Darkness Descending

A waiter came over with an expectant look. Cornelu glanced at the bill of fare chalked on a board behind the bar. “Fried cod, boiled parsnips and butter, and a mug of ale,” he said.

“Aye.” The waiter went into a back room. He didn’t come out right away; maybe he was the cook, too. He didn’t have so much trade that he couldn’t be both.

Presently, the door from the street opened. Cornelu started to leap to his feet. A tired-looking fisherman came in and sat down with the fellow eating prawns. Cornelu sank back onto his stool.

Out came the waiter, with his supper on a tray. He set it down, then took his new customer’s order. That fellow wanted prawns, like his friend. Cornelu started eating his fish. It wasn’t bad. He’d had better, but also worse. He sipped the ale. Like the fish, it was middling good.

He ate slowly, stretching out the meal, making it last. That wasn’t easy. He felt hungry as a wolf. He’d come up onto the island without a copper banu to his name and stayed alive doing odd jobs. He really had herded sheep for a while. He’d spent a lot of time hungry.

Coins clinked as the old men paid for their brandy. They got up and left. The waiter scooped their money into a leather pouch he wore at the front of his kilt. Cornelu raised a forefinger and asked for another mug of ale. The waiter looked him over, then raised an eyebrow. He understood the challenge, and set silver on the table. Mollified, the waiter gave him what he wanted.

He’d almost finished the parsnips and was halfway down that second ale when the door opened again. A worn woman pushing a baby carriage paused in the doorway and looked at the handful of customers in the eatery.

A worn woman pushing a carriage ... for a moment, to his shame, that was all Cornelu saw. He salved his conscience by noting she’d needed a moment to recognize him, too. Then he did leap up, as he’d started to do before. “Costache!” he exclaimed.

“Cornelu!”

He’d expected his wife to run to him. In his dreams, that was how it had been. His dreams, though, had left out the carriage. Carefully pushing it ahead of her, she made her way to his table. Then he embraced her. Then he kissed her. As if from very far away, he heard the fishermen sniggering. He didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, the powers below could swallow them both.

At last, Costache asked, “Do you want to see your daughter?”

What he wanted was a chance to start another child then and there. He knew he couldn’t have that. As naturally as he could, he looked down into the carriage. “What is her name?” he asked. He’d been able to write to his old address, to the house where Costache still lived, but he’d had no address of his own, drifting from one place to another. Till this moment, he hadn’t known whether his child was boy or girl.

“I called her Brindza, after your mother,” Costache answered.

Cornelu nodded. It was good. It was fitting. He wished the baby could have been named Eforiel, but that would have been wrong. The leviathan had still been living when she was born.

“And what would milady care for today?” the waiter asked. He might have been standing there for some time, waiting to be noticed. Had he not spoken up, he would have kept on waiting quite a while, too.

“Whatever my husband had there will be fine for me, too,” she answered, sitting down on the stool next to Cornelu’s. She sounded dazed, as if she didn’t want to think right now. Cornelu understood that; he felt dizzier, drunker, than if he’d swallowed a tun of ale. The waiter shrugged and went ofT to the back room.

Costache pointed a finger at Cornelu, as if in accusation. “I thought you were dead.”

“I was out to sea when the Algarvians came,” he answered. “They’d already taken the harbor when I got back.” He spoke in a low voice so the fishermen couldn’t overhear: “I didn’t want to surrender, so I took Eforiel over to Lagoas. I’ve been there ever since, along with the rest of the exiles, doing what we could to fight Mezentio.”

Now that Costache wasn’t in his arms anymore, wasn’t pressed against the flesh that had missed her so, he took a longer look into the carriage. The baby sleeping in there had a thin, short fuzz of reddish hair. “She looks like you,” Costache said softly.

“She looks like a baby,” Cornelu said. As far as he was concerned, all babies looked more or less alike--oh, maybe not Kuusamans or Zuwayzin, but the rest. And yet, even as that thought went through his mind, he was trying to find his nose, his chin, on those small smooth features.

The waiter set down Costache’s supper. If he found anything remarkable about a father staring at a daughter more than a year old as if he’d never seen her before, he kept it to himself. Costache ate absently. She kept staring from Cornelu to Brindza and back again, as if reconnecting the two of them in her mind.

“How have you been?” Cornelu asked her.