“I never get them as fast as you think I should,” Pekka answered. “They always read them and scratch things out first. What’s happened?”
Voice still flat, Elimaki said, “He’s taken up with one of his pretty little clerks, that’s what. He wants to leave. Our solicitors are snapping at each other.”
“Oh, no!” Pekka exclaimed.
“Oh, aye.” Elimaki smiled wryly. “I doubt I’ll ever see him again. Right now, I hope I don’t. He always thought he was too big for a provincial town like Kajaani. Now he gets to try his luck in the capital, and on someone else, or maybe on a lot of someone elses. He is sending me money for the house. He’s always been scrupulous about money. Other things…” Pekka’s sister shrugged. “And how are you!”
“I don’t know. I think I’m stunned.” Pekka had intended to unburden herself to Elimaki. If she couldn’t talk about men and life and love with her own sister, with whom could she? The answer to that looked to be, no one.
“Uncle Olavin is a louse,” Uto said.
Elimaki laughed a harsh laugh. “I’ve called him a lot worse than that, but I try not to do it where Uto can hear. He picks up enough bad language without learning it from me.” Uto looked proud when his aunt said that. Pekka had to stifle a giggle. Uto had always delighted in the mischief he caused.
They took the local ley-line caravan to the stop where Pekka had got out so often on her way home from Kajaani City College. Then they walked up the hill to the lane with her house and Elimaki’s beside it. By then, full darkness had fallen. Lights were few and far between. Pekka worried more about slipping and turning an ankle than about footpads. Robbers were few and far between in Kajaani: an advantage to provincial towns, though Kuusamans generally were law-abiding folk.
Elimaki’s house lay closer to the opening of the lane than did Pekka’s. “Why don’t you come in with me?” her sister said. “I’ll fix some supper and something for both of us to drink, and we can go on from there.”
“That sounds wonderful,” Pekka said.
“What’s wonderful is to see you,” Elimaki answered. “Now I have someone I can let my hair down to.” She sighed. “I’m jealous of you and Leino. Isn’t that terrible?”
Pekka’s ears heated. “Not really.” She changed the subject in a hurry: “I’ll help in the kitchen.”
Elimaki didn’t let her do much, but she did fix them both stiff drinks. Uto hung around while the halibut steaks cooked. He stared wide-eyed at his mother all through supper. Elimaki, these days, surely felt more like a mother to him than Pekka. After supper, though, he hurried off to play. Before long, a horrible crash came from a back room. “What was that?” Elimaki called as she and Pekka carried dishes back to the kitchen to wash them.
“Nothing,” Uto answered sweetly. Pekka snickered. She knew that tone altogether too well.
She and Elimaki had a couple of more drinks while they did the dishes, and they took more brandy out to the parlor. Eventually, Elimaki called Uto and told him to go to bed. He sent Pekka the look of appeal she knew too well and hadn’t seen in too long. “Do I have to, Mother?”
“Is this the time you usually go to sleep?” Pekka asked. Powers above! I don’t even know! Reluctantly, Uto nodded—Elimaki would give him the lie if he did anything else. “Then you do,” Pekka told him. “But come give me a kiss first.” He ran to her. They clung to each other. Then, with less fuss than she’d expected, he went off to the back of the house. Pekka glanced over to Elimaki. “He’s growing up.” She emptied her glass.
“Aye—when he feels like it,” her sister said. “He’s probably reading under the covers for a while. Sometimes I let him get away with that.” Elimaki drained her glass, too, then poured it full again and filled Pekka’s with it. “You haven’t said two words about yourself since you got off the caravan car.”
“Well …” Discretion warred with brandy. For the moment, discretion won. Pekka said, “There are a lot of things I can’t talk about.” She could hear the beginning of a slur in her words. Brandy hadn’t lost by much.
“I know that,” Elimaki said impatiently. “I don’t care about what you do. I wouldn’t understand most of it anyway—I’m no mage. I want to know how you are.”
“Do you?” Pekka said. Her sister nodded, the motion exaggerated enough to show she’d had a good deal to drink, too. “Do you?” Pekka repeated. Elimaki nodded again. And Pekka, surprising herself even as the words poured out, told her.
