“Somewhere not far from here, we beat these buggers back from the beaches.” Istvan heaved a sigh. “But they’re like roaches, seems like. Stomp ‘em once and they just come back again.”
He’d expected to have to march all the way to the captives’ camp, wherever on the island it turned out to be. He looked toward the forest that grew almost down to the beach. Parts of it were still battered from the fight his countrymen had put up before the Kuusamans finally seized Obuda. His own memories of that losing campaign were of hunger and fog and fear.
To his surprise, though, the guards marched his comrades and him only as far as what proved to be a ley-line caravan depot. “In! To go in!” the Kuusamans commanded. Into the caravan cars went the Gyongyosians.
Kunkept shaking his head, as he had at the harbor. “This is plainly the extension of the ley line the ship that brought us from Becsehely used,” he said, though no such thing was plain to Istvan. “The Kuusamans use every bit of sorcerous energy they can. We don’t. No wonder the war isn’t going the way we wish it would.”
“Silence, there,”CaptainFrigyes said sharply. “I’ll hear no talk of defeatism. Have you got that, Corporal?”
“Aye, Captain,”Kun answered, the only thing he could say-out loud, at any rate. To Istvan, he murmured, “No defeatism, is it? How does he think we got here? Have we invaded Obuda again?”
“We got caught, but that doesn’t mean we’ve got to give up,” Istvan said. His own attitude lay somewhere betweenKun ’s and Frigyes’. Obviously, Gyongyos had lost the fight for Becsehely, and the whole war in the Bothnian Ocean was going Kuusamo’s way. Even so
… “If we let the slant-eyes think we’ll do whatever they say, they’ll end up owning us, do you know what I mean:
Kunjust grunted. Whether that meant he agreed or he didn’t think the remark worth wasting words on, Istvan couldn’t have said.
The ley line went through the forest, straight as the beam from a stick. It passed by a couple of little Obudan villages. The natives hardly looked up from their fields to watch it go past. Before the Derlavaian kingdoms came to their islands, they’d lived a simple life. They hadn’t known metalworking or much magecraft past exploiting obvious power points or how to tame the wild dragons that flew from one island to another and preyed on men and flocks alike. By now they’d grown so accustomed to the marvels of modern civilization, they took them for granted.
When at last the ley-line caravan stopped, it had climbed halfway up the slope of Mount Sorong. Istvan thought they were somewhere near the town of Sorong, the largest native settlement. He wondered how much of Sorong was left these days. Then he shrugged. The Obudans hadn’t been strong enough to hold Gyongyos or Kuusamo away from their island. Whatever happened to them, they deserved it.
“Out! To go out!” shouted the guards on the caravan cars.
Out Istvan went. There straight ahead stood the captives’ camp, behind a palisade with nails sticking out of the timbers like hedgehog spines, to make them all but impossible to climb. Istvan looked around and started to laugh again.
“What to be funny?” a guard demanded.
“This used to be my regiment’s encampment,” Istvan answered. The Kuusaman nodded to show he understood, then shrugged to show he wasn’t much impressed. After a moment, Istvan wasn’t much impressed, either. The Gyongyosians hadn’t been strong enough to hold Kuusamo away from Obuda. Didn’t that mean they deserved whatever happened to them?
That was a chilly thought with which to enter the captives’ camp.
Some of the Gyongyosian barracks still stood. The guards took Istvan and his comrades to a newer, less weathered building. He turned out to have a better cot and more space as a captive of the Kuusamans than he’d had as a Gyongyosian soldier on Obuda. He didn’t know what that said about the relative strength of the two warring kingdoms. Nothing good, probably, not from a Gyongyosian point of view.
“I wish to speak toColonelEino,” Frigyes told a guard. The Kuusaman went off to see if the camp commandant cared to speak with a captive captain.
To Istvan’s surprise, Eino came to the barracks. “What do you want?” he asked. “Whatever it is, it had better be important.”
“It is,” Frigyes said. “I want your word of honor as an officer that you do not abuse us by feeding us the filthy, forbidden flesh of goats. We are in your power. I hope you are not so vile as to make us either starve or become ritually unclean.”
