“We have been foes to the cursed Kaunians for time out of mind,” Balastro said with a shrug. “Now that we have the whip hand, we shall use it. Tell me you love the Unkerlanters. Go ahead--I need a good laugh today.”
“We have been known to live at peace with them,” Hajjaj said, “even as you Algarvians have been known to live at peace with the Kaunians.”
“Peace on their terms.” Balastro had no bend in him (and was, Hajjaj knew, forgetting long stretches of his homeland’s history). “Now it is peace on our terms. That is what victory earned us. We are the valiant. We are the strong.”
“Then surely, your Excellency, you will not need much in the way of help from Zuwayza in reducing Glogau, will you?” Hajjaj asked innocently.
Balastro gave him a sour look, got to his feet, and departed with much less ceremony than was customary. Hajjaj stood in the doorway and watched his carriage start back toward the Algarvian ministry back in Bishah. As soon as it rounded a corner--but not an instant before--the Zuwayzi foreign minister let himself smile.
Istvan eyed the pass ahead with something less than delight. “There’ll be Unkerlanters up yonder,” he said, with as much gloomy certainty as a man eyeing dark clouds billowing up from the horizon might use in saying, There’s a storm on the way.
“Aye, no doubt.” That was Szonyi. “And we’ll have to pay the bill for digging them out, too.”
“There won’t be very many of them.” Kun, of all people, was looking on the bright side of things.
“There won’t need to be very many of them.” Istvan waved a hand at the steep-sided jumble of rocks to right and left. “This is the only way forward. As long as they hold it, we aren’t going anywhere.”
Szonyi nodded, looking no more happy than Istvan felt. “Aye, the sergeant’s right, Kun. Ever since the Unkerlanters decided they were going to fight after all, this is the game they’ve played. They aren’t trying to stop us. They’re trying to slow us down, to give us as little as they can till winter comes.”
“And winter in this country won’t be any fun at all.” Istvan eyed the sun. It still stood high in the northern sky at noon, but a tiny bit lower each day. Winter was coming, as inexorably as sand ran through the neck of a glass and down into the bottom half.
Trouble was coming, too. From the strong position they’d set up for themselves in that pass, the Unkerlanters started tossing eggs at the advancing Gyongyosians. Their aim wasn’t particularly good; many of the eggs, instead of bursting on the paths Istvan and his countrymen were using, smote the mountainsides above them. Before long, Istvan discovered the Unkerlanters knew what they were doing after all. One of those bursts touched off an avalanche that swept several soldiers and several donkeys off a path and down to their doom.
“Whoresons!” Istvan shook his fist toward the east. “That’s a coward’s way to fight.”
“They have no honor,” Kanizsai said. “They do nothing but toss eggs and blaze at us from ambush.”
“That’s because there aren’t very many of them here,” Kun said, as if explaining things to an idiot child. “They can’t afford a big standup fight with us, because they’re in the middle of a big standup fight with Algarve.”
“No honor,” the young recruit repeated.
“Whether they do or whether they don’t, we still have to shift the goat-buggers,” Istvan said. As if to underscore his words, an egg burst close by, hurling a big chunk of stone past his head.
Kun asked a question Istvan wished he would have kept to himself: “How?”
Since the whole squad was looking at him, Istvan had to answer. Since he didn’t know, he said, “That’s for the officers to figure out.”
“Aye, but it’s for us to do,” Szonyi said. “We do the work, and we do the bleeding, too.”
“We are warriors,” said Kanizsai, who, not yet having been in any big fights, didn’t realize how quickly most of them could become dead warriors if they rushed a strong position manned by stubborn troops.
The officers set over them did seem to realize that, for which Istvan blessed the stars. Instead of the headlong rush he’d dreaded, the commanders in charge of the advance into Unkerlant sent dragons against the enemies blocking the pass ahead. Eggs fell from under the bellies of the great beasts. Having endured more rains of eggs on Obuda than he cared to remember, Istvan knew a sort of abstract sympathy for the Unkerlanters there to the east.
