Authors: Harry Turtledove
He’d also had more sorrows to drown than she knew. He’d looked up from the mug when she walked into the kitchen, looked up from it and— voice not blurry in the least, he’d asked, “Did you ever run across a redhead named Spinello?”
The question had crashed into her like a lightning bolt from a clear sky. Her face must have given her away, for she’d seen his mouth tighten. After that, what point to lying? “Aye,” she’d answered quietly. “Back in Oyngestun. How did you know?”
Maybe that hadn’t been the perfect question, for it had made him gulp down all the wine left in his mug. “I heard him … mention your name talking to his men. How could he know I speak Algarvian?”
Mentioning her name undoubtedly meant going into obscene detail over all the things he’d made her do back there in her home village. With a sigh, Vanai had said, “He wanted to get my grandfather to collaborate with the redheads. That would have meant something in scholarly circles. You saw him once, when he was out looking at an imperial Kaunian site with my grandfather and me.”
“I remember,” Ealstan had said. He’d hesitated then; Vanai gave him credit for it. But he’d gone on: “He wanted something else from you.”
Vanai had nodded.
What else could I have done?
she wondered.
Nothing. Nothing at all.
“My grandfather said no,” she’d told Ealstan. “He kept saying no. You met him. You have some small idea what a stubborn man he was. And so Spinello threw him into a labor gang. He wasn’t young. He’d never done work like that in his life. It was killing him. I watched it happen for a little while. I couldn’t stand it. Whatever else he was, he was the only kin I had left in the world. And so I …” Up till then, she’d managed to sound as cool, as detached, as if she were talking about building a fence. But the last few words came out in a ragged gulp as tears spilled down her cheeks: “I made a bargain with Spinello.”
She’d stood there waiting once she got it out. What would Ealstan do? Slowly, he’d climbed to his feet.
Is he going out the door?
she remembered thinking.
Will he come back? Will he even look back? Will he hit me? This once, I could bear it without hating him afterwards.
He’d come toward her. She remembered bracing herself, too. Then he’d put his arms around her and switched from the Forthwegian they’d been speaking to his slow, clear, classical Kaunian: “Brivibas, I think, was luckier in you than he realized—perhaps luckier than he deserved. And may the powers below eat that Spinello.”
Vanai really had burst into tears then, and buried her face in the hollow of his shoulder. They were very nearly of a height; she hadn’t had to stand on tiptoe to do it. She remembered whispering, “Thank you,” over and over again, but she still wasn’t sure if she’d said it loud enough for Ealstan to hear.
But she was sure what he’d said before she looked up again: “May the powers below have some help eating that Spinello.” He’d sounded thoroughly grim.
He’d sounded so grim, in fact, that he’d terrified her. She’d thought about killing Spinello. He’d sounded as if he intended to march out right that minute and do it. And so she’d clung to him and exclaimed, “No! He’s not worth the risk of you. By the powers above, he
isn’t,
Ealstan! And besides, before long the Unkerlanters are bound to do it for us.”
“They haven’t done it yet,” he’d grumbled. But he hadn’t gone charging out of the flat then, and, so far as Vanai knew, he hadn’t tried stalking Spinello since. She hoped that meant he’d listened to her as well as hearing her. She hoped so, but she wasn’t sure. He hadn’t seemed any different with her after that dreadful day, and he hadn’t seemed any different with Saxburh, either. Vanai dared take that for a good sign.
Even so, she knew that, if she was going to try to get rid of Spinello, sooner was definitely better. Ealstan, she feared, would also try—and even if he succeeded, he was all too likely to get caught. If he did try, he would pick the most obvious, most direct way. Vanai knew him too well to have any doubts on that score. But what Algarvian would pay any particular attention to a Forthwegian woman? Vanai wasn’t standing by a mirror to see her own smile, but suspected it showed a lot of pointed teeth. Every now and then, being Thelberge to the world had its advantages.
But being anyone in Eoforwic these days also had its disadvantages, and they were many and large. Few Unkerlanter eggs had burst close to the block of flats, but that didn’t mean Swemmel’s soldiers couldn’t start lobbing them this way whenever they chose. Staying in Eoforwic meant living with danger.
Staying in Eoforwic also meant living with hunger. Not a lot of food came into the Forthwegian capital, and the redheads kept more than their share of what did. People haunted the markets. They also pocked through the wreckage that made up so much of the city, looking for jars of olives and for smoked or salted meat and for wine and, most of all, for rest crates filled with sorcerously preserved food. Find one of those—and get it home without having it stolen—and you might eat well for a long time. Find silver or jewelry and you could pay the piratical prices in the markets.
And, as happened every fall, people hunted mushrooms over every inch of bare ground in Eoforwic. Sometimes Vanai would go out with Ealstan and they would pass the baby back and forth. No matter how dismal things were, Saxburh could make Ealstan smile. “If it weren’t for mushrooms, you wouldn’t be here,” he would tell her. She hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about, but she always gurgled with delight when he talked to her.
