Through the Darkness

A cricket chirped. Off in the distance, a cat yowled. Those sounds didn’t worry Talsu. He listened for boots thudding on cobbles. The Algarvians knew a lot of things, but they didn’t seem to know how to patrol stealthily.

When he got to his house, he let himself in, then barred the door. If an enterprising burglar chose to strike on a night when he was studying classical Kaunian, tlie thief might clean out the downstairs of Traku’s shop and depart with no one the wiser.

To make sure Talsu wasn’t a burglar, his father came partway down the stairs and called softly: “That you, son?”

“Aye,” Talsu answered.

“Well, what did you learn tonight?” Traku asked.

“Having gained the upper hand, the Kaunian army advanced into the forest,” Talsu declaimed, letting the sounds of the classical language fill his mouth in a way modern Jelgavan couldn’t come close to matching.

“Isn’t that posh?” his father said admiringly. “What’s it mean?” After Talsu translated, Traku frowned and asked, “What happened then--after it advanced into the forest, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” Talsu said. “Maybe the Kaunians kept on winning. Maybe the lousy redheads who lived in the forest ambushed them. It’s just a sentence in a grammar book, not a whole story.”

“Too bad,” Traku said. “You’d like to know how these things turn out.”

Talsu yawned. “What I’d like to do is go to bed. I’ll still have to get up and work tomorrow morning. Come to that, so will you, Father.”

“Oh, aye, I know,” Traku answered. “But I like to be sure everything’s all right before I settle down--and if I didn’t, I’d hear about it in the morning from your mother.” He turned and went back up to the top floor. Talsu followed.

His room had seemed cramped ever since he came home from the army after Jelgava’s losing fight against the Algarvians. It still did. He was too tired to care tonight. He took off his tunic and trousers and lay down wearing nothing but his drawers: the night was fine and mild. He fell asleep with participles spinning in his mind.

Instead of advancing into the forest the next morning, he advanced on breakfast: barley bread, garlic-flavored olive oil, and the usual Jelgavan wine tangy with citrus juice. Afterwards, and before his father could chain him to a stool to work on a couple of cloaks that needed finishing, he ducked out and headed over to the grocer’s shop to say hello to Gailisa and to show off the bits of classical Kaunian he was learning. She didn’t understand much of it herself, but it impressed her, not least because she did understand why he was studying it. “I’ll be back soon,” he promised over his shoulder as he left, to keep his father from getting too annoyed at him.

But he broke the promise. During the night, somebody--more likely several somebodies--had painted DEATH TO THE ALGARVIAN TYRANTS! on walls all over Skrunda: not in Jelgavan, but in excellent classical Kaunian. Talsu might not have been able to understand it before he started studying the old language. He could now.

Unfortunately, so could the Algarvians. Their officers, as he’d seen, were familiar with the classical tongue. And their soldiers were on the streets with jars of paint to cover up the offending slogan and with wire brushes to efface it. The redheads didn’t aim to do the work themselves, though. They grabbed Jelgavan passersby, Talsu among them. He spent the whole morning getting rid of graffiti. But the more he worked to get rid of them, the more he agreed with them. And he didn’t think he was the only Jelgavan who felt that way, either.

“New songs?” Ethelhelm shook his head and looked a little sheepish when Ealstan asked the question. “Haven’t got a whole lot. The boys and I have been on the road so much lately, we haven’t had very many chances to sit down and fool around with anything new.”

Ealstan nodded, doing his best to seem properly sympathetic. He didn’t want to say something like, Hard to write nasty songs about the Algarvians now that you’ve started cozying up to them. Even the last few new songs Ethelhelm had written had lost a good deal of their bite. But Ealstan needed the band leader’s business. And Ethelhelm knew he had a Kaunian lady friend. Ealstan didn’t think the musician would betray him to the redheads, but he didn’t want to give Ethelhelm any excuse for doing something like that, either.

“Good to have things quiet in Eoforwic again,” Ethelhelm said. “It got a little livelier than we really wanted for a while there.”