Darkness Descending

by Harry Turtledove

  Leofsig started to sigh. His breath caught in his throat; what emerged was more of a choking noise, which seemed to fit. “I don’t know,” he answered, but that wasn’t what Ealstan had asked. With another sigh, a real one this time, he went on, “By the powers above, I hope not. I wouldn’t like to think . . . that of anyone, even the Algarvians.” What he’d like to think wasn’t what Ealstan had asked, either. “I tell you this, though: it could be true. The way they treated Kaunians in the captives’ camp, the way they’re treating them here . . . Aye, it could be true.”

  “I thought the same thing--I was hoping you’d tell me I was wrong,” Ealstan said. “If you’re right--if we’re right--King Mezentio’s men could go into Oyngestun for some more Kaunians to send west, and they might take her.” Fear was back on his face; it rubbed his voice raw. “And I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. I wouldn’t even know about it till I stopped hearing from her.”

  Leofsig had never had such worries with Felgilde (for that matter, he suspected she wouldn’t be brokenhearted to see every Kaunian vanish from Forthweg). He eyed his brother with mingled sympathy and surprise. “You’ve got a man’s load of troubles there, sure enough. I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t suppose you could move her here to Gromheort, could you?”

  Ealstan shook his head. “Not a chance. She lives with her grandfather. And even if I could, the redheads would be as likely to grab her here as they would there.” He clenched his fists. “What am I going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Leofsig repeated, that being kinder than saying, There’s nothing you can do. After some thought, he added, “You might tell Father. He won’t get mad at you for being sweet on a Kaunian girl--you know better than that--and he may be able to do you some good.”

  “Maybe.” Ealstan didn’t sound convinced. “I didn’t want to tell anybody, but you asked just the right questions.” He looked grim. “If I keep getting letters from Oyngestun, I won’t need to do much telling, will I? Not unless I want to do a lot of lying, I mean.” From grim, his features went to grimmer. “Pretty soon, Sidroc’s going to figure things out. That won’t be so good. He already knows about her.”

  “How does he--?” Again, Leofsig stopped in the middle of a question and answered it himself: “This is the girl whose basket you brought home last year.” He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, angry he hadn’t made the connection sooner.

  “Aye, it is,” Ealstan said. “But we were just friends then, not--” Now he stopped abruptly.

  “Not what?” Leofsig asked. Ealstan sat on his stool and didn’t answer. By not answering, he said everything that needed saying. Leofsig shook his head in bemusement. He’d only thought he was jealous of his younger brother before. He had hopes he might enjoy Felgilde--probably the night after he asked for her hand, if he ever did. That Ealstan didn’t have to live on hope struck him as most unfair. He found another question: “What are you going to do now?”

  “That’s what we’ve been talking about,” Ealstan said impatiently--and Leofsig wasn’t used to his little brother’s being impatient with him, either. “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know if there’s anything I can do, and I don’t want anybody else to know I’ve got to do anything.”

  “I still think Father could help,” Leofsig said. “He helped me, remember.”

  “Of course I remember,” Ealstan said. “If I think of anything he might do, I’ll ask him.” He suddenly looked very fierce. “But don’t you dare say anything to him till I do--if I ever do. Do you hear me?”

  Leofsig had used that tone with Ealstan any number of times. Up till now, Ealstan had never used it with him. He started to bristle. The set look on his brother’s face warned that bristling would do no good and might do a lot of harm. When he did speak, his voice was still rough, but not in the way it would have been a moment before: “Just don’t go and do anything stupid, do you hear me?”

  “Oh, aye, I hear you,” Ealstan answered. “The way things are going, though, who knows whether I’ll be able to listen to you?”

  “I wish I could argue with that.” Leofsig got up and clapped his brother on the shoulder. “I hope it turns out as well as it can for you.”

  “Thanks.” Now Ealstan sounded like the younger brother he’d always been. As he looked up at Leofsig, his smile seemed familiar, too--for a couple of heartbeats. But then his face hardened into that of a near-stranger again. “About as much as anybody can hope for these days, isn’t it?”

