Darkness Descending

He was burly as Leofsig had become despite not doing hard physical labor. He looked like Leofsig, too, though his nose was blobbier than Leofsig’s sharply hooked one. It took after that of his mother; she’d been killed when an Algarvian egg wrecked their house, and he and Uncle Hengist had lived, not always comfortably, with Leofsig’s family ever since.

After finishing his first bowl of stew, Sidroc helped himself to another, which he also devoured. Only then did he speak: “That. . . wasn’t so bad.” He rubbed his temples. “My head hurts.”

He’d had headaches ever since he’d hit his head in the brawl with Ealstan. He still didn’t remember what the brawl had been about, for which Leofsig and his father and mother and sister thanked the powers above. Ealstan’s disappearance afterwards, though, had left both him and Uncle Hengist suspicious, most suspicious indeed. Leofsig wished his brother hadn’t had to run off. But Ealstan couldn’t have known Sidroc would wake up without remembering. He couldn’t have known Sidroc would wake up at all.

“Have you finished your schoolwork?” Hengist asked Sidroc.

“Oh, aye--as much of it as I could do,” Sidroc replied. He’d been an indifferent scholar before the knock on the head and hadn’t got better since. After taking a big swig from his wine cup, he went on, “Maybe I’ll sign up for Plegmunds Brigade after all. I wouldn’t have to worry about poems and irregular verbs there.”

Everyone else at the table, even Uncle Hengist, winced. The Algarvians had set up Plegmund’s Brigade to get Forthwegians to fight for them in Unkerlant. Leofsig had fought the Algarvians. He would sooner have jumped off a tall building than fought for them. But Sidroc had been talking about the Brigade even before the fight with Ealstan. Maybe he needs another shot to the head, Leofsig thought, and a harder one this time.

 

Fifteen

Officially, Hajjaj was far in the north, up in Bishah. Any number of witnesses would swear at need that the Zuwayzi foreign minister was hard at work in the capital, right where he should be. Hajjaj didn’t want any of them to have to take such an oath. That would mean something had gone wrong, something had made the Algarvians suspicious. Better by far they never, ever come down to Jurdhan.

He strolled along the main street, such as it was, of the little no-account town: one elderly black man wearing only a straw hat and sandals among many black men and women and children, all dressed, or not dressed, much as he was.

Nudity had its advantages. By leaving off the bracelets and anklets and gold rings and chains he would normally have worn, Hajjaj turned himself into a person of no particular importance. He would have had a harder time doing that with shabby clothes. When he walked into Jurdhan’s chief--by virtue of being Jurdhan’s only--hostel, no one gave him a second glance. That was just what he wanted.

He went upstairs (the hostel was one of a handful of buildings in town to boast a second story) and walked down the hall to the chamber where, he’d been told, the man he was to meet awaited him. He knocked once, twice, then once again. After a moment, the latch clicked. The door swung open.

A short, squat, swarthy man--swarthy, but far from black--wearing a knee-length cotton tunic looked him up and down. “Powers above, you’re a scrawny old bugger,” he remarked in Algarvian.

“Thank you so much, my lord Ansovald. I am so glad to see you again, your Excellency,” Hajjaj answered in the same language. Speaking Algarvian to the former--and perhaps future--Unkerlanter minister to Zuwayza tickled his sense of irony, which needed little tickling. But it was the one speech they truly had in common. His own Unkerlanter was halting, Ansovald s Zuwayzi as near nonexistent as made no difference.

If Ansovald noticed the irony, he didn’t let on. “Well, come in,” he said, and stood aside. “If you want to put on a tunic and hide that bag of bones you call a carcass, I’ve got one here for you.”

That was the usual practice for Zuwayzi diplomats. Hajjaj had grown resigned to wearing a long tunic when calling on envoys from Unkerlant and Forthweg, a short tunic and kilt when seeing a minister from an Algarvic kingdom, a tunic and trousers when meeting with Kaunians, and clothes of some sort, at any rate, when dealing with lands like Kuusamo and Gyongyos, where style of apparel carried less political weight. But growing resigned to it didn’t mean he loved it. He shook his head and answered, “No, thank you. This is unofficial, which means I can be comfortable if I please, and I do.”

He’d thought about wearing a tunic to this meeting too, thought about it and rejected the notion. Nothing would have drawn stares like a clothed Zuwayzi strolling through Jurdhan--nothing except a naked Unkerlanter strolling through Cottbus. And maybe his nudity would disconcert Ansovald.