He clapped a hand to his forehead. “You stupid slut!” he shouted. “I couldn’t very well go around in uniform then. Do you think I wanted to end up in a captives’ camp, or more likely blazed?”
Instead of answering right away, Costache looked all around, as if to see which neighbors were likely drinking in the scandal. That also seemed to remind her of the dustpan, which she picked up. “Oh, come inside, will you?” she said impatiently. “You don’t have to do this in front of everyone, do you?”
“Why not?” Cornelu slapped her in the face. “Don’t you think you deserve to be shamed?”
Her hand flew to her cheek. “I think …” She grimaced—not with pain, he thought, but with disgust, and not self-disgust—disgust at him. “What I think doesn’t matter anymore, does it? It never will anymore, will it?” She walked up the path to the house, not caring, or at least pretending not to care, whether Cornelu followed.
He did, still almost too furious to speak. In the front room, Brindza was playing with a doll—the gift of an Algarvian officer? Of the father of her half brother or sister to come? Cornelu’s own daughter shied away from him and said, “Mama, who is the strange man in the funny clothes?”
“Brindza, I am your father,” Cornelu said, but he could see that didn’t mean anything to her.
“Go on back to your bedroom now, sweetheart,” Cornelu told her. “We’ll talk about it later.” Brindza did as she was told. Cornelu wished Costache would have done the same. He looked down at himself. Sibian naval uniform—funny clothes? Maybe so. Brindza might never have seen it before. That spoke unhappy volumes about the state of Cornelu’s kingdom.
Costache went into the kitchen. He heard her getting down goblets, and knew exactly the cupboard from which she was getting them. He knew which cupboard held the wine and ale and spirits, too. Costache came back carrying two goblets full of wine. She thrust one of them at him. “Here. This will be bad enough any which way. We may as well blur it a little.”
“I don’t want to drink with you.” But Cornelu took the goblet. Whether with her or not, he did want to drink. He took a big swig, then made a face. “Powers above, that’s foul. The Algarvians sent all their best vintages here, didn’t they?”
“I gave you what I have,” Costache answered.
“You gave everybody what you have, didn’t you?” Cornelu pointed at her belly as he finished the wine. Costache’s mouth tightened. He went on, “And you’re going to pay for it, too, by the powers above. Sibiu’s free again. Anyone who sucked up to the Algarvians”—he started to say something else along those lines, but the thought so infuriated him, he choked on the words—“is going to pay.”
She just stood there, watching him. She has nerve, curse her, he thought angrily. “I don’t suppose I could say anything that would make you change your mind,” she observed.
“Ha!” He clapped a hand to his forehead. “Not likely! What’ll you tell me, how handsome the Algarvian was? How good he was?”
That got home. Costache flushed till the handprint on her cheek seemed to fade. She said, “I could talk about how lonely I was, and how afraid, too.”
“Aye, you could,” Cornelu said. “You might even get some softheaded, softhearted fool to believe it, too. But so what? You won’t even get me to listen.”
“I didn’t think so,” Costache said tonelessly. “You never had any forgiveness in you. And I’m sure you never got into bed with anyone all the time you were away.”
“We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you,” Cornelu snapped. “I’m not carrying an Algarvian’s bastard. You miserable little whore, you were sleeping with Mezentio’s men when you knew I was on Tirgoviste island. Do you even know which one put the baby in you?”
“How do you know what I was doing or what I wasn’t?” she asked.
“How do I know? They were chasing me, that’s how!” Cornelu howled. “I came down here out of the hills hoping I’d find some way to shake free of them and bring you and Brindza along with me. And what did I find? What did I find? You telling the Algarvians how much they’d enjoy it, that’s what!”
He took a couple of quick steps across the room and slapped her again. She staggered. The goblet flew out of her hand and shattered on the floor. She straightened, the whole side of her face red now. “Did you enjoy that?” she asked.
“Aye,” he growled, breathing hard. He might have been in battle. His heart pounded. His stomach churned. He raised his hand to hit her once more. Then, quite suddenly, his stomach did more than churn. It knotted. Horrible pain filled him. He bent double, clutching at his belly. The next thing he knew, he’d crumpled to the floor.
