Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  A crowd had formed around the corpse. People were pointing at it and exclaiming in their unintelligible language. “Move aside, curse you, move aside,” Bembo said, and made sure people moved aside with a few well-placed elbows. Then he got a good look at the body and said, “Well, I’ll be a son of a whore.”

  “What else is new?” Oraste pointed down to the dead man and said, “What do you bet the other two were the same?”

  “I wouldn’t touch that,” Bembo said. The corpse had black hair—hair that surely had to be dyed, for the man’s build, skin tone, and long face were all typically Kaunian. “I bet he looked like a Forthwegian till your beam caught him,” Bembo added.

  “Of course he did,” Oraste said. “Now let’s see what he was trying to lift.”

  Bembo picked up the leather sack that lay by the dead man’s outflung right hand. He looked inside and whistled softly. “All sorts of pretties: rings and necklaces and earrings and bracelets and I don’t know what.” He hefted the sack. It was heavy, all right. “Good stuff—gold and silver, or I don’t know anything.”

  “You don’t know bloody much—you’ve made that plain enough,” Oraste said. “But I’ll believe you know what’s worth something and what isn’t.”

  A Forthwegian spoke up in good Algarvian: “That’s my jewelry, gentlemen, I’ll have you know.” He held out a hand for the sack, at the same time asking, “Where are the other two bandits? They said they’d cut my throat if I didn’t give them everything I had on display. I believed them, too.”

  “They’re long gone, pal.” Oraste didn’t sound particularly brokenhearted about that, either. “You’re cursed lucky you had constables around. Otherwise, you never would have seen any of your stuff again. This way, you get some of it back, and one of the bad eggs is dead.” He spat on the corpse. “Stinking Kaunian.”

  “You get some of your pretties back eventually,” Bembo added. “For now, it’s evidence of a crime—and serious crime, and even more serious because these outlaws were Kaunians with illegal, very illegal, sorcerous disguises.”

  Maybe the jeweler had been robbed before. Maybe he just knew how the minds of Algarvian constables worked. His expression sour, he said, “You mean you’ll make the stuff disappear for good if I don’t pay you off.”

  “I never said that,” Bembo answered righteously: everyone else gathered around the dead Kaunian was listening. Being corrupt was one thing, getting caught being corrupt something else again. Still more righteously, he went on, “What you’re saying violates our regulations.”

  Oraste gave him a horrible look. Having killed a robber, he wanted to make a profit on the deal, too. Fortunately, the jeweler wasn’t so naive as to take Bembo seriously. He said, “Come back to my shop, boys, and we can talk this over like reasonable people.”

  Once inside the shop—which had several glass cases opened, and several others smashed—Bembo said, “All right, pal, just how reasonable do you propose to be?”

  He and Oraste left without the sack of trinkets, but with a couple of goldpieces each that hadn’t been in their belt pouches before. “If I’d thought getting rid of robbers was such good business, I’d’ve tried harder before,” Oraste said.

  “If you’d listened more to me, you’d have known that,” Bembo answered. “Your trouble is, half the time you care more about smashing heads than making a good deal. This time, you got to do both.”

  “What if I did?” Oraste said. “We’d better see if we can find out who that dead Kaunian sack of turds is—was. If we can get a name for him, maybe we can find out who his pals are.”

  “That’s true.” Bembo gave his partner a puzzled look. Oraste wasn’t usually so diligent. “Why do you want ’em so bad?”

  “Were you born that stupid, or did you have to practice?” Oraste asked. “Whichever, you’re a champion. Why do you suppose the cursed Kaunians were after a jeweler? Just for the take? Maybe, but not bloody likely, you ask me. Who’s getting the money they’d take in from unloading those jewels? Nobody who likes Algarvians any too well, or I’m a naked black Zuwayzi.”

  Bembo saw nasty, greedy men everywhere he looked. Years as a constable had taught him to do that. He didn’t see plots everywhere he looked. Here in Gromheort, maybe that meant he was missing things. “You’d look good as a naked black Zuwayzi,” he remarked.

  “You’d look good as a mountain ape,” Oraste replied. “It’s about the only way you would look good.” He turned to the people who were gawking at the robber’s body. “Anybody here know this filthy Kaunian son of a whore?”

