Darkness Descending (15 page)

Ealstan looked startled. “He’s never said anything—”

“So what?” Leofsig broke in. “Sometimes the ones who don’t blab beforehand are more dangerous than the ones who do.”

In Skrunda, as in so many Jelgavan towns, ancient and modern lived side by side. A couple of blocks beyond the market square stood an enormous marble arch from the later days of the Kaunian Empire celebrating the triumph of the Emperor Gedimainas over the Algarvian tribe known as the Belsiti. Below a relief of kilted barbarians being led away in chains, Gedimainas’ inscription declared to the world what a hero and conqueror he was.

Talsu took the arch and its inscription as much for granted as he did the oil-seller’s shop next to it on the street. He’d walked under it a couple of times a week ever since he’d got big enough to go so far from home. He rarely bothered looking up at the relief or at the vaunting inscription below it. He could barely make sense of the inscription, anyhow; he hadn’t studied classical Kaunian in school, and Jelgavan, like Valmieran, had drifted a long way from the old language.

He headed toward the arch this particular morning because he was carrying four pairs of trousers his father, Traku, had made for a customer who lived half a mile down the street the monument straddled. A crowd had gathered under the arch. Some were Jelgavans, some Algarvians in their broad-brimmed hats, tight tunics, kilts, and knee stockings.

“You can’t do that,” one of the Jelgavans exclaimed. Several of Talsu’s countrymen nodded. Somebody else said, “That arch has stood there for more than a thousand years. Knocking it down would be an outrage!” More Jelgavans nodded.

“Why do they want to knock down the arch?” Talsu asked somebody at the back of the little crowd. “It’s not doing anything to anybody.” He consciously noticed it for only the third or fourth time since coming home to Skrunda after the Jelgavan defeat the year before.

Before the fellow could answer, one of the Algarvians did, in Jelgavan accented but clear: “We can destroy it, and we will destroy it. It is an insult to all the brave Algarvians of ancient days, and to the Algarvic kingdoms of today: to Algarve, to Sibiu, and even to Lagoas, that is misguided enough to be our foe.”

From the middle of the crowd, a woman called, “How is it an insult if it tells the truth?”

“Algarvians went on to triumph,” the redheaded officer replied. “That proves all the vile things this Kaunian tyrant said about our ancestors were false. They have stood too long. They shall stand no more.” He turned to a mage. Looking over the people in the crowd, Talsu saw that eggs had been affixed to the pillars upholding the arch. All of a sudden, he didn’t want to stand right there.

The oil seller didn’t like his shop standing right there, either. Bursting out of it, he cried, “You people are going to drop a million tons of rock right through my roof!”

“Calm yourself,” the officer said, a startling bit of advice from an excitable Algarvian’s mouth. “Buraldo there is very good at what he does, very careful. You should come through fine.”

“And if I don’t?” the oil seller shouted. The Algarvian shrugged one of his kingdom’s extravagant shrugs. The oil seller shouted again, wordlessly this time.

Talsu shouldered his way through the crowd. A couple of Algarvian soldiers swung their sticks in his direction. They were only alert, though, not dangerous. He’d seen the difference on the battlefield. Holding up the trousers, he said, “Before you do whatever you’re going to do, can I get by to deliver these?”

“Aye, go on,” the officer said, and waved him through with a laugh. He was glad of the arch’s shade against the summer sun; that was about as much attention as he usually paid it. More Jelgavans stood on the far side, some of them also grumbling about what the redheads were on the point of doing to the monument. He pushed his way past them and up the street.

“How can you be so uncaring?” a woman with yellow hair like his demanded.

“Lady, I don’t want the redheads to knock it down, either,” Talsu answered. “But I can’t do anything about it, and neither can you. If you have the time to stand around and moan, fine. Me, I’ve got work to do.”

She stared at him. By the cut and cloth of her clothes, she had more money than he. A tailor’s son, he could make a good guess at how much anyone made by what he wore on his back. These days, her wealth only meant the Algarvians could steal more from her than from Traku and his family.

Behind Talsu, the redheads started shouting, “Back! Everyone back! If you don’t go back, it’s your own cursed fault!”

