible attitude. It was, in fact, not so far removed from his own attitude. He said, “Your Majesty, I’ll do everything I can to make sure we manage exactly that.”

“Good,” Shazli said. “I know I can rely on you.”

Hajjaj inclined his head once more. “You do me too much honor,” he murmured, and hoped he was being overmodest.

Twelve

G
arivald wasn’t drunk yet from this latest jar of spirits, but he wasn’t far away, either. There just wasn’t that much else to do, not with snowdrifts taller than a man on the ground in Zossen.

Oh, the livestock took up some time, but less than in summer, the pig and the chickens and Garivald’s couple of sheep and the cow shared his thatch-roofed house with him, Annore, Syrivald, and Leuba. They would freeze if they tried to go through the winter outdoors. Here in the hut, they helped the hearth keep things warm.

They also made a dreadful mess, even if the floor was only of rammed earth. Annore did her best to clean up after them, but her best, though better than that of most village wives, wasn’t nearly good enough. Garivald didn’t mind the stink; he’d long since got used to that, as he did every winter. He didn’t like stepping in freshly dropped dung, but a careful man didn’t do that very often.

He lifted his mug and let another swig of spirits burn its way down his throat. “Well, it’s not as bad as it could have been, I suppose,” he said.

“What isn’t?” Annore asked darkly. She was washing Leuba’s feet. Leuba, at not quite three, didn’t watch where she stepped, and didn’t much care, either.

“Having the Algarvians in Zossen,” Garivald answered.

“What? The redheads?” Annore’s thick eyebrows shot upwards. “Powers above curse them,
I
say!” She set hands on hips to show how strongly she meant it. Her nostrils flared. She pointed at Garivald. “You say that when they’ve worked you like a slave chopping wood for them?”

“Aye, I do,” he answered. “Think—in spite of everything, we have more to get us through the winter than we did in any other year I can remember. Aye, they work us like slaves sometimes. Aye, they robbed the harvest. But we still managed to store away more than usual. Go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong.” He folded his thick arms across his chest and looked a challenge at Annore.