Harry Turtledove - Darkness Descending

“Men,” Conberge added.

Sidroc looked from one of them to the other. Then, suspiciously, he looked at the plum. “Has this thing turned into brandy while I wasn’t looking?” he asked. Ealstan and Conberge both shrugged, so solemnly that they started laughing again. Sidroc snorted. “I think the two of you have gone daft, is what I think.”

“You’re probably right,” Ealstan told him. “They do say that too many bookkeeping problems--”

“Compounded quarterly,” his sister broke in.

“Compounded quarterly, aye,” Ealstan agreed. “Bookkeeping problems compounded quarterly cause calcification of the brain.”

“Even you don’t know what that means,” Sidroc said.

“It means my brain is turning into a rock, like yours was to start with,” Ealstan said. “If the Algarvians had let you take stonelore, you would have found out for yourself.”

“Think you’re so smart.” Sidroc kept smiling, but his voice held an edge. “Well, maybe you are. But so what? So what?--that’s what I want to know. What’s it gotten you?” Without waiting for an answer, he pitched his plum pit into the trash basket and stalked out of the kitchen.

Ealstan wished he could ignore the question. It was too much to the point. Since Sidroc hadn’t stayed around, he turned back to Conberge. “What has being smart got me? Or you, either? Nothing I can see.”

“Would you rather be stupid? That won’t get you anything, either,” Conberge said. After a moment’s thought, she went on, “If you’re smart, when you grow up you turn into someone like Father. That’s not so bad.”

“No.” But Ealstan remained unhappy. “Even Father, though--what is he? A bookkeeper in a conquered kingdom where the Algarvians don’t want us to know enough to be bookkeepers.”

“But he’s teaching you anyhow, and he taught me, too,” Conberge reminded him. “If that isn’t fighting back against the redheads, what is?”

“You’re right.” Ealstan glanced toward the parlor. His father and Uncle Hestan were still arguing. Then he looked at Conberge, as surprised as he’d been when he discovered she knew how to cast accounts. “Sometimes I think I don’t know you at all.”

“Maybe I should have gone on seeming stupid.” His sister shook her head. “Then I’d sound like Sidroc.”

“He isn’t really stupid, not when he doesn’t want to be,” Ealstan said. “I’ve seen that.”

“No, he’s not,” Conberge agreed. “But he doesn’t care about the way things are right now. He’s happy enough to let the Algarvians run Forthweg. So is Uncle Hengist. All they want to do is get along. I want to fight back, if I can.”

“Me, too,” Ealstan said, realizing his father might have been teaching him more than bookkeeping after all.

“Milady, he is waiting for you downstairs,” Bauska said as Marchioness Krasta dithered between two fur wraps.

“Well, of course he is,” Krasta answered, finally choosing the red fox over the marten.

“But you should have gone down there some little while ago,” the maidservant said. “He is an Algarvian. What will he do to you?”

“He won’t do a thing,” Krasta said with rather more confidence than she felt. Standing straighter and brushing back a stray lock of pale gold hair, she added, “I have him wrapped around my little finger.” That was a lie, and she knew it. With a younger suitor, a more foolish suitor, it might well have been true. Colonel Lurcanio, though, to her sometimes intense annoyance, did not yield himself so readily.

When Krasta did go downstairs, she found Lurcanio with his arms folded across his chest and a sour expression on his face. “Good of you to join me at last,” he said. “I was beginning to wonder if I should ask one of the kitchen women to go with me to the king’s palace in your place.”

From most men, that would have been annoyed bluster. Lurcanio was annoyed, but he did not bluster. If he said he’d been thinking of taking one of the kitchen wenches to the palace, he meant it.

“I’m here, so let’s be off,” Krasta said. Lurcanio did not move, but stood looking down his straight nose at her. She needed a moment to realize what he expected. It was more annoying than anything he required of her in bed. Grudgingly, very grudgingly, she gave it to him: “I’m sorry.”

“Then we’ll say no more about it,” Lurcanio replied, affable again now that he’d got his way. He offered her his arm. She took it. They went out to his carriage together.

His driver said something in Algarvian that sounded rude. Had he been Krasta’s servant, she would have struck him or dismissed him on the spot. Lurcanio only laughed. That irked her. Lurcanio knew it irked her and did it anyhow to remind her Valmiera was a conquered kingdom and she a victor’s plaything.

After the carriage began to roll, she asked him, “Have you ever been able to learn what became of my brother?”

“I am afraid I have not,” Colonel Lurcanio answered with what sounded like real regret. “Captain Skarnu, Marquis Skarnu, is not known to have been slain. He is not known to have been captured. He is not known to have been among those who surrendered after King Gainibu capitulated. It could be--and for your sake, my lovely lady, I hope it is--that the records of capture and surrender are defective. It would not be the first time.”

“What if they aren’t?” Krasta asked. Lurcanio did not reply. After a few seconds, she recognized the expression on his long, somber face as pity. “You think he’s dead!” she exclaimed.

“Milady, there at the end, the war moved very swiftly,” the Algarvian officer replied. “A man might fall with all his comrades too caught up in the retreat to bring him with them. Our own soldiers would have been more concerned with the Valmierans still ahead than with those who could endanger them no more.”

“It could be so.” Krasta did not want to believe it. But, with most of a year passed since she’d heard from Skarnu, she had a hard time denying it, too. As was her way, when a painful fact stared her in the face, she looked in another direction: in this case, around Priekule. “I don’t see so many Algarvian soldiers on the streets these days, I don’t think.”

“You are likely right,” Lurcanio said. “Some of them have gone west to join in the fight against King Swemmel.”

“He’s a nasty sort,” Krasta said. “He deserves whatever happens to him and so does his kingdom.” Civilization, as far as she was concerned, did not run west of Algarve. Not so long before, she would have said it did not run west of Valmiera.

Someone shouted at her from a dark side street: “Algarvian’s hired twat!” Running footsteps said the fellow who’d yelled had not lingered to note the effects of his remark. In that, no doubt, he was wise. Had she been able to catch him, Krasta would not have been gentle.

Colonel Lurcanio patted her leg, a little above the knee. “Just another fool,” he said, “so take no notice of him. I do not need to hire you, do I?”

“Of course not.” Krasta tossed her head. Had Lurcanio offered her money for the use of her body, she would have thrown everything she could reach at him. He’d done nothing of the sort. He’d simply made her afraid of what might happen if she said no. (She chose not to dwell on that; she did not care to think of herself as afraid.)

“Ah, here we are,” Lurcanio said a little later, as the carriage came up to the palace. “An impressive building. The royal palace in Trapani is larger, but, I think, less magnificent. One can imagine ruling all the world from here.” After that praise, his laughter sounded doubly cruel. “One can imagine it, but not all that one can imagine comes true.” He descended from the carriage and handed Krasta down. “Shall we pay our respects to your king, who does not rule all the world from here?” He laughed again.