Darkness Descending

by Harry Turtledove

  “That’s only because you haven’t done it,” Leofsig said, remembering the smell of entrails laid open--and remembering the smell of fear, too.

  “You sound like my father,” Sidroc said scornfully.

  “He hasn’t done it, either, so he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Leofsig answered, relishing the chance to say that about Uncle Hengist. “But I have, and I do, and I’m telling you you’re crazy, too.”

  “You can tell me whatever you want. It doesn’t matter worth a sack of beans because I signed the papers this afternoon,” Sidroc said. “Anybody who doesn’t like it can cursed well lump it.”

  Leofsig wanted to lump Sidroc. But he also still wanted supper and sleep. And a house without Sidroc in it was liable to be a more peaceable place. So all he said was, “Have it your way,” and walked down the entry hall and turned left into the kitchen.

  His mother and sister were in there. “I heard you talking with him,” Elfryth said in a stage whisper. “Fighting for Mezentio after what the redheads have done to our kingdom! The very idea! Did you persuade him not to?”

  “No, Mother,” Leofsig answered, and poured himself some wine. “And do you know what else? I didn’t try very hard.”

  “Good.” Conberge didn’t bother holding her voice down. “I won’t be sorry to see him out of this house, and nobody can make me say I will. Having him here has been nothing but trouble. If the Algarvians want him, they’re welcome to him, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Sidroc must have gone back into the dining room after letting Leofsig in, for more shouts erupted from there: he and Uncle Hengist were going at each other hammer and tongs. Leofsig cocked his head to one side, wanting to catch some of the choicer names they were throwing back and forth. He almost missed his mother saying, “Here--I had a kettle of hot water over the fire waiting for you. You can wash now.”

  Reluctantly, he came back to the real world. “Oh. Thank you,” he said, and hoped he didn’t sound too vague.

  Conberge set a basin on the floor for him. She and Elfryth headed out of the kitchen to give him privacy in which to wash. Over her shoulder, Conberge said, “Take the pork stew off the fire if it starts to smell like it’s burning.”

  “All right.” Leofsig worked the pump handle in the sink to get cold water to mix with what his mother had heated for him. Then he scrubbed away at the dirt and sweat that clung to him. A washrag and a basin didn’t let him do the job he could have at the baths, but he hadn’t had to go out of his way to get here.

  His father came into the kitchen while he was drying off. Leofsig didn’t know whether Hestan had been home for a while or just stepped in. His father quickly made that plain: “You’ll have heard the news, I expect.”

  “Oh, aye,” Leofsig answered with a nod. “The whole neighborhood will have heard it by now, except for that old deaf man three doors down.”

  Hestan chuckled, then sighed. “That would be funny, if only it were funny, if you know what I mean. Sidroc doesn’t want to listen to anybody, though I wish he would.”

  “You and Uncle Hengist are the only ones who do,” Leofsig said as another blast of shouts came out of the dining room. “And I thought you’d be glad to see Sidroc gone, from most of the things you’ve said.”

  His father sighed again. “I would have been. Powers above, I was, till he said he was really going. After that. . . it’s hard to watch your own kin walk into what can’t be anything but a big mistake.”

  “If he goes, Ealstan’s safer,” Leofsig pointed out.

  “That’s so,” Hestan said, “but Sidroc hasn’t shown any sign of recalling just what happened there. I never felt safe enough about it to tell Ealstan he could come home, and he probably wouldn’t want to now, not when he’d have to try to bring that girl with him.”

  “Vanai,” Leofsig said, remembering how startled he’d been when Ealstan told him her name. “Aye. Now that the redheads are shutting so many of the Kaunians away, how could he bring her back to Gromheort?”

  Before Hestan could answer, Sidroc shouted. “Curse you, you old shitter! Powers below eat you! I’m going where I am wanted!” A moment later, the door opened and then slammed shut. The whole house shook.

  “That seems to settle that,” Leofsig said, and his father nodded. He continued, “I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry, if that makes any sense. I won’t miss him very much, and I’m safer with him gone, too, even if he hasn’t made little sly cracks about turning me in to the Algarvians for a while.”

