Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

Like the traffic on its thoroughfares, Priekule seemed a shadow of its former self. Many shops and taverns were shuttered. Some of those shutters no doubt meant the owners had gone off to war. And some shutters were up because owners wanted to save their expensive glass if Algarvian eggs burst in the capital of Valmiera. None had yet. Krasta was serenely confident none would.

Workmen were piling sandbags around the base of the Kaunian Column of Victory. Cloth sheathed the carved stone. Krasta giggled, thinking of lamb’s-gut sheaths for other columns. A wizard walked around the ancient monument, incanting busily. Perhaps he was fire-proofing the cloth or otherwise sorcerously strengthening it. Valmiera could afford to do that for its treasures. Few nobles and even fewer commoners could afford to do it for their private property.

Horses snorting, the carriage pulled to a stop. Krasta stepped out on to the Avenue of Equestrians. She did not look back, nor wonder even for a moment what the coachman would do till it was time to retrieve her. As far as she was concerned, he stopped existing when she no longer needed him. If he didn’t start existing again the moment she required him, he would be sorry.

Shops on the Avenue of Equestrians remained open. Clerks fawned on Krasta as she strutted into a jeweler’s, a milliner’s, a fancy lampseller’s. The clerk in a fine tailor’s shop did not fawn enough to suit her. She had her revenge: she ran the young girl ragged, trying on every pair of silk and leather and linen trousers in the place.

“And which will milady choose for herself today?” the sweating clerk asked when Krasta redonned her own trousers at last.

“Oh, I do not care to buy today,” Krasta answered sweetly. “I was just comparing your styles to the ones I saw the other day at the House of Spogi.” Out she went, leaving the clerk, slump-shouldered with dejection, staring after her.

Setting the commoner in her place immensely improved Krasta’s mood. She hurried across the street to the Bronze Woodcock, a cafe she’d always favored. An old waiter with a bushy mustache of almost Algarvian impressiveness was leading her to an empty table by the fire when a man a couple of tables away sprang to his feet and bowed. “Will you join me, Marchioness?”

The waiter paused, awaiting Krasta’s decision. She smiled. “Of course I will, Viscount Valnu,” she replied. With a tiny shrug, the waiter steered her to Valnu’s table. The viscount bowed again, this time over her hand. He raised it to his lips, then let it fall. Krasta’s smile got wider. “So good to see you, Viscount,” she said as she sat down. “And since I hadn’t seen you in a while, I thought you must have put on a uniform, as my brother has done.”

Valnu took a pull at the flagon of porter in front of him. Firelight played off his cheekbones. Depending on how it struck his features, they were either beautifully sculpted or skeletal: sometimes both at once. His blood, Krasta thought, was very fine. With a wry smile of his own, he said, “I fear the rigors of the field are not for me. I am a creature of Priekule, and could flourish nowhere else. If King Gainibu grows so desperate as to need my martial services, Valmiera shall be in desperate peril indeed.”

“Porter, milady?” the waiter asked Krasta. “Ale? Wine?”

“Ale,” she said. “Ale and a poached trout on a bed of saffron rice.”

“And I will have the smoked sausage with vinegared cabbage,” Valnu declared. “Hearty peasant fare.” He himself was neither peasantish nor hearty. As the waiter bowed, he went on, “You need not hurry the meals overmuch, my good fellow. The marchioness and I shall amuse ourselves in the meantime by talking about rank.” The waiter bowed again and departed.

Krasta clapped her hands together. “That is well said!” she cried. “Truly you are a man of great nobility indeed.”

“I do my best,” Valnu said. “More than that, I cannot do. More than that, no man can do.”

“So many of the superior class do not even try to come up to such standards,” Krasta said. “And so many of the lower order these days are so grasping and vulgar and rude, they require lessons in the art of dealing with their better.” She explained how she had dealt with the clerk in the clothier’s establishment.

Valnu’s delighted grin displayed very white, even teeth and made him look more like a skull than ever, save only for the glow of admiration in his bright blue eyes. “That is excellent,” he said. “Excellent! You could hardly have done better without running her through, and, had you done that, she would not have long appreciated what you’d taught her.”

“I suppose not,” Krasta agreed regretfully, “though that might have left a stronger impression on the rest of the vulgar herd.”

Valnu clicked his tongue between his teeth several times, shaking his head all the while. “People would talk, my dear. People would talk. And now”—he sipped his porter—“shall we talk?”

Talk he and Krasta did: who was sleeping with whom, who was feuding with whom (two topics often intimately related), whose family was older than whose, who had been caught out while trying to make his family seem older than it was. That was meat and drink to Krasta. She leaned across the small table toward Valnu, so intent and interested that she hardly noticed the waiter bringing them their luncheons.

Valnu did not at once attack his sausage and sour cabbage, either. In a sorrowful voice, he said, “And, I hear, Duke Kestu lost his only son and heir in Algarve the other day. When I think of how the Six Years’ War cut down so many noble stems, when I think of how likely this war is to do the same … I fear for the future of our kind, milday.”

“There will always be a nobility.” Krasta spoke with automatic confidence, as if she had said, There will always be a sunrise in the morning. But her family’s male line depended on her brother. And Skarnu was fighting in Algarve, and he had no heir. She did not care to think about that. To keep from thinking about it, she took a long pull from her flagon of ale and began to eat the trout and rice on the plate before her.

“I hope everything goes as well as it can for you and yours, milady,” Valnu said quietly. Krasta wished he had not said anything at all. If he had to say something, that was more kindly and less worrisome than most of the other things she could think of.

He dug into the pungent cabbage and sausage—peasant fare indeed—and made them disappear at an astonishing rate. However emaciated he appeared, it was not due to any failure of appetite.

Nor, very plainly, was anything wrong with any of his other appetites, either. As Krasta ate, she was startled—but, given some of the things she’d heard about Valnu, not surprised—when, under the table, his hand came down on her leg, well above the knee. She brushed it away as she might have brushed away a crawling insect. “My lord viscount, as you yourself said, people would talk.”

His answering smile was hard and bright and predatory. “Of course they would, my dear. They always do.” The hand returned. “Shall we, then, give them something interesting to talk about?”

She considered, letting his hand linger and even stray upwards while she did. He was well-born, and was attractive in a bony way. While he would certainly be unfaithful, he would never pretend to be anything else. In the end, though, she shook her head and took his hand away again. “Not this afternoon. Too many shops I haven’t yet visited.”

“Thrown over for shops! For shops!” Valnu clapped both hands over his heart, as if pierced by a beam from a stick. Then, in an instant, he went from melodrama to pragmatism: “Well, better that than being thrown over for another lover.”