Silence stretched and stretched after she finished. I shouldn‘t have done that, she thought, and blamed the brandy. But it wasn’t just the brandy, and she knew it. One of the reasons she’d come home was to talk with Elimaki about Fernao. Now she’d done it. If only Olavin hadn’t chosen the most inconvenient possible time to take up with someone else, too.
At last, Elimaki said, “I don’t know what to say. I … never expected anything like this—from Olavin or from you. Especially from you, I think.”
“I didn’t really expect it, either,” Pekka said, and knocked back the brandy Elimaki had poured her. “It just… happened. These things do, sometimes.”
“I know. I ought to know.” Elimaki’s face twisted. She paused again, then asked, “What are you going to do? What are you going to tell Leino?”
“I don’t know,” Pekka answered. “I just don’t know. I haven’t the faintest idea in the world. I’ll cross that ice when I come to it.”
“I didn’t expect it of you,” Elimaki said again. “If anybody in the family was going to go off and take a lover, I thought it would be me. Here I was, sitting at home by myself—except for Uto, and that’s a pretty big ‘except.’ But I … sat here. I was lonely, but it wasn’t that bad. And now this.” Her goggle-eyed look also came only in part from the brandy.
“I know. But—” Pekka stopped, unsure how to go on.
Her sister held up a hand. “Never mind. Your face says it all. If I doused every one of the lamps, you’d still glow.”
“Does it? Would I?” Pekka asked. Very solemnly indeed, Elimaki nodded. So did Pekka. “Well, it’s the truth. It’s how I feel. I know it’s not the way I’m supposed to feel, but I do.”
“I don’t know whether to be green with envy of you or to want to hit you over the head with a brick,” Elimaki said. “These things usually don’t have happy endings, you know.”
“Of course I know,” Pekka said. “At least we aren’t Algarvic people, where they go to knives sometimes instead of solicitors.” And then, even before her sister could say anything, she remembered Fernao was of Algarvic blood. That gave her something brand new to worry about. As if I didn‘t have enough, she thought.
Behind Garivald—who was getting used to thinking of himself as Fariulf— lay the Twegen River. Behind him also lay a good many artificers frantically repairing the bridges over the Twegen the Algarvians had knocked down with their sorcerously guided eggs. Ahead of him, to the east, were the rest of Forthweg and all the redheads trying to keep his countrymen and him from taking any more of it.
To the north, smoke rose from the burning city of Eoforwic. Garivald supposed the Algarvians could have given this bridgehead even more trouble than they had if they weren’t trying to put down the rebellious Forthwegians in their capital.
That didn’t mean Mezentio’s men were idle here. Garivald wished it would have. Eggs started bursting not far away. They were of the plain, ordinary, unsteered variety, but if one burst in the hole where he crouched it would kill him just as dead as the fanciest product of inventive Algarvian sorcery. The eggs kicked up great, choking clouds of brown dust. Coughing a little, Garivald marveled at that. Down in the Duchy of Grelz, it would have been raining now—the fall mud time—with snow on the way. Here, rain fell mostly in the late fall and winter, and snow was uncommon. So he’d been told, anyhow. He had trouble believing it, but it looked to be true.
“Stay alert!” Lieutenant Andelot shouted. “They like to attack after they plaster us with eggs. They think that’s a
n efficient way to do things. Our job is to show ‘em they’re wrong.”
“That’s right,” Garivald said. From what he’d seen of Algarvian soldiers, they were alarmingly efficient, but he had to back up his officer. That was part of what being a corporal was about. And he spoke the absolute truth when he added, “We’ve got to hold on to this bridgehead, no matter what.”
A moment later, somebody else let out a frightened yell: “Here they come!”
Garivald quickly looked every which way. There were the kilted Algarvians loping forward. Some of them shouted, “Mezentio!” as they ran. They still acted as much like world-beaters as they had when they overran his home village of Zossen. True, they’d been driven out of Unkerlant, but that didn’t seem to be because they were bad soldiers, only because there weren’t quite enough of them to overwhelm the larger kingdom.
