Through the Darkness d-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Half a dozen Forthwegians in identical tunics came up the street toward him. After a moment, he realized they belonged to Plegmund’s Brigade. He eyed them warily, much as he would have eyed so many mean dogs running around outside a farm. They were useful creatures, no doubt about it, but liable to be dangerous, too. And, by the way they looked at him, they were thinking about being dangerous right now.

  He’d moved out of their way before he quite realized what he was doing. They realized it fast enough; a couple of them laughed as they tramped past. His ears burned. Forthwegians weren’t supposed to intimidate Algarvians-it was supposed to be the other way round.

  “Bugger ‘em,” Bembo said under his breath. “They don’t pay me enough to be a hero.” He laughed a nasty laugh. They doubtless didn’t pay those young toughs in Plegmund’s Brigade enough to be heroes, either. All he had to do was pound the pavement here in Gromheort. The Forthwegians would get shipped off to the west to fight King Swemmel’s troopers. They might not make heroes, but a lot of them would end up dead.

  Serve ‘em right, too, Bembo thought. Let ‘em laugh now. They’ll be laughing out of the other side of their mouths soon enough.

  Once he’d got round the corner from the men of Plegmund’s Brigade, he started swaggering once more. Why not? No one who’d seen him embarrass himself was around now. As far as he was concerned, what had happened back there might as well have belonged to the days of the Kaunian Empire.

  No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than he saw a Kaunian on the street. He reached for his bludgeon. A Forthwegian woman who saw him and the blond called out in Algarvian: “Make him wish the powers below had hold of him instead of you!”

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Bembo answered, even though the woman was ten years older than he was, shapeless, and homely to boot. She got even homelier when she smiled, which she did now. Bembo didn’t have to look at her for long, though. He swung his attention-and his anger-toward the Kaunian. “You there! Aye, you, you miserable son of a whore! Who let you out of your kennel?”

  The Forthwegian woman giggled and clapped her hands and hugged herself with glee. She stared avidly. If anything dreadful happened to the Kaunian, she wanted to watch. The blond turned out to speak Algarvian. Bowing to Bembo, he said, “I am sorry, sir.”

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it.” Bembo advanced on him, club upraised. The Forthwegian woman clapped her hands again. “Sorry doesn’t begin to cut it,” the constable growled. “I already asked you once, what are you doing running around loose? This isn’t your part of Gromheort, and you’ll pay for poking your nose out of the part that is.”

  “Do what you want to me.” The Kaunian bowed again. This time, he kept on looking down at the cobbles. “My daughter is sick. None of the Kaunian apothecaries has the drug she needs. And so”-he shrugged-”I went outside to find it. If you had a daughter, sir, would you not do the same?”

  Since he’d got out of the Kaunian district, odds were he’d already bribed one Algarvian constable. Bembo was as sure of that as he was of his own name. “Have you got any money left?” he demanded.

  “Aye, some,” the blond answered, and the Forthwegian woman let out an angry, thwarted screech. The Kaunian went on, “If it is all the same to you, though, I think I would sooner take a beating. I will need the money for more medicine, and for food.”

  Bembo stared at him. Either the blond was serious, or else he’d just come up with the most outlandish scheme to escape a beating Bembo had ever heard of. He didn’t know whether to admire the fellow’s nerve or to beat him to within an inch of his life to teach him not to try that sort of nonsense again. The Forthwegian woman had no doubts. “Wallop him!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “He deserves it. He said so himself. Wallop him!”

  Reluctantly-he didn’t want to do anything the noisy woman suggested- Bembo decided he had to give the Kaunian a lesson. If the blonds got the idea they could shame the Algarvians into leaving them alone, who could guess how much trouble they’d cause? And so, raising the bludgeon, he advanced on the blond.

  He hoped the Kaunian would run. The fellow was skinny and looked agile. The constable wasn’t like to be able to catch him. He could prove his own ferocity and still not beat a man who wasn’t fighting back.

  But the Kaunian just stood there waiting. Bembo didn’t soften. Instead, he got angry. The club thudded down on the Kaunian’s back. The blond grunted, but held his ground. That made Bembo angrier. His next stroke laid open the Kaunian’s scalp.

