Balastro no doubt meant it; he came closer to conforming to Zuwayzi usages than any other minister. Nevertheless, Hajjaj said, “Tell him that, for the sake of my kingdom’s dignity, I prefer to dress before receiving him. Getting into those ridiculous wrappings will also give me time to think, but you need not tell him that. Be sure to bring in tea and wine and cakes as quick as you can.”
“Just as you say, your Excellency,” Qutuz promised. “First, though, the Algarvian.”
Balastro usually had the hail-fellow-well-met air so many of his countrymen could don with ease. Not today. Today he was furious, and making no effort to hide it. Or, perhaps, today he donned a mask of fury with as much skill as he usually used while wearing a mask of affability.
Before Balastro could do much in the way in the way of blustering, Hajjaj’s secretary came in with the customary dainties on a silver tray. The Algarvian minister fumed to see them, but his manners were too good to let him talk business for a while. Hajjaj carefully hid his smile; he enjoyed turning the Algarvian’s respect for Zuwayzi customs against him.
But the small talk over refreshments could go on only so long. At last, Hajjaj had to ask, “And to what do I owe the pleasure of this unexpected visit?”
“Unexpected? I doubt it,” Balastro said, but some of the harsh edge was gone from his voice: Qutuz had picked a particularly smooth, particularly potent wine. Still, he did not sound accommodating as he went on, “Unless you can speak the truth when you tell me your kingdom isn’t taking in Kaunian fugitives.”
“No, I cannot do that, and I do not intend to try,” Hajjaj replied. “Zuwayza is indeed taking in Kaunian refugees, and will continue to do so.”
“King Mezentio has charged me to say to you that your giving haven to these fugitives”-Marquis Balastro clung to his own word-”cannot be construed as anything but an unfriendly act on the part of your kingdom.” He glared at Hajjaj; the wine hadn’t softened him so much after all. “Algarve knows full well how to punish unfriendly acts.”
“I am sure of it.” Hajjaj glared back. “Is Mezentio thinking of using us as fodder for his mages to kill to power their sorceries, along with however many Kaunians you have left?”
The sheer insolence of that, far out of character for Hajjaj, made Balastro lean forward in surprise. “By no means, your Excellency,” he replied after a pause for thought. “But you are an ally, or so Algarve has believed. Do you wonder that we mislike it when you clasp our enemies to your bosom?”
“Zuwayza is a small kingdom of free men,” Hajjaj replied. “Do you wonder that we welcome others who come to us looking for freedom they cannot find in their own lands?”
“I wonder that you welcome Kaunians,” Balastro growled. “And you know cursed well why I wonder that you welcome them, too.”
“Indeed I do.” Hajjaj pulled the city directory out of the drawer where he had put it a few days before and opened it to one of the dog-eared pages. “I see here the name of Uderzo the florist, who has been here for thirty years now- since he got out of Algarve at the end of the Six Years’ War. And here is Goscinnio the portraitist. He has been here just as long, and got here the same way. Do you think Forthweg and Jelgava and Valmiera and Lagoas weren’t screaming at us for taking in Algarvian refugees? If you do, sir, you’re daft.” He opened the directory to yet another marked page. “I can show you a great many more, if you like.”
“Never mind. I take your point.” But Balastro didn’t look or sound happy about taking it. “I remind you, though, your Excellency, that you were not allied to any of those kingdoms at the time.”
“As I have told you before, we are your allies, we are your cobelligerents against Unkerlant, but we are not your servants or your slaves,” Hajjaj replied. “If you try to treat us as if we were, we shall have to see how long we can remain your allies.”
“If you bring in spies and enemies, we shall have to see whether we want you for allies,” Balastro said. “Remember how many dragons you have from us, and how many behemoths; remember how our dragonfliers help ward your skies. If you want to face Unkerlant on your own …” He shrugged.
Would Mezentio make good on such a threat? He might, and Hajjaj knew it; the Zuwayzi foreign minister dared not underestimate the hatred the King of Algarve had for Kaunians. “How long ago were you begging us for more help here in the north?” Hajjaj asked. “Not very, as I recall.”
