Harry Turtledove: Darkness Descending

It no longer hurt, as it had the first time. Spinello was not cruel that particular way. In fact, he kept trying to please her. He would caress her for what seemed like forever before doing what he wanted. She never kindled. She never came close to kindling. She despised him far too much for that. Even resignation wasn’t easy, though at last she managed it.

Instead of by wounding her in the bedchamber, Spinello took his nasty pleasure by ostentatiously leading her to that chamber and closing the door in Brivibas’ face. He didn’t bother barring it. Once, in a transport of impotent fury, Brivibas had burst in. “Come to watch, have you?” Spinello asked coolly, not missing a stroke. Vanai’s grandfather reeled away as if blazed through the heart.

It was after Major Spinello left that the fights would start. “Better you should have let me die than to do such a thing!” Brivibas would shout. Vanai knew he meant it, too, which was twisting the knife.

She always answered the same way: “In a while, this will be over. If you died, my grandfather, that would be forever, and I could not bear it.”

“But how does this make me look?” Brivibas cried one day. “Preserved alive because my granddaughter gives herself to an Algarvian barbarian? How am I to hold my head up in the village?”

He spoke in terms of himself, not in terms of Vanai. His selfishness infuriated her. She said, “I have not been able to hold my head up in Oyngestun since you first grew friendly toward the Algarvian barbarian--which is not what you called him when he began meeting with you-- how he admired your scholarship! I shared your shame then. If you share mine now, is it not part of the bargain you made?”

Brivibas stared at her. For a moment, she thought she’d made him see things through her eyes. But then he said, “How, after this, will I be able to make a proper marriage alliance for you?”

“How, after this, do you think I would ever want another man to touch me?” Vanai retorted, at which her grandfather flinched and retreated to the safety of his study. Vanai glared after him. He hadn’t thought about how she might feel about being married, only about the difficulties her behavior might cause him. A poisonous thought sprouted in her mind, tempting and lethal as a death-cap mushroom: Ishould have let him labor till he dropped.

She shook her head violently. If she blamed him for thinking only of himself, how could she let herself do the same? By all the logic Brivibas had so carefully taught her, she couldn’t. And once in the open, the thought sickened her. However much she wanted it to, though, it would not go away.

When she had to go out in the streets of Oyngestun, she held her own head high. That stiff, straight carriage--and the trousers she wore, still stubbornly clinging to Kaunian styles--drew howls and leers from the Algarvian soldiers who passed through the village these days, marching west toward the fight with Unker-lant down roads her grandfather had helped pave. The men of the small local garrison, though, stopped bothering her. She wished she could be happy about that, but she understood why all too well: they knew she was an officer’s plaything, and so not for the likes of common soldiers.

Only little by little did she notice that the Kaunians of Oyngestun were slower to curse her or turn their backs on her than they had been the summer before. When she did notice, she scratched her head. Then all she’d done was eat some of the food Major Spinello lavished on her grandfather and her in the hope of getting Brivibas to say how happy he was with Algarvian rule. Now she was indeed Spinello’s plaything, was the harlot she’d been accused of being then. The villagers should have hated her more than ever.

She got part of the answer one day from Tamulis the apothecary. Brivibas had sent her forth because he was down with a headache--he seemed to come down with headaches ever more often these days--and they had no powders in the house. Handing her a packet, the apothecary remarked, “I’m cursed if I think the old buzzard is worth it.”

“What? Headache powders?” Vanai shrugged. “We can afford them--and, except for food, there’s not much to spend silver on these days.”

Tamulis looked at her. After a moment, he said, “I was not talking about headache powders.”

Vanai felt the flush climb from her throat to her hairline. She couldn’t even say she didn’t know what he was talking about. She did. Oh, she did. She looked down at the dusty slates of the floor. “He is my grandfather,” she whispered.

“By all the signs I’ve seen, that’s his good fortune and none of yours,” the apothecary said, his voice rough.

Tears filled Vanai’s eyes. To her mortification, they began dripping down her cheeks. She was powerless to stop them. She’d spent so long and put so much effort into inuring herself to the villagers’ scorn, sympathy struck her with double force. “I’d better go,” she said thickly.

“Here, lass--wait,” Tamulis said. Blurrily, she saw him holding out a square of cloth to her. “Dry your eyes.”

She obeyed, though she didn’t think it would help. Her eyes would still be red and swollen, her face blotchy. When she handed the cloth back, she said, “These days, we all do what we have to do to get through.”

Tamulis grunted. “You do more for that long-winded old foof than he would ever do for you.”

Vanai had a vision of a statuesque, brassy-haired Algarvian noblewoman demanding that Brivibas--whose own blond hair was heavily streaked with silver--make love to her to keep his granddaughter out of a labor gang. She held that vision in her mind for a couple of seconds. . . but for no more than a couple of seconds, because after that she exploded into laughter almost as involuntary as her tears had been. Try as she would, she couldn’t imagine an Algarvian noblewoman with such peculiar tastes.

“And what’s so funny now?” Tamulis asked.

Somehow, explaining to the apothecary why she’d laughed would have embarrassed Vanai more than having the whole village know Major Spinello spread her thighs whenever the fancy struck him. Maybe it was that she couldn’t do anything about Spinello, not if she wanted Brivibas to stay safe in Oyngestun. But maybe, too, it was that explaining would have meant admitting she’d had a bawdy thought of her own. She took the headache powders and left in a hurry.

“What kept you?” Brivibas demanded peevishly when she gave him the powders. “My head feels as if it were on the point of falling off.”

“I brought them to you as quickly as I could, my grandfather,” Vanai answered. “I am sorry you are in pain.” She kept her voice soft and deferential. She’d been doing that around Brivibas for as long as she could remember. It was harder now than it had been. She sometimes felt he ought to keep his voice soft and deferential around her, considering who owed whom what at the moment.

She shook her head. Brivibas had been father and mother both to her since she was no more than a toddler. All she was doing when she lay still for Spinello or sank to her knees in front of him was paying back a small part of that debt. So she told herself, over and over again.

And then Brivibas said, “Part of my pain, I have no doubt, comes from my grief and sorrow at your fall from the proper standards of Kaunian womanhood.”

Had he said, at what you are enduring for my sake, everything would have been well. But that was not how he measured things. To him, the standards were more important than the reason for which they were broken. Vanai said, “I can meet your expectations, my grandfather, or I can keep you alive. My apologies, but I do not seem to be able to do both at once.” She turned on her heel and walked away without giving him a chance to reply.