“I’ve been drinking for a while,” the band leader said. “I’ve been drinking to being able to drink. Will that do for you, or do I have to come up with something fancier?” He knocked back his glass of brandy at a gulp.
More cautiously, Ealstan drank, too. “As bad as that?” he asked.
“Worse,” Ethelhelm said. “Eventually, you can go through all the receipts and see how much money I lost. It could have been worse. I could have stayed here and lost even more. Aye, as bad as that.”
“Why did they let you go, then, if all they were going to do was steal from you?” Ealstan didn’t usually drink brandy in the morning, but made an exception today. He thought he would need lubricating to hear the band leader’s story.
“Why?” Ethelhelm’s laugh had nothing to do with honest mirth; it seemed more a howl of pain. “I’ll tell you why: so they would have more to steal, that’s why.” He disappeared into the kitchen again, and returned with his glass newly full. “But I never thought when I set out that they’d steal so bloody much.”
“They’re Algarvians,” Ealstan said, as if that explained everything.
But Ethelhelm only laughed that raw, wounded laugh again. “Even Algarvians have limits—most of the time. They don’t have any limits with me. None at all. Look.”
He rose again. Ealstan had hardly any choice but to look at him. The band leader was swarthy like a proper Forthwegian, but he overtopped Ealstan (who was of good size by Forthwegian standards) by half a head. His face was longer than a Forthwegian’s should have been, too. Kaunian blood, sure as sure.
“If I don’t do what they tell me, if I don’t pay whatever they ask of me …” His voice faded out. “They’d just as soon kill me as waste their time dickering. You can’t pick your ancestors. That’s what everybody says, and it’s not a lie, but oh, by the powers above, how I wish it were.”
“Maybe you ought to quit singing and find quiet work where they won’t pay any attention to you,” Ealstan said slowly.
Ethelhelm glared. “Why don’t you ask me to cut my leg off, too, while I’m at it?”
“If it’s in a trap, sometimes you have to,” Ealstan answered. He knew all about that. He’d had to flee Gromheort after stunning his cousin Sidroc when Sidroc found out he’d been seeing Vanai. At the time, he hadn’t known whether Sidroc would live or die. He’d lived, lived and gone on to kill Ealstan’s brother Leofsig, so Ealstan wished he’d killed him.
Ethelhelm was shaking his head back and forth. He looked trapped. “I can’t, curse it,” he said. “Ask me to live without my music and you might as well ask me not to live at all.”
Patiently, Ealstan said, “I’m not asking you to live without your music. Make all you want, for yourself and for whatever friends you make after you disappear from Eoforwic. Just don’t make a big enough splash with it to draw the redheads’ notice.”
“It’s not just making the music.” The band leader shook his head. “I think I’m trying to explain color to a blind man. You don’t know what it’s like to get up there on a stage and have thousands of people clapping and yelling out your name.” He waved at the elegant flat. “You don’t know what it’s like to have all this stuff, either.”
Ethelhelm didn’t know that Ealstan’s father was well-todo. Ealstan didn’t know how much like his father he sounded when he said, “If these things are more important to you than staying alive, you haven’t got them. They’ve got you. Same goes for getting up on stage.”
Now Ethelhelm stared at him. “You’re not my mother, you know. You can’t tell me what to do.”
“I’m not telling you what to do,” Ealstan said. “I’m just a bookkeeper, so I can’t. But I can’t help seeing how things add up, either, and that’s what I’m telling you. You don’t have to listen to me.”
Ethelhelm kept shaking his head. “You don’t have any idea how hard I’ve worked to get where I am.”
“And where is that, exactly?” Ealstan returned. “Under the Algarvians’ eye, that’s where. Under their thumb, too.”
“Curse you,” the band leader snarled. “Who told you you could come here and mock me?”
Ealstan got to his feet and gave Ethelhelm a courteous bow: almost an Algarvian-style bow. “Good day,” he said politely. “I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding someone else to keep your books in order for you—or you can always do it yourself.” He had a good deal of his father’s quiet but touchy pride, too.