Costache stood over him, looking down. Calmly, she said, “The warning on the packet was true. It does work on people the same way it works on rats.”
“You poisoned me,” he choked, tasting blood in his mouth. He tried to reach for her, to grab her, to pull her down, but his hands obeyed him only slowly, oh so slowly.
She stepped back, not very far. She didn’t need to step back very far. “So I did,” she told him, calm still. “I knew what you’d be like, and I was right.” Her voice seemed to come from farther and father away.
Cornelu stared up at her. “You won’t—get away—with it.” His own words seemed to come from farther and farther away, too.
“I have a chance,” she said. He tried to answer. This time, no words came. He still stared up, but he saw nothing at all.
Nineteen
See that that gets translated into Algarvian,” Hajjaj told his secretary, “but let me review the translation before we send it on to Marquis Balastro, and then … Are you listening to me?”
“I’m sorry, your Excellency.” Qutuz had cocked his head to one side and seemed to be listening not to the Zuwayzi foreign minister but to something outside King Shazli’s palace. “Is that thunder?”
“Nonsense,” Hajjaj said. Aye, fall and winter were the rainy season in Zuwayza, but the day—the whole week—had been fine and dry and sunny. But then his ears also caught the low rumble the younger man had heard before him. He frowned. “That is thunder. But it can’t be.”
He and Qutuz both found the answer more slowly than they should have. They both found it at the same time, too. “Eggs!” Qutuz blurted, while Hajjaj exclaimed, “The Unkerlanters!”
Ever since the war began, King Swemmel’s dragonfliers had occasionally visited Bishah. They hadn’t come in large numbers; they could hardly afford to, not with Unkerlant locked in a life-or-death struggle against Algarve. As far as Hajjaj could tell, they’d mounted the attacks more to remind the Zuwayzin that Swemmel hadn’t forgotten about them than for any other reason. The Unkerlanter dragons had also done their best to hit the Algarvian ministry in Bishah, but they’d never quite succeeded.
Hajjaj didn’t need long to realize this morning would be different. “They’re dropping a good many eggs today, aren’t they?” he remarked, doing his best to stay calm—or at least not to show he was anything else but.
“Aye, your Excellency, so they are.” Qutuz took his cue from Hajjaj, but he had less practice at seeming dispassionate while actually frightened or furious.
More roars of bursting eggs beat against Hajjaj’s ears. They were coming closer to the palace now, too, so he no longer had any doubt what they were. The ground started shaking under his fundament, as if at an earthquake. Pen cases and leaves of paper on his desk trembled and quivered.
“Perhaps,” Qutuz said, “we ought to look for shelter.”
“Where?” Hajjaj asked, not at all rhetorically. He’d read that people in Setubal and Sulingen and other places that often came under attack from the air took refuge in cellars. Cellars, however, had never been a part of Zuwayzi architecture, and no one had ever dreamt the Unkerlanters would really pummel Bishah.
“I’m getting under my desk,” Qutuz declared, and hurried off to do just that. Hajjaj nodded approval. It wasn’t a bad notion at all. He crawled under his own. For o
nce, he wished he were in the habit of working at it in a chair rather than sitting on the floor; he would have had more room under there. His joints creaked as he tried to fold himself into as small a space as he could.
Then the first eggs fell on the royal palace. For the next little while, Hajjaj had nothing whatever to do with whether he lived or died. The ground shook. Windows blew out. Walls fell in. Chunks of the roof came crashing down. One of them landed where he’d been sitting while talking with his secretary. Another came down on the desk, but wasn’t heavy enough to crush it—and, incidentally, Hajjaj.
Someone was screaming. After a moment, Hajjaj realized that was his own voice. He bit down hard on his lower lip to make himself stop. Then he wondered why he bothered. Plenty of people, surely, were screaming right now. But he kept on biting his lip instead. Pride is a strange thing, he thought, a strange thing, but a very strong one.
An eternity later—an eternity probably measurable as a couple of minutes—the eggs stopped landing on and around the palace and started falling farther north in Bishah. Hajjaj had to fight his way out from under the desk; some of the rubble all but caged him there.
