Out of the Darkness

Good intentions got sidetracked, as good intentions have a way of doing. A column of Kuusamans was tramping west through Skrunda. Till they passed, Talsu, like everybody else, had to wait. People took waiting no better than they usually did. Someone behind him in the crowd complained, “We might as well still be occupied by the Algarvians.”

“Nonsense,” somebody else said. Talsu thought he would tell the first speaker what a fool he was, but he didn’t. Instead, he went on, “The Algarvians never wasted our time with this nonsense.”

“That’s right,” a woman said, nothing but indignation in her voice. “My cat is getting hungrier every minute, and here I am, stuck in the road because of all these foreigners going by.”

Talsu rolled his eyes. Powers above! he thought. We don’t deserve to be our own masters any more. We really don’t.

Behemoths lumbered along the street. Their armor seemed different from any that Talsu had seen on Algarvian behemoths or on the few the Jelgavans had put in the field, but he couldn’t put his finger on the difference. The little, swarthy soldiers on the behemoths reminded him more of the redheads than of his own folk. They grinned and joked as they went forward; that was obvious though he knew not a word of Kuusaman. They were men with their peckers up.

They felt like winners, which went a long way toward making them into winners. The Jelgavan army had always gone into a fight looking over its shoulder, wondering what might happen to it, not what it could do to the foe.

At last, the rear of the column went by--footsoldiers stepping carefully to avoid whatever the behemoths had left behind. The Jelgavans on both sides of the road who’d had to wait surged forward and made their own traffic jam. With a judicious elbow or two, Talsu got through it fairly fast. He wished he could have elbowed the woman with the hungry cat, but no such luck.

The Kuusamans heading west to fight the redheads weren’t the only ones in town. A short, slant-eyed fellow who looked to have drunk too much wine lurched down the street with his arm around the waist of a giggling girl who wore a barmaid’s low-cut tunic and tight trousers. A few months before, had she been giving the Algarvians her favors? Talsu wouldn’t have bet more than a copper against it.

In a way, we are still occupied, he thought. Oh, the Kuusamans--and the Lagoans farther south--didn’t treat the people of Jelgava the way the Algarvians had. But if they wanted something--as that drunken trooper had wanted what the barmaid had to give--they were probably going to get it. Talsu sighed. He didn’t know what to do about that, except to hope Jelgava somehow could become strong enough to make foreigners take her seriously.

And how long will I have to wait for that? he wondered. Can we ever do it while King Donalitu sits on the throne? He had his doubts.

A new broadsheet he passed only made those doubts worse, CONCERNING TRAITORS, its big print declared, and it went on to define traitors as anyone who’d had anything at all to do with the Algarvians throughout the four years of occupation. By what it said, practically everyone in the kingdom was subject to arrest if his name happened to come to the notice of Donalitu’s constabulary.

He’ll have to leave a few people free, Talsu thought. Otherwise, who would build the dungeons he’d need to hold the whole fornicating kingdom? He laughed, but on second thought it wasn’t very funny. Captives could probably build as well as free men, if enough guards stood over them with sticks.

“Ah, good,” Krogzmu said when Talsu showed up with the trousers. “Let me just try them on. . . .” He disappeared. When he came back, he was beaming. Not only did he pay Talsu the silver he owed without being asked, he gave him a clay jar of olive oil to take home, adding, “This is some of what I squeeze for my own family. This is not what I sell.”

Talsu’s mouth watered. “Thank you very much. I know it’ll be good.” His own father did good tailoring for everyone, but better than good for his own household.

“Good?” He might have insulted Krogzmu. “Is that all you can say? Good! You wait here.” The oil dealer disappeared back into his house. He returned a moment later with a chunk of bread and snatched the jar of oil out of Talsu’s hands. Yanking out the stopper, he poured some oil on the bread, then thrust it at Talsu. “There! Taste that, and then you tell me if it’s just good.”