Into the Darkness (92 page)

There had been times—more than a few of them—when she wished he would go away and leave her alone and not bother her again. Now he was gone. The house they’d shared since she was tiny seemed much too big and much too empty without him. She wandered aimlessly from room to room.

Eventually, long after she took her midday meal most days, she realized she was hungry. She ate some bread and some dried figs, having no energy to make anything more ambitious. For supper, she started a thick soup with barley and what little sausage she found in the larder. She had no appetite, but her grandfather would be hungry.

Brivibas came home almost two hours later than she thought he would. She’d never seen him so filthy in all her life, nor half so worn. Most of his fingernails were broken; they all had black crescents ground under them. His palms were nothing but blisters and blood.

Vanai took one look at him and burst into tears. “There, there, my granddaughter,” he said in what she heard for the first time as an old man’s voice, brittle as dry grass. “Spinello thinks his logic keen, but it shall not persuade me.”

“Eat,” Vanai said, as he had so often said to her. Eat he did, and lustily, but he fell asleep a little more than halfway through the bowl of soup. Vanai shook him, but he would not wake. Had he not been breathing, she would have wondered if he was dead.

At last, she managed to rouse him and half carry him to the bedroom. “I must be up and away from here before sunrise tomorrow,” he said, his voice distant but clear. Vanai violently shook her head. “Oh, but I must,” Brivibas insisted. “I rely on you for it: if I am not, they will beat me and I shall have to labor anyhow. I rely on you, my granddaughter. You must not fail me.”

Through tears, Vanai said, “I obey, my grandfather,” and then, because she could not help herself, “Wouldn’t it be easier to give Spinello, curse him, what he wants from you?”

“Easier? No doubt.” Brivibas yawned enormously. “But it would be wrong.” His head hit the pillow. His eyes closed. He began to snore.

Vanai felt like a murderer when she woke him the next morning. He thanked her, which only made things worse. She gave him the remains of the evening’s soup for breakfast and bread and cheese and dried mushrooms—some from Ealstan’s basket—to eat while he worked. And then he was off, and she was alone in a house where the wind rattling a shutter was enough to make her leap in the air like a startled cat.

He came back late again that night, and the next one, and the next. Every day of labor seemed to age him a month, and he had not so very many months to spare. “It gets easier as I grow accustomed to it,” he would say, but it was a lie. Vanai knew it. Every day, the flesh thinned on his face, until she thought it was a staring skull that looked back at her out of bright blue eyes and spoke pedantic reassurances that did not reassure.

One morning after he staggered off, Vanai stood stock-still, as if a mage had suddenly made her into marble.
I know what I have to do.
The realization held an almost mystical clarity and certainty.

But it would be wrong.
Brivibas’s sleep-sodden voice sounded inside her head.

“I don’t care,” she said aloud, as if her grandfather were there to argue with her. It wasn’t quite true. But she knew what was more important to her, and what less. If she could win the one, what did the other matter?

In that house, finding paper and pen was a matter of a moment. She knew what she wanted to say, and said it. The purity of the Kaunian she used would have brought a nod of approval from her grandfather, regardless of what he thought of certain other aspects of the note.

After she’d folded the paper on herself and sealed it with wax and her grandfather’s seal, she threw on a cloak and carried the note to the Forthwegian barrister’s home where the Algarvians made their headquarters in Oyngestun. She left it there, with a sergeant who leered at her and ran a red, red tongue over his lips. She fled.

“Still a whore for the redheads,” a Kaunian woman hissed at her. She hung her head and hurried back to her home. There she waited, and waited, and waited. Nothing out of the ordinary happened the next day, or the day after that. Each morning, before first light, Brivibas shambled off to labor for the Algarvians. Each morning, he was more a crumbling ruin of the man he had been.

In the middle of the afternoon on the third day, the knock Vanai had been waiting for, the knock she recognized, came. She started, spilling some of the peas she’d been putting into water to soak. Even though she’d been waiting for that knock, she moved toward the door with the slow, reluctant steps she might have taken in a bad dream.
If I don’t answer, he will think I am not at home, and go away,
went through her mind. But so did another thought;
if I don’t answer, my grandfather will surely die.

