Redheaded soldiers on leave strolled the Boulevard of Horsemen, staring at the clothes and jewelry and furniture on display, and staring in a different way at the Valmieran women who’d come to the Boulevard to shop. Once upon a time, Krasta had come to the Boulevard of Horsemen to display herself as well as to see what was new and expensive and chic. Now she wished the men in kilts would take no notice of her.
Whenever one of them tried to do more than look, she said, “Colonel Lurcanio is my protector.” Not all of them spoke Valmieran, but they did understand the rank and—mostly—kept their hands to themselves afterwards.
But one of them spoke to her in classical Kaunian: “If he is an occupation soldier, he is not a real man. Do you want a real man?”
Her own classical Kaunian was sketchy, but she got the gist of that. And she managed to say, “He is a real colonel,” in the old language. The Algarvian looked disgusted, but he went away.
After that, she discovered she had little trouble telling redheads on occupation duty in Priekule from those who’d come to the city for surcease from the grinding war in the west. The latter were younger, rougher-looking, and wore tunics and kilts whose light brown was sometimes faded almost to white. The soldiers actually garrisoned in the city wore smarter uniforms and were better fed, but they put her in mind of dogs set next to wolves.
And then, from behind her, someone called, “Hello, sweetheart!” in a voice purely Valmieran. She turned. Sure enough, there was Viscount Valnu hurrying toward her. He squeezed her and kissed her on the cheek. “You look good enough to eat,” he said.
“Promises, promises,” she answered, which made him laugh. But she had trouble caring about badinage today. More wearily and more angrily than she’d thought she would be, she added, “Half the Algarvian army seems to think the same thing.”
“Well, I do understand why, I do indeed.” Valnu’s eyes sparkled.
“If you wear your kilt any shorter, some of the redheads will think the same thing about you,” Krasta said, acid in her voice.
“Oh, some of them do,” Valnu replied blithely. “And some of them think I make a proper ally, and some of them want to beat me senseless for presuming to wear their clothes. Life is never dull.”
“No.” Krasta, for once in her life, rather wished it were. She took him by the arm. “Buy me a brandy, will you?”
“I’m putty—or something—in your hands.” Valnu pointed in the direction from which they’d both come. “The tavern back there isn’t too bad. It’s only a block or so.” Krasta nodded; she remembered walking past it. As Valnu steered her toward the place, he asked, “Is it really true? Have you got a loaf in the oven?”
With a yawn, Krasta said, “Aye.” She hated being sleepy all the time.
He gave her an arch grin. “Is papa anyone I know?”
“You may know him very well,” she answered.
“Really?” he said, and Krasta nodded again. One of his pale eyebrows rose. “Well, well. Isn’t that interesting? Shall we elope? Or shall I be angry at you because I may not know papa as well as all that?”
“As if you had any business being angry about what I did or didn’t do,” Krasta said as Valnu held the door to the tavern open for her. He laughed. She didn’t think it was so funny. Lurcanio was convinced such things were his business. If the baby turned out to look like Valnu, he was liable to make himself very difficult. No, worse—he wasn’t just liable to; he’d already said he would.
The brandy didn’t taste right, any more than tea had lately. Krasta drank it anyway, and drank it fast. She needed not to think about Lurcanio for a little while. That was what she needed, but she didn’t get it. Valnu said, “I hear your … friend has gone down to the seashore for a while.”
“What if he has?” Krasta said. The brandy was hitting her hard, maybe because she hadn’t drunk any for a while, maybe just because she was pregnant.
When Valnu leaned toward her across the little table they shared, the smile stayed on his face for the benefit of the fellow behind the bar, but his voice came low and urgent: “You silly little twat, are the Kuusamans and the Lagoans going to land down there? Does Lurcanio think they are?”
“He thinks so, aye, but he isn’t sure. He’s going to talk with some of the Algarvians there,” Krasta answered. Only afterwards did she realize she should have been insulted.
