“Stupid bastards?” The constabulary sketch artist let out an indignant squawk. “They were patriots, heroes, martyrs.”
“They were cursed fools,” Bembo said. “If you aren’t in the army and you blaze at the people who’ve taken your town and they catch you, this is one of the things that’re liable to happen.” He remembered some of the things that had happened in Eoforwic. Compared to those, hanging was a mercy. Saffa didn’t know about things like that, and didn’t know how lucky she was not to.
“But the Kuusamans are the enemy,” she protested.
“That’s why we have an army-or had an army,” Bembo answered. “Civilians who try to fight against soldiers are what you call free-blazers. If the soldiers catch ‘em, they’re what you call fair game.”
“They were brave,” Saffa said.
“They were bloody dumb,” Bembo told her. “They didn’t do themselves any good, and they didn’t do Algarve any good, either. We don’t have any soldiers in the field anywhere within a hundred miles of here, not any more we don’t.” He threw his hands in the air in a gesture of extravagant despair. “Powers below eat everything, we’ve lost.”
Saffa stared at him. The truth there was obvious. The little slant-eyed soldiers in the streets made it so. Maybe she somehow hadn’t realized everything it meant, though, till he all but shouted in her face. She bit her lip, blinked a couple of times, and quietly began to cry.
“Don’t do that!” Bembo exclaimed. He fumbled for a handkerchief, didn’t find one, and gave her a cafe napkin instead. “Come on, sweetheart. Please don’t do that.” He had a soft spot for weeping women. Most Algarvian men did.
“I can’t help it,” she said, dabbing her eyes. “I don’t think Salamone is ever coming home, not from fighting the horrible Unkerlanters.” Her tears came faster, harder.
Bembo muttered something more or less polite. Salamone was the fellow who’d fathered her son. She still hadn’t let Bembo into her bed, or come into his. He wondered why he bothered with her; he wasn’t usually so patient with women. Maybe it was because he’d known her before things got bad, and she was a line back to those better days. He took a pull at his wine to disguise a snort. That was an alarming thing to think about somebody all over prickles like Saffa.
She gave him a look holding a good deal of her old vinegar. “I know what you’re thinking. You hope those savages have him for supper, and without any salt, too.”
“No such thing!” Bembo said with an indignation all the louder for being less than sincere. But then he followed it with the truth: “I wouldn’t wish getting caught by the Unkerlanters on anybody at all.”
Saffa eyed him, then slowly nodded. “You may even mean that.”
“I do!” Bembo exclaimed. “Remember, darling, I was in Eoforwic when all the Unkerlanters in the world came rolling east across Forthweg straight at me.” Being who he was, of course he saw the battles of the summer before, so disastrous for Algarve, in that light. He ate an almond, then went on, “And the cursed Forthwegians rose up and stabbed us in the back, too. Fat lot of good it did them-now they’ve got Swemmel sitting on ‘em instead of us, and may they have joy of that.”
“It’s all a mess,” Saffa said, which summed things up as well as any four words Bembo might have found.
“That it is,” he said dolefully, and then, when a plump woman with a pitted complexion almost stumbled over his splinted leg-which had to stick out from the table a bit-his gloom turned to spleen: “Watch it, lady!”
She glared at him. “If you were any kind of a man, you’d have let yourself get killed before all this happened.” Her wave encompassed the whole of Tricarico and, by extension, the whole of Algarve. She might have held Bembo personally responsible for the lost war.
He wouldn’t have taken that from Saffa, and he certainly wasn’t about to take it from a stranger he didn’t find attractive. “If I had anything to do with you, I certainly would have let myself get killed before I came home,” he said, and bit his thumb at her, a fine Algarvian insult.
The plump woman screeched like a wounded trumpet. She drew back a foot to kick Bembo’s bad leg. He grabbed a crutch by the wrong end and got ready to swing it like a club. Algarvians were normally the most chivalrous of men, but he wasn’t about to let anybody do that leg any more harm.
Saffa snatched up the bowl of olives and made as if to throw it at the woman. The olives glistened with oil; they would have ruined the plump woman’s kilt and frock. Bembo wondered if she didn’t find that a more dangerous threat than his makeshift bludgeon. Mumbling curses under her breath, she stalked off with her nose in the air.
