“I know.” She nodded. “You’ll never believe what I heard from one of the women who came into the shop today, though.”
“Will I want to believe it, though?” Talsu asked. When Gailisa nodded again, he said, “Then tell me!”
“Well, what she said was …” Gailisa paused, either for dramatic effect or just to take a breath. “What she said was, either Mainardo’s already run away from Balvi or he’s just about to. He doesn’t want to end up like what’s-his-name, his cousin, did over there in Unkerlant.”
“Boiled alive, you mean,” Talsu said. The news sheets had screamed of Unkerlanter barbarism when that happened. His wife nodded once more. He scratched his head. That was a rumor he wanted to believe. But no matter what he wanted, he saw certain basic difficulties. “How did this woman here in Skrunda know what was going on with the Algarvians way over in Balvi?”
“I don’t know,” Gailisa answered. “I’m telling you what she told me, that’s all. I hope it’s true, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” Talsu said with a nod of his own. “The only thing better would be having the Lagoans or the Kuusamans catch him and give him to King Donalitu. He’d envy his cousin by the time Donalitu was through with him.”
“He would, wouldn’t he?” Gailisa smiled, but then shook her head. “The things I’m imagining, the things I’m hoping for—even thinking about them would have made me sick a few years ago.”
“It’s the war.” Talsu had seen things and done things and had things happen to him that he never would have imagined before the war, either. One of the things that had happened to him was only too obvious right now. Pointing to the ruins past which he and Gailisa were walking, he said, “Aye, it’s the cursed war. We used to live here.”
Gailisa squeezed his hand. “Your father will find a way to rebuild. He would have already if it were an ordinary fire and not eggs from the sky. We can’t go on living in a tent too much longer.” She sounded more hopeful than sure of that, but Talsu didn’t argue with her. He thought the same thing.
He started to say so, but then exclaimed in surprise instead. Someone had been hurrying up the sidewalk toward them. Now, despite the deepening dark, Talsu recognized him. “Father!” he said. “What are you doing here? It’s close to curfew time, and you know how jumpy the redheads are.”
“Powers above be praised,” Traku said, panting a little. “I found you before you got in. I just hope they haven’t followed me.”
“What are you talking about?” Talsu asked, though he had a horrid fear he knew.
Traku said, “Someone—never mind who—came by today and warned me the Algarvians were going to come after everybody they’d ever caught before. I don’t know why. Maybe lock ‘em up again, maybe do something worse. But for all I know, they’ve got somebody—probably a Jelgavan, too, curse the bugger—watching the tent waiting for you to get there so they can drop on you.”
“Something worse,” Talsu repeated. People whispered about what the Algarvians did to people of Kaunian blood off in the west. If they were in trouble in Jelgava, what would keep them from doing the same thing here? Nothing he could think of. He said, “No, I can’t go home, not with that waiting. I have to disappear.”
“I think you’re right,” his father said. Gailisa nodded.
“Will you be all right if I don’t come home tonight?” Talsu asked Traku.
“We’ll find out,” Traku answered with a shrug. “If it’s not quite all right, I’ll make my getaway, too.”
Traku knew it was liable not to be that easy. He didn’t say anything for fear of alarming Gailisa. He clasped Traku’s hand, then clutched his wife to him. He kissed her for a long time. When at last he had to let her go, he said, “I’ll come back. If I made it back from the dungeon, I can make it back from this.”
He knew that was liable not to be so easy, too. Again, he kept quiet. Gailisa said, “Don’t tell us where you’re going. If we don’t know, the redheads can’t tear it out of us.”
“Good luck, son,” Traku said gruffly. He held out a small cloth sack. It was heavy in Talsu’s hand, and clinked softly. Traku went on, “Get going now. Maybe that’ll buy you a little luck. Hope so, anyhow.”
With a wordless nod, Talsu started up a side street. When he looked back, he couldn’t see his father and Gailisa anymore. He stuffed the sack of coins into a pocket. He didn’t know how long it would last, but having it was ever so much better than going into exile with no more than a couple of coppers.
