Darkness Descending (68 page)

Had some of Oslac’s comrades backed him, he might have taken it further. Even the laborers who hated Kaunians worse than he did, though, seemed too worn to care. A couple of men had already started snoring. Leofsig rather envied them; no matter how much he’d done during the day, he couldn’t hope to sleep on bare boards in an unsprung wagon jouncing over cobblestones.

An hour or so later—just enough time for him to start to go stiff—the wagon clattered into Gromheort. He helped shake the sleepers awake, then creakily descended from the wagon and started home.

The Kaunian he’d defended, a fellow named Peitavas, fell into step beside him. “My thanks,” he said in his own language, which Leofsig spoke fairly well.

“It’s all right,” Leofsig answered in Forthwegian; he was too spent to look for words in another tongue. “Go home. Stay there. Stay safe.”

“I’m as safe as any Kaunian in Forthweg,” Peitavas said. “As long as I build roads for the Algarvians, I’m more useful to them alive than dead. With most of my people, it’s the other way round.” He turned down a side street before Leofsig could answer.

Leofsig cast a longing look toward the public baths. He sighed, shook his head, and walked on toward his home. His mother or sister would have a basin of water and some rags waiting for him. That wasn’t as good as a warm plunge and a showerbath, but it would have to do. Anyway, with fuel scarce and expensive in Gromheort these days, the plunge more often than not wasn’t warm. And getting into the baths cost a copper, a good part of what he’d spent the day slaving to earn.

Home, then, through the dark streets of the city. Curfew hadn’t come yet but wasn’t far away. Once, an Algarvian constable stopped him and started asking questions in bad Kaunian and worse Forthwegian. He wondered if he’d land in trouble and whether he ought to kick the chubby fellow in the balls and run. But then they recognized each other. Leofsig had helped the constable find his way back to his barracks when he got lost just after arriving in Gromheort. “Going on,” the Algarvian said, tipping his hat, and went on himself.

And so, instead of returning to the captives’ camp from which he’d escaped or having something worse happen to him, Leofsig knocked on his own front door a few minutes later. He waited for the bar to be lifted, then worked the latch and went inside. Conberge waited in the short entry hall. “You’re late tonight,” she said.

“Redheads worked us hard, curse ‘em,” he answered.

His sister wrinkled her nose. “I believe that.” To leave no possible doubt about what she believed, she added, “The basin’s waiting for you in the kitchen. It’ll be mostly cold by now, but I can put in some more hot water from the kettle over the fire.”

“Would you?” Leofsig said. “It’s chilly out there, and I don’t want to end up with chest fever.”

“Come along, then,” Conberge said briskly. She was between him and Ealstan in age, but insisted on mothering him in much the same style as their true mother. As Leofsig went past her and turned left toward the kitchen, she lowered her voice, murmuring, “We’ve heard from him.”

Leofsig stopped. “Have you?” he said, also softly. “Where is he? Is he all right?”

His sister nodded. “Aye, he is,” she whispered. “He’s in Eoforwic.”

“Not in Oyngestun?” Leofsig asked, and Conberge shook her head. “Is the Kaunian girl with him?”

She shrugged. “He doesn’t say. He says he’s happy though, so I think she is. Now come on. People will have heard you come in, and they’ll be wondering why you’re dawdling in the hallway.”

Fondly, Leofsig patted her on the shoulder. “You’d have made a terrific spy.” Conberge snorted and stopped acting motherly; she elbowed him harder than Oslac could have done. Thus propelled, into the kitchen he went. His mother was stirring a pot hanging over the fire next to the kettle. By the way Elfryth nodded, by the secretly delighted look in her eye, he knew she knew the news. All she said was, “Clean yourself off, son. Supper will be ready soon.”

“I’m going to give him some fresh hot water,” Conberge said, and used a dipper to draw some from the kettle. As Leofsig scrubbed dirt and sweat from his arms and legs and face, she went on, “I think he ought to put on a clean tunic, too, before he comes to the supper table.” That was also motherly: she didn’t seem to think he had sense enough to change clothes unless she told him to.

