Through the Darkness

Water dripping from his rubber suit, he splashed up onto the beach. Overhead, a gull mewed. Sandpipers scurried by the ocean’s edge, now and then pecking at something or other in the wet sand. As far as he could tell, he had the beach to himself but for the birds.

“Hallo!” he called, ready to fight or to dive back into the sea and try to escape if Algarvians answered him. On that wide, empty strand, his cry seemed as small and lost as the gull’s.

And then, a moment later, an answering “Hallo!” floated to his ears. Almost a quarter of a mile to the north, a small figure came up over the top of a sand dune and waved in his direction. Waving back, he walked toward the other man. He waddled awkwardly because of the rubber paddles on his feet.

“Call me Belo,” he said, the Lagoan phrase he’d been given back in Setubal.

“Call me Bento,” the other man replied, also in Lagoan. Cornelu didn’t think the other fellow was a Lagoan, though. Small and slight and swarthy, with black hair and slanted eyes, he looked like a full-blooded Kuusaman. Whatever he was, he was no fool. Recognizing the five-crown emblem on the left breast of Cornelu’s rubber suit, he said, “Sib, eh? How much Lagoan do you speak?”

“Not much.” Cornelu switched languages: “Classical Kaunian will do.”

“Aye, it generally serves,” the man who called himself Bento said in the same tongue. “Leaving will also do, and do nicely. I don’t think they are on my track, but I don’t care to wait around and find out I am wrong, either.”

“I can see how you would not.” Cornelu pointed back toward the raft. “We can go. You are sorcerously warded against travel in the sea?”

“I came here by leviathan,” Bento said. “I have not been here long enough for the protections to have staled.” Wasting no more time on conversation, he stripped off his tunic and trousers and started toward the raft.

Pushing it out through the booming waves proved harder than riding it to the beach had been, but Cornelu and Bento managed. After they’d reached the calmer sea farther from shore, Cornelu helped the smaller man into the raft, then swam toward the waiting leviathan, pushing Bento ahead of him. As he swam, he asked, “Why did they send a Kuusaman down into Jelgava?”

“Because I knew what needed doing,” Bento answered placidly. That might even have been his real name; it sounded almost as Kuusaman as Lagoan.

“Could they not have found someone of Kaunian blood who knew the same things, whatever they are?” Cornelu said. He knew better than to ask spies about their missions. Still. . . “You are not the least conspicuous man in Jelgava, looking as you do.”

Bento laughed. “In Jelgava, I did not look this way. To eyes there, I was as pale and yellow-haired as any Kaunian. I abandoned the sorcerous disguise when I needed it no longer.”

“Ah,” Cornelu said. So Bento was a mage, then. That came as no real surprise. “I hope you put sand in the Algarvians’ salt.”

A Lagoan might have bragged. Even a Sibian might have. Bento only shrugged and answered, “I sowed some seeds, perhaps. When they will come to ripeness, or if they will grow tall, is anyone’s guess.”

“Ah,” Cornelu said again, this time acknowledging that he recognized he wouldn’t get much out of Bento. He looked around for the leviathan, which obligingly surfaced just then, not more than fifty yards away.

“A fine animal,” Bento said in tones that implied he knew leviathans. “But Lagoan, not Sibian--or am I mistaken?”

“No, that is so,” Cornelu said. “How did you know?” How strong a mage are you? was the unspoken question behind the one he asked.

But Bento only chuckled. “I could tell you all manner of fantastic lies. But the truth is, the animal wears Lagoan harness. I have seen what Sibiu uses, and it attaches round the flippers rather differently.”

“Oh.” Well, Cornelu had already seen that Bento didn’t miss much: the fellow tabbed him for a Sibian right away. “You notice things quickly.”

“They are there to be noticed,” Bento replied. Cornelu grunted in response to that. The Kuusaman laughed at him. “And now you are thinking I am some sort of sage, subsisting on melted snow and--” He spoke a couple of words of classical Kaunian Cornelu couldn’t catch.

“What was that?” the leviathan-rider asked.

“Reindeer dung,” Bento answered in Lagoan, which jerked a startled laugh from Cornelu. Returning to the language of scholarship, Bento continued, “It is not so. I like roast beef as well as any man, and I like looking at pretty women--and doing other things with them--as well as any man, too.”

“Some of the Jelgavan women are pretty enough,” Cornelu observed.

Bento shrugged. “You would be likelier to think so than would I, because Kaunian women look more like those of Sibiu than like those of Kuusamo. To me, most of them are too big and beefy to be appealing.”