Darkness Descending

Had he said, at what you are enduring for my sake, everything would have been well. But that was not how he measured things. To him, the standards were more important than the reason for which they were broken. Vanai said, “I can meet your expectations, my grandfather, or I can keep you alive. My apologies, but I do not seem to be able to do both at once.” She turned on her heel and walked away without giving him a chance to reply.

They did not speak to each other for the next several days.

They might have healed the rift sooner, but Major Spinello chose that afternoon to pay Vanai a visit. Brivibas retreated to his study and slammed the door. Spinello laughed. “The old fool does not know when he is well off,” he said. As if to declare the rest of the house his to do with as he chose, he took Vanai on the divan in the parlor, under the eyes of the ancient statuettes and reliefs displayed there.

Afterwards, sated, he ran his hand along her flank. She wanted to get up, to wash away the feel of his skin slick against hers, but his weight still pinned her to the rather scratchy fabric of the divan. With a wriggle and a twist, she let her exasperation at that show. She’d seen he didn’t mind, or not too much.

This time, though, he didn’t let her go free right away. Looking down at her face from a distance of about six inches, he said. “You were wise to yield yourself to me. The whole of Derlavai is yielding itself to Algarve.”

All Vanai said, rather faintly, was, “You’re squashing me.”

Spinello took more of his weight on his elbows and knees. He stayed atop her, though, his legs between hers, imprisoning her. “Forthweg is ours,” he said. “Sibiu is ours. Valmiera is ours. Jelgava is ours. And Unkerlant crumbles. Like a child’s sand castle when the tide rolls over it, Unkerlant crumbles.”

Boasting of his kingdom’s conquests excited him; she felt him stir against her inner thigh. He bent his head to her breast. She realized he was going to have a second round. With a small sigh, she looked up at the rough plaster of the ceiling till he finished.

As he got back into his kilt and tunic, he went on, “The war is as good as over. You need have no doubt of that. Our time, the Algarvian time, is come at last, the time of which our forefathers dreamt even in the days when they dwelt in the forests of the distant south.”

Vanai only shrugged. What seemed a golden dream to Spinello was her nightmare brought to life. She shuddered to think of Algarvians free to torment Kauni-ans for the next hundred years. She also shuddered to think of Spinello free to come back here tomorrow or the next day or a week from now to make her do whatever he wanted.

She could do nothing about Spinello. She could do nothing about the war. As the Algarvian major had boasted that his kingdom’s armies were overwhelming the Unkerlanters, so the war had overwhelmed her.

Spinello chucked her under the chin--one more liberty she had to let him take. “Until I see you again,” he said with a bow, as if he imagined she might want to see him again. “And do give my best regards to your ever so learned grandfather.” Out he went laughing and whistling.

He was happy. Why not? He’d satisfied himself, and Algarve’s armies stood everywhere triumphant. Vanai, despised by the large Forthwegian majority in her own kingdom, despised even more by its conquerors, went off to get a rag and a pitcher and to do her best to scrub the memory of his touch from her body. She despised herself most of all.

Marshal Rathar had come down into the south to see with his own eyes how the Algarvians were making such headway against the Unkerlanter armies there. He had gone to the north, to the border with Zuwayza, to take charge of the fight in the desert when it was going badly. That had been an embarrassment for Unkerlant. If this fight went badly, it would be a catastrophe.

His first lesson was very nearly his last. He had just got out of his ley-line caravan car in the medium-sized town of Wirdum, a good twenty miles behind the battle line, when flight after flight of Algarvian dragons appeared overhead. By the time they got done dropping eggs, the local depot was burning. So were the baron’s castle and much of the center of town.

He didn’t realize he was bleeding till someone offered him a sticking plaster for the cut on his cheek. He declined with a shrug: “I thank you, but no. I don’t want the soldiers to think I hurt myself shaving.” The joke would have been better if he hadn’t had to say it three times, each louder than the one before, till the fellow with the plaster finally got it. The rain of eggs from the sky had stunned everyone’s ears.

Strong, hook-nosed face set in a frown, he rode forward toward General Ortwin’s headquarters. That was no easy trip, either. The Algarvians had already given the roads hereabouts the same sort of pasting Wirdum had just taken. Rathar s horse had to pick its way through the fields to get around the craters in the roadway. Soldiers and horses and unicorns and a few behemoths lay sprawled in death; the stink of rotting meat that rose from them was very strong. Flies rose from them, too, in great humming,