Into the Darkness (60 page)

Penda had not proved a good traveling companion. Used to palaces, he found distinctly less than appealing the grimy hostel in Heshbon where he and Fernao lodged. “Swemmel’s dungeon would be more comfortable,” he grumbled.

Fernao answered in Forthwegian: “I am sure it could be arranged.”

The fugitive king shuddered. “Perhaps I was mistaken.” His belly rumbled, loudly enough that he couldn’t pretend Fernao hadn’t heard it. Instead, he sighed and said, “We may as well go downstairs and eat something, if the kitchen can turn out anything worth eating.”

“Or even if it can’t,” Fernao said.

The odds, he knew, were not much better than even money. Yaninans ran the hostel. They did their best to cook in the hearty style of their homeland, but what they had to work with was what the Ice People ate: camel meat, camel milk, camel blood, and tubers that tasted like paste. They came up with all manner of stews, but few of them, to Fernao’s mind, were hearty.

He ate, anyway, spooning up meat and boiled tubers, drinking a spirit the folk of Heshbon distilled from the tubers. It also tasted like paste, but kicked like a unicorn. He found he enjoyed most meals more with his tongue numbed.

As quickly as they could, he and Penda left the hostel and headed for the market square. “Maybe today we shall find a caravan faring east,” Penda said, as he did every day when they headed for the market square.

“Aye, maybe we shall,” Fernao answered absently. For one thing, he was tired of hearing Penda say that. For another, he was looking south, toward the Barrier Mountains. Whenever he was on the streets of Heshbon, he looked toward the mountains. Tall and jagged, they serrated the southern skyline. Snow and ice covered them from their peaks more than halfway down to the lower ground that ran toward the sea. Adventurers had died climbing those peaks. Others had pushed past them into the frigid interior of the austral continent. Some had escaped the Ice People and mountain apes and other, lesser, dangers and written books about what they’d found.

About half the people on the street were short, swarthy Yaninans, most of them with wool cloaks over their big-sleeved tunics and tights. The rest, except for a scattering of aliens like Fernao and Penda, were Ice People. They wore hooded robes of fur or woven camel hair that covered them from head to foot. Their beards, which they never trimmed, grew up to their eyes; their hairlines started less than an inch above their eyebrows. The women, unlike those of other races, had faces no less hairy than those of the men.

They never bathed. The climate gave them some excuse, but not, to Fernao’s mind, enough. Their stink filled the cold, crisp air, along with that of the camels they led. Those camels were as unlike those of Zuwayza as beasts sharing a name could be. They had two humps, not one, and thick coats of shaggy brown hair. Only their nasty tempers matched those of their desert cousins.

Ice People had nasty tempers, too. A woman cursed a camel in her own guttural language. Fernao had no idea what she was saying, but it sounded hot enough to melt half the ice on the Barrier Mountains. Penda stared at her. “Do you suppose they’re that hairy all over?” Before Fernao could reply, he went on, “Who would want one of them enough to try to find out?”

“I think they are,” Fernao told him. “And because they are, they’re all the go for a certain kind of customer, shall we say, at the very fanciest brothels in Priekule and Trapani and, I have to admit, in Setubal, too.”

Penda looked revolted. “I wish you had not told me that, sir mage.” Fernao hid a smile. By his standards, Forthweg was a provincial land. Compared to this miserable stretch of semifrozen ground, though, Penda’s kingdom suddenly looked a lot better.

Fernao sighed. “If it weren’t for the cinnabar here, the Ice People would be welcome to the whole miserable continent.”

“Were there no Derlavaians here, we should have had a much harder time escaping from Yanina,” Penda said.

“That is so.” Fernao admitted what he could scarcely deny. “Now, instead, we are having a hard time escaping from Heshbon.”

They strode into the market square. It was something like the lively one in the center of Patras, the capital of Yanina, but only something. As in much of Heshbon, camels remained the dominant theme. Ice People and Yaninans bartered flesh, milk, cheese, hair, the beasts themselves, and what they brought into Heshbon on their backs: furs and cinnabar, which came packed in camel-leather sacks.

Yaninans and Ice People dickered in different ways. Yaninans were, as usual, even more excitable, or more sincerely excitable, than Algarvians. They clapped their hands to their foreheads, rolled their eyes, jumped up and down, and often seemed on the point of suffering fits of apoplexy.

