But this particular Algarvian turned out not to be going to Unkerlant. Pointing to Talsu, he spoke in good Jelgavan: “You are Talsu son of Traku, is it not so?”
“Aye,” Talsu answered. As his father had, he asked, “What can I do for you today, sir?”—but he feared he knew the answer.
Sure enough, the Algarvian said, “We haven’t heard much from you. We’d hoped for more—quite a lot more.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” replied Talsu, who was anything but. “I’ve just stayed close to home and minded my own business. I haven’t heard anything much.”
With a frown, the Algarvian said, “That’s not why we ordered you turned loose, you know. We expected to get some use out of you.”
“And so you have, by the powers above,” Traku put in. “I couldn’t have done half as much for you people without my son here stitching right beside me.”
“That’s not what I meant,” the redhead said pointedly.
“I don’t care,” Traku growled.
“Father—” Talsu said in some alarm. He didn’t want to go back to the dungeon himself, no, but he didn’t want to send his father there on his account, either.
But Traku wasn’t inclined to listen to him, either. Glaring at the Algarvian, he went on, “I don’t care what you meant, I tell you. Go ask the soldiers who’ve left this sunny land of ours for Unkerlant. Ask them about their tunics and kilts and capes and cloaks. Ask them if Talsu’s done something worth doing for them. Then come back here and complain, if you’ve got the nerve.”
Now the Algarvian captain frankly stared at him. Odds were; nobody in Jelgava had ever dared talk back to him before. He didn’t seem to know what to make of it. At last, he said, “You play a dangerous game.”
Still furious, Traku shook his head. “I’m not playing games at all. For you, maybe, it’s a game. For me and my son, it’s our lives and our livelihood. Why don’t you cursed well leave us alone and let us mind our own business, like Talsu here said?”
He was shouting, shouting loud enough to make Ausra come halfway down the stairs to find out what was going on. When Talsu’s mother saw the redhead in the shop, she let out a horrified gasp and retreated in a hurry. Talsu sighed in relief. He’d feared she would lay into the Algarvian the same way his father had.
The captain said, “There is service, and then there is service. You are trying to tell me that one kind is worth as much as another. In this, you …” Then, to Talsu’s astonishment, he grinned. “In this, you may be right. I do not say you are; I say you may be. Someone of higher rank than I will make the final decision.” He bowed and strolled out of the shop.
Talsu gaped at his father. “That was one of the bravest things I ever saw,” he said.
“Was it?” Traku shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that. All I know is, I was too little to go off and fight the redheads in the last war, and I get bloody sick of bending my neck and going, ‘Aye, sir,’ whenever they come through the door. So I told this son of a whore a couple of plain truths, that’s all.”
“That’s not all,” Talsu said. “You know the risk you were running.”
“What risk?” Traku didn’t want to take him seriously. “You went after the Algarvians with a stick in your hands. That, now, that was running a risk. This isn’t so much, not even close.” He coughed once or twice. “There’ve been times when I’ve sounded like it was your fault Jelgava didn’t lick those Algarvian buggers. I know there have. I’m sorry for it.”
Talsu tried to remember if he’d ever heard his father apologize for anything before. He didn’t think so. He didn’t quite know how to respond, either. He finally said, “Don’t worry about it. I never have.”
That was true, though perhaps not in a way Traku would have cared to know. Talsu discounted everything his father had to say about the war precisely because Traku hadn’t seen it for himself. What soldier ever born took seriously a civilian’s opinions about fighting?
They went back to work in companionable silence. After a while, Ausra appeared on the stairs again, Laitsina behind her. When the two women didn’t see the Algarvian, they came all the way down. “Is everything all right?” they asked together.
“Everything is fine,” Traku said gruffly. “Sometimes it’s a little harder to make people see sense than it is other times, that’s all.”
“You made … an Algarvian see sense?” Laitsina sounded as if she couldn’t believe her ears.
“He sure did.” Talsu thumped his father on the shoulder. Traku, to his astonishment, blushed like a girl. Ausra came over and kissed her husband on the cheek. That made Traku blush more than ever.
