“Nonsense,” somebody else said. Talsu thought he would tell the first speaker what a fool he was, but he didn’t. Instead, he went on, “The Algarvians never wasted our time with this nonsense.”
“That’s right,” a woman said, nothing but indignation in her voice. “My cat is getting hungrier every minute, and here I am, stuck in the road because of all these foreigners going by.”
Talsu rolled his eyes. Powers above! he thought. We don’t deserve to be our own masters any more. We really don’t.
Behemoths lumbered along the street. Their armor seemed different from any that Talsu had seen on Algarvian behemoths or on the few the Jelgavans had put in the field, but he couldn’t put his finger on the difference. The little, swarthy soldiers on the behemoths reminded him more of the redheads than of his own folk. They grinned and joked as they went forward; that was obvious though he knew not a word of Kuusaman. They were men with their peckers up.
They felt like winners, which went a long way toward making them into winners. The Jelgavan army had always gone into a fight looking over its shoulder, wondering what might happen to it, not what it could do to the foe.
At last, the rear of the column went by--footsoldiers stepping carefully to avoid whatever the behemoths had left behind. The Jelgavans on both sides of the road who’d had to wait surged forward and made their own traffic jam. With a judicious elbow or two, Talsu got through it fairly fast. He wished he could have elbowed the woman with the hungry cat, but no such luck.
The Kuusamans heading west to fight the redheads weren’t the only ones in town. A short, slant-eyed fellow who looked to have drunk too much wine lurched down the street with his arm around the waist of a giggling girl who wore a barmaid’s low-cut tunic and tight trousers. A few months before, had she been giving the Algarvians her favors? Talsu wouldn’t have bet more than a copper against it.
In a way, we are still occupied, he thought. Oh, the Kuusamans--and the Lagoans farther south--didn’t treat the people of Jelgava the way the Algarvians had. But if they wanted something--as that drunken trooper had wanted what the barmaid had to give--they were probably going to get it. Talsu sighed. He didn’t know what to do about that, except to hope Jelgava somehow could become strong enough to make foreigners take her seriously.
And how long will I have to wait for that? he wondered. Can we ever do it while King Donalitu sits on the throne? He had his doubts.
A new broadsheet he passed only made those doubts worse, CONCERNING TRAITORS, its big print declared, and it went on to define traitors as anyone who’d had anything at all to do with the Algarvians throughout the four years of occupation. By what it said, practically everyone in the kingdom was subject to arrest if his name happened to come to the notice of Donalitu’s constabulary.
He’ll have to leave a few people free, Talsu thought. Otherwise, who would build the dungeons he’d need to hold the whole fornicating kingdom? He laughed, but on second thought it wasn’t very funny. Captives could probably build as well as free men, if enough guards stood over them with sticks.
“Ah, good,” Krogzmu said when Talsu showed up with the trousers. “Let me just try them on. . . .” He disappeared. When he came back, he was beaming. Not only did he pay Talsu the silver he owed without being asked, he gave him a clay jar of olive oil to take home, adding, “This is some of what I squeeze for my own family. This is not what I sell.”
Talsu’s mouth watered. “Thank you very much. I know it’ll be good.” His own father did good tailoring for everyone, but better than good for his own household.
“Good?” He might have insulted Krogzmu. “Is that all you can say? Good! You wait here.” The oil dealer disappeared back into his house. He returned a moment later with a chunk of bread and snatched the jar of oil out of Talsu’s hands. Yanking out the stopper, he poured some oil on the bread, then thrust it at Talsu. “There! Taste that, and then you tell me if it’s just good.”
“You don’t need to ask me twice.” Talsu took a big bite. It was either that or get olive oil smeared all over his face. The next sound he made was wordless but appreciative. The oil was everything he could have hoped it would be and then some: sharp and fruity at the same time. It made him think of men on tall ladders in the autumn plucking olives from green-gray-leafed branches to fall on tarpaulins waiting below.
“What do you say to that?” Krogzmu demanded.
“What do I say? I say I wish you’d given me more,” Talsu told him. Krogzmu beamed. That apparently satisfied him. To Talsu’s disappointment, the praise didn’t get him a second jar of that marvelous oil.
