The Algarvian, a plump fellow, came cautiously toward him. Ealstan noticed the redhead wore the uniform of a constable, not a soldier. Some small hope blossomed in him; Mezentio’s soldiers had proved much more brutal in Eoforwic than the Algarvian constabulary. The plump redhead tried to say something more in Forthwegian, made a complete hash of it, and, to Ealstan’s surprise, started over again in slow, bad, but understandable classical Kaunian: “You following me?”
“Aye, I follow you,” Ealstan replied in the same language.
“Good.” The Algarvian seemed unaware of the irony of his using the speech of the folk his own people killed. Even so, that he knew enough of it to use kept Ealstan’s hope alive. Then the constable gestured with his stick, and Ealstan wondered how long his hope-and he-would live. “What you doing here?” the redhead demanded, hard suspicion in his voice.
“I am going home,” Ealstan said, which had the advantage of being literally true. “I mean no one any harm.” For the moment, that was true, too.
“Likely telling,” the constable sneered. “Why youout? You being fighter?”
“No, I am not a fighter,” Ealstan said carefully. But if I’m not a fighter, what amIdoing out and about? Inspiration struck, in the form of a couple of worthless toadstools sprouting from the dirt next to the bottom couple of courses of a wall. Moving slowly so as not to alarm the constable, he bent, picked them, and held them out. “I was gathering mushrooms, sir. These are very good. Would you like them?”
“No! Not liking!” The Algarvian made a horrible face. “You Forthwegian crazy. Mushrooms? Faugh!” The last was a guttural noise of disgust.
But he didn’t call Ealstan a liar. That meant he’d been in Forthweg a while, and knew of the passion Forthwegians-and Kaunians in Forthweg- had for mushrooms, a passion Algarvians emphatically didn’t share. “May I go now, sir?” Ealstan asked.
With an elaborate Algarvian shrug, the constable shook his head. “How I knowing you not being a fighter, eh?” he said. Ealstan’s heart sank. Then the fellow did a very Algarvian thing: he stuck out his hand, palm up.
Trying not to shout for joy, Ealstan dug into his belt pouch and gave the redhead silver. “This is all I have, sir,” he said. It wasn’t; he wanted to keep some in reserve in case he had to pay off another venal constable or soldier. But he thought it would do.
And it did. The redhead had a belt pouch, too. The coins vanished into it. “Going on,” he told Ealstan.
“I thank you,” Ealstan said gravely. He thought he remembered seeing this fellow around Eoforwic for a while, and also thought him a human being, or as close to a human being as an Algarvian constable was likely to come.
By the time another Algarvian noticed him, he was well inside the territory the redheads had retaken. The soldier paid him no particular attention; plenty of Forthwegians trudged through the wreckage of Eoforwic, or else scrabbled through it, looking for whatever they might find.
A couple of Algarvians were pasting broadsheets on walls that hadn’t been knocked down. Ealstan hadn’t seen these before. They showedKingSwemmel as a bleeding hog, with his blood spilling out of Unkerlant and pouring over eastern Derlavai toward Algarve and even the lands beyond. Facing the hog stood an Algarvian with a butcher’s apron and an outsized cleaver. The legend read, help us stop the flood!
He’d seen worse broadsheets. He liked the Unkerlanters only a little better than the Algarvians. Plenty of Forthwegians liked them less than they liked the redheads. Plegmund’s Brigade might get some new recruits. Of course, with the Unkerlanters already having overrun half of Forthweg, and with them rampaging forward in the south, too, how much good would a few new Forthwegian footsoldiers doKingMezentio ? Not much, or so Ealstan hoped.
An Algarvian colonel, a short, handsome fellow with the jaunty ferocity of a fighting cock, was giving orders to some of the men he led: “Come on, my dears. Don’t just stand there now that the fornicating Forthwegians have thrown in the sponge. The Unkerlanters are sitting on their arses just across the Twegen. Pretty soon they’ll decide they’re done with their holiday and get around to fighting us again. We’d better be ready for them, right?”
“Right, ColonelSpinello,” one of the redheads said, in the indulgent tones soldiers used when they were fond of an officer.
