Into the Darkness (77 page)

Leofsig eyed Burgred. Mentioning Kaunians to him was a calculated jab. He responded to it, sure enough, but not in the way Leofsig had expected, saying, “Ought to hang all the stinking Kaunians, same as the redheads hanged that one bugger back in town. Serve ‘em right.”

“They’re not that bad,” Leofsig said, which was about as far as he could go without putting himself in danger. “What did they ever do to you?”

“They’re Kaunians,” Burgred said, which seemed to be the only answer he thought necessary. Several of the men in the labor gang were Kaunians, too, but Burgred didn’t bother trying to keep his voice down. He took it for granted that the blonds would know what he thought of them. Maybe they took it for granted, too, because, while a couple of them must have heard him, they didn’t get angry.

No. In the captives’ camp, Leofsig had got to know Kaunians better than he had before. They got angry. They didn’t show it. Had they dared show it in Forthweg, they would soon have become a tinier minority than they already were.

Before he could take that thought any further, they came to the end of the cobbled stretch of road. When the wagons stopped, Burgred let out a theatrical sigh of relief. The Algarvian soldier pointed dramatically toward the northeast. “Moving on!” he cried. Even in his bits of Forthwegian, he made the prospect of setting stones in the roadbed more exciting than one of Leofsig’s countrymen could do.

Not all the stones in the wagon were proper rounded cobblestones. A lot of them came from the rubble left over from the fighting in Gromheort. Whenever Leofsig picked up one of those, he tried to see if he could figure out from what building it had come. He’d succeeded a couple of times, but only a couple. Most of them were just anonymous chunks of masonry.

He laughed at himself. He couldn’t help thinking, even on a job as mindless as roadbuilding. He watched Burgred carry a stone from the wagon to the roadway, dig out the roadbed so his stone would lie more or less level with its neighbors, and then slam it into place. Was Burgred doing much in the way of thinking while he did that? Leofsig had his doubts. Leofsig doubted Burgred did much in the way of thinking any time.

Leofsig was carrying a stone—another anonymous bit of rubble—of his own to what would be its place in the roadbed when the Algarvian straw boss let out a furious shout. “Who doing?” he demanded, pointing to a stone some ten or twenty feet away from the present border between paving and dirt. “Who doing?” From his point of view, he had a right to be exercised: the stone jaggedly projected half a foot above its fellows.

No one in the labor gang said anything. No one had been close to the stone when the Algarvian noticed it. Any one of four or five different men might have set it there. Nobody’d paid any attention.

“Must have been one of the Kaunians,” Burgred said. “Hang ‘em all.”

“Sabotage bad,” the straw boss said.
Sabotage
was a fancy word, but one that tied in with his job. He shook his head. “Very bad. Killing sabotagers.”

“Oh, aye,” Leofsig murmured. “That’s clever, isn’t it? Now whoever did it is sure to admit it.”

“Hang a couple of Kaunians,” Burgred repeated loudly. “Nobody will miss the whoresons, and then we can get on with the fornicating road.”

One of the blond men in the labor gang took a couple of steps toward him. “I have a wife,” he said. “I have children. I have a mother. I have a father. I know who he is, too, which is more than you can say.”

Burgred needed a bit to get that. For a couple of heartbeats, Leofsig thought he wouldn’t, which would have been convenient. Probably because it would have been convenient, it didn’t happen. “Call me a bastard, will you?” Burgred roared, and started toward the Kaunian.

Leofsig brought him down with a tackle as fierce and illegal as the one he’d used to level Sidroc. He’d regretted that one, because he should have let his cousin keep going. He wasn’t the least bit sorry about knocking Burgred over. Burgred wasn’t very happy about it, though. They rolled on the cobbles and then off the cobbles and on to the dirt, pummeling each other.

“You stopping!” the Algarvian yelled at them. They didn’t stop. Had either of them stopped, the other would have gone right on doing damage. The straw boss turned to the laborers. “Stopping they!”

The men from the work gang pulled Leofsig and Burgred apart. Leofsig had a cut lip and a bruised cheek. Burgred, he saw, had a bloody nose and a black eye. Leofsig’s ribs ached. He hoped Burgred’s did, too.