He headed home. Again, he had to wait in the middle of town. This time, though, the procession wasn’t Kuusaman soldiers heading west to fight King Mezentio’s men. It was hard-faced Jelgavans in the uniform of King Donalitu’s elite constabulary leading along a motley collection of captives. The captives weren’t Algarvians; they were every bit as blond as the constables, as blond as Talsu was himself.
A chill ran through him. Maybe Donalitu and his henchmen wouldn’t have any trouble finding enough dungeons after all.
Ealstan had imagined a great many ways he might return to Gromheort. He might have come after the war ended, bringing Vanai and Saxburh to meet his mother and father and sister. He might have come back to make sure Elfryth and Hestan and Conberge were all right, and then returned to Eoforwic to bring his wife and little daughter to them. He might even have come as part of a triumphant Forthwegian army, driving the Algarvians before him.
Coming to Gromheort as part of a triumphant Unkerlanter army that cared little, if at all, for anything Forthwegian had never once crossed his mind. Nor had he thought the Algarvians would do anything but pull out of Gromheort once they faced overwhelming force. That they might pull back into his home town and stand siege there . . . No, he hadn’t thought of that, not in his wildest nightmares.
But that was just what the redheads had done, and they’d thrown back several Unkerlanter efforts to break into Gromheort. By now, Mezentio’s men trapped inside the city couldn’t retreat into Algarve even if they’d wanted to. The Unkerlanter ring around Gromheort was twenty miles thick, maybe thirty. The Algarvians had only two choices: they could fight till they ran out of everything, or they could yield.
Unkerlanter officers under flag of truce had already gone into Gromheort twice, demanding a surrender. The Algarvians had sent them away both times, and so Ealstan sprawled in a field somewhere between Oyngestun and Gromheort, peering toward his home town.
Gromheort’s wall had been more a formality than a defense for several generations. He knew that perfectly well. But seeing so many chunks of the wall bitten away by bursting eggs still hurt. What hurt worse was being unable to tell his comrades why it hurt. For one thing, they had trouble understanding him, and he them. Forthwegian and Unkerlanter were related languages, but they were a long way from identical. And, for another, they wouldn’t have cared anyhow. Gromheort was nothing to them but one more foreign town they had to take.
Whistles shrilled. Officers along the line shouted, “Forward!” That word wasn’t much different in Unkerlanter from its Forthwegian equivalent. Even if it had been, Ealstan would have been quick to figure out what it meant.
He didn’t want to advance. He wanted to go back to Eoforwic, to Vanai and Saxburh. But one Unkerlanter word he had learned was the one for efficiency. In their own brutal way, Swemmel’s men did their best to practice what they preached. Hard-faced fellows with sticks in their hands waited not far behind the line. Any soldier who tried to retreat without orders got blazed on the spot. Soldiers who went forward had at least a chance of coming through alive. The argument was crude, but it was also logical.
“Up!” a sergeant screamed. Sergeants didn’t get whistles, but soldiers had to do as they said anyhow. Ealstan got up and trotted forward with the rest of the men in rock-gray.
Rock-gray dragons swooped low overhead, eggs slung under their bellies. The eggs burst in front of
and inside Gromheort. Ealstan didn’t know what to think about that. It made him more likely to live and his kinsfolk more likely to die. He wanted to give up thinking altogether.
“Behemoths!” That shout came in Unkerlanter. The word was nothing like its Forthwegian equivalent, which had been borrowed from Algarvian. Ealstan had had to learn it in a hurry. It meant either Help is coming or We’re in trouble, depending on who owned the behemoths being shouted about.
These behemoths had Algarvians aboard them. They were sallying from Gromheort, doing their best to hold the Unkerlanters away from the town. Officers or no officers, sergeants or no sergeants, Ealstan threw himself down on the muddy ground. He’d seen behemoths in the desperate fighting in and around Eoforwic, and had a hearty respect for what they could do. Most of the Unkerlanters close by him dove for cover, too. Anyone who’d had more than the tiniest taste of war knew better than to stay on his feet when enemy behemoths were in the neighborhood.
