Darkness Descending

A small band--bagpipe, tuba, trumpet, and thumping kettledrum--began to play: one sprightly Valmieran tune after another. Skarnu watched some of the Algarvian troopers make sour faces at the music. Their own tastes ran more toward plinkings and tinklings that were, to Valmieran ears, effete. And then he watched one of their officers growl something at them in their own language. The sour faces disappeared. The smiles that replaced them often looked like bad acting, but were unquestionably smiles. The redheads didn’t offend except on purpose. No, they weren’t stupid, not even slightly.

After a little while, the band struck up a particularly bouncy tune, the drummer pounding away with might and main. “That is the count’s air,” Merkela murmured to Skarnu and Raunu. Had they grown up around Pavilosta, as she had, they would have heard it on ceremonial occasions all their lives. As things were, it was new to both of them. Skarnu assumed an expression that suggested it wasn’t.

“Here he comes,” someone behind him said. People’s heads turned toward the left: They knew from which direction Simanu would come. Skarnu didn’t, but again couldn’t have been more than half a heartbeat behind everyone else--not far enough (he hoped) for even the most alert Algarvian to notice.

Dressed in a tunic stiff with gold thread and trousers of silk with fur at the cuffs, the late Count Enkuru’s son advanced toward the double chair in which he would formally succeed his father. Simanu was somewhere in his mid-twenties, with a face handsome and nasty at the same time: the face of a man who’d never had anyone tell him no in his whole life.

“I’ve served under officers who looked like that,” Raunu muttered. “Everybody loved ‘em--oh, aye.” He rolled his eyes to make sure no one took him seriously.

Simanu bestowed his sneer impartially on the Valmierans over whom he was being set and the Algarvians who were allowing him to be set over those townsmen and villagers. Just for a moment, the cast of his features reminded Skarnu of his sister Krasta’s. He shook his head. That wasn’t fair. . . was it? Had Krasta ever really worn such a snide smile? He hoped not.

After Simanu came more Algarvian bodyguards and a peasant obviously cleaned up for the occasion. The fellow led two cows, one fine and plump, the other a sad, scrawny, shambling beast. Raunu muttered again: “Have to find out who that bugger is and make sure something bad happens to him.”

“Aye, we will,” Skarnu agreed. “He’s as much in bed with the redheads as Simanu is.” He turned to Merkela. “Why the beasts?” He held his voice down--one more thing a proper peasant from around Pavilosta would have known from childhood.

“Only watch, and you’ll see,” Merkela answered. She might not have seen this ceremony before--Enkuru had been the local lord for a long time--but it was second nature to her. It probably figured in tales the peasants in this part of the kingdom told their children. For all Skarnu could tell, diligent folklorists back in Priekule had composed learned dissertations about it.

Simanu strode up to the double chair, one side of which faced east, the other west. “People of Pavilosta, people of my county,” he called out in a voice as poisonously sweet as his face, “I now come into my inheritance.” He sat down facing west, toward Algarve. That was, no doubt, intended to symbolize his defense of the region against the kilted barbarians who had so often troubled the Kaunian Empire and the later Kaunian kingdoms. His facing west now, with Algarvians surrounding and upholding him, felt cruelly ironic.

The scrubbed peasant, still holding the lead ropes for the two cows, took his seat back-to-back with Simanu. Then he rose again, and led the beasts around the double chair to the new count. He held out both ropes, one in each hand.

“Now you’ll see how it goes,” Merkela murmured to Skarnu. “Simanu has to choose the skinny cow, and he has to let the peasant give him a box on the ear--just a little one, mind--to show he governs here not for his own sake but for the sake of his people.”

But when Count Simanu got to his feet to face the peasant, his smile had grown nastier still. “People of Pavilosta, people of my county, the world has changed,” he said. “Vile brigands slew my father, and still have not got their just deserts because their wicked fellows conceal them and keep them safe from harm. Very well, then: if you will not give, you will not get.”

Speaking thus, he seized the fat cow’s rope in his left hand and with his right dealt the peasant a buffet to the side of the head that sent the fellow sprawling with a cry of pain and surprise. Simanu threw back his own head and laughed loud and long.