“Kaunian-lover,” Burgred snarled.

“Oh, shut up, you cursed fool,” Leofsig answered wearily. “When you start talking about hanging people, you can’t really be surprised if they insult you. Besides”—he spoke quietly so the Algarvian soldier wouldn’t follow—“when we quarrel, who laughs? The redheads, that’s who.”

Had he just talked about Kaunians, he never would have got Burgred to pay him any attention. But Burgred did glance over at the straw boss. When he shrugged off the hands that restrained him, it wasn’t so he could get at either Leofsig or the Kaunian. “A pestilence take ‘em all,” he muttered.

“No pay.” The Algarvian pointed at Leofsig. “No pay.” He pointed at Burgred. “No pay.” He pointed at the Kaunian who’d questioned Burgred’s legitimacy.

“I don’t lose much,” the Kaunian said.

Ignoring that, the Algarvian went on, “No treason. No sabotage.” He’d learned the Forthwegian words he needed to know, all right. He pointed back at the offending chunk of stone. “Fixing that. One more? Losing heads.” This time, he pointed to everyone in the work gang in turn. By the expressions on the laborers’ faces, none of them, Forthwegians or Kaunians, thought he was joking.

A tall, blond Kaunian and a couple of stocky, swarthy Forthwegians broke up the offending stone. They didn’t quarrel about who did what. In the face of the straw boss’s threat, that didn’t matter. Getting the work done mattered, and they did it. Leofsig watched them with a certain sour satisfaction. Under the threat of death, they might have become brothers. Without it …? He sighed and went back to work.

Seventeen

W
HEN HE served the Sibian Navy, Cornelu had rarely ridden Eforiel to the south, toward the land of the Ice People. Sibiu had worried—and had had reason to worry—about Algarve. Almost all the time he’d spent aboard his leviathan had been in the channel between his island kingdom and the mainland of Derlavai to the north.

Now Lagoas had sent him and Eforiel down toward the austral continent. He wished the powers that be in Setubal had chosen to send him a couple of months earlier. Despite his rubber suit, despite the sorcery the Lagoan mages had added to the suit, he was chilly. Of course, the waters around the land of the Ice People weren’t warm even in high summer, such as it was down near the bottom of the world. Now … the sea hadn’t started freezing yet, but it wouldn’t be long.

Cornelu’s teeth might have felt like chattering, but Eforiel thought the Lagoans had sent her (and, incidentally, her rider) to a fine restaurant. For reasons mages had never been able to fathom, fish flourished in the frigid waters of the Narrow Sea. Eforiel put on more blubber with every mile she swam. It did a better job of keeping her warm than rubber and mage-craft did for her master.

Thanks to the Lagoans, he’d taught her a new trick. At his tapped command, she stood on her tail, thrusting the front part of her body up out of the water. That let Cornelu, who clung not far back of her blowhole, see farther than he could have from a couple of feet above the surface of the sea.

He sighed. The Lagoans were clever, no doubt about it. They hadn’t invaded his kingdom. They had taken him in as an exile. He wished he liked them better. He wished he liked them at all.

Whether he liked them or not, he preferred them to the Algarvians, whom he actively despised. Lagoas being the only kingdom still in the fight against Algarve, she perforce had his allegiance. He urged Eforiel up on her tail once more. Was that smoke he saw, there to the southwest?

“Aye, it is,” he said, and urged the leviathan toward it.

Mizpah was falling. Had the Yaninans put their full effort into the attack on the Lagoan towns at the edge of the land of the Ice People, Mizpah would have fallen long since. But King Tsavellas kept most of his men at home, to watch the border with Unkerlant. Cornelu wasn’t sure whether that made Tsavellas wise or foolish. King Swemmel
was
likely to go to war against Yanina. If he did, though, a few regiments wouldn’t do much to slow him down. They might have been used to better purpose on the austral continent.

King Tsavellas had chosen otherwise, though. Because of that, the Lagoans and their nomad allies still had a grip on Mizpah, even if the Yaninans finally had fought their way into egg-tosser range, which meant the outpost would not hold much longer. But the Lagoans had the chance to salvage some of what they thought important from Mizpah before it fell.

