Out of the Darkness

“That’s why we have an army-or had an army,” Bembo answered. “Civilians who try to fight against soldiers are what you call free-blazers. If the soldiers catch ‘em, they’re what you call fair game.”

“They were brave,” Saffa said.

“They were bloody dumb,” Bembo told her. “They didn’t do themselves any good, and they didn’t do Algarve any good, either. We don’t have any soldiers in the field anywhere within a hundred miles of here, not any more we don’t.” He threw his hands in the air in a gesture of extravagant despair. “Powers below eat everything, we’ve lost.”

Saffa stared at him. The truth there was obvious. The little slant-eyed soldiers in the streets made it so. Maybe she somehow hadn’t realized everything it meant, though, till he all but shouted in her face. She bit her lip, blinked a couple of times, and quietly began to cry.

“Don’t do that!” Bembo exclaimed. He fumbled for a handkerchief, didn’t find one, and gave her a cafe napkin instead. “Come on, sweetheart. Please don’t do that.” He had a soft spot for weeping women. Most Algarvian men did.

“I can’t help it,” she said, dabbing her eyes. “I don’t think Salamone is ever coming home, not from fighting the horrible Unkerlanters.” Her tears came faster, harder.

Bembo muttered something more or less polite. Salamone was the fellow who’d fathered her son. She still hadn’t let Bembo into her bed, or come into his. He wondered why he bothered with her; he wasn’t usually so patient with women. Maybe it was because he’d known her before things got bad, and she was a line back to those better days. He took a pull at his wine to disguise a snort. That was an alarming thing to think about somebody all over prickles like Saffa.

She gave him a look holding a good deal of her old vinegar. “I know what you’re thinking. You hope those savages have him for supper, and without any salt, too.”

“No such thing!” Bembo said with an indignation all the louder for being less than sincere. But then he followed it with the truth: “I wouldn’t wish getting caught by the Unkerlanters on anybody at all.”

Saffa eyed him, then slowly nodded. “You may even mean that.”

“I do!” Bembo exclaimed. “Remember, darling, I was in Eoforwic when all the Unkerlanters in the world came rolling east across Forthweg straight at me.” Being who he was, of course he saw the battles of the summer before, so disastrous for Algarve, in that light. He ate an almond, then went on, “And the cursed Forthwegians rose up and stabbed us in the back, too. Fat lot of good it did them-now they’ve got Swemmel sitting on ‘em instead of us, and may they have joy of that.”

“It’s all a mess,” Saffa said, which summed things up as well as any four words Bembo might have found.

“That it is,” he said dolefully, and then, when a plump woman with a pitted complexion almost stumbled over his splinted leg-which had to stick out from the table a bit-his gloom turned to spleen: “Watch it, lady!”

She glared at him. “If you were any kind of a man, you’d have let yourself get killed before all this happened.” Her wave encompassed the whole of Tricarico and, by extension, the whole of Algarve. She might have held Bembo personally responsible for the lost war.

He wouldn’t have taken that from Saffa, and he certainly wasn’t about to take it from a stranger he didn’t find attractive. “If I had anything to do with you, I certainly would have let myself get killed before I came home,” he said, and bit his thumb at her, a fine Algarvian insult.

The plump woman screeched like a wounded trumpet. She drew back a foot to kick Bembo’s bad leg. He grabbed a crutch by the wrong end and got ready to swing it like a club. Algarvians were normally the most chivalrous of men, but he wasn’t about to let anybody do that leg any more harm.

Saffa snatched up the bowl of olives and made as if to throw it at the woman. The olives glistened with oil; they would have ruined the plump woman’s kilt and frock. Bembo wondered if she didn’t find that a more dangerous threat than his makeshift bludgeon. Mumbling curses under her breath, she stalked off with her nose in the air.

“Thanks,” Bembo told Saffa.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “That stupid sow had no business coming down on you so. You did everything for the kingdom you could. What did she do? Sit around and eat cakes the whole war long, by the look of her.”

Everything I could do for the kingdom? Bembo wondered. He really had fought, and he really had kept order in foreign towns. And you sent powers above only know how many Kaunians off on their last rides. Had that helped Algarve or hurt it? Hurt it, probably, for such things made all her neighbors more certain they couldn’t afford to lose. But his superiors had ordered it, and so he’d done it.