Alarm blazed through Istvan. He glanced atKun and Szonyi. They looked alarmed, too. The scar on his hand seemed to throb. His gaze swung back toColonelEino.
The camp commandant laughed. “Many of your people ask this. I give you my word, it does not happen.” He laughed again, less pleasantly. “You may ask, what is a Kuusaman’s word worth?” Off he went, leaving appalled silence behind him.
ColonelSpinellowas bored. He’d been a great many things since the war took him to Unkerlant-wounded, hungry, freezing, terrified-but never bored, never till now. He yawned till his jaw creaked. He felt like ordering another attack on Pewsum, just to give his men-and himself-something to do.
No matter what he felt like, he refrained. He had no doubt whatever that his brigade was glad about the lull in the fighting. It didn’t break his heart, either. He’d more than half expectedKingSwemmel ’s men to have laid on an attack against Waldsolms by now. Maybe the Unkerlanters were enjoying the lull, too.
If I want something to do, I ought to get Jadwigai into bed with me, he thought, not for the first time. Not for the first time, he turned the thought aside. Tampering with the brigade’s luck would only be bad for his own. He even believed that, which made it easier for him to resist temptation-but not a great deal easier.
Then a shout rang out that sent him springing to his feet: “Field post! The field post’s here!”
Spinello hurried out of the Unkerlanter hut where he’d been brooding. He hadn’t even reached the unpaved street before turning into his usual jaunty self. “Come on, boys,” he called to the other soldiers also hurrying toward the wagon that brought letters from home. “Time to find out how much your girlfriends are trying to squeeze out of you this time.”
The men in the wagon started calling out names. Spinello’s clerks took care of most of them, sorting the envelopes and packages by regiment and company so they could go on up to the front. Every so often, one of the clerks said, “He’s wounded,” or “He’s dead,” or, “He got transferred six months ago. Anybody who’s looking for him here is out of luck.”
“Here’s one forColonelSpinello,” one of the field postmen called.
“That’s me.” Spinello happily reached for it.
Before giving it to him, the fellow in the wagon held it under his nose. “Perfumed!” he exclaimed, which made all the Algarvians in the muddy main street whoop and sigh and roll their eyes and pretend to swoon.
“Powers below eat every bloody one of you,” Spinello said. “You’re just jealous, and you bloody well know it.”
None of the soldiers argued with him. They probablywere jealous, but not in a bad way. Any officer in the Algarvian army who got a perfumed letter only saw his prestige rise-it made his men think he was good at some of the things that made life worth living.
“You going to read it to us, Colonel?” somebody called. A chorus of baying whoops followed that suggestion.
“Read your own letters-if you know how to read,” Spinello replied with dignity. “I’m going to enjoy this one myself.” It came from Fronesia; if the scent, the same one she used herself, hadn’t been enough to tell him as much, her flowing script would have. He smiled. He’d had a splendid time with her back in Trapani, the sort of time that would have made his men whoop even more than they were already whooping if he’d chosen to tell them about it.
Before he tore the envelope open, he glanced up and saw Jadwigai peering out through one of the small windows in the peasant hut she used as her own. She rarely come out onto the street when Algarvians from outs
ide the brigade could see her. One more proof she knows what happens to most Kaunians, Spinello thought, something that hadn’t occurred to him before.
He took out the letter from his mistress, unfolded it, and began to read. The first part was all conventional enough. Fronesia missed him, she hoped he was safe, she hoped he got leave soon so she could see him, she suggested several things she might do to make his leave more entertaining if he got it. A couple of the things she suggested sounded entertaining enough to make him want to head back toward Trapani whether he had leave or not.
And then, three or four paragraphs into the letter, Fronesia got down to business.
Someone has been ungenerous enough to slander or libel me toColonelSabrino, and he, in his ingratitude, has seen fit to cut off the allowance he used to give me. While I know I can rely on your kindness, I wonder if you might be sweet enough to send me just a little more than usual over the next couple of months, to help me wean myself away from Sabrino for ever and always. I promise you, dear, that I will show you just exactly how glad I am to have finally fallen into the arms of a true man, not a cold-hearted calculator who holds the least little thing against me.
