Darkness Descending

his village and everything he and everybody else had. They wanted Unkerlant, all of it. He could see that. Anyone who couldn’t. . . Anyone who couldn’t had to believe Raniero was the rightful King of Grelz.

Once the crystal got out to the woods, if it did, he might be able to let some of the men the Algarvians called brigands know it was there. They could likely find a way to use it. Maybe they would cut a few redheads’ throats. Or maybe they would cut the throats of a few Unkerlanter traitors instead.

He nodded. One way or another, he judged, they could do the job. “Aye,” he said to Waddo. “When the ground turns soft, we’ll dig it up and get it into the woods. Then we won’t have to worry about it anymore.” But the Algarvians will, he thought.

Raunu swung the hoe, lopped the stalk off a weed in Merkela’s herb garden, and chuckled. “I’m getting good at this business,” the veteran sergeant said. “Never thought I would. I was a town boy. My mother made sausages, and my father hawked ‘em through the streets. So did I, before I got sucked into the army in the middle of the Six Years’ War.”

Skarnu was also weeding. “And you stayed in.”

“That’s right.” Raunu nodded. He was more than twenty years older than Skarnu, but probably stronger and certainly tougher. “Once the fighting got done, it was easier work for better pay than I’d had before.”

“Easier than farm work?” Skarnu asked, beheading a weed himself.

“In between wars, sure,” Raunu answered. “And I was good at it, too, by the powers above. It took me awhile, but I got as high up as a fellow like me was ever going to get in the army.”

As a commoner was ever going to get, he meant. He’d spent thirty years serving Valmiera, and had risen to sergeant and no higher. Skarnu had joined the army with no experience and immediately became a captain. But then, he was a marquis. As he wouldn’t have before the war, he wondered if the rank and file of the Valmieran army would have fought harder against Algarve had a few very able men--his mind reached no further than that--had the chance to become officers.

Merkela came out of the slate-roofed farmhouse. She surveyed the weeding efforts of the two soldiers-turned-farmers with something less than full approval. Taking the hoe from Skarnu, she slaughtered a couple of weeds he and Raunu had both missed. Then she returned it with a flourish, like a drill sergeant showing a couple of raw recruits how a stick ought to be handled.

Raunu snickered. Skarnu felt faintly embarrassed. “I’ll never get the hang of farm work,” he muttered.

“You’re better than you were when you first came here,” Merkela said: an endorsement of sorts, but not a ringing one. Then her whole manner changed. Leaning forward, she asked, “Are we going to do it tonight?”

Raunu snickered again, in a different way. Skarnu knew Merkela didn’t mean taking her up to her bedchamber and making love to her. He might do that, too, but only afterwards. “Aye,” he said. “We are. People have to know that collaborating with the Algarvians has a price.”

“Anyone who has anything to do with the Algarvians ought to pay the price,” Merkela declared.

Skarnu wondered about that. Where did you draw the line between simply going on with your daily life and collaborating with the redheads? Was a tailor a collaborator if he made the occupiers tunics and kilts? Was the chap who steered a ley-line caravan a collaborator if he took Algarvians around Priekule? Maybe not. But what if he took them in the direction of fighting? What then? Questions were easy, answers less so.

Merkela didn’t care to look so hard. She had her answers. Sometimes Skarnu envied her certainty. Seeing the world in black and white--or redhead and blond--was simple, and required next to no thought. He shrugged. In broad outline, they agreed. He knew who the enemy was, sure enough.

As if to echo that, Raunu said, “This Negyu’s a bad egg, no doubt about it. He tells the Algarvians everything he hears, and everything his wife hears, too.

“And his daughter’s carrying a redhead’s bastard, the little slut,” Merkela added. “And she doesn’t even have the decency to be ashamed. I heard her bragging in the market square at Pavilosta about all the presents her man gives her. I bet she gave him one, too--the clap.” No, she didn’t need to look hard to hate.

“We’ll take care of’em,” Raunu said.

“We ought to make it look as much like an accident as we can,” Skarnu said. Blazing Negyu didn’t bother him. Blazing Negyu’s wife and his pregnant daughter felt different, even if they were as much hand in glove with the Algarvians as Negyu.

“Why?” Merkela shook her head, making her