Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

“Good day, Constable,” they chorused, smiling at him.

“Good day, fair ladies,” he answered, sweeping off his hat and bowing to each of them in turn. Dalinda wasn’t particularly fair, and was brawnier than most of the men still working for the master gardener. Procla wasn’t anything special, either. Alcina, now, Alcina was worth bowing to. Seeing her sweaty from pruning branches made Bembo wish he’d got her sweaty in a different way. Smiling back at all of them, but at her in particular, he asked, “And how do you like men’s work?”

“Fine,” they said, all together again, so much in unison that Bembo wondered if the gardener had hired them from a singing group that had fallen on hard times.

“Isn’t that something?” the constable said, and gave the head gardener a poke in the ribs with his elbow. “Tell me, pal—does your wife know how you’ve managed to keep your crew going?”

“Now, Constable,” the fellow answered with a nudge and a wink of his own, “do I look that foolish?”

“Not a bit of it, friend, not a bit of it,” Bembo said, chuckling. “But, of course, the municipal business licensing bureau does know you’ve changed the conditions under which you’re operating?”

Had the master gardener said aye, Bembo would have given up and gone on with his patrol. But the man only frowned a little and said, “I hadn’t imagined that would be necessary.”

Bembo clicked his tongue between his teeth and looked doleful. “Oh, that’s too bad. That’s really too bad. Those boys are sticklers, aye, they are. Why, if they were to find out what you were up to, if I were to tell them …” He looked up at the sky, as if he’d forgotten what he was saying.

“Perhaps we can come to an understanding,” the master gardener said, hardly even sounding resigned. He knew how the game was played, and he’d given Bembo an opening. Taking the constable aside, he asked, “Would ten suit you?”

They haggled for a while before meeting at fifteen. Bembo said, “By the powers above, I’ll settle for ten if that one wench—Alcina—feels like being friendly.”

“I didn’t hire her out of a brothel, so I’ll have to ask her,” the gardener said. “If she turns you down, I’ll pay you the extra silver and you can buy what you want.”

“That’s fair,” Bembo agreed.

The gardener went back to Alcina and spoke to her in a low voice. She looked back toward Bembo. “Him?” she said. “Ha!” She tossed her head in fine contempt.

“That costs you another five,” Bernbo growled at the gardener, his ears burning. The other man knew better than to argue with him. He paid out the silver without another word. Bembo took it and stalked off, pleased and angry at the same time. He’d made a profit, but if he’d been a little luckier, he could have had fun, too.

At last, as much by accident as any other way (or so it seemed to him), the Lagoans had given Cornelu an assignment he actually wanted to have. Looming out of the mist ahead of him and Eforiel was Tirgoviste harbor.

He thanked the powers above for the mist. Without it, he would have had a much harder time approaching his home island. The Algarvians patrolled much more alertly than the Sibian navy had—which was one huge reason why King Mezentio’s men ruled in Sibiu these days.

Turning back to the Lagoans Eforiel carried, he asked, “All good?” He would never be truly fluent in their language, but he was beginning to be able to make himself understood.

“Aye,” the three of them said, one after another. They slipped off the lines to which they’d clung while the leviathan brought them across the sea. Cornelu wondered if the toys under Eforiel’s belly were of the same sort the riders going into Valmiera had used or something altogether different. He hadn’t asked. It was none of his business.

“Here. Wait,” he said as the Lagoan raiders got ready to swim off. Treading water, they looked back at him. From inside his rubber suit, he pulled out a thin tube of oiled leather, tightly sealed at both ends. He spoke Lagoan phrases he’d carefully memorized: “Envelope in here. Please put in post box. For my wife.”

He had not fled Sibiu with any such envelopes—printed in advance to show the proper postage fee had been paid—in his possession. Neither had any of his fellow exiles from the island kingdom. But Lagoas had hobbyists who collected such things. He’d been able to buy what he wanted from a shop that catered to them, and hadn’t paid above twice what he would have at his own post office.

One of the Lagoans took the waterproof tube. “Aye, Commander, we’ll take care of it,” he said in Algarvian. That was a two-edge sword; it would let him be understood by most Sibians, but might make him seem an occupier rather than someone fighting the occupiers.

Cornelu shrugged as he said, “I thank you.” Few Lagoans really spoke his language. Most thought Algarvian was close enough, and most of the time, up till the war, they’d been right. Now, though, a man who used o-endings instead of u-endings and trilled his “r”s instead of gargling them showed he did not come from the unlucky islands King Burebistu had ruled.

With a last wave, the Lagoans swam toward the shore, pushing their canister full of trouble ahead of them. They vanished into the mist almost at once. Cornelu had everything he could do not to slip away from his leviathan and swim after them. To come so close to Tirgoviste and not be allowed to go ashore was cruel, cruel. And yet, if he disobeyed his orders and left Eforiel behind, how could he strike more blows against Algarve? If all he wanted was to stay home, he could have surrendered after King Mezentio’s men seized Sibiu. He had not. He would not.

“Costache,” he murmured. And, somewhere up there in Tirgoviste town, he had a son or daughter he’d never seen. That was hard, too.

Eforiel let out a questioning grunt. Leviathans were smarter than animals had any business being, and Eforiel and he had been together almost as long as he and Costache. She knew something was wrong, even if she couldn’t quite fathom what.

Cornelu sighed and stroked her smooth, pliant skin. It wasn’t the lover’s caress he wanted to give his wife, but had satisfactions of its own. “I cannot abandon you, either, can I?” he said. Eforiel grunted again. She wanted to tell him something, but he was not clever enough to know what.

His orders were to make for Setubal once more as soon as he had dropped off the raiders or saboteurs or whatever they were. Obeying those orders exactly as he’d got them proved impossible. He was a warrior disciplined enough to keep from abandoning the fight and trying to sneak home to his wife. But not all the discipline in the world could have kept him from lingering for a while outside the harbor in the hope of at least getting a long, bittersweet look at the land he loved.

He knew the mist might lay on the sea all day; it often did, in wintertime. If it did today, he promised himself he would guide Eforiel southeast again when evening came. Till then, he would wait. The Lagoans could not complain about when he returned. As he reluctantly admitted to himself, they were seamen, too; they understood the sea was not always a neat, tidy, precise place.

He looked west, in the direction of distant Unkerlant. King Swemmel’s commodores probably timed their leviathan-riders with water clocks, and docked their pay for every minute they were late coming into port. That was what they called efficiency. Cornelu called it madness, but the Unkerlanters cared no more for his opinion than he did for Swemmel’s.

Eforiel lunged off to one side after a pilchard or a squid, almost jerking Cornelu out of his harness. He laughed; while he was thinking about Unkerlant, an unprofitable pleasure if ever there was one, the leviathan was worrying about keeping her belly full. “You have better sense than I,” he said, and patted her again. She wriggled under his hand, as if to answer, Well, of course.