Spinello read that several times. No matter how many times he read it, it always added up to the same thing. “Why, you little tramp!” he said, half annoyed, half admiring. Squeeze indeed, he thought. Mistresses, of course, were and had to be mercenary. They had custom on their side, but the law had never heard of them. Fronesia, though, managed to turn greed into something uncommonly like art.
To how many other officers was she sending similarly artful letters? In peacetime, having multiple protectors was almost impossibly difficult for a mistress. But the war made it easy. What were the odds that two… friends would come into Trapani wanting to see a woman at the same time? Slim, no doubt about it. A canny woman, or a grasping one, could do very well for herself.
He had no proof, only the tone of the letter. In his own prewar days, though, he’d studied the Kaunian classics, which left him uncommonly sensitive to tone. If Fronesia didn’t have more than one protector, it wasn’t solely because of love for him. He was sure, very sure, of that.
Instead of crumpling up the letter and tossing it into the mud, he took it back to his hut. He kept his head up and his stride brisk. He wouldn’t let the men see that Fronesia had written anything to upset him.
When he got inside, though, he tossed the letter on the embers of the fire. Those were plenty to make it char and crackle and flare and burn. For a moment he smelled, or imagined he smelled, scorched perfume. Then the sharp odor of burning paper overwhelmed it, and then that too was lost in the usual smoky stink of the hearth.
He sat down at a folding table-Algarvian army issue; Unkerlanter peasant huts didn’t boast such amenities-inked a pen, and began his reply. Halfway through the first paragraph, he set down the pen, shaking his head. If he wrote while angry, he would regret the letter as soon as he posted it. Fronesia didn’t need to hear from him right away. If she didn’t hear from him right away, she might worry a little. That wouldn’t be so bad.
After a bit, the field-post wagon rattled off to deliver letters and packages to some other brigade. Half noticing the noise, Spinello nodded to himself. The military postmen were good, solid fellows; even footsoldiers respected them. They carried sticks when they got near the front, and they knew what to do with them, too.
Someone knocked on the door. ColonelSpinello started. He wished one of his regimental commanders would have picked a different time to bother him. He also sniffed a couple of times before going to the door. No, he couldn’t smell the perfume from Fronesia’s letter. That was something, anyhow.
But when he opened the door, no grimy, poorly shaved Algarvian officer stood there. Jadwigai did. “Oh,” Spinello said in surprise. He managed a bow. “Come in, milady. What can I do for you?”
He intended to leave the door to the hut open, so the men in the brigade could see he was up to nothing nefarious with their mascot. Jadwigai, though, closed it after herself as she walked in. “Are you all right, Colonel?” she asked in that disconcertingly fluent Algarvian of hers.
“Why shouldn’t I be?” Spinello asked in return, more surprised than ever.
“When the field post came, I saw you didn’t like the letter you got,” the Kaunian girl answered. “I was afraid it might be bad news from your family. This is a… very large war.”
If it hadn’t been a very large war, a Kaunian girl from Forthweg would never have found herself in the wilds of northern Unkerlant. But that wasn’t what Jadwigai had meant. Touched, Spinello said, “No, no, it’s nothing like that.”
“Really?” She didn’t sound as if she believed him. Maybe she’d heard other Algarvian officers making light of losses.
But, very firmly, Spinello said, “Really. My father and uncles are too old to fight. My brother and my cousins are all fine, so far as I know. So are my aunts and my sister, for that matter.”
“All right,” Jadwigai said-actually, the soldiers’ expression she used had a literal meaning a lot more pungent than that. “I’m glad. Even so, though, you can’t tell me that letter made you happy.”
“No, it didn’t,” Spinello admitted. The Kaunian girl’s face bore anI-told-you-so expression. Hoping to cure her of it, he went on, “If you really must know what the trouble is, my mistress back in Algarve is trying to squeeze more money out of me.”