Ausra and Laitsina went upstairs again. Talsu and Traku looked at each other before they started work again. Maybe the Algarvian captain had seen sense, aye. But maybe he’d just gone for reinforcements—more redheads, or perhaps some Jelgavan constables. Or maybe his superiors would overrule him. Having been in the army, Talsu knew how easily that could happen.
But the Algarvian didn’t come back, with or without reinforcements. As the day wore on toward evening, Talsu began to believe he wouldn’t. When Gailisa came back from the grocer’s shop, Talsu told her how brave Traku had been. She clapped her hands together and kissed Traku on the cheek, too. That made Talsu’s father turn even redder than the kiss from his own wife had.
Supper was barley porridge enlivened with garlic, olives, cheese, raisins, and wine: food for hard times. Talsu remembered that huge piece of mutton he’d eaten with Kugu. Then he shrugged. The company was better here. When he went off to his cramped little bedchamber with Gailisa, that thought occurred to him again, rather more forcefully. He kissed her.
“What was that for?” she asked, smiling.
“Just because,” Talsu answered. Because you’re not Kugu struck him as the wrong thing to say. He did add, “I like kissing you.”
“Do you?” Gailisa gave him a sidelong look. “What else would you like?”
They found something they both liked. As a result, they were sleeping soundly when eggs started falling on Skrunda. The first bursts made Talsu sit bolt upright, instantly wide awake. After his time in the army, he would never mistake that sound, and never fail to respond to it, either.
“Downstairs!” he exclaimed, springing out of bed. “We’ve got to get downstairs! Powers above, I wish we had a cellar to hide in.” He heard his parents and sister calling out in their bedrooms. “Downstairs!” he cried again, this time at the top of his lungs. “We’ll hide behind the counter. It’s good and thick—better than nothing.”
Only later did he stop to think that going downstairs in pitch blackness was liable to be more dangerous than having an egg burst close by. But the whole family got down safe. They huddled behind the counter, chilly and frightened and crowded and uncomfortable. “The news sheets will be screaming about air pirates tomorrow,” Traku predicted.
“Not if one of these eggs bursts on their office, they won’t,” Laitsina said.
“I hope some of them burst on the Algarvians here in town,” Talsu said. “Otherwise, the Lagoans or Kuusamans up there on those dragons are just wasting their eggs.”
“Why are they bothering us?” his mother wailed as an egg came down close by and made the building shake. “We haven’t done anything to them.”
Talsu did his best to think like a general, and a foreign general at that. “If they strike at Jelgava,” he said, “that makes it harder for the Algarvians to pull men out of our kingdom and send them to Unkerlant.” He paused. “That means Father and I won’t sell the redheads so many cloaks.”
“Curse the foreigners, in that case!” Traku exclaimed. Maybe he meant it. Maybe he was joking. Maybe he was doing both at once. Any which way, Talsu laughed in spite of the death raining down on his home town. May it strike the Algarvians indeed, just as my sister said, he thought, and hoped the powers above were listening.
Colonel Spinello’s ley-line caravan glided to a stop in a battered city in eastern Forthweg—n
ot that there were any cities in Forthweg, eastern or western, that weren’t battered. The corporal doing conductor duty bawled, “This here is Gromheort. Two-hour layover—we’re picking up some men and some horses here. Two-hour layover.”
“Gromheort,” Spinello murmured. He’d been through this place before, when he was posted in Oyngestun back in the days when the war was easy. When he thought of Oyngestun, he thought of the Kaunian girl he’d enjoyed there. He’d whiled away a lot of bitter hours in Unkerlant telling stories about Vanai.
Gromheort was the biggest Forthwegian town near the Algarvian border. Almost without a doubt, the Kaunians from Oyngestun would have been brought here, to make it easier for the Algarvians to ship them west for sacrifice. If Vanai was here, if he could find her and bring her back … She won’t be sacrificed, and I won’t have to sleep with some dumpy Unkerlanter peasant wench, Spinello thought. It’ll work out fine for both of us.
He got up and limped to the door of the caravan car. His leg still wasn’t everything it might have been. But he could use it. And Algarve, these days, needed every man even remotely able to fight to throw into the battle against King Swemmel.
