Into the Darkness

11.

When Vanai heard the knock on the door, her first thought was that it meant trouble. She’d grown quite good at telling Kaunians from Forthwegians simply by the way they knocked. Kaunians did it as softly as they could to make themselves heard inside, almost as if they were apologizing for causing a disturbance. The Forthwegians of Oyngestun came less often to the house she shared with her grandfather. When they did, they forthrightly announced themselves.

This knock—it came again as Vanai hurried toward the door—did not seem to fall into either the apologetic or the forthright school. What it said was, Open up or suffer the consequences, or, perhaps, Open up and suffer the consequences anyway.

“What is that dreadful racket?” Brivibas called from his study. “Vanai, do something about it, if you please.”

“Aye, my grandfather,” Vanai said. Brivibas sensed something out of the ordinary, too, which worried her. He paid as little heed as he could to such mundanities as knocks on the door. No ancient Kaunian author Vanai knew and no modern journal of things anciently Kaunian mentioned them; thus, they might as well not have existed for him.

She opened the door, telling herself she was imagining things and a Forthwegian tradesman would be standing there irritably wondering what took her so long. But the man standing there was no Forthwegian. He was tall and lanky, with a red chin beard and mustaches waxed to needle points. On his head, cocked at a jaunty angle, sat a broad-brimmed hat with a bright pheasant feather sticking up from the band. He wore a short tunic above a pleated kilt, and boots and knee socks. He was, in short, an Algarvian, as Vanai had feared from the first.

She thought about slamming the door in his face, but didn’t have the nerve. Besides, she doubted that would do any good. Trying to keep a quaver from her voice, she asked, “What—what do you want?”

He surprised her by sweeping off his hat and bowing almost double, then astonished her by replying in Kaunian rather than the Forthwegian she’d used: “Is this the home of the famous scholar Brivibas?”

Was it a trap? If it was, what could she do about it? The occupiers had to know where Brivibas lived. They didn’t need to waste time on politeness, either. Had they wanted her grandfather for dark reasons of their own, they could have broken down the door and sent soldiers storming in. Despite the obvious truth in all that, she couldn’t bring herself to say anything more than, “Who wishes to learn?” She kept on speaking Forthwegian.

The Algarvian bowed again. “I have the honor to be Major Spinello. Will you do me the courtesy of announcing me to your—grandfather, is that correct? I wish to seek his wisdom in matters having to do with antiquities in this area.” He kept using Kaunian. He spoke it very well, and even used participles correctly. Only his trilled “r”s declared his native language.

Vanai gave up. “Please step into the front hall,” she said in her own tongue. “I will tell him you wish to see him.”

Spinello rewarded her with another bow. “You are very kind, and very lovely as well.” That made her retreat faster than the Forthwegian army ever had. The redhead did keep his hands to himself, but she didn’t let him get close enough to do anything else.

Brivibas looked up in some annoyance when she poked her head into the study. “Whoever that was at the door, I hope you sent him away with a flea in his ear,” he said. “Drafting an article in Forthwegian is quite difficult enough without distractions.”

“My grandfather”—Vanai took a deep breath, and also took a certain amount of pleasure in dropping an egg on Brivibas’s head—“my grandfather, an Algarvian major named Spinello would speak with you concerning antiquities around Oyngestun.”

Brivibas opened his mouth, then closed it again. He tried once more: “An—Algarvian major?” Each word seemed to require a separate effort. “What am I to do?” he muttered, apparently to himself. But the answer to that, even for a scholar, was only too obvious. He rose from his chair. “I had better see him, hadn’t I?”

He followed Vanai back to the hall that led to the street door. Spinello was examining a terra-cotta relief of a cobbler at work hanging there. After bowing to Brivibas and yet again to Vanai, he said, “This is a splendid copy. I’ve seen the original in the museum at Trapani.”

That he should recognize such an obscure piece and recall where the original was displayed flabbergasted Vanai. Her grandfather said only, “A shame it was carried away from its original site.”

Spinello wagged a finger at him, like an actor playing an Algarvian on the stage. “The original site for this one was in Unkerlant, if I recall,” he said in his excellent Kaunian. “The local barbarians probably would have smashed it when they were drunk.”

“Hmm,” Brivibas said. Vanai watched him weighing one dislike against another. At last, brusquely, he nodded. “It could be so. And now, if you will, tell me why a major of the occupying army seeks me out.”

Spinello bowed again. Watching him made Vanai dizzy. He said, “I am a major, true: I serve my king, and serve him loyally. But I am also an antiquarian and, being an antiquarian, I seek to learn at the feet of the great scholar whose home, I discover, is in the otherwise unimpressive village where I find myself stationed.”

Vanai thought he laid it on with a trowel. She looked for her grandfather to send him away, probably with his ears ringing. But Brivibas proved no more immune to flattery than most men. After coughing a couple of times, he said, “In my own small way, I do what I can.”

“You are too modest!” Spinello cried. However well he spoke Kaunian, he did so with Algarvian theatricality. “Your studies on late imperial pottery in the Western Kaunian Empire? First-rank! Better than first-rank!” He kissed his fingertips. “And the monograph on the bronze coinage of the usurper Melbardis? Again, a work scholars will use a hundred years from now. Could I ignore the opportunity to seek wisdom from such a man?”

“Ahem!” Brivibas ran a finger inside the neck of his tunic, as if it had suddenly become too tight for comfort. He turned pink. Vanai couldn’t remember the last time he’d flushed. He coughed again, then said, “Perhaps we should discuss this in the parlor, rather than standing here in the hall. My granddaughter, would you be good enough to pour wine for the major and me—and for yourself, of course, if you would care for some?”

“Aye, my grandfather,” Vanai said tonelessly. She was glad to escape to the kitchen, even though the goblet of wine the Algarvian major would drink meant one goblet fewer that she and Brivibas could share.

When she went back to the parlor, Spinello was knowledgeably praising the ornaments in the chamber. He took his goblet and beamed at Vanai. “And here is the finest ornament of them all!” he said, lifting the wine cup in salute to her.

She was glad she hadn’t taken any wine. She had nothing that made her linger in the parlor. As soon as she gave her grandfather his goblet, she could—and did—leave. Her ears felt on fire.

She stayed in the kitchen, soaking peas and beans and chopping an onion for the meager stew that would be supper. She didn’t have enough of anything. Since the war ended, she’d given up on the idea of having enough of anything. That she and Brivibas weren’t starving she reckoned no small accomplishment.

Her grandfather’s voice and Spinello’s drifted across the courtyard to her. She could not make out much of what they said, but tone was a different matter. Spinello sounded animated. Spinello, though, was an Algarvian—how else would he sound? She hadn’t heard her grandfather so lively in … She tried to recall if she’d ever heard him so lively. She had trouble being sure.

After what seemed like forever, Brivibas escorted Spinello out to the street once more. Then her grandfather came to the kitchen. His eyes were wide with wonder. “A civilized Algarvian!” he said. “Who would have imagined such a thing?”

“Who would have imagined such a thing?” Vanai echoed coldly.

Brivibas had the grace to look flustered, but said, “Well, he was, however strange you may find that. He discoursed most learnedly on a great many aspects of classical Kaunian history and literature. He is, as it happens, particularly interested in the history of sorcery, and sought my assistance in pinpointing for him some of the power points the ancient Kaunians utilized in this area. You will perceive at once how closely this marches with my own researches.”

“My grandfather, he is an Algarvian.” Vanai set the peas and beans and onions over the fire to start cooking.

