Darkness Descending

by Harry Turtledove

“Don’t you, Uncle Hengist?” Ealstan spoke before Hestan could.

  Now Hengist shrugged. “If we couldn’t beat the redheads, what difference does it make? Things won’t be too bad, I don’t expect. It’s not like we were Kauni-ans, or anything like that.”

  “Remember what the Algarvians are letting your son learn,” Hestan answered. “Remember what they aren’t. You’re right, they save the worst for the Kaunians--but they do not wish us well.”

  “They ruled here when we were boys--have you forgotten?” Hengist said. “If they hadn’t lost the Six Years’ War, if the Unkerlanters hadn’t fought among themselves, we wouldn’t have gotten a king of our own back. The redheads treated Forthwegians better than the Unkerlanters did farther west, that’s certain.”

  “But we shouldbt free,” Ealstan exclaimed. “Forthweg is a great kingdom. We were a great kingdom when the Algarvians and the Unkerlanters were nothing to speak of. They had no business carving us up like a roast goose, either a hundred years ago or now.”

  “Boy has spirit,” Hengist remarked to Hestan. He turned back to Ealstan. “If you want to get right down to it, we aren’t carved up any more. King Mezentio’s men hold all of Forthweg these days.”

  Ealstan didn’t want to get right down to it, not like that. Without waiting to hear when he should use simple interest and when compound, he left the parlor. Behind him, Hestan said, “In the old days, a Forthwegian or even a blond Kaun-ian could get ahead in Algarve--not as easily as a redhead, but an able man could make do. I don’t see that happening now.”

  “Well, I don’t want a Kaunian getting ahead of me--unless she’s a pretty girl in tight trousers.” Uncle Hengist laughed.

  That’s where Sidroc comes by it, all right, Ealstan thought. Instead of going back to his room, he went into the kitchen, intending to hook a plum. He hesitated when he discovered his older sister Conberge in there kneading dough. Since hard times and the Algarvians came to Gromheort, his sister and even his mother had grown stern about making food disappear like that.

  But Conberge looked up from her work and smiled at him. Thus encouraged, he sidled up. Her smile didn’t disappear when he reached toward the bowl of fruit. She didn’t swat him with a floury hand. He took a plum and bit into it. It was very sweet. Juice dribbled down his chin, through the sparse hairs of his sprouting beard.

  “What have you got there?” his sister asked, pointing not to the plum but to the paper in his other hand.

  “Bookkeeping problems Father set me,” Ealstan answered. With a little effort, he managed a smile. “I’m not wild about doing them, but at least he doesn’t switch me when I make mistakes, the way a master would at school.”

  “Let me see,” Conberge said, and Ealstan handed her the sheet. She looked it over, nodded, and gave it back. “You used simple interest once when you should have compounded.

  “Aye, so Father told--” Ealstan stopped and stared. “I didn’t know you could cast accounts.” He couldn’t tell whether he sounded indignant or astonished--both at once, probably. “They don’t teach you that in the girls’ academy.”

  Conberge’s smile turned sour. “No, they don’t. Maybe they should, but they don’t. Father did, though. He said you never could tell, and I might have to be able to earn my own way one day. This was before the war started, mind you.”

  “Oh.” Ealstan glanced back toward the parlor. His father and Uncle Hengist were still going back and forth, back and forth, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. “Father sees a long way ahead.”

  His sister nodded. “It was a lot harder than writing bad poetry, which is what my schoolmistresses set me to doing, though they didn’t know it was bad. But I think better because of ii, do you know what I mean? Maybe you don’t, because they will teach boys some worthwhile things.”

  “They would--till the Algarvians got their hands on the school,” Ealstan said bitterly. But he shook his head. He didn’t want to distract himself. “I didn’t know Father had taught you anything like that, though.”

  “And up until not very long ago, I wouldn’t have told you, either.” Conberge’s grimace made Ealstan see the world in a way he hadn’t before. She said, “Men don’t usually want women to know too much or be too bright--or to show they know a lot or they’re bright, anyhow. If you ask me, it’s because most men don’t know that much and aren’t that bright themselves.”

  “Don’t look at me like that when you say such things,” Ealstan said, which made his sister laugh. He grabbed another plum.