“We’d better dig in, then,” Spinello said. “We’d better do it deep and tight, as deep and tight as I was into that Kaunian girl of mine back when the war was new.” He sighed. His men laughed. Ealstan’s hands folded into fists. With a deliberate effort of will, he made them relax. Don’t give yourself away. The Algarvian colonel kissed his bunched fingertips. “That Vanai, she was a special piece, she was. I trained her myself.”
Ealstan stumbled and almost fell, though he hadn’t tripped on anything. Mezentio’s soldiers laughed, as if they’d heard this colonel’s stories a great many times before. They probably had. Ishouldn‘t have left my stick behind after all, Ealstan thought. Even without it, I’ll find a way to kill him. But that vow still left his feet unsteady beneath him, as if he were drunk or stunned. I amstunned. What do I do when I set home to Vanai? What do I say? What can /do? What canI say? Good questions, all of them. He had perhaps five minutes to find good answers.
Bembo’s belt pouch was nicely heavy with silver these days. As he strutted through the streets of downtown Eoforwic-or what was left of them-he was even acting as a constable again, not as a soldier any more. He should have been happy, or at least happier. He should have been, but he wasn’t.
Some of the constables had gone back to business as usual the minute the Forthwegian rebels finally surrendered and marched off to captives’ camps- those who hadn’t tried fitting back in among the ordinary people of Eoforwic, or the survivors thereof. Up in the tropical continent of Siaulia, there were supposed to be big birds that hid from danger by sticking their heads in the sand. Bembo’s complacent comrades reminded him of those big birds.
“They won’t look across the river,” he told Oraste-he had his old partner back, for Delminio had been badly wounded at the start of the fighting. “It’s going to happen, but they don’t want to think about it.”
“Shut up,” Oraste said. “I don’t want to think about it, either.”
“But you never want to think about anything.” Bembo was still no braver than he had to be, but before his spell as a soldier he would never have dared say anything like that to Oraste. “It’s different with those other buggers. They want to forget about the Unkerlanters, and how can we?”
Oraste looked west, toward the Twegen. “We’ll fight like mad bastards when they cross the river,” he said.
“Of course we will,” Bembo agreed. “But how much good will it do us?”
His partner’s shrug was not the usual Algarvian production. “How much good has fighting the stinking Unkerlanters done us so far?” Oraste asked bleakly. “Sometimes you go into something and you figure you won’t come out the other side, that’s all. You’re futtering stuck, that’s all.”
Bembo shivered, though the day was mild enough. He watched soldiers methodically preparing defenses against the attack they too knew was coming. One of the soldiers looked up from his pick-and-shovel work and called, “Hey, constable! When they come, you think they’ll pay any attention to which uniform you’re wearing?”
His laugh, Bembo thought, was singularly unpleasant. His question was singularly unpleasant, too, especially since the obvious answer wasno. Bembo stuck his nose in the air. That only made the soldier laugh harder.
Forthwegian civilians with hods hauled rubble from hither to yon under the sticks of Algarvian guards. “They might as well be Kaunians,” Bembo remarked.
With another one of those businesslike shrugs, Oraste answered, “Better they get their throats cut than I get mine.”
“Better nobody gets his throat cut,” Bembo said, but Oraste looked at him as if that were beyond the realm of possibility. Given the sorry state of the world these days, it probably was.
Oraste
walked on for a few paces, then nudged him in the ribs. Oraste being who and what he was, the nudge sent Bembo staggering sideways and almost knocked him flat. Oraste grabbed him and held him up. “Come over here with me,” he said, steering Bembo away from the Forthwegian laborers.
“Why?” Bembo asked. “Do you want to murder me in privacy?”
“Only sometimes,” Oraste said patiently. “Not right now. Now I want to make a bet with you.”
“Ah?” That got Bembo’s notice, all right. “What do you have in mind?”
Before answering, Oraste looked around to make sure nobody but Bembo was in earshot. Then he said, “Name however much you want, and I’ll lay you two to one that none of those Forthwegians who gave up ever comes home again. I figure it serves ‘em right if we use ‘em just like Kaunians.”
“We said we’d treat ‘em like war captives,” Bembo reminded him.
“I know what we said,” his partner answered. “And if you think we’ll really do it, put your money where your mouth is.”