He wished Gailisa hadn’t been carrying the olives. They would have given him a snack, if nothing else.
In the old days, Skrunda, like most towns, had had a wall around it. No more. Hardly any of the wall remained; once Jelgava became a united kingdom, builders started making the most of all that ready-cut stone. Why not, when the town was unlikely to have to stand siege? These days, Skrunda had long since outgrown the old walled-in area, anyhow.
As Talsu got to the outskirts, then, he wasn’t in town one minute and out in the countryside the next. He kept passing houses, but less and less often, with more and more open space between them. Presently, he started going past little almond orchards and groves of fragrant lemons and oranges.
At first, all he wanted to do was put distance between himself and Skrunda. The longer the Algarvians had to chase him and the farther into the country they had to go, the better. “If they want to catch me, they’d better work for it,” he muttered. An eagle owl let out a couple of deep hoots, as if agreeing with him.
But once he was well away, he started wondering where he should go and what he could do. Head for Dobele, the next town farther west? What would he do when he got there? The redheads knew he was a tailor, so looking for work with a needle would be asking to get caught. Could he work as a day laborer? He supposed so, but the idea roused no enthusiasm in him.
What I really want to do is fight the Algarvians, not run from them, he thought. If I had a stick in my hands, I wouldn‘t be running now. All he’d ever wanted to do was fight Mezentio’s men. Trying had landed him in the dungeon. Trying again might land him in something worse. He didn’t care. That was what he wanted, more than anything else in the world.
And so, instead of staying on the road and making for Dobele, he turned down a little path that led up toward low, rolling hills south of the two towns. He didn’t know whether bandits lurked in them; what he did know was that, were he a bandit, he would have lurked up there.
He didn’t get to them that night, but fell asleep in bushes by the side of the track. That was uncomfortable, but not too bad on a summer’s night in Jelgava. He wouldn’t have cared to try it in some southern kingdom.
When he came to a farm the next morning, he asked the farmer, “If I give you a day’s work, will you give me a couple of days’ food?” The farmer just stood in the yard, tossing feed to his hens. His eyes measured Talsu. After the silence stretched for a while, Talsu said, “Or, if you want, you can turn me in to the redheads. They’d thank you.” He hadn’t wanted to roll the dice so soon, but seemed to have little choice.
And it worked. The farmer said, “Well, I’ll find something for you to do.” He went into the house and came out with barley bread and hard white crumbly cheese and some olives much like the ones Talsu had bought at the grocery and a flask of wine sharpened with citrus juices. Talsu ate and drank. Then he chopped wood till his palms blistered, and pulled weeds in the vegetable garden after that. The farmer and his wife gave him bread and ham and olive oil and more wine for lunch, and a stew of mutton and grain and almonds and apricots for supper. He slept on straw in the barn.
The following morning, the farmer brought him a couple of loaves of bread, a small flask full of a paste of garlic and olives and oil, and a large flask full of wine. He even gave him a knapsack that had seen better days in which to carry the food. Talsu came to attention and saluted as he might have to an officer.
He wasn’t altogether astonished when the farmer returned the salute.
The fellow said, “If you go six or eight miles south, you’ll come to a track that heads southwest into some of the steeper country. It’s the one with a milepost from the old Kaunian days just in front of it. Follow it, if you care to.”
“Why?” Talsu asked. The farmer just shrugged. After a moment, Talsu shrugged, too. He slung the knapsack over one shoulder and started south. His hands hurt. His joints ached, and his muscles were stiff and sore; he wasn’t used to the work the farmer had set him. After a while, though, walking along under the warm sun eased the kinks.
There was the milestone, its gray-streaked marble much weathered but the inscription still legible. And he could make sense of that classical Kaunian inscription, thanks to Kugu the silversmith. He’d had other, less pleasant, things for which to thank Kugu, and he’d had his revenge. He turned right and walked down the track the farmer had mentioned.
