“Liar,” three men said together.
“Maaa! Maaa!” That hateful, mocking goat-bleat rang out again.
“I am no liar,” Istvan declared. “Come on, all of you. I will fight you one at a time till I can fight no more. I will say nothing to the guards about what happened. By the stars, I swear it. Or show yourselves goat-eating cowards and mob me all at once.”
They hesitated. He hadn’t been sure he would get even that much. Then a burly man stepped out of the group and advanced on him, saying, “My fists and feet are better than you deserve.”
Istvan didn’t answer. He just waited. The other captive was bigger than he, and looked to know what he was doing. The fellow surged forward, head down, fists churning. Istvan blocked a blow with his arm, struck a stomach hard as oak, took a boot in the hip instead of in the crotch, and also lashed out with his foot. A buffet to the side of the head made him see stars that had nothing to do with the ones he reverenced. He grabbed his foe and threw him to the floor. The other captive tripped him on the way down.
But Istvan was the one who got up. He spat red on the floor. “Who’s next?” he said, squinting a little because his left eye was half swollen shut.
Another Gyongyosian strode toward him. He won that fight, too, and waved for a third challenger. By then, every part of him hurt. He didn’t think he would win the third fight, and he didn’t. The other captive thumped his head against the floor, once, twice. . . . That was the last thing he remembered.
They could have killed him after he was out. When he woke up again, he rather wished they had. They’d kicked him around some. He could feel that. But it was almost lost in the thudding, nauseating pain in his head. He’d had his wits scrambled for him, sure as sure. He had trouble remembering where he was and even who he was. He did remember how three other captives in the barracks had got pretty good sets of lumps of their own, though. That gave him a certain small satisfaction, when he wasn’t hoping his own head would fall off.
Corporal Kun walked into the barracks perhaps half an hour after Istvan came to. He took one look at Istvan and realized what must have happened to him. He had time for one horrified yelp before somebody said, “All right, squealer--your turn now.” The captives fell on him and beat him bloody, but he was still breathing when they stopped. Maybe Istvan had won enough respect to keep them from wanting to kill his comrade any more.
At the roll call that evening, the Kuusaman guards stared at Istvan. “What you to do?” one of them asked.
“Nothing,” he said stolidly. Where he had trouble recalling his name, he did remember the oath he’d sworn. The guards eyed Kun. He didn’t look quite so bad as Istvan--and, somehow, he’d managed to keep his spectacles from shattering-- but he was no beauty. Neither were the men who’d fought Istvan one after the next.
The guards shook their heads and shrugged. They’d seen such things before. This time, at least, they weren’t carrying corpses from the captives’ camp.
A couple of days later, Istvan got summoned out of the camp for another interrogation with Lammi, the forensic sorcerer. By then, some of his bruises had turned truly spectacular colors. His ribs looked like a sunset. His face was no bargain, either. When he made his way into Lammi’s tent--ducking through the flap hurt, too--the mage’s jaw dropped. “By the stars!” she exclaimed in her good Gyongyosian. “What happened to you?”
No matter how well she spoke his language, Istvan didn’t like to hear her use such oaths--what regard would the stars have for a foreigner like her? He answered as he’d answered the guard: “Nothing.”
Lammi shook her head. “A little more nothing like that and they would lay you on a pyre. Now--tell me at once what happened to you.”
“Nothing,” Istvan repeated.
“You are a stubborn man. I have seen that,” she said. “But you know I have ways to get answers from you.”
“Nothing happened,” Istvan said. As he’d expected, his command of his senses disappeared. Lammi might have miscalculated there. Taking away his senses took away his pain, too, the first relief he’d had from it since the fights. And she’d robbed him often enough, he was starting to get used to it. He didn’t mistake her voice for that of the stars any more.
Presently, she brought him back to himself. “You are a very stubborn man,” she said.
“Thank you,” he answered, -which made her blink.
