Through the Darkness

The wine seller dipped up two cups from his barrel. The wine was of the plainest--an ordinary red, flavored with oranges and limes and lemons. But it was wet and it was cool. Talsu poured it down and held out the cheap earthenware cup for a refill. The wine seller pocketed the coin Talsu gave him, then plied his tin tipper once more.

As Talsu sipped the citrus-laced wine, he glanced at the Algarvians in the market square. He knew it was foolish, but he did it anyhow. He might recognize the one he’d hit in the nose in the grocer’s shop, but he had no idea what the one who’d stabbed him looked like. A redhead--that was all he knew.

Gailisa was glancing across the market square, toward the other side of town. “It still doesn’t seem right,” he said.

“Huh? What doesn’t?” Talsu asked. So many things in Skrunda didn’t seem right these days, he had trouble figuring out which one she meant.

“That the Algarvians knocked down the old arch,” Gailisa answered. “It had been here more than a thousand years, since the days of the Kaunian Empire, and it hadn’t done anybody any harm in all that time. They didn’t have any business knocking it down.”

“Ah. The arch. Aye.” Talsu nodded. He’d been running an errand to that side of town when a couple of Algarvian military mages brought it down with well-placed eggs. He hadn’t thought much about the arch--which commemorated an imperial Kaunian victory over long-dead Algarvian tribesmen--while it stood, but he too missed it now that it was gone.

Maybe the wine he’d drunk made him say, “The arch,” louder than he’d intended. A fellow a few feet away heard him and also looked toward the place where the monument had stood. He said, “The arch,” too, and he said it loud on purpose.

“The arch.” This time, a couple of people said it.

“The arch. The arch! The arch?’ Little by little, the chant began to fill the square. The concertina player echoed it with two notes of his own. The Algarvian soldiers started watching the crowd of Jelgavans in a new way, looking for enemies rather than pretty girls.

One of the redheads, a lieutenant wearing a tunic Talsu’s father had sewn for him, spoke in Jelgavan: “The arch is down. Not going up again. No use complaining. Go home.”

“The arch! The arch! The arch!” The cry kept on, and got louder and louder. Talsu and Gailisa grinned at each other as they shouted. They’d found something King Mezentio’s men didn’t like.

Like it the Algarvians certainly didn’t. They huddled together in a compact band. They’d come to the market square to have a good time, not to fight. The promenading Jelgavans badly outnumbered them. If things went from shouting to fighting, the unarmed redheads were liable to have a thin time of it.

In an experimental sort of way, Talsu kicked at one of the cobbles in the square. It didn’t stir. He kicked it again, harder, and felt it give a little under his shoe. If he needed to pry it out of the ground and fling it at the Algarvians, he could. If he wanted to, he could. And he knew he couldn’t be the only Jelgavan in the crowd having such thoughts.

“Go home!” the Algarvian lieutenant said again, shouting this time. Then he made an enormous mistake, adding, “In the name of King Mainardo, I order you to go home!” Mainardo was Mezentio of Algarve’s younger brother, put on the throne here after the redheads conquered Jelgava.

A moment of silence followed. People stopped shouting, “The arch! The arch! The arch!” When they resumed, they had a new cry: “Donalitu! Donalitu! Donalitu!” Talsu joined it, roaring out the name of Jelgava’s rightful king.

Even as he roared, he wondered at the passion for King Donalitu that had seized everyone, himself included. The king had been more feared than loved while he sat on Jelgava’s throne, and with reason: he’d ground down the commoners, and flung them into dungeons if they complained. In spite of that, though, he was a Jelgavan, not a redheaded usurper kept on the throne by redheaded invaders.

Instead of shouting again for the Jelgavans to go home, the Algarvian lieutenant tried a different ploy. “Stand aside!” he yelled. “Let us by!”

That would have left the square to the Jelgavans, the biggest victory they’d have had in Skrunda since their kingdom fell to Mezentio’s men. But it didn’t feel like enough to Talsu. It didn’t seem to feel like enough to anybody. People didn’t move aside. They cried out Donalitu’s name louder and more fervently than ever. In a moment, the brawl would start; Talsu could feel it.

Something in the air--a small hiss, right at the edge of hearing. Talsu’s body knew what it was before his brain did. He pushed Gailisa to the cobbles and lay down on top of her as the first egg burst no more than a couple of furlongs away. All through the square, young men, both Jelgavan and Algarvian, were going to the ground even before the egg burst. They’d all known combat in the recent past, and retained the reflexes that had kept them alive.