Valnu grunted. “That’s a little more than I knew before, but not so much as I would have liked.” His shrug was almost as ornate as a redhead’s. He gulped his ale, then got to his feet. “I must dash. Always delighted to see you. And the other news you gave me was fascinating, too; it truly was.” He left some coins on the tabletop and hurried out.
“Another brandy, milady?” the tapman asked.
“No.” Krasta got up and left, too.
Out on the Boulevard of Horsemen, a band played a stirring march— Valmieran-style music, not Algarvian. And up the Boulevard came the first blond soldiers in Valmieran uniform Krasta had seen since the surrender. She stared, as a lot of other people were staring. But then she realized it wasn’t quite Valmieran uniform: each soldier wore a red, green, and white patch sewn onto the left sleeve of his tunic, to show he served not King Gainibu but King Mezentio of Algarve.
Only a couple of companies of the soldiers marched down the Boulevard of Horsemen, but they were enough. Krasta hurried back into the tavern and poured down another brandy, and then another after that. The spirits didn’t come close to taking away the taste of what she’d seen.
“A roundup?” Bembo sent Delminio a reproachful look. “Do we have to?”
His new partner nodded. “Aye, we have to. You’ll have done them before, won’t you, back in whatever no-account town you served in before you got sent here?”
“Gromheort.” Bembo didn’t know why he bothered supplying the name. Delminio wouldn’t care. “I’ve done ‘em, but I never liked em. Any way I can get out of it? My old sergeant would sometimes excuse one of the fellows in my squad. Evodio just wasn’t any use for that business—didn’t have the stomach for it. Even when Pesaro made him do it, he’d drink himself blind afterwards.”
“Your sergeant must have been a softy,” Delminio said, which made Bembo snort in disbelief. But the other constable went on, “Here, you get a choice. You can do what you’re told, or you can put on a footsoldier’s uniform and head for Unkerlant.”
“You just talked me into it,” Bembo said.
“I thought I would.” Delminio tapped his fingernail on the refectory tabletop. “We have had a few fellows who went off to fight King Swemmel’s whoresons. Strange birds—stupid birds, if you ask me. We haven’t had many, and none at all I can think of the past year or so.”
“I believe that.” Bembo shivered, though it was warm inside the refectory. Things in Unkerlant hadn’t been going Algarve’s way the past year or so. Fine choice, he thought. / can stifle my conscience and do as I’m told, or go off and get myself killed. But he’d already made his choice, and told Delminio as much. He hardly knew why he was fussing about a conscience distinctly vestigial. It’s nothing I haven’t done before.
Before going into the Kaunian quarter, he and Delminio and the other constables drew army-issue sticks. Bembo waved to Oraste. His old partner from Gromheort waved back. “Going hunting,” he said. Rounding up Kaunians bothered him not at all.
Some of the guards outside the quarter were Forthwegians. “We should send them in for the roundup,” Bembo said. “They hate the blonds more than we do.”
But Delminio shook his head. “It looks like it’s a good idea, but it just doesn’t work. Some of the Kaunians would use their stupid little spell and get away.”
Bembo grunted. “I suppose so. It’s a good thing they haven’t got a spell to let ‘em look like Algarvians.”
His partner’s hand writhed in a very old sign for turning away evil omens. “Bite your tongue. Powers above, wouldn’t that be all we needed?”
A pompous constabulary captain s
trode out in front of the men he’d led to the district. He made exactly the sort of speech Bembo had known he would make, full of the greater glory of Algarve and a lot of other things every man there had surely heard too many times before. Then he said, “We have to meet our quota. Nothing and nobody will keep us from meeting our quota. Now let’s go do it.”
The constables tramped into the Kaunian quarter. As Bembo strode past the officer, he saw him looking about ready to burst a blood vessel. “What’s his trouble?” he asked Delminio. “Did he think we were going to burst into cheers?”
“Probably,” Delminio answered. “Have you ever known a captain who wasn’t a cursed fool?” Bembo stared at him in astonished delight. He didn’t make such a bad partner after all.