She needed a moment to rally. “I think,” she said, “we would do well not to send you back to your barracks.” She picked up a crystal and spoke into it in Kuusaman, which Istvan didn’t understand. Whoever was on the other end of the etheric connection answered in the same language. The crystal flared, then went inert. Lammi looked back to Istvan. “Corporal Kun, it seems, is also sporting bruises. How did that happen?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, and waited to go back to the unworld of no sight, no hearing, no smell, no taste, no touch. He looked forward to losing the sense of touch once more: indeed he did.
Lammi made an exasperated noise. “How can we find and punish the men who beat you if you will not tell us who they are?”
“What men?” Istvan said. The forensic sorcerer made another, louder, exasperated noise. With a shrug, Istvan went on, “I told you, nothing happened.”
“Aye, that is what you told me,” Lammi agreed. “And I am telling you once more, Sergeant, that, had a little more of such nothing happened, you would now be dead, and we would not be having this discussion.” Istvan shrugged again. She was probably--no, certainly--right. She glowered at him. “We will be removing you from the captives’ camp for your own protection. You do understand that?”
With one more shrug, Istvan answered, “You are the captors. I am the captive. You can do as you like with me. If you do too much, and word gets back to Gyongyos, your own captives will suffer.”
The Kuusaman mage drummed her fingers on her notepad. She muttered something in her own tongue, then translated it into Gyongyosian: “Very difficult, too.” Istvan inclined his head, as at another compliment. That made Lammi mutter again. When she returned to Gyongyosian once more, she said, “Very well, Sergeant. If you will not discuss this, you will not. Let us turn to something else, then.”
“You are the captor,” Istvan repeated.
“I do wonder,” Lammi murmured. Istvan understood the words, but not everything behind them. She gathered herself and went on, “You have a scar on your left hand, Sergeant.”
Istvan had been afraid in a physical sense of what the Kuusamans might do to him. Now, for the first time in the interrogation, he knew real terror. He had to force a one-word answer out through numb lips: “Aye.”
“Sergeant Kun, your comrade, has an identical scar,” Lammi continued.
“Does he?” Istvan said, shrugging yet again. “I hadn’t noticed.”
The world disappeared once more. Lammi, he remembered, knew when he lied. After some endless--but, happily, also painless--time, she allowed him to return to the sensible world. “I point out,” she said, “that one of the men who was slain in the unfortunate incident, a certain,”--she checked her notes--”a certain Szonyi, aye, had an identical scar, duly noted on his identity documents. He too was a comrade of yours.”
“He was,” Istvan said. He couldn’t very well deny it. Saying anything else-- such as how much he missed his friend--would have just given Lammi another handle on him.
She waited for something more. When it didn’t come, she shrugged and said, “How do you explain these three identical scars, Sergeant?”
“We all got them at the same time in Unkerlant,” Istvan said. Again, he said no more. He fought against trembling. His heart pounded in his chest. He would sooner have gone through a dozen beatings than this.
Lammi peered at him through her spectacles. Try as he would to hide it, he feared she saw his agitation. “Why?” she asked softly.
She can tell when I lie. To Istvan, that was the most terrifying thought of all. Instead of lying, he said nothin
g at all. Whatever she chose to do to him would be better than a truthful answer to that question.
“Why?” Lammi asked once more. Istvan still did not answer. The inside of the tent was cool--the island of Obuda never got very warm, especially not in late winter--but sweat ran down his face. He could smell his own fear. He didn’t know if Lammi could, but she could hardly miss the sweat. Still softly, she asked, “Is it a scar of expiation?”
“I don’t know what that word means,” Istvan said.
She could tell when he gave her the truth, too. That didn’t do him much good, though. She simplified: “A scar, a wound, to wash away a sin?” Istvan still sat mute, which looked to be answer enough by itself. Lammi asked, “What sort of sin?”
“One I never meant to commit!” Istvan burst out. The Kuusaman mage just sat there, waiting. Again, he said no more. Again, it didn’t seem to matter. Lammi looked at him, looked through him, looked into his heart. She knows. By the stars, she knows, he thought, and despair overwhelmed even terror. A Kuusaman, a foreigner, knew he’d eaten goat. She knew what it meant, too. She knew altogether too much about Gyongyos and its ways. She owns me, he thought hopelessly.