“Wait!” Ethelhelm said, as if he were a superior entitled to give orders. Ealstan kept walking toward the door. “Wait!” Ethelhelm said again, this time with a different kind of urgency. “Do you know any people who could help me disappear out from under the redheads’ noses?”
“No,” Ealstan said, and set his hand on the latch. It was true. He wished he did know people of that sort. He would gladly have joined their ranks. Even if he had known them, though, he wouldn’t have admitted it to Ethelhelm. The musician might have used their services. But he might also have betrayed them to Mezentio’s men to buy favor for himself. Ealstan opened the door, then turned back and bowed again. “Good luck. Powers above keep you safe.”
Walking home, he wondered how he’d make up the hole in his income he’d just created for himself. He thought he would be able to manage it. He’d been in Eoforwic a year and a half now. People who needed their accounts reckoned up were getting to know he was in business, and that he was good.
Men were pasting up new broadsheets in his neighborhood. They showed a dragon with King Swemmel’s face flaming eastern Derlavai, the slogan beneath reading, SLAY THE BEAST! The Algarvians used good artists. Ealstan still wondered if anyone took the broadsheets seriously.
The postman was putting mail in boxes when he went into his building. “One for you here,” the fellow said, and thrust an envelope into his hand.
“Thanks,” Ealstan replied, and then said, “Thanks!” again in a different tone of voice when he recognized his father’s handwriting. He didn’t hear from Gromheort nearly often enough, though he understood why: he might still be sought, and writing carried risk. He was smiling when he opened the envelope and stepped into the stairwell—he’d read the letter on the way up.
By the time he got to the top, he wasn’t smiling anymore. When Vanai opened the door to let him in, he thrust the letter into her hand. She quickly read it, then let out a long sigh. “I wish I were sorrier to hear they’d caught my grandfather,” she said at last. “He was a fine scholar.”
“Is that all you have to say?” Ealstan asked.
“It’s bad luck to speak ill of the dead,” she answered, “so I said what good I could.” Brivibas had raised Vanai from the time she was small; Ealstan knew as much. He didn’t know what had estranged them, and wondered if he ever would. Later that evening, he found his father’s letter, a balled-up wad of paper, in the wastebasket. Whatever her reasons, Vanai meant them.
Lieutenant Recared’s whistle squealed. “Forward!” the young officer shouted.
“Forward!” Sergeant Leudast echoed, though without the accompaniment of the whistle.
“Urra!” the Unkerlanter soldiers shouted, and forward they went. They’d been going forward ever since they cut off the redheads down in Sulingen, and Leudast saw no reason they shouldn’t keep right on going forward till they ran King Mezentio out of his palace in Trapani.
He had no sure notion of where Trapani was. Until Swemmel’s impressers hauled him into the army, he’d known only his own village not too far west of the border with Forthweg and the nearby market town. He’d seen a lot more of the world since, but few pleasant places in it.
The village ahead didn’t look very pleasant. It did have one thing in common with Trapani, wherever Trapani was: it was full of Algarvians. Mezentio’s soldiers had never quit fighting through their long, hard retreat from southern Unkerlant; they simply hadn’t had the manpower to hold back the Unkerlanters over a broad front. In any one skirmish, though, there was no guarantee Leudast and h
is countrymen would come out on top.
That thought crossed Leudast’s mind even before eggs started bursting among the advancing Unkerlanters. He threw himself down in the snow, cursing as he dove: nobody had told him the Algarvians had a couple of egg-tossers in the village. Some of his men dove for cover, too. Some—the new recruits, mostly—kept running forward in spite of the eggs. A lot of them went down, too, as if a scythe had sliced through them at harvest time. Their shrieks and wails rose above the roar of the bursting eggs.
Algarvian pickets in carefully chosen hidey-holes in front of the village blazed at Leudast and his comrades. “Sir,” he shouted to Lieutenant Recared, who sprawled behind a rock not far away, “I don’t know if we can pry them out of there by ourselves.”