  “He’s liable to come from one of the villages,” Bembo said.

  But Oraste shook his head. “He’ll be a townman. You wait and see. If he wasn’t, how would his pals and him know which place to hit?” Bembo’s only answer was a grunt. He hated it when Oraste outthought him, and Oraste had done it twice in a row now.

  Nobody in the crowd spoke up. Bembo said, “I know you people don’t much like Algarvians, but do you love Kaunians? Do you want them robbing you next?”

  Someone said, “Isn’t that the fellow named Gippias?” Bembo didn’t see who’d chosen to open his mouth, but Oraste did. He knifed through the crowd and grabbed the Forthwegian. The man looked anything but happy about having to say more, but that was just too bloody bad. Bembo and Oraste looked at each other and nodded. They had a name. They’d find out more. And if there was a plot, they’d find out about that, too.

  More and more these days, Ealstan thought of Vanai as Thelberge. Things were safer that way. Even inside their flat, they spoke more Forthwegian and less Kaunian than they had before she’d turned the botched spell in You Too Can Be a Mage into one that really did what it was supposed to do. When the spell that made her swarthy and stocky lapsed and she got her own features back for a while, he would look at her sidelong, a little curious, a little surprised. Maybe that was because he wasn’t used to seeing Kaunian looks under her dark hair—for her hair, of course, being dyed, didn’t go back to blond. But maybe it was because he wasn’t so used to her real looks any more, too.

  “Do you know what we can do?” he asked one evening after supper. “If you want to, I mean.”

  Vanai set down the dirty dish she’d been washing. “No, what?”

  He took a deep breath. Once he’d said what he was going to say, he couldn’t back away from it. “We could go down to the hall of laws and get married. If you want to, I mean.”

  For a long moment, Vanai didn’t say anything. She looked away from Ealstan. Fear ran through him. Was she going to turn him down? But then she looked back. Tears streaked her face. “You’d marry me, in spite of—everything?” she asked. Everything, of course, boiled down to one thing: her blood.

  “No,” Ealstan said. “I just asked you that to watch you jump.” And then, fearful lest she take him seriously, he went on, “I’m marrying you—or I will marry you, if you want to marry me—because of everything. I can’t imagine finding anybody else I’d rather spend the rest of my life with.”

  “I’m glad to marry you,” Vanai said. “After all, if it weren’t for you, I’d probably be dead.” She shook her head, dissatisfied with the way she’d answered. “And I love you.”

  “That sounds like a good reason to me.” Ealstan walked over and kissed her. One thing led to another, and the dishes ended up getting finished rather later than they would have if he hadn’t proposed.

  When they woke the next morning, Vanai’s sorcery had slipped, so that she looked like herself, or herself with dark hair. She quickly set the spell to rights, waiting for Ealstan’s nod to let her know she’d done it correctly. Once she was sure of that, she meticulously redyed her hair, both above and below.

  “You don’t suppose they’ll have mages at the hall of laws, do you?” she asked anxiously.

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Ealstan answered. “Unless I’m daft, any redhead with enough magic in him to make a flower open two days early is off fighting the Unkerlanters.” His smile held
a fierce delight. “And they’re not doing too bloody well even so. That’s why you find SULINGEN scrawled on every other wall.”

  “Let’s see how many times we see it before we get to the hall of laws,” Vanai said, at least as happy at the idea of Algarvian disasters as Ealstan was.

  They counted fourteen graffiti on the walk through Eoforwic. Twice, the name of the Unkerlanter city had been painted over recruiting broadsheets for Plegmund’s Brigade. The combination made Ealstan thoughtful. “I wonder if Sidroc’s down in Sulingen,” he said hopefully. “The only thing wrong with that would be getting my revenge through an Unkerlanter instead of all by myself.”

  “Would it do?” Vanai asked.

  After a little thought, Ealstan nodded. “Aye. It would do.”

  The hall of laws lay not far from King Penda’s palace. In the days before the war, judges and barristers and functionaries would have gone back and forth from one building to the other. They still did, the only difference being that most of them, and all the high-ranking ones, were Algarvians now.

