Darkness Descending

All at once, she moaned and strained and bucked against him, delicacy forgotten. She clenched him inside her, as if with a hand. He cried out; he could no more have held back than he could have stopped himself from breathing. Merkela cried out, too, a curious, mewing wail, almost like a cat’s. Then, spent, she slumped down onto him.

And then, as she did after every time they joined, she began to weep as if her heart would break. No--as if it were already broken. “Gedominu!” she wailed. “Oh, my poor Gedominu!”

Skarnu held her and stroked her and waited for the worst of the sorrow to pass, as he knew it soon would. There were jokes, there were sayings, about the chances a man took when he consoled a new widow in her bedchamber. Discovering she still loved her dead husband was not the least of them. Her tears felt hot as molten lead against the side of his neck and the hollow of his shoulder.

“I can’t bring him back,” Skarnu said once the sobs had ebbed to sniffles. The Algarvians had blazed Gedominu, as they’d blazed a good many other Valmieran hostages, to punish resistance against their occupying army. “I wish I could, but I can’t.”

That was true, even if it meant Merkela would not be giving herself to him now. It might not have meant anything of the sort; what had smoldered between them might have caught fire even with Gedominu still limping around his farm. “He was a brave man.” That was also true. Skarnu would have said it even were it not, to honor the dead.

“Aye, he was.” Merkela’s head came up. From grief, she swung quickly to rage. Tears still streaked her cheeks, but her eyes glittered with fury. “He was brave, and the redheads blazed him down like a dog. Powers above spurn them. Powers below eat them through all eternity.” Her voice held an incantatory quality, as if she truly had the power to make her curses bite deep. “They will pay. How they will pay.”

“Aye.” Skarnu kept stroking her, gentling her, as if she were an unbroken unicorn. “They will pay. They are paying. You’re helping to make them pay.”

Merkela nodded. The thought might have come from her own mind, not Skarnu’s. While Gedominu lived, she’d been content to wait at home and let him carry on the clandestine war against the redheads. After they executed him, she’d gone out on every raid Skarnu and his sergeant, Raunu, and the handful of stubborn local farmers and villagers had put on. Skarnu’s greatest fear was not that she would be unable to hold her own but that she would get herself killed from foolish eagerness to throw herself at the foe. It hadn’t happened yet. In time, he hoped, she would get her common sense back.

“And you, Skarnu, you are a brave man,” she exclaimed, suddenly seeming to remember he was there even though she’d been lying mostly on top of him, her naked, sweaty flesh pressed tightly against his. “When they took him, you tried to go in his place.”

Skarnu shrugged. She’d been watching them. He could think of no other reason why he’d offered himself to the Algarvians instead of Gedominu. Had they taken him, had they blazed him, would Merkela now be mourning him, naked in this bed with her old lame husband? Skarnu shrugged and shivered, both at the same time. No one could know such a thing--and just as well, too.

He reached for her, to hold away what might have been. She was reaching for him, too, perhaps to hold away what had been. Only noblewomen in Valmiera were said to know what she knew and used to get him ready quickly. He’d learned before that what people said and what was so often had no connection to each other. Soon, she arched her hips to receive him. “Hurry,” she whispered, there in the darkness.

When her pleasure came this time, she groaned as if it were pain. A moment later, Skarnu groaned, too, and spent himself. Merkela wept again, but only for a little while. Her breathing grew deep and slow. She drifted off to sleep without bothering to put on the loose tunic and trousers she wore at night.

Getting into his own clothes was a matter of a moment for Skarnu. Merkela let him share her bed when they joined on it, but she would not let him sleep with her in the literal meaning of the words. He slipped down the stairs and out of the farmhouse, closing the door behind him. He’d grown very used to sleeping on straw in the barn. A mattress, by now, would probably feel too soft to be comfortable.

“Hello, sir,” Raunu said quietly. Straw rustled under the veteran--Raunu had fought in the Six Years’ War--as he sat up.

“Oh, hello, Sergeant,” Skarnu said in dull embarrassment. Raunu had kept him afloat when, thanks to his being a marquis, he’d taken command of a company in Valmiera’s failed war against Algarve. They’d stayed together after the formal fighting ended, too. Now, since he hadn’t been here, Raunu could hardly help knowing where he had been and what he’d been doing. “I didn’t mean to wake you.