“My granddaughter, he is a scholar.” Brivibas coughed on a note different from the one he’d used when Spinello praised him; no doubt he was remembering the unkind things he’d said about non-Kaunian scholars in the past. “He has shown himself to be really quite an excellent scholar. I have a great deal to teach him.” Vanai busied herself with supper. After a while, Brivibas gave up justifying himself and went away. He came back to eat, but the meal passed in gloomy silence.

That, however, did not solve the problem of Major Spinello. The Algarvian returned a couple of days later. He did not come emptyhanded, either: he carried a bottle of wine, another bottle full of salted olives, and greasy paper enclosing a couple of pounds of ham cut so thin, each slice was almost transparent.

“I know times are not easy for you,” he said. “I hope I can in some small way be of assistance.” He laughed. “Call it my tuition fee.”

The food was very welcome. Neither Brivibas nor Vanai said how welcome it was. Spinello likely knew. He never showed up without some sort of present after that: dried fruit, a couple of dressed squab, fine olive oil, sugar. Vanai’s belly grew quieter than it had been in a long time. Her spirit…

She did not go out on to the streets of Oyngestun that often. When she did, though, she discovered she had more to fear from her own folk than from the Algarvian soldiers. Small boys threw mud at her. Kaunian youths her own age spat on her shadow. Blond girls turned their backs on her. Adults simply pretended she did not exist.

In the night, someone painted ALGARVIANS’ WHORE on the front of the house she shared with Brivibas. She found a bucket of whitewash and covered over the big red letters the best she could. Her grandfather clucked sadly. “Disgraceful,” he said. “That our own folk should not understand the call of scholarship…” He shook his head. If the villagers harassed him, too, he’d never spoken a word of it.

“They understand that they’re hungry and we’re not,” Vanai said. “They understand we have an Algarvian visitor every few days and they don’t.”

“Shall we throw the food away?” Brivibas asked, more than usually tart. Vanai bit her lip, for she had no good answer to that.

And so Major Spinello kept visiting. The rest of the Kaunians of Oyngestun—and some of the Forgiathwens, too—kept ostracizing Vanai and Brivibas. Brivibas cared more for antiquities than for his neighbors’ opinions. Vanai tried to match his detachment, but found it hard.

When the weather was fine, as it was more often as winter waned, Brivibas led Spinello out of Oyngestun to show him some of the ancient sites nearby. Vanai stayed home as often as she could, but she couldn’t always. Sometimes Spinello asked her to come along. He always chatted gaily when she did. Sometimes Brivibas did a little digging at one site or another, and used her as a beast of burden.

Once, east of Oyngestun, he held up a Kaunian potsherd as if he’d invented it rather than pulling it from between the roots of a weed. Spinello applauded. Vanai sighed, wishing she were elsewhere. She’d seen too many sherds to let one more impress her.

Bushes rustled. Vanai turned to look. Neither Brivibas nor Spinello, lost in antiquarian ecstasies, noticed. Through burgeoning new leaves, Vanai saw a Forthwegian peering out at her—and at the others. After a moment, she recognized Ealstan. He’d already recognized her… and Spinello. He pursed his lips, shook his head, and slipped away.

Vanai burst into tears. Her grandfather and the Algarvian major were most perplexed.

Leudast wore one thin black stripe on each sleeve of his rock-gray tunic. He had his reward for living through the desert war against Zuwayza: promotion to corporal. That was the reward the Unkerlanter military authorities thought they’d conferred on him, at any rate.

In his own view, being transferred back to occupation duty in western Forthweg counted for far more. He’d seen enough naked shouting black men to last him the rest of his days. If he missed the chance to see some naked black women—well, that was a privation he’d have to endure.

Discussing such matters with Sergeant Magnulf, he said, “The burnt-skinned wenches are probably ugly, anyway.”

Magnulf nodded. “Wouldn’t surprise me a bit. Besides, far as I’m concerned, any woman who’d sooner spit in my eye than smile at me is ugly, and I don’t care whether she’d naked or not.”

“That’s so, I expect,” Leudast said after a little thought. “More efficient to go after the ones who do smile.”

“Of course it is.” Magnulf had no doubts. Why should he? He was a sergeant. “And if you have to lay out a little cash to make ’em smile, so what? What else were you going to spend it on?” He changed the subject: “Go see that the men have gathered plenty of firewood.”

“Aye, Sergeant.” One of the things Leudast liked about being a corporal was that it freed him from duties like gathering wood and hauling water.

He’d never seen such a pack of lazy bastards as the common soldiers to whom he delivered Magnulf’s order, either. “Come on, you shirkers,” he growled. “Shake a leg, or you’ll eat your supper raw.” Had he been so useless when he was just a common soldier? He looked back across the immense distance of a few weeks—looked back and started to laugh. No wonder the underofficers in charge of him had spent so much time screaming.

The next morning, Colonel Roflanz, the regimental commander, assembled the entire regiment, something he hadn’t done since they came back to Forthweg. In addition to a colonel’s three stars grouped in a triangle on his shoulder, Roflanz also wore the silver belt of an earl. He was a good-sized man; a lot of silver had gone into that belt.

He said, “Enough of rest, men. Enough of relaxation. A little is efficient. Too much, and the rot begins. We start exercises today. We need to be ready. We always need to be ready. Anything can happen. Whatever happens, we will be ready.”

Leudast wondered if he talked that way because he was stupid or because he was convinced his men were stupid. Then he wondered if both those things might not be true at once. It probably didn’t matter, anyhow. A stupid commander would get a lot of his men killed. A commander who thought his men were stupid wouldn’t care how many of them he got killed.

The exercise was against cavalry, but the horses had been tricked out with gray blankets. “For this drill, you are to make believe those animals are behemoths,” Sergeant Magnulf said solemnly.

“Shall we make believe we’re dragons?” somebody asked—somebody well back of the first rank, who had sense enough to disguise his voice.

“Silence!” Magnulf shouted, and Leudast surprised himself by echoing the sergeant. The horsemen advanced at a lazy trot. Magnulf glowered at his squad. “Here come the behemoths. What are you going to do about it?”

Had they been real behemoths, Leudast’s thoughts would have gone back and forth between Run like blazes and Die on the spot. Because it was only an exercise, he could look on things in a more detached way. “We’d better scatter,” he said, “so they can’t take out all of us with one egg or one long blaze from a heavy stick.”

Magnulf beamed at him, not something he was used to from a sergeant. “Maybe we should have promoted you a while ago,” Magnulf said. “Scattering is the efficient thing to do, all right. And then what?”

Leudast knew the answer to that, too, but he’d already spoken up once. Somebody else deserved a chance. A trooper named Trudulf said, “Then we try and blaze the bastards up on the behemoths.”

Each horse was carrying only one rider. All the horses looked as if they’d fall over dead if asked to carry more than one rider. Even so, it was the right answer, for real behemoths bore sizable crews. “Good,” Magnulf said. “Now we’d better do it, before they trample us into the dust.”

The soldiers dove into the bushes. The riders on the horses made as if to bombard them. Leudast and his comrades pretended they were picking off the riders. Every so often, someone would pretend to be slain and thrash about or dramatically fall off a horse. It was not a very realistic exercise.

Even so, Leudast wondered why Colonel Roflanz’s superiors had ordered this particular drill now. All Leudast wanted to do was go on peacefully occupying Forthweg. He didn’t think the Forthwegians were going to come after him with thundering herds of behemoths. What Forthweg had had along those lines, she’d thrown at Algarve—and then got thrown back.