“Shame!” somebody shouted. One by one, the crowd of Jelgavans took up the chant: “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

If the Algarvians felt any sense of shame, they didn’t let it stop them from doing what they had orders to do. Talsu hadn’t gone more than another few steps when a roar of bursting eggs made him want to dive for cover—again, reflexes honed in the field. An instant later, chunks of masonry thundered down like an avalanche in the mountains.

He turned to see what the redheads had wrought. Wind from the falling marble rustled his hair. The familiar square shape was gone. A cloud of dust kept him from seeing any more than that. When the dust settled, the street would be as unfamiliar to the eye as his lower jaw might be to the tongue after losing a couple of teeth. No one was shouting “Shame!” any more. He wondered if the collapse of the arch had caught any Jelgavans in it, or, for that matter, any of the Algarvian soldiers. He shrugged. He’d find out on the way back. Delivering the trousers came first.

Silver jingled in his pockets as he headed home. By then, the dust was gone, and so was the arch. The Algarvians had been clever about dropping it; the marble lay in the street, but did not seem to have wrecked the houses and shops nearby. Talsu couldn’t see the oil-seller’s place, which lay on the far side of that great pile of rubble. Small boys had already started playing king of the mountain on top of it.

Their game did not last long. The Algarvian officer who spoke Jelgavan shouted, “Get off!” He followed that with some choice colloquialisms that set the children giggling as they scampered down. Then, to Talsu’s dismay, the officer and his soldiers (none of whom seemed to be missing) started pulling men off the street to get rid of the hill debris. One of the troopers nabbed him before he could make himself scarce.

He called, “Is this a paying job?” to the officer.

After a moment, the Algarvian nodded. “Aye, we’ll make it so.”

For the rest of the day, Talsu carried baskets of broken marble under the broiling summer sun. He dumped them into freight cars on the ley-line caravan that could get nearest the arch. That meant going halfway across town; people hadn’t known about ley lines in the days of the Kaunian Empire, and so hadn’t set their big buildings near them. The Algarvians didn’t stop him when he went into a tavern to buy a mug of ale, but one came in after him to make sure he didn’t linger or slip out the back door. He muttered curses under his breath; he’d had something like that in mind.

As evening twilight fell, he lined up to get his pay. He was worn and battered. Bruises covered his legs; he walked with a limp because a stone had done its best to smash his right foot. He had a couple of mashed fingernails, too, and half a dozen cuts and scrapes on his hands. “By the powers above, we earned whatever they give us,” he said.

When he got to the head of the line and held out an abused hand, the Algarvian officer slapped a couple of shiny new coppers into it. They bore the sharp-nosed image of King Mainardo, King Mezentio’s brother and now, by grace of Algarve, lord of Jelgava. Talsu looked from them to the redhead. “Go on,” the officer snapped. “Go on, and count yourself lucky you’re getting anything.”

Talsu stared at the coppers. They might have paid for an hour’s labor. Most of a day’s? He shoved them back at the officer. “Keep ‘em, pal,” he said. “Looks like you need ‘em worse than I do.”

“Do you know what I could do to you?” the Algarvian demanded.

“It might last longer than what you just did, but it couldn’t hurt much more,” Talsu answered with a shrug. “You had a chance to make people like you—like you better than our own nobles, anyway. This isn’t how you go about it.”

“Like us? What difference does that make?” the redheaded officer asked in surprise. “All that matters is that you obey us.” He offered Talsu the coins once more. “Take them. You earned them.”

“I
earned six
times that much,” Talsu said, and walked away. He waited for the Algarvian to order him seized. It didn’t happen. He scurried around the first corner he came to, trembling from fatigue and reaction both. He’d been a fool to talk back to the occupiers. He’d got away with it, but that made him no less a fool.

“Where have you been?” Laitsina, his mother, cried when he came into the shop above which the family lived and slept. Then she got a good look at him and cried out again, this time in horror: “And what were you doing while you were there? Have the Algarvians beaten you with sticks?”

“No. They just caught me in the street and set me hauling broken rock—one of their sorcerers wrecked the old arch past the market square.” Talsu scowled. “Hard work, and then they cheated me at the end of it. About what you’d expect from the cursed redheads. I didn’t even bother taking their lousy coppers.” He didn’t bother telling his mother how he’d rejected the coins, either.