“Let me have a cup of wine first,” Leofsig said. Conberge poured him one. Before he drank, he raised the cup in salute. His sister and mother both smiled; they understood what he meant.

After putting on a fresh wool tunic and fresh drawers, he went across the courtyard to the dining room, which lay just to the right of the entry hall so as to make it convenient to the kitchen. As he’d expected, he found his father and uncle already there. Uncle Hengist was reading the news sheet: reading it aloud, and loudly. “ ‘No Unkerlanter gains reported on any front,’ “ he said. “What do you think of that, Hestan?”

Leofsig’s father shrugged. “The Unkerlanters have already gained a lot of ground,” he said in mild tones; his brother enjoyed hearing himself talk more than he did.

“But the Algarvians haven’t fallen to pieces, the way you said they would a few weeks ago,” Hengist insisted.

“I didn’t say they would. I said they might,” Hestan answered with a bookkeeper’s precision. “Pretty plainly, they haven’t. You’re right about that.” He nodded to Leofsig, looking to change the subject. “Hello, son. How did it go today?”

“I’m tired,” Leofsig answered. He could have said that any day and been telling the truth. He raised an eyebrow at his father. Hestan nodded, ever so slightly. He knew about Ealstan, too, then. Neither of them said anything where Uncle Hengist could hear. After what had happened to Sidroc, if he knew where Ealstan was, he might let the Algarvians know, too. Nobody wanted to find out whether he would.

“If you want to work with me, you may,” Hestan said. “Numbers are as stubborn as cobblestones, but not so backbreaking to wallop into place.”

“You’d make more money, too,” Uncle Hengist pointed out. His mind always ran in that direction.

“I still don’t think it’s safe,” Leofsig said. “Nobody pays attention to one laborer in a gang. But the fellow who casts accounts for you, you notice him. You want to be sure he knows what he’s doing. If he saves you money, you tell people about him. After a while, talk goes to the wrong ears.”

“I suppose that’s wise,” his father said. “Still, when I see you come dragging in the way you do sometimes, I wouldn’t mind throwing wisdom out the window.”

“I’ll get by,” Leofsig said. Hestan grimaced, but nodded.

Conberge came in and set stoneware bowls and bone-handled spoons on the table. “Supper in a minute,” she said.

“It smells good,” Leofsig said. His stomach growled agreement. The bread and olive oil he’d eaten at noon seemed a million miles away. Any sort of food would have smelled wonderful just then.

“Same old stew: barley and lentils and turnips and cabbage,” Conberge said. “Mother chopped a little smoked sausage into it, but only a little. You’ll taste it more than it will do you any good, if you know what I mean. It’s probably what you smell.”

Elfryth brought in the pot and ladled the bowls full. As she was sitting down, she asked, “Where’s Sidroc?” Uncle Hengist called his son, loudly. After another couple of minutes, Sidroc came in, sat down, and silently began to eat.

He was burly as Leofsig had become despite not doing hard physical labor. He looked like Leofsig, too, though his nose was blobbier than Leofsig’s sharply hooked one. It took after that of his mother; she’d been killed when an Algarvian egg wrecked their house, and he and Uncle Hengist had lived, not always comfortably, with Leofsig’s family ever since.

After finishing his first bowl of stew, Sidroc helped himself to another, which he also devoured. Only then did he speak: “That. . . wasn’t so bad.” He rubbed his temples. “My head hurts.”

He’d had headaches ever since he’d hit his head in the brawl with Ealstan. He still didn’t remember what the brawl had been about, for which Leofsig and his father and mother and sister thanked the powers above. Ealstan’s disappearance afterwards, though, had left both him and Uncle Hengist suspicious, most suspicious indeed. Leofsig wished his brother hadn’t had to run off. But Ealstan couldn’t have known Sidroc would wake up without remembering. He couldn’t have known Sidroc would wake up at all.

“Have you finished your schoolwork?” Hengist asked Sidroc.

“Oh, aye—as much of it as I could do,” Sidroc replied. He’d been an indifferent scholar before the knock on the head and hadn’t got better since. After taking a big swig from his wine cup, he went on, “Maybe I’ll sign up for Plegmunds Brigade after all. I wouldn’t have to worry about poems and irregular verbs there.”