Outside the depot, a news-sheet vendor was waving a copy of his wares and shouting in Forthwegian. Spinello had only a smattering of Forthwegian, but he got the gist: Algarvian dragons striking hard at Sibiu. His mouth twisted. Some of the more ignorant or more forgetful Forthwegians might take that as an Algarvian victory. But if Lagoas and Kuusamo hadn’t swooped down on the island kingdom, Algarvian dragons would have had no need to set upon it.
He saw no obvious Kaunians on the street. But what did that prove? He’d heard about the sorcery that let them look like Forthwegians, and about the trouble it had caused the occupying authorities. When he spotted a plump, redheaded constable in tunic and kilt, he waved to the man. “You, there!”
For a moment, he thought the fat constable would pretend he hadn’t heard, but the fellow didn’t quite dare. “Aye, Colonel?” he said, coming up. “What do you want?”
“Do you by any chance know for a fact whether the Kaunians from a no-account village called Oyngestun were brought here for safekeeping?” Spinello asked.
“I do know that.” The constable’s chest swelled with self-importance, till it stuck out almost as far as his belly. “Helped bring those blonds in myself.”
“Did you?” That was better than Spinello had hoped for. “Good! Do you chance to recall a girl named Vanai, then? She’d be worth recalling.”
And sure enough, the constable nodded. “She live with an old foof named Brivibas, didn’t she? Cute little piece.”
“That’s right,” Spinello agreed. “His granddaughter. I’m bound for Unkerlant, and I want to get her out of the Kaunian quarter here and take her along to keep my bed warm.”
“Don’t blame you a bit,” the constable said, “but I don’t think you can do it.”
“Don’t tell me she’s been shipped west!” Spinello exclaimed. “That would be a horrible waste.”
“I can’t prove it one way or the other,” the constable replied. “I’ll tell you this, though: that Brivibas whoreson is dead as shoe leather. I caught him myself—me, Bembo. Bastard put on his sorcerous disguise—you know the blonds do?” He waited for Spinello to nod, then, looking smug, went on, “That disguise doesn’t do anything for a voice, and I recognized his. He hanged himself in his gaol cell, and nobody misses him a bit, not so far as I can see.”
Spinello missed Brivibas—he missed him a good deal. Brivibas was a key to getting Vanai to do what he wanted. Sooner than watch her dusty old granddad kill himself as a roadbuilder, she’d peeled off her clothes and opened her legs. Spinello sighed. “So you don’t think anybody could find Vanai in a hurry?”
“Not a chance.” The constable—Bembo—paused again, frowning. “In fact, come to think of it, she never got hauled into Gromheort at all. If I remember right, she ran off before we cleaned all the Kaunians out of Oyngestun.”
“Powers above!” Spinello glared at him. “Why didn’t you say that sooner? Who’d she run off with? Some boy?” Maybe that fellow from Plegmund’s Brigade had known what he was talking about after all.
“I don’t know all the ins and outs of it.” Bembo laughed loudly at his own wit. “If it weren’t for her mouthy old grandfather, I might not remember her at all. It’s not like I ever laid her or anything.”
“All right. All right.” Spinello, who had, knew when to give up. He turned, cursing under his breath at a good idea wasted, and went back to the depot.
Before long, the ley-line caravan was gliding west across Forthweg again. It stopped in Eoforwic to pick up more reinforcements, then slid on toward the fighting front. Towns and villages in western Forthweg and in Unkerlant had taken even more damage, and more recent damage, than those farther east Swemmel’s men might not have fought skillfully, but they’d fought hard from the very beginning.
And they—or their brethren who practiced the nasty art of the guerrilla—kept right on making themselves difficult. The caravan had to halt twice before it got to the front, for Unkerlanter irregulars had burst eggs on the ley line and overloaded its energy-carrying capacity. Algarvian mages had to put the damage right, and there weren’t enough of them to go around.
At last, a day and a half later than he should have, Spinello got down from the caravan car in the wreckage of a town named Pewsum. A sergeant was standing on the platform at the depot, holding up a leaf of paper with his name printed on it in big letters. “I’m Spinello,” he said, cane in one hand, carpetbag in the other.
The sergeant saluted. “Pleased to meet you, sir. Welcome to the brigade. Here, let me get that for you.” He relieved Spinello of the carpetbag. “Now if you’ll just come with me, I’ve got a wagon waiting.”