Bembo thought it over. Oraste suggestively jingled his belt pouch. But Bembo hesitated only a couple of seconds before shaking his head. “Find another sucker, Oraste. I won’t touch that one. I think you’re too likely to be right.”
Oraste snapped his fingers. “There, you see? You’re not as dumb as you look, and all this time I thought you were.”
“Funny,” Bembo said. “Ha, ha. Very funny.” He paused. “What do you want to bet that the Unkerlanters are getting rid of all the Forthwegians they don’t like, too?”
“I’ll bet on it, if you want,” Oraste said. “Will you bet against it?”
“Me? Are you crazy?” Bembo shook his head again, even more decisively this time. “That’s not a sucker bet. That’s an idiot bet.”
“Never can tell,” Oraste said. “Plenty of idiots running around loose in Algarve. A lot of em wear fancier uniforms than we ever will.”
“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Bembo agreed. “The way things are these days, I don’t care if I ever get promoted. All I want to do is get back to Tricarico in one piece.”
“Why not wish for the moon while you’re at it?” Oraste waved toward the west. “You suppose the Unkerlanters want any of us to get home?” He seemed to have forgotten saying he didn’t want to think about Swemmel’s men.
Instead of answering, Bembo just sighed. He didn’t suppose anything of the sort. He wished he did. He said, “I never wanted to meet those Unkerlanter whoresons up close like this.”
“You haven’t met ‘em up close yet-they’re still on the other side of the Twegen,” Oraste said. “Well, most of them are, anyway. When they’re close enough to yell, ‘Swemmel!’ and blaze at you, that’s up close. By all the stories, they do worse than that if they catch you, too.”
Bembo’s shiver was no littlefrisson of horror, such as he might have known while hearing a scary story at an evening’s entertainment with plenty of food and good northern wine around. It was too large, too robust, for that. And it had nothing to do with the weather. It was plain, honest fear. If the Unkerlanters caught you, bad things happened. That, to Algarvians in the west, was an obvious truth.
And the Unkerlanters did not have to catch Mezentio’s men to make bad things happen to them. Bembo grabbed Oraste’s arm. “Dragons!” he shouted. They both dove for cover as the rock-gray beasts swooped down on Eoforwic from Unkerlanter dragon farms on the far side of the river.
“Powers below eat them,” Oraste said, his face buried in the dirt. Bembo lay perhaps a foot away from him. Between them, some sort of nasty mushroom thrust up from the ground. Bembo was amazed some Forthwegian hadn’t picked it and taken it off as a prize.
A moment later, as eggs began bursting uncomfortably close by, he found more urgent things about which to be amazed. “The whoresons pretty much left us alone while we were fighting the Forthwegians here,” he said. “Why in blazes are they bothering us now?”
“Of course they left us alone then-we were doing them a favor,” Oraste said. “Now we aren’t killing Forthwegians who might cause ‘em trouble further down the ley line, so they don’t have to bother being nice to us anymore.”
That exercise in cynicism might have upset Bembo more if he hadn’t come to a similar conclusion himself. “We need to get to a shelter,” he bawled.
“Go ahead, if you want to,” Oraste said. “Me, I think you’ll get your stupid self killed if you stand up.”
Again, he had a point. Bembo stayed where he was. Enough piles of wreckage lay around to do a good job of shielding him and Oraste unless an egg burst right on top of them. Somebody much too close by started screaming. Bembo couldn’t tell if he was Algarvian or Forthwegian. Agony, the constable had discovered, sounded the same in any language.
Bembo rolled from his belly to his back. He saw no dragons, but eggs, more of them than ever, kept bursting all over Eoforwic. “They’ve got their tossers limbered up, too,” he said in dismay.
“Well, if they’re going to pound on us, odds are they’ll pound on us with everything they’ve got, eh?” Oraste said.
“There won’t be anything left of this place by the time they’re through with it,” Bembo said. “There wasn’t much left of it before they started.”
“Aye, we took care of that,” Oraste said. “And I’m sure it breaks the Unkerlanters’ hearts to knock the capital of Forthweg flat.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bembo asked, punctuating the question with a yelp as a brick or a stone bounced off his belly. He rolled back over onto his back.
“Don’t you remember?” Oraste said. “Back before the Six Years’ War, we split Forthweg with the Unkerlanters. Eoforwic used to belong to them. As far as old Swemmel’s concerned, there shouldn’t ought to be any such thing as a Kingdom of Forthweg.”