“We didn’t get much of it, as I recall.” Balastro leaned forward again, this time with keen interest. “Might we get more, in exchange for looking the other way at certain things you do?”
Algarvians were good at looking the other way when there were things they didn’t want to see. Hajjaj usually found that trait dismaying. Now he might be able to use it to Zuwayza’s advantage. “That could be a bargain, or the start of one,” he said, hoping to escape this dilemma with honor after all.
Skarnu’s world had shrunk to the farm where he lived with Merkela and Raunu, the hamlet of Pavilosta, and the roads between those places. He’d had little reason and less chance to go far astray since washing up on the farm, one more piece of flotsam tossed adrift as Valmiera foundered.
By now, though, he’d made a name for himself as one of the leaders of the fight against Algarve in his country. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. On the one hand, he was flattered that other Valmierans knew he was one of those who hadn’t despaired of the kingdom. On the other, their knowing he remained a rebel against the occupiers made it more likely the redheads would find out, too.
And so, when he strode into the town of Tytuvenai, he looked around to make sure no Algarvians were paying him any undue attention. To his surprise, he saw hardly any of King Mezentio’s men on the streets. Valmieran constables as blond as Skarnu patrolled them instead. In smart uniforms that reminded him of the one he’d worn in the army, they eyed his homespun tunic and baggy trousers with almost as much scorn as nobles in Priekule would have aimed at him.
“Come to see the bright lights, farmboy?” one of them called to Skarnu. The fellow’s partner laughed.
“Aye,” Skarnu answered with a wide, foolish grin. The role he played amused him: a city man pretending to be a country yokel to fool a couple of other city men. But if the new audience criticized his performance, he wouldn’t get a bad notice in the local news sheet. He’d get killed.
He’d never been in Tytuvenai before, and so some of his curiosity was genuine. The town, he’d heard, had some monuments that dated back to the days of the Kaunian Empire. He saw none. He did see some plots of ground that looked as if they’d recently held something or other but were now empty. He wondered if Algarvian wreckers had got rid of monuments they didn’t fancy, as he knew they’d done elsewhere in Valmiera.
After some searching, he found the tavern called the Drunken Dragon. The dragon on the signboard above the door certainly looked as if it had had several too many. Skarnu smiled up at it. Before he went inside, he checked to make sure no one had picked his pockets: the Drunken Dragon lay in that kind of neighborhood. Valmieran constables didn’t come hereabouts.
Inside, the place was dark and smoky and crowded. People gave Skarnu, a stranger, a once-over as he made his way to the bar. “What’ll it be?” asked the taverner, a man missing a couple of fingers from his right hand-probably from a wound in the Six Years’ War, for he was old enough.
“Ale and roasted chestnuts,” Skarnu answered, as he’d been told to do.
The taverner eyed him, then slowly nodded. After giving him what he’d asked for, the fellow said, “Why don’t you take ‘em over to that table by the fireplace? Looks like it’s got room for a couple more.”
“All right, I’ll do that,” Skarnu said. The men sitting at that table didn’t look much different from the rest of the crowd. Some were old. Some were young. None looked rich. One or two looked a good deal shabbier than Skarnu did. A couple, but only a couple, looked as if they’d be nasty customers in a fight.
“Where you from?” one of
the tough-looking fellows asked.
That was the question he’d been waiting for. “Pavilosta,” he answered.
“Ah,” the tough said. Several of the men nodded. One of them lifted a glass of wine in salute. “Simanu. That was a nice piece of work.”
Skarnu had never heard an assassination praised in such matter-of-fact terms. This was the crowd he’d come to meet, all right. He hoped none of the blonds at the table was an Algarvian spy. By coming to Tytuvenai, he’d bet his life none of them was.
A balding fellow with silver-rimmed spectacles said, “We’re just about all here now. I don’t know if Zarasai will be able to come.” That was not the name of a man but the name of a town: a sensible precaution, Skarnu judged. The bespectacled man went on, “Those people talk all the way across Valmiera. They can act all over the kingdom at the same time, too. We have to be able to do the same if we’re going to make their lives interesting.”
