“Death to the traitors!” Captain Recared yelled. Somewhere in the long fight between Durrwangen and westcentral Grelz, a promotion had finally caught up with him. Leudast couldn’t remember where. It didn’t matter to him. Promotion or no, Recared kept doing the same job. Leudast kept doing the same job, too, and nobody would ever promote him to lieutenant’s rank. He was sure of that. He had neither the bloodlines nor the pull to become an officer. “Death to the traitors!” Recared cried again, from behind a pale-barked birch tree.
Leudast crawled over toward Recared. Somebody in the village saw the motion and blazed at him. The ground was wet: steam puffed up where the beam bit, a few feet in front of his head. He froze. In southern Unkerlant, with winter coming on fast, that could easily be a literal as well as a metaphorical statement. After shivering for half a minute, he dashed forward again, and found shelter behind another tree trunk. The Grelzer blazed at him again, and missed again.
“Death to those who follow the false king!” Captain Recared roared.
“Sir,” Leudast said, and then, when Recared didn’t notice him right away, “Sir!”
“Eh?” That second time, he’d spoken loud enough to make Recared jump. The young regimental commander turned his head. “Oh, it’s you, Sergeant. What do you want?”
“Sir, if you don’t mind, don’t shout about death so much,” Leudast answered. “It just makes the cursed Grelzers fight harder, if you know what I mean. Sometimes they’ll surrender, if you give’em the chance.”
Recared chewed on that: visibly, for Leudast watched his jaw muscles work. At last, he said, “But they deserve death.”
“Aye, most of ‘em do.” Leudast didn’t want to argue with his superior; he just wanted him to shut up. “But if you tell’em ahead of time that they’ll get it, then they’ve got no reason not to fight as hard as they can to keep from falling into our hands. Do you see what I’m saying?”
The winter before, Recared wouldn’t have. Now, reluctantly, he nodded, though he said, “I still have to make our men want to fight.”
“Haven’t you noticed how it is, sir?” Leudast asked. “Advancing makes a big difference there.” Unkerlanter egg-tossers began pelting the enemy-held village. Leudast grinned wider at each burst. “And so does efficiency. They see we really can lick the whoresons on the other side.”
“Of course we can,” Recared exclaimed, as if the first two desperate summers of the war against Algarve had never happened. He knew how to take advantage of the egg-tossers, though. He raised his voice to a shout again: “They’ve got to keep their heads down, boys, so we can take ‘em. Forward! King Swemmel and victory!”
“Swemmel and victory!” Leudast echoed, also at the top of his lungs. Nothing wrong with that war cry, nothing at all. A lot of Unkerlant—and a good big stretch of the Duchy of Grelz here—had been recaptured behind it.
Recared ran forward—he was brave enough and to spare. Leudast followed him. So did everybody within earshot, and then the rest of the Unkerlanter soldiers who saw their comrades moving. “Urra!” they shouted, and, “Swemmel and victory!”
Shouts rose from inside the village: “Raniero!” and “Swemmel the murderer!” Advancing Unkerlanters went down. Some howled out cries that held no words, only pain. Others lay very still. These Grelzers weren’t about to surrender regardless of what the Unkerlanters yelled.
They’d buried eggs in the mud in front of their village, too. An Unkerlanter soldier trod on one. He shrieked briefly as the released energies consumed him. Leudast cursed. His own countrymen had stalled Algarvian attacks in the Durrwangen salient with belt after belt of hidden eggs. Having the stratagem turned against them seemed anything but fair.
Then Recared pointed south of the village and said the happiest words any Unkerlanter footsoldier could use: “Behemoths! Our behemoths, by the powers above!”
Even with snowshoes spreading their weight, even with the way made easier with brush and logs spread in front of them, the great beasts made slower, rougher going in the mud than they had on the hard ground of summer. But they moved forward faster than men could, and they and their armored crewmen were much harder to kill than ordinary footsoldiers.
Leudast said, “Let’s go with them and bypass this place. Once we get behind it, it won’t be worth anything to the Grelzers anymore.”
Recared frowned. “We ought to go straight at the enemy. He’s right there in front of us.”