Somewhere not far away, a crystallomancer shouted into his glassy sphere. Before long, egg-tossers started aiming at the Algarvian beasts. They did less than Ealstan would have liked; only a direct hit, which took luck, would put paid to the immense beasts in their chain-mail coats. But a barrage of bursting eggs did keep Algarvian footsoldiers from going forward with the behemoths, and that left the animals and their crews more vulnerable than they would have been otherwise.
Ealstan swung his stick towards one of the redheads atop a behemoth a couple of hundred yards away. He had to aim carefully; behemoth crewmen wore armor, too. Why not? They relied on the animals to take them where they needed to go, and didn’t get down on the ground themselves unless something went wrong.
“There,” Ealstan muttered, and let his finger slide into the stick’s blazing hole. The beam leaped forth. The Algarvian started to clutch at his face, but crumpled with the motion half complete. He never knew what hit him, Ealstan thought. Instead of celebrating, he crawled toward a new hiding place. If one of Mezentio’s men had seen his beam, staying where he was might get him killed.
More men fell from the Algarvian behemoths. The Unkerlanter footsoldiers, like Ealstan, had learned to pick off crewmen whenever they got the chance. Had Algarvian footsoldiers gone forward with the beasts, they could have kept Swemmel’s soldiers too busy to let them snipe at the behemoth crews. But eggs bursting all around had held back the unarmored footsoldiers.
Sullenly, the Algarvian behemoths drew back toward Gromheort. Ealstan waited for the order to pursue. It didn’t come. The Unkerlanters around him seemed content to stay where they were, even if they could have gained some ground by showing initiative. There were also times when the efficiency Swemmel’s men talked so much about proved only talk.
Night fell. That didn’t keep the Unkerlanters from pounding Gromheort with eggs or the Algarvians in the town from answering back as best they could. Ealstan filled his mess tin with boiled barley and chunks of meat from a pot bubbling over a fire well shielded from sight by banks of dirt--Algarvian snipers sometimes sneaked out after dark to pick off whomever they could spot, and they were good at what they did. Poking one of the chunks with his spoon, Ealstan asked the cook, “What is this?”
“Unicorn tonight,” the fellow answered. “Not too bad.”
“Not, not too,” Ealstan more or less agreed. Unicorn, horse, behemoth--he’d eaten all sorts of things he never would have touched before the war. Behemoth was very tough and very gamy. But when the choice lay between eating it and going hungry . . . Hard times had long since taught him that lesson.
He sat with his squadmates, going through the stew and talking. He couldn’t always understand them, nor they him, but they and he kept repeating themselves and changing a word here, a word there, till they got it. They didn’t hold his being Forthwegian against him. A couple of them still seemed to think he was just an Unkerlanter from a district where the dialect was very strange. They’d already seen he knew enough on the battlefield not to be a danger to them.
As for his method of joining King Swemmel’s army, most of them had stories not a whole lot different. “Oh, aye,” said a fellow named Curvenal, who, by his pimpled but almost beardless face, couldn’t have been much above sixteen. “The impressers came into my village. They said I could go fight the Algarvians or I could get blazed. With that for a choice . . . The Algarvians might not blaze me, so here I am.”
“Me, I’m from the far southwest,” another soldier said. “I’d never even heard of Algarvians till the fornicating war started. All I want to do is go home.”
Ealstan could have had something to say about Unkerlant’s jumping on Forthweg’s back after the Algarvians stormed into his kingdom. He could have, but he didn’t. What point to it? None of these men had been in Swemmel’s army then; Curvenal would have been about eleven years old. And most of his new comrades were peasants. He might be ignorant of their language, but they were ignorant of much more. How could one not have heard of Algarvians? Not have met any?--that, certainly; the far southwest of Unkerlant was far indeed. But not to know they existed? That astonished Ealstan. He’d never met any Gyongyosians, but he would have had no trouble finding Gyongyos on a map.
Under cover of darkness, more Unkerlanter soldiers came forward. As soon as it got light, dragons painted rock-gray started harrying Gromheort once more. Listening to the thud of bursting eggs, Ealstan wondered again how his family was faring. He hoped they were well. That was all he could do.