“Qutuz!” he called. “Are you all right?”
“Aye, your Excellency.” The secretary came running into Hajjaj’s office. “Powers above be praised that you’re safe.”
“I’m well enough,” Hajjaj said, “but you’re bleeding.” He pointed to a gash on Qutuz’s left calf.
His secretary looked down at it. When he looked up again, astonishment filled his face. “I didn’t even know it was there,” he said.
“Well, it needs bandaging—that’s plain.” Hajjaj used a letter-opener to cut up cushions to get cloth to wrap around Qutuz’s leg. He would have had a simpler time of it had either of them worn clothes.
“I thank you, your Excellency,” Qutuz said. “There are bound to be plenty of people hurt a lot worse than I am. We’d better see what we can do for them.”
“You’re right.” Hajjaj went over to the little closet that opened onto his office. His ceremonial wardrobe lay in chaos on the floor. He didn’t care. He tossed his secretary a couple of tunics and kilts and grabbed some for himself. Seeing Qutuz’s bewilderment, he spoke aloud his thought of a moment before: “Bandages.”
“Ah.” Qutuz’s face cleared. “That’s clever. That’s very clever.”
“It’s cleverness I wish we didn’t need,” Hajjaj said grimly. “Come on. Let’s make for the audience chamber and the throne room.” That was as close as he would come to admitting he was worried about King Shazli. His secretary’s eyes widened, but Qutuz didn’t worry out loud, either.
And they both had plenty to do before they got anywhere near the throne room. People were down and groaning in the hallways. Some of them, the ones with broken bones, needed more than bandaging. Some were beyond all help. Hajjaj and Qutuz found not only bodies but buried bodies and pieces of bodies. Before long, their sandals left bloody footprints at every stride.
Someone around the comer of a corridor barked peremptory orders: “Get that rubble off him! Grab that roof beam and lift! Maybe we can still save his leg!”
Hajjaj’s heart leaped within him. He knew that voice. “Your Majesty!” he called. Behind him, Qutuz whooped.
“Is that you, Hajjaj?” the king asked. “Powers above be praised you’re whole and hale. Powers below eat the Unkerlanters for doing this to us.” He went back to the rescue he was leading: “Heave there, all of you.” A shriek—not King Shazli’s—followed. “Easy there, my friend,” Shazli said. “It’ll be better now.”
Dust and dirt and blood covered Shazli when Hajjaj finally reached his side. But the king needed no fancy trappings to gain obedience. When he gave a command, everyone who heard hurried to carry it out. People respected him for the man he was as well as for the rank he held.
“Very good indeed to see you in one piece, your Excellency,” he told Hajjaj when the foreign minister reached his side. “Swemmel’s whoresons have struck us a heavy blow here.”
“Aye, your Majesty.” Hajjaj knew more than a little gratitude that the king didn’t blame him for the Unkerlanter attack—or, if he did, didn’t say so in public.
“We are going to have to strengthen our defenses against dragons around the city,” Shazli said. “If the Unkerlanters did this once, they’ll come back to do it again.”
“That’s … true, your Majesty.” Hajjaj bowed with no small respect. “I hadn’t thought so far ahead.” That such a thing could happen once to Bishah was appalling enough. That it might happen again and again … He shivered.
“Do you know whether General Ikhshid lives?” King Shazli asked.
“I’m sorry, but no,” Hajjaj answered. “I have no idea. The eggs stopped falling, and the first thing I wanted to do was make sure you were safe.”
“Here I stand.” Shazli had lived the softest of soft lives. He was inclined to be pudgy, and had never looked particularly impressive. But there was iron in him. “King Swemmel will think he can put fear in us, so that we will do whatever he wants. He will find he is wrong. He will find he cannot make us bend our necks by dropping eggs from the sky.”
Several of the people in the damaged hallway clapped their hands. Hajjaj almost clapped himself. He did bow again. “This is the spirit that led your father to reclaim our freedom after the Unkerlanters ruled us for so long.”