“It sounds good,” the ruffian said, “but how do we go about it? The post is slow, and the whoresons read it. Where are we going to get enough crystals? And how do we keep their mages from listening in on them? Emanations will leak, and we can’t afford it, not if we want to keep breathing we can’t.”
“Those are good questions,” the man with the silver spectacles said, nodding. “But we can’t go on as we have been, either. A good blow like the one at Count Simanu went half wasted because we didn’t make those people sweat all over the place at the same time. And we could have. But we didn’t, because we didn’t know it would happen till after it did.”
Nobody talked about Algarvians or redheads, or named King Mezentio. That, Skarnu judged, was also wise: no telling who might be trying to listen at some of the nearby tables. Skarnu said, “Only trouble is, if you’d known ahead of time, they might have known ahead of time, too.”
“Aye.” That was the tough again, his voice gone savage. “We’ve spawned enough traitors and to spare, that’s certain. And it’s not just the nobles who go riding with. . those people, or the noblewomen who let those people go riding on them, either.” Skarnu thought of his sister, the Marchioness Krasta-an Algarvian colonel’s lover these days-but not for long, for the fellow was continuing, “There’s traitors all the way down. When our time comes round again, we’ll have some fancy killing to do.” He sounded as if he looked forward to every bit of it.
“We must be ruthless, but we must be fair,” the bespectacled man said. “This isn’t Unkerlant, after all.”
The tough tossed his head. “No, it sure isn’t, is it? Unkerlant is still in the fight. Don’t you wish we could say the same?”
Skarnu winced. That hit home, painfully hard. He said, “We’re still in the fight.”
“A whole table’s worth of us,” the tough said. “Speaks well for the kingdom, that it does. But you’re right, Pavilosta. We’re what Valmiera’s got, and we’re the ones who are going to set her to rights when the day is ours.”
One of the other irregulars was about to say something when the tavern door opened. The fellow with the silver-rimmed spectacles nodded to himself. “Maybe that will be Zarasai after all.”
But it wasn’t yet another Valmieran who hadn’t given up on the fight against Algarve. Instead, it was a kilted Algarvian officer, backed by a handful of his own countrymen and quite a few more Valmieran constables. He spoke in a loud voice: “I am hearing there is an unlawful assembling here. You are all under arresting for questioning.”
Somebody threw a mug at him-not somebody from the table at which Skarnu sat. It caught the redhead in the face. He went down with a yowl, clutching at his smashed face. A moment later, all the mugs in the Drunken Dragon seemed to be flying. Skarnu wasn’t sure the Valmieran army had tossed so many eggs at the redheads while it was still a going concern.
But mugs were less deadly than eggs, and these Algarvians and their Valmieran stooges surged into the tavern. Some of them had bludgeons, and started beating on anyone they could reach. Some of them had sticks. To Skarnu’s shame, the redheads trusted the Valmieran constables with such weapons, sure they would use them against their own countrymen.
Except for the fire, all the lights in the tavern went out. That just made the brawl more confusing. Skarnu sprang off his chair and laid about him. The chair slammed into somebody’s ribs. Whoever it was went down with a groan. Skarnu hoped he’d flattened a foe, not a friend.
“Back here!” That was the bespectacled man’s voice. It came from the direction of the bar. Skarnu fought his way toward it. Someone close by him took a beam in the chest and toppled. When Skarnu smelled burnt flesh, he went down, too, and crawled the rest of the way. The Valmieran army had failed against Algarve, but he’d learned how to fight in it.
Behind the bar, he almost crawled over the tough. The fellow grinned at him and said, “Come on, pal. I know the back way.”
“Good,” Skarnu said. “I hoped there was one.” He also hoped the Algarvians and the constables who did their bidding weren’t watching it and scooping up fleeing foes one by one.
The tough scrambled into the little room in back of the bar. Skarnu followed him. The little room had a door that opened on the alleyway behind the Drunken Dragon. The tough hurried through it. Skarnu would have peered out first. But when the tough didn’t get blazed, he followed again.
Nobody looked to be watching the alley. Maybe the Algarvians didn’t know it was there, and maybe the Valmieran constables hadn’t bothered telling them about it. Skarnu hoped the constables weren’t cooperating so enthusiastically as they seemed to be, anyhow. After looking this way and that, he said, “Now we split up.”