“Well, there won’t be if his men keep doing this to Eoforwic,” Bembo said. “Or if there is, there won’t be any Forthwegians left alive in it.”
“After what they put us through, who’d miss ‘em?” Oraste said.
“A point,” Bembo said. Then new fear ran through him, fear different from the simple, elementary terror caused by knowing that sorcerous energy might sear him at any moment. The only way he could find to exorcise it was to name it aloud: “You don’t suppose Swemmel’s men are pounding us like this because they’re getting ready to cross the Twegen, do you?”
“How in blazes should I know?” Oraste answered crossly. “If you want to find out something like that, why don’t you swim across the river and askMarshalRathar? He’s over there somewhere.”
“Oh, good idea. Really good idea.” Bembo’s voice dripped sarcasm. “Maybe I should ask for leave again. Then I wouldn’t be here when the avalanche came down on our heads.”
“Futter you,” his partner told him. “Everybody in Gromheort wanted to kill you when you got leave once. If you got it again, somebodywould up and murder you. And besides, by the time you got to Tricarico, how do you know the stinking Lagoans and Kuusamans wouldn’t be holding it?”
“I don’t,” Bembo admitted. “But if you had to get captured, who’d be your first choice to nab you: one of the islanders or an Unkerlanter?”
“My first choice to capture me? A redheaded gal with big tits,” Oraste said. “Second choice’d be a blond wench with big tits. It’s all downhill from there.”
That wasn’t what Bembo had meant, which didn’t stop him from laughing. Anything that could make him laugh when the world was coming to pieces all around him was something to be cherished. Only later did it occur to him to wonder just how far his standards had fallen. When it did, he wished it hadn’t.
MarshalRathar, as it happened, was not right across the Twegen River from Eoforwic at that moment. He’d been summoned back to Cottbus, and left the fight in the north inGeneralGurmun ’s capable hands. “Don’t strike till everything is ready,” he’d warned the general of behemoths. “The worst mistakes we’ve made in this war, we’ve made by
hitting too soon.”
“Aye, lord Marshal,” Gurmun had said. Rathar had wondered if he could trust the younger man to hold himself in. IfKingSwemmel ordered Gurmun to attack, he would, whether the situation called for it or not. Gurmun had also said, “I envy you.” He assumed Swemmel was recalling Rathar to confer some new high command on him.
Going through papers as the ley-line caravan glided west, Rathar hoped Gurmun was right. He hoped so, but he had no guarantee of it. For all he knew, the king was summoning him to have him blazed outside the royal palace as a warning to others. You never could tell with Swemmel.
Mile after mile of plain, first Forthwegian and then Unkerlanter, slid past before Rathar’s eyes. Every time the ley line took him through or past a village, he winced. No village remained intact. Hardly any buildings remained intact. What the war hadn’t wrecked, the Algarvians had often deliberately smashed in their long, slow, stubborn withdrawal toward the east. If we can’t keep it, you won’t get any use from it, either, they seemed to say.
And the villages-the whole ruined landscape-looked the same from early morning, when Rathar left the western suburbs of Eoforwic, till the sun set. It would have gone on looking the same, too, had he been able to see longer. All the way to the suburbs of Cottbus, the devastation would have continued-did continue, though shrouded now in darkness. How many years, how many generations, will Unkerlant need before she is again what she was? But that was a question beyond the ken even of marshals.
Rathar’s caravan car boasted a couch. He fell asleep on it. An aide shook him awake, saying, “Sir, we’re in the capital.”
“Are we?” He yawned, stretched, and sat up. The ley-line caravan depot remained dark. No Algarvian dragon could reach Cottbus these days-or so Rathar hoped with every fiber of his being-but the fear remained. Unkerlanters had always feared and suspected and admired the energetic redheads from the east. These past three and a half years, the Algarvians had given them fresh reasons for all three.
Descending from the caravan car gave Rathar another anxious moment. Who would be waiting for him down on the ground? His adjutant, Major Merovec? Or some of Swemmel’s hard-eyed, dead-souled guards, there to haul him away to torment or death for some slight the king had imagined? Again, you never could tell.
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