  And that proved too much for the blond to bear. With a howl of pain, he turned and fled. His trousers flapped at his ankles. Bembo tried to kick him in the backside, but missed. He ran after him for half a block. By then, he was panting; his heart thudded in his chest. He slowed, then stopped. He’d done his duty.

  “You should have blazed him!” the Forthwegian woman shouted. “It would have served him right.”

  “Oh, shut up, you old hag,” Bembo said, but not very loud. He didn’t want her screeching at him anymore. What he wanted was a simple, quiet tour on the beat, a tour where he didn’t have to do anything but stop in at some shops he knew to cadge a few cups of wine and some cakes and sausages and whatever else he might happen to crave. He sighed. What he’d been through felt too much like work. And his day wasn’t even half over yet.

  A few blocks later, he came to the park where he and Oraste had met and blazed a drunken Kaunian mage. It was daytime now, not the middle of the night, and all-or at least most-Kaunians were closed up in their own district nowadays. On the other hand, the park was even more decrepit than it had been a few months before. No one had bothered cutting grass or trimming weeds. He could hardly make out the paved paths along which Oraste and he had walked.

  He wanted to go through the park as much as he would have wanted to go fight Unkerlanters alongside the men of Plegmund’s Brigade. He stood at the edge, indecisive. A gust of wind sprang up and wrapped long stalks of grass around his ankles, as if trying to pull him in. He made a disgusted noise and hopped back.

  But that wouldn’t do. He realized as much, however unhappy the knowledge made him. Sergeant Pesaro would have some pungent things to say if he funked the job. And if Pesaro didn’t just ream him out but told his superiors, Bembo knew he was liable to get shipped off to Unkerlant. And so, with a melodramatic sigh, he plunged into the park.

  Dry grass scrunched under his sandals. Sure enough, staying on the paths was next to impossible. Weeds and shrubs grew higher than a man’s middle. Here and there, they grew higher than a man’s head. When Bembo looked back over his shoulder, he could hardly see the street from which he’d come. If anything happens to me in here, he thought nervously, nobody’d find out for days.

  That wasn’t quite true. If he didn’t come back from his shift, people would go looking for him. But would they find him soon enough to do him any good? He had his doubts.

  A Kaunian Emperor from the days of old might have held court on the benches in the middle of the park without anyone outside being the wiser. When Bembo got to them, he found not a Kaunian Emperor but a couple of Forthwegian drunkards. By their unkempt, shaggy beards and filth, they made the park their home.

  Bembo’s hand went not to his bludgeon but to the short stick he carried next to it. The Forthwegians watched him. He nodded to them. They didn’t move. He walked past them. Their eyes followed him. He didn’t want to turn his back on them, but he didn’t want them to see he was afraid, either. He ended up sidling away from them crab-fashion.

  A rustling in the bushes made him whip his head around. Another Forthwegian, as grimy and disreputable as the two on the benches, waved his arms and shouted, “Boo!”

  He laughed like a loon. So did the other two drunks. “You stupid bald-arsed bugger!” Bembo screamed. “I ought to blaze you in the belly and let you die an inch at a time!” As a matter of fact, he wasn’t sure he could blaze the Forthwegian; his hand shook like a fall leaf in a high breeze.

  The fellow
who’d frightened him hawked and spat. “Oh, run along home to mother, little boy,” he said in good Algarvian. “You cursed well don’t belong anywhere they let grown-ups in.” He laughed again.

  “Futter your mother!” Bembo was still too rattled to hang on to his aplomb as a proper Algarvian should.

  His shrill voice made all the Forthwegians start laughing. He thought about blazing them. He thought about blazing the tall grass that choked the paths, too, in the hope of roasting them alive. The only thing wrong with that was, he might end up roasting himself, too.

  Instead, after cursing all the drunks as vilely as he knew how, he pushed on down the path toward the far side of the park. He passed two more Forthwegians, both of them curled up asleep or blind drunk in the grass with jars of spirits or wine beside them. One wore a tattered Forthwegian army tunic.

  Seeing that made Bembo laugh, and he was sure his laugh was last and best. “Worthless clots!” he said, as if the three back by the benches were still close enough to hear. “This is what you get. This is what all of Forthweg gets. And oh, by the powers above, do you ever deserve it.”

