Darkness Descending

by Harry Turtledove

  “If I’m lucky, I will,” Garivald answered. “Of course, if I were lucky, there wouldn’t be an Algarvian within a hundred miles of Zossen.”

  “And isn’t that the truth?” Annore said bitterly. “Well, go on, then. Maybe some small luck will help make up for the big.”

  “Here’s hoping. Hand me the whetstone, will you?” He took the hatchet off his belt and got the edge as sharp as he could. While he was working for the Algarvians, he didn’t care what state his tools were in; dull ones gave him an excuse for going slower and doing less. Working for himself, he wanted to do the job right.

  He hurried out among the trees. Firewood and the chance to hunt weren’t all that drew him. There in the quiet, words shaped themselves in his head more readily than back in the village. He’d had a whole verse vanish from his mind when Syrivald asked him a question at just the wrong time.

  Waddo expected a song to make winter nights pass more pleasantly. Garivald knew that was the piece he should have been working on. Naturally, the other one he had in mind, the one that urged Unkerlanter women not to give their bodies to King Mezentio’s soldiers, kept forcing its way forward.

  He threw a stone at a gray squirrel on die gray bark of a birch. The stone slammed into the trunk a few inches to one side of the little animal. The squirrel scurried around to the far side of the tree, chattering reproachfully.

  “Whore,” Garivald muttered. He chopped at a sapling. Unlike the squirrel, it couldn’t run away. He stuffed lengths of the trunk and the bigger branches into a leather sack he carried over his shoulder. As his body did the work, his mind roamed free. Two verses centered on the word whore shaped themselves before he quite knew what had happened.

  He quietly sang them to himself, weighing the sounds, seeing if the rhythm was right, looking for ways to make the verses better. By the time he went back to Zossen, he’d have them just the way he wanted them.

  After singing them, he changed a couple of words, then sang them again. He was about to change one of the words back when someone behind him clapped his hands. Garivald whirled in alarm, his hand tightening on the hatchet’s handle. Some of the villagers thought the best way to get along with the Algarvians was to suck up to them. Anyone who tried taking this tale back to them would be sorry.

  But the fellow who’d clapped didn’t come from Zossen. Garivald had never seen him before. He was skinny and dirty and mean-looking. Once upon a time, his grimy tunic had been rock-gray. He carried a stick; Garivald’s hatchet wasn’t much against it. He wasn’t pointing it at Garivald, though. Instead, he was nodding in slow approval.

  “Good song,” he remarked, and his accent proved he hadn’t been born anywhere near the Duchy of Grelz. “Did you make it?”

  “Aye,” Garivald answered before realizing he should have lied.

  “Thought so--hadn’t heard it before,” the stranger said. “Aye, a good song. Sing it over, friend, so I get it straight.”

  Garivald did, this time all the way through. The stranger listened, then made a peremptory gesture for him to do it again. Now, the stranger sang along. He had a good ear; he made few mistakes.

  “My pals will like that,” he said. “Aye, in a few months people will be singing that all over the countryside. Not everyone’s given up against the Algarvians, no indeed, not even after their behemoths ran over us. What’s the name of your village yonder?”

  “Zossen,” Garivald answered.

  “Zossen,” the stranger--a soldier who hadn’t surrendered?--repeated. “Zossen will hear from us one of these days.” He sketched a salute, as if to an officer, before slipping away between the trees. He was far better in the woods than Garivald and vanished almost at once.

  Fernao didn’t know why he’d been summoned to the royal palace in Setubal. The bored functionary who’d linked crystals hadn’t explained, saying only, “All will be made clear upon your arrival, sir.” In a way, Fernao supposed his caution made sense: a good mage could spy on the emanations passing between two crystals. But not knowing why he had to go to the palace irritated him.

  As he got off the caravan car in front of the palace grounds, an unpleasant thought crossed his mind: what if it had to do with the exiled King Penda of Forthweg? That was worse than irritating. It was downright frightening. He would have been perfectly happy--powers above, he would have been delighted--never to see Penda again.

  He worried as he walked up the broad red-brick path toward the palace, worried so much that at first he paid little attention to the building itself. Having lived his whole life in Setubal played a part in that; he took die palace for granted, where a man who saw it but seldom would not have.

