Harry Turtledove - Rulers of the Darkness

Ealstan sat. The chair, at a guess, was worth more than all the furniture in his flat. He raised the glass Ethelhelm had given him and asked, "To what shall we drink?"

"I've been drinking for a while," the band leader said. "I've been drinking to being able to drink. Will that do for you, or do I have to come up with something fancier?" He knocked back his glass of brandy at a gulp.

More cautiously, Ealstan drank, too. "As bad as that?" he asked.

"Worse," Ethelhelm said. "Eventually, you can go through all the receipts and see how much money I lost. It could have been worse. I could have stayed here and lost even more. Aye, as bad as that."

"Why did they let you go, then, if all they were going to do was steal from you?" Ealstan didn't usually drink brandy in the morning, but made an exception today. He thought he would need lubricating to hear the band leader's story.

"Why?" Ethelhelm's laugh had nothing to do with honest mirth; it seemed more a howl of pain. "I'll tell you why: so they would have more to steal, that's why." He disappeared into the kitchen again, and returned with his glass newly full. "But I never thought when I set out that they'd steal so bloody much."

"They're Algarvians," Ealstan said, as if that explained everything.

But Ethelhelm only laughed that raw, wounded laugh again. "Even Algarvians have limits- most of the time. They don't have any limits with me. None at all. Look."

He rose again. Ealstan had hardly any choice but to look at him. The band leader was swarthy like a proper Forthwegian, but he overtopped Ealstan (who was of good size by Forthwegian standards) by half a head. His face was longer than a Forthwegian's should have been, too. Kaunian blood, sure as sure.

"If I don't do what they tell me, if I don't pay whatever they ask of me…" His voice faded out. "They'd just as soon kill me as waste their time dickering. You can't pick your ancestors. That's what everybody says, and it's not a lie, but oh, by the powers above, how I wish it were."

"Maybe you ought to quit singing and find quiet work where they won't pay any attention to you," Ealstan said slowly.

Ethelhelm glared. "Why don't you ask me to cut my leg off, too, while I'm at it?"

"If it's in a trap, sometimes you have to," Ealstan answered. He knew all about that. He'd had to flee Gromheort after stunning his cousin Sidroc when Sidroc found out he'd been seeing Vanai. At the time, he hadn't known whether Sidroc would live or die. He'd lived, lived and gone on to kill Ealstan's brother Leofsig, so Ealstan wished he'd killed him.

Ethelhelm was shaking his head back and forth. He looked trapped. "I can't, curse it," he said. "Ask me to live without my music and you might as well ask me not to live at all."

Patiently, Ealstan said, "I'm not asking you to live without your music. Make all you want, for yourself and for whatever friends you make after you disappear from Eoforwic. Just don't make a big enough splash with it to draw the redheads' notice."

"It's not just making the music." The band leader shook his head. "I think I'm trying to explain color to a blind man. You don't know what it's like to get up there on a stage and have thousands of people clapping and yelling out your name." He waved at the elegant flat. "You don't know what it's like to have all this stuff, either."

Ethelhelm didn't know that Ealstan's father was well-to-do. Ealstan didn't know how much like his father he sounded when he said, "If these things are more important to you than staying alive, you haven't got them. They've got you. Same goes for getting up on stage."

Now Ethelhelm stared at him. "You're not my mother, you know. You can't tell me what to do."

"I'm not telling you what to do," Ealstan said. "I'm just a bookkeeper, so I can't. But I can't help seeing how things add up, either, and that's what I'm telling you. You don't have to listen to me."

Ethelhelm kept shaking his head. "You don't have any idea how hard I've worked to get where I am."

"And where is that, exactly?" Ealstan returned. "Under the Algarvians' eye, that's where. Under their thumb, too."

"Curse you," the band leader snarled. "Who told you you could come here and mock me?"

Ealstan got to his feet and gave Ethelhelm a courteous bow: almost an Algarvian-style bow. "Good day," he said politely. "I'm sure you'll have no trouble finding someone else to keep your books in order for you- or you can always do it yourself." He had a good deal of his father's quiet but touchy pride, too.

"Wait!" Ethelhelm said, as if he were a superior entitled to give orders. Ealstan kept walking toward the door. "Wait!" Ethelhelm said again, this time with a different kind of urgency. "Do you know any people who could help me disappear out from under the redheads' noses?"

"No," Ealstan said, and set his hand on the latch. It was true. He wished he did know people of that sort. He would gladly have joined their ranks. Even if he had known them, though, he wouldn't have admitted it to Ethelhelm. The musician might have used their services. But he might also have betrayed them to Mezentio's men to buy favor for himself. Ealstan opened the door, then turned back and bowed again. "Good luck. Powers above keep you safe."

Walking home, he wondered how he'd make up the hole in his income he'd just created for himself. He thought he would be able to manage it. He'd been in Eoforwic a year and a half now. People who needed their accounts reckoned up were getting to know he was in business, and that he was good.

Men were pasting up new broadsheets in his neighborhood. They showed a dragon with King Swemmel's face flaming eastern Derlavai, the slogan beneath reading, SLAY THE BEAST! The Algarvians used good artists. Ealstan still wondered if anyone took the broadsheets seriously.

The postman was putting mail in boxes when he went into his building. "One for you here," the fellow said, and thrust an envelope into his hand.

"Thanks," Ealstan replied, and then said, "Thanks!" again in a different tone of voice when he recognized his father's handwriting. He didn't hear from Gromheort nearly often enough, though he understood why: he might still be sought, and writing carried risk. He was smiling when he opened the envelope and stepped into the stairwell- he'd read the letter on the way up.

By the time he got to the top, he wasn't smiling anymore. When Vanai opened the door to let him in, he thrust the letter into her hand. She quickly read it, then let out a long sigh. "I wish I were sorrier to hear they'd caught my grandfather," she said at last. "He was a fine scholar."

"Is that all you have to say?" Ealstan asked.

"It's bad luck to speak ill of the dead," she answered, "so I said what good I could." Brivibas had raised Vanai from the time she was small; Ealstan knew as much. He didn't know what had estranged them, and wondered if he ever would. Later that evening, he found his father's letter, a balled-up wad of paper, in the wastebasket. Whatever her reasons, Vanai meant them.

Lieutenant Recared's whistle squealed. "Forward!" the young officer shouted.

"Forward!" Sergeant Leudast echoed, though without the accompaniment of the whistle.

"Urra!" the Unkerlanter soldiers shouted, and forward they went. They'd been going forward ever since they cut off the redheads down in Sulingen, and Leudast saw no reason they shouldn't keep right on going forward till they ran King Mezentio out of his palace in Trapani.

He had no sure notion of where Trapani was. Until Swemmel's impressers hauled him into the army, he'd known only his own village not too far west of the border with Forthweg and the nearby market town. He'd seen a lot more of the world since, but few pleasant places in it.

The village ahead didn't look very pleasant. It did have one thing in common with Trapani, wherever Trapani was: it was full of Algarvians. Mezentio's soldiers had never quit fighting through their long, hard retreat from southern Unkerlant; they simply hadn't had the manpower to hold back the Unkerlanters over a broad front. In any one skirmish, though, there was no guarantee Leudast and his countrymen would come out on top.