“Thanks,” Bembo told Saffa.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “That stupid sow had no business coming down on you so. You did everything for the kingdom you could. What did she do? Sit around and eat cakes the whole war long, by the look of her.”
Everything I could do for the kingdom? Bembo wondered. He really had fought, and he really had kept order in foreign towns. And you sent powers above only know how many Kaunians off on their last rides. Had that helped Algarve or hurt it? Hurt it, probably, for such things made all her neighbors more certain they couldn’t afford to lose. But his superiors had ordered it, and so he’d done it.
He wished he hadn’t had that thought. He saw in his mind’s eye that horrible old Kuusaman mage who’d looked through him as if the ocean of his soul were no more than ankle-deep. What that fellow thought of him. . No, better not to imagine what that fellow thought of him. And the Kuusaman had given him the benefit of the doubt, too. Bembo shivered even though the day was warm, almost hot. He gulped down the rest of his wine and waved for more.
Before it got there, Saffa’s eyes narrowed with anger. “Oh, that’s too much,” she said. “That really is too much.”
Bembo wondered what he’d done now, but her rage wasn’t aimed at him. She pointed. He twisted in his chair. Up the street came a couple of Jelgavan officers in tunics and trousers, looking around at Tricarico as if they’d conquered it themselves.
“Those stinking Kaunians have their nerve,” Saffa said savagely. “They shouldn’t show their faces here. It’s not like they beat us.”
“No, it isn’t,” Bembo agreed. “Even so. .” His voice trailed off. As far as he could see, Algarvians were going to have a hard time saying anything bad about Kaunian folk, even if it was true (maybe especially if it was true), for generations to come. He saw no way to say that to Saffa, precisely because she didn’t know all the things he did. She’s the lucky one, he thought again.
She stared at the trousered blonds, looking daggers into their backs, till they went round a corner. Then she turned back to Bembo and said, “Your flat is only a couple of blocks from here, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” he answered.
“Let’s go back there,” she said. “We’ll see what happens.” She cocked her head to one side, laughing at his flabbergasted expression. “Don’t get your hopes up too far. You don’t move very fast. I have plenty of time to change my mind.”
He knew that was true, but couldn’t hurry on his crutches no matter how much he wanted to. He spent most of the time on the way trying to remember how messy the flat was. If Saffa laughed at him for being a slob, she might not want to do anything but laugh.
She raised an eyebrow at the state of the front room when he opened the door, but said only, “I expected worse.” And she did go into the bedchamber with him, and, he being hampered by the splint, she rode him as if he were a racing unicorn. But that was a race they both could win-and, by the way she threw back her head and cried out at the end, they both did.
Then she sprawled down onto him, her breasts soft and firm against his chest. “Ask you something?” he said, running his hand along the sweet curves of her back down toward her bottom.
One of Saffa’s eyebrows quirked upward. The smile she smiled down at him was lopsided, too. “It can’t be that one, and I didn’t know you knew any other ques
tions.”
His hand paused on her backside and pinched, not too hard. She squeaked. Bembo said, “I didn’t even need to ask that one. You asked me instead, remember?”
“Well, maybe I did,” she said, and bent down to kiss the end of his nose. He’d wondered if she would bite instead, but she didn’t. “All right, Bembo- what’s your other question?”
“I was just wondering why,” he answered. “Not that I’m not not happy you did”-he kissed her this time-”but how come? You’d been telling me no for so long, I’d kind of got used to it.”
“Maybe that’s why you hadn’t been pestering me so much lately,” Saffa said. But it was a serious question, and after a small pause she gave it a serious answer: “We’ve really lost. There’s nothing we can do about it. Seeing those cursed Jelgavans walking along like they owned the town gave me a kick in the teeth. Salamone isn’t coming home. I’ve got to start over somewhere.”
“And I’m it?” Bembo said. It might have been a serious answer, but it was a long way from flattering.
But Saffa nodded. “And you’re it.” This time, her smile held fewer barbs. “Better than I thought you’d be, too.”
