Darkness Descending (55 page)

A lot of Unkerlanter husbands, especially after they’d started drinking, would have followed up that challenge by going over and smacking their wives around. Garivald didn’t. What restrained him wasn’t so much chivalry as the nagging fear that he’d wake up one morning with his throat slit if he got too rough with her.

She shrugged. “Maybe we did,” she said in grudging tones.

“No maybes about it,” Garivald exclaimed. “Aye, powers above curse the Algarvians, but they’re lousy thieves. Inefficient, I say. King Swemmel’s inspectors would have found a lot more of the hiding places where we squirreled things away.”

“Maybe,” Annore repeated.

“Maybe,” Leuba said gaily. She didn’t know what her mother and father were talking about—for which Garivald envied her—but she wanted to join in.

“No maybes,” Garivald said again. “They’re not up to a proper job of robbery, the way Unkerlanter inspectors would be.

Words formed inside his head.
They’re lousy thieves,
he thought,
And who believes I They’re here to stay? I For Swemmel’s soldiers I Grow ever bolder I To drive them away.
It wasn’t a great song. He knew that. But it was a beginning. Maybe he could turn it into something worth hearing. He hadn’t known he could make songs till the summer before. Now they kept springing into his mind all unbidden.

Softly, he sang those first couple of scrappy verses to Annore, setting them to the tune of a sprightly dance. She nodded approval, but warned, “You’ll have to be careful about letting people hear that one. Somebody’s liable to go to the Algarvians with it, and then where would you be?”

“I know,” Garivald said. “You’d best believe I know. But maybe our own soldiers will come back to Zossen before too long. The redheads are still retreating, they say.”
They
were his fellow villagers, who knew no more than he did, and roaming small bands of Unkerlanter soldiers still on the loose after being bypassed by the advancing redheads, who might.

“Here’s hoping they’re right,” Annore said, “but be careful anyhow, until the rightful king’s men take Zossen back.”

“What?” Now Garivald raised an eyebrow. “You don’t call Raniero your king?”

“This for Raniero,” Annore said, and made a rude noise. Delighted, so did Leuba. And so did Syrivald, who, these days, was almost as tall as his mother. Garivald laughed. After the redheads overran southeastern Unkerlant, Mezentio had proclaimed his cousin Raniero King of Grelz.

Once upon a time, Grelz had been a kingdom, before shrinking to a duchy in the Union of Crowns with Unkerlant. But Grelzers and Unkerlanters were closest kin; Grelz had never had an Algarvian king. As far as Garivald was concerned, it still didn’t: only an Algarvian cat’s-paw.

Leuba wasn’t likely to talk enough to get Garivald into trouble. He did eye his son. “You have to remember, Syrivald, nobody needs to hear what we say inside the house.”

“I know, Father,” Syrivald said seriously. After eyeing him, his father nodded. Syrivald, by now, was used to keeping his mouth shut. Before the redheads swept through this part of the kingdom, people hadn’t wanted Waddo to hear a lot of what they said. That became especially true after Zossen got a crystal of its own, a direct connection between the village and King Swemmel’s vast corps of inspectors and impressers. Now different people might betray things to the redheads, but the principle remained the same. Garivald was glad Syrivald understood it.

Outside, boots crunched on snow. Garivald grew alert. Visitors in dead of winter weren’t that common. People stayed indoors most of the time. He didn’t care to leave the house, to go outside in the cold and wind. He wondered who among his fellow villagers would.

When he heard the knock, he knew. Unkerlanter knocks, even worthless Waddo’s, were casual, friendly things. This one served notice: if he didn’t come to the door right away, whoever was on the other side would break it down.

Annore’s lips shaped a soundless word: “Algarvians.”

“Aye,” Garivald agreed. “But I’ve got to let them in.” He regretted saying they weren’t so bad. When they pounded on his door, they were very bad indeed.

Reluctantly, he went to the door. Even more reluctantly, he opened it. Sure as sure, three Algarvian soldiers stood there shivering and trying to look fierce. Their own kingdom hadn’t given them proper cold-weather gear; they’d added hats and cloaks stolen from villagers to their short tunics and kilts. That made them look less uniform and, somehow, less ferocious. It didn’t make them look much warmer.

“We coming in,” one of them said in bad Unkerlanter. The other two pointed their sticks at Garivald, as if to tell him he’d better not complain.

