Jaws of Darkness (58 page)

“I think you’re lying,” Gurmun said in a deadly voice.

“Thinking how you liking.” The Algarvian’s voice made it plain he didn’t care what an Unkerlanter, even an Unkerlanter general, thought. “King Mezentio saying these things so. I believing he.”

Marshal Rathar gestured once more, waving the captives on. The guards screamed at them. They got moving. Before long, the arrogant redhead was lost in the throng.
Not soon enough, though,
Rathar thought.

“Do you believe the son of a whore?” Gurmun asked, sounding unwontedly nervous.

“I believe he believes himself,” Rathar answered. “Whether Mezentio is telling lies … That’s a different question.”

“It’s not the first we’ve heard of these secret sorceries.” Aye, Gurmun was unhappy. “A lot of the captives we’ve taken lately go on about them. Where there’s smoke, there’s liable to be fire.”

“Where there are Algarvians, there’s liable to be trouble,” Rathar said, and his general of behemoths nodded vigorously. He went on, “Reports have gone back to Cottbus, though, and King Swemmel doesn’t seem to worried about this.”

“Good,” Gurmun said.

Although Marshal Rathar nodded, he wondered whether it was good. True, Swemmel saw plots behind ever chair and under every rug. If he didn’t think these worrisome reports true, it was a good sign he judged them an Algarvian bluff. That was fine—if he proved right. Every once in a while, though, his instinct let him down badly, as when he’d judged that the Algarvians wouldn’t expect an Unkerlanter attack three years before. Maybe the redheads hadn’t expected such an attack, but if not, it was only because they’d been so far along with plans for their own, which had gone in first. No mistake now could cost as much as that one had—or so Rathar devoutly hoped— but he didn’t want to have to deal with the king’s mistakes under any circumstances.

A crystallomancer burst out of the hut next to the one in which Rathar made his headquarters. “Lord Marshal!” the young man shouted. “We’ve got men inside Forthweg, sir!”

“Told you so.” General Gurmun went from anxious to smug in a heartbeat.

“This is even faster than you thought it would happen,” Rathar said, and Gurmun nodded. The marshal went on: “We have to move east, we truly do.

We’re getting too far behind the line again.” Gurmun nodded once more. Rathar laughed. “Plenty of worse problems to have, by the powers above.” Gurmun chuckled, too. To the men in charge of an advancing army, life looked good.

Talsu set silver on the grocery counter. Since Gailisa’s father was in the shop, she put the money in the cash box before sliding the jar of green olives in a brine flavored with garlic and fennel across the counter. He spoke in a low voice, so her father wouldn’t hear: “With luck, we won’t have to look at Mainardo’s pointy-nosed Algarvian face too much longer.”

“That would be good,” she agreed, also quietly. Then she raised her voice to tell her father, “I’m going home with Talsu now, Papa.”

“All right,” he answered. “I’ll shut the place up myself. You don’t need to worry about that.” He’d stopped trying to persuade her and Talsu to spend their nights there instead of in the tent on the outskirts of Skrunda.

Gailisa took Talsu’s hand as she emerged from behind the counter. They walked out of the grocer’s shop and into the warm twilight of a Jelgavan summer evening. A couple of news-sheet vendors were still waving leaves of paper and shouting their news: “Invaders thrown back before Balvi! King Mainardo’s heroic Algarvian allies triumph in savage righting!”

When one of the vendors waved his sheet at Talsu, he shook his head and kept walking. To Gailisa, he said, “The redheads keep right on telling lies.”

“I know.” She nodded. “You’ll never believe what I heard from one of the women who came into the shop today, though.”

“Will I want to believe it, though?” Talsu asked. When Gailisa nodded again, he said, “Then tell me!”

“Well, what she said was …” Gailisa paused, either for dramatic effect or just to take a breath. “What she said was, either Mainardo’s already run away from Balvi or he’s just about to. He doesn’t want to end up like what’s-his-name, his cousin, did over there in Unkerlant.”