“Aye, I was going to tell you the same thing, Pavilosta,” the other Valmieran answered. “You’ve got a pretty good notion of what you’re doing, looks like. Powers above keep you safe.”
“And you,” Skarnu said. The tough hadn’t waited for his reply, but was already strolling down the alley as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Skarnu strolled up it, trying to act similarly nonchalant. He felt easier when he ducked into another alleyway that ran into the one behind the tavern. That second alley led him to a third, and the third to a fourth. Tytuvenai seemed to have a web of little lanes going nowhere in particular. By the time Skarnu emerged onto a real street, he was several blocks away from the Drunken Dragon. He hoped more of the men who kept on resisting the Algarvians had got out after the tough and him.
“You, there!” The call was sharp and peremptory. Skarnu turned. A constable was pointing at him. “Aye, you, bumpkin. What are you doing here?”
If he was trying to panic Skarnu, he failed. For all the world as if he were nothing but a bumpkin, the marquis jingled coins in his pocket. “Sold some eggs,” he answered. “Now I’m heading home.”
“Well, go on, then,” the constable growled. He might not have caught hold of foes of the Algarvians, but he had exercised his petty authority. That was enough to satisfy him.
Skarnu hurried out of Tytuvenai. He breathed easier once he was out in the countryside. Most people on the roads outside the towns looked like farmers-which made sense, because most of them were farmers.
He wondered how the Algarvians had got word of the meeting their enemies were having. Someone betrayed us. The thought was inescapable. And everyone who’d sat around that table now knew what he looked like and near which village he lived. If the Algarvians caught his comrades and squeezed them, would they send a company of soldiers-or a couple of officers and a company of Valmieran constables-looking for him on the farms round Pavilosta? In their boots, he would have. That worried him more than anything.
“Come on!” Sergeant Pesaro boomed to the squad of Algarvian constables he led west from Gromheort. “Keep moving! You can do it!”
Bembo lifted off his hat and wiped sweat from his forehead with his other sleeve. “Fat old bugger,” he grumbled. “Why doesn’t he have an apoplexy and fall over dead?”
“He’s not even as fat as he used to be,” Oraste said.
&
nbsp; “I know.” Bembo didn’t like that, either, and wasn’t shy about saying why: “It’s all this fornicating marching we’re doing. Powers above, even I’m starting to get skinny.”
“Not so you’d notice, you’re not,” Oraste answered, which made Bembo send him a wounded look and tramp along for some little while in silence.
Sergeant Pesaro wasn’t shy about filling silences. “Keep it moving,” he repeated. “Won’t be much longer before we get to that stinking Oyngestun place.”
“Oh, aye, and won’t they be glad to see us when we get there?” Bembo said. “We’ve already taken one lot of Kaunians out of the lousy dump. What’ll they do now that we’re coming back for more?”
“Forthwegians’ll cheer, just like I would,” Oraste said. “As far as the blonds go, well, who cares?”
No one cared what happened to the Kaunians in Forthweg-except those Kaunians themselves, and there weren’t enough of them to matter. That was why dreadful things kept happening to them. If the Kaunian kingdoms were winning the war, what would they be doing to Algarvians? Bembo wondered. Nothing good-he was sure of that.
Another thought crossed his mind: if the Unkerlanters do win the war, what will they do to Algarvians? He didn’t care to imagine that. He was ever so glad to be marching through eastern Forthweg rather than through Unkerlant, even if King Mezentio’s men were moving forward again there. The Forthwegians might not love Algarvian constables, but some of the rumors that came drifting out of Unkerlant made the hair on the back of his neck try to prickle up.
“Here we are,” Pesaro said, lifting him out of his unhappy reverie. “Beautiful Oyngestun, the garden spot of all Forthweg.”
“Huh,” Oraste said, looking at the small, decrepit village with his usual scorn. “If Forthweg needed a good purging, this is where they’d plug in the hose.”
Bembo thought about that, then snorted. As long as Oraste was making jokes about villages and not about him, he thought his squadmate was a pretty funny fellow.
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