  Even for him, it wasn’t easy. The Lagoan royal palace cried out to be noticed--cried out in a loud, piercing voice. It was built in the ornate Algarvian style of the century before last: the Algarvian style carried to an extreme only the royal treasury could have supported. Everything leaped toward the heavens, and everything was carved in incredible, maniacal detail. The entire history of Lagoas up till that time appeared on the walls and buttresses and towers, all of it perfect, much of it swathed in gold leaf. Fernao wondered how many stonecutters had gone blind while the palace rose.

  If anything, the great bronze doors that led into the royal residence were even more astonishing than the building. On them was the Second Battle of the Strait of Valmiera--in which, not long before the palace went up, Lagoas had won a smashing victory over Sibiu--all picked out in enamelwork whose brilliance had not diminished a bit over the course of two centuries.

  Muttering under his breath, Fernao passed through those brazen doors and into the palace. A dozen secretaries sat behind desks in the antechamber there. He went up to one of them and gave his name.

  “A moment, sorcerous sir, if you please,” the fellow said. “Let me consult my list of appointments.” He ran his finger down the sheet. “Ah, here you are—and right on time, too. Your appointment is with Colonel Peixoto, in the Ministry of War. That is in the south wing, sir--go through this hall and take the corridor to your left.”

  “Thank you very much,” Fernao said. The secretary bowed in his chair, almost as ceremonious as an Algarvian. Fernao walked through the antechamber with a new bounce to his stride. Only the splendor of his surroundings kept him from whistling as he walked. Whatever this was about, it had nothing to do with Penda. And if it has nothing to do with Penda, he thought, I don’t care what it is.

  As he got farther from the parts of the palace where King Vitor actually lived, interior decoration grew less grandiose. By the time he reached the offices of the Ministry of War--a good ten minutes’ walk from the antechamber--he’d come to surroundings in which he could actually imagine men doing serious work.

  A uniformed clerk took charge of him. After making him touch his Guild card--had he been an impostor, the spot he touched would have glowed red--the clerk led him to Peixoto’s office. The Lagoan colonel was younger and leaner than Fernao had expected: within a couple of years of the sorcerer’s own age. He was also more enthusiastic than Fernao had looked for in a soldier.

  “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, sir, a very great pleasure,” Peixoto said, springing from his seat to clasp Fernao’s hand. “Here, take a chair, make yourself comfortable. Will you drink a glass of wine with me?” Without waiting for an answer, he clapped his hands. The military clerk hurried in with a bottle and a couple of glasses.

  The wine had the tang of oranges and lemons. “A Jelgavan vintage,” Fernao remarked without bothering to look closely at the bottle.

  “Aye, so it is,” Colonel Peixoto answered. “The Algarvians make better, but I’ll be cursed if I want any of theirs now. I’d think I were drinking blood.” His face, which seemed sunny most of the time, clouded. “That’s a filthy trick they’ve pulled in Unkerlant.”

  “You’re not a mage, Colonel--you have no notion how filthy it feels to me,” Fernao said. “If you’ve called me here to try to put a stop to it, I am your man, and with a
ll my heart.” He emptied his wineglass, then poured it full again.

  “Well, in a manner of speaking, sir mage, in a manner of speaking,” Peixoto said. “We aim to put a thorn under the wings of King Mezentio’s dragons, so we do. And from all I can see”--he rustled papers on his desk--”you are the perfect man--the perfect man, I tell you--for the job.”

  “Say on,” Fernao told him.

  “I’ll do just that,” Colonel Peixoto replied. “Curse me if I won’t. Now, then--I see you’ve served as a ship’s mage. You were doing that when the war broke out, weren’t you? Can’t very well hit the Algarvians a proper lick unless we cross the sea to get at ‘em, can we?”

  “No, indeed,” Fernao said. The wine lent his voice extra solemnity. “Although the research I’m working on now is important, if you think I could best serve the kingdom by going back to sea, I’ll do it.”

  Peixoto beamed. “Spoken like a patriot, my dear sir. But that’s not precisely what we have in mind for you, by your leave. You’re not far off--don’t get me wrong--but you’re not quite on, either. Plenty of mages--plenty of Lagoan mages, anyhow--go to sea. But do you know--do you know, sir?--that only a handful of Lagoan mages, and fewer of the first rank, have ever set foot on the land of the Ice People?”