“Boiled alive, you mean,” Talsu said. The news sheets had screamed of Unkerlanter barbarism when that happened. His wife nodded once more. He scratched his head. That was a rumor he wanted to believe. But no matter what he wanted, he saw certain basic difficulties. “How did this woman here in Skrunda know what was going on with the Algarvians way over in Balvi?”

“I don’t know,” Gailisa answered. “I’m telling you what she told me, that’s all. I hope it’s true, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Talsu said with a nod of his own. “The only thing better would be having the Lagoans or the Kuusamans catch him and give him to King Donalitu. He’d envy his cousin by the time Donalitu was through with him.”

“He would, wouldn’t he?” Gailisa smiled, but then shook her head. “The things I’m imagining, the things I’m hoping for—even thinking about them would have made me sick a few years ago.”

“It’s the war.” Talsu had seen things and done things and had things happen to him that he never would have imagined before the war, either. One of the things that had happened to him was only too obvious right now. Pointing to the ruins past which he and Gailisa were walking, he said, “Aye, it’s the cursed war. We used to live here.”

Gailisa squeezed his hand. “Your father will find a way to rebuild. He would have already if it were an ordinary fire and not eggs from the sky. We can’t go on living in a tent too much longer.” She sounded more hopeful than sure of that, but Talsu didn’t argue with her. He thought the same thing.

He started to say so, but then exclaimed in surprise instead. Someone had been hurrying up the sidewalk toward them. Now, despite the deepening dark, Talsu recognized him. “Father!” he said. “What are you doing here? It’s close to curfew time, and you know how jumpy the redheads are.”

“Powers above be praised,” Traku said, panting a little. “I found you before you got in. I just hope they haven’t followed me.”

“What are you talking about?” Talsu asked, though he had a horrid fear he knew.

Traku said, “Someone—never mind who—came by today and warned me the Algarvians were going to come after everybody they’d ever caught before. I don’t know why. Maybe lock ‘em up again, maybe do something worse. But for all I know, they’ve got somebody—probably a Jelgavan, too, curse the bugger—watching the tent waiting for you to get there so they can drop on you.”

“Something worse,” Talsu repeated. People whispered about what the Algarvians did to people of Kaunian blood off in the west. If they were in trouble in Jelgava, what would keep them from doing the same thing here? Nothing he could think of. He said, “No, I can’t go home, not with that waiting. I have to disappear.”

“I think you’re right,” his father said. Gailisa nodded.

“Will
you
be all right if I don’t come home tonight?” Talsu asked Traku.

“We’ll find out,” Traku answered with a shrug. “If it’s not quite all right, I’ll make my getaway, too.”

Traku knew it was liable not to be that easy. He didn’t say anything for fear of alarming Gailisa. He clasped Traku’s hand, then clutched his wife to him. He kissed her for a long time. When at last he had to let her go, he said, “I’ll come back. If I made it back from the dungeon, I can make it back from this.”

He knew that was liable not to be so easy, too. Again, he kept quiet. Gailisa said, “Don’t tell us where you’re going. If we don’t know, the redheads can’t tear it out of us.”

“Good luck, son,” Traku said gruffly. He held out a small cloth sack. It was heavy in Talsu’s hand, and clinked softly. Traku went on, “Get going now. Maybe that’ll buy you a little luck. Hope so, anyhow.”

With a wordless nod, Talsu started up a side street. When he looked back, he couldn’t see his father and Gailisa anymore. He stuffed the sack of coins into a pocket. He didn’t know how long it would last, but having it was ever so much better than going into exile with no more than a couple of coppers.

He wished Gailisa hadn’t been carrying the olives. They would have given him a snack, if nothing else.

In the old days, Skrunda, like most towns, had had a wall around it. No more. Hardly any of the wall remained; once Jelgava became a united kingdom, builders started making the most of all that ready-cut stone. Why not, when the town was unlikely to have to stand siege? These days, Skrunda had long since outgrown the old walled-in area, anyhow.

As Talsu got to the outskirts, then, he wasn’t in town one minute and out in the countryside the next. He kept passing houses, but less and less often, with more and more open space between them. Presently, he started going past little almond orchards and groves of fragrant lemons and oranges.