Sure enough, the country did get rougher. Anyone with a stick on one of those bluffs could have potted him before he knew where danger lurked. But the fellow with a stick—Algarvian military issue; Talsu recognized it at once—stepped out from behind a tree. “You may have made a mistake, coming along this track,” he said. A fatal mistake, he meant.
“Not if you’re fighting Mezentio’s buggers. A farmer”—Talsu described the man and his farm as well as he could—”sent me on this way. I was in the army till we quit. I know what to do.”
“Do you?” The bandit—or was diehard a better name?—rubbed his poorly shaved chin. He lowered the stick, but not by very much. “Come along with me. We’ll see what we find out.” Talsu gladly came.
Thirteen
Krasta stood naked by the side of the bed, staring down at herself. “I still don’t look like I’m pregnant,” she said, sounding as if she was trying to convince herself.
Colonel Lurcanio, lying naked in the bed, lazy and cheerful after making love, nodded. “Not, not very much,” he answered agreeably.
“What do you mean, not very much?” Krasta demanded, her indignation quick to kindle even toward her dangerous Algarvian lover. “My belly doesn’t bulge at all.”
“Well, so it doesn’t.” Lurcanio reached out and set the palm of his hand on that still-flat belly. Krasta expected it to slide lower, down between her legs. Instead, Lurcanio went on, “But your breasts are larger than they were— not that I mind, you understand.” Rather than reaching down from her belly, he reached up to caress her.
She hissed. “Be careful. They’re more tender than they used to be, too.” She couldn’t help admitting that. It was both blessing and curse. When his hands weren’t gentle, or sometimes simply when she moved too fast, they would hurt. But they also gave her more pleasure when he did a proper job of caressing them than they ever had before she quickened.
“Sorry, my dear.” Lurcanio continued in almost clinical tones: “And your nipples are larger and darker than they were.”
“Are they?” Krasta looked down at herself again. “I hadn’t noticed that.”
“I’m not surprised, or not very,” Lurcanio said. “Men are liable to pay more attention to that sort of thing than women do.”
“I should hope so.” Krasta sat down beside him—carefully, so her tender breasts wouldn’t bounce. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re just… there.” A sudden thought took her by surprise. “But I suppose they’ll matter to me if I decide to nurse the baby myself.”
“Aye, I’m sure they would.” Lurcanio raised an eyebrow. “And would you do such a thing, or would you hire a wet nurse?”
“I don’t know,” Krasta said with an impatient toss of the head. She promptly regretted it, for it jerked the upper part of her body, too. She hissed again, and brought a protective hand up to her breasts. “They’re just… there,” she repeated.
“Like Algarvians in Valmiera,” Lurcanio said.
She nodded. “Aye, like Algarvians in Valmiera.” Only after she’d repeated that, too, did she pause to wonder about it. “What an odd way to put things.”
“Not so odd. We have been here four years, /have been here four years,” Lurcanio said. “Considering some of the places I might have gone instead, I have no complaints. You may rest assured that that is the truth. But I do not know how much longer I can stay here.”
“What do you mean?” Krasta had always hated change. These days, Lurcanio in her bed and Algarvians on the streets of Priekule were what she was used to.
He stroked her again. That was all he was likely to do. He wasn’t a young man any more, and wouldn’t want her more than once of a night. Voice detached and ironic as usual, he answered, “Unlike some people I could name, I am usually in the habit of meaning what I say, and neither more nor less than that.”
“But …” Krasta frowned, trying hard to think despite finding the exercise unfamiliar. “Where would you go? What would you do?”
“Unkerlant or Jelgava, most likely,” he replied. “I would fight for my king and my kingdom. That is one of the things a soldier may be called upon to do from time to time, you know.”
“But what would I do?” Krasta exclaimed. When she did think, she usually thought about herself first.
Colonel Lurcanio laughed. “I presume that, were I to depart this mansion tomorrow, the very next day you would start trying as hard to convince Viscount Valnu that your baby is his as you’ve spent the last few weeks trying to convince me it is mine.”
“It is yours,” Krasta insisted with much more certainty than she felt. All along, though, she’d done her best to make herself believe the baby was Lurcanio’s. And if the Algarvian officer should disappear, would she have to start believing the child was Valnu’s? She glared at Lurcanio. “You’re a horrid man, too, you know.”