Every which way also included behind Garivald. He’d learned as an irregular to know where he would retreat before he had to fall back. He’d had that lesson brutally reinforced in Swemmel’s regular army, too. A soldier who didn’t think ahead wouldn’t get many chances to think at all.
“Mezentio!” Aye, the redheads still knew their business. As soon as the Unkerlanters started blazing at them, some of them dove for cover and blazed back. Others scrambled forward. Then they flopped down in turn, while the troopers in back of them ran past them and toward the Unkerlanter front line.
“Get up there, curse it!” Garivald yelled at a soldier too deep in his hole to fight. “You’ve got a better chance if you blaze at them, too.”
The soldier couldn’t have been older than sixteen. He’d had his father yelling at him back in his home village, not an underofficer with all the savage weight of King Swemmel’s army behind him. His father, losing his temper, might beat him. A corporal, losing his temper, could do or cause to be done far worse than that. Garivald didn’t think he could ever make himself give a man over to the inspectors for sacrifice, but the youngster didn’t need to know that.
And his curses did what they were supposed to do: they got the kid up and fighting. He might want to blaze Garivald along with or instead of the Algarvians, but he was blazing at them. Garivald blazed at one of them, too. The fellow kept running, so he must have missed. He cursed again, this time at himself.
He looked back over his shoulder. If the redheads kept coming, he’d have to scurry back toward that next hiding place. He hoped no one else had marked it—it wouldn’t hide a pair of men.
Just as he was about to jump out of his hole and fall back, what seemed like all the eggs in the world descended on the Algarvians. The Unkerlanters had moved a lot of egg-tossers into the bridgehead. A crystallomancer must have reached the men who served them, and the efficient way they responded would have warmed King Swemmel’s heart—assuming anything could.
Whatever such efficiency would have done to Swemmel’s heart, it wreaked havoc on the Algarvians. Their onslaught petered out, smashed under a blizzard of bursts of sorcerous energy. The ground shook under Garivald’s feet—not as it would have when one side or the other started sacrificing, but simply because so many eggs were coming down close to him.
“Take that, you whoresons!” Lieutenant Andelot screamed at the redheads. He was only a youngster himself. This probably seemed like a great lark to him.
“We ought to go after the stinking buggers,” somebody said.
But, youngster or not, Andelot knew how to follow orders. “No,” he said. “For the time being, we’re just supposed to hold this bridgehead.”
“When do we break out, sir?” the soldier asked.
“When the generals tell us to,” Andelot answered. Garivald found himself nodding. Sure enough, that was how things worked.
Once driven off, the Algarvians didn’t resume their attack. From what the handful of surviving old-timers Garivald had talked with said, that was a change from the earlier days of the war. Mezentio’s men didn’t have the reserves of strength they’d once enjoyed. As far as he was concerned, they were quite bad enough as they were.
Andelot came over to him. “What’s up, sir?” he asked cautiously. He didn’t like drawing official attention to himself.
“Don’t worry, Fariulf—you’re not in trouble,” Andelot said, which did nothing to keep Garivald from worrying. “I just wanted to say you did a good job of handling that fellow who wasn’t blazing at the redheads.”
“Oh,” Garivald said. “Thank you, sir.”
“I think you’ve got the makings of a good soldier—a fine soldier, even,” Andelot said. “Would you like to move up in the army? You might be an officer by the time the war ends. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”
Garivald wanted to become an officer about as much as he wanted an extra head. “Sir, I don’t have my letters,” he said, thinking that would dispose of that.
“I’ll teach you, if you like,” Andelot offered.
“Would you?” Garivald stared. “Nobody ever said anything like that to me before, sir. My village didn’t even have a school. The firstman there could read, and maybe a few other people, but not that many. I’d give a lot, sir, to be able to read and write.” / could write down my songs. I could make them better. I could make them last forever.
“It would be my pleasure,” Andelot said. “The more men who do know how to read and write, the more efficient a kingdom Unkerlant becomes. Wouldn’t you say that’s so, Corporal?”