After picking himself up and brushing dry grass off the front of his tunic, Leudast peered east. Unkerlanter occupation of Forthweg stopped not far east of Eoforwic, which had been the capital. The redheads held the rest of the kingdom. Leudast’s father and one of his grandfathers had fought the Algarvians during the Six Years’ War. If a quarter of the stories they’d told were true, only a madman would look forward to facing the armies of Algarve.

Leudast looked from east to west, toward Cottbus. Some of the things people whispered about King Swemmel… Who could guess if those things were true? Leudast hoped they weren’t, for Unkerlant’s sake. But Zuwayza hadn’t had many behemoths—the black men, curse them, had gone in for camels instead. The Gongs might have had herds of the great beasts—truth about Gyongyos was as hard to come by as truth about King Swemmel—but couldn’t use many of them against Unkerlant, not in the mountains that marked the far western frontier.

Which left… Algarve. “Hey, Sergeant!” Leudast called. Magnulf looked a question his way; he didn’t want to ask what was in his mind so everyone could hear. He almost whispered it, in fact, when the veteran came over: “Are King Mezentio’s men going to jump us?”

Magnulf also glanced around to see who might be listening. When he’d satisfied himself no one was too close, he answered, “Not that I’ve heard. How come? Do you know something I don’t?”

“I don’t know anything,” Leudast said. A spark glowed in Magnulf’s eyes, but he didn’t make the obvious joke. Leudast went on, “If we’re not worried about Algarve, though, why drill against behemoths?”

“Ah.” Magnulf thought about that, then nodded. “I see what you’re saying,” he continued, also speaking quietly. “It makes sense, I suppose, but no, from all I’ve heard, the border is quiet.”

“Good.” Leudast started to turn away, but something else occurred to him: “Are we going to jump the Algarvians?”

Just for a moment, Magnulf’s eyes went very wide. Then he caught himself and answered, “No, of course not. What a daft notion.”

He was lying. Leudast was as sure of that as of his own name. He wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He wished the idea had chosen a different time to pop into his head. He could have told himself it was so much moonshine, so much hogwash. Now he knew different. He sighed. The impressers hadn’t asked him if he wanted to join the army. They’d told him what would happen if he didn’t. It had seemed horrifying at the time. Next to what he’d seen since, it didn’t look so bad.

Magnulf flipped him a coin. “Get the squad billeted, then go over to the tavern and buy yourself some ale or some wine or whatever suits you.”

Leudast stared at the silver bit. King Penda’s image stared back at him—it was a Forthwegian coin. Then Leudast stared at Magnulf. The sergeant had never tossed him money before. Maybe Magnulf did it because he was a corporal now, not a common soldier. Maybe, on the other hand, Magnulf did it so he would forget about the question he’d asked.

“Go on, get moving,” Magnulf said. Some sergeantly snap returned to his voice, but only some—or was Leudast letting his imagination run away with him?

He didn’t want to find out the hard way. “Aye, Sergeant,” he said. “Thanks.” He put the silver bit in his own belt pouch, then followed orders. No Unkerlanter who did exactly as his superior told him could go far wrong. King Swemmel’s reign had changed a good many things, but not that. Never that.

As he strode through the village toward the tavern, the Forthwegians sent him resentful stares. His uniform tunic and his clean-shaven face marked him as an Unkerlanter, a foreigner, an occupier. But the Forthwegians didn’t say anything where he could hear them. They’d learned the hard way that Unkerlanters could follow enough of their language to recognize insults.

A couple of soldiers were already inside the tavern when Leudast came through the door. Maybe they weren’t supposed to be there, for they got up in alarm. They weren’t from his company, so he didn’t care what they did. He waved them back to their stools and went up to the tavernkeeper. “Plain spirits,” he said, speaking slowly and distinctly so the Forthwegian couldn’t misunderstand him.

“Aye, plain spirits,” the fellow said, but he moved like a sleepwalker till Leudast set the silver bit Magnulf had given him on the counter. After that, Leudast got his drink very fast.

He sat down and sipped from the glass. The tavernkeeper had given him what he’d asked for, but even plain Forthwegian spirits tasted a little different from those brewed in Unkerlant. The Forthwegians also drank spirits they’d stored inside charred wooden casks, sometimes for years. Leudast had tried those, too—once. One taste was plenty to put him off them forever.

A Forthwegian paused in the doorway, saw three Unkerlanter soldiers inside the tavern, and decided to come back another time. The tavern-keeper sighed and swiped a wet rag over the counter with more force than the job needed.

One of the common soldiers laughed. He said to his friend, “The old boy’s mad he’s lost a customer. He ought to be cursed glad we pay him anything at all.”

“Aye.” His friend laughed, too. “Better than he deserves, you ask me.”

The tavernkeeper polished the counter harder than ever. Just as Unkerlanters could understand some Forthwegian, Forthwegians could follow some Unkerlanter. This old boy probably wished he couldn’t.

Leudast looked down into his glass of spirits. All at once, he knocked it back with a flick of the wrist. The spirits might have been plain, but they weren’t smooth; he felt as if a dragon had breathed fire down his throat. Even so, he got up, bought another glass, and poured it down. He didn’t feel any better after he’d drunk it, nor did he dare have a third; Magnulf hadn’t given him leave to get drunk. But two glasses of spirits weren’t nearly enough to make him feel easy about the prospect of going forward against the Algarvians.

Marshal Rathar was fighting a campaign he could not possibly win: memoranda and reports piled up on his desk faster than he was able to deal with them. He might have had a better chance to catch up had King Swemmel taken a couple of week’s holiday at the spas west of Cottbus or at the royal hunting lodge in the woods to the south.

But, as Rathar had seen, Swemmel did not take holidays. For one thing, the king did not care to leave the capital, lest a usurper seize the reins of government while he was away. For another, Swemmel had no passions—indeed, so far as Rathar knew, had no interests—save ruling.

The marshal studied a map of what had been Forthweg and was now divided between Unkerlant and Algarve, as it had been before the Six Years’ War. He studied the blue arrows that showed Unkerlanter forces slashing into eastern Forthweg and taking it away from King Mezentio’s men. He noted only one flaw in the plan, which had King Swemmel’s enthusiastic support: it required that the Algarvians not do anything out of the ordinary—like resisting, he thought with a snort.

When he looked up from that alarmingly optimistic map, he discovered a young lieutenant from the crystallomancy section standing in the doorway waiting to be noticed. “What is it?” Rathar asked, gruffness covering embarrassment—how long had the poor fellow been gathering dust there while he stayed in his brown study?

“My lord Marshal, his Majesty requires your presence in his audience chamber in an hour’s time,” the lieutenant replied. He touched his right hand to his forehead and bowed in salute, then turned on his heel and hurried away.

Well, that answered that: with a message from King Swemmel, the fellow had not been waiting long. Had Rathar not looked up almost at once, the lieutenant would have interrupted him. Swemmel’s commands took precedence over everything else in Unkerlant.

For the sake of the kingdom, he endured stripping off his marshal’s sword and hanging it in the anteroom to the audience chamber. For the sake of his kingdom, he endured the bodyguards’ intimate attentions. “You should have seen that crazy old Zuwayzi, my lord,” one of the guards said, patting the insides of his thighs. “He took off his clothes so we could search ’em. Have you ever heard the like?”