“Thank you,” Lurcanio said, which only annoyed her more. He laughed, but the amusement wouldn’t stay on his face. When it faded, he looked a long way indeed from young. “I have not got my orders yet, you understand, but I fear they may not be far away.”
Krasta didn’t feel so happy, either. Seeing her lover look not so young reminded her she wasn’t quite so young, either. So did the weariness that came with carrying a child. Fighting back a yawn, she said, “If you Algarvians need all your officers and soldiers in those other kingdoms far away, how will you hold on to Valmiera?”
She thought about the soldiers she’d seen marching up the Boulevard of Horsemen, the blond soldiers in Valmieran uniform with Algarvian flags on their sleeves. Did the redheads think they could use men like that to hold down the kingdom? If they were right, what did that say about Valmiera? What did lying naked here beside an Algarvian say about her? It was all very confusing.
Lurcanio patted her. He liked to touch her even when he didn’t feel like doing—or couldn’t do—anything more. “That is a good question, my sweet,” he said. “When King Mezentio figures out a good answer for it, I hope he will let me know. Until then …” He got out of bed and started getting into his clothes. When he was dressed, he bowed to her. “I shall see you in the morning.” He seldom spent nights in her bedchamber.
Krasta turned out the lamp without bothering to put on pyjamas. A month into summer, the night was fine and warm—nothing like the long, frigid, miserable hours of darkness the winter before. And she’d had it easier than most, because of the Algarvians in the mansion with her. She didn’t dwell on that for long; she just slid under the linen sheets and fell asleep.
A couple of hours later, distant rumblings woke her—those and flashes of light on the horizon. Thunder? she wondered muzzily. But the day was bright and clear. Then her wits began to work, and she remembered the sorry world in which she lived. “Oh,” she said out loud, around a yawn. “The islanders are dropping eggs on us again.”
She took it for granted. Why not? It had happened before, a good many times. It would doubtless happen again, too. She sighed and went back to sleep.
When she came down to breakfast the next morning, she found Colonel Lurcanio in a foul temper. “How are we supposed to go about
fighting a proper war if they keep dropping eggs on our heads?” he demanded.
“They have dragons,” Krasta said, spreading butter and Jelgavan marmalade on toast. “Don’t you have dragons, too?”
“Of course we have dragons, too,” Lurcanio answered irritably. He was going to be difficult. Krasta could feel it. And she was right. More irritably still, Lurcanio went on, “We have dragons fighting to keep the Lagoans and Kuusamans on Sibiu from dropping eggs on Algarve herself. We have dragons, some dragons, fighting the islanders down in Jelgava. And we have dragons in the west, in Unkerlant and Forthweg, fighting Swemmel’s men.”
“Unkerlant and Forthweg?” Krasta asked. “I hadn’t heard that before.”
“And you have not heard it now, either. Forget I said it,” Lurcanio told her. He passed a hand across his face. It was still early morning, but he looked weary. After a moment, he looked up at Krasta again. “Where was I? Ah, aye. With all those dragons flying over the rest of Derlavai, how many do you think Algarve has left to put in the air above Priekule?”
“Not enough—that’s plain,” Krasta said. “And so eggs land on Valmierans. You people should have thought this out better before you got into such a big war, if you want to know what I think.”
Lurcanio stared at her out of red-rimmed eyes. He started to laugh. Krasta started to get angry. Then her Algarvian lover said, “Out of the mouths of babes.” He got up, walked around the table, and kissed her. “You are right, my sweet. We probably should have thought this out better. But it is rather too late to worry about that now, would you not agree?”
“Lurcanio …” she said as he went back to his seat.
He looked her way in some surprise. She hardly ever called him by name. “What is it?” he asked, his voice more serious than usual, the mocking note so often in it now entirely gone.
“You’re going to lose the war, aren’t you?” The words came forth in a rush, blurted out before Krasta had the chance to think about whether she really wanted to ask that question.
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