King Shazli nodded. “And we shall stay free, come what may. Are we not still the men of the desert our forefathers were in days gone by?”
“Even so, your Majesty,” Hajjaj replied, though he and the king both knew the Zuwayzin were no such thing. This generation was more urban, and more like townsfolk in the rest of Derlavai, than any before it. But Shazli had to know saying such things was the best way to rally his people.
Neither of them mentioned that the king’s father had needed to free Zuwayza because the Unkerlanters had been strong enough to hold it down for generations, and neither of them mentioned that enough blows like the one the Unkerlanters had just delivered might break any people’s will—to say nothing of ability—to keep on fighting. Hajjaj understood both those things painfully well. This did not seem the best time to ask Shazli whether he did, too.
“I shall find out what we need to learn about Ikhshid,” the king said. He pointed at Hajjaj. “I want you to find a crystallomancer and speak to Marquis Balastro. Assure him we are still in the fight, and see what help we can hope to get from Algarve.”
“As you say.” Hajjaj’s cough had nothing to do with the dust and smoke in the air. It was pure diplomacy. “Seeing how things are going for them in their own fight against Unkerlant, I don’t know what they’ll be able to spare us.”
Shazli, fortunately, recognized a diplomatic cough when he heard one. “You may tell the marquis that we need tools to stay in the fight. They have more dragons than we do. They also have more highly trained mages than we do; they’re bound to be better off when it comes to things like heavy sticks that can knock a dragon out of the sky.”
“Every word you say there is true,” Hajjaj agreed. “I’ll do what I can.” He nodded to Qutuz. “To the crystallomancers.” His secretary nodded and followed.
One of the thick mud-brick walls of the crystallomancers’ office had a new, yard-wide hole in it. Some of their tables were overturned; some of their crystals were bright, jagged shards on the floor; some of them were bleeding. But one of the men who hadn’t been hurt quickly established an etheric connection with the Algarvian ministry. Balastro’s image stared out of a surviving crystal at Hajjaj. “Good to see you in one piece, your Excellency,” the redhead said.
“And you,” Hajjaj answered. “King Shazli expects the Unkerlanters to pay us more such calls.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Balastro said. “They missed me this time, so they’ll have to come back and try again.”
Hajjaj smiled at his self-importance, which was partly an act and partly typical of a lot of Algarvians. The
Zuwayzi foreign minister said, “Any help you can give us, we’ll be grateful for and put to good use. We have the men to serve heavy sticks and the men to fly dragons, if only we could get them. Then the Unkerlanters wouldn’t have such an easy time of it.”
“I’ll pass that along,” Balastro said. “When we haven’t got enough of anything ourselves, I don’t know what they’ll say about it back in Trapani. But I’ll pass it on with my recommendation that they give you all they can.” His eyes narrowed. He was shrewd, was Balastro. “After all, we have to keep you fighting Swemmel, too.”
“You and King Shazli see things much alike here,” Hajjaj said. “I am glad of it.” And I hope it does some good. But will it? Will anything?
Captain Orosio stuck his head into Colonel Sabrino’s tent. “Sir, the field post is here,” the squadron commander said.
“Is it?” Sabrino rose from his folding chair. He winced. The blazed shoulder he’d taken escaping the Unkerlanters after his dragon was flamed out of the sky still pained him. He wore a wound badge along with his other decorations now. He knew how lucky he was to be alive, and savored survival with Algarvian gusto. “Let’s see what we’ve got, then.”
He wore the furs and leather in which he would have flown into the frigid upper air. It was frigid enough down here on the ground in the Kingdom of Grelz. The third winter of the war against Unkerlant, he thought with a sort of dull wonder. He’d never imagined, not that first heady summer when the Algarvians plunged ahead on their western adventure, that the war against King Swemmel could last into its third winter. He’d found a lot of things here that he’d never imagined then.
The postman, who wasn’t a dragonflier, looked cold, but Algarvian soldiers who stayed on the ground weren’t always freezing, as they had that first dreadful winter, for which they’d been so woefully unprepared. The fellow saluted as Sabrino came up to him. “Here you go, Colonel,” he said, and handed the wing commander an envelope.
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