  “All right, you can have that one, but that’s all,” Conberge said. “If you think you’ll get away with any more, you aren’t that bright.”

  Ealstan laughed then. Perhaps drawn by his amusement and his sister’s, Sidroc came in from the door that opened on the courtyard. Seeing Ealstan with a plum in his hand, he grabbed one himself. Conberge couldn’t do anything about it, not with Ealstan eating one. As she turned back to the bread dough, Sidroc asked, “What’s so funny?” His voice came blurry around a big mouthful of plum. He looked a good deal like Ealstan, save that his nose bore a closer resemblance to a turnip than to a sickle blade.

  “Getting stuck with bookkeeping problems,” Ealstan answered.

  “Men,” Conberge added.

  Sidroc looked from one of them to the other. Then, suspiciously, he looked at the plum. “Has this thing turned into brandy while I wasn’t looking?” he asked. Ealstan and Conberge both shrugged, so solemnly that they started laughing again. Sidroc snorted. “I think the two of you have gone daft, is what I think.”

  “You’re probably right,” Ealstan told him. “They do say that too many bookkeeping problems--”

  “Compounded quarterly,” his sister broke in.

  “Compounded quarterly, aye,” Ealstan agreed. “Bookkeeping problems compounded quarterly cause calcification of the brain.”

  “Even you don’t know what that means,” Sidroc said.

  “It means my brain is turning into a rock, like yours was to start with,” Ealstan said. “If the Algarvians had let you take stonelore, you would have found out for yourself.”

  “Think you’re so smart.” Sidroc kept smiling, but his voice held an edge. “Well, maybe you are. But so what? So what?--that’s what I want to know. What’s it gotten you?” Without waiting for an answer, he pitched his plum pit into the trash basket and stalked out of the kitchen.

  Ealstan wished he could ignore the question. It was too much to the point. Since Sidroc hadn’t stayed around, he turned back to Conberge. “What has being smart got me? Or you, either? Nothing I can see.”

  “Would you rather be stupid? That won’t get you anything, either,” Conberge said. After a moment’s thought, she went on, “If you’re smart, when you grow up you turn into someone like Father. That’s not so bad.”

  “No.” But Ealstan remained unhappy. “Even Father, though--what is he? A bookkeeper in a conquered kingdom where the Algarvians don’t want us to know enough to be bookkeepers.”

  “But he’s teaching you anyhow, and he taught me, too,” Conberge reminded him. “If that isn’t fighting back against the redheads, what is?”

  “You’re right.” Ealstan glanced toward the parlor. His father and Uncle Hestan were still arguing. Then he looked at Conberge, as surprised as he’d been when he discovered she knew how to cast accounts. “Sometimes I think I don’t know you at all.”

  “Maybe I should have gone on seeming stupid.” His sister shook her head. “Then I’d sound like Sidroc.”

  “He isn’t really stupid, not when he doesn’t want to be,” Ealstan said. “I’ve seen that.”

  “No, he’s not,” Conberge agreed. “But he doesn’t care about the way things are right now. He’s happy enough to let the Algarvians run Forthweg. So is Uncle Hengist. All they want to do is get along. I want to fight back, if I can.”

  “Me, too,” Ealstan said, realizing his father might have been teaching him more than bookkeeping after all.

  “Mil
ady, he is waiting for you downstairs,” Bauska said as Marchioness Krasta dithered between two fur wraps.

  “Well, of course he is,” Krasta answered, finally choosing the red fox over the marten.

  “But you should have gone down there some little while ago,” the maidservant said. “He is an Algarvian. What will he do to you?”

  “He won’t do a thing,” Krasta said with rather more confidence than she felt. Standing straighter and brushing back a stray lock of pale gold hair, she added, “I have him wrapped around my little finger.” That was a lie, and she knew it. With a younger suitor, a more foolish suitor, it might well have been true. Colonel Lurcanio, though, to her sometimes intense annoyance, did not yield himself so readily.

  When Krasta did go downstairs, she found Lurcanio with his arms folded across his chest and a sour expression on his face. “Good of you to join me at last,” he said. “I was beginning to wonder if I should ask one of the kitchen women to go with me to the king’s palace in your place.”