At first, all he wanted to do was put distance between himself and Skrunda. The longer the Algarvians had to chase him and the farther into the country they had to go, the better. “If they want to catch me, they’d better work for it,” he muttered. An eagle owl let out a couple of deep hoots, as if agreeing with him.

But once he was well away, he started wondering where he should go and what he could do. Head for Dobele, the next town farther west? What would he do when he got there? The redheads knew he was a tailor, so looking for work with a needle would be asking to get caught. Could he work as a day laborer? He supposed so, but the idea roused no enthusiasm in him.

What I really want to do is fight the Algarvians, not run from them,
he thought.
If I had a stick in my hands, I wouldn‘t be running now.
All he’d ever wanted to do was fight Mezentio’s men. Trying had landed him in the dungeon. Trying again might land him in something worse. He didn’t care. That was what he wanted, more than anything else in the world.

And so, instead of staying on the road and making for Dobele, he turned down a little path that led up toward low, rolling hills south of the two towns. He didn’t know whether bandits lurked in them; what he did know was that, were he a bandit, he would have lurked up there.

He didn’t get to them that night, but fell asleep in bushes by the side of the track. That was uncomfortable, but not too bad on a summer’s night in Jelgava. He wouldn’t have cared to try it in some southern kingdom.

When he came to a farm the next morning, he asked the farmer, “If I give you a day’s work, will you give me a couple of days’ food?” The farmer just stood in the yard, tossing feed to his hens. His eyes measured Talsu. After the silence stretched for a while, Talsu said, “Or, if you want, you can turn me in to the redheads. They’d thank you.” He hadn’t wanted to roll the dice so soon, but seemed to have little choice.

And it worked. The farmer said, “Well, I’ll find something for you to do.” He went into the house and came out with barley bread and hard white crumbly cheese and some olives much like the ones Talsu had bought at the grocery and a flask of wine sharpened with citrus juices. Talsu ate and drank. Then he chopped wood till his palms blistered, and pulled weeds in the vegetable garden after that. The farmer and his wife gave him bread and ham and olive oil and more wine for lunch, and a stew of mutton and grain and almonds and apricots for supper. He slept on straw in the barn.

The following morning, the farmer brought him a couple of loaves of bread, a small flask full of a paste of garlic and olives and oil, and a large flask full of wine. He even gave him a knapsack that had seen better days in which to carry the food. Talsu came to attention and saluted as he might have to an officer.

He wasn’t altogether astonished when the farmer returned the salute. The fellow said, “If you go six or eight miles south, you’ll come to a track that heads southwest into some of the steeper country. It’s the one with a milepost from the old Kaunian days just in front of it. Follow it, if you care to.”

“Why?” Talsu asked. The farmer just shrugged. After a moment, Talsu shrugged, too. He slung the knapsack over one shoulder and started south. His hands hurt. His joints ached, and his muscles were stiff and sore; he wasn’t used to the work the farmer had set him. After a while, though, walking along under the warm sun eased the kinks.

There was the milestone, its gray-streaked marble much weathered but the inscription still legible. And he could make sense of that classical Kaunian inscription, thanks to Kugu the silversmith. He’d had other, less pleasant, things for which to thank Kugu, and he’d had his revenge. He turned right and walked down the track the farmer had mentioned.

Sure enough, the country did get rougher. Anyone with a stick on one of those bluffs could have potted him before he knew where danger lurked. But the fellow with a stick—Algarvian military issue; Talsu recognized it at once—stepped out from behind a tree. “You may have made a mistake, coming along this track,” he said.
A fatal mistake,
he meant.

“Not if you’re fighting Mezentio’s buggers. A farmer”—Talsu described the man and his farm as well as he could—”sent me on this way. I was in the army till we quit. I know what to do.”

“Do you?” The bandit—or was diehard a better name?—rubbed his poorly shaved chin. He lowered the stick, but not by very much. “Come along with me. We’ll see what we find out.” Talsu gladly came.

Thirteen