Cries of alarm and the sound of running feet ahead warned that the Kaunians knew the roundup was under way. Bembo scowled. “Now we’re going to have to dig the buggers out of their hiding places,” he grumbled. “There are times when this job looks a lot too much like work.” It did, however, look a great deal better than going off to fight in Unkerlant.
Not all the Kaunians were hiding, not yet. Something came hurtling down from the sill of an upper-story window in a block of flats. It landed on the head of a constables three ranks in front of Bembo. The noise was that of a brickbat smacking a calabash. The constable went down as if blazed—perhaps more surely than if he’d been blazed. He thrashed briefly, then lay still. Blood poured out of him, pooling among the cobblestones. His bowels let go; Bembo wrinkled his nose at the sudden stink. Flies began gathering almost at once.
The constables shouted and pointed. Bembo didn’t know why they bothered. None of them had any better idea than he did from which window the missile—by the shards, he judged it a flowerpot full of dirt—had come.
“Every blond in that building!” the captain screamed. “I want every blond in that building out here, and I want all those whoresons out here in nothing flat. Capture squads, forward!” His whistle shrilled as if he were ordering footsoldiers into battle against the Unkerlanters.
Bembo and Delminio weren’t in a capture squad. They were in a holding squad, to make sure none of the Kaunians escaped once captured. They waited in the street for their comrades to start bringing out blonds. They waited in the very middle of the street, and kept looking nervously up toward the buildings on either side of it.
“Kaunian bastards have their nerve,” Delminio said angrily.
Shrieks and screams rang out inside the block of flats. Before long, Kaunians started stumbling out of the building. The men were all bruised and bloody. The women were bruised and bloody, too, and some of them came down the steps without trousers. “Revenge,” Bembo said.
Delminio nodded. “Makes me wish I was in a capture squad,” he said. Bembo answered that with a shrug. Rape had never been his favorite sport.
A Kaunian spat on the dead Algarvian constable’s corpse. All that got him was another beating from the constables in the holding squad. Bembo swung his bludgeon with as much zeal as anyone else. “We can’t kill the bastard— that’d waste his life energy,” he said. “But we can sure as blazes make him wish he was dead.”
“All right, on with the rest of the business,” the captain said, when the last constables came out of the building. “They’ll pay. Oh, how they’ll pay.”
“Only one trouble with that,” Bembo said. Delminio raised an eyebrow. Bembo explained: “If the blonds know we’re going to do for them, why shouldn’t they try and boot us in the balls before they go west?”
His partner made a sour face. “That’s a nasty thought. You’re full of them today, aren’t you? Here’s hoping the Kaunians don’t have it, too.”
“Kaunians, come forth!” the captain shouted in front of the next block of flats. Bembo wondered why he bothered. Predictably, no blonds came forth. He just gave them another few seconds to conceal themselves before the capture squads swarmed in. The extra time didn’t seem to matter much, though. Soon, more battered Kaunians came out. The Algarvians would take their vengeance through the whole quarter.
As the holding squads took charge of the blonds the capture squads prised out of their flats, the captain kept a tally on a leaf of paper stuck in a clipboard. Bembo knew what that was all about. “Quota,” he said. “Not much point to this business if we don’t make quota, is there?”
Privately, he wondered if there was any point to it regardless of whether they made quota or not. For every Kaunian Algarve got rid of to fuel its mage-craft, what would the Unkerlanters do? Kill one of their own, or two of their own, or three, or four. Maybe King Mezentio hadn’t realized how very much in earnest about the war King Swemmel was. If he didn’t realize it by now, he was a fool. And if he did realize it by now … maybe he was a fool anyhow, for biting off more war than he could chew.
No, I can’t say anything like that. I shouldn‘t even think anything like that. But Bembo couldn’t help it. He wasn’t blind. He wasn’t deaf. No matter what sergeants thought, he wasn’t stupid. If something hovered there in front of his nose and yelled at him at the top of its lungs, he couldn’t very well not notice it.
A lot of people he knew didn’t seem to think that way, though.
