Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  That last wasn’t a word in any language Cornelu knew, but he understood it. He liked the sound of it, too. “Aye,” he said. “Clothes fftt.”

  The Lagoan got to his feet. “Come with me,” he said again, in the tones of a man giving an order. He couldn’t have known Cornelu was a commander—clothes went a long way toward making a man, or, in the case of sodden nightclothes, toward unmaking him. On the other hand, he might not have cared had he known; some petty officers got so used to bullying sailors around that they bullied their superiors, too.

  Inside of another half hour, he had Cornelu outfitted in a Lagoan sailor’s uniform, complete with a heavy coat and a broad-brimmed hat to shed the rain. “I thank you,” Cornelu said in Sibian; the phrased remained similar in all the Algarvic languages.

  “It’s nothing,” the petty officer answered, catching his drift. Then he said something Cornelu couldn’t precisely follow, but it included Mezentio’s name and several obscenities and vulgarities. Having taken care of Cornelu, the Lagoan went on his way.

  Cornelu walked back to the crumpled Sibian barracks. The sour smell of wet smoke still hung in the air despite the rain. But Cornelu’s uniform, all his effects, the whole building, were indeed fftt. A Sibian lieutenant still wearing nothing but soaked nightclothes gave him a look full of lacerating jealousy and said, “You seem to have landed on your feet better than anyone, sir. As far as I can see, we’re on our own till the Lagoans get around to providing for us.”

  “All right.” That was what Cornelu had hoped to hear. “I’m going into town, then. I want to make sure some friends are all right.” Janira mattered to him. Balio, her father, mattered to him because he mattered to her.

  After only a few strides toward the closest ley-line caravan stop, Cornelu paused and cursed himself for a fool. How could he get aboard without money? But when he jammed his hands into the pockets of his new navy coat, he found coins in one of them—plenty of silver, he discovered, for the fare and for a good meal afterwards. Who’d put it there? The petty officer? The quartermaster who’d given him the coat? He had no way of knowing. He did know he’d have a harder time looking down his nose at Lagoans from now on.

  He got out of the caravan car at the stop near the Grand Hall of the Lagoan Guild of Mages. He’d passed several new stretches of wreckage on the way there; the Algarvians had hit Setubal hard. But Cornelu knew it could have been worse—Mezentio’s men could have massacred Kaunians instead of coming over and risking themselves.

  People were standing around in the street near Balio’s café. Cornelu didn’t think that a good sign. He pushed his way through the crowd. A couple of men sent him resentful looks, but gave way when they saw him in Lagoan naval uniform. He grimaced when he got to see the café. It was a burnt-out ruin. An egg had burst a few doors down, burst and started a fire.

  And there stood Balio, staring at the ruins of his business. “I’m glad to see you well,” Cornelu told him, and then asked the really important question: “Is Janira all right?”

  “Aye.” Balio nodded vaguely. “She’s around somewhere. Powers above only know how we’ll make a living now, though.” He cursed the Algarvians in Lagoan and Sibian both. Cornelu joined him. He’d been cursing the Algarvians for years. He expected to go on doing it for years more. And now he had a brand new reason.

  News sheets in Eoforwic had stopped talking about the battle for Sulingen. From that, Vanai concluded it was going badly for the Algarvians. The quieter they got, she assumed, the more they had to hide. And the more they had to hide, the better she liked it. “May they all fall,” she said savagely at breakfast one morning.

  “Aye, and take all their puppets down with them,” Ealstan agreed. “Powers below eat King Mezentio, powers below eat all his soldiers, and powers below eat Plegmund’s Brigade, starting with my accursed cousin.”

  “If the Algarvians are ruined, everyone who follows them will be ruined, too,” Vanai said. She understood why Ealstan hated Plegmund’s Brigade as he did. But one thing her grandfather had taught her that still seemed good was to search for root causes first. The Algarvians had caused Forthweg’s misery. Plegmund’s Brigade was only a symptom of it.