If Lammi did, she didn’t seem anxious to take possession. “We will find you other housing, safer housing,” she said, and spoke to the guards in Kuusaman. They led Istvan out of the tent.
Likely not by coincidence, Kun came out of the other interrogation tent at just the same time. He walked toward Istvan as Istvan headed toward him. The guards didn’t interfere. Istvan looked at Kun’s battered face, and at the devastated expression on it, the same expression he wore himself. The two men embraced and burst into tears. No matter how bright the night sky might be, Istvan didn’t think the stars would ever shine on him again.
Very cautiously, Leudast stuck his head up from behind a shattered wall and peered across the Scamandro. He had reason for caution. The Algarvians had snipers on the east bank of the river, and they were very alert. A man who wasn’t careful would have a beam go in one ear and out the other.
True, eggs were bursting over there, but that wouldn’t make the redheads quit blazing. Leudast knew what sort of men he faced. They’d driven through Unkerlant to the outskirts of Cottbus. Had the war gone just a little differently .. .
“It’s a good thing there weren’t more of the whoresons,” he muttered.
“What’s that, Lieutenant?” asked Captain Dagaric, who’d taken over as regimental commander after Captain Drogden hadn’t been careful enough while raping an Algarvian woman. Dagaric had efficiency written all over him. He was a good soldier, in a cold-blooded way. Nobody would love him, but he wouldn’t throw men away out of stupidity, either. Given some of the things Leudast had seen, solid professionalism was nothing to sneeze at.
He repeated himself, adding, “Powers below eat ‘em.”
“They will.” Dagaric spoke with assurance. “We are going to hammer them flat when we cross the river. That will be the last fight, because we will take Trapani once we get rolling.”
“May it be so, sir,” Leudast said. “This war . . . We had to win it. If we didn’t, they’d’ve held us down forever.”
“I only wish we could get rid of every last one of the buggers,” Dagaric said. “If we treated them the way they treated the Kaunians up in Forthweg, we really wouldn’t have to worry about Algarve for a long time to come.”
Leudast nodded. He didn’t think even King Swemmel would massacre all the redheads in the lands he was overrunning, but you never could tell with Swemmel. Any Unkerlanter would have said the same. And . . . “We’ve had to use our own people the way the Algarvians used the Kaunians from Forthweg. Mezentio’s men deserve something extra to pay for that.”
“You bet they do,” Captain Dagaric said. “I expect they’ll get it, too.”
A weird wailing, laughing, gobbling noise came out of the east. Leudast grabbed for his stick. “What in blazes is that? Does it go with some new Algarvian magic?”
Dagaric pointed out to the Scamandro, where a big bird was swimming, its back checked in black and white, its beak a fish-catching spear. “No, it’s just a loon--and you’re another one, for letting the call spook you.”
“They must be birds of the south,” Leudast said. “They don’t live on any streams up near the village I come from.” More than half to himself, he added, “I wonder if anything’s left of the place these days.” Then he spoke to the regimental commander again: “And I don’t see how you can blame me for being jumpy about the fornicating redheads and their magecraft, sir. With all the weird new spells they’re throwing at us these days . . .”
With a dismissive gesture, Dagaric said, “A drowning man thrashes his arms and flails. Whoreson still drowns, though. The Algarvians send these stupid spells of theirs at us before they find out what the magic can do, or even if it works at all. No wonder most of it goes sour.”
That made sense--up to a point. “Even the spells that maybe don’t do everything they’re supposed to can still hurt us,” Leudast said. “We’ve seen it.”