Everyone else at the table, even Uncle Hengist, winced. The Algarvians had set up Plegmund’s Brigade to get Forthwegians to fight for them in Unkerlant. Leofsig had fought the Algarvians. He would sooner have jumped off a tall building than fought for them. But Sidroc had been talking about the Brigade even before the fight with Ealstan.
Maybe he needs another shot to the head,
Leofsig thought,
and a harder one this time.

Fifteen

O
fficially, Hajjaj was far in the north, up in Bishah. Any number of witnesses would swear at need that the Zuwayzi foreign minister was hard at work in the capital, right where he should be. Hajjaj didn’t want any of them to have to take such an oath. That would mean something had gone wrong, something had made the Algarvians suspicious. Better by far they never, ever come down to Jurdhan.

He strolled along the main street, such as it was, of the little no-account town: one elderly black man wearing only a straw hat and sandals among many black men and women and children, all dressed, or not dressed, much as he was.

Nudity had its advantages. By leaving off the bracelets and anklets and gold rings and chains he would normally have worn, Hajjaj turned himself into a person of no particular importance. He would have had a harder time doing that with shabby clothes. When he walked into Jurdhan’s chief—by virtue of being Jurdhan’s only—hostel, no one gave him a second glance. That was just what he wanted.

He went upstairs (the hostel was one of a handful of buildings in town to boast a second story) and walked down the hall to the chamber where, he’d been told, the man he was to meet awaited him. He knocked once, twice, then once again. After a moment, the latch clicked. The door swung open.

A short, squat, swarthy man—swarthy, but far from black—wearing a knee-length cotton tunic looked him up and down. “Powers above, you’re a scrawny old bugger,” he remarked in Algarvian.

“Thank you so much, my lord Ansovald. I am so glad to see you again, your Excellency,” Hajjaj answered in the same language. Speaking Algarvian to the former—and perhaps future—Unkerlanter minister to Zuwayza tickled his sense of irony, which needed little tickling. But it was the one speech they truly had in common. His own Unkerlanter was halting, Ansovald s Zuwayzi as near nonexistent as made no difference.

If Ansovald noticed the irony, he didn’t let on. “Well, come in,” he said, and stood aside. “If you want to put on a tunic and hide that bag of bones you call a carcass, I’ve got one here for you.”

That was the usual practice for Zuwayzi diplomats. Hajjaj had grown resigned to wearing a long tunic when calling on envoys from Unkerlant and Forthweg, a short tunic and kilt when seeing a minister from an Algarvic kingdom, a tunic and trousers when meeting with Kaunians, and clothes of some sort, at any rate, when dealing with lands like Kuusamo and Gyongyos, where style of apparel carried less political weight. But growing resigned to it didn’t mean he loved it. He shook his head and answered, “No, thank you. This is unofficial, which means I can be comfortable if I please, and I do.”

He’d thought about wearing a tunic to this meeting too, thought about it and rejected the notion. Nothing would have drawn stares like a clothed Zuwayzi strolling through Jurdhan—nothing except a naked Unkerlanter strolling through Cottbus. And maybe his nudity would disconcert Ansovald.

If it did, the Unkerlanter diplomat didn’t show that, either. “Come in, then,” he said. “I told you that already. I’d sooner you were a woman half your age, but I don’t suppose King Shazli would.”

“No, in a word.” Hajjaj walked into the chamber. Ansovald closed the door behind him, closed it and barred it. From any other kingdom’s minister, Ansovald’s words would have been monstrously rude. From the Unkerlanter, they were something of a prodigy. This was the first time Hajjaj could remember him caring in the slightest for what King Shazli thought.

The room was furnished Zuwayzi-style, with carpet piled on carpet and with cushions large and small a guest could arrange to suit his own comfort. Hajjaj wasted no time doing that. Ansovald followed suit rather more clumsily. He did not offer Hajjaj wine and cakes and tea, as any Zuwayzi host would have done. Instead, very much an Unkerlanter again, he bulled straight ahead: “We aren’t going to settle the war between us this afternoon.”