“Hajjaj?” Rathar asked, and the bodyguard nodded. The marshal went on, “He’s not crazy—he’s a very clever, very able man. And if you don’t have a little care with your hand there, I may do the same thing the next time the king summons me.”

That scandalized the guards, but not enough to make the search any less thorough. When they were finally satisfied Rathar carried no lethal implements, they suffered him to enter the audience chamber. He went through the prescribed prostrations and acclamations before King Swemmel, then received the king’s permission to rise.

“How may I serve your Majesty?” he asked—always the question with Swemmel. That was what the king was for: to be served.

“In the matter concerning the war to come against Algarve,” Swemmel answered.

Rathar had hoped his sovereign would say that—hoped for it and dreaded it at the same time. With Swemmel, nothing was ever simple. “I am yours to command, your Majesty,” he said. I am also going to talk you out of anything excessively foolish, he thought. I am going to do that, if you give me half a chance. Even if you give me a quarter of a chance, I am going to do it.

He hid such thoughts away. Having them was dangerous. Showing them was fatal. And Swemmel, who stared down at him from his high seat like a bird of prey, had a bloodhound’s nose for them. The king’s genius ran in twisted channels, but ran strong where it did run. Rathar’s stolidity was not the least of the assets that had helped him rise to his present rank.

Swemmel said, “Algarve wars in the east. King Mezentio pays Unkerlant no mind. The best time to strike a redhead is when his back is turned.”

“All you say is true, your Majesty.” For a sentence, Rathar could be fulsome and tell the truth at the same time, and he took full advantage of that. It let him go on, “But recall, I beg, that Algarve also warred in the west when we reclaimed western Forthweg. Then you were scrupulous not to molest Mezentio’s men, and also scrupulous not to go beyond Unkerlant’s boundaries before the Six Years’ War.”

“Mezentio would have been looking for us to strike him then,” King Swemmel replied. “He is a devious man, Mezentio.” Coming from Swemmel, that was no small praise—or perhaps simply a matter of like recognizing like. “But we did not strike. Now we have lulled him. Now he thinks we will not strike. He may even think—we hope he does think—we fear to strike against Algarve.”

Rathar feared to strike against Algarve. He and his aides had spent a lot of time examining the way the Algarvians had pierced the Forthwegian army like a spear piercing flesh. In the privacy of his own mind, he set the redheads’ performance against the way the Unkerlanter army had handled itself facing the Zuwayzin. He found the comparison so alarming, he kept it to himself. Had he admitted his fear, Swemmel would have named a new marshal on the instant.

No matter how the Unkerlanters’ performance against Zuwayza dismayed Rathar, though, he could turn it to his own purposes. “Your Majesty, do you recall the chief difficulty your forces had in the campaign in the north?” he asked.

“Aye,” Swemmel growled: “that we could not even smash through the ragtag and bobtail the black men threw against us. Camels!” He screwed up his face till he looked remarkably like a camel himself. “We assure you, Marshal, your reports on the subject of camels grew most tedious.”

“For this, I can only beg your Majesty’s pardon.” Rathar took a deep breath. “The Zuwayzin did indeed fight harder and do more with the camels than we had expected. But that was not our chief difficulty in facing them.”

King Swemmel leaned forward once more, trying to put Rathar in fear—and succeeding, though Rathar hoped the king did not realize that. “If you say bad generalship was the flaw, Marshal, you condemn yourself out of your own mouth,” Swemmel warned.

“Our generals, but for Droctulf, did as well as they could have done,” Rathar said. Droctulf was no longer a general; Rathar thought Droctulf was no longer among the living. The marshal refused to let irrelevancies distract him. He took another deep breath. “Our chief difficulty, your Majesty, was that we struck too soon.”

“Say on,” Swemmel told him, in the tones of a jurist listening to a man already obviously guilty further condemning himself.

“We struck too soon, before all the regiments called for in the plan against Zuwayza were in place,” Rathar said. He did not point out that that had been at Swemmel’s express command. “We struck before we were fully ready, and paid the price. If we strike too soon against Algarve, we shall pay a larger price.”

“You need not fear that,” Swemmel said. “We know the redheads are tougher than the Zuwayzin. You have our leave to collect such soldiery as you need, provided you attack when we give the order. There, do you see? We endeavor to be flexible.”

The clenched fist in Rathar’s gut eased a little. Swemmel was, for Swemmel, in a reasonable mood. That emboldened the marshal to say what needed saying: “Your Majesty, this is but half the loaf. Here is the other half: that I would hesitate to attack Algarve even with all our forces assembled. Now I would hesitate.”

Swemmel stabbed a forefinger out at him. “Did you leave your ballocks behind, up there in the Zuwayzi desert?”

“No.” Standing still and speaking calmly were harder than facing the Zuwayzin in the front line, as he’d done. “For consider: now Algarve fights on the defensive everywhere in the east, against Jelgava and Valmiera both. If we strike the redheads, they will have men to spare, with whom to strike back. But spring is here, or near enough. Soon the Algarvians will strike at their foes. For that, they will have to throw all the men they can spare into the fight. All will be as it was during the Six Years’ War, army locked with army, neither side able to go forward or back. Then, your Majesty, then we strike, and strike hard.”

He waited. He could not judge which way King Swemmel would go. Swemmel was a law of his own. The king would decide what he decided, and Rathar would obey, or, if not Rathar, someone else.

“Ahh,” Swemmel said: more an exhalation than a real word. Whatever it was, though, Rathar knew he’d won his case. Swemmel’s dark eyes glowed; had they been green like an Algarvian’s, he would have looked a happy cat. “That is indeed subtle, Marshal.” By the way he said it, he could have offered no higher praise.

Rathar inclined his head. “I serve your Majesty. I serve the kingdom.” And now I will go on serving a while longer.

“Of course you do.” Swemmel spoke as if no doubt were possible. Everyone in Unkerlant served him… and he destroyed without warning or mercy any servant who, in his sole judgment, had ambitions beyond serving him. For now, though, his suspicions were a banked fire. He took the bait Rathar dangled before him. “Aye, aye, and aye. Let them murder each other by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, as they did for six years straight. This time, the Algarvians shall not slaughter the men of Unkerlant in the same way, as they did during our father’s reign.”

“Even so, your Majesty.” Rathar hid relief as carefully as he had hidden worry.

“But you must be ready,” King Swemmel warned him. “When the moment comes, when the hosts of Algarve bog down in the east of their kingdom or in western Valmiera or Jelgava—wherever they strike first—you must be prepared to smash through whatever garrisons they have left behind in Forthweg. We shall give the order, and you shall obey it.”

“As you say, your Majesty, so shall it be,” Rathar said. If Swemmel picked a time he judged wrong, he would try to talk the king out of it. If he was lucky, as he had been today, he might even succeed.

Something new seemed to occur to Swemmel. “In your plans for attacking Algarve, Marshal, you will assuredly have one wherein our armies strike through Yanina as well as through Forthweg.”

“Aye, your Majesty. More than one, in fact.” Rathar told the truth there without hesitation, even if he did not fully grasp why that mattered to the king.

“Make your dispositions according to whichever of those plans you reckon best, then,” Swemmel said. For once, he condescended to explain: “Thus we shall punish King Tsavellas for letting Penda slip through his fingers instead of yielding him up to us, as we demanded.”