Delminio said, “I still wish we’d been on a capture squad. Some of these Kaunian wenches look pretty tasty, or they would have before our boys started roughing them up. Wouldn’t mind tearing off a piece, not even a little I wouldn’t.”
“If you want a broad that bad, pick one who suits you and throw her down on the cobblestones,” Bembo said. “Nobody’s going to do anything but cheer you on and line up behind you, not today.” He looked back toward the crumpled body of the Algarvian constable. Poor whoreson hadn’t known what hit him, anyhow. One second walking along, the next dead. There were worse ways to go.
Into the next block of flats charged the men from the capture squads. As before, they beat all the Kaunian men and most of the women before sending them out. As before, they had their sport with some of the women, too. Delminio said, “They keep on like that, they’ll be too cursed tired to finish the job.”
“They’d better not be,” the constabulary captain said. “They can do whatever they want—as long as they make quota. If they don’t make quota, they answer to me. There are still plenty of Kaunians in here, for us to harvest what we need.”
Quota. Harvest. Those were nice, bloodless words. They had very little to do with the bruised and bleeding and raped blonds huddled under the sticks of the holding squads. They let the captain do his job without thinking much about what he was doing. They’d let you do the same, if you didn’t keep poking and prodding at things, Bembo told himself. It’s only Kaunians, after all.
But the noises they made—not the words he could hardly understand, having forgotten the classical Kaunian he’d had beaten into him at school, but the wordless sounds of pain and sorrow and despair—were the same as those so many Algarvians might have made. Bembo violently shook his head. What was he doing, thinking of Algarvians in such straits? What was the war about, if not making sure Algarvians never found themselves in such straits?
One block of flats after another, the capture squads seized Kaunians and sent them down to the street. At last, the captain blew his whistle. “Quota!” he shouted. “Now let’s get ‘em to the caravan depot for transport.”
Transport. Another bloodless word. Let’s send them off to be killed. That was what the word meant. That was what the captain meant. But he didn’t have to say it, so he didn’t have to think it. Bembo shook his head. You’re thinking too much yourself again.
Some of the Kaunians were too badly battered to have an easy time walking. The constables’ solution to that was to beat them some more. They set other blonds to carrying the ones that didn’t spur into motion.
“See?” a constable said as they left the Kaunian quarter. “You’re out. Aren’t you glad? Aren’t you happy?”
Forthwegians on the streets jeered the Kaunians on their way to the ley
-line caravan depot. By the way some of the Kaunians flinched, that hurt more than the beatings they’d taken from the Algarvians. Bembo didn’t understand that, but saw it was so.
As some desperate Kaunian had hurled the flowerpot down on the constables, so somebody—a woman—hurled one word in Algarvian at them from an upper story: “Shame!”
Delminio laughed. So did the captain leading the constables. Bembo only shrugged. The flowerpot had done some damage. What could a word do?
As always, shoving too many Kaunians into not enough caravan cars was hard work. As always, the constables did what needed doing, and barred the doors from the outside when they finished. The windows were already shuttered.
To Bembo’s surprise, the caravan glided off toward the east, the direction of Algarve and the Kaunian kingdoms beyond. “Haven’t seen that in a while,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“I hear the fellows with the thick spectacles are worried about Valmiera,” Delminio answered. “If Lagoas and Kuusamo try invading, we’ll throw ‘em right back into the Strait, by the powers above.”
“Aye,” Bembo said, and then, “We’d bloody well better.”
Skarnu liked the farm the Valmieran underground leaders had found for Merkela and little Gedominu—and now for himself. It wasn’t so big as the one outside Pavilosta where she’d lived, but the land was richer. He chuckled when that thought crossed his mind. Before the war, he wouldn’t have been able to tell good farmland from bad.
He thought Merkela would laugh, too, when he told her that. But she didn’t. She said, “That’s something you should have known.” She had Gedominu on her hip. She always did when she needed to do chores, and the farm always had chores to do. The baby didn’t slow her down a bit. She got more work done with him than Skarnu did without him.
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