Darkness Descending (80 page)

He stroked his beard, his eyes far away as he thought. Leofsig noted with a small start how gray his father’s beard was getting, even if Hestan’s hair stayed mostly dark. That graying had all come since the war: one more evil to blame on it.

“Well, what will we do?” Hestan murmured.

“I’ll come up with something,” Leofsig said.

His father shook his head. “No, don’t you worry about a thing. Your mother and I will take care of it, one way or another. We’ll keep Elfsig sweet, or not too sour, one way or another, too.”

“Tell him I picked up a disease in a soldiers’ brothel,” Leofsig suggested.

“That’s what the Algarvians spend a lot of time complaining about,” Hestan replied with a snort. “Of course, since they’re the only ones who use their brothels, they never ask who gave the girls the diseases in the first place.” With another snort, he added, “No, I think we’ll find something else to say to the man who won’t end up being your father-in-law.”

“But what?” Leofsig was less inclined to worry or brood than his father or his brother, but saying good-bye to the girl he’d thought himself likely to marry wasn’t going to be easy.

“Your mother and I will come up with something that will serve,” his father said firmly, “so don’t you trouble yourself about it. If you see Felgilde on the street, don’t let on that anything is wrong.”

“All right.” Leofsig didn’t know how good an actor he was, either. He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out. Then he yawned. He wouldn’t worry about it, not till he got up in the morning. “Thank you, Father,” he said as he pushed back his chair and got up from the table.

“Don’t thank me yet, not when I haven’t done anything,” Hestan answered. “But I do think we’ll be able to take care of this without too much trouble.”

When Hestan stumbled out to the kitchen the next morning to eat porridge for breakfast and take along the bread and oil and onions and cheese his mother and sister had packed for his midday meal, he found his mother kneading dough for the day’s baking. Making bread from scratch was cheaper than buying it ready-baked; Elfryth and Conberge had been doing more and more of it since the redheads occupied Gromheort. The dough wasn’t quite the right color—it would have barley flour in it as well as wheat. At least it didn’t have peas or lentils ground up with it, as it would have when things were hungriest the winter before.

“I think your father and I have found something to keep Felgilde’s family from being too disappointed when we break off our arrangement,” Elfryth said. “It will probably cost a little cash, but what is cash for except greasing the wheels every now and then?”

“You’ve already spent a lot on me,” Leofsig said around a mouthful of barley porridge. He gulped the rough wine his mother had poured for him. “How many palms did you have to grease after I broke out of the captives’ camp?”

“That doesn’t matter,” his mother said. “Besides, almost all the people we paid off then are gone now. As far as the Algarvian constables here these days know, you’re right as rain.”

He didn’t argue; he didn’t have time to argue. He grabbed the cloth sack that held his lunch and a tin flask with more cheap wine in it, then hurried out the door. In the early morning light, Gromheort seemed almost as sleepy as he felt. Only a handful of people were out and about to hear the great burst of song with which the birds greeted the sun in springtime.

Hardly any of that handful were Kaunians. Except for a few skulkers, the blonds were all packed into a neighborhood about a quarter the size of that in which they’d formerly lived. Algarvian constables patrolled the edges of that neighborhood and let out only the few Kaunians who had leave to labor elsewhere. Road workers fell into that group (so did streetwalkers).

Leofsig waved to Peitavas, who was arguing his way past the constables. The blond laborer waved back. After the constables finally let him go, he walked with Leofsig toward the west gate. “You shouldn’t treat me as if I were a human being,” Peitavas said in his own language. “It will give you a bad character among your own people and with the redheads.”

As if I were a human being.
Kaunian could be a remorselessly precise tongue; it was certainly better than Forthwegian for putting across fine shades of meaning. “I do not call that contrary to fact,” Leofsig said, also in Kaunian.

“I know you don’t,” Peitavas answered. “That proves my point.” He said very little after that, no matter how hard Leofsig tried to draw him out. And he made a point of climbing into a wagon different from the one Leofsig chose. Leofsig muttered to himself. What was he supposed to do if Peitavas didn’t want to be treated like a human being? That the Kaunian might have been trying to protect him never entered his mind.