Szonyi had endured attack from the air, too. If he knew any sympathy for the Unkerlanters, he concealed it very well. “Ball the whoresons,” he said, over and over again. “Smash ‘em up. Squash ‘em flat. Don’t leave enough of any one of’em to make a decent ghost.”
Kun cleared his throat. “The notion that a ghost resembles a body at the moment of its death is only a peasant superstition.”
“And how many ghosts have you seen with your beady little eyes there, Master Spectacles?” Szonyi demanded.
“Stuff a cap in it, both of you,” Istvan said, rolling his eyes. “We’re supposed to be fighting the Unkerlanters, not each other.”
And the Unkerlanters, to his dismay, kept fighting back. They must not have saved all their heavy sticks for the fight against Algarve: they blazed a pair of Gyongyosian dragons out of the air as the beasts stooped low to drop their eggs precisely where their fliers wanted them to go. The rest of the men flying the brightly painted dragons urged them higher into the sky.
“Stars guide the souls of those two,” Szonyi murmured, and glanced over to Kun as if expecting the mage’s apprentice to argue with him. Kun simply nodded, at which Szonyi relaxed.
Eggs did keep falling on the Unkerlanter strongpoint, if not with the accuracy the Gyongyosians could have got by going lower. But eggs also kept falling on the footsoldiers waiting to assault the strongpoint, for the dragonfliers had not been able to wreck all the Unkerlanter egg-tossers.
A whistle shrilled. “Forward!” shouted Captain Tivadar, the company commander. He went forward himself, without hesitation. A commander who was not afraid to face the foe brought his men with him.
“Forward!” Istvan called, and trotted after the captain. He did not look back over his shoulder to see if his men followed. He assumed they would. If they didn’t, their countrymen would do worse to them for cowardice than the Unkerlanters would for courage.
Here, at least, he could see the position he was attacking. Back on Obuda, he’d often blundered through the forest without the faintest notion of where the Kuusamans were till he or his comrades stumbled over them. The disadvantage here was that the Unkerlanters knew where he was, too. He used what bushes and boulders he could for cover, but felt as if he were under the eyes of King Swemmel’s men at every stride.
Still under assault from the air, the Unkerlanters were slower than they might have been to shorten the range on their egg-tossers. That made life easier for Istvan and his companions . . . for a little while. But then flashes of light began winking from behind the piled-up stones at the mouth of the pass as the Unkerlanters brought their sticks into play.
Istvan blazed back at them. “By squads!” Captain Tivadar shouted. “Blaze and move! Make them keep their heads down while we advance on them!”
He wasn’t the only officer shouting similar orders. The Gyongyosian soldiers who’d seen war before, either in the mountains against Unkerlant or on the islands of the Bothnian Ocean, obeyed more readily than the new recruits. Running past a corpse with tawny yellow hair, Istvan shook his head. Living through a couple of fights improved your odds of living through more than a couple.
A moment later, he shook his head again. If you didn’t live through your first couple of fights, you were unlikely to live through any after that.
“Swemmel!” the Unkerlanter soldiers shouted. “Swemmel!” They shouted other things than their king’s name, too, but Istvan couldn’t understand those. To his ears, the Unkerlanter language sounded like a man in the last stages of choking to death.
A beam hissed past his
head, so close that he could feel the heat and smell the sharp lightning reek it left behind in the air. He threw himself flat and scrambled toward the closest rock he could find. He peered out from behind it. In their gray tunics, the very color of the mountainside, the Unkerlanters were cursed hard to see.
When he did spot one, he took careful aim before blazing and then whooped as the fellow slumped bonelessly, stick falling from his fingers. “Good blazing, Sergeant,” Tivadar called, and Istvan puffed out his chest: nothing like doing well when a superior was watching.
Then he had no more time to dwell on such trivia, for he and his comrades were in among the Unkerlanters, forcing the enemy back more by weight of numbers than by skill at arms. Some of King Swemmel’s soldiers seemed glad to flee, running east down the valley toward the distant land where most of them were born. Others, though, iield their ground as stubbornly as if they too sprang from a warrior race. And, indeed, it was not through want of courage that some of the defenders finally did give way, but only through being overwhelmed by the swarming Gyongyosians.