  Forthwegians did remain in the hall of laws—as clerks and other minor officials not worth the occupiers’ while to replace. One of those clerks, who looked so bored he should have been covered with dust, handed a form to Ealstan and another to Vanai. “Fill these out and return them to me with the fee indicated on the sign on the wall,” he droned, not even bothering to point at the sign he’d mentioned.

  Ealstan filled in his own true name and his place of residence. That was where the truth stopped for him. He invented his father’s name and declared that his fictitious forebear had been born and raised in Eoforwic. He didn’t know whether the constables were still looking for Ealstan son of Hestan of Gromheort, but he didn’t know that they weren’t, either, and didn’t care to find out by experiment.

  Glancing over at Vanai’s form, he saw that the only truth she’d told on it was her place of residence. She’d invented a fine Forthwegian pedigree for herself. Their eyes met. They both grinned. This was all part of the masquerade.

  When they went back to the counter, the clerk barely glanced at the forms. He was more interested in making sure Ealstan had paid the proper fee. On that, he was meticulous; Ealstan supposed the Algarvians would take it out of his pay if he came up short there. Having satisfied himself, the clerk said, “There is one more formality. Do you both swear by the powers above that you are pure Forthwegian blood, without the slightest taint of vile Kaunianity?”

  “Aye.” Ealstan and Vanai spoke together. She must have expected something like this, Ealstan thought, for not even a flicker of anger showed in her eyes.

  But the occupiers required more than oaths. A couple of burly Forthwegian men came up to Ealstan; a couple of almost equally burly women approached Vanai. One of the men said, “Step into this anteroom with us, if you please.” He sounded polite enough, but not like somebody who would take no for an answer.

  As Ealstan headed for the antechamber, the women led Vanai off in the other direction. “What’s all this about?” he asked, though he thought he already knew.

  And, sure enough, the bruiser said, “Ward against oath-breakers.” He closed the door to the antechamber, then took a small scissors from his belt pouch. “I’m going to snip a lock of hair from your head.” He did, then nodded when it failed to change color. “That’s all right, but you wouldn’t believe what some of the stinking Kaunians try and get away with. I’m going to have to ask you to hike up your tunic and drop your drawers.”

  “This is an outrage!” Ealstan exclaimed. He wondered what Vanai was saying in the other room. With any luck, something more memorable than that.

  With a shrug, the Forthwegian tough said, “You’ve got to do it if you want to get married. Otherwise you throw away your fee and you get the redheads poking and prodding at you, not just fellows like me.”

  Still fuming, Ealstan did what he had to do. The tough with the scissors snipped again, with surprising delicacy. He looked at the little tuft of hair between his fingers, nodded, and tossed it into a wastepaper basket. Ealstan yanked his drawers back up. “I hope you’re satisfied.”

  “I am, and now you can be.” The bruiser chuckled at his own wit. So did his pal. Ealstan maintained what he hoped was a dignified silence.

  Vanai came out of her anteroom at the same time as he came out of his. She looked furious, like a cat that had just been forced to take a bath. The two blocky women who’d escorted her in there were both smirking. But they weren’t restraining her. Ealstan assumed that meant she’d passed her test.

  He asked the clerk, “What do we have to go through now?”

  “Nothing,” the man answered. “You’re married. Congratulations.” He sounded as bored saying that as he had through the rest of the proceedings.

  Ealstan didn’t much care how he sounded. Turning, he embraced Vanai and gave her a kiss. The two bruisers who’d taken him away snickered. So did the women who’d examined Vanai—but not closely enough.

  The newlyweds left the hall of laws as quickly as they could. Not all of Vanai’s fury turned out to be acting. “Those, those—” She came out with a classical Kaunian word Ealstan had never heard before. “I’d almost sooner have had your pair. They couldn’t have been worse about letting their hands wander where they didn’t belong. And they kept looking at me as if they thought I was enjoying it.” She said that Kaunian word, in a low voice but even more hotly than before. Now Ealstan had a pretty fair notion of what it meant.

  He said, “The ones who got hold of me weren’t interested like that. They just wanted to make sure I was a real Forthwegian.”

  “Well, I’m a real Forthwegian, too—now I am,” Vanai said. “And I took an oath to prove it.” She sighed. “I hate being forsworn, but what choice had I? None.”

