Darkness Descending

When he got to the head of the line and held out an abused hand, the Algarvian officer slapped a couple of shiny new coppers into it. They bore the sharp-nosed image of King Mainardo, King Mezentio’s brother and now, by grace of Algarve, lord of Jelgava. Talsu looked from them to the redhead. “Go on,” the officer snapped. “Go on, and count yourself lucky you’re getting anything.”

Talsu stared at the coppers. They might have paid for an hour’s labor. Most of a day’s? He shoved them back at the officer. “Keep ‘em, pal,” he said. “Looks like you need ‘em worse than I do.”

“Do you know what I could do to you?” the Algarvian demanded.

“It might last longer than what you just did, but it couldn’t hurt much more,” Talsu answered with a shrug. “You had a chance to make people like you--like you better than our own nobles, anyway. This isn’t how you go about it.”

“Like us? What difference does that make?” the redheaded officer asked in surprise. “All that matters isthat you obey us.” He offered Talsu the coins once more. “Take them. You earned them.”

“I earned six times that much,” Talsu said, and walked away. He waited for the Algarvian to order him seized. It didn’t happen. He scurried around the first corner he came to, trembling from fatigue and reaction both. He’d been a fool to talk back to the occupiers. He’d got away with it, but that made him no less a fool.

“Where have you been?” Laitsina, his mother, cried when he came into the shop above which the family lived and slept. Then she got a good look at him and cried out again, this time in horror: “And what were you doing while you were there? Have the Algarvians beaten you with sticks?”

“No. They just caught me in the street and set me hauling broken rock--one of their sorcerers wrecked the old arch past the market square.” Talsu scowled. “Hard work, and then they cheated me at the end of it. About what you’d expect from the cursed redheads. I didn’t even bother taking their lousy coppers.” He didn’t bother telling his mother how he’d rejected the coins, either.

His father slammed a pair of shears down on the counter beside which he was working. “They wrecked the imperial arch?” Traku said. At Talsu’s nod, the older man muttered something pungent under his breath.

“That must have been the crash we heard this morning,” Laitsina said. “I wondered what it was. If business were better, somebody who knew about it would have come in before this and told us.”

“If the Algarvians weren’t here, business would be better,” Traku said. By the look he sent his son, he still blamed Talsu for the collapse of the Jelgavan armies. “And if the Algarvians weren’t here, they wouldn’t have been able to knock down the arch, either. Curse them, it’s stood since imperial times. They’ve got no business wrecking things that have stood for so long.”

“They won the war,” Talsu said. At the moment, he regretted that more than he had at any time since he’d marched off to oppose the redheads. “That lets them do as they please. And they’re turning out to be a worse bargain than our own nobles. Who would have thought anyone could be?”

Laitsina and Traku both glanced around nervously, though they were the only ones who could have heard what Talsu said. His sister chose that moment to come downstairs. “Who would have thought anyone could be worse than what?” Ausra asked.

“Worse than our nobles,” Talsu answered defiantly. “The Algarvians are.” He repeated the story of what they’d done to him and to the monument.

“That’s terrible!” Ausra said. “Are they doing the same thing all over the kingdom? If they are, there won’t be an arch or a column standing before long.”

“They’re jealous of us, that’s what it is,” Traku said. “We Kaunians were civilized while they still chased each other through the woods. They don’t want to be reminded of that, and they don’t want us reminded of it, either.”

“Some people may think more about things that are missing than they ever did about things that were there.” Talsu looked down at his battered, filthy, bloody hands. “I know I will.”

Garivald didn’t know why the impressers hadn’t marched him out of Zossen as part of the draft they took for King Swemmel’s army. Maybe they’d intended to scoop him and the other men they left behind into their net later. If so, they miscalculated, for the Algarvians overran the village before they could return.

Waddo kept reporting good news coming in over the crystal: Swemmel’s forces advancing, the Algarvians and Yaninans and Zuwayzin falling back in disorder. The firstman even brought the crystal out into the village square several more times so the peasants of Zossen could hear the news for themselves. He hadn’t misrepresented it; it always sounded good.