Through the Darkness

“And now they are come in, home from their moils and toils,” Vatsyunas said in what he thought was Valmieran. And so it was, after a fashion: Valmieran as it might have been spoken centuries before, when it remained much closer to classical Kaunian than it was these days. Neither the dentist nor his wife had known any of the modern language when they arrived. Now they could make themselves understood, but no one would ever believe Valmieran was their native tongue.

Merkela got up and dusted off the knees of her trousers. “I’m going in to have a look at the stew,” she said. “I killed that hen--you know the one I mean, Skarnu, the one that wasn’t giving us more than an egg a week.”

“Aye, that one’s better off dead,” Skarnu said. Merkela had made such calculations before. Now they took on a new urgency. If she was wrong too often, people would go hungry. The farm had less margin for error than before the fugitives came.

Chicken stew, bread to sop up the gravy, ale. Peasant food, Skarnu thought. That was what he would have called it, the edge of a sneer in his voice, back in Priekule. He wouldn’t have been wrong, but the sneer would have been. It tasted good and filled his belly. Past that, what more could a man want? Nothing Skarnu could think of.

Vatsyunas said, “I had liefer drink wine at meats, but”--he took a long pull at his cup of ale--”having gone so long without much in the way of either wine or aliment, I’m not fain to play the ungrateful cull the now.”

Just listening to him made Skarnu smile. His speech improved week by week; eventually, Skarnu hoped, he would sound pretty much like everyone else. Meanwhile, he was a lesson in how the Valmieran language had got to be the way it was today.

After another long draught, Vatsyunas set the cup down empty. He said, “What I am fain for is vengeance ‘gainst the scurvy coystril knaves, the flame-haired barbarians of Algarve, who used me so.” He looked from Raunu to Merkela to Skarnu. “Can it be done, without foolishly flinging away the life with which you gifted me anew on taking in my lady and me?”

Pernavai spoke very quietly: “I too would have revenge on them.” She was so pale, she looked almost bloodless. Skarnu wondered what Mezentio’s men had done to her. Then he wondered if Vatsyunas knew everything the redheads had done to her. That was a question to which he doubted he’d find an answer.

He didn’t quite know what to tell the escaped Kaunians from Forthweg, who didn’t know he’d been one of the people who’d wrecked the ley-line caravan that carried them. Cautiously, he said, “All of Valmiera cries out for vengeance against the Algarvians.”

“No!” Pernavai and Vatsyunas spoke together. Her golden hair flew round her head as she shook it. Vatsyunas was bald, but somehow managed to look as if he were bristling even so. He said, “Did you speak sooth, why would the countryside not seethe with strife? Why are so many here so glad to give over to the red wolves their kinsfolk from the distant Occident?”

“Why, an what we hear be true, do so many here give themselves to the conquerors body and soul?” Pernavai added.

Her words were bitter as wormwood to Skarnu, who remembered the news sheet listing his sister with that Algarvian colonel. What did the whoreson call himself? Lurcanio, that was it. One day, Skarnu thought, I’ll have a reckoning with Krasta, But that would be true only if Lurcanio had no reckoning with him. Meanwhile--

Meanwhile, Merkela spoke up while he was still contemplating his own embarrassment: “We have traitors, aye. When the time comes, we’ll give them what they deserve.” She raised her proud chin, drew a thumbnail across her throat, and made a horrible gargling noise. “Some have gotten it already.”

“In sooth?” Vatsyunas breathed, and Merkela nodded. The dentist from Forthweg asked, “Know you, then at whose hands these treacherous wretches of whom you speak lie dead? Right gladly would I join with them, for to commence the requital of that which can never be requited.”

“And I.” Pernavai spoke less than her husband, but sounded no less determined.

Before either Skarnu or Merkela could answer, Raunu said, “Even if we knew anything about that, we’d have to be careful about saying very much. What people don’t know, nobody can squeeze out of ‘em.”

“Think you we’d betray--?” Vatsyunas began angrily, but he fell silent when his wife touched his arm. They spoke back and forth in quick classical Kaunian, for them a birthspeech. As usual, Skarnu could make out words, but rarely sentences: as he seized one phrase, two more would slip past him. After perhaps half a minute, Vatsyunas returned to his archaism-littered version of Valmieran: “I am persuaded you have reason. I crave you pardon for mine earlier hasty speech.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Skarnu spoke as he might have in his days as an officer on pardoning a soldier for some minor offense.