  “It was a wicked oath,” Ealstan said. “If the oath is wicked, how can you do wrong by swearing falsely?” He wasn’t sorry when Vanai didn’t pursue that. He saw the slippery slope ahead. Who decided when an oath was wicked? Whoever he was, how did he decide? This one seemed obvious to Ealstan, but it must have looked different to the Algarvians.

  “Married,” Vanai said in wondering tones. Then she chuckled, not altogether pleasantly. “My grandfather would pitch a fit.”

  “I hope he’s alive to pitch a fit,” Ealstan said.

  “On the whole, so do I,” Vanai answered, and he shut up in a hurry.

  When they got back to the flat, he unlatched the door. He motioned for Vanai to go in ahead of him. While she was in the doorway, he stepped in beside her, took her arm so she couldn’t fully pass into the flat, and gave her a kiss. She squeaked. “That’s what we do at proper Forthwegian weddings,” he said, “not the kind where the fee is the only thing that makes it real.”

  “I knew that. I’ve seen Forthwegian weddings in Oyngestun,” Vanai said. “At a proper Kaunian wedding, there would be flowers and there would be olives and almonds and walnuts—oh, and mushrooms, too, of course—for fruitfulness.” She sighed and shrugged. “However we did it, I’m glad I’m married to you.”

  Ealstan hadn’t thought anything could make up for the shabby ceremony—no ceremony at all, really—and for the goons who’d tried to make sure he and Vanai weren’t Kaunians in sorcerous disguise. But that double handful of words did the job. He kissed her again, this time for the sake of the kiss, not for anything else. Then he said, “I bet there’s one part of the wedding—or right after the wedding—that’s the same for Forthwegians and Kaunians.”

  Vanai cocked her head to one side. “Oh?” she said. “Which part do you mean?”

  He wanted to grab her. He wanted to take her hand and set it on the part of him he had in mind. He did neither. He’d seen she didn’t care for such things—in fact, she sometimes froze for a moment when he did them. He still didn’t know exactly what had happened to her before they came together, but he thought something bad had. One day, she might decide to tell him. If she did, fine. If she didn’t . . . he would live
with that, too.

  And she was still standing there smiling, waiting for his answer. “Come into the bedchamber,” he said, “and I’ll show you.”

  He did. She showed him, too. They lay side by side, waiting for him to rise for another round. He was eighteen; it wouldn’t take long. Stroking her, he said, “That’s better magic than any the sorcerers work.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” Vanai said. “I wonder if it was the very first magic, and everything else grew out of it.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t suppose anyone else knows, either,” Ealstan said. After a little while, they began again. The oldest magic of all, if that was what it was, had them well and truly—and happily—ensnared.

  Talsu got up from the supper table. “I’m off,” he said in Jelgavan, and then, in classical Kaunian, “I go to learn my lesson.”

  Gailisa beamed at him. “You sound so smart when you speak the old language.”

  “Only goes to show you can’t always tell,” Ausra remarked.

  Trying to smile at his wife and glare at his sister at the same time, Talsu feared he ended up looking foolish. “Don’t bother waiting up for me,” he said, and went downstairs, out the front door, and onto the dark, quiet streets of Skrunda.

  With the winter solstice not long past, nightfall came early. So it seemed to Talsu, at any rate. From what he’d read about how things worked down in places like Kuusamo and southern Unkerlant, though, he knew they had it worse. And in the land of the Ice People, the sun didn’t come up for days—sometimes for weeks, if you went far enough south—at a time. He tried to imagine that, tried and felt himself failing.

  A constable strode past, twirling his truncheon. He was a Jelgavan, but no Jelgavan before the war would have swaggered that way. Learned something from the Algarvians who give you orders? Talsu thought.

  Almost as if the constable had heard the thought, he barked at Talsu: “Curfew’s coming soon. You’d better be off the streets!”

  “Aye, sir. I will,” Talsu said. That was true. He’d get to the house of Kugu the silversmith before the curfew hour. And then, because Skrunda would only get darker to foil any dragons that might fly overhead, he would sneak home again. The constables hadn’t caught him yet, and he didn’t expect that they would.