Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

One of the redheads was uncommonly plump. Vanai took a long look at him, though she was careful enough not to get close enough to the glass to let him have a good look at her. She nodded. She’d seen him before, back in Oyngestun. She and her grandfather had almost been sent west, but he’d spoken up on their behalf, and two others had gone instead.

Now he was here. What did that mean? Nothing good-she was sure of it. Were any Kaunians at all left alive in and around Gromheort? Maybe the Algarvians didn’t need constables there anymore. Vanai didn’t want to think that was true, but it made an unpleasant amount of sense.

Along with his partner, the plump constable strolled around the corner and disappeared. Vanai let out a sigh of relief, though she didn’t know why. How was she in less danger now than she had been while the constables remained in sight? In no way she could see. But she did feel better, regardless of whether she had any rational reason to do so.

“My grandfather would not approve of such irrationality,” she said. More and more these days, she’d fallen into the habit of talking aloud to the baby. She seldom had anyone else to talk to. Not many Kaunians were left in this block of flats, not after the latest roundup.

Isuppose seeing that constable made my grandfather come into my mind, Vanai thought. Normally, Brivibas didn’t enter her thoughts very often. When he did, she usually tried to force him out of them again. He would have disapproved of much more than a momentary lapse of irrationality. Her hands went to her belly once more. Having a child by a Forthwegian would have topped his list. She was sure of that. Bnvibas would have thundered on and on about diluting Kaunianity.

“But don’t you see, my grandfather?” Vanai said, as if he stood beside her. “The Algarvians have done more to dilute Kaunianity in Forthweg than the Forthwegians could have done if they’d made half our maidens marry their young men.”

Her grandfather would have said something stuffy about that being beside the point. She didn’t think it was. Back before the war-that magical phrase-perhaps one in ten ofKingPenda ’s subjects had been of Kaunian blood. How many Kaunians would be left alive by the time the war ended? Any at all? Even if there were some scattered handful, would they have any weight in Forthweg-assuming a Kingdom of Forthweg ever existed again? Penda had had to notice a tenth of his subjects. Would he have to notice a thirtieth, or a fiftieth, or whatever remnant of blonds was left?

Vanai laughed bitterly. Not being noticed by King Penda-if Penda ever came back from exile-was, at the moment, the least of her worries, and of the Forthwegian Kaunians’ worries, too. Surviving till he returned-if he returned-took pride of place there.

The baby kicked inside her, strongly enough to make her hand move on her belly. She nodded to herself. The baby kicked hard these days. Once or twice, it had kicked in just the wrong place and made one of her legs go weak beneath her for a moment. She counted herself lucky that she hadn’t fallen.

Patting her swollen stomach, she said, “And you ought to count yourself lucky that I didn’t fall, too.” The baby rewarded her with another kick and a wriggle. It wasn’t listening to her. She sighed. No one did, these days. The only person who’d ever really listened to her, as long as she could remember, was Ealstan.

Tears welled up in her eyes. She’d known terror after the Algarvians captured her. She’d expected that. What she hadn’t expected was the most crushing loneliness she’d ever known. She’d got used to having someone with whom she could talk, someone to whom she really mattered, someone to whom she wasn’t just a research assistant or a convenience (or, occasionally, an inconvenience).

She hadn’t realized how important, how marvelous that was, till she didn’t have it any more. She wiped the tears on her sleeve. Before she got pregnant, they would have embarrassed her. Now she almost took them for granted. They came more easily these days. She didn’t know why that was so, but she knew that it was so.

Even back in the days of the Kaunian Empire, people had noticed the same thing. A couple of quotations from the days of the Empire flashed through her mind. Her mouth twisted. That she knew such things was her grandfather’s doing. And what had it got her? A flat in the Kaunian district, a wait till the Algarvians caught her and took her away.

For that matter, what had Brivibas’ erudition got him? First, the attentions ofMajorSpinello, who’d had plenty of attentions to give Vanai, too, curse him. And last, a makeshift noose in an Algarvian gaol cell after he got recognized in spite of his sorcerous disguise as a Forthwegian.

“So much for scholarship,” she said, though she did wonder how her grandfather had been recognized. Had the magic worn off, as hers had done? She found that hard to believe: Brivibas was nothing if not careful and precise. Had someone known his voice in spite of the way he looked? That seemed more plausible. But who could have?

MajorSpinellomight have. Vanai shuddered. Spinello had gone off to the west to fight the Unkerlanters. She hoped he was dead, horribly dead. But even if he wasn’t, he was there, in the west, not in Gromheort. Who else? That plump constable? Would he have had any special reason to remember and recognize Brivibas? Vanai could only shrug. How could she know what had happened in Oyngestun after she left with Ealstan?

The baby wiggled and twisted inside her. The sensation was like none she’d ever known. She wondered how she could put it into words for someone who hadn’t known it. After a moment, she shook her head. She didn’t think there were any such words.

“Oh, stop,” she said, when the baby seemed to be trying to learn to dance inside a space that didn’t have room for fancy steps. “If it weren’t for you, I’d be back at my own flat, not here.”

She was sure the baby made the masking spell she’d devised fade away faster than it would have otherwise. She wondered how long the spell would hold if she tried it now, with the baby so much bigger. She’d probably have to renew it every half hour, maybe even more.

“I could,” she said. “I would. But…” Anyone who looked like a Forthwegian caught inside the Kaunian quarter would be blazed, no questions asked. “If it weren’t for that, I really could,” Vanai repeated. She had the dark brown strand of yarn and the yellow one. She even had a Forthwegian-style woman’s tunic. She’d found it going through a now-empty flat in the building. She sometimes wore it when the weather got warm. She’d always despised those baggy tunics, but they were a lot more comfortable for a pregnant woman than any trousers.

Here came that Algarvian constable and his partner, back along the street. They were both talking and gesturing animatedly, as Algarvians did. The plump constable laughed at something the other one said. How can you do that? How can you laugh? ’Vanai wondered. You must know what goes on here. How can you not care?

Bells began to clang then, not just in the Kaunian quarter but all over Eoforwic. The two Algarvian constables stopped laughing. The plump one shouted a phrase Vanai didn’t understand-one she judged unlikely ever to have appeared in polite literature-and shook his fist at the sky. Then he and his partner stopped strolling along and started hurrying away from the Kaunian quarter.

Blonds on the street started hurrying, too: hurrying toward those blocks of flats that had cellars. From the gossip at the feeding stations the Algarvians maintained, Vanai had heard that her own people had killed a couple of constables rash enough to go down into a cellar with them. She didn’t know if that was true-it sounded almost too good to be true-but she hoped so.