“Call this cinnabar?” one of them roared, pointing to a sack full of the crushed orange-red mineral.

“Aye,” answered the man of the Ice People with whom he was dealing. Every line of his body bespoke utter indifference to his opponent’s fury.

That only made the Yaninan more furious. “This is the worst cinnabar in the history of cinnabar!” he cried. “A dragon would flame better if you fed him beans and lit his farts than if you gave him this stuff.”

“Then don’t trade for it,” the man of the Ice People said.

“You are a thief! You are a robber!” the Yaninan shouted. The nomad in the long dirty robe just stood there, waiting for the allegedly civilized man from Derlavai to make his next offer. After the Yaninan calmed down enough to stop screeching for a moment, he did.

Penda said, “Most of the cinnabar the Yaninans buy here goes straight to Algarve.”

“I know,” Fernao said unhappily. Before the Six Years’ War, Algarve had held trading towns along the coast of the austral continent, to the east of Heshbon. Now those towns were in the hands of Lagoas or Valmiera (although, with Valmiera fallen to King Mezentio’s men, who could guess what would happen to the towns the Kaunian kingdom had controlled?). If Fernao and Penda could get to Mizpah, the closest Lagoan-ruled town, they would be safe.

If. The war on the mainland of Derlavai had disrupted caravan routes down here. Yanina remained formally at peace with Lagoas, but was so close to alliance with Algarve that she had all but cut off commerce with her larger neighbor’s foe.

But there stood a man of the Ice People with laden camels he was not unloading in the market square. Fernao and Penda went up to him. “Do you speak this language?” Fernao asked him in Algarvian.

“Aye,” the nomad answered. His dirty, hairy face was impossible to read.

“Do you travel?” Fernao asked, and the man of the Ice People nodded. “Do you travel east?” the Lagoan mage persisted. The nomad stood silent and motionless. Given the way things were in Heshbon these days, Fernao took that for affirmation. He said, “My king will pay well to see my friend and me installed in Mizpah.”

He did not say who his king was. If the man of the Ice People assumed he followed Mezentio, he was willing to let the fellow do that. After a moment’s thought, the fellow said, “The big talkers”—by which, Fernao realized, he meant the Yaninans—“will not make such a trip easy.”

“Can you not befool them?” Fernao asked, as if inviting the man of the Ice People to share a joke. “And is profit ever easy to come by?”

A light kindled in the nomad’s eyes. One of those questions, at least, had struck his fancy. He said, “I am Doeg, the son of Abishai, the son of Abiathar, the son of Chileab, the son of…” The genealogy continued for several more generations. Doeg finished, “My fetish animal is the ptarmigan. I do not slay it, I do not eat of it if slain by others, I do not allow those who travel with me to do it harm. If they do, I slay them to appease the bird’s spirit.”

Ignorant, superstitious savage,
the mage thought. But that was beside the point now. He asked, “Do you tell me this because my friend and I are traveling with you?”

“If you wish it,” Doeg answered with a shrug. “If you pay enough to satisfy me. If you are ready to move before the sun moves far.”

They dickered for some time. Fernao did his best not to burst into Yaninan-style hysterics. That seemed to make a good impression on Doeg. Good impression or not, the nomad was an implacable bargainer. Fernao fretted; what the man of the Ice People wanted was about as much as he had, and Doeg seemed uninterested in promises of more gold and silver after reaching Mizpah. He saw only what lay right before him. “I am a mage,” Fernao said at last, an admission he had not wanted to make. “Bring your price down by a quarter and I will work for you on that journey.”

“You would anyway, if danger came,” Doeg said shrewdly. “But you may have some use, so let it be as you say. But be warned, man of Algarve”—a misapprehension Fernao did not correct—“your sort of sorcery may not work so well in this country as it does in your own.”

“It works here in Heshbon,” Fernao said.

“Heshbon is in my country. Heshbon is no longer of my country,” Doeg said. “So many Yaninans and other hairless folk”—his dark eyes swung to the clean-shaven Penda—“have come that its essence has changed. Away from the towns, the land is as it once was here. Sorcery is as it once was here. It does not look kindly on the ways of hairless ones.”