He already knew that. “Well, come in if you’re coming,” he said gruffly. “Don’t stand there letting all the heat out.” Cold flowed over his feet and legs in waves. As soon as the tall redheaded soldiers were inside, he shut the door behind them.

One of them wrinkled his nose and spoke in his own language. The other two grinned. Garivaid didn’t know what they were grinning about and didn’t want to find out. These garrison soldiers had been in Zossen since the village was captured. Not all of them were bad fellows, not as people. He’d come to know them. That didn’t mean he wanted them in his house.

They were looking around. He didn’t like it when their eyes settled on Annore. The garrison troops lived up to the Algarvians’ name for lechery. Regardless of whether they carried sticks, if they aimed to torment his wife they’d have to kill him first. But, after a couple of leers, their gaze showed what they really had in mind.

“You giving us a pig,” said the one who spoke Unkerlanter. “You giving us a sheep, too. Or—” He gestured with his own weapon.

“Take them,” Garivaid said in disgust. Aye, he shouldn’t have said anything about how the Algarvians weren’t so good at robbing peasants as Unkerlanter inspectors were. The words came back to mock him. But even if he had to eat peas and beans and pickled cabbage till spring, he wouldn’t starve and neither would his family. “Take them,” he repeated. The sooner the Algarvians were out of the house, the smaller the chance they’d start looking toward Annore again.

They’d come prepared. One tied a rope around the sheep’s neck. The other two had a harder time catching the pig, but they managed. Both animals let out piteous sounds of protest when the redheads took them out into the snow, but they went. Garivaid closed and barred the door once the Algarvians were gone.

“Well,” he said with peasant fatalism, “the house isn’t so crowded now.” But fatalism went only so far. “Powers below eat the stinking thieves as they’ll eat my beasts!” he burst out.

“Aye, and may their bellies gripe,” Annore agreed.

A couple of days later, new Algarvian troops came stumbling into Zossen out of the west. They were leaner, tougher-looking men than the little squad of garrison soldiers: wolves rather than dogs. But they were sadly battered wolves, a couple of them wounded, all of them half frozen and weary unto death. After they’d paused to get warm and to eat—maybe some of Garivald’s pork and mutton—they went on, heading east. The soldiers they’d left behind began looking like worried dogs.

Dagulf came to visit in a state of high excitement. “Maybe our own men’ll be coming back in a few days,” he said, sipping the mug of spirits Garivaid gave him. That was a thought worthy of getting a man out of his own house—and Dagulf’s wife nagged. He went on, “Maybe they’ll chase these raggedy kilted buggers back to Algarve where they belong.”

“That’d be good.” Garivaid was halfway to being drunk himself, and would have agreed to almost anything.

Dagulf had a scar on his cheek. It twisted his smile. “Aye, it would,” he said. “And then we can let people know who played along with the redheads. You know names. So do I. Not as bad here as some places, they say. Some places, lots of people are willing to lick Raniero’s Algarvian arse.”

But the folk of Zossen did not get the chance to inform on their collaborationist neighbors. No Unkerlanter soldiers fought their way into the village to slaughter the garrison or drive King Mezentio’s men back toward the border. Instead, struggling forward through the snow, half a dozen Algarvian behemoths and a company of footsoldiers camped in Zossen.

One of their officers, a young lieutenant, spoke Unkerlanter pretty well. At his order, the villagers had to assemble in the central square. “You wish we were gone, don’t you?” he said with an unpleasant smile. “You wish Swemmel’s men were here instead, don’t you? If they do come, how glad will you be to see them after they cut your throats to power their magecraft against us? Eh? Think on it.”

By the next morning, the Algarvians were gone, heading west to get into the fight. Garivald feared more would be coming, though. “He was lying, wasn’t he?” Annore said. Garivald only shrugged. He remembered the convicts who’d been sacrificed for the sorcerous energy to power Zossen’s crystal. He wished he didn’t, but he did. Who could say what Swemmel would or wouldn’t do to drive the redheads back?

When Krasta walked through the west wing of her mansion, the wing given over to the Algarvians who helped rule occupied Priekule, she knew at once that things were not as they should have been. On any normal day, the clerks and spies and military constables who labored there would have leered and muttered among themselves as she walked past. They were redheads. Leering at good-looking women was in their blood. The only thing that kept them from reaching out and fondling her as she went by was in their blood. The only thing that kept them from reaching out and fondling her as she went by was her being Lurcanio’s mistress. The count and colonel could punish anyone who go to gay with his hands.

