Darkness Descending

“Whatever my husband had there will be fine for me, too,” she answered, sitting down on the stool next to Cornelu’s. She sounded dazed, as if she didn’t want to think right now. Cornelu understood that; he felt dizzier, drunker, than if he’d swallowed a tun of ale. The waiter shrugged and went ofT to the back room.

Costache pointed a finger at Cornelu, as if in accusation. “I thought you were dead.”

“I was out to sea when the Algarvians came,” he answered. “They’d already taken the harbor when I got back.” He spoke in a low voice so the fishermen couldn’t overhear: “I didn’t want to surrender, so I took Eforiel over to Lagoas. I’ve been there ever since, along with the rest of the exiles, doing what we could to fight Mezentio.”

Now that Costache wasn’t in his arms anymore, wasn’t pressed against the flesh that had missed her so, he took a longer look into the carriage. The baby sleeping in there had a thin, short fuzz of reddish hair. “She looks like you,” Costache said softly.

“She looks like a baby,” Cornelu said. As far as he was concerned, all babies looked more or less alike--oh, maybe not Kuusamans or Zuwayzin, but the rest. And yet, even as that thought went through his mind, he was trying to find his nose, his chin, on those small smooth features.

The waiter set down Costache’s supper. If he found anything remarkable about a father staring at a daughter more than a year old as if he’d never seen her before, he kept it to himself. Costache ate absently. She kept staring from Cornelu to Brindza and back again, as if reconnecting the two of them in her mind.

“How have you been?” Cornelu asked her.

“Tired,” she answered at once. “If you have a baby, you’re tired. You can’t be anything else. And times have been hard. No pay, no pension, no money to hire a nurse to take care of Brindza so I could make money on my own.” She shook her head. “Tired,” she repeated.

“I wish I could have let you know sooner that I was all right,” Cornelu said. “Some . . . friends of mine were finally able to post that note.” He wondered if the Lagoan raiders were still on the island. He had no way to know, not now.

“I almost fell over in a faint when I recognized your script,” Costache said. “And then the other notes started.”

“They wouldn’t have, but I got stranded here.” Cornelu shook his head. “Poor Eforiel took all the energy from an egg.”

“Ah, too bad.” Costache also shook her head. She sounded sad. But she did not understand, not really. No one but another leviathan-rider could have understood. Cornelu had been more intimate with his wife, but not a great deal.

Intimate with his wife ... It had been so long. He took a last swig from the second mug of ale. “Can we go home now?” he asked, confident he knew the answer.

But, to his astonished chagrin, Costache shook her head again. “I dare not bring you home,” she said. “I have three Algarvian officers billeted on me. They have been correct in every way,” she added hastily, “but if you came there, you’d go into a captives’ camp the instant you walked through the door.”

“Three Algarvian officers?” Cornelu echoed in tones that couldn’t mean anything but, Three men I have to kill. He thought pain and outrage would choke him. Clapping a hand to his forehead, he exclaimed, “Has it come to this, then? Do I have to make an assignation to sleep with my own wife?” He barely remembered to keep his voice too low for the fishermen to hear him.

“Aye, I fear it has come to that, and even assignations won’t be easy,” Costache answered. Cornelu felt the veins of his neck tighten with fury: fury at the Algarvians, fury at her, fury at everything that kept him from taking what he’d wanted so much for so very long. Before he could bellow like a bull, Brindza woke up and started to cry. Costache gave Cornelu a weary smile. “And here you have one of the reasons assignations won’t be easy.” She scooped the baby out of the carriage.

Cornelu stared at his daughter. He did his best not to see her only as an obstacle standing between him and taking Costache to bed. She looked back at him out of eyes that might have been her mother’s. With some effort, he smiled. She turned her face back toward Costache, as if to ask, Who is this person? What she did say was, “Mama?”

“She’s shy with strangers right now,” Costache said. “People say they all are at this age.”

I am not a stranger! Cornelu wanted to shout. I am her father! That was true, but Brindza had no way of knowing it. A new thought cut him like a dagger from out of the night: I wonder if she’s shy with the Algarvians living, in my house.

“I’d better go,” Costache said. “They will be wondering where I am at this hour.” She leaned forward and brushed Cornel us lips with her own. “Keep writing to me. We’ll meet again as soon as we can.”