“A fugitive king and a mage,” Cornelu said to Eforiel. “I can see that. Both will be useful, and the Lagoans love what is useful. But I wager plenty of other people in Mizpah would sooner we were coming for them.”

Eforiel’s jaw closed on a good-sized squid that swam right in front of her. By the way she frisked under Cornelu, she would be delighted to visit these waters again. Cornelu gently patted the leviathan. By the time she took these men back to Lagoas, Mizpah would not be worth visiting, not for anyone with Lagoas’s interests in mind. He couldn’t explain that to the leviathan, and didn’t bother trying.

“A little spit of land east of the harbor,” Cornelu murmured. That was where the fugitives were supposed to be. He wondered if they could get there with the Yaninans investing Mizpah. He shrugged. If they weren’t there, he couldn’t very well pick them up.

He had Eforiel rear in the water again. If that wasn’t the right spit of land, there a few hundred yards ahead, he didn’t know what would be. He didn’t see any people on it. He shrugged again. The Lagoan officers who sent him forth had thought the fugitives would be there.

“Oh, aye,” one of them had said just before he and Eforiel left Setubal harbor. “The one of them has a name for getting out of scraps—and the mage isn’t supposed to be bad at it, either.” Cornelu remembered the fellow laughing uproariously at his own sally. Among Lagoans, it passed for wit.

Cornelu was harder to amuse. These days, nothing less than the prospect of King Mezentio’s palace going up in flames, and all of Trapani with it, would have set him to laughing uproariously. He would have howled like a wolf for that, laughed like a loon. Even thinking about it with no likelihood of its happening was enough—more than enough -to make him smile.

He urged Eforiel closer to the end of the spit of land. Maybe the mage and the king hadn’t got there yet. Maybe the mage would detect his arrival by some occult means and hurry out to meet him. Maybe, maybe, maybe …

He blinked. He would have taken oath … a proper oath, an oath on the name of King Burebistu—the spit was empty of people. Had he done so, he would have been forsworn. Suddenly, he saw two men there, one tall and lean and of Algarvic stock, the other shorter and stockier with, aye, a Forthwegian or Unkerlanter look. They saw him, too, or more likely the leviathan, and began to wave.

He had rubber suits along for men of their builds. If the mage knew his business, he’d be able to keep himself and his royal companion from freezing in this icy water. If he didn’t—Cornelu shrugged one more time. He himself would do everything he could. What he couldn’t do, he wouldn’t worry about.

He brought Eforiel in toward the land as close as he dared. Having her beach herself wouldn’t do, here and now even less than most other places and times. Cornelu slid off her back and swam toward the rocky, muddy land, pushing ahead of him a bladder that held the rubber suits.

When he came up on to the land, the mage greeted him with a slew of almost incomprehensible Lagoan. “Slow,” Cornelu said. “I speak only a little.” He pointed to the five crowns on the chest of his own rubber suit. “Cornelu. From Sibiu. Exile.” That was one word of Lagoan he knew very well.

“I speak Sibian,” the mage said, and he did, with a good accent—none of the variations on Algarvian that most Lagoans thought were Cornelu’s native language. The fellow went on, “I am Fernao, and here before you you see King Penda of Forthweg.”

“I speak Algarvian—not Sibian, I fear,” Penda said.

Cornelu bowed. “I also speak Algarvian, your Majesty: better than I would like,” he said. The king of Forthweg scowled at that, scowled and nodded.

“We are all speaking too much,” the mage said in Sibian, and repeated himself in what Cornelu presumed to be Forthwegian. Whatever language he spoke, he made good sense. Turning back to Cornelu, he went on, “I presume those are suits to keep us from coming back to Setubal as if packed in ice?”

“Aye.” Cornelu opened the bladder. “The suits, and whatever protective magic you can add to them. Warmth and breathing underwater would be useful, I expect.”

The mage said, “Aye, I expected as much. I can do all that. Useful, you call the breathing spell? A good word for it, I would say. I will have to drop the magic that keeps people from noticing much about the spit. I tried not to project much of it out to sea; I’m glad you could find us.”