“And we’re right here in front of him, where he’s got the best blaze at us,” Leudast answered. “When the Algarvians were driving us, they’d go around the places that fought hard and let them wither on the vine. They’d advance where we were weak, and we couldn’t be strong everywhere.”
“That’s so,” Recared said thoughtfully. He hadn’t been there to go through most of that, but he knew about it. A great many of the soldiers who had gone through it were dead; Leudast knew how lucky he was to be among the exceptions. To his relief, Recared nodded again, blew his whistle, and shouted for his men to swing south of the village and go with the behemoths. “The men who come after us, the ones who aren’t good enough to fight in the first rank, can mop up these traitors,” he declared.
As Leudast hurried toward the behemoths, he wondered if the Grelzers would sally to try to stop them. But the men who followed King Mezentio’s cousin stayed under cover; they knew they’d get slaughtered out in the open. Leudast expected them to get slaughtered anyway, but now it would take longer and cost more.
The Unkerlanters pressed on for another couple of miles before a well-aimed beam from a heavy stick left one of their behemoths kicking its way toward death in the mud. Another beam, not so well aimed, threw up a great gout of nastysmelling steam between a couple of other behemoths. All the crews frantically pointed ahead. When Leudast saw Algarvian behemoths at the edge of some woods, he threw himself flat in the muck. The redheads didn’t seem to have so many behemoths left these days, but they used the ones they did have with as much deadly panache as ever.
Still, two and a half years of war had taught King Swemmel’s soldiers several painful but important lessons. Their behemoths didn’t charge straight at the Algarvian beasts. Some of them traded beams and sticks with the Algarvians from a distance. That let the others sidle around to the flank. Leudast had watched this dance of death before. He knew what the right counter would be: having more behemoths waiting to engage the Unkerlanters trying the flanking move. The Algarvians didn’t have them. That meant they could either withdraw or die where they stood.
They chose to withdraw. Someplace else, someplace where they found odds that looked better, they would challenge the Unkerlanters again. In the meanwhile … “Forward!” Leudast shouted, scrambling up out of the mud. He wasn’t that much filthier than the men around him, and his voice lent him authority.
Not long before nightfall, his squad and a couple of others fought their way into a village neither the Grelzers nor the Algarvians defended very hard. Captain Recared strode for the firstman’s house, to make his headquarters there. He found the place empty, the door standing open. “Where’s the firstman?” he asked a dumpy woman looking out the window of the hut next door.
She jerked a thumb toward the east. “He done run off,” she answered, her Grelzer accent thick as syrup in Leudast’s ears. “He were in bed with the Algarvians, he were.” She sniffed. “His daughter were in bed with anything that walked on two legs and weren’t quite dead. Little slut.”
Recared nodded and went inside. Leudast nodded, too—wearily. He heard that story, or one just like it, in every village the Unkerlanters recaptured. All those villages had the same look: a lot of houses abandoned because the peasants had fled east to stay under Algarvian protection, hardly any men fit for soldiers showing themselves on the street.
The first few times he’d heard peasants tell tales of woe, he’d been sympathetic. Now … Now sympathy came harder. A lot of these people had run away rather than returning to King Swemmel’s rule. F
rom what Leudast had seen, a lot of the ones who’d stayed behind had done so only because they hadn’t found the chance to flee.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a scuffle broke out in a house not far away: curses and thumps and a shout of pain. “Think we ought to do anything about that, Sergeant?” one of his men asked.
Leudast shrugged and then shook his head. “I think it’ll sort itself out without us. When it does …”
He proved a good prophet. A couple of minutes later, three middle-aged men half led, half dragged one of their contemporaries up before him. “Ascovind here, he done sucked up to the Algarvians and to the miserable little tinpot king they made,” one of the captors said. “He ought to get what’s coming to him.”
“That’s a filthy lie!” Ascovind shouted, twisting and trying to break free. “I never done nothing like that.”
“Liar!” all three of the men shouted at the same time. One added, “He done told the Grelzers where irregulars hid out. Hurt’em powerful bad, I bet.”
“What do you want me to do about it?” Leudast asked the men. “You can save him for King Swemmel’s inspectors when they get here, or else you can knock him over the head yourselves. Makes no difference to me one way or the other.”