  “Seems that way.” Leofsig thought about adding the hope that things would get better soon. He held his tongue. As far as he could see, that hope would just rouse Ealstan to bitter laughter. Contemplating it almost roused him to bitter laughter. Instead of laughing, he yawned. “I’m going to bed. Shoving rocks around takes more work than Algarvian irregular verbs.”

  “Good night,” Ealstan said, and then used an Algarvian irregular verb that startled Leofsig.

  “Where did you learn that?” he asked. “The guards in the captives’ camp used to yell it at us.”

  “From the constables,” his brother answered. “They call people that all the time. They usually laugh when they say it, though. They’re whoresons, aye, but they aren’t as mean as the soldiers were.”

  “Maybe not--some of them don’t seem to be bad fellows, anyhow,” Leofsig allowed. “But they’re still redheads.” Having said that, he thought he’d given them all the condemnation necessary. Then, discovering he was wrong, he added, “And they’re the ones who loaded the Kaunians into the caravans cars.”

  “So they are.” Ealstan grimaced. “I’d forgotten that. I wonder how they sleep at night.”

  “I don’t know.” Leofsig yawned again. “But I can tell you how I’m going to sleep tonight: like a brick.” He soon proved himself right, too.

  A couple of evenings later, while Ealstan was wrestling with Algarvian irregular verbs or his father’s bookkeeping problems, Hestan took Leofsig out into the courtyard and quietly said, “Something is troubling your brother. Do you know what it is?”

  “Aye,” Leofsig answered. He shivered a little; the weather had got no warmer.

  When he said no more than that, his father clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Is it anything where I could help him?”

  “Maybe,” Leofsig said.

  Hestan waited to see if anything more was forthcoming. When he found it wasn’t, he chuckled under his breath. “In a gamesome mood tonight, are you? All right, I’ll come out and ask: what is it?”

  “I don’t think I ought to tell you,” Leofsig said. “He asked me not to.”

  “Ah.” Hestan exhaled. A lamp inside the kitchen and another in a bedroom showed the puff of fog that came from his mouth and nose. “Whatever it is, it has to do with those letters he’s been getting from Oyngestun, doesn’t it?”

  Too late, Leofsig realized Ealstan would have wanted him to say something like, What letters? When he didn’t say that right away, his father slowly nodded. Leofsig’s sigh brought forth mist, too. “I don’t think I’d better say anything at all, Father.”

  “Why not?” Hestan was still quiet--he almost always was--but now he was quietly angry. “I did you some good, you know. I might be able to do the same for your brother.”

  “If I thought you could, I’d tell you fast as a blaze,” Leofsig said. “I wish I did, but I don’t. Have you got the pull to keep the redheads from shipping Kaunians west?”

  Hestan stood silent. Just for a moment, his eyes widened, glittering in the dim lamplight. “So,” he said, a word that stood for a sentence, or maybe two or three. “No, I don’t have that kind of pull. No one has that kind of pull, no one I know of.” Ever so slightly, his shoulders sagged.

  “I was afraid of that,” Leofsig said. Without another word, he and his father went back inside.

  Skarnu gave the sky a warning glance, as if telling the powers above what they might and might not do. In case they weren’t listening, he spoke to his comrades, too:
“If it snows, we’ve got trouble.”

  “Aye.” Raunu’s gaze also flicked up toward those ugly gray clouds. “Snow can make hiding your tracks a lot harder.”

  Standing behind a bare-branched chestnut, Merkela clung to the hunting stick that had been Gedominu’s. “We’ll try it anyway--we’ve come too far not to,” she said. “And if it snows hard enough, it’ll cover our tracks as fast as we make them.”

  A peasant whose farm lay on the far side of Pavilosta, a short, dour, middle-aged man named Dauktu, shook his head. “If it snows that hard, cursed Simanu’ll just stay inside his castle where it’s nice and warm instead of coming out a-coursing,” he said.

  All of the double handful of Valmierans who hated Count Simanu and the Algarvians propping him up enough to risk their lives to try to be rid of him looked toward the fortress of yellow limestone that crowned a hill halfway between Pavilosta and Adutiskis, the other leading village in the county. Enkuru, Simanu’s father, had made the place strong. The way he’d treated the local peasants, he’d needed a strong place of refuge. This forlorn squad could not hope to go in there and get Simanu out. They had to hope the word they’d got was good, and that he would come forth today after deer and boar and pheasant.

