Out of the Darkness

“Occupying authorities?” Talsu started to get up to throttle the fellow. The guards slammed him down onto the stool again. They didn’t try to keep him from talking: “What occupying authorities? You were the bastard who tormented me--and tormented my wife, too--till I gave you names. I did get into the underground, and I fought the Algarvians while you were probably still torturing people for them.”

“Subject does not deny the charges,” the major murmured, jotting a note on the pad in front of him. Talsu howled again, a wordless cry of fury. The interrogator gestured to the bully boys. They went to work on Talsu. Before long, he had plenty more reasons to howl.

Over the years, Bembo had grown used to giving orders. It wasn’t just that he’d been a constable in occupied Forthweg. He’d been a constable long before that, here in Tricarico. People jumped when he told them to jump. They did him favors to stay on his good side. He’d had no trouble getting all sorts of bribes and other sweeteners.

That was over now, and his broken leg had nothing to do with it. The leg was healing as well as it could, though it looked thin as a twig under the splints that protected it. But Algarvians didn’t give orders in Tricarico anymore. The city belonged to the Kuusamans now, and they made who was in charge very plain.

Bembo and Saffa sat at a table in a sidewalk cafe, drinking wine he would have turned up his nose at before the war and eating olives and salted almonds. Saffa’s nose--much cuter than Bembo’s--wrinkled. “What’s that stink?” she asked.

Taking everything into account, Tricarico had been lucky during the war. Devastation had mostly left it alone, and, when the town fell, it fell fast. Having been in Eoforwic, Bembo knew things didn’t have to be that way. The grinding fight there had also left him intimately acquainted with the stench in question. “That’s dead bodies,” he answered, and surprised even himself with how casually the words came out.

“Oh.” Saffa grimaced. “That’s right. Those three in the town square. I’d forgotten.”

“Naughty.” Bembo waggled a forefinger at her. “The Kuusamans don’t want you to forget. They don’t want any of us to forget. That’s why they hanged those three stupid bastards right in the middle of the square four days ago, and it’s why they haven’t taken ‘em down, too.”

“Stupid bastards?” The constabulary sketch artist let out an indignant squawk. “They were patriots, heroes, martyrs.”

“They were cursed fools,” Bembo said. “If you aren’t in the army and you blaze at the people who’ve taken your town and they catch you, this is one of the things that’re liable to happen.” He remembered some of the things that had happened in Eoforwic. Compared to those, hanging was a mercy. Saffa didn’t know about things like that, and didn’t know how lucky she was not to.

“But the Kuusamans are the enemy,” she protested.

“That’s why we have an army--or had an army,” Bembo answered. “Civilians who try to fight against soldiers are what you call free-blazers. If the soldiers catch ‘em, they’re what you call fair game.”

“They were brave,” Saffa said.

“They were bloody dumb,” Bembo told her. “They didn’t do themselves any good, and they didn’t do Algarve any good, either. We don’t have any soldiers in the field anywhere within a hundred miles of here, not any more we don’t.” He threw his hands in the air in a gesture of extravagant despair. “Powers below eat everything, we’ve lost.”

Saffa stared at him. The truth there was obvious. The little slant-eyed soldiers in the streets made it so. Maybe she somehow hadn’t realized everything it meant, though, till he all but shouted in her face. She bit her lip, blinked a couple of times, and quietly began to cry.

“Don’t do that!” Bembo exclaimed. He fumbled for a handkerchief, didn’t find one, and gave her a cafe napkin instead. “Come on, sweetheart. Please don’t do that.” He had a soft spot for weeping women. Most Algarvian men did.

“I can’t help it,” she said, dabbing her eyes. “I don’t think Salamone is ever coming home, not from fighting the horrible Unkerlanters.” Her tears came faster, harder.

Bembo muttered something more or less polite. Salamone was the fellow who’d fathered her son. She still hadn’t let Bembo into her bed, or come into his. He wondered why he bothered with her; he wasn’t usually so patient with women. Maybe it was because he’d known her before things got bad, and she was a line back to those better days. He took a pull at his wine to disguise a snort. That was an alarming thing to think about somebody all over prickles like Saffa.

She gave him a look holding a good deal of her old vinegar. “I know what you’re thinking. You hope those savages have him for supper, and without any salt, too.”

“No such thing!” Bembo said with an indignation all the louder for being less than sincere. But then he followed it with the truth: “I wouldn’t wish getting caught by the Unkerlanters on anybody at all.”

Saffa eyed him, then slowly nodded. “You may even mean that.”