She opened the door. Major Spinello stood there, as she’d known he would. He bowed to her. “I greet you, my lady Vanai. May I come in?”

His formality surprised her. Had he got the note? He had. Oh, he had.

She saw it in his eyes. “Aye,” she whispered, and stood aside to let him.

He closed and barred the door. That done, he turned to her. “Did you know what you were saying when you said you would do anything to keep your worthless old grandfather from going off and doing what he should have been doing this past year and more?” he asked.

“Aye,” Vanai whispered again, even lower this time. She looked at the floor to keep from looking at Spinello. Again to her surprise, he waited to see if she would say more. After a moment, she did: “He is all I have.”

“Not all.” The Algarvian shook his head. “Oh, no, my dear, not all.” He stretched out a hand and undid the three wooden toggles that closed the neck of her tunic, then reached down to the hem and pulled it up over her head. Hating him, hating herself more, she raised her arms to help him. He looked at her for what felt like forever. “Brivibas is very far from all you have.” He reached out again. This time, his hands stroked bare flesh.

He surprised her once more by not mauling her. His touch was knowing, assured. Had she freely chosen him, she might—she thought she would—have enjoyed it. As things were, she stood still and endured.

“To your bedchamber, then,” he said after a while. Vanai nodded, thinking it would be easier there than on the floor, where she’d more than half expected him to drag her down. Pausing only to pick up her tunic, she took him where he wanted to go.

The bed would be narrow for two. The bed was none too wide for her alone. She waited beside it. If he wanted her out of her trousers, he would have to take her out of them. He did, and seemed to enjoy the doing. Then, amazingly fast, he undressed himself. She looked away. She knew how a man was made. She did not want to be reminded.

But even a brief glimpse reminded her that Algarvians were made rather differently—or made themselves rather differently. She’d known of their ritual mutilation, a custom that had persisted since ancient days. Till now, she’d never imagined it would matter to her.

“Lie down,” Spinello said, and Vanai obeyed. He lay beside her. “It gives a man more pleasure if a woman takes pleasure, too,” he remarked, and did his best with hands and mouth to give her some. When he told her to do something, she did it, and tried not to think about what she did. Otherwise, as she had in the hall, she endured.

When his tongue began to probe her secrets, she twisted away toward the wall. “Come back,” he said. “If you will not kindle, you will not. But the wetter you are, the less it will hurt.”

“A considerate ravisher,” Vanai said through clenched teeth.

Spinello laughed. “But of course.” Presently, he went into her. “Ah,” he murmured a moment later, discovering no one had been there before him. “It
will
hurt, some.” He pushed forward. It did hurt. Vanai bit down on the inside of her lip. She tasted blood: blood to match the blood the Algarvian was drawing down below. She closed her eyes and tried to ignore his weight on her.

He grunted and quivered and pulled out. That hurt, too. Vanai tolerated it, though, because it meant this was finally over. “My grandfather—” she began.

Major Spinello laughed again. “You know what you did this for, don’t you?” he said. “Aye, a bargain: the wordy old bugger can come home and stay home—for as long as you keep giving me what I want, too. Do we understand each other, my dear?”

Vanai twisted toward the wall once more. “Aye,” she said, huddling into a ball. Of course once would not be enough to suit him. She should have known that. She supposed she had known it, even if she’d hoped … But what good was hope? She listened to him dress. She listened to him leave.
Whore for the redheads,
the Kaunian woman had called her. It hadn’t been true then. It was now. Vanai wept, not that weeping helped.

Winter on the island of Obuda brought endless driving rainstorms roaring off the Bothnian Ocean. Istvan hadn’t cared for them when he could take shelter in his barracks. He honestly preferred blizzards. He knew how to get around on snow. Anyone who grew up in a Gyongyosian valley knew everything he needed to know about snow.

Rain was a different business. Bad enough in the barracks—far worse when the only shelter he had was a hole in the ground. His cape still shed some water. That meant he was only soaked, not drenched. He slept very little, and that badly. Being soaked was only part of it. The other part was a healthy fear that some sneaking Kuusaman would get through the lines and slit his throat so he’d die without ever waking. It wasn’t an idle fear. Those little bastards could slip through cracks in the defenses a weasel couldn’t use.