  Raunu said, “Back before the days of egg-tossers, nobody could have stormed a keep like that.”

  “Even with egg-tossers, even with dragons, a stubborn garrison in there could have made the Algarvians work for a living,” Skarnu said.

  Dauktu spat on the ground. “Not Enkuru,” he said bitterly. “He knew which side of his bread had honey on it. As soon as the redheads looked like winning the war, he rolled over on his back and showed ‘em his throat and his belly, the way any cowardly cur-dog would.”

  “He’s dead,” Merkela said. “Powers below eat him, he’s dead. Simanu deserves to be dead. And”--her voice roughened--”all the redheads deserve to be dead, too. What they did to Gedominu ...”

  Her war with the Algarvians was and always would be personal. Skarnu said, “What they’re doing now, there in the west...”

  As Merkela’s had, his voice trailed away. None of the other Valmierans said anything. None of them wanted to meet his eye. Skarnu still didn’t know how much faith to put in the rumors that swirled through his conquered kingdom. He didn’t want to believe any of them, but with that much smoke, he feared a fire had to be burning somewhere down at the bottom of it.

  “You wouldn’t think even Algarvians could do such a thing,” Raunu said. “They’re whoresons, aye, but they fought clean enough, taking all in all, in the Six Years’War.”

  “Barbarians. Always have been. Always will be.” Dauktu spat again.

  “Aye.” Merkela’s voice was fierce. No one--not Skarnu, not Raunu, not the peasants who’d known her all her life--had had the nerve to tell her she might not come with the men on this raid. Had anyone tried, she would have been more dangerous to him than the redheads were likely to prove.

  The Algarvians would say, “Even Kaunians do thus and so,” Skarnu thought. They have the whip hand, though, and they’re using it, curse them. He gave no outward sign of what was going through his mind. Seeing the enemy’s point of view was sometimes useful for an officer. Soldiers fought better when they reckoned the foe nothing but a barbarian, a whoreson.

  A horn call, thin in the distance, drove such thoughts from his mind. He peered toward Count Simanu’s castle, squinting to try to make his vision sharper. “Is that the drawbridge coming down?”

  “Aye,” Raunu said. “I can’t hardly read at all without spectacles on my nose, but I don’t have any trouble with what’s far away.”

  “Here he comes,” Merkela breathed. “Oh, here comes the whole band of hunters.” Her voice was soft, but the passion it held matched--outdid--even her wildest moanings when she lay joined to Skarnu in the bedchamber she had shared with Gedominu.

  Skarnu had no trouble seeing that, either: every one of the hunters’ mounts was a brilliant, gleaming white, a white that glowed even under this dark, lowering sky. “Those aren’t horses,” he said. “They’re unicorns, for swank.”

  “Aye,” Dauktu said. “You didn’t know about the herd the counts keep?” He shrugged. “Well, can’t be helped, I suppose. You’re not from here.”

  If Skarnu lived out all his remaining days in this stretch of the kingdom, people would, he knew, be saying, You’re not from here, even when he was a doddering old man. He put that out of his mind. “It makes our job harder,” he said. “Unicorns are faster than horses, and they’re smarter than horses, too.”

  “Aye, and all of those riders will have sticks of their own, and they’ll know what to do with them,” Raunu said. “Don’t know about Simanu, but Algarvian cowards are few and far between, whatever else you say about the redheads.”

  “If you haven’t got the stomach for the game, you can still go back to the farm,” Merkela told him.

  “You know better.” The veteran underofficer locked eyes with Merkela. She looked away first, with a grudged nod. Skarnu’s respect for Raunu, already high, went up another notch. Very few people were able to make Merkela give ground. He’d had scant luck there himself, and he was her lover.

  Another horn call sounded. Simanu and his cronies drew nearer. Some wore trousers, others kilts. They were all fine riders, handling their unicorns with effortless ease. The lead rider--Skarnu thought it was Simanu himself--pointed in the direction of the thicket where the raiders waited.

  Raunu chuckled mirthlessly. “Now we find out who’s sold whom.”

  “Aye,” Skarnu agreed. “Did that groom tell us the count would come this way today because he couldn’t stand his master, or was he taking Simanu’s money to suck us into the redheads’ web?”