“By the stars,” Istvan said, shaking his head in wonder as he finally made his way toward the end of the Unkerlanters’ defensive works, “if this were great army against great army and not a regiment of ours thrown at a couple of companies of theirs, Gyongyos and Unkerlant would both run out of men.”
“Aye.” That was Kun, who limped along after him, having taken a light wound from a stick. The mage’s apprentice still had his spectacles on, whether through some protective magic of his or thanks to an out-and-out miracle Istvan couldn’t have said. Kun pointed ahead. “One more little fortress of theirs up there, and then we can go on.”
“So we can,” Istvan said. “And then, a few miles farther east, they’ll choose another pass we have to go through, and they’ll entrench themselves there. At five miles a day, how many years are we from Cottbus?”
Kun wore a faraway expression as he calculated. “Three,” he said, “or rather a bit more.”
Istvan, who had only sketchy schooling, did not know if he was right or wrong. He did know the prospect struck him as gloomy. And he also rapidly realized that the Unkerlanters in the little fortress ahead had no intention of letting his comrades go any miles farther that day. They blazed away at the Gyongyosians with such ferocity across such level ground that to approach or to try to go around their strongpoint was an appointment with death.
Only after Gyongyosian dragons returned and dropped great swarms of eggs on the fortress did the blazing from it ease enough to let the footsoldiers mount an assault. Even then, Unkerlanter survivors kept fighting in the wreckage until, at last, almost all of them were slain. Only a couple of dark-haired men came out of the works with their hands held high.
And when Istvan went into the battered fortress, he discovered something that set him shouting for Captain Tivadar. After a while, the company commander picked his way through the wreckage and stood beside his sergeant. “Well,” he said at last, “now we know why they were able to blaze so well for so long.”
“Aye, sir,” Istvan said. “So we do.” Ten Unkerlanters lay side by side, each of them with his throat cut. The Gyongyosians had not done that; the Unkerlanters’ own countrymen had. “Do you suppose they volunteered, or did their officers draw straws, or would they just pick the men they liked least?”
“I don’t know,” Tivadar answered. “Maybe the captives will be able to tell us.” He gulped, looking for something more to say. At last, he managed, “It was bravely done, though. See?--none of them has his hands tied. They gave themselves up so their comrades would have plenty of sorcerous energy in their sticks to keep blazing at us.”
“So they did.” Istvan looked down at the neat if bloody row of corpses. He gave them the best tribute he could: “They died like warriors.” He wondered how many Gyongyosians would have yielded themselves up for their fellows’ sake like that. Then he wondered what the Unkerlanters would do at the next position they chose to defend with all their strength. And then he wondered if he’d be lucky enough to see the Unkerlanter stronghold after that.
Seen from Setubal, the Derlavaian War had a curious feel, almost as if it were happening in a distant room. The Strait of Valmiera protected Lagoas from invasion. So did Algarve’s enormous fight with Unkerlant; thus embroiled, King Mezentio’s men could not afford to do much against the Lagoans. Occasional dragons dropped eggs on Setubal and the other towns of the northern coast. Occasional warships tried to sneak in and raid the shoreline. Rather more Lagoan dragons flew against the Algarvian-held ports of southern Valmiera. Other than that. . .
“They fear us,” a second-rank mage named Xavega said to Fernao as the two of them sat drinking fortified wine in a dining room of the Grand Hall of the Lagoan Guild of Mages.
Fernao bowed in his seat, an almost Algarvian courtesy. “I thank you, milady,” he said. “You have proved, without leaving the tiniest particle of room for doubt, that being a woman does not keep one from being a fool.”
Xavega glared at him. She was in her early thirties, a few years younger than he, and had a fierce scowl somehow made fiercer by her being quite good-looking. “If Algarve did not fear us,” she said, “Mezentio would have tried settling accounts with us before turning his eye westward.”
“You’ve never traveled outside Lagoas, have you?” Fernao asked.
“As if that should make a difference!” Xavega tossed her head. Her mane of auburn hair flipped back over her shoulders.