They dragged Ascovind away. Presently, they came back and he didn’t. Leudast had seen the like there a good many times, too. Ascovind should have run off, but he’d probably thought his neighbors wouldn’t turn on him when they got the chance. As far as Leudast was concerned, that made him a fool as well as a traitor, he’d probably deserved whatever the other villagers had given him.
And he wouldn’t be the only one. Men who’d cursed King Swemmel or who’d just tried to get along; women who’d opened their legs to an Algarvian or to a Grelzer soldier; men and women nobody much liked-aye, the inspectors would be busy here. They’d be busy lots of places. Leudast was glad of his uniform. Nobody could suspect him of treason, not for anything.
The soldiers took as much food as they could find. They had to, to feed themselves. None of the villagers dared say a word. These men in filthy rock-gray who represented King Swemmel could start calling them traitors, too. Leudast shared some of the black bread he got with the prettiest girl he saw. Later, she shared herself with him. They hadn’t made the bargain in words, but it was nonetheless real.
Recared’s whistle shrilled before sunrise the next morning. “Forward!” he shouted. Forward Leudast went, on toward Herborn.
Eighteen
Bembo was sleeping the deep, restful sleep of a man with a clean conscience—or perhaps of a man with no conscience—when someone shattered that rest by rudely shaking him awake. His eyes flew open. So did his mouth, to curse whoever would perpetrate such an enormity. But the curses died before they saw the light of day: Sergeant Pesaro loomed over him, fat face filled with fury.
“Get your arse out of the sack, you son of a whore,” Pesaro snarled. “Come with me this instant—this instant, do you hear?”
“Aye, Sergeant,” Bembo answered meekly, and came, even though he wore only his light tunic and kilt and the barracks was chilly. He followed Pesaro into the sergeant’s office, where, shivering, he plucked up his always indifferent courage enough to ask, “What—what is it?”
The worst he could think of was that Pesaro had found out how he’d spirited away the parents of Doldasai the Kaunian courtesan. By the fearsome expression on Pesaro’s face, this was liable to be even worse than that. Pesaro snatched a leaf of paper off his desk and waved it in Bembo’s face. “Do you see this?” he shouted. “Do you?”
“Uh, no, Sergeant,” Bembo said. “Not unless you hold it still.” Thus reminded, Pesaro did. Bembo read the first few lines. His eyes widened. “By the powers above,” he whispered. “My leave’s come through.”
Pesaro’s glare grew more baleful yet. “Aye, it has, you stinking sack of moldy mushrooms,” he ground out. “Your leave has come through. Nobody else’s has, not in this whole barracks, not in this whole stinking town. Not even mine. Powers below eat you, you get to go back to Tricarico for ten mortal days and enjoy yourself in civilization while the rest of us stay stuck with the fornicating Forthwegians.”
He looked about to tear the precious paper to shreds. To forestall such a disaster, Bembo snatched it out of his hands. “Thank you, Sergeant!” he exclaimed. “I feel like a man who just won the lottery.” That was no exaggeration; he knew how unlikely leaves were. All but babbling, he went on, “I’m sure yours will come through very soon. Not just sure—positive.” Aye, he was babbling. He didn’t care.
“Ha!” Pesaro tossed his head in magnificent, jowl-wobbling contempt. “Go on, get out of my sight. I’ll be jealous of you every minute you’re gone—and if you’re even one minute late coming back to duty, you’ll pay. Oh, how you’ll pay.”
Nodding, doing his best not to gloat, Bembo fled. He dressed. He packed. He collected all his back pay. He hurried to the ley-line caravan depot and waited for an eastbound caravan. He’d just scrambled aboard it when he realized he hadn’t bothered waiting for breakfast. If that didn’t speak to his desperation for escape, he didn’t know what did.
Almost all the Algarvians in his caravan car were soldiers who’d got leave from the endless grinding war against Unkerlant. Some of them, seeing his constable’s uniform, cursed him for a coward and a slacker. He’d heard that before, whenever soldiers passed through Gromheort. Here, he had to grin and bear it—either that or pick a fight and get beaten to a pulp.
But some of the soldiers, instead of reviling him, just called him a lucky dog. They shared food with him, and fiery Unkerlanters spirits, too. By the time the ley-line caravan had got well into Algarve, Bembo leaned back in his seat with a glazed look on his face.