Fernao didn’t know how seriously to take that. It accorded with his own experience, but not with what some of the theoretical sorcerers of Lagoas and Kuusamo had been saying just before the war broke out. He shrugged. “I will do what I can, whatever it proves to be. And you will be seeking to evade the Yaninans, whose magic is not so different from mine.”

“This is true. This is good.” Doeg nodded. He thrust out his filthy hand. Fernao and, a moment later, Penda clasped it. The man of the Ice People nodded once more. “We have a bargain.”

Krasta was going from one shop on the Avenue of Equestrians to the next when the Algarvian army staged its triumphal procession through Priekule. That the procession could have anything to do with her had not crossed her mind. She was glad she had so many of the shops to herself, but annoyed that about every third one was closed.

She had just bought an amber brooch from a shop girl obsequious enough to suit even her and was coming out on to the sidewalk with the new bauble pinned to her tunic when a blast of martial music made her turn her head. Here came the Algarvians, the band at the head of the procession blaring away for all it was worth. The sun gleamed off their trumpets and the metal facings of their drums. Like a jackdaw, Krasta was fascinated with bright, shiny things. She started to stare because of the reflections from the instruments. She kept staring because of the soldiers who carried those instruments.

When she thought of Algarvians, the word that echoed in her mind was
barbarians.
She was a typical enough Valmieran—a typical enough Kaunian—there. Maybe the troopers marching along the Avenue of Equestrians toward her were King Mezentio’s finest.
Or maybe I was wrong all along,
she thought: a startling leap of imagination for her.

The Algarvian troopers—first the band, then a couple of companies of footsoldiers, then a squadron of unicorn cavalry, then warriors mounted on snorting, lumbering behemoths, then more footsoldiers, and on and on—impressed her much more favorably than she’d imagined they could, and also much more favorably than the Valmieran soldiers she’d seen coming through Priekule on the way to the war. It wasn’t that these warriors were tall and straight and handsome: the same held true for many of her countrymen. It wasn’t that their kilts displayed admirable calves; she knew all she needed to know about how men were made.

No, what struck her was partly their discipline—not something she was used to thinking about when she thought of Algarvians—and partly their attitude. They strode down the Avenue of Equestrians as if certain beyond the possibility of doubt that they deserved the victory they had won, deserved it because they were better men than the Valmierans they had beaten. The Valmieran soldiers she’d seen hadn’t looked that way. They’d seemed sure they were heading for trouble—and they’d been right.

Having known that feeling of lordly superiority all her life, Krasta naturally responded to it in others. She even let Algarvians—surely commoners, almost to a man—stare at her as she stared at them without showing (indeed, without feeling) the furious resentment such lascivious looks from Valmieran commoners would have roused in her. But even these stares were well disciplined, especially by Algarvian standards: the soldiers’ eyes turned toward her, but not their heads.

A handful of other Valmierans stood on the sidewalk watching the procession, but only a handful. Most of Priekule was doing its best to pretend the conquest had not happened and the conquerors did not exist. Krasta had intended to act the same way if and when she encountered any Algarvians, but this display of might and splendor caught her by surprise.

At last, though the procession was far from over, she tore herself away and went down the side street where her carriage waited. The driver was swigging from a flask he hastily put away when he saw his mistress. He descended from the carriage and handed her up into it. “Take me home,” she said.

“Aye, milady.” The driver hesitated, then volunteered speech, something he rarely did: “Was you watching the redheads pass by, milady?”

“Aye,” Krasta answered. “Things may not be so dreadful as the doomsayers have been quacking.”

“Not so dreadful?” the driver said as he got the horses going. “Well, here’s hoping you’re right, but nothing good comes of losing a war, I fear.”

“Just drive!” Krasta snapped, and her servant fell silent.

The streets were almost deserted. Many of the men Krasta saw on them were more Algarvian soldiers, moving into place to take possession of Priekule. They were also well behaved. Unlike their parading comrades, they did turn their heads to look her over, but that was all they did. They didn’t say anything, and they didn’t come close to committing any outrages on her person. Frightened rumor in the city had credited King Mezentio’s men with savagery to match their ancient ancestors’.

By the time Krasta neared her mansion, her mood was as good as it ever got. All right: Valmiera had lost the war (she did hope Skarnu was hale), but the Algarvians looked to be far more civilized victors than anyone had expected. After things settled down again, she expected she would be able to enjoy good times with her fellow nobles once more.