  Ealstan thought about arguing with her: she could see it on his face. Instead, he took a last bite of bread and gulped down the rough red wine in his mug. Pausing only to give her a kiss that landed half on her mouth, half on her cheek, he headed for the door, saying, “It’s not worth the quarrel, and I haven’t got time for one anyhow. I’m off to see if I can help some men pay the redheads a little less.”

  “That’s worth doing,” Vanai said. Her husband nodded and left.

  My husband, Vanai thought. It still bemused her. It would have horrified Brivibas: not just because Ealstan was a Forthwegian, though that alone would have been plenty, but because of the mean little ceremony with which they’d been formally joined. And what her grandfather would have thought about the two woman-loving matrons who’d checked the hair on her secret place . . . She laughed, imagining the look on his face if she ever told him about that.

  She knew exactly what had let her get through it without smacking them. It was simple: the Algarvians had already shown her worse. What Ealstan wished on his cousin, she wished on Major Spinello.

  For a long time after she’d had to start giving herself to him, she’d doubted she would ever feel clean again. Falling in love with Ealstan had gone a long way toward curing her there. But, after the two of them came to Eoforwic, she’d had trouble feeling clean in the literal sense of the word. Washing with a pitcher and basin here in the flat wasn’t a patch even on Oyngestun’s public bath. And Oyngestun was only a village. Eoforwic had the finest baths in all of Forthweg.

  Up till very recently, of course, they’d done her no good at all. She hadn’t been able to show her face in public, let alone her body. Now, though, she looked like a Forthwegian to everyone around her as long as her magic held. When she looked in a mirror, she saw her familiar Kaunian features framed by much less familiar dark hair. What she saw didn’t matter, so long as no one else could see it.

  She went through the spell again, to make sure it wouldn’t wear off while she was out and about in Eoforwic. Then she put some coppers in her belt pouch and left the flat. Now that she could head for the public baths, she did, usually every other day. She had trouble thinking of anything she enjoyed more about the freedom she’d sorcerously found.

  With a sneer, she walked past the bathhouse closest to her block of flats. Oyngestun’s was better; whoever’d built this one seemed to have thought, Well, it’s plenty good enough for poor people. Here, unlike in Oyngestun, she had other choices.

  The bathhouse not far from the farmers’ market was a great deal finer. She strode up the stairs that led to the women’s side, paid her little fee to the bored-looking attendant who sat there with a coin box, and went inside. She stripped off her tunic and gave it and her belt pouch and her shoes to another attendant, who put them on a shelf and handed her a numbered token with which she could claim them when she finished bathing.

  A couple of Forthwegian women stripped off as casually as she had. They didn’t give her a second glance, for which she was grateful, but went off chatting with each other. She followed, a little more slowly. In her own eyes, she remained too thin and far too pale to make a proper Forthwegian, and her black bush seemed even more unnatural than the hair on her head. But nobody else could see her fair skin and her pink nipples. Were that untrue, she would have long since been caught.

  One of the Forthwegian women slid down into the warm pool. “It’s not what it used to be, is it?” she said to her friend. “Time was when you got in here it didn’t matter how things were outside—you’d be warm. Nowadays . . .” A curl of her lips said what she thought of nowadays.

  Vanai had known warmer pools, too, but this wasn’t so bad. And Eoforwic, like most of Forthweg, had a mild climate even in winter. She was also sure the soap had been finer once upon a time, though that wou
ld come later in the bath. It was always harsh and alkaline these days, and varied between a nasty stink and an almost equally nasty, cloying perfume. Today, it was perfumed—Vanai could smell it across the bathhouse. She tried not to notice. That wasn’t too hard. She had plenty of water here, and didn’t need to worry about dripping all over the kitchen floor.

  She ducked down under the surface of the warm pool, running her fingers through her hair. When she stood up straight again, the two Forthwegian women in the pool with her were making shocked noises. For a dreadful moment, she feared she’d botched her magecraft and the charm had worn off much too soon. Then she realized the Forthwegians weren’t staring at her but back toward the vestibule. “The nerve!” one of them said.

  “The brazen hussies,” the other agreed.

