Darkness Descending

But it was already too late. The redheads understood what no meant. They were as young and headstrong as he was, and they were the conquerors, and there were two of them. Smiling most unpleasantly, they advanced on him. Gailisa darted around the counter and into the back of the shop, loudly calling for her father. Talsu noticed only out of the corner of his eye; almost all of his attention stayed on the Algarvians.

The fight, such as it was, didn’t last long. One of the redheads swung at him, a looping haymaker that would have knocked him sprawling had it landed. It didn’t. He blocked it with his left forearm and delivered a sharp, straight right. The Algarvian’s nose flattened under his fist. With a howl, the soldier staggered back into shelves piled high with produce. He knocked them over. Vegetables spilled across the floor.

Talsu spun toward the other Algarvian. This fellow didn’t waste time on fisticuffs. He yanked a knife from his belt, stabbed Talsu in the side, and then helped his friend get up. They both ran out of the grocer’s shop.

When Talsu started to run after them, he got only a couple of paces before crumpling to his knees and then to his belly. He stared in dull surprise at the blood that darkened his tunic and spread over the floor. He heard Gailisa’s shriek as if from very far away. The inside of the shop went gray and then black.

He woke puzzled, wondering why he wasn’t seeing the grocer’s shop. Instead, his eyes took in the iron rails of a bed, and a whitewashed wall beyond it. A man in a pale gray tunic peered down at him. “How do you feel?” the fellow asked.

Before Talsu could answer, he became aware of a snarling pain in his flank. He bit back a scream, as he might have done were he wounded in battle. “Hurts,” he got out through clenched teeth.

“I believe it,” said the man in the gray tunic--a healing mage, Talsu realized. “We had to do a lot of work on you while your body was slowed down. Even with the sorcery, it was touch and go for a while there. You lost a lot of blood. But I think you’ll come through pretty well, if fever doesn’t take you.”

“Hurts,” Talsu repeated. He was going to start screaming in a minute, whether he wanted to or not. The pain felt as big as the world.

“Here,” the mage said. “Drink this.” Talsu didn’t ask what it was. He seized the cup and gulped it down. It tasted overpoweringly of poppies. He panted like a dog, waiting for the pain to go away. It didn’t, not really. He did: he seemed to be floating to one side of his body, so that, while he still felt everything, it didn’t seem to matter anymore. It might almost have been happening to someone else.

The mage lifted his tunic and examined the stitched-up wound in his side. Talsu looked at it, too, with curiosity far more abstract than he could have managed undrugged. “He put quite a hole in me,” he remarked, and the mage nodded. “Did they catch him?” Talsu asked, and this time the healer shook his head. Talsu shrugged. The drug didn’t let him get excited about anything. “I might have known.”

“You’re lucky to be alive,” the healer said. “You’ve got more stitches holding you together inside. If we’d come a little later ...” He shook his head again. “But your lady friend made sure we didn’t.”

“My lady friend?” Talsu said vaguely, and then, “Oh. Gailisa.” He knew he ought to be feeling something more than he was, but the drug blocked and blurred it. Too bad, he thought, still vague.

Having been nearly idle through the winter, Garivald was making up for it now that the ground had finally got firm enough to hold a furrow. Along with the rest of the peasants of Zossen, he plowed and sowed as fast as he could, to give the crops as long to grow as possible. He rose before sunset and went to bed after nightfall; only harvest time was more wearing than the planting season.

Along with everything else he had to do, he still had to go into the forest to cut wood for Zossen’s Algarvian occupiers. How he’d hoped the Unkerlanter advance would sweep them out of his village! But it hadn’t happened, and it didn’t look as if it would, either.

He hacked at a tree trunk, wishing it were a redhead’s body. When the Unkerlanters in grimy rock-gray tunics let him see them, he kept right on chopping wood. One of his countrymen said, “You’re the singer, aren’t you?”

“What if I am?” Garivald asked, pausing at last. “What difference does it make?”

“If you aren’t, we might decide not to let you live,” the ragged soldier answered and made as if to turn his stick in Garivald’s direction.

“You’ve already spent awhile killing my hopes,” Garivald said. “I thought the Algarvians would be gone from here by now.” Thought probably took it too far; hoped came closer. But the men who skulked through the woods had taken his songs, had promised great victories, and then hadn’t delivered. If they were unhappy with him, he was unhappy with them, too.

“Soon,” said the soldier who hadn’t