  “I don’t think he ever meant them,” Hestan said. “I hope he never did, I’ll tell you that.”

  Leofsig was convinced his cousin had thought hard about betraying him to the Algarvian authorities, but held his tongue. Sidroc hadn’t actually done it, and pretty soon he’d get shipped off to Unkerlant. He’d have plenty of more urgent things to worry about there.

  Uncle Hengist came into the kitchen. He was Hestan’s younger brother, and the more dapper of the two. Now he looked older than Leofsig’s father, and worn to a nub. “He’s gone,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe it. “He walked out of here. He’s gone.”

  “Aye,” Hestan said. Leofsig busied himself with putting away the basin. That way, Uncle Hengist wouldn’t be able to see the look on his face. As he’d said to his father, the whole block knew Sidroc was gone.

  “Who would have thought he’d want to go fight for the Algarvians?” Hengist said, though Sidroc had been talking about doing that for months.

  And Hengist had had some things to say about the redheads that didn’t sit well with Leofsig, either. “Don’t you think they’re the coming thing anymore, Uncle?” he asked.

  His father gave him a look that told him to keep his mouth shut. Uncle Hengist scowled, but answered, “Even if they are, that’s no reason to take up arms for them. They’ve got plenty of soldiers of their own.”

  You can’t have it both ways, was what Leofsig wanted to say. One thing that stopped him was his father’s warning glance, which had got more urgent than ever. The other was remembering that Hengist, like Sidroc, knew he’d escaped from an Algarvian captives’ camp. He didn’t dare push his uncle too far, not when he couldn’t fully trust him.

  Hestan said, “Powers above keep the boy safe, Hengist.”

  “Boy is right!” Hengist burst out. “But he’s so cursed sure he’s a man, and how can anyone tell him anything different?”

  “He’ll learn,” Hestan said. “You did. I did. Leofsig has. We just hope he doesn’t pay too high a price for his lessons.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Uncle Hengist said.

  “No, it’s not,” Leofsig’s father answered. “I had a son in the army, the Forthwegian army”--he couldn’t resist the dig, and Hengist’s mouth tightened--”and my other boy’s gone, and who can say what happened to him? No one in Gromheort knows where Ealstan is. He might have fallen off the face of the earth.”

  “I never have understood what happened the day he disappeared, Hestan, the day Sidroc got hurt,” Hengist said. “If I did understand it, I think I might have something more to say to you.” He turned on his heel and walked away.

  “He’s liable to be more dangerous than Sidroc,” Leofsig said in dismay after his uncle had gone.

  “I don’t think so,” Hestan answered, and then, with one more sigh, “I hope not. He has other things than us on his mind right now, anyhow.”

  “Now that he won’t have Sidroc staying with him, he ought to move out of here and find a place of his own,” Leofsig said.

  “Do you think so?” His father sounded genuinely curious. “My notion has always been that it’s better to have him where we can keep an eye on him than to let him go off on his own and brood. Am I wrong?”

  Leofsig considered. “No, I don’t suppose you are. I wish you were, but I don’t think you are.”

  From the hallway, Conberge called, “Are you decent in there? If you are, Mother and I would like to finish cooking.”

  “Come ahead,” Leo
fsig said. “I have a better appetite for pork stew than I do for quarreling right now.” His father raised an eyebrow, then solemnly nodded.

  Twenty

  For the first time since an egg from an Algarvian dragon killed Eforiel, Cornelu was back in his element: riding a leviathan in search of the most harm he could do to King Mezentio’s followers. The leviathan, a Lagoan beast, wasn’t trained up to the standards of the Sibian navy, but she was still young, and she could learn. He’d already seen as much.

  True, these days Cornelu patrolled the Strait of Valmiera, not the narrower channel that separated Sibiu from the mainland of Derlavai. His own kingdom remained under Algarvian occupation. Powers above, his own wife remained under Algarvian occupation. But he was fighting back again.

  He tapped the leviathan in a pattern the same in the Lagoan service as it had been in that of Sibiu. Obediently, the great beast raised the front part of her body out of the water, lifting Cornelu with it so he could see farther. If an Algarvian ship glided down a ley line without his seeing it, he could hardly try to sink it.