His father slammed a pair of shears down on the counter beside which he was working. “They wrecked the imperial arch?” Traku said. At Talsu’s nod, the older man muttered something pungent under his breath.

“That must have been the crash we heard this morning,” Laitsina said. “I wondered what it was. If business were better, somebody who knew about it would have come in before this and told us.”

“If the Algarvians weren’t here, business would be better,” Traku said. By the look he sent his son, he still blamed Talsu for the collapse of the Jelgavan armies. “And if the Algarvians weren’t here, they wouldn’t have been able to knock down the arch, either. Curse them, it’s stood since imperial times. They’ve got no business wrecking things that have stood for so long.”

“They won the war,” Talsu said. At the moment, he regretted that more than he had at any time since he’d marched off to oppose the redheads. “That lets them do as they please. And they’re turning out to be a worse bargain than our own nobles. Who would have thought anyone could be?”

Laitsina and Traku both glanced around nervously, though they were the only ones who could have heard what Talsu said. His sister chose that moment to come downstairs. “Who would have thought anyone could be worse than what?” Ausra asked.

“Worse than our nobles,” Talsu answered defiantly. “The Algarvians are.” He repeated the story of what they’d done to him and to the monument.

“That’s terrible!” Ausra said. “Are they doing the same thing all over the kingdom? If they are, there won’t be an arch or a column standing before long.”

“They’re jealous of us, that’s what it is,” Traku said. “We Kaunians were civilized while they still chased each other through the woods. They don’t want to be reminded of that, and they don’t want us reminded of it, either.”

“Some people may think more about things that are missing than they ever did about things that were there.” Talsu looked down at his battered, filthy, bloody hands. “I know I will.”

Garivald didn’t know why the impressers hadn’t marched him out of Zossen as part of the draft they took for King Swemmel’s army. Maybe they’d intended to scoop him and the other men they left behind into their net later. If so, they miscalculated, for the Algarvians overran the village before they could return.

Waddo kept reporting good news coming in over the crystal: Swemmel’s forces advancing, the Algarvians and Yaninans and Zuwayzin falling back in disorder. The firstman even brought the crystal out into the village square several more times so the peasants of Zossen could hear the news for themselves. He hadn’t misrepresented it; it always sounded good.

But then, one day, dragons painted in green and white and red flew by to the north of the village. They dropped no eggs, they did no harm, but they were there. They spread fear and, worse, they spread doubt as well. “If we’re kicking the Algarvians’ tails, how did those ugly flying things get here?” Dagulf asked Garivald as they were weeding in the fields outside of Zossen.

After looking around to make sure no one but his friend could hear him, Garivald answered, “If you expect the crystal to tell you the truth all the time, you probably think Waddo tells you the truth all the time, too.” Both men laughed, each warily. After a moment, Garivald added, “I wish the king would speak to us again. He pulled no punches. I liked that.”

“Aye.” Dagulf nodded. “Some of these city men with their fancy accents who lie straight-faced, though . . .” He spat into the rich, black soil.

Less than a week later, soldiers in rock-gray tunics started falling back through Zossen. Some of them had fancy city accents, some used the almost Forthwegian dialect of the northwest, and others talked like Garivald and his fellow villagers. However they spoke, they all told tales much different from those the villagers heard on the crystal.

“Aye, Herborn is fallen,” one of them said to Garivald as he gulped water and gnawed on a chunk of black bread Annore had given him. He was skinny and filthy and looked wearier than a peasant near the end of harvest time. “Powers above only know how many men the redheads cut off west of there, too. All I can tell you is, I’m cursed lucky I wasn’t one of them.”

“The crystal said we were still fighting hard there,” Garivald said. Losing Herborn, the capital of Grelz in the days when Grelz was a kingdom and not a subordinate duchy of Unkerlant, was like taking a knife in the chest. He didn’t want to believe it.

But the soldier said, “Bugger the crystal. If we still held Herborn, if the cursed Algarvians hadn’t nipped in behind us like a crayfish nipping with its pincers, you suppose I’d be here now?” He stuffed what was left of the bread into his pack, drained the mug of water, wiped his dirty face on his equally dirty sleeve, and trudged off toward the west. Other Unkerlanter troopers retreated through the fields, careless of the crops they were trampling.