Through the Darkness

The Forthwegian woman giggled and clapped her hands and hugged herself with glee. She stared avidly. If anything dreadful happened to the Kaunian, she wanted to watch. The blond turned out to speak Algarvian. Bowing to Bembo, he said, “I am sorry, sir.”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it.” Bembo advanced on him, club upraised. The Forthwegian woman clapped her hands again. “Sorry doesn’t begin to cut it,” the constable growled. “I already asked you once, what are you doing running around loose? This isn’t your part of Gromheort, and you’ll pay for poking your nose out of the part that is.”

“Do what you want to me.” The Kaunian bowed again. This time, he kept on looking down at the cobbles. “My daughter is sick. None of the Kaunian apothecaries has the drug she needs. And so”--he shrugged--”I went outside to find it. If you had a daughter, sir, would you not do the same?”

Since he’d got out of the Kaunian district, odds were he’d already bribed one Algarvian constable. Bembo was as sure of that as he was of his own name. “Have you got any money left?” he demanded.

“Aye, some,” the blond answered, and the Forthwegian woman let out an angry, thwarted screech. The Kaunian went on, “If it is all the same to you, though, I think I would sooner take a beating. I will need the money for more medicine, and for food.”

Bembo stared at him. Either the blond was serious, or else he’d just come up with the most outlandish scheme to escape a beating Bembo had ever heard of. He didn’t know whether to admire the fellow’s nerve or to beat him to within an inch of his life to teach him not to try that sort of nonsense again. The Forthwegian woman had no doubts. “Wallop him!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “He deserves it. He said so himself. Wallop him!”

Reluctantly--he didn’t want to do anything the noisy woman suggested-- Bembo decided he had to give the Kaunian a lesson. If the blonds got the idea they could shame the Algarvians into leaving them alone, who could guess how much trouble they’d cause? And so, raising the bludgeon, he advanced on the blond.

He hoped the Kaunian would run. The fellow was skinny and looked agile. The constable wasn’t like to be able to catch him. He could prove his own ferocity and still not beat a man who wasn’t fighting back.

But the Kaunian just stood there waiting. Bembo didn’t soften. Instead, he got angry. The club thudded down on the Kaunian’s back. The blond grunted, but held his ground. That made Bembo angrier. His next stroke laid open the Kaunian’s scalp.

And that proved too much for the blond to bear. With a howl of pain, he turned and fled. His trousers flapped at his ankles. Bembo tried to kick him in the backside, but missed. He ran after him for half a block. By then, he was panting; his heart thudded in his chest. He slowed, then stopped. He’d done his duty.

“You should have blazed him!” the Forthwegian woman shouted. “It would have served him right.”

“Oh, shut up, you old hag,” Bembo said, but not very loud. He didn’t want her screeching at him anymore. What he wanted was a simple, quiet tour on the beat, a tour where he didn’t have to do anything but stop in at some shops he knew to cadge a few cups of wine and some cakes and sausages and whatever else he might happen to crave. He sighed. What he’d been through felt too much like work. And his day wasn’t even half over yet.

A few blocks later, he came to the park where he and Oraste had met and blazed a drunken Kaunian mage. It was daytime now, not the middle of the night, and all--or at least most--Kaunians were closed up in their own district nowadays. On the other hand, the park was even more decrepit than it had been a few months before. No one had bothered cutting grass or trimming weeds. He could hardly make out the paved paths along which Oraste and he had walked.

He wanted to go through the park as much as he would have wanted to go fight Unkerlanters alongside the men of Plegmund’s Brigade. He stood at the edge, indecisive. A gust of wind sprang up and wrapped long stalks of grass around his ankles, as if trying to pull him in. He made a disgusted noise and hopped back.

But that wouldn’t do. He realized as much, however unhappy the knowledge made him. Sergeant Pesaro would have some pungent things to say if he funked the job. And if Pesaro didn’t just ream him out but told

his

superiors, Bembo knew he was liable to get shipped off to Unkerlant. And so, with a melodramatic sigh, he plunged into the park.

Dry grass scrunched under his sandals. Sure enough, staying on the paths was next to impossible. Weeds and shrubs grew higher than a man’s middle. Here and there, they grew higher than a man’s head. When Bembo looked back over his shoulder, he could hardly see the street from which he’d come. If anything happens to me in here, he thought nervously, nobody’d find out for days.