  Even with the added range to his vision, he saw nothing but sea and sky. He tapped the leviathan again, and it sank back down into the water. By the way the beast quivered under him, he knew it thought rearing was part of an enjoyable game. That was all right with him. He would enjoy the game if it led him to Algarvians. King Mezentio’s men wouldn’t, but sending them to the bottom would only make Cornelu happier.

  “Now,” he muttered, “I think we’ve been traveling along a ley line, but I’d better make sure.”

  Like the skintight suit he wore, his belt was made of rubber. He took from one of the pouches on the belt an instrument of bronze and glass. Inside the hollow glass sphere that made up the bulk of it were two vanes of thinnest gold leaf. They stood well apart from each other.

  Cornelu let out a satisfied grunt. That the vanes repelled each other showed they were in the presence of sorcerous energy--and the only sources of sorcerous energy out on the ocean were the ley lines that formed a grid on sea and land alike. If Cornelu waited here long enough, a ship was sure to pass close by.

  But he had no idea how long long enough might be. And, loathing the Algarvians as he did, he was not in the mood to wait. He wanted to hunt. He was a coursing wolf, not a spider sitting in a web waiting for a butterfly to blunder along and give him a meal.

  He turned his instrument this way and that in his hands, watching the gold-leaf vanes flutter as he did. He knew they spread wider when parallel to a ley line than when perpendicular to it. As he’d thought, the line on which he’d positioned himself and his leviathan ran from northeast to southwest. Without hesitation, he urged the leviathan in the latter direction, toward the coast of Algarvian-occupied Valmiera and of Algarve itself.

  “If you don’t go where the bees are, you won’t get any honey,” he told the leviathan. Talking to this new beast wasn’t like talking with Eforiel. He’d told his old leviathan everything. With this one, he still felt a certain reserve. He wasn’t sure how much it understood, either--after all, it spoke Lagoan, not Sibian. Cornelu knew that was an absurd conceit, but he couldn’t get it out of his mind.

  The leviathan swam along happily enough. It was doing what it would have done had it never made the acquaintance of mankind: foraging. When it got into a school of mackerel, its long toothy jaws opened and closed, snapping up fish after fish. The only notice it took of Cornelu on its back and of the eggs strapped beneath its belly was that they made it swim a little slower and more awkwardly than it would have otherwise. That let a couple of mackerel it should have caught get away. But it still caught plenty and didn’t seem aggrieved.

  “Come on, my beauty,” Cornelu urged it. “Come on. Bring me to a ship. It doesn’t have to be a great big ship. Just bring me to a ship.”

  He was lying. He knew the kind of ship to which he wanted the leviathan to bring him: to a great Algarvian floating fortress, all bristling with heavy sticks and with egg-tossers. Sending a vessel like that to the bottom would be the beginning of revenge for everything Algarve had done to his kingdom and to his life.

  But sending a vessel like that to the bottom wouldn’t be easy. He knew as much. He would have to be sly. He would have to be sneaky. He would have to be lucky. The sailors aboard a floating fortress would always be alert against attack by leviathans. So would the mages aboard such a ship, though he didn’t worry so much about them as he would have on land. He had his instrument for detecting sorcerous energy, but wasn’t using any to speak of. That made his own sorcerous footprint very small and hard to note.

  Sea . . . sky . . . sea . . . sky. Still nothing but sea and sky, as far as he could see. He muttered in frustration. And then he spied something neither sky nor sea, but not something to delight him as a hunter. Instead, he cursed and ordered his leviathan to dive. He hoped the dragon gliding through the air far above had not spied him.

  His rubber suit and sorcery kept the cold of the southern seas from slaying him by stealth. Another sorcery let him get air from the water around him, so that he could stay down as long as the leviathan could. No mage had ever successfully applied that latter spell to a leviathan, to let it stay submerged without ever needing to come up and breathe. Nor had any mage ever made a spell to let a man dive as deep as a leviathan could without the weight of the water above him crushing out his life.