At the start of the winter campaign, Recared would have called him a coward and might have had him blazed. They’d been ordered to take the village, and orders, to Recared, might have been handed down by the powers above. But action had taught the company commander a couple of things. He pointed off to the left, to the west. “We don’t have to do it by ourselves. We’ve got behemoths for company.”
Leudast yelled himself hoarse as the big beasts lumbered forward. He’d hated it when the Algarvians threw behemoths at him, and loved Unkerlanter revenge in equal measure. Eggs from the tossers mounted on the behemoths’ back started bursting in the village. The redheads there stopped pounding the Unkerlanter footsoldiers and swung their egg-tossers toward the behemoths.
“Forward!” Recared yelled again, to take advantage of the enemy’s distraction.
But, even though the tossers weren’t aimed at the footsoldiers, eggs kept bursting under them anyhow as they got closer to the village. “They’ve buried them under the snow!” Leudast shouted. “We burst them as we run over them.” He’d seen the Algarvians do that before, but not since the fighting in the ruins of Sulingen, where they’d had plenty of time to dig in.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than an Unkerlanter behemoth trod on a buried egg. The burst of sorcerous energy killed the beast at once. Its body shielded the crew who rode it from the worst of the energies, but as it toppled over onto its side, it crushed a couple of men beneath it.
Recared’s whistle squealed again—the shrill squeak reminded Leudast of the noise a pig made in the moment it was castrated. “Forward!” the young lieutenant yelled once more. “Look behind you—we’re not in this alone. We’ve got reinforcements coming up to give us a hand, too.”
Leudast risked a quick glance over his shoulder. Sure enough, a fresh wave of soldiers in white smocks worn over long gray tunics stormed toward the village on the heels of Recared’s regiment. That was plenty to make him shout, “Urra!” and scramble toward the huts himself. This winter, for the first time, his kingdom seemed able to put men where they were needed when they were needed there. Up till very recently, far too many attacks had gone in either late or in the wrong place.
An Algarvian picket popped up out of his hole to blaze at the onrushing Unkerlanters. Leudast raised his own stick to his shoulder and blazed the redhead. The enemy soldier went down with a screech. An Unkerlanter closer to that hole than Leudast was jumped down into it. A moment later, he scrambled out again and ran on toward the village. The Algarvian didn’t come up again.
As King Swemmel’s men pushed forward, a couple of enemy pickets tried to run back into the village themselves. One fell before he could take half a dozen steps. The other might have blazed Leudast if he hadn’t been more interested in trying to get away.
“Surrender!” Leudast shouted in Algarvian. “Hands high!” That was about all of the language he knew: all a soldier needed to know.
The soldier took a couple more steps. Leudast raised his stick, ready and more than ready to blaze. Then the redhead seemed to realize he couldn’t get away. He threw his stick down in the snow and raised his hands over his head. The smile he aimed at Leudast was was half cheerful, half fearful. He loosed a torrent of speech in his own language.
“Shut up,” barked Leudast, who understood not a word. He strode forward and relieved the Algarvian of money and rations, then gestured with his stick: go to the rear. Hands still high, the redhead obeyed. Maybe he’d end up in a captives’ camp; maybe the other Unkerlanters would kill him before he got off the battlefield. Leudast didn’t look back to find out.
Sticks or bursting eggs had started fires in a couple of the peasant huts at the southern end of the village. Leudast welcomed the smoke. It made the Algarvians have a tougher time seeing him, and it might attenuate their beams, too. More eggs churned up the ground in front of him as the behemoth crews did all they could to help the footsoldiers.
Getting through the houses in the southern half of the village proved easier than Leudast had expected. Once the Unkerlanters reached those houses, the enemy fought only a rear-guard action against them. That surprised Leudast till he got to the edge of the market square.
As in most Unkerlanter peasant villages, the square was good and wide. In happier times, people would buy and sell things there, or else just stand around and gossip. Now … Now the Algarvians had dug themselves in on the far side of the square. If the Unkerlanters wanted to come at them, they would have to charge across that open space. It might be possible. It wouldn’t be easy, or cheap.
An Algarvian beam seared the timbers of the hut behind which Leudast crouched. He pulled back in a hurry; smoke scraped his throat as he breathed in. He hoped the hut wouldn’t catch.
