Out of the Darkness

“You don’t need to worry about supporting me-not with silver, anyhow,” Pekka said. “I’ve always been able to do that. It’s the other things we need to worry about: getting along with each other, bringing up Uto the best we can.”

“Seeing about a child or two of our own, too,” Fernao added.

“Aye, and that, too,” Pekka agreed. Fernao fought down bemusement. For his whole life, his interest in children had been theoretical at best. At worst. . He’d had one lady friend who’d thought he made her pregnant. He hadn’t; an illness had thrown her monthly courses out of kilter. What he’d felt then was alarm bordering on panic. Now. . Now he smiled as Pekka went on, “I’ve spent some time wondering what our children would look like. Haven’t you?”

“Now that you mention it, aye,” Fernao answered, adding, “If we have a little girl, I hope she’s lucky enough to look like you.”

That flustered Pekka. He’d seen that a lot of his compliments did. Partly, he supposed, it was because she was so stubbornly independent. The rest came from a fundamental difference between his folk and hers. Among Lagoans, as with Algarvians, flowery compliments were part of the small change of conversation. Nobody took them too seriously. Kuusamans were more literal-minded. They rarely said things unless they meant them-and they assumed everyone else behaved the same way. His pleasantries gained a weight, a force, here that they wouldn’t have had back in Setubal.

“You’re sweet,” Pekka said at last, and Fernao was confident she meant it. He was also very glad she meant it.

“What I am,” he said, “is happy. I love you, you know.”

“I do know that,” she agreed. “I love you, too. And. .” She sighed and let it rest there. When Fernao didn’t ask her to go on, she looked relieved.

He didn’t ask her because he already had a good notion of what she wasn’t saying: something like, And now it’s all right. With Leino still living, she’d been torn. Fernao knew that; he could hardly help knowing it.

If Leino had lived, she would have chosen him, he thought. He was familiar. He was a Kuusaman. And he was the father of her son, and that counted for a lot with her.

Pekka looked at him and turned his thoughts away from such reflections, which was just as well. Otherwise, he would have come back to remembering that he owed his happiness to another man’s death, and to the despised Algarvians. He hated himself whenever such ideas scurried over the ley lines of his mind, but he could hardly drive them away once for all. They held too much truth, and so kept coming back.

“We’ll do the best we can,” she said. “I don’t know what else we can do. If we work hard, it should be good enough.”

“I hope so,” Fernao said. “I think so, too.” He knew little more about getting along with one special person for years and years than he did about raising a child. But Pekka knew both those things well. As long as I’ve got a good teacher, Fernao thought, I can learn anything.

Twelve

All the regular news sheets in Trapani were dead. But the Algarvians still turned out something they called The Armored Wolf. Printed on small leaves of cheap, sour-smelling paper, it kept right on screaming shrill defiance at all of King Mezentio’s enemies and declaring that victory lay just around the corner.

Crouched behind a barricade only a couple of hundred yards in front of the royal palace, with Unkerlanter eggs bursting all around him, Sidroc was certain the only thing lying around the next corner was a swarm of Unkerlanter footsoldiers and behemoths. He folded his copy of The Armored Wolf and. stuffed it into his belt pouch.

Ceorl asked, “Why are you wasting time with that horrible rag? Seeing it once is bad enough. Nobody’d want to look at it twice.”

“I’m not going to look at it twice,” Sidroc said. “I’m almost out of arsewipes, though, and it’ll do well enough for that.”

“Ah. All right.” Ceorl’s big head bobbed up and down. “You’re not as dumb as I thought you were when you came into the Brigade. If you were, you’d’ve been dead a long time ago.”

Sidroc shrugged and spat. “Dumb doesn’t matter-you’re still breathing, for instance.” Ceorl’s fingers twisted in an obscene gesture. Laughing, Sidroc gave it back. He went on, “You’re still here, and I’m still here, and Sergeant Werferth, who made a better soldier than both of us put together, what happened to him? He stopped a beam in Yanina, that’s what. Bad futtering luck, nothing else to it.”

Before Ceorl could answer, smoke on the breeze set him coughing. Whole great stretches of Trapani burned, with no one doing much to try to put out the fires. The Algarvians couldn’t, and the Unkerlanters didn’t care.