“Ah, but it does,” Fernao said. “You may not believe me, but it does. People who’ve never left Lagoas have no sense of... of proportion--I think that’s the word I want. It’s true of anyone who hasn’t traveled, but more so with us, because our kingdom is only the smaller part of an island, but we naturally think it’s the center of the world.”
By Xavega’s expression, no other thought had crossed her mind. And, by her expression, she wasn’t interested in having other thoughts cross her mind. The thought of bedding her later in the evening had crossed Fernao’s mind; he suspected he’d just dropped an egg on his chances. She said, “Setubal contains the world. What need to go farther?”
That held some truth--some, but not enough. “Proportion,” Fernao repeated. “For one thing, Mezentio couldn’t very well jump on us when Swemmel was ready to jump on him from the west. For another, if he did jump us, he’d bring Kuusamo into the war against him, and he can’t afford that.”
“Kuusamo.” Xavega waved her hand, as Lagoans had a way of doing when they thought of their neighbors on the island.
“Kuusamo outweighs us two or three to one,” Fernao said, an unpleasant truth his countrymen preferred to forget. “The Seven Princes look east and north for gain more than they do toward us or toward the mainland--easier pickings in those directions--but they don’t have to.”
“They’re Kuusamans,” Xavega said with a sneer, as if that explained everything. For her, evidently, it did. Pointing to Fernao, she went on, “Just because you have their eyes, you don’t need to take their part.”
Fernao got to his feet and bowed stiffly. “Milady, I think you would find yourself more at home in Mezentio’s kingdom than in your own. I give you good evening.” He stalked out of the dining room, proud he hadn’t flung the last of his wine in Xavega’s face. By her looks, she might have been of pure Algarvic stock. But, like most Lagoans, she also probably had Kaunians and Kuusamans somewhere down the trunk of her family tree. Scorning people for their looks was bad manners in most Lagoan circles--although not, evidently, in hers.
He wondered how many did share her views. If Lagoas became a kingdom where a man with narrow eyes or a woman with blond hair couldn’t go out on the streets without fear of being insulted or worse, would it be the sort of kingdom in which he cared to live? No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than another followed it: Where else could I go?
Nowhere on the continent of Derlavai, that was certain. He’d been to the austral continent, and heartily hop
ed never to have anything to do with it again. He hadn’t visited equatorial Siaulia, but had no interest in doing so. It was as backward as the land of the Ice People, and the war that blazed through Derlavai sputtered there, too, as Derlavaian colonists and their native vassals squabbled among themselves.
The scattered islands in the Great Northern Sea were even less appealing, unless a man aimed to forget the world and make sure the world forgot him, too. That was not what Fernao had in mind. If Lagoas went bad . . .
As he left the Grand Hall, his head turned, almost of itself, toward the east. Odd to think of Kuusamo as a bastion of sanity in a world gone mad. It was odd for most Lagoans to think of their short, dark, slim neighbors any more than they had to.
Fernao hurried up the street to the caravan stop. Because of his own interests, he was not like most Lagoans. Maybe his interest in Kuusaman magecraft:--and his curiosity over whatever the Kuusamans weren’t talking about--had led him to take Xavega’s crack about his looks more to heart than he would have otherwise.
A ley-line caravan glided up. A couple of passengers got off; a couple got on. Fernao stayed at the stop--this wasn’t the route he needed. And maybe she’s just a nasty bitch, the mage thought sourly. He glanced at the people hurrying past him: regardless of the hour, Setubal never slept. One in five, maybe one in four, had eyes like his. If Xavega didn’t care for them, too cursed bad.
Another caravan car came to the stop. Fernao climbed aboard and tossed a coin in the fare box: this car would take him to within a street of his block of flats. He sat down next to a yawning woman who looked to have a good deal more Kuusaman blood than he did himself.
Coming into his building, he paused at the pigeonholes in the lobby to see what the postman had brought him. Along with the usual advertising circulars from printers, dealers in sorcerous apparatus, nostrum peddlers, and local eateries, he found an envelope with an unfamiliar printed franking mark. He held it up to his face so he could read the postmaster’s blurry handstamp over the mark.
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