  From most men, that would have been annoyed bluster. Lurcanio was annoyed, but he did not bluster. If he said he’d been thinking of taking one of the kitchen wenches to the palace, he meant it.

  “I’m here, so let’s be off,” Krasta said. Lurcanio did not move, but stood looking down his straight nose at her. She needed a moment to realize what he expected. It was more annoying than anything he required of her in bed. Grudgingly, very grudgingly, she gave it to him: “I’m sorry.”

  “Then we’ll say no more about it,” Lurcanio replied, affable again now that he’d got his way. He offered her his arm. She took it. They went out to his carriage together.

  His driver said something in Algarvian that sounded rude. Had he been Krasta’s servant, she would have struck him or dismissed him on the spot. Lurcanio only laughed. That irked her. Lurcanio knew it irked her and did it anyhow to remind her Valmiera was a conquered kingdom and she a victor’s plaything.

  After the carriage began to roll, she asked him, “Have you ever been able to learn what became of my brother?”

  “I am afraid I have not,” Colonel Lurcanio answered with what sounded like real regret. “Captain Skarnu, Marquis Skarnu, is not known to have been slain. He is not known to have been captured. He is not known to have been among those who surrendered after King Gainibu capitulated. It could be--and for your sake, my lovely lady, I hope it is--that the records of capture and surrender are defective. It would not be the first time.”

  “What if they aren’t?” Krasta asked. Lurcanio did not reply. After a few seconds, she recognized the expression on his long, somber face as pity. “You think he’s dead!” she exclaimed.

  “Milady, there at the end, the war moved very swiftly,” the Algarvian officer replied. “A man might fall with all his comrades too caught up in the retreat to bring him with them. Our own soldiers would have been more concerned with the Valmierans still ahead than with those who could endanger them no more.”

  “It could be so.” Krasta did not want to believe it. But, with most of a year passed since she’d heard from Skarnu, she had a hard time denying it, too. As was her way, when a painful fact stared her in the face, she looked in another direction: in this case, around Priekule. “I don’t see so many Algarvian soldiers on the streets these days, I don’t think.”

  “You are likely right,” Lurcanio said. “Some of them have gone west to join in the fight against King Swemmel.”

  “He’s a nasty sort,” Krasta said. “He deserves whatever happens to him and so does his kingdom.” Civilization, as far as she was concerned, did not run west of Algarve. Not so long before, she would have said it did not run west of Valmiera.

  Someone shouted at her from a dark side street: “Algarvian’s hired twat!” Running footsteps said the fellow who’d yelled had not lingered to note the effects of his remark. In that, no doubt, he was wise. Had she been able to catch him, Krasta would not have been gentle.

  Colonel Lurcanio patted her leg, a little above the knee. “Just another fool,” he said, “so take no notice of him. I do not need to hire you, do I?”

  “Of course not.” Krasta tossed her head. Had Lurcanio offered her money for the use of her body, she would have thrown everything she could reach at him. He’d done nothing of the sort. He’d simply made her afraid of what might happen if she said no. (She chose not to dwell on that; she did not care to think of herself as afraid.)

  “Ah, here we are,” Lurcanio said a little later, as the carriage came up to the palace. “An impressive building. The royal palace in Trapani is larger, but, I think, less magnificent. One can imagine ruling all the world from here.” After that praise, his laughter sounded doubly cruel. “One can imagine it, but not all that one can imagine comes true.” He descended from the carriage and handed Krasta down. “Shall we pay our respects to your king, who does not rule all the world from here?” He laughed again.

  “I came here the night King Gainibu declared war against Algarve,” Krasta said.

  “Then he still ruled some of the world from here,” Colonel Lurcanio said. “He would have done better to keep silent. He would have gone on ruling some of the world. Now he has to ask the leave of an Algarvian commissioner before he takes a glass of spirits.”

  “If Algarve hadn’t invaded the Duchy of Bari, he wouldn’t have had to declare war,” Krasta said. “Then everything would still be as it was.”