  One of the peasants nodded in the direction of the fortress. “I don’t see any more soldiers coming forth there, and we’d know if the Algarvians had men in these woods. They’d already be at us.” What he meant by that was, We’d already be dead. Since Skarnu thought the fellow was right, he didn’t argue.

  Simanu shouted something. The count was still too far away for Skarnu to make out his words, but he sounded carefree. Maybe that meant he was a good actor. Skarnu hoped it meant he suspected nothing.

  “We don’t start blazing too soon,” he warned his comrades--Merkela in particular. “This is likely to be the best chance we’ll ever have. If we waste it, we’re stuck with the bugger forevermore.”

  He wondered if he ought to be talking like that. Simanu was a reprobate, but he was also a member of Skarnu’s class. Nobles who maligned their fellows to commoners got themselves a bad name. But what of nobles who went to bed with the Algarvians? What did they get? Not half what they deserve, Skarnu thought. He’d do his best to fix that.

  Simanu shouted something else. This time, Skarnu caught a phrase--”after a wild boar”--though the breeze blew away the rest. One of the Algarvians answered in his own language. Then Simanu said something in Algarvian, too; the rhythms and trills were unmistakable. Skarnu didn’t know why that should have surprised him, but it did, and infuriated him, too.

  “Closer,” Raunu said softly. “Let ‘em come closer.” He might have been watching a wary doe approaching a deadfall. “We don’t want to spook ‘em by--”

  Before he could finish, one of the peasants at the far end of their little line started blazing. The Kaunian behind Simanu threw up his hands and slid bonelessly off his unicorn. It was a very fine blaze. Skarnu didn’t think he could have matched it, not at that range.

  “Oh, you cursed fool,” he muttered under his breath. Because it was such a fine blaze, who else would have the chance to get an easier one? No help for it now; Simanu and his henchmen were already shouting in alarm. Skarnu shouted, too: “Let’s get them!” He raised his stick to his shoulder, aimed at Simanu, and blazed.

  The collaborationist count’s unicorn reared, let out a horrid shriek, and then toppled. Skarnu and his friends cheered. Then they cried out again, this time in dis
may. Simanu had managed to kick free. Now he lay behind the beast’s thrashing body and started blazing toward the woods.

  Most of his henchmen galloped back toward the safety of the keep. A couple of men, though--both Algarvians, Skarnu saw with mixed admiration for their courage and shame that they had no Valmierans with them--spurred their unicorns straight for the woods. They blazed as they came, buying time for their comrades to get away. They couldn’t have known how many foes they faced, or just where among the trees those foes hid, but they attacked anyhow.

  Several beams converged on them, Merkela used Gedominu’s hunting stick for all it was worth. As each redhead fell, she grunted breathily, as she might have done while building toward her peak of pleasure with Skarnu atop her. When they both lay unmoving, she nodded to him. “You were right,” she said. “They are brave. Now these two are brave and dead, which is better yet.”

  “Aye,” Skarnu said. A hole appeared in a branch too close to his head for comfort. “But Simanu’s not dead, curse him, and he’s got some cover.”

  “We’d best do something about him quick, too,” Raunu said. “They’ve seen something’s wrong, back there in the castle. We’ll have all of Simanu’s cursed retainers coming down on us if we hang around too long.”

  “Aye.” Skarnu called quick orders to Dauktu and the other raiders at the far end of the line.

  They didn’t obey automatically, as true soldiers would have had to do. “And while we’re up to that, what’s your part of the game?” Dauktu demanded.

  “You’ll see,” Skarnu said. “I won’t shrink, I promise. Now--do you want Simanu dead or don’t you?” That decided the peasants. They started blazing at the count without taking so much trouble about their cover. One of them cried out in pain a moment later, too, for Simanu was alert and no bad blazer himself.

  But while he traded beams with the raiders, Skarnu burst from cover a good ways away and rushed toward him. As soon as the unicorn’s body no longer shielded the count, Skarnu raised his stick and blazed. He was almost too late; Simanu had already started to swing back toward him. But his beam caught Simanu in the face. The count wailed and went limp. Skarnu waited to see no more, but dashed back toward the trees.