By the time he got out to the work, and especially by the time he’d put in a full day breaking rocks and making a roadbed, he was too worn to care. He didn’t go back to Gromheort in a wagon with Peitavas or any other Kaunian, and he was too worn to care about that, either. He came as close to falling asleep on the way home as he’d ever done.

Not only because he wanted to be clean but also in the hope that a warm plunge followed by cold water would revive him, he did pay a copper and stop at the public baths not far from the count’s castle. He knew how tired he truly was when he realized he was standing under a showerbath from a perforated bucket without imagining the naked women doing the same thing on the other side of the brick wall dividing the building in two.

But one of those women, he discovered when he left the baths, was Felgilde: she was coming out of the women’s exit, still running a comb through her damp hair, at the same time as he was going out through the men’s door. He pretended he didn’t notice her. That gave him a couple of heartbeats’ worth of relief, no more, for she called out, “Leofsig!” as soon as she saw him.

“Oh. Hello, Felgilde,” he said, doing his best to sound surprised. He hadn’t been so frightened since the battle when the Algarvians smashed the army of which he’d been a part not long after it began its invasion of Mezentio’s kingdom. “Uh, how are you?” He had the bad feeling he would find out in great detail.

And he did. “I never want to see you again,” Felgilde said. “I never want to talk to you again. I never want to have anything to do with you again. After all we did. ...” Had she had a knife, she might have pulled it out and used it on him. “The nerve of your father!”

Since Leofsig didn’t know just what his father had done, he kept quiet. Whatever it was, it seemed to have broken the not-quite-engagement. He stood there doing his best to look innocent, hoping Felgilde would tell him why he ought to look that way and why she thought he wasn’t.

She didn’t disappoint him. “The nerve of your father!” she repeated. “The dowry he asked for, a duchess’ father couldn’t afford to pay. And your family has more money than mine, anyhow.” she sniffed. “I can certainly see why; your father would dive into a dung heap to bring out a copper in his teeth.”

That should have infuriated Leofsig. It did infuriate him, in fact, but he wanted to seem contrite. “I’m sorry, Felgilde,” he said, and some small part of him was: by most Forthwegian standards, her views were normal and his strange. “When it comes to money, no one else in the family can argue with him.”

Felgilde tossed her head. “Well, you can’t have tried very hard. Since you didn’t, good-bye.” Nose in the air, she stalked off. Leofsig felt a pang, watching her go. But he also felt he’d just had a narrow escape. Trying to hold that feeling uppermost in his mind, he headed for home himself.

Leave. The word sang within Istvan. He’d spent far too long either at the front or on garrison duty, with never the chance to go back to his home valley and spend a little time there. Now, at last, he had it. He vowed to the stars to make the most of it, too.

He’d been walking for hours, at the ground-eating pace he’d acquired in the Gyongyosian army, from the depot at which the ley-line caravan had left him. No ley line came any closer to his valley than that. Now, looking down from the pass, he could see spread out before him the place where he’d spent his whole life till Gyongyos’ wars pulled him away.

He stopped, more in surprise than from weariness.
How small and cramped it looks,
he thought. The valley had seemed plenty big enough while he was growing to manhood in it. He shrugged broad shoulders and started walking again. His village lay closest to the mouth of the pass. He’d be there well before nightfall.

The mountains that ringed the valley still wore snow halfway down from their peaks. That snow would retreat up the slopes as summer advanced on spring, but not too far, not too far. Even now, Istvan’s breath smoked as he trudged along.

Snow still lay on the ground here and there in the valley, too, in places shaded from the northern sky. Elsewhere, mud replaced it, mud streaked with last year’s dead, yellow grass and just beginning to be speckled with the green of new growth.

An old man, his tawny beard gone gray, was setting stones in a wall that marked the boundary between two fields: a boundary no doubt also marked in spilled blood a few generations before. He looked up from his work and eyed Istvan, then called, “Who are you, lad?”—a natural enough question, when Istvan’s green-brown uniform tunic and leggings hid his clan affiliation and made him look different, too.

“I am Istvan son of Alpri,” Istvan answered. “Kunhegyes is my village.”

“Ah,” the old man said, and nodded. “Be welcome, then, clansmate. May the stars always shine on you.”