“Efficiency,” Spinello remarked, and the sergeant grinned at him. Algarvians did their best to practice what King Swemmel preached. But the locally built wagon testified to genuine Unkerlanter efficiency—it was high-wheeled and curve-bottomed, and could go through mud that bogged down any Algarvian vehicle. As the sergeant flicked the reins and the horses got moving, Spinello said, “We can’t have too many of these wagons, no matter how we get’em. Nothing like’em in the fall or the spring.”
“That’s the truth, sir. Powers above be praised that you see it,” the driver said. “Sometimes we can get them from units that think something has to come from Trapani to be any good. If our neighbors want to be fools, it’s no skin off our noses.”
“No, indeed,” Spinello said, but then he checked himself. “The way things are nowadays, nobody Algarvian can afford to be a fool. We have to leave that for the Unkerlanters.” After a few seconds of very visible thought, the sergeant nodded.
Brigade headquarters lay in a little village called Ubach, a couple of miles northwest of Pewsum. Getting there took more than an hour; though Unkerlanter wagons could get through the mud, nothing could get through it very fast. The sergeant pointed to the firstman’s house. “That’ll be yours, sir. I’ll let the regimental commanders know you’re here, so you can meet them.”
“Thanks.” Spinello looked around Ubach with something less than overwhelming curiosity. He’d already seen more Unkerlanter villages than he’d ever wanted. A few peasants tramped along the streets, doing their best to keep their long tunics out of the mud. Some nodded to him as the wagon sloshed by. Rather more pretended he didn’t exist. He’d seen all that before, too. And then he did a double take. Seeing a pretty young Kaunian girl in Ubach was the last thing he’d expected. She reminded him achingly of Vanai, though she was even younger and, he thought, even prettier. Pointing her way, he asked, “What’s she doing here?”
“Oh, Yadwigai?” The sergeant blew her a kiss. He raised his voice: “Hello, sweetheart!”
The blond girl—Yadwigai—waved back. “Hello, Sergeant,” she called in good Algarvian. “Is that the new colonel there?”
“Aye, it is,” the sergeant answered,
and blew her another kiss.
“Is she yours?” Spinello poked the sergeant in the ribs. “You lucky dog.”
“Oh, no, sir!” The soldier driving him sounded shocked.
“Ah.” Spinello nodded wisely. “A pet for one of the officers, then.” He sighed, wishing again that he’d been lucky enough to get his hands on Vanai during the layover at Gromheort.
But the sergeant shook his head once more. “No, sir,” he repeated. “Yadwigai isn’t anybody’s—not any one man’s, I mean. She belongs to the brigade.”
“Really?” Spinello knew he sounded astonished. He’d seen more camp followers than he’d ever wanted to, too. Yadwigai had none of their hard, bitter look. If anything, she put him in mind of a prosperous merchant’s daughter: happy and right on the edge of being spoiled.
“Aye, sir,” the sergeant replied, and then, realizing what Spinello had to mean, “No, sir—not like that! She’s not our whore. We’d kill anybody who tried doing anything like that with her. She’s our … our luck, I guess you might say.”
Spinello scratched his head. “You’d better tell me more,” he said at last. The sergeant had to know what happened to most of the Kaunians the Algarvians brought into Unkerlant. Spinello wondered if Yadwigai did.
“Well, it’s like this, sir,” the sergeant said, halting the wagon in front of the firstman’s house. “We picked her up in a village in western Forthweg when we first started fighting Swemmel’s buggers, and we’ve brought her along ever since. We’ve had good fortune ever since, too, and I don’t think there’s a man among us who wouldn’t die to help keep her safe. She’s … sweet, sir. You know what I’m saying?”
“All right, Sergeant. I won’t mess with your good-luck charm.” Spinello could see that any other answer would land him in trouble with his new brigade before he met anyone in it but this fellow driving him.
He got down from the wagon and went into the firstman’s hut Along with the benches against the walls that marked Unkerlanter peasant houses, the main room held an Algarvian-issue cot, folding table, and chairs. A map was tacked down on the table. Spinello studied it while the sergeant brought in his carpetbag, set it down beside the cot, and went out again.
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