  Every time Ealstan saw a broadsheet praising Plegmund’s Brigade, he felt like tearing it from the wall to which it was pasted. He didn’t much care what happened to him afterwards-after what Sidroc had done to his brother, and after Sidroc had got away with it because he’d joined the Algarvians’ hounds, Ealstan ached for vengeance of any sort.

  The only thing that held him back was fear of what would happen to Vanai if he were seized and cast into prison. She depended on him. He’d never had anyone depend on him before. On the contrary-he’d always depended on his father and his mother and poor Leofsig and even on Conberge. He hadn’t thought about everything loving a Kaunian woman meant when he started doing it. He’d thought about little except the most obvious. But now. .

  Now, very much his father’s son, he refused to evade the burden he’d assumed. And so, in spite of scowling at the broadsheets, he walked on toward Ethelhelm’s flat without doing anything more. Scowling wouldn’t land him in trouble; most of the Forthwegians in Eoforwic scowled when they walked by broadsheets urging them to join Plegmund’s Brigade.

  Most, but not all. A couple of fellows not far from Ealstan’s age stared at one of the broadsheets, their lips moving as they read its simple message. “That wouldn’t be so bad,” one of them said. “Cursed Unkerlanters deserve a good boot in the balls, you ask me.”

  “Oh, aye.” His pal nodded; the sun gleamed off the grease with which he made his hair stand up tall enough to give him an extra inch or so of apparent height. The nasty-sweet odor of the grease didn’t quite cover the reek that said neither he nor his friend had gone to the baths any time lately. Their tunics were grimy, too; if they’d ever had any luck, they were down on it now.

  “I bet they feed you good there,” the first one said, and his friend nodded again.

  Both of them eyed Ealstan as he went by. He didn’t need to be a mage to see into their thoughts: if they knocked him over the head and stole his belt pouch, they might also eat well for a while. He hunched his shoulders forward and let one hand fold into a fist, as if to say he wouldn’t be easy meat. The two hungry toughs turned away to watch a girl instead.

  When Ealstan got to Ethelhelm’s building, the doorman gave him the once-over before letting him in. In this prosperous part of Eoforwic, his own ordinary tunic seemed almost as shabby and worthy of suspicion as those of the young men who’d been looking at the broadsheet. But then the doorman said, “You’re the chap who casts accounts for the band leader, right?”

  “That’s me,” Ealstan agreed, and the flunky relaxed.

  Up the stairs Ealstan went. As usual, he contrasted the stairwell in this block of flats with the one in his own. The stairs here were clean and carpeted and didn’t stink of boiled cabbage or of sour piss. Neither did the hallways onto which the stairs opened.

  After he knocked, Ethelhelm opened the door and pumped his hand, saying, “Come in, come in. Welcome, welcome.”

  “Thanks,” Ealstan said. Ethelhelm lived more splendidly than his own family had back in Gromheort. Living large was part of what made a bandleader what he was, while a bookkeeper who did the same would only make people wonder if he skimmed cash from his clients. Even had his father been a bandleader, though, Ealstan doubted Hestan would have flaunted his money. Powers above knew Ealstan didn’t-couldn’t-do any flaunting of his own.

  “Wine?” Ethelhelm asked. When Ealstan nodded, the musician brought him some lovely golden stuff that glowed in the goblet and sighed in his throat. Ealstan wished Vanai could taste it. Calling it by the same name as the cheap, harsh stuff he brought home to their flat hardly seemed fair. Ethelhelm, by all appearances, took it for granted. That hardly seemed fair, either. The bandleader said, “Shall I bring you tea and little cakes, too, so we can pretend we’re naked black Zuwayzin?”

  “No, thank you.” Ealstan laughed. Ethelhelm waved him to the sofa. When he sat down, he sank into the soft cushions there. Fighting against the comfort as he fought against the languor the wine brought on, he asked, “And did this latest tour go well?”

  “I think so, but then I’ve got you to tell me whether I’m right,” Ethelhelm answered. “Everywhere we went, we played to sold-out houses. I’ve got a great big leather sack full of receipts that’ll let you figure out whether we made any money while we were doing it.”

