Into The Darkness

"Plenty." Annore tapped it with her sandal. "Dip me up a mug, too, will you?" When her husband did, she murmured a word of thanks. Then she said, "People say the inspectors were buzzing around you out in the fields." The words came out with the usual mixture of hate and fear - and, as usual, fear predominated.

But Garivald shrugged his broad shoulders. "It wasn't too bad. They were being efficient" - he laced the catchword with scorn - 11 so they didn't spend too much of their precious time on me." He raised his wooden mug of beer to his lips and took a long pull. After wiping his upper lip on his sleeve, he went on, "The one bad part was when they asked if the impressers had been through this part of the Duchy any time latchy. "

"What did you tell them?" Annore asked. Yes, fear predominated.

He shrugged again. "Told 'em I didn't know. They can't prove 11 in lying, so that looked like the efficient thing to do." Now he laughed at King Swemmel's favorite term - but softly, lest anyone but his wife hear.

Slowly, Annore nodded. "I don't see any better choices," she said. "But not all inspectors are fools, even if they are bastards. They're liable to figure out that I don't know means haven't seen 'em for years. If they do…"

If they did, sergeants would teach a lot of young men from the village the arcane mysteries of marching and countermarching. Garivald knew he was liable - no, likely - to be one of them. He'd been too young the last time the impressers came through. He wouldn't be too young now.

They'd give him a stick and tell him to blaze away for the glory of King Swemmel, which mattered to him not in the least. The Gyongyosians had sticks, too, and were in the habit of blazing back. He didn't want to g go to the edge of the world to fight them. He didn't want to go any where. All he wanted was to stay with his family and bring in the harvest.

His daughter Leuba woke up and started to cry. Annore scooped her out of the cradle, then slid an arm out of her tunic, bared a breast, and put the baby on it. "You'll have to chop the sausage," she said above

Leuba's avid gulping noises.

"All night," Garivald replied, and he did. He almost chopped off his finger a couple of times, too, because he paid as much attention to his wife's breast as to what he was supposed to be doing. Annore noticed, and stuck out her tongue at him. They both laughed. Leuba tried to laugh, too, but didn't want to stop nursing while she did it. She coughed and choked and sprayed milk out her nose.

When the smell of the vegetables and blood sausage made his stomach growl more fiercely than any inspector from Cottbus, Garivald went to the door and shouted for his son Syrivald to come in and eat supper.

Syrivald came. He was covered in mud and dirt, and all the more cheerful because of it, as any five-year-old boy would have been. I could eat a bear," he announced.

"We haven't got a bear," Annore told him. "You'll eat what we give you." And so Syrivald did, from a child-sized wooden bowl, a smaller copy of the one from which his parents spooned up supper. Annore gave Leuba little bits of barley and groats and sausage on the top of her spoon.

The baby was just learning to eat things that weren't milk, and seemed intent on trying to get as messy as her big brother.

The sun went down about the time they finished supper. Annore did a little cleaning up by the light of a lamp that smelled of the lard it burned.

Syrivald started yawning. He lay down on a bench against the wall and went to sleep. Annore nursed Leuba once more, then laid her in the cradle.

Before his wife could set her tunic to rights, Garivald cupped in his hand the breast at which the baby had been feeding. "Don't you think of anything else?" Annore asked.

"What should I think of, the impressers?" Garivald retorted. "This is better." He drew her to him. Presently, it was a great deal better. By the moans she tried to muffle, Annore thought so, too. She fell asleep very quickly. Garivald stayed awake longer. He did think of the impressers, whether he wanted to or not.

Bembo had never seen so many stars in the sky above Tricarico. But, as the constable paced through the dark streets of his home town, he did not watch the heavens for the sake of diamonds and the occasional sapphire or ruby strewn across black velvet. He kept a wary eye peeled for the swift-moving shapes of Jelgavan dragons blotting out those jewels.

Tricanico lay not far below the foothills of the Bradano Mountains, whose peaks formed the border between Algarve and Jelgava. Every so often, Bembo could spy flashes of light - momentary stars - in the mountains on the eastern horizon: the soldiers of his kingdom and the Jelgavans blazing away at one another. The Jelgavans, so far, had not pushed their way through the foothills and down on to the southern Algarvian plain.

Bembo was glad of that; he'd expected worse.