And sometimes Vanai would take Saxburh out by herself. Nobody in shattered Eoforwic seemed to need bookkeepers, but there were plenty of day-laborer jobs, and Ealstan took them without complaint, especially when he got paid in food instead of silver. Plenty of Forthwegian women took them, too, but Vanai couldn’t. Even if she’d had someone to take care of Saxburh, she didn’t dare stay out in public for the long shifts such work required. If her sorcerous disguise wore off… She didn’t want to think about that.
No one kept track of a mushroom hunter’s hours, though. Head down, the baby in the crook of her arm or sometimes in a cloth harness she’d made from scraps of old clothes, she eyed damp ground in the park where she’d first shown herself to the world as Thelberge—where, in fact, Ealstan had given her the name she’d used ever since.
Sometimes she had good luck, sometimes not so good. More people were harvesting a lot less space than had been true around Gromheort and Oyngestun. But mushrooms weren’t like gold or silver—getting some out of the ground today didn’t mean more wouldn’t spring up tomorrow. You couldn’t live on mushrooms alone, but they did help. And they made barley—often stale barley, sometimes moldy barley—much more bearable and less monotonous than it would have been without them.
Paying close attention to small patches of ground helped Vanai keep from noticing how ravaged the park was. Sometimes, though, as when a score of new craters from bursting eggs pocked its face like some ghastly disease, she couldn’t help it. Ealstan was along with her that morning. With a sad sigh, she said, “This place was shabby when you brought me here a couple of years ago. Now—now it’s like looking at a corpse.”
“A murdered corpse,” he agreed. “But if we’d been here when those eggs came down, we’d’ve been the ones who got murdered.”
“Maybe,” Vanai said. “But maybe not, too. I’ve had to jump into craters a few times when the Unkerlanters started tossing eggs across the river, or when their dragons came over the city. It’s just something we need to do these days, that’s all.” She wondered what her former self from Oyngestun—herself from before the war—would have made of that calm, matter-of-fact statement. She would have reckoned it madness. She was sure of that. What else could it possibly be?
But why, if it were madness, was Ealstan soberly nodding? “I’ve had to do the same thing myself,” he answered, and showed his teeth in a mirthless grin. “Life in the big city. It isn’t even what irks me these days. You know what is?”
“Tell me,” Vanai said, but then she stopped listening because she’d seen some meadow mushrooms peeping out from the edge of a clump of woods. She hurried over, picked them, and put them in her basket. “I’m sorry.
Now
tell me.”
“You know about Plegmund’s Brigade? Everybody knows about Plegmund’s Brigade,” he said, and Vanai nodded. Ealstan muttered something under his breath about his cousin Sidroc, then got back to things at hand:
“The Algarvians have cooked up something like that for Forthwegian women now, powers below eat them.”
“For women?” Vanai said. “Do they give them sticks?”
“No, no.” He shook his head. “They call them Hilde’s Helpers—you know, after Plegmund’s queen. And what Hilde’s Helpers do is, they cook and they bake like maniacs, and then they give the redheads everything they make. They just ignore Forthwegian laborers—I’ve seen that, too, curse them. I heard one of them say the Algarvians deserve the best of everything because they’re defending us from Swemmel’s savages.”
“Do people really believe that? Can people really believe that?” Vanai asked.
“This gal did,” Ealstan said. He held Saxburh up in front of his face. “She didn’t even know as much as you do. She didn’t come close.” Saxburh laughed.
Vanai didn’t. No Kaunian, of course, could prefer Algarvians to Unkerlanters. But, even now, some Forthwegians evidently could.
Fools,
she thought. But there were also Forthwegians who preferred the Algarvians not in spite of what they’d done to the Kaunians of Forthweg but because of it.
She saw some of Hilde’s Helpers a couple of days later. They wore blue-and-white armbands—Forthwegian colors—and, sure enough, carried baskets and trays of food. They all looked well fed themselves, too. Vanai quietly cursed them. And, had they known what she was, they would have cursed her.
She hoped Unkerlanter dragons would raid Eoforwic while Hilde’s Helpers were serving Algarvian soldiers. If that wasn’t poetic justice, what was? “They would deserve it,” she told Saxburh. The baby smiled, showing a new tooth that had cost Vanai an almost sleepless night. Babies didn’t argue, except when you wanted them to go to bed.
And then Vanai smiled, too, and kissed Saxburh. Her daughter laughed out loud. A moment later, so did Vanai. She knew what she needed to do. She knew how to do it. “I’ll have to get another basket,” she said, “a little one. A special one. And I’ll need a bit of luck. But do you know what, sweetheart? For once in my life, I won’t need much.” Saxburh grinned, as if proud of that new tooth. So did Vanai.