  If the two Algarvian women approaching the pool understood Forthwegian, they didn’t show it. Forthwegians—and Kaunians in Forthweg—took nudity in the baths for granted. These women didn’t. They walked—strutted—as if they were on display . . . and both of them had a good deal to display, even if the women in the plunge weren’t the ideal audience for their charms. Vanai wondered why they’d come to Eoforwic. Were they officers’ wives? Officers’ mistresses? Wouldn’t Algarvian officers have found new mistresses here?

  Whatever they were, they giggled as they slid down into the water. Giggling still, they rubbed each other. That wasn’t the custom in public baths; the Forthwegian women looked scandalized, and hastily got out of the hot pool. Vanai followed. She didn’t want to seem like an abnormal Forthwegian in any way.

  Evidently she didn’t, for one of the Forthwegian women turned back to her and said, “Aren’t they disgraceful?” She kept her voice down, but not well enough; if the Algarvian women did know Forthwegian, they would have had no trouble catching the disparaging comment. Vanai just nodded. That wouldn’t get her into any trouble unless the redheads chanced to look straight at her.

  She and the Forthwegian women jumped into the cold plunge together. They all yipped. The warm pool had been only indifferently warm; the plunge was anything but indifferently cold. Some people stayed out of the warm pool altogether, and did all their soaking in the cold plunge. Vanai thought such folk were out of their minds. The two Forthwegians must have agreed with her, for they scrambled out as fast as she did. All over gooseflesh, they hurried toward the soaping area.

  Up close, the scent of the soap was even more irksome than it had been at a distance. Vanai had a couple of little scrapes; the suds stung fiercely. She was lathering her legs when a splash and a couple of small shrieks came from the cold plunge. “Maybe they didn’t expect that,” she remarked.

  “Hope not,” one of the Forthwegian women said. “Serve ’em right if they didn’t.”

  “You don’t suppose . . .” The other Forthwegian paused with left leg sudsy and right leg not. “You don’t suppose they’ll put soap on each other, too?”

  After her unfortunate experience with the Forthwegian matrons, Vanai had no interest in learning more about such things. She finished soaping herself in a hurry. Then she grabbed a bucket with a perforated bottom, filled it in a great tub of lukewarm water, and hung it on a hook that came down from the ceiling. She stood under it to rinse the soap off her skin and out of her hair.

  Rubbing at her hair after that first bucket went dry, she discovered she still had some suds in it. With a small sigh, she took the bucket off the hook, refilled it, and got back under it once more.

  She was still under it when the two Algarvian women, soapy all over, came up and got their own buckets. The Forthwegian women had already gone off to swaddle themselves in towels. One of the Algarvians nodded to Vanai and asked, “Do you speak this language?” in pretty good Kaunian.

  “No,” Vanai answered, more sharply than she’d intended—were they trying to entrap her? She wouldn’t fall for that.

  Both redheads shrugged and went back to getting themselves clean. As they filled buckets and stood under them, they talked back and forth in Algarvian. Thanks to her grandfather, Vanai could read it after a fashion, but she didn’t speak much and didn’t understand much when she heard it spoken. But she did hear the word Kaunians several times, mostly in the mouth of the woman who’d asked her if she spoke the classical tongue.

  The other one pointed to Vanai and said something more in Algarvian. Vanai thought she knew what it meant: something like, Why expect her to speak it? They’re all gone. If she let on she had any idea what they were saying, it would only land her in trouble. She knew that, and kept rinsing her hair. What she wanted to do was scream at the Algarvians, or, better, bash out their brains with a bucket.

  Had only one of them been there with her, she might have tried that. She didn’t think she could kill two, no matter how enraged she was. Both Algarvian women laughed. Why? Because they thought all the Kaunians in Forthweg were dead and gone? She wouldn’t have been surprised. But they were wrong, curse them, wrong. She wanted to scream that, too, wanted to but didn’t. She only finished rinsing and went off to get a towel of her own.