“Oh.” She turned red. For a moment, he thought it was embarrassment. Then he realized it was outrage. “The nerve of her, doing something like that when you’re out here where you’re liable to get killed.”
“That did cross my mind, aye,” Spinello said. “Of course, from Fronesia’s point of view my being out here only makes me a poor long-term investment.”
Jadwigai said something inflammatory in Algarvian-she’d learned it from soldiers, sure enough. Then she said something even more inflammatory in classical Kaunian. It was the first time Spinello had heard her use her birth-speech.
He answered in classical Kaunian himself: “Letting such small things pierce one to the heart merely burdens the spirit to no purpose.”
Jadwigai looked astonished. “I didn’t think you knew my language, not when…” She didn’t go on. She didn’t need to go on. She had to know what happened at the camps the Algarvians politely termedspecial, sure enough.
Spinello grimaced. How was he supposed to respond to that? At last, after some thought, he said, “A kingdom will do what it thinks it has to do to win, to survive. Afterwards, maybe, it will look back and count the cost of what it did.”
To his surprise, and more than a little to his relief, Jadwigai nodded. “Or, if it wins, it won’t bother to count the cost at all.” That jerked a nod from Spinello. The Kaunian girl went on, “It’s the same for people, you know: you do what you have to do first, and then you count the cost later.”
He nodded again. “Any soldier who’s ever been blazed at, will say the same thing.”
“Not just soldiers.” Jadwigai stepped up to him and put her hands on his shoulders. She was, if anything, an inch or two taller than he. “You can have me if you want me, you know.”
“And you’ll count the cost later?” he asked.
Quite seriously, she nodded. “Of course. If there is a later.”
Sleeping with you would improve my chances of having a later. Spinello had had no compunctions whatever about making Vanai bribe him with her body to keep her miserable grandfather alive. He hesitated now, and wondered why. The answer wasn’t long in coming, not least because he’d seen so much more soldiering than he had when he was stationed in Oyngestun.
Gently, he kissed her. She stiffened in his arms. That had excited him with Vanai. Here, it just left him sad. He said, “I’m afraid you’re not my pet-you’re the brigade’s pet.” She stared at him, then started to cry. “Stop that!” he exclaimed, and he wasn’t acting at all. “If the soldiers think I’ve done something to you that you didn’t want,
I’m a dead man.”
Too late, he realized he’d just handed her a weapon. But she didn’t seem interested in using it. “Thank you,” she said. “Oh, thank you.”
“For what? For being a fool?” he said, and was relieved again when that made her laugh. She was still smiling when she left the hut. Later, he thought, standing there all alone. You count the cost later.
Skarnu turned to Palasta. “If we go much farther, we fall off the edge of the world,” he said.
The young mage smiled at him. She looked as if a strong breeze would blow her away. Here at the southeasternmost reach of Valmiera, there were plenty of strong breezes, most of them off the Strait of Valmiera that separated the Derlavaian mainland from the great island holding Lagoas and Kuusamo. The wind didn’t stagger her, but it did blow her long blond hair into a mare’s nest of tangles. Brushing a strand that escaped her flat knitted wool hat back from her eyes, she said, “Back in the days of the Kaunian Empire, they really thought they would.”
“I suppose so, sis,” he said, which made Palasta smile again. They’d decided to travel as brother and sister; he would have had to have startedvery young to claim her as a daughter. He wished shewere his sister-he vastly preferred her to the one he really had. Palasta would never have given herself to the Algarvians, not for anything.
She said, “If we go to the top of that little hill there”-she pointed-”we might be able to see something interesting.”
“Maybe,” Skarnu said. Up to the top of the hill they went. The path was muddy; Skarnu almost slipped. Once they did get to the top, he shaded his eyes with the palm of his hand and peered south and east toward the beach where the Algarvians had murdered their Kaunian captives to assail the Kuusamans, and where something-no one on this side of the Strait of Valmiera seemed to know what-had gone wrong for the redheads. Even shading his eyes against the wan southern sun, he couldn’t see as much as he would have liked. “I wish I had a spyglass,” he muttered.
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