Today, though, the Algarvians scarcely seemed to notice her, though she was wearing a pair of green velvet trousers cut like a second skin. Mezentio’s men talked in low voices, but not about her. The looks on their faces put her in mind of those the servants had worn after her parents died. They’d had a shock, and they were wondering what would come next.

When she strode into the anteroom where Captain Mosco worked, she demanded, “Nothing’s gone and happened to your precious king, has it?”

Colonel Lurcanio’s aide looked up from his paperwork. “To Mezentio?” he said. “No indeed, milady—as far as I know, he’s hale as can be.” But his face had that pinched, pained expression on it, too, and his voice was full of things he wasn’t saying. Setting his pen in the inkwell, he rose from his desk. “I’ll tell the colonel you’re here.” He returned a moment later. “Aye, he’ll see you.”

Krasta went into Lurcanio’s office. The Algarvian was, as always, courteous as a cat. He got to his feet, bowed over Krasta’s hand, and gallantly raised it to his lips. He handed her into the chair across from his desk. But it all struck Krasta as a performance, and not a very good one at that. “What
is
the matter with you people today?” she fumed.

“Have you not heard?” Lurcanio asked. Even his accent seemed thicker than usual, as if he wasn’t trying so hard to shape the sounds that went into Valmieran.

“If I’d heard—whatever there is to hear—would I be asking you?” Krasta said. “By all the long faces out there, I thought something was wrong with your king. Mosco said that wasn’t it, but he didn’t say what was.”

“No, Mezentio is hale,” Lurcanio said, echoing his aide. “But, against all expectations, we have been thrown back before Cottbus, which naturally pains us.”

“Oh,” Krasta said. “Is that all?”

Lurcanio stared at her from under gingery eyebrows going gray. “You may not think it so much of a much, milady, but there are those who will tell you it is no small thing. Indeed, I fear I am one of them.”

“But why?” Krasta asked in genuine perplexity. “By the powers above, Lurcanio, it’s on the other side of the world.” Few things outside Priekule, and next to none outside Valmiera, carried much weight with her.

Lurcanio perplexed her by rising and giving her another bow. “Ah, milady, I almost envy you: you are invincibly provincial,” he said. By his tone, it was a compliment, even if Krasta didn’t quite understand it.

“As far as I’m concerned,” she said with a sniff, “King Swemmel is welcome to Cottbus. A nasty place for a nasty man.”

“He is a nasty man. It is a nasty place,” Lurcanio agreed with a sniff of his own. “But Unkerlant has a great many nasty places, and none of them so strong or so strongly held as Cottbus. It should have fallen. That it did not fall will mean . . . complications in the war ahead.”

To Krasta, tomorrow was a mystery, a week hence the far side of the moon. “You will beat the Unkerlanters,” she said. “After all, if you beat us, you can beat anyone.”

For a moment, what looked uncommonly like a smirk lit Lurcanio’s face. It vanished before Krasta could be sure she’d seen it. He said, “Actually, the Unkerlanter army has given us a rather better fight than Valmiera’s did.”

“I can’t imagine how that could be,” Krasta said.

“I know you can’t. I almost envy you that, too,” Lurcanio said; he might have been speaking Gyongyosian for all the sense he made to her. “But whether you can imagine it or not, the thing is there, and we have to see what comes of it.”

Krasta tossed her head. “I know what will come of it. No one will be having any parties worth going to until you people decide you can be happy again, and powers above only know how long that will take.” Before Lurcanio could answer, she spun on her heel and stalked out of his office.

She swung her hips more than usual when she headed back toward the part of the mansion that still belonged to her. Even so, hardly any of the Algarvians looked up from their work as she went by. That only made her unhappier. If no one was watching her, she hardly felt she was alive.

“Bauska!” she shouted when she got back into her own section of the mansion. “Curse it, you lazy slut, where are you hiding?”

“Coming, milady,” the maidservant said, hurrying down the stairway and up to her. She was very pale and gulped as if hoping her stomach would stay quiet. As far as Krasta was concerned, she’d been next to useless since Captain Mosco put a loaf in her oven. Gulping again, she said, “How may I serve you?”