  “If you didn’t make enough to pay me, I’m going to be upset with you,” Ealstan said.

  Both young men laughed. They knew it wasn’t a question of whether Ethelhelm’s band had made money, but of how much. The bandleader and drummer said, “I expect you’ll find enough in the books for that, and who’ll know whether it’s really there or not?”

  To any honest bookkeeper, that was an insult. Hestan would have been coldly furious to hear it, regardless of whether he showed his anger. Ealstan forgave Ethelhelm, reasoning the band leader knew no better. He said, “It’s a wonder the Algarvians let you travel so widely.”

  “They think we help keep things quiet,” Ethelhelm answered. “And I’ll be cursed if I haven’t had a good many Algarvian soldiers and functionaries listening to me this tour. They like what we’re doing, too.”

  “Do they?” Ealstan said tonelessly.

  “Aye.” Ethelhelm didn’t notice how Ealstan sounded. He was full of himself, full of what he and the band had done. “Everybody likes us, everybody in the whole kingdom. And do you know what? I think it’s bloody wonderful.”

  More slowly than he should have, Ealstan realized Ethelhelm had already had a good deal of wine. That didn’t keep his own anger from sparking, and he wasn’t so good at hiding it as his father would have been. “Everybody, eh?”

  “Aye-no doubt about it,” Ethelhelm declared. “Laborers, noblemen’s sons-and daughters-recruits for the Brigade, even the redheads, like I said. Everybody loves us.”

  “Even Kaunians?” Ealstan asked.

  “Kaunians.” Ethelhelm spoke the word as if he’d never heard it before. “Well, no.” He shrugged. “But that’s not our fault. If the Algarvians would have let them listen to us, they would have loved us, too. Or I think so, anyhow. A lot of them aren’t that keen on Forthwegian music, you know.”

  “So I do,” Ealstan said, remembering Vanai’s reaction when he’d smuggled her to a performance of the band.

  “But I’ll bet they would have liked us on this tour.” Ethelhelm rolled on as if Ealstan had sat quiet. “These new songs we’ve been doing-it doesn’t matter who you are these days. You’ll like ‘em.”

  Now Ealstan did sit quiet. He didn’t care for Ethelhelm’s latest songs nearly so well as he’d liked the earlier ones. They still had the pounding rhythms that had made the band popular in the first place, but the words were just. . words. They lacked the bite that had made some of Ethelhelm’s earlier tunes grab Ealstan by the ears and refuse to let him go.

  Sadly, he said, “Let me have that sack of r
eceipts you were talking about, and I’ll see how much sense I can make of it.”

  “Of course.” Even drunk--both on wine and on his own popularity- Ethelhelm remained charming. “Let me get them for you.” He heaved himself up off the sofa and went back into the bedchamber, wobbling a little as he walked. He returned with the promised leather sack, which he thumped down at Ealstan’s feet. “There you go. Let me know where we stand as soon as you have the chance, if you’d be so kind.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Ealstan promised.

  “I’ll see you soon, then,” Ethelhelm said-a dismissal if ever there was one. He didn’t ask about Vanai, not a single, solitary word. He couldn’t have forgotten her; he had an excellent memory. He just-couldn’t be bothered? That was how it seemed to Ealstan.

  He picked up the sack of receipts and headed for the door. The sack felt unduly heavy, as if it were more than leather and papers. Ealstan wondered if he were carrying Ethelhelm’s spirit in there, too. He didn’t say anything about that. After a while-as soon as he got outside Ethelhelm’s block of flats-he decided he was imagining things: the sack weighed no more than it should.

  Every trash bin, every gutter on the way home offered fresh temptation. Somehow, Ealstan managed not to fling the sack away or to drop it and then keep walking. He was sure no beautiful woman, no matter how wanton, could arouse his desires like the sight of an empty, inviting bin. But he resisted, though he doubted Vanai would have been proud of him for it.

  When he gave the coded knock at the door to his flat, Vanai opened it and let him slip inside. “What have you got there?” she asked, pointing to the leather sack.

  “Rubbish,” he answered. “Nothing but rubbish. And I can’t even throw it away, worse luck.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked. “Those are Ethelhelm’s things, aren’t they?”