He found he had little trouble figuring out just when the caravan entered his native kingdom. It wasn’t so much that redheads replaced swarthy, bearded Forthwegians in the fields. That did happen, but it wasn’t what he noticed. What he noticed was something starker: women replaced men.
“Where are all the men?” he exclaimed. “Gone to fight King Swemmel?”
One of the fellows who’d been feeding him spirits shook his head. “Oh, no, buddy, not all of them. By now, a good many are dead.” Bembo started to laugh, then choked on it. The soldier wasn’t joking.
Changing caravans in Dorgali, a good-sized town in south-central Algarve, came as more than a little relief. Most of the men under fifty in the depot wore uniforms, but some didn’t. And hearing women and children use his own language as their birthspeech was music to Bembo’s ears after a couple of years of listening to sonorous Forthwegian and occasional classical Kaunian.
Best of all, the civilians among whom Bembo sat on the trip to Tricarico didn’t blame him for not being a soldier. Some of them, in fact, started to take his constable’s uniform for that of the army. He wouldn’t have denied it if a woman hadn’t pointed him out for what he really was. But even she didn’t do it in a mean way; she said, “You’re serving King Mezentio beyond the frontier, too, just as if you were a soldier.”
“Why, so I am, dear,” Bembo said. “I couldn’t have put it better, or even so well, myself.” He flirted with her till she got off the caravan car a couple of hours later. That made him snap his fingers in disappointment; if she’d stayed on till Tricarico, something interesting might have developed.
He let out a long sigh of pleasure, like that of a lover returning to his beloved, when the conductor called, “Tricarico, folks! All out for Tricarico!” He grabbed his bag and hurried down onto the platform of the depot. It was, he saw, the platform from which he’d left for Forthweg a couple of years before. He kicked at the paving stones as he left the depot and hurried out into the city—his city.
There were the Bradano Mountains, indenting the eastern skyline. He didn’t have to worry about blond Jelgavans swarming out of them, as he had in the early days of the war. He didn’t have to worry about Jelgavan dragons anymore, either.
/> And there was a cab. He waved to it. The driver stopped. Bembo hopped in. “The Duke’s Delight,” he told the hackman, naming a hostel he’d have no trouble affording. He’d had to give up his flat when he went off to the west.
“You’ll be from around these parts,” the driver said, flicking the horse’s reins.
“How do you know?” Bembo asked.
“Way you talk,” the fellow answered. “And nobody who wasn’t would know of a dive like that.” Bembo laughed. He also got the last laugh, by shorting the driver’s tip to pay him back for his crack.
Once he’d got himself a room at the hostel, Bembo walked down the hall to take a bath, then changed into wrinkled civilian clothes and went back out to promenade through the streets of Tricarico. How shabby everything looks, he thought. How worn. That took him by surprise; after so long in battered Gromheort, he’d expected his home town to sparkle by comparison.
As he’d seen on his caravan journey across Algarve, few men between seventeen and fifty were on the streets. Of those who were, many limped or were short a hand or wore an eye patch or sometimes a black mask. Bembo grimaced whenever he saw men who’d come back from the war something less than a full man. They made him feel guilty for his free if not especially graceful stride.
After so long looking at dumpy Forthwegian women and the occasional blond Kaunian, Bembo had thought he would enjoy himself back in his home town. But his own countrywomen seemed tired and drab, too. Too many of them wore the dark gray of someone who’d lost a husband or brother or father or son.
Powers above, he thought The Forthwegians arehaving a better time of it than my own folk. For a moment, that seemed impossible. Then, all at once, it made sense. Of course they are. They’re out of the war. They aren’t losing loved ones anymore— well, except for the Kaunians in Forthweg, anyhow. We have to go right on taking it in the teeth till we finally win. Lurid broadsheets shouted, THE KAUNIANS STARTED THIS WAR, BUT WE WILL FINISH IT! Others cried, THE STRUGGLE AGAINST KAUNIANITY NEVER ENDS! They were pasted on every vertical surface, and gave Tricarico most of what little color it had. People hurried past them head down, not bothering to read.
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