Istvan bowed. “May you always know their light, kinsman.” He walked on.

But even as he walked, he realized he spoke differently from the old man. The accent of the valley—which had been his accent till he joined the army—now struck his ear as rustic and uncouth. His own way of speaking, these days was smoother and softer. In the army, he still sounded like someone from the back country. Here in his old home, though, he would seem almost like a city man whenever he opened his mouth.

Like any village in Gyongyos, Kunhegyes sheltered behind a stout palisade. So far as Istvan knew, his hometown remained at peace with the other two villages in the valley, nor was the valley as a whole at feud with any of its neighbors. Still, such things could change in the blink of an eye. The lookout up on the palisade was in grim earnest when he demanded Istvan’s name.

He gave it again and added, “You let me in this instant, Csokonai, or I’ll thrash you till you can’t even see.”

The lookout, who was also Istvan’s cousin, laughed and said, “You and what army?” But he didn’t try to keep Istvan out; instead, he ran down off the palisade and opened the gate so his kinsman could enter. As soon as Istvan came inside, the two young men embraced. “By the stars, it’s good to see you,” Csokonai exclaimed.

“By the stars, it’s good to be seen,” Istvan answered, which made Csokonai laugh. Istvan laughed, too, but he hadn’t been joking; plenty of times, he’d thought he would never be seen again, not in his home village.

Inside the palisade, Kunhegyes’ houses were as he remembered them: solid structures of stone and brick, with steep slate roofs to shed rain and snow and to make sure no stick could set them afire. The houses stood well apart from one another, too, to make each more defensible. Despite that, the place seemed crowded to Istvan in a way it hadn’t before he saw the wider world.
First the valley felt crowded, and now the village looks too small,
he thought.
What’s wrong with me?

“You must be glad to be back,” Csokonai said.

“Oh, aye, so I must,” Istvan agreed vaguely, though that had been the furthest thing from his mind.

“Well, don’t just stand there, then,” his cousin said. “I’ll take you along to your house—not likely anybody else’U come along till I get back up on the palisade. We don’t get one traveler most days, let alone two.” His laugh said he was happy to dwell in such perfect isolation.

Istvan had been, too. He kept looking into shops and taverns. Was everything here really on such a small scale? Had it always been this way? If it had, why hadn’t he noticed before? It had been air under the wings of a bird—that was why. He’d never imagined things could be any different. Now that he knew better, Kunhegyes shrank in his mind like a wool tunic washed in hot water.

Up the street toward him came a fellow ten years older than he, a bruiser named Korosi. Every so often, he’d made Istvan’s life in Kunhegyes miserable. He still walked with a swagger. But, like everything else in the village, he seemed to have shrunk. Istvan walked straight toward him, not looking for trouble, but not about to give way, either. In days gone by, he would have yielded. Now Korosi was the one who stepped aside.

He didn’t even growl about it. Instead, he said, “Welcome home, Istvan. May the stars shine on you.”

“And on you,” Istvan answered, half a heartbeat slower than he should have. He glanced over toward Csokonai. His cousin seemed as surprised that he’d got a friendly greeting from Korosi as he was.
It must be the uniform,
Istvan thought, not realizing that he looked like what he was: a combat veteran who’d seen a lot of fights and wouldn’t shy from one more.

Csokonai pointed. “There’s the house, in case you’ve forgotten where you live. Now I am going to get back up on the palisade, before somebody notices I’m not where I’m supposed to be and pitches a fit.”

“Not know my own house? Not likely,” Istvan said. “If you think I’m that stupid, maybe I ought to knock some sense into your head.” Csokonai beat a hasty retreat.

Istvan’s own house, strangely, seemed as it should have to him. After a moment, he realized it had been shrinking for him as long as he could remember. What had seemed immense to a toddler was just the right size once he had some size of his own. Being away hadn’t pushed that process any further; it had already gone as far as it could.

As with most houses in Kunhegyes, his had only little slits for windows, but out of them floated the delicious smell of his mother’s pepper stew. Spit poured into his mouth. Where so much seemed less than it once had, the stew smelled even better than he’d expected. He hadn’t had anything like it in a long time. He hurried forward to knock on the door.