“Thanks-I suppose,” he said. She laughed. He hadn’t slipped out of her, and felt himself growing hard once more. He began to move, slowly and carefully. “Shall we try again, then?”
“So soon?” Saffa sounded surprised.
“Why not?” Bembo answered grandly. The only reason why, of course, was that he’d been so very long without. He didn’t have to tell her that, though. And she didn’t seem displeased. After a while, she seemed very pleased indeed. Bembo knew he was.
Colonel Lurcanio sat beneath an oak tree just coming into full leaf and contemplated the death and ruination of his kingdom and its army. He didn’t think the Unkerlanters were in Trapani yet, but he didn’t know how much longer his countrymen could hold them away from the capital. The last few reports coming by crystal from Algarve’s greatest city had held a note of frantic desperation under their defiance. The past couple of days, no reports at all had come from Trapani: enemy mages were blocking the emanations. That didn’t strike him as a good omen.
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” he muttered. Even if King Mezentio had personally appealed to him to come to the capital’s rescue, he couldn’t have obeyed his sovereign. A good-sized Algarvian army remained in the field here in the southeastern part of the kingdom, but it was cut off from the rest of Algarve by the Lagoans and Kuusamans. Having bypassed it, the islanders seemed content to leave it alone so long as it didn’t make a nuisance of itself.
Captain Santerno came up to Lurcanio. The combat veteran didn’t bother saluting. Lurcanio didn’t bother reproving him. Without preamble, the captain said, “Sir, how in blazes are we going to get out of this mess?”
“That’s a good question, Captain,” Lurcanio replied. “As best I can see, there’s no way. If you want to tell me I’m wrong, I’d be delighted to hear the whys and wherefores, believe me.”
Santerno cursed with soldierly fluency. When he ran out of curses-which took a while-he said, “I don’t see any way, either. I was hoping you did.”
“Me?” Lurcanio said. “What do I know? After all, I spent the war shuffling papers in Priekule and laying Valmieran women.” Santerno hadn’t thrown his previous duty in his face, but his scorn for Lurcanio because of it had never been far from the surface.
Now the captain had the grace to cough and shuffle his feet and show a certain amount of embarrassment. “Turned out you knew what you were doing in the field after all, sir,” he said. “I stopped doubting it after the way you led the brigade down toward the sea this past winter during our last big attack in Valmiera.”
“We might have gone farther if those Kuusamans holed up in that one town hadn’t cramped the whole attack.” Lurcanio sighed. “But it probably wouldn’t have made any difference in the long run.”
“Maybe not.” Santerno drew himself up with a certain melancholy pride. “We scared the buggers out of a year’s growth, though.”
“I suppose we did,” Lurcanio replied. “And how many men and behemoths and dragons did we throw away doing it? We could have used them against the Unkerlanters instead, don’t you think, and got more with them.”
His adjutant shrugged. “I don’t give orders like that, sir. I just follow the ones I get.”
“We all just followed the ones we got, Captain.” Lurcanio waved, as if to show this last bypassed army trapped in its pocket. “And look what we got for following them.”
Before Santerno could answer that, a soldier came up to Lurcanio and said, “Sir, there’s an enemy soldier coming up under flag of truce.”
“Is there?” Lurcanio heaved himself to his feet, however much his weary bones protested. “I’ll see him.” The soldier nodded and trotted off to bring back the foe.
“He’s going to ask for our surrender,” Santerno said.
“Probably,” Lurcanio agreed. “I can’t give it to him, of course.” I would if I could, he thought, but kept that to himself. Aloud, he went on, “All I can do is pass him along to General Prusione, and I expect I will.”
But his resolve wavered when he saw the fellow who came in under the white flag. Not that the major in the greenish brown tunic and trousers was ugly, but he was, unquestionably, a Valmieran. “Do you speak classical Kaunian, Colonel?” he asked in that tongue. “I regret to tell you, I have no Algarvian.”
“I know Valmieran, Major,” Lurcanio replied in that language. “What can I do for you this afternoon?”