“I serve your Majesty,” Rathar repeated. That struck him as a weak reason for choosing one course over another, but such choices lay in Swemmel’s hands, not his. And Yanina would likely be an enemy in any war against Algarve. Musingly, Rathar went on, “I do wonder where Penda is. King Mezentio has not got him—Tsavellas didn’t yield him up to Algarve, either, as I might have guessed.”

“Penda is not here. We ordered his person surrendered, and it was not.” King Swemmel folded his arms across his chest. “Tsavellas shall pay for his disobedience.”

Rathar had already got Swemmel to be reasonable once. Having won the larger battle, he yielded the smaller one, lest his victory come undone. “Aye, your Majesty,” he said.

Istvan and Borsos the dowser walked through the dirt streets of Sorong. An Obudan man wearing a sort of kilt of woven straw, a Gyongyosian army tunic, and a big straw hat was spreading fresh thatching over the roof beams of a wooden house.

Borsos watched in fascination. “It’s like coming to another world, isn’t it?” he murmured.

“Aye, so it is,” Istvan answered with a chuckle. “I expect you grew up in a solid stone house, same as I did—slates on the roof and everything?”

“Well, of course,” Borsos said. “By the stars, in Gyongyos a man needs a house he can fight from. You never know when you’ll be at feud with the clan in the next valley, or when a feud will break out in your own clan. A house like that”—he pointed—“wouldn’t be much more than kindling for a bonfire.”

Istvan chuckled. “That’s the truth, sir, the truth and to spare. This whole place has gone up in smoke a couple of times since we and the accursed Kuusamans started swapping Obuda back and forth. Wooden houses with thatched roofs don’t stand up to beams and eggs any too well.”

Borsos clicked his tongue between his teeth. “They wouldn’t, no indeed. But the Obudans didn’t know about beams and eggs before ley-line ships started going through the Bothnian Ocean.” He looked wistful, an expression so rarely seen on a Gyongyosian’s face that Istvan needed a moment to recognize it. “It must have been a quiet, peaceful sort of life.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but not likely,” Istvan said. “They went right after each other with spears and bows and with these funny almost-swords they made by edging flat clubs with volcanic glass. I’ve seen those things. You could cursed near cut a man in half with one of’em.”

The dowser gave him a sour look. “You’ve just ruined one of my illusions, you know.”

“Sorry, sir,” Istvan said: the common soldier’s last bastion. “Would you sooner have illusions, or would you sooner have what’s so?”

“Always an interesting question.” Now Borsos studied him in a speculative way. “I take it you’ve never been in love?”

“Sir?” Istvan stared in blank incomprehension.

“Never mind,” Borsos said. “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, all the explaining in the world won’t tell you.”

A couple of Obudans coming down the street nodded to Istvan and Borsos. They wore straw hats like that of the fellow repairing his roof. The man of the couple had on a tunic of coarse local wool over trousers from a Kuusaman uniform. The trousers left several inches of shin showing above the Obudan’s sandals; his people were taller than Kuusamans. The woman’s tunic matched his. Below it, she wore a brightly striped skirt that stopped at about the same place his trousers did.

As she and her companion drew near, they both held out their hands and spoke in Gyongyosian: “Money?”

Istvan made a face at them. “Go milk a goat,” he growled: anything but a compliment in his language.

Borsos had a captain’s pay to spend, not a common soldier’s. He hadn’t been on Obuda nearly so long as Istvan had, either. Pulling a couple of small silver coins out of his pocket, he gave one to each of them, saying, “Here. Take this, and then be off.”

They showered loud praises on the dowser in Obudan, in broken Gyongyosian, and even in scraps of Kuusaman that proved they’d begged during the previous occupation, too. As they went on their way, they kept acclaiming him at the top of their lungs. He looked as pleased with himself as if he’d tossed a scrawny stray dog a bone with a lot of meat on it.

“Well, now you’ve gone and done it, sir.” Istvan rolled his eyes. No doubt Borsos was a fine dowser, but didn’t he have any sense? Istvan shook his head. Borsos had just proved he didn’t.

And, sure enough, those loud praises from the Obudans to whom the captain had given money brought what seemed like half the people of Sorong out of their houses, all of them—men, women, and children—with hands outstretched. “Money?” they all cried. If they knew one word of Gyongyosian, that was it. Istvan fumed. The man and woman hadn’t praised Borsos just to make him feel good. They’d done it to let their cousins and friends and neighbors know there was a Gyongyosian around from whom they could hope to get something.

Borsos doled out a few more coins, which Istvan thought was only compounding his foolishness. Then, far later than he should have, he too figured out what was going on. Instead of smiling, he began to frown, and then to scowl. Instead of saying, “Here,” he began to say, “Go away,” and then, in short order, “Go bugger a billy goat!”

The swarm of Obudans dispersed much more slowly than they’d gathered. The ones who hadn’t got any money—the majority of them—went off disappointed and angry. They showered Borsos with abuse in Obudan, Gyongyosian, and Kuusaman, just as the first couple had showered him with praise. “A goat’s horn up your arse!” a skinny little girl screeched at the dowser, and then, wisely, disappeared around a corner.

“By the stars!” Borsos said when he and Istvan were at last free of the crowd. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “It’ll be a long time before I do that again.”

“Aye, sir,” Istvan said stolidly. “They don’t much mind if you tell all of ’em to jump off a cliff. They’re like beggars back home that way—they’re used to no, and they hear it a lot more than aye. But if you give to some of them, they think you have to give to everybody.”

Borsos still looked shaken. “Beggars back home are broken men, mostly, them and women too old and raddled to get by selling their bodies any more. Some of these folk were merchants and artisans and their kin: people able to live on their own well enough. Why should they shame themselves for silver when they already earn plenty?”

Istvan shrugged. “Who knows why foreigners do what they do? They’re only foreigners. I’ll tell you this, though, sir: the next Obudan I meet with a proper warrior’s pride, or even anything close to it, will be the first.”

“Aye, I’ve seen that myself, though never like today,” the dowser said. He looked thoughtful. “And why should they have a warrior’s pride? Set against us, set even against the Kuusamans, they aren’t proper warriors. They can’t stand against sticks and eggs and wardragons, not with spears and bows and clubs edged with volcanic glass. No wonder they’re blind to shame.”

“Well, isn’t that interesting?” Istvan murmured, more to himself than to Borsos. Just when he’d reckoned his superior a perfect fool, the dowser came out with an idea he’d been thinking about for days.

And Borsos went on, “It’s like that over big stretches of the world.

The folk of Derlavai—aye, and the Lagoans and the accursed Kuusamans, too—know too much magic for anyone else to withstand them. Too much of the mechanic arts, too, though those count for less. There was a tribe on an island in the Great Northern Sea where, a couple of lifetimes ago, all the men slew themselves because the Jelgavans—I think it was the Jelgavans—trounced them every time they fought. They saw they couldn’t win, and couldn’t bear to lose any more.”

“That, at least was bravely done,” Istvan said. “The Obudans fawn and cringe instead.”

“Nothing is ever simple,” the dowser said. “The Obudans are still here to fawn and cringe. When those other islanders slew themselves, they slew their tribe as well. Other men took their women. Other men took their land. Other men took their goods. Their name is dead. It will never live again.”

“It lives,” Istvan insisted. “It lives even in the memory of their foes. If it didn’t, sir, how would you have heard of it?”

“I am a scholar of sorts,” Borsos answered. “I make it my business to learn of such strange things. The Jelgavans wrote down what these tribesmen did, and someone found it interesting enough to translate into our language so people like me could read of it. I doubt that the descendants of these men, if any still live, have the slightest notion of what they did. Are you answered?”