  Fernao discovered he’d made a mistake, a dreadful mistake, when he’d decided he didn’t care why he’d been called to the palace so long as it had nothing to do with King Penda. “Colonel,” he said plaintively, “have you ever eaten boiled camel hump? Have you ever tried to gnaw through strips of dried and salted camel meat?”

  “Never once, powers above be praised.” Colonel Peixoto sounded pleased that that was true, too, for which Fernao could hardly blame him. The mage wished it were true for himself. Peixoto went on, “But since you have, that makes you all the more valuable for this expedition. You must see that, mustn’t you?”

  “What expedition?” demanded Fernao, who was not in the mood to see anything if he could help it.

  “Why, the one we’re planning to the austral continent, of course,” Peixoto said. “With a little bit of luck--with only a little bit of luck, mind you--we’ll throw out the Yaninans and however many Algarvians they’ve got down there to give them a hand, and then where will they be? Eh? Where then?”

  “Somewhere warm and civilized,” Fernao answered. Colonel Peixoto laughed heartily, as if he’d said something funny rather than speaking simple truth. The mage asked, “Why on earth are we mad enough to want to take the land of the Ice People away from the Yaninans? As far as I’m concerned, they did us a favor when they ran us out of it last year.”

  “What’s on the earth there doesn’t matter, not a bit--no, not a bit. It’s what’s in the earth that counts.” Peixoto leaned forward and breathed a wine-smelling word into Fernao’s face: “Cinnabar.”

  “Ah,” the mage said. “Indeed. But still--”

  “But me no buts, my dear sir,” Peixoto said. “Without the austral continent, Algarve has not got a lot of cinnabar. Without cinnabar, her dragons cannot flame nearly so fiercely as they can with it. If we take it away, that makes fighting the war harder for them. Can you tell me I am mistaken in any particular there?”

  “No,” Fernao admitted. “But can you tell me that whatever we have to spend to take the cinnabar from the land of the Ice People away from Mezentio’s men won’t be twice--three times--five times--what it costs them to do without?”

  Peixoto beamed at him. The colonel really was too cheerful to make a typical soldier. “Ah, a very nice point, a very nice point indeed! But you must recall, we can think differently now that Kuusamo has joined the fight on our side and we don’t have to worry about being stabbed in the back. Algarvian folly there, nothing else but.”

  “I do recall that, aye,” Fernao said. He’d hoped it would mean the Kuusamans would start sharing whatever they know of whatever they weren’t talking about. So far, it hadn’t; they’d kept blandly denying everything. Pointing to a map on the wall by the desk, he continued, “But I also recall that Sibiu sits over our route to the austral continent, and that there are a certain number of Algarvians and Algarvian ships and Algarvian leviathans and Algarvian scouting dragons in Sibiu.”

  “It’s true. Every bit of it’s true.” Nothing fazed Peixoto. “I never said this would be easy, sir mage. I said we were going to undertake it. If we succeed in landing men and dragons on the austral continent, we will require sorcerers somewhat familiar with conditions there--and also with conditions in the waters thereabouts. Can you deny you are such a mage?”

  After his journey by leviathan back from the land of the Ice People to Lagoas, Fernao was more familiar with those waters than he’d ever wanted to be. “I don’t suppose I can deny it, no,” he said, wishing he could. “Even so--”

  Colonel Peixoto held up a hand. “My dear sir, your voluntary cooperation would be greatly appreciated--greatly appreciated indeed. It is not a requirement, however.”

  Fernao glared at him. That was plain enough--unpleasant, but plain. “You will dragoon me, then.”

  “If we must, we will,” Peixoto agreed. “We need you. I promise you this: the rewards of success will not be small, neither for the kingdom nor for yourself.”

  “Nor will the penalties--for me, anyhow--be small if we fail,” Fernao said. “The kingdom, I expect, will survive it.” He sighed. “At least I’ll have till spring to prepare for this . . . adventure.”