“My name is Vizgantu, Colonel,” the Valmieran said, plainly relieved to be able to use his own speech. “Please take me to your commander. I have been sent to request the surrender of the Algarvian army in this pocket, further resistance on your part plainly being hopeless. Why spill more blood to no purpose?”
Lurcanio took a deep breath. “Major Vizgantu, I am going to send you back to your own superiors instead. I mean no personal offense to you, sir, but having a Valmieran demand our surrender is an insult, nothing less. We may have lost this war, but we did not lose it to your kingdom. I spent more than four very pleasant years in Priekule. I should have a child there now, as a matter of fact.”
Captain Santerno laughed out loud. Major Vizgantu turned red. Doing his best to choke back rage, he said, “You are in a poor position to tell the armies opposing you what to do, Colonel. By the powers above, I hope you pay for your insolence.”
My whole kingdom is paying, Lurcanio thought. What Algarve had made her neighbors pay never entered his mind-that was their worry, not his. He turned to the soldier who’d brought the Valmieran to him. “You may take this gentleman to the front once more. His flag of truce will be honored as he returns to his own side, of course.”
“You bastard!” Vizgantu snarled.
“My bastard, as I told you, is back in Priekule,” Lurcanio answered calmly. Unless it’s Valnu’s bastard. He shrugged. He would gladly claim paternity here, just to watch the Valmieran steam. He wondered how many times Krasta had been unfaithful to him, and with whom. Another shrug. As many as she thought she could get away with, or I miss my guess. It wasn’t as if he’d spent all his nights in her bed.
Off went the Valmieran, still furious and not trying very hard to hide it any more. Santerno came over and slapped Lurcanio on the shoulder. “Well done, your Excellency, well done! Your occupation duty turned out to be good for something after all. You put that fellow in his place as neatly as you please.”
“And now we find out how much we’ll pay for my pleasure,” Lurcanio replied. “If the islanders are annoyed enough, they’ll plague us with their egg-tossers for the rest of the day.”
And the Lagoans and Kuusamans did exactly that. The egg-tossers the Algarvians had left did their best to reply. Huddling in a hole in the ground, Lurcanio was glumly certain their best would not be good enough.
The next morning, Major Vizgantu returned, white flag and all. A differe
nt soldier brought him to Lurcanio, saying, “Sir, this cursed Kaunian says he is ordered to report to you, if you’re still alive.”
“I think I may qualify,” Lurcanio answered, which made the soldier chuckle. Lurcanio bowed to the Valmieran. “And a good day to you, Major. We meet again.”
“So we do,” Vizgantu said coldly. He took from his pocket a folded leaf of paper, which he held out to Lurcanio. “This is for you.”
“Thank you so much.” Lurcanio unfolded the paper. It was written in classical Kaunian. To Colonel Lurcanio of the Algarvian army, greetings, he read. Major Vizgantu is my chosen representative in requesting a surrender of the Algarvian forces currently surrounded in this area. If you do not permit him to proceed to your commander, no other representative will be proffered, and no other request for surrender will be made. The fate of your army will be left, in that case, to the chances of the battlefield. The choice, sir, is yours. Your humble servant, Marshal Araujo, commanding allied armies in southern Algarve.
“Have you read this?” Lurcanio asked the Valmieran. A slight smirk was all the answer he needed. He let out a long sigh. The enemy commander had had his revenge, and had taken more than he’d expected. Was Araujo bluffing? Lurcanio studied the note again. He didn’t think so, and he knew the army of which he was a part had no hope of stopping any serious push the Lagoans and Kuusamans-aye, and the Valmierans-chose to make.
“What is your answer, Colonel?” Vizgantu demanded.
Lurcanio contemplated his choice: give up his pride or give up any hope for the soldiers in the pocket with him. He knew more than a few of his countrymen who would have sacrificed the army for the sake of pride. Had he been younger, he might have done the same himself. As things were. .
He thought of salvaging what he could by insulting the Valmieran again, by saying that if Marshal Araujo, a distinguished soldier, chose to use a man who was anything but as his emissary, that had to be respected, but he himself deplored it. He thought of it, then shook his head. It would have come out as childish petulance, no more. All he said was, “I shall send you forward, Major.”
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