Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

“Thanks, Conberge,” Ealstan said.

“Remember to stop at a baker’s on the way home and bring us more bread,” Conberge told him. “Or if the bakers are all out, get ten pounds of flour from a miller. Mother and I can do the baking perfectly well.”

“All right.” Ealstan paused. “What if the millers are out of flour, too?”

His sister looked a bit harried. “In that case, we all start going hungry. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit.” She raised her voice to a shout: “Sidroc! Aren’t you ready yet? Your masters will beat you black and blue, and you’ll deserve it.”

Sidroc was still running a tortoiseshell comb through his dark, curly hair when he hurried into the kitchen to receive a lunch similar to Ealstan’s. “Come on,” Ealstan said. “Conberge’s right—they’ll break switches on our backs if we’re late again.”

“I suppose so,” Sidroc said indifferently. Maybe he needed a thrashing to bring him out of his funk. Ealstan didn’t, and didn’t want to get one because his cousin remained in a daze. He grabbed Sidroc by the arm and hauled him out on to the street.

No Algarvians were strutting past his house, for which he was duly grateful. The mere sight of kilts set his teeth on edge. Being unable to taunt the Algarvians hurt, too, but he didn’t care to take his life in his hands. Women were not the only ones the occupiers outraged.

Ealstan was sure Leofsig and his comrades had done no such things while on Algarvian soil. No: that Leofsig and his comrades could have done such things never entered his mind. And even if they had, the Algarvians would have deserved it.

When he turned the corner on to the main thoroughfare that led to his school, Ealstan could no longer pretend Gromheort remained a free Forthwegian city. For one thing, the Algarvians had checkpoints every few blocks. For another, signboards written in their script—so sinuous as to be hard to read, especially for someone like Ealstan, who was used to angular Forthwegian characters—sprouted everywhere. And, for a third, heading up the thoroughfare toward the school showed him what a battering Gromheort had taken before it finally fell.

The Algarvians had set gangs to work clearing the wreckage of ruined buildings. “Work, cursing you!” a kilted soldier shouted in bad Forthwegian. The Forthwegians and Kaunians the occupiers had rounded up were already working, throwing tiles and chunks of bricks and shattered timbers into wagons. A Kaunian woman bent to pick up a couple of bricks. An Algarvian soldier reached out and ran his hand along the curve of her buttocks.

She straightened with a squeak of outrage. The soldier and his companions laughed. “Work!” he said, and gestured with his stick. Her face a frozen mask, she bent once more. He fondled her again. This time, she went on working as if he did not exist.

Ealstan hustled past the work gang, lest the Algarvians make him join it. Sidroc followed, but kept looking back over his shoulder. His eyes were wide and staring as he watched the solider amuse himself. “Come on,” Ealstan said impatiently.

“Powers above,” Sidroc muttered, as much to himself as to his cousin. “Wouldn’t you like to do that with a woman?”

“Sure I would, if she wanted me to,” Ealstan answered, even though thinking a woman might one day want him to do such a thing required all the imagination he had. But despite that, he noted a distinction Sidroc had missed: “That soldier wasn’t doing it with her—he was doing it to her. Did you see her face? If looks could kill, she’d have wiped out all those stinking redheads.”

Sidroc tossed his head. “She was only a Kaunian.”

“You think the Algarvian cared?” Ealstan asked, and shook his head to give the question his own answer. “He would have done it to”—he started to say to your mother, but checked himself; that hit harder than he wanted to—“to Conberge the same way. Everybody’s fair game to Mezentio’s men.”

“They won,” Sidroc said bitterly. “That’s what you get when you win: you can do as you please.”

“I suppose so,” Ealstan said. “I never thought we could lose.”

“We cursed well did,” Sidroc said. “We might even be worse off, you know? Would you rather we were off in the west, and King Swemmel’s Unkerlanters came stomping through Gromheort? If I had to chose between them and the Algarvians—”

“If I could make a choice, I’d choose to have all of them go far, far away.” Ealstan sighed. “But magic doesn’t work that way. I wish it did.”

They got to the school just as the warning bell clanged, and then ran like madmen to their first class. In spite of his lethargy, Sidroc didn’t want to have his back striped after all. “Why couldn’t the Algarvians have dropped an egg here?” he muttered fretfully as he flung his bottom on to his stool.

But the master of classical Kaunian was not in the chamber to note—and to punish—his tardiness and Ealstan’s. After a heartfelt sigh of relief, Ealstan turned to the scholar next to him and whispered, “Did Master Bede have to visit the Jakes?”

“Don’t think so,” the other youth answered. “I haven’t seen him at all this morning. Maybe the Algarvians have him grubbing stones.”

“He’d be on the other end of the switch if they do,” Ealstan said. Seeing the Kaunian woman molested had bothered him. He could contemplate the master’s being put to hard labor without batting an eye.

A man strode into the classroom. He was a Forthwegian, but he was not Master Bede, even if he did carry a switch in his left hand. “I am Master Agmund,” he announced. “From this day forth, by order of the occupying authorities, all studies in classical Kaunian are suspended, the language being judged useless both because of its antiquated, outmoded nature and because folk of Kaunian blood have wickedly attempted to destroy the Kingdom of Algarve.”

He spoke as if reading from a script. Ealstan gaped. Master Bede and earlier masters of Kaunian had drilled into him—often painfully—that anyone in eastern Derlavai with the slightest claim to culture had to be fluent in the language, regardless of his own blood. Had they been lying? Or did Algarve have its own purposes here?

Agmund answered that in a hurry, saying, “Instead, you shall be instructed in Algarvian, in which subject I am your new master. Attend me.”

One of Ealstan’s classmates, a youth named Odda, thrust his hand in the air. When Agmund recognized him, he said, “Master, can we not learn Algarvian from the soldiers in the city? Why, already I can say ‘How much for your sister?’ just from having heard them say it so much.”

A vast silence fell on the classroom. Ealstan stared, admiring Odda’s defiant bravado. Master Agmund’s stare was of a different sort. He advanced on Odda and gave him the fiercest thrashing Ealstan had ever seen. Agmund said, “My clever little friend, if you were half as funny as you think you are, you would be twice as funny as you really are.”

When the beating was over, the lessons began. Agmund proved himself a capable enough master, and was plainly fluent in Algarvian. Ealstan repeated the words and phrases the master set him. He had no desire to learn Algarvian, but he had no desire to be whipped, either.

He and Sidroc took turns telling the story around the supper table that evening. “The boy did a brave thing,” Sidroc’s father said.

“He certainly did, Uncle Hengist,” Ealstan agreed.

“Brave, aye,” his father said. Hestan looked from Ealstan to Sidroc to Hengist. “Brave, but foolish. The lad suffered for it, as you and your cousin said, and his suffering is not over yet, either, unless I miss my guess. And his family’s suffering will barely have begun.”