“Sir, I am answered,” Istvan said. “If my great-great-grandchildren forget the deeds of Gyongyos in this war, why do we bother fighting it?”

“Even so,” Borsos said. He looked around. “Now that we’ve finally shaken free of that accursed swarm of beggars, where is this shop you were speaking of?”

“We go round this corner here, sir, and it’s about halfway down the lane toward the woods.” After rounding the corner, Istvan pointed. “That little building there, with the moldy green paint.”

Borsos nodded. “I see it.” He hurried on ahead of Istvan, opened the door, and then paused on the threshold, waiting for Istvan to join him. When Istvan stayed outside in the street, the dowser raised an eyebrow. “Come on in with me.”

“It’s all right, sir,” Istvan said. “You get what you came for. I’ll wait here.”

“Short of silver?” Borsos asked. “Don’t worry about that. You’ve been a lot of help to me since I got shipped out here. I’ll spring for one, if you like.”

Istvan bowed. “Very kind of you, sir,” he said, and meant it—no regular officer, not even a sergeant, would have made such a generous offer. “But you go ahead. I haven’t got anybody to send one to. And besides”—he coughed—“in the valley I come from, people would go on and on about newfangled city ways even if I did.”

Borsos shrugged. “Fewer clan feuds get started this way. I don’t know why the folk in the backwoods valleys can’t see as much if even the Obudans can.” Istvan only shrugged. So did the dowser, who said, “All right, have it as you’d have it.” He went into the shop.

A little old woman hobbling by asked Istvan for money. He stared through her as if she didn’t exist. She limped on down the narrow path. She wasn’t angry. No one else had succeeded where she’d failed.

Presently, Borsos came out with what looked like a long, thick sausage covered in smooth, supple leather. “I got a good price,” he said happily. “I’ll send it to my wife on the next supply ship. Better Gergely should use it and think of me than go looking for some other man and cause all kinds of trouble, eh?”

“Whatever pleases you, sir,” Istvan answered. Borsos started to laugh. So did Istvan, when he realized what he’d said. The toy wasn’t for Borsos’s pleasure, after all—only for his peace of mind.

Rain came down in sheets. Garivald supposed he should have been glad it wasn’t snow. Annore was certainly glad. Now that the freezing weather had gone at last, she’d driven the livestock out of the house. With the beasts gone, she had less work than she’d had before.

Garivald wished he could say the same. He’d be plowing and planting as soon as the thaw let him. Except for the harvest, spring was the busiest time of year for him. And, before long, the roads would dry enough for inspectors to make their way along them. He looked forward to that as much as he would have to the arrival of any other locusts.

He pulled on his worn leather knee boots. “Where are you going?” Annore asked sharply.

“Out to throw some garbage to the hogs,” he answered. “The sooner they put on fat, the sooner we can slaughter them. And besides”—he knew his wife well—“won’t you be just as well pleased to have me out from underfoot for a while?”

“That depends,” Annore said. “When you get drunk here, you mostly just go to sleep. When you get drunk in the tavern, you get into brawls, and then you come home with rips in your tunic or with bloodstains on it.”

“Did I say anything about going to the tavern?” Garivald demanded. “I said I was going to slop the hogs. That’s all I said.”

Annore didn’t answer, not with words. But the look she gave him was eloquent. His ears heated. His wife knew him well, too.

Getting out, then, felt like escaping. He squelched through the mud toward the hogs and flung them a bucketful of parsnip peelings and other such delicacies. The hogs weren’t fussy. He could have thrown them soggy thatching, and they probably would have enjoyed that, too.

He set the wooden bucket by the door to his house, thought about going back inside, and then decided not to. Out here, all he had to worry about were rain and mud: such small things, when set against his wife’s edged tongue.

He wasn’t the only man out of doors despite the nasty weather, either. “As long as I’m out here,” he muttered, “I may as well wander around a bit and say hello. Efficiency.” He laughed. In a village like Zossen, to which inspectors came but seldom, Unkerlanters could laugh at King Swemmel’s favorite word—provided no one knew they were doing it.

Rain beat down on his hat and his wool cape. The mud did its best to pull the boots right off his feet. It was thick and gluey, even deeper than in the fall. Each step took effort. He wondered if it would come up over his boot tops. That happened every so often, but usually later in the thaw.

When the first person Garivald spied through the curtain of rain was Waddo the firstman, he wished he’d gone indoors after all. Waddo saw him, too, which meant Garivald either had to ignore him, which was rude, or go over and talk with him, which he didn’t want to do. Whether he wanted to or not, he went. Waddo had a long memory for slights.

“Good day to you, Garivald,” the firstman said, his voice almost as slick and greasy as if he were speaking to an inspector.

“And to you,” Garivald answered. He had less trouble sounding cheerful than he’d thought he would. The closer he got to Waddo, the more easily he could see how hard a time the firstman had making his way through the mud. After breaking his ankle, Waddo still walked with the help of a cane. Here in the spring thaw, the cane didn’t help much. Instead of letting the firstman gain purchase, it sank deep into the mud.

“May the coming year be bountiful for you and yours,” Waddo said. “May the harvest be abundant.”

May you shut up and leave me at peace, Garivald thought. Aloud, he replied, “May all these things prove true for you as well.” He was not even wishing falsely, or not altogether falsely. Anything that went wrong with Waddo’s harvest—a blight, locusts, rain at the wrong time—was only too likely to go wrong with everyone’s harvest, including his own.

Waddo inclined his head, which made water run off the front of his hat instead of the back for a moment. “You have always been a well-spoken man, Garivald,” he said.

Only because you don’t know what I say behind your back. But Garivald had always been careful to whom he said such things. Some of the people in the village were as much Waddo’s inspectors as the men in rock-gray were King Swemmel’s. Evidently, Garivald had been careful enough, for no one had betrayed him. “I thank you,” he told the firstman, doing his best to match Waddo for hypocrisy.

It worked; under the wide brim of his hat, Waddo beamed. “Aye,” he said, “it’s thanks to folk like you that Zossen will be going places.”

“Eh?” Garivald looked politely interested to conceal the stab of alarm he felt. He liked the village where and as it was just fine.

But the firstman repeated, “Going places.” His eyelid rose and fell in an unmistakable wink. “We may—we just may, mind you—have a way to bring a crystal into Zossen after all. And if we bring a crystal into the village, we bring the whole world into the village.” Under his cloak, he threw his arms wide with excitement, as if to say that would assuredly be a good thing.

Garivald was anything but assured. It hadn’t been so long before that he and Annore had concluded Zossen was better off without a crystal. He saw no reason to change his mind. Being an Unkerlanter peasant like most Unkerlanter peasants, he seldom saw reason to change his mind. “How?” he asked, giving no sign of what he thought. “We have no power points close by. No ley line runs anywhere near us. As far as magic goes—well, magic might as well be gone, as far as we’re concerned.”

“Aye, and isn’t it a pity?” Waddo said. “So much we could do if more sorcery worked around these parts. And it may. Before too long, it really may.”

“How?” Garivald asked again. “You can’t squeeze water out of a stone—there’s no water to squeeze. You can’t get magic out of a land with no power points, either.”

“I don’t know just how it’s done,” Waddo answered. “I’m no mage. But if it is done, wouldn’t it be fine? We’d know what happened all over the world, and wouldn’t have to wait till some trader came to Zossen with the news.”

