Out of the Darkness

“Won’t be anything left of that place before long,” Curvenal said.

“I used to live there,” Ealstan said in Forthwegian, and then had to struggle to get meaning across in Unkerlanter, which formed past tenses differently.

“Is your family still there?” Curvenal asked.

Ealstan nodded. “I think so. I hope so.”

The young Unkerlanter slapped him on the back. “That’s hard. That’s cursed hard. The redheads never got to my village, so I’m one of the lucky ones. But I know how many people have lost kin. I hope your folks come through all right.”

Sympathy from one of Swemmel’s men came as a surprise. “Thanks,” Ealstan said roughly. “So do I.” In ironic counterpoint, more eggs burst on Gromheort. He hoped his mother and father and sister were down in cellars where no harm could come to them. He also hoped they had enough to eat. The Algarvians would probably do their best to keep everything in the besieged town for themselves.

If any Forthwegians got food, he suspected his own family would. His father had both money and connections, and the Algarvians took bribes. Ealstan had seen that for himself, both in Gromheort and in Eoforwic. But even the redheads wouldn’t give civilians food if they had none to spare.

All I can do is try to break into the city when we’ve worn Mezentio’s men down enough to have a decent chance of doing it, Ealstan thought. If I desert and try to sneak in on my own, the Unkerlanters will blaze me if they catch me and the Algarvians will if the Unkerlanters don’t. And I couldn‘t do anything useful even if I did get in.

Every bit of that made perfect logical sense, the sort of sense that should have calmed a bookkeeper’s spirit. Somehow or other, it did nothing whatever to ease Ealstan’s mind.

Hajjaj was glad Bishah’s rainy season, never very long, was drawing to a close. That meant his roof wouldn’t leak much longer-till next rainy season. Zuwayzi roofers were among the most inept workmen in the whole kingdom. They could get away with it, too, because they were so seldom tested.

“Frauds, the lot of them,” he grumbled to his senior wife just after the latest set of bunglers packed up their tools and went down from the hills to Bishah.

“They certainly are,” Kolthoum agreed. They’d been together for half a century now. It had been an arranged marriage, not a love match; leaders among Zuwayzi clans wed for reasons far removed from romance. But they’d grown very fond of each other. Hajjaj wondered if he’d ever spoken the word love to her. He didn’t think so, but he couldn’t imagine what he would do without her.

“As far as I’m concerned, they’re just a pack of clumsy children playing with toys-and not playing very well,” he went on.

“Odds are, we won’t find out what sort of work they’ve done till the fall,” Kolthoum said. “By then, they can expect we’ll either have forgotten all the promises they’ve made or lost their bill or both.”

“They can expect it, but they’ll be disappointed,” Hajjaj said. “They don’t know how well you keep track of such things.” His senior wife graciously inclined her head at the compliment. She’d never been a great beauty, and she’d got fat as the years went by, but she moved like a queen. From roofers, Hajjaj went on to other complications: “Speaking of toys. .”

He needed no more than that for Kolthoum to understand exactly what he had in mind. “What’s the latest trouble with Tassi?” she asked. “And why won’t Iskakis dry up and blow away?”

“Because King Tsavellas of Yanina chose exactly the right moment to change sides and suck up to Unkerlant and we didn’t,” Hajjaj answered. “That means Swemmel’s happier about the Yaninans than he is about us. And besides, Ansovald likes sticking pins in me to see if I’ll jump. Barbarian.” The last word was necessarily in Algarvian; Zuwayzi didn’t have a satisfactory equivalent.

“Why doesn’t Iskakis leave it alone, though?” Kolthoum asked fretfully. “It’s not as if he wants her for herself. If she were a pretty boy instead of a pretty girl, he might. As things are?” She shook her head.

“Pride,” Hajjaj said. “He has plenty of that; Yaninans are prickly folk. A Zuwayzi noble would want to get back a wife who’d run off, too.”

“Aye, so he would, and something horrible would happen to her if he did, too,” Kolthoum said. “Plenty of feuds have started that way. Tassi doesn’t deserve to have anything like that happen to her. She can’t help it if her husband would sooner have had a boy.”

“I wish Marquis Balastro had taken her back to Algarve with him when he had to flee Zuwayza,” Hajjaj said. “But he’d quarreled with her by then; that was what prompted her to come to me.”