  He had the leviathan stay submerged as long as it could. When it finally had to rise to spout, he anxiously scanned the heavens. If that dragonflier had spotted him before he took cover below the surface of the sea, an egg might fall out of the sky at any moment, or the dragon might come skimming low over the waves to flame him off his leviathan. He hated dragons and dragonfliers not least because they could hurt him and he couldn’t hit back.

  But, once more, he saw nothing but sea and sky. He breathed a sigh of relief at what had annoyed him only minutes before. He hated ley-line warships, too, but he hated them because they belonged to Algarve. Aye, they could hurt him. He could hurt them, too, though, if only he got the chance.

  Patting the leviathan, Cornelu asked, “Now, which way did you swim when you went under?” The leviathan couldn’t answer--and, by his own silly logic, wouldn’t even have understood the question, being a Lagoan beast.

  He pulled out the instrument he used to detect sorcerous energy. Both gold-leaf vanes hung limp, which meant the leviathan had swum away from the ley line. Cornelu turned the instrument in his hands. The vanes stayed limp. Cornelu cursed, loudly and foully. Why not? No one was around to hear him.

  With a couple of taps, he ordered the beast to swim south. After what he judged to be about half a mile, he stopped the leviathan and examined the instrument again. If anything, the vanes hung closer together than they had before.

  Cornelu grunted. He hadn’t found the ley line, but he’d found where it wasn’t. That gave him a better idea of where it was. He turned the leviathan back toward the north and swam past--he hoped he swam past--the point where he’d begun trying to reacquire it. Then he checked the instrument once more and nodded to himself. The vanes were separating.

  Before long, he’d found the ley line again. He sent the leviathan southwest down it. These were Algarvian-controlled waters. Where were the warships with which the Algarvians controlled them?

  Most patrols, by the nature of things--the ocean was vast, the targets upon it few and small and far between--ended in futility. Cornelu’s whole war up till now had been futile. He didn’t know how much more futility he could stand.

  That thought had hardly crossed his mind before he spotted a speck on the horizon. Hope flooded into him. If he could bring his leviatJhan back to Setubal after sinking an Algarvian ship, even the haughty Lagoans would have to give him his due.

  Haughty wasn’t quite fair. The Lagoans thought they were better than anybody else, but they didn’t flaunt it the way, say, Valmierans did. For his part, Cornelu remained convinced one Sibian was worth three Lagoans any day. Nobody
who talked through his nose the way King Vitor’s subjects did was altogether to be trusted.

  Well, now Cornelu had the chance to prove that of which he was convinced. He urged the leviathan toward the ship--and the ship was coming toward him, too. He couldn’t have caught it from behind, not unless it was just lazing along.

  He pulled a brass spyglass off his belt. A minor magic kept its lenses dry so he could peer through it right away. The ship seemed to leap toward him. He gasped. For a moment, he thought it was a floating fortress. Then he realized it was the next class down, a ley-line cruiser. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage smile. “It will have to do,” he said.

  Through the spyglass, he saw sailors on the deck of the cruiser. A jack of green, white, and red snapped in the breeze. Cornelu nodded. He wouldn’t be attacking a Lagoan ship by mistake. That would be biting the hand that fed him.

  Those sailors would be on the lookout for leviathans. If they spied him, he would never get close enough to plant his egg against the cruiser’s flank. He fought the Algarvians, ironically, by keeping his mount at the surface. Mezentio’s men would be watching for the big plumes of vapor that rose when a leviathan came up from the depths. So long as his beast kept breathing steadily, it wouldn’t give itself away too soon.

  Cornelu had to gauge when to dive for his attack. If he waited too long, Mezentio’s men would spot him. If he dove too soon, his leviathan wouldn’t be able to come alongside the cruiser. He would have to surface before it got there, and then he would really be in trouble.

  When he judged the moment ripe, he tapped the leviathan, which slipped beneath the waves and sped toward the ley-line cruiser. It knew it had to swim alongside or under the ship long enough to let him attach the egg. He’d sometimes wondered if leviathans had any true notion why men did such things. The beasts fought among themselves, over mates and sometimes over food. Did they know their masters fought, too?