“That might not be so bad,” Garivald said; coming right out and telling the firstman he hated the idea struck him as foolish. But he did give some hint of his own notions: “Of course, it’s still news here whenever it gets to us.”

“But that’s not good enough!” Waddo exclaimed. “When traders and neighbors come to Zossen, I want us to be able to give them the news. I don’t want to always be begging for it, the way old Faileuba has to beg for bread because her husband and her daughter are dead and her other daughter ran away with that tinker.”

“Doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,” Garivald said. It mattered very much to him, but his hopes were opposite Waddo’s. With a shrug that flung drops of water from the shoulders of his cloak, he went on, “It’s not like we’re Cottbus, or anything of the sort.”

“But wouldn’t it be fine if we were?” the firstman said. “Zossen—the Cottbus of the south! Doesn’t that have a fine sound to it?”

Garivald took a couple of shuffling steps to keep from sinking into the mud. He shrugged again, in lieu of roaring at Waddo that he didn’t want his home village to be anything like Cottbus. That one crystal, even if it could be made to function here, wouldn’t turn Zossen into a copy of the capital of Unkerlant occurred to him no more than it did to the firstman.

Waddo also shifted position. He almost fell while he was doing so. Had he gone down into the muck, Garivald would have been tempted to hold him there till he stopped struggling. If Waddo drowned, Zossen would stay as it had always been. To Garivald’s disappointment, the firstman caught himself. “We’ll see what we see, that’s all,” Waddo said. “Nothing’s sure yet.” He might have been firstman, but remained a peasant under the petty rank.

“Aye, nothing’s ever sure,” Garivald agreed. So would everyone else in the village. So would everyone else through vast stretches of Unkerlant.

“Well, then,” Waddo said, as if everything were all settled.

He said it so convincingly, Garivald believed for a moment everything was all settled and started to go on his way. The firstman wasn’t firstman for nothing. But then Garivald turned back. “This is the third time I’ve asked you, and you haven’t told me yet: how would we make a crystal work here without a power point or a ley line anywhere close by?”

Waddo looked unhappy. Garivald thought that was because he had no answer, because the whole scheme lived in his head and nowhere else. But he discovered he was wrong, for Waddo said, “Power points and ley lines aren’t the only ways to get sorcerous energy, you know. There is another source it would be more efficient to use here in Zossen.”

“Oh, aye, I’ll bet it would,” Garivald said with a laugh. “Well, when you line people up to sacrifice ’em to make your precious crystal, you can start with my mother-in-law.” He laughed again. All things considered, he got on pretty well with Annore’s mother, her chief virtue being that she stayed out of his hair.

Then he watched Waddo’s expression change. His own expression changed, too, to one of horror. He’d thought he was joking. He’d been sure he was joking. Just how badly did the firstman want a crystal here? What would he do—what would King Swemmel’s inspectors, and maybe King Swemmel’s soldiers, too, help him do—to get a crystal here?

“Powers above,” Garivald whispered, thinking he ought to drown Waddo in the mud right this instant.

Waddo’s arms fluttered under the cloak, as if he was making brushing-away motions. “No, no, no,” he said. “No, no, no. We would never sacrifice anyone from Zossen to power the crystal. That would upset people”—which would do for an understatement till a bigger one came along—“and be inefficient. But there are plenty of criminals in the kingdom, especially in the cities, where people haven’t got any morals at all. Who’d miss them if they had their throats cut? And they’d be doing something useful, wouldn’t they? That’s efficiency.”

“Aye … so it is,” Garivald said grudgingly. He didn’t mind the idea of unpleasant strangers getting their throats slit—no doubt they had it coming. He did wish it would be for a better cause than bringing a cursed crystal to the village.

Waddo said, “Now do you see why I didn’t want to come right out and talk about sacrifices and such? Everybody in the village would want to get rid of everybody else, or else be sure everybody else wanted to get rid of him. Things won’t settle down till folks see it’s only bad eggs from far away who get what they deserve.”

“I suppose so,” Garivald said. He knew whom people in Zossen would want to sacrifice. He was standing here talking with the fellow people in Zossen would want to sacrifice. He almost said as much, to see the look on Waddo’s face. But the firstman would remember a crack like that. If something chanced to go wrong with the crystal—Garivald didn’t know how he could arrange that, but figured it was worth a try—he didn’t want Waddo thinking of him first. Come to that, he didn’t want Waddo thinking of him at all.

Tealdo approved of Captain Galafrone, the late Captain Larbino’s replacement as company commander. Galafrone was a thick-shouldered veteran of the Six Years’ War, his hair, mustaches, and side whiskers more gray than auburn. He was also a rarity in the Algarvian army—in those of Valmiera or Jelgava, he would have been an impossibility—an officer risen from the ranks.

“This one’s for revenge, boys,” he said as Tealdo and his comrades stood in the forwardmost trenches and waited for the trumpets to signal them into action. “The cursed Kaunians stole our land when I was a lad your age, near enough. Now we get to pay the stinking whoremasters back. It’s that simple.”

He couldn’t have timed things better had he been a first-rank mage. No sooner had he finished speaking than eggs started falling on the Valmieran positions in front of Tealdo’s company. Egg-tossers behind the line flung some of them. More fell from beneath the bellies of the swarms of dragons Tealdo could make out against the lightening sky.

Here and there along the line, Valmieran egg-tossers tried to answer, but the dragons, or so Tealdo had heard, were concentrating on them. In that duel, the Algarvians had the better of it.

Trumpets rang out. The notes were harsh and blaring, not the smooth tones of the royal hymn. “Follow me!” Captain Galafrone shouted. He was the first one out of the trench. If he’d done the same thing during the battles of the Six Years’ War, Tealdo wondered why he remained among the living.

“Follow me!” Sergeant Panfilo echoed. “For King Mezentio!”

“Mezentio!” Tealdo cried, and awkwardly climbed the sandbag steps so he could expose his precious body to the Valmierans’ beams and eggs. He wished he’d stayed on occupation duty in Sibiu instead of getting shipped back to southeastern Algarve to join in the assault against Valmiera. The powers that be back in Trapani had decided otherwise, though, and here he was.

“If Mezentio wants to lick the Valmierans so much, let him come fight them!” Trasone shouted. But he, like Tealdo, dashed toward the trenches the blond robbers had dug on Algarvian soil.

One or two men went down as beams smote them, but only one or two. The egg-tossers and dragons had done their work well. Behemoths advanced with the Algarvian infantry, to bring more egg-tossers and heavy sticks to the edge of the fighting. Other behemoths hauled supplies and bridging gear forward.

Tealdo sprang down into the forwardmost Valmieran trench. A couple of blond men in trousers threw down their sticks and threw up their hands. “No fight!” one of them said in bad Algarvian.

“Send the captives back!” Captain Galafrone shouted, somewhere not far down the line. “Don’t waste time going through their pockets, just send ’em on back. We’ve got plenty of plunder waiting ahead of us, lads—we won’t go without. But the faster we move now, the sooner we kick the Kaunians out of our kingdom. Forward!”

Rather reluctantly, Tealdo didn’t take the time to rob the Valmierans. No doubt Galafrone was right, in a strictly military sense. Still, Tealdo resented the certainty that the trousered Kaunians’ money and trinkets would end up in the hands of behind-the-lines types who’d done nothing to earn them.

