Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

“Aye,” Ealstan said, and yawned again. He pulled off his tunic, his shoes and socks, and his drawers, and stood there in the kitchen careless of his nakedness. Vanai just smiled and hurried to get the hot water. A few years before, she would have been shocked. What her grandfather would have said… Idon’t care what my grandfather would have said, she thought firmly. This is my husband.

She gave him bread and oil and cheese and olives and onions: all sorts of food that would keep. She wished they had a rest crate for meat and other perishables. They could have afforded one, but they’d never got around to buying it. Now they had to do without. Ealstan sat down, still naked. He wolfed down everything in sight and looked around for more.

“When did you eat last?” Vanai demanded.

“Yesterday?” he said vaguely. “Aye, yesterday, I think. It’s been busy out there.” He shook his head; a few drops of water sprayed out from his hair and his beard. “We’re doing what we have to do-so far, anyway. How’s the baby?”

“She’s fine,” Vanai said, which drew a grin from Ealstan. She got up and filled his mug with wine once more. A moment later, it was empty again. Vanai went on, “She really is starting to smile.”

“That’s good. That’s very good,” Ealstan said. “Here’s hoping we’re able to give her something to smile about.” As if to underscore his words, more eggs burst. He grimaced. “Powers below eat the Algarvians. They don’t care if they knock Eoforwic flat, as long as they get rid of us.”

“Will the Unkerlanters help us?” Vanai asked.

“Who knows what the Unkerlanters will do?” Ealstan said. “Who cares what they’ll do? This isour kingdom, curse it. It doesn’t belong to Swemmel any more than it belongs to Mezentio.”

“Which is all very well,” Vanai said, “but will Swemmel pay any attention if you tell him that?”

“I doubt it.” Ealstan spoke with a bitter cynicism Vanai had heard from other Forthwegians talking about their kingdom’s unhappy history. “When have our neighbors ever paid any attention to us?”

Vanai got up, walked around the table, stood beside Ealstan, and set her hands on his bare shoulders. “I’ll pay attention to you, if you wouldn’t sooner fall asleep.”

He laughed as he looked up at her, but hesitated even so. “Will you be all right if we do?”

“I think so,” she answered. “It should be long enough-and I’ve missed you, too, you know.” She kissed him. That might have been a cue in a farce: Saxburh started to cry. Instead of getting angry, Ealstan laughed again. Vanai hurried off to tend the baby. Saxburh turned out to be both wet and hungry. She also turned out to be wide awake and full of smiles.

“Maybe I will just fall asleep,” Ealstan said after a while.

“Whatever you like.” Vanai knew she would be up a couple of times in the night. Saxburh hadn’t quite got the idea of sleeping through it yet. In a way, having the baby in the flat was an advantage; it left her so tired, the din of fighting outside seldom disturbed her rest.

After a couple of hours, Saxburh went back to sleep again. Vanai set her in the cradle. Ealstan, to her surprise, was still awake. “I must be important to you,” she said as she got undressed.

“You think you’re joking,” he said.

“No.” Vanai shook her head. “I don’t. I know what being tired means, too.”

Ealstan soon proved he wasn’ttoo tired. Vanai straddled him, carefully lowering herself onto him. It hurt. She wasn’t surprised that it did, not after a baby had gone through there. It hurt almost as much as her first time had. She did her best not to let Ealstan see that. She took no pleasure from it. No, that wasn’t true. She took no sensual pleasure, but she did enjoy pleasing Ealstan. He moved slowly and carefully, doing his best not to hurt her, even when he groaned and clutched her backside and spent himself.

She leaned down and kissed him. “Go to sleep now, sweetheart. Nothing’s going to happen till the morning.” Saxburh would, inevitably, wake up between now and then, but Ealstan couldn’t do anything about that.

When the baby did wake up, Ealstan didn’t even hear her cries; he kept on breathing deeply, not quite snoring, in the bed beside Vanai. His breathing didn’t change when she slid out of bed. She shook her head in bemusement. Back in the days when he’d gone to work and she’d had to stay in the flat for fear of being seized as a Kaunian, he’d often risen without waking her. Now the shoe was on the other foot.

Occasional flashes of light came through the shutters as Vanai changed Saxburh’s wet linen and put the baby to her breast: bursts of sorcerous energy, along with the fires those bursts could start. Those flashes meant men shrieking and buildings crashing to ruin, but they looked and sounded like nothing so much as a thunderstorm without the drumming rain.

Saxburh nursed. She burped. She went back to sleep without much fuss. Vanai laid her in the cradle, then lay down beside Ealstan. All sorts of questions filled her mind. Would this uprising do Forthweg any good? If it did, would Ealstan come through safe? The second mattered more to her than the first. If anything happened to Ealstan, she didn’t care what happened to Forthweg.

And then she fell asleep herself. No matter how worried about Ealstan she was, she couldn’t hold her eyes open another moment.

When she woke, it was beginning to get light outside. She found herself alone in bed. She hurried out to the kitchen. Ealstan had left a note behind. /hope I see you again soon, he’d written in classical Kaunian. Whatever happens, I shall love you as long as I live. She stared at that. Tears filled her eyes.

Saxburh chose that moment to wake up with a yowl. Vanai scooped her out of the cradle and sat down to give her her breakfast. As the baby began to nurse, they were both crying.

Ealstan wondered whether he’d been wise to go home during the lull in the fighting. He loved Vanai, and wanted to see her as much as he could. His new little daughter entranced him. But seeing them, while it reminded him of why he was fighting, also reminded him of how much he had to lose. He didn’t need that reminder, not if he was going to lay his life on the line against the redheads.

Leofsig did it, he thought. That brought his fury up to the proper pitch. If it hadn’t been for the Algarvians, his cousin Sidroc never would have quarreled either with him or with his brother. Ealstan hoped Sidroc was dead these days. If he wasn’t, he was still fighting in Plegmund’s Brigade on the Algarvian side. Recruiting broadsheets for Plegmund’s Brigade remained on some walls, though the Forthwegian rebels who held most of Eoforwic had whitewashed the greater number of them.

Ealstan picked his way through rubble up to the barricade of brickwork and boulders and benches behind which the rebels sheltered. A fellow named Beortwulf, who’d been a sergeant in the Forthwegian army and served as a captain here, nodded to him. “Pretty quiet right now. The redheads have been busy further west.” He pointed across the Twegen before continuing, “To them, we’re an afterthought. They’re really sweating about Swemmel’s men.”

“Afterthought, eh?” Ealstan bared his teeth in a fierce grin. “Let’s seem ‘em try moving men through Eoforwic and call us an afterthought.”

“Something to that,” Beortwulf agreed. “Far as I’m concerned, the powers below can eat Algarve and Unkerlant both.”

“Aye.” Ealstan nodded. “It’d make things a lot easier for Forthweg, that’s certain.”

Before Beortwulf could answer, a runner called Ealstan’s name. When he admitted to being in the neighborhood, the fellow said, “Come on with me. The big boss wants to have a chat with you.”