A couple of men, both new recruits, tried to rush across the square. Almost contemptuously, the Algarvians let them run for four or five strides before knocking them over. One crumpled and lay still. The other, moaning and dragging a useless leg, crawled back toward cover. Beams boiled snow into puffs of steam all around him. He’d nearly made it to safety when one struck home. His moans turned to shrieks. A moment later, another beam bit. He fell silent.
“Can we do it, Sergeant?” a soldier asked Leudast.
He shook his head. He wouldn’t order a charge across the square. If Recared did, he’d try to talk the regimental commander out of it. If he couldn’t, he’d sprint across the square along with his comrades—and see how far he got.
Somewhere a few houses over, Lieutenant Recared was speaking to some other soldiers: “We’ll have to be quick, aye, and we’ll have to be bold, too. The Algarvians can’t have that many men on the other side of the square.” Leudast’s heart sank. He saw no reason why the redheads couldn’t have that many men and more in the northern part of the village.
But it turned out not to matter. He didn’t know where the dragons came from. Maybe they were returning from another raid when some of their dragonfliers looked down and saw the fighting, or maybe the other regiment had a crystallomancer with better connections than Recared’s. The Algarvians in the village were surely ready for an attack on the ground. They were just as surely not ready for the death that swooped on them from the sky.
When Leudast heard the thunder of great wings overhead, he threw himself flat in the muddy snow—not that that was likely to save him. But the attacking dragons were painted rock-gray, and they flamed the half of the village Mezentio’s men still held. Even from across the market square, he could feel the heat as houses and barricades—and soldiers—caught fire. Soldiers burned not quite to death screamed. A couple of minutes later, the Unkerlanter dragons flamed the Algarvians again. Then they flew off toward the south.
Even before Lieutenant Recared blew his precious officer’s whistle, Unkerlanters started rushing across the square. A few of them fell; the dragons hadn’t killed all the redheads. But they had flamed the heart out of the enemy’s position. Some of the Algarvians fought on anyhow, and made Swemmel’s men pay a price for killing them. The rest—more than usual in this kind of fight—surrendered. They seemed dazed, astonished to be alive.
“Another village down,” Recared said proudly. “Little by little, we take back our kingdom.”
“A v
illage down is right, sir,” Leudast answered, coughing a little and then more than a little. “It’ll be a while before the peasants move back here.”
Recared opened his mouth in surprise, as if the people who’d once lived in the village hadn’t crossed his mind. They probably hadn’t; he was, Leudast knew, a city man. After a moment, he did find a reply: “They weren’t serving the kingdom with the Algarvians holding this place.” Since that was true, Leudast nodded. He couldn’t prove Recared had missed the point.
With what light remained to the day, the Unkerlanters pushed north again. Leudast approved of that without reservation. He approved of it even more because it didn’t involve fighting. Somewhere up ahead, Algarvians would be holed up in the next village. When he came to them, he’d do whatever he had to do. Till then, he enjoyed the respite.
He didn’t enjoy having Recared shake him awake in the middle of the night. “What’s gone wrong, sir?” he asked, assuming something had.
Only faint glowing embers illuminated the young lieutenant’s face. In that dim, bloody light, Recared looked, for once, far older than his years. “Our crystallomancer just got the order,” he said. “We have to countermarch, head back south.”
“What?” Leudast exclaimed. “Powers above, why?”
“I don’t know, curse it. The order didn’t explain.” Recared sounded as harassed as an ordinary soldier. “But you’re bound to be right, Sergeant: something’s gone wrong somewhere.”
Hajjaj hoped no one knew he’d left Bishah. He did manage to sneak out of the capital every now and again. So far, he’d managed to keep the secret from those who would have been most interested in learning it: chief among them Marquis Balastro, the Algarvian minister to Zuwayza. Balastro knew Zuwayza was imperfectly happy in her role as Algarve’s ally; Hajjaj worked hard to keep him from knowing just how unhappy his kingdom was, not least since Zuwayza would have been even unhappier without Algarve.
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