“They’d hurt us worse if the redheads really knew what they were doing,” Dagaric said. That made Leudast blink. Like most Unkerlanters, he took it almost for granted that the Algarvians were cleverer than his own folk. They’d proved their wit in Unkerlant too often for him to think anything else. But Dagaric stubbornly plowed ahead: “Think how much trouble they could cause if all their fancy magic really worked. It mostly doesn’t, though, and I’ll tell you why. A couple-three years ago, the redheads figured they could lick us with what they already had, and they didn’t worry about anything else. Then, when they started getting into trouble, that’s when they decided to make the fire under their mages hotter. So they have all these spells that would do this, that, or the other thing--if only they worked right. But they cursed well don’t, and we’ll have licked Algarve before the redheads ever do get ‘em right.”
After Leudast thought that over, he slowly nodded. “The one thing Mezentio’s men always foul up is, they always think they’re smarter than they really are and they can do more than they can really do.”
Dagaric nodded, too, most emphatically. “You’ve got it, Lieutenant. You’ve got it just right, matter of fact. And how fornicating smart does that make them? If they were anywhere near as smart as they want everybody else to think they are, would we be here halfway between the Yaninan border and Trapani? Would the stinking islanders be coming up the Algarvians’ arse from the east?”
“No, sir,” Leudast said. “They made everybody hate ‘em and they made everybody afraid of ‘em and now they’ve made everybody gang up on ‘em, too. You look at it that way, maybe they really aren’t so smart.” He heard the wonder in his own voice. We’re winning the war. We’re not only winning it, we’ve got it almost won. I can’t quite see Trapani from here, but it won’t be long.
He wondered what would happen then. Maybe Swemmel would put everything he could into the war against Gyongyos. Leudast shook his head, marveling. He’d been fighting the Gongs when the Derlavaian War broke out. Maybe things would come full circle, and he’d fight them some more. If Unkerlant went after them now, he thought his kingdom would smash them.
But what then? Suppose Unkerlant didn’t have an enemy left in the world. Suppose he got out of the army. What would I do then? I’ve been fighting for a long time. I hardly know anything else any more.
Go home. I suppose that’s the first thing I have to do. See if anything is left of the village. See if I have any kin left alive. And then . . . There was that girl back in Grelz, that Alize. If I can find her again, that might turn into something. I wonder how much different farming is down there. I could find out.
He laughed at himself. A couple of minutes’ thought, and he had the rest of his life neatly laid out. One thing the war had taught him was that plans mostly didn’t work the way people thought they would ahead of time.
Dagaric slapped him on the shoulder, stopping his ley-line caravan of thou
ght. “Things look pretty quiet up here for now,” the regimental commander said. “We can get back to our men.”
“Aye, sir,” Leudast said. They slipped away from the Scamandro’s western bank. As they went off, the loon loosed its mad, laughing call once more. Leudast’s shiver had nothing to do with the chilly weather. Nobody hearing that cry for the first time would think it came from a bird’s throat. That it presaged some nasty Algarvian sorcery still struck him as much more likely.
Sentries challenged them twice on the way back to the Algarvian village in which the regiment was resting. The men weren’t taking victory for granted, which struck Leudast as the best way to insure it. Another officer was heading up to the Scamandro for a look of his own at the enemy.
Another officer . . . Leudast stiffened to attention when he saw the big gold stars embroidered on the collar tabs of the oncoming man’s cape. Only one soldier in all of Unkerlant wore those stars. Dagaric might all at once have turned to rigidly upright stone, too.
“Marshal Rathar, sir!” the two junior officers exclaimed together.
“As you were, gentlemen,” Rathar said. “I always like to see officers doing their own reconnaissance. That’s what I’m doing myself, as a matter of fact.”
“There’s what’s left of a wall by the riverbank, sir.” Leudast turned and pointed. “You have to be careful, though--the redheads have snipers on the far bank.”
“Thanks.” Rathar started to go on, then paused and gave him a quizzical look. “I know you, don’t I?” Before Leudast could speak, Rathar answered his own question: “Aye, I do. You’re the fellow who brought in Raniero, you and that other soldier.”
“That’s right, sir,” Leudast said. “You made me a lieutenant and him a sergeant.”
“What happened to him? Do you know?”
“Afraid I do, sir,” Leudast answered. “An Algarvian sniper got him. Kiun never knew what happened. There are worse ways to go.”
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