  She dried quickly, threw the towel into a wickerwork hamper, and handed her claim token back to the woman in charge of bathers’ clothes. The women gave back her garments, which she put on as quickly as she could. She didn’t want to be there when the Algarvians came out to dress.

  But she was; they’d done a faster job of rinsing than she had. Out they came, outwardly conforming to the Forthwegian custom of nudity but in truth flouting it by flaunting their bodies instead of taking no special notice of them in the baths. Even the attendant noticed, and she was as bovine a woman as Vanai had ever seen. She scowled and snapped at the redheads as she passed them their tunics and kilts. They only laughed, as if to say nothing a mere Forthwegian did could matter to them.

  And the worst of it was . . . in ordinary times, as far as the title could be applied to the war, nothing the Forthwegians did would or could let them rise up in numbers that would make them more than a nuisance to Mezentio’s men and women.

  In ordinary times. What if times weren’t ordinary? What if the Unkerlanters ran the redheads out of Sulingen? What if the Algarvians didn’t look so much like winning the war? Would the Forthwegians decide they weren’t going to stay quiet under the Algarvian yoke forever? If they did decide that, how much trouble could they cause the redheads?

  Vanai didn’t know. She hoped she would get the chance to find out. Meanwhile, she’d go right on cursing the Algarvians.

  “Another winter,” Istvan said. Another self-evident truth, too: what else would this be, with snow filtering down through the trees of the trackless, apparently endless forest of western Unkerlant?

  Corporal Kun said, “And where would we be if this weren’t another winter? Up among the stars with the other spirits of the dead, that’s where.”

  Taking a sergeant’s privilege, Istvan said, “Oh, shut up.” Kun sent him a wounded look; he didn’t usually take such privileges with a man beside whom he’d fought for years. Istvan refused to let that stare bother him. He knew what he’d meant. Since Kun didn’t, he set it out in large characters: “Another winter here. Another winter away from my home valley, away from my clansfolk. I haven’t even had leave in most of a year.”

  He held his hands out to the little fire around which he and his men sat, trying to get some warmth back into them. Then he looked down at his palms. The scar from the wound Captain Tivadar had given him remained fresh, easy to see, despite calluses and dirt. He didn’t say anything about it; not all the soldiers crouched around the fire had eaten goat’s flesh with him.

  If he came home to the little village of Kunhegyes on leave, his family wouldn’t know what the scar meant. They would welcome him into their bosom with glad cries and open arms, as they had the last time he’d got away from the war for a little while. They would have no idea he was, at best, only marginally purified from the uncleanness into which he’d fallen. If he didn’t tell them, they would never learn. He could live out h
is life in the valley with no one the wiser.

  He looked at the scar again. Whether his kinsfolk knew or not, he would know. He could imagine the knowledge eating away at him, day by day, month by month, year by year. He could imagine himself screaming out the truth one day, just because he couldn’t stand to hold it in any more. What he knew counted for more than what anyone else knew.

  Szonyi spat into the flames. His saliva sizzled for a moment and then was gone. He said, “We’re a warrior race. We’re here because we’re a warrior race. Sooner or later, we’ll win because we’re a warrior race. We’re too stubborn to quit, by the stars.”

  “Aye,” Istvan said. In a way, that was the other side of the coin to his own thoughts. Gyongyosians did what they did because of what was inside of them, not because of any outside force.

  And then Kun spat, too, in utter contempt. “Oh, aye, that’s why we’ll be marching into Cottbus week after next,” he said.

  “There aren’t enough of us here,” Istvan protested.

  “More of us than there are Unkerlanters,” the onetime mage’s apprentice said.

  “Well, but . . .” Istvan’s wave encompassed the forest, or as much of it as remained visible through the drifting, swirling snow. “I’d call this place the arsehole of the world, but you need to know where your arsehole is once or twice a day. Nobody’s needed to know where these woods are since the stars made them.”

  “We wouldn’t have come as far as we have if we weren’t a warrior race,” Szonyi said stubbornly. “Some of us still believe in things, we do. Next thing you know, some of us will say we’ve stopped believing in the stars.” He stared a challenge back at Kun.