Behemoths lumbered toward the city wall. “Forward!” officers shouted. Forward Ealstan went, along with his squadmates, along with the fresh troops. The Algarvians fought like canny veterans. Some of the new Unkerlanter soldiers were very raw indeed, too raw to know to take cover when the enemy started blazing at them. They might as well have been grain before the reaper.
But they also took a toll on the redheads. Though it was a smaller toll, the Algarvians could afford less in the way of losses. And, seeing smoke rising all around Gromheort, Ealstan realized Swemmel’s soldiers were coming at the city from every side. If they broke in anywhere, they would be ahead of the game.
No such luck. The Algarvians in Gromheort were trapped, but they hadn’t given up--and they hadn’t run out of food or supplies. They threw back this attack as they’d thrown back the others. They had courage and to spare--or maybe they didn’t dare let themselves fall into Unkerlanter hands.
“Won’t be anything left of that place before long,” Curvenal said.
“I used to live there,” Ealstan said in Forthwegian, and then had to struggle to get meaning across in Unkerlanter, which formed past tenses differently.
“Is your family still there?” Curvenal asked.
Ealstan nodded. “I think so. I hope so.”
The young Unkerlanter slapped him on the back. “That’s hard. That’s cursed hard. The redheads never got to my village, so I’m one of the lucky ones. But I know how many people have lost kin. I hope your folks come through all right.”
Sympathy from one of Swemmel’s men came as a surprise. “Thanks,” Ealstan said roughly. “So do I.” In ironic counterpoint, more eggs burst on Gromheort. He hoped his mother and father and sister were down in cellars where no harm could come to them. He also hoped they had enough to eat. The Algarvians would probably do their best to keep everything in the besieged town for themselves.
If any Forthwegians got food, he suspected his own family would. His father had both money and connections, and the Algarvians took bribes. Ealstan had seen that for himself, both in Gromheort and in Eoforwic. But even the redheads wouldn’t give civilians food if they had none to spare.
All I can do is try to break into the city when we’ve worn Mezentio’s men down enough to have a decent chance of doing it, Ealstan thought. If I desert and try to sneak in on my own, the Unkerlanters will blaze me if they catch me and the Algarvians will if the Unkerlanters don’t. And I couldn‘t do anything useful even if I did get in.
Every bit of that made perfect lo
gical sense, the sort of sense that should have calmed a bookkeeper’s spirit. Somehow or other, it did nothing whatever to ease Ealstan’s mind.
Hajjaj was glad Bishah’s rainy season, never very long, was drawing to a close. That meant his roof wouldn’t leak much longer--till next rainy season. Zuwayzi roofers were among the most inept workmen in the whole kingdom. They could get away with it, too, because they were so seldom tested.
“Frauds, the lot of them,” he grumbled to his senior wife just after the latest set of bunglers packed up their tools and went down from the hills to Bishah.
“They certainly are,” Kolthoum agreed. They’d been together for half a century now. It had been an arranged marriage, not a love match; leaders among Zuwayzi clans wed for reasons far removed from romance. But they’d grown very fond of each other. Hajjaj wondered if he’d ever spoken the word love to her. He didn’t think so, but he couldn’t imagine what he would do without her.
“As far as I’m concerned, they’re just a pack of clumsy children playing with toys--and not playing very well,” he went on.
“Odds are, we won’t find out what sort of work they’ve done till the fall,” Kolthoum said. “By then, they can expect we’ll either have forgotten all the promises they’ve made or lost their bill or both.”
“They can expect it, but they’ll be disappointed,” Hajjaj said. “They don’t know how well you keep track of such things.” His senior wife graciously inclined her head at the compliment. She’d never been a great beauty, and she’d got fat as the years went by, but she moved like a queen. From roofers, Hajjaj went on to other complications: “Speaking of toys . . .”
He needed no more than that for Kolthoum to understand exactly what he had in mind. “What’s the latest trouble with Tassi?” she asked. “And why won’t Iskakis dry up and blow away?”
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