  “Oh, no.” Peixoto shook his head. “It will not be at once, but we aim to move later in the winter. The bad weather in the south will make it harder for the Algarvians to spy out what we’re doing, and we have more practice sailing in those waters during wintertime than they do.”

  “Practice dodging icebergs, you mean,” Fernao said, and the colonel, curse him, nodded. The mage went on, “And I suppose you intend landing your army at the edge of the ice pack and letting everyone march to real ground.”

  He’d intended that for sarcasm. To his dismay, Colonel Peixoto nodded. “Aye. Nothing better than taking the foe by surprise.”

  “A blizzard at the wrong time would take us by surprise,” Fernao remarked. Peixoto shrugged, as if to say such things couldn’t be helped. Fernao tried again: “What do you propose that we eat once we get down there?”

  “We’ll manage,” Peixoto said. “After all, the Ice People do.”

  “You’re mad,” Fernao said. “Your superiors are mad. And you want me to help save you from yourselves.”

  “If that’s how you care to put it,” Peixoto said. “I’m going along, when we go. I’m not asking anything of you I dare not do myself.”

  “Oh, don’t turn Algarvian on me,” Fernao said crossly. “I’ll go.” He wondered how big a fool he was being. No--he didn’t wonder. He knew.

  Eight

  Leofsig turned to his younger brother and asked, “Who’s your friend in Oyngestun? This is the third letter you’ve got from there in the last couple of weeks.”

  He hadn’t meant anything in particular by the question. The last thing he expected was for Ealstan to blush and look embarrassed and stammer out, “Oh, just, uh, somebody I, uh, got to know, that’s all.”

  It so patently wasn’t all, Leofsig started to laugh. Ealstan glared at him. “Somebody you got to know, eh? Is she pretty?” he asked, and then went on, “She must be pretty, to get you all flustered like that.”

  And, sure enough, Ealstan’s face lit up like a sunrise. “Aye, she’s pretty,” he said in a low voice. He glanced out toward the doorway of the bedroom they shared, to make sure nobody was standing out in the courtyard and listening. Leofsig thought he was being foolish; on a miserably chilly night like this one, nobody in his right mind would want to linger out there.

  “Well, tell me more,” Leofsig urged. “How’d you meet her? What’s her name?” He had trouble thinking of his baby brother as being old enough to care about girls, but Ealstan’s beard was getting on toward man-thick these days.

  “I met her gat
hering mushrooms,” Ealstan answered, still hardly above a whisper. Leofsig laughed again; if that wasn’t the way a quarter of the Forthwegian writers ever born started their romances, he’d eat his shoes. “Well, I did, curse it,” Ealstan said. But something more than silliness at being caught up in a cliche was on his face. Leofsig had trouble naming it, whatever it was.

  “What’s her name?” he asked again.

  That other thing grew stronger on Ealstan’s face. Now Leofsig recognized it: it was fear. For a moment, he didn’t think his brother would answer him. When at last Ealstan did speak, he said, “I wouldn’t tell anybody but you, not even Father, not yet anyhow. Her name’s . . . Vanai.” The whisper was so quiet, Leofsig had to lean forward to hear it.

  “Why are you making such a secret out of. . .” he began, and then, before he’d finished the sentence, he understood exactly why. “Oh.” He whistled softly. “Because she’s a Kaunian.”

  “Aye.” Ealstan’s voice was bleak. When he chuckled, the sound might have come from the throat of a weary, cynical old man. “My sense of timing couldn’t be better, could it?”

  “Not if you tried for a year.” Leofsig shook his head, as stunned as if an egg had burst close by. “That would be hard enough any time. Now ...”

  Ealstan nodded. “Now it’s a disaster. But it happened anyhow. And do you know what?” He stuck out his chin, as if challenging not only Leofsig but the whole world to make him take it back. “I’m glad it happened.”

  “You’re head over heels is what you are.” Leofsig knew a stab of jealousy. He’d been taking Felgilde out since before he’d got summoned into King Penda’s levy, and he didn’t think he’d ever felt about her the way Ealstan obviously felt about this Vanai. But his brother had his eyes open, too: his wariness made that plain.

  So did his next question: “Leofsig, do you think it’s true, what people are saying about what the redheads did to the Kaunians they shipped off to the west?”