But with Galafrone already running on, Tealdo didn’t see how he could do anything less. His comrades followed the veteran captain, too. The Valmierans fought back, but not so hard as he’d expected. The pelting they’d taken from egg-tossers and dragons seemed to have left a lot of them stunned. Others threw down their sticks the moment they first spied Algarvian soldiers.

“Our stinking nobles led us into a losing war,” a blond man said bitterly as he went off into captivity. His Algarvian was already pretty good. He’d get the chance to improve it further in a camp.

Then Tealdo dove behind a pile of rubble as some Valmierans in a little stone keep showed themselves far from ready to quit. Their beams scorched the tender spring grass. Tealdo tried to sneak one of his own beams through their blazing slits. By the way they went on fighting, he knew he wasn’t having much luck.

Galafrone and his crystallomancer sprawled in back of similarly makeshift shelter a few yards away. The company commander looked at a map, then yelled something—Tealdo couldn’t make out what—to the man with the crystal. The fellow spoke urgently into his sorcerous apparatus; again, Tealdo caught tone without words.

Hardly more than a minute later, a couple of dragons with eggs under their bellies dove on the Valmieran strongpoint. Watching, Tealdo wondered if their fliers intended to take them straight into it. But they released the eggs at little more than treetop height, from which they had no chance of missing. The ground shook under Tealdo as the eggs burst. The Valmierans in that small stone fortress suddenly stopped blazing.

Galafrone jumped to his feet. “Come on, let’s get moving!” he shouted. “Those bastards won’t bother us any more.”

He was right about that. Tealdo trotted past the ruins of the stone keep. The sharp stink of new-burst eggs still lingered; it always put him in mind of thunderstorms. Other odors lingered with it: burnt meat and the iron smell of blood.

Out ahead of the advancing footsoldiers, he spied a large band of behemoths. Like the dragons, they and their crews were busy smashing up the places from which the Valmierans fought hardest. By the time Tealdo and his comrades got to those places, they rarely needed to do more than mop up.

By the time that first day ended, Tealdo was more worn than he’d ever been in his life. He and his comrades had also come farther than he’d imagined they could. And, somehow, the field kitchens had kept up with them. The stew a cook with a dragon tattoo on his forearm ladled into his tin bowl wasn’t anything over which a gourmet back in Trapani would have gone into ecstasies, but it was a lot better than anything he and his pals could have come up with by themselves.

Galafrone ate like a wolf. He looked dazed, and not from the hard marching and fighting he’d done. “I can’t believe how fast we’ve moved,” he said with his mouth full. He’d said that before, too. “We never advanced so fast in the Six Years’ War, not even in the last push toward Priekule. Powers above, we’ve already taken back half of what the blondies stole from us up till now.”

Around a yawn, Trasone said, “They don’t seem so hot to fight now that we’re pounding on them instead of them pounding on us.”

Tealdo nodded. “I thought the same thing. One of them said he blamed their nobles for the war.”

“I hope they all think that way,” Galafrone exclaimed. “They fought like mad bastards the last time, you bet your arse they did. If their hearts aren’t in it now, all the better for us.”

The discussion around the fire would have gone on longer had the warriors not been so tired. Tealdo rolled himself into his blanket and slept like a dead man. He felt like a dead man when Sergeant Panfilo shook him awake before sunrise the next morning, too. Panfilo looked disgustingly fit and well rested. “Come on,” he said. “You’re not much, but if you’re what we’ve got to hit the Valmierans another lick, you’ll have to do.”

“If I’m not much, why don’t you leave me here and go on without me?” But Tealdo was already climbing to his feet. He smelled bread baking in the field kitchen’s oven. He thought he smelled victory in the air, too.

And then, after washing down the bread with a few gulps of rough red wine, he tramped east again. Again, the behemoths had already done a lot of his work for him. Again, Algarvian dragons dove on the soldiers of Kaunian blood who kept on fighting after the behemoths had passed. A few eggs usually proved plenty to silence them. Hardly any Valmieran dragons attacked Mezentio’s men. And, again, most Valmierans seemed not to have their hearts in the fight. They surrendered far more readily than the Sibians had.

“We took the Sibs by surprise, but they fought hard while they could,” Tealdo said to Trasone after they sent another group of captives toward the rear. “These whoresons were supposed to be ready and waiting for us.”

“Are you complaining?” his friend asked.

“Now that you mention it, no,” Tealdo answered. Both soldiers laughed. They strode down the road leading east.

Tealdo did his best to stay close to Captain Galafrone and the crystallomancer. That wasn’t easy; the veteran kept setting a blistering pace Tealdo had trouble matching. But he wanted to be among the first to learn if anything interesting happened: in that, he was a typical Algarvian. And, toward midafternoon, his curiosity and persistence paid off. The crystallomancer listened to his sorcerous apparatus, then spoke to Galafrone.

After hearing him out, Galafrone whooped. “What’s up, sir?” Tealdo asked. Maybe the captain would tell him, maybe he wouldn’t. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Galafrone wasn’t just willing to talk. Had Tealdo not asked, the captain would have grabbed him and shouted the news: “The marquisate of Rivaroli has risen in revolt behind the Valmieran lines! Let’s see those cursed Kaunians move men or supplies through there now!”

“Powers above,” Tealdo said. Then he whooped, too. “That’s what Valmiera gets for taking a marquisate full of good Algarvians away from us after the Six Years’ War.”

“That’s just what Valmiera gets,” Galafrone agreed. “And we’re the fellows to give it to King Gainibu and his worthless nobles in their gilded trousers.” Tealdo suspected Galafrone was imperfectly enamored of his own kingdom’s nobility. Galafrone couldn’t say that, so he took out his anger on the nobles next door.

He wasn’t the only one, either. Tealdo said, “Talking with the blondies we’ve nabbed who speak a little Algarvian, a lot of them don’t want to fight for their nobles, either.”

Galafrone nodded and turned to the crystallomancer. “Send that on to Colonel Ombruno, and to the army headquarters, too. They’ll probably have heard it already, but send it on the off chance they haven’t. Maybe it’ll help us find a way to make more Kaunians quit without fighting.”

“Aye, Captain,” the crystallomancer said. As soon as the message went out, Galafrone waved his men forward again.

By the end of the day, the company was inside the Marquisate of Rivaroli. Tealdo had no trouble telling when they crossed the border. All at once, Valmieran replaced Algarvian on every roadside sign—the retreating enemy had knocked down some of those, but not all—and in the first village through which the company passed. The people in the village remained Algarvian, even if their names were spelled Valmieran-style. Tealdo wondered what his own name would look like if he’d grown up here. Something like Tealtu, he supposed.

Most of the villagers greeted the Algarvian soldiers with wine and cakes and cheers. The women greeted them with hugs and kisses. The women might have greeted them with more, too, as they had when Tealdo helped reclaim the Duchy of Bari for Algarve, but Galafrone shouted, “Keep in line and keep moving, curse you all! The way this campaign’s shaping up, you’ll have plenty of chances to dip your wicks before long. The harder we press the Kaunians now, the sooner it’ll be.”

Tealdo saw a man and woman staring out through a shop window. They weren’t Algarvians, not with hair yellow as butter. A good many Valmierans had moved into the Marquisate since the Treaty of Tortus. Tealdo wondered what they were thinking as they watched the Algarvian soldiers tramp past. “Nothing good,” he muttered, “or I miss my guess.”

“Keep moving!” Galafrone yelled again. Entering open country, his troopers spread out into a skirmish line. Maybe the Valmierans would be able to make a stand somewhere ahead. They hadn’t done it yet, though.