  Lurcanio leaned over and brushed his lips across hers. “You must be an innocent. You are too decorative to be a fool.” He began ticking points off on his fingers. “Item: we didn’t invade Bari; we took back what was ours. The men welcomed us with open arms, the women with open legs. I know. I was there. Item: Valmiera had no business detaching Bari from Algarve after the Six Years’ War. It was done, but, as with wizards, what one can do, another can undo. And item: things would not still be as they were.” Just for a moment, long enough to make Krasta shiver, he might have been one of his barbarous ancestors. “Had you not gone for us, we would have come after you.”

  Krasta turned and looked back toward the Kaunian Column of Victory. It still stood in its ancient park, pale and proud and tall in the moonlight. Unlike during the Six Years’ War, no damage had come to it in this fight. Even so, the imperial victories it commemorated had never seemed so distant to her.

  “Well,” Lurcanio said, “let us go in, then, and pay our respects to your illustrious sovereign.” He spoke without discernible irony. In the wink of an eye, he’d pulled the cloak of polished noble courtier over whatever lay beneath.

  In the palace, King Gainibu’s servitors bowed to Lurcanio as they might have to a count of Valmieran blood or perhaps even as they might have to a duke of Valmieran blood. They fawned on Krasta as if she were duchess rather than marchioness, too. That went a long way toward improving her mood.

  At the door to the reception hall--the Grand Hall, Krasta realized, the hall in which Gainibu had declared his ill-fated war--a uniformed Algarvian soldier checked Lurcanio’s name and hers against a list. After affirming they had the right to go past him, he stood aside. He and Lurcanio spoke briefly in their own language.

  “What was that about?” Krasta asked irritably.

  “Making sure neither of us is an assassin in disguise,” Lurcanio answered. “Still a few malcontents loose in the provinces. They’ve murdered some nobles who cooperate with us, and some of our men, too. If they managed to sneak a murderer in here, they could do us some harm.”

  He thought of harm to his kingdom. Krasta thought of harm to herself. When she looked around the room, she found it odd to realize Algarvians were more likely to keep her safe than her own countrymen. She made a beeline for the bar and got herself a brandy laced with wormwood. She tossed it back as if it were ale. The sooner the world got blurry, the better she’d like it.

  Lurcanio took a glass of white wine for himself. He drank. He enjoyed drinking. Krasta had seen that. But she’d never seen him fuddled. She doubted she ever would. Foolishn
ess, she thought. Anything worth doing was worth doing to excess.

  “Shall we go over and greet his Majesty?” Lurcanio asked, glancing toward the receiving line at whose head Gainibu stood. His mouth tightened. “Perhaps we should do it now, while he will still remember who we are--and who he is.”

  Gainibu held a large tumbler half full of amber spirits. By the way he stood, by the vague expression on his face, he’d already emptied it a good many times. Krasta remembered Lurcanio’s sardonic comment outside the palace. The Algarvian commissioner must not have given the king any trouble about refills.

  Krasta and Lurcanio worked their way up the receiving line. It was shorter than it would have been before the war. Not all the guests bothered presenting themselves to Gainibu. He was not the most important man in the room, not any more. Several of Lurcanio’s superiors possessed more authority than he. Again, Krasta had the sense of ground shifting under her feet.

  Gainibu’s decorations, honorary and earned, glittered on his chest. Lurcanio saluted him as junior officer to senior. Krasta bowed low. “Your Majesty,” she murmured.

  “Ah, the marchioness,” Gainibu replied, though Krasta was not sure he knew which marchioness she was. “And with a friend, I see. Aye, with a friend.” He took another sip from the tumbler. His eyes followed it as he lowered it from his mouth. Before the war, his eyes had followed beautiful women that way. They’d followed Krasta that way, more than once. What was she now? Just another noblewoman on a conqueror’s arm, less interesting than the spirits that swirled in his glass.

  Lurcanio touched Krastas elbow. She let him lead her away. Behind her, King Gainibu mumbled something courteous to someone else. “He is not the man he was,” Lurcanio said, hardly caring whether Gainibu heard or not. In a different tone, it might have been pity. It was scorn.

  To her surprise, sudden tears filled Krasta’s eyes. She looked back toward the king. There he stood, impressive, amiable, drunk. His kingdom was a prisoner of Algarve. And he, she thought with a burst of insight that surely came from the wormwood, was a prisoner within himself.