“Aye, sir,” Garivald replied. New thoughts crowded in on the heels of his first excitement. If I do write my songs down, I have to be careful. If the inspectors find them, they’ll know who I really am. And if they know who I really am, I’m in a lot of trouble.
He didn’t show what he was thinking. Showing your thoughts could and often did prove deadly dangerous in Unkerlant. He did his best to look interested and attentive when Andelot pulled a scrap of paper, a pen, and a bottle of ink from his belt pouch. He wrote something on the paper in big letters. “Here’s your name—Fariulf.”
“Fariulf,” Garivald repeated dutifully, wondering what his real name looked like. He didn’t ask. If he ever got the hang of this writing business, he’d figure it out for himself.
“That’s right.” Andelot smiled and nodded. “It’s not hard, really—all the characters always have the same sound, so you just have to remember which sound each character makes. See? You have an ‘f sound at each end of your name.”
“Those both say ‘f ?” Garivald asked. Andelot nodded. Garivald scratched his head. “Why don’t they look the same, then?”
“Ah,” Lieutenant Andelot said. “You use this form—the royal form, people call it—for the first one because it’s the first letter of a name. You’d do the same thing if it were the first letter of a sentence. The rest of the time, you use small letters.”
“Why?” Garivald asked.
Andelot started to answer, then stopped, chuckled, and shrugged. He looked very young in that moment. “I don’t know why, Corporal. It’s just how we do things. It’s how we’ve always done them, so far as I know.”
“Oh.” Garivald shrugged, too. Rules didn’t have to make sense to be rules. Anyone who’d lived under King Swemmel understood that perfectly well. “All right, you make the one kind of mark for—what did you say, sir?”
“For the first letter of a name or the first letter of a sentence,” Andelot repeated patiently.
“Thanks. I’ll remember now.” And Garivald thought he would. Not least because he couldn’t read or write, he had a very good memory.
To his surprise, Lieutenant Andelot thrust the pen at him. He recoiled from it, almost as if it were a knife. “Here. Take it,” Andelot said. “Write your own name. Go ahead—you can do it. Just copy what I did.”
When Garivald held the pen as if it were a knife, Andelot showed him a better way. Brow furrowed in concentration, he made marks on the paper, doing his best to imitate what the officer had written. “There,” he said at last. “Does that say … Fariulf?” He nearly made
the mistake of using his real name. He might get away with that mistake once. On the other hand, he might not.
“Aye, it does.” Andelot beamed at him, so he must have done it right. The officer started to write again, then stopped and fumbled in his belt pouch till he found a bigger leaf of paper. He wrote a lot of characters on it. “These are the royal form and the regular form of all the letters, in the right order. Do you know the children’s rhyme that helps you remember the order and the way each letter sounds?”
“No, sir,” Garivald said simply.
Andelot sighed. “You really must have lived in the back of beyond.” Garivald shrugged again. He probably had. Andelot taught him the rhyme, which had a catchy little tune. He learned it quickly enough to please the lieutenant. “That’s good,” Andelot said. “That’s very good. Here, let me give you more paper. You can have that pen, too, and here’s a bottle of ink. Go practice shaping the letters and keep saying the rhyme so you know what each one sounds like. In a couple of days, I’ll show you how to read more things, too.”
“Thank you, sir,” Garivald said. He went back to his own hole, his head as full of that children’s rhyme as it had ever been with his own songs. He wrote the alphabet several times, reciting the rhyme as he wielded the pen. Then—first looking around to make sure no one could see him—he wrote Garivald as,best he could, being certain to use the royal form of the G.
And then he crumpled up that leaf of paper and threw it in the closest fire. He let out a small sigh of relief as he watched it burn. In Swemmel’s kingdom, no one could be too careful. Fariulf he was, and Fariulf he would have to remain.
Istvan raised an axe and brought it down on a chunk of firewood. The chunk split into two smaller chunks. The Kuusaman guards who watched the woodcutting detail stayed very alert—axes were real weapons. A few feet from Istvan, Kun was chopping away, too.
“Anyone can tell you didn’t grow up cutting wood,” Istvan said.
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