He peered down the side of Mt.  Sorong toward the Kuusaman trenches and holes. He couldn’t see very far through the trees and rain, but that didn’t stop him from being wary. He kept his stick close by him every moment, awake or asleep. He also had a stout knife on his belt. In weather like this, the knife might do him more good than the stick. Beams couldn’t carry far through driving rain.

Squelching noises behind him made him whirl—no telling from what direction a Kuusaman might come. But that big, tawny-bearded trooper was no Kaunian. “What now, Szonyi?” Istvan asked.

“Still here,” Szonyi said.

“Oh, aye, still here,” Istvan agreed. “The stars must hate us, don’t you think? If they didn’t, we’d be somewhere else. Of course”—he paused meditatively—“they might choose to send us somewhere worse.”

“And how would they do that?” the younger soldier demanded. “I don’t think there is a worse place than this.”

“Put it that way and you may be right,” Istvan said. “But you may be wrong, too.” He wasn’t sure how, but he’d seen enough bad to have a strong suspicion worse always waited around the corner. His stomach growled, reminding him bad was still bad. “What have you got in the way of food?” he asked Szonyi.

“Not much, I’m afraid,” Szonyi answered, so regretfully that Istvan suspected he had more than he was admitting. The youngster was turning into a veteran, all right. But, short of searching his pockets and pack, Istvan couldn’t make a liar of him. He wasn’t desperate enough to do that, not yet. And maybe Szonyi wasn’t lying, too, for he said, “Maybe we ought to raid the slanteyes again.”

“Aye, maybe we should,” Istvan said. “They aren’t a proper warrior race, not even close—they think soldiers have to have full bellies to fight well. If we spent a quarter of the trouble on provisioning our men as they do, we’d be too fat to fight at all.” Rain dripped from the hood of his cape down on to his nose. “Go ahead, tell me I’m wrong.”

“Can’t do it,” Szonyi said. “Here’s one, though: if they aren’t a warrior race and we are, how come we haven’t kicked ‘em off Obuda once and for all?”

Istvan opened his mouth, then abruptly closed it again. That was a good question, such a good question that a man could break teeth on it if he was unwary enough to bite down hard. At last, Istvan said, “The stars know,” which was undoubtedly true and which also undoubtedly did not come close to answering the question. He took the talk back in the direction it had gone before: “What do you say we slide down the hill and see if we can knock over a couple of Kuusamans? They’ll have more food than we do—you can bet on that.”

“Aye,” Szonyi said. “They couldn’t very well have less, could they?”

“I hope not, for their sake,” Istvan said. “Come to think of it, I hope not for our sake, too.” He slung his stick on his back and pulled his knife from its sheath. “Come on.”
I am going to risk my life for no better reason than filling my belly,
he thought as he crawled out of his shelter and down the mountainside. Then he wondered if there could ever be any better reason than filling his belly.

He moved as silently as he could. The drumming rain helped muffle any sounds he did make. It also helped hide him from the Kuusamans’ narrow eyes. At the same time, though, it muffled their noises and helped conceal them from him. He hadn’t stayed alive as long as he had by being careless. Szonyi might have been a shadow behind him. If bad luck didn’t kill the youngster, he would make a fine soldier.

The rain came down harder and harder, so that Istvan could see only a few yards in front of him. Spring wasn’t that far away; before long, the storms would ease. Istvan had seen it happen before. He knew it would happen again. But it hadn’t happened yet, and the storm didn’t seem to think it ever would.

He crawled past the stinking, sodden corpse of a Gyongyosian trooper—no Kuusaman born had ever had hair that shade of yellow. The corpse warned him he was nearing the Kuusaman line. It also warned him he might not come back.

No sooner had that unpleasant thought crossed his mind than eggs started dropping out of the sky on and around the Kuusaman position. He looked up, but of course the low, thick gray clouds hid the dragons that carried the eggs. He hoped they were Gyongyosian, but they might almost as readily have had Kuusamans riding them. Gyongyosian dragons had dropped eggs on their own footsoldiers before; he did not think the enemy immune from such mischances.

He flattened himself out on the ground. Bursts of energy near him tried to pick him up and throw him away. He clung to the bushes for all he was worth.