Oyngestun’s two or three Algarvian constables were waiting for the squad from Gromheort. So were a couple of dozen Kaunians, all standing glum and dejected in the village square. “Powers above, you lazy buggers,” Pesaro shouted to the local constables. “Where’s the rest of ‘em?”
“We haven’t got enough men to do a proper roundup,” one of the men posted to Oyngestun answered. “Miserable blonds start sliding away whenever our backs are turned.”
“You should have blazed a couple. That would have given the rest the idea.” Pesaro threw his hands in the air, as if to say, What can you do? “All right, all right. Well take care of it.” He turned to his squad. “Come on, boys. It’ll be a little more work than we figured, but we’ll live through it. Remember, we want to make a clean sweep-no more Kaunians left in Oyngestun. We’re going to take ‘em all back to Gromheort with us.”
A young constable named Almonio asked, “Permission to fall out, Sergeant?”
He didn’t have the stomach to seize Kaunians and put them on ley-line caravans to certain death. To Bembo’s surprise, Pesaro had let him get away with hanging back. But the sergeant shook his head this time. “Only place they’re going is Gromheort, kid. You can cursed well help us get ‘em there.”
“You know what’ll happen to them afterwards, though, same as I do,” Almonio protested.
“No.” Pesaro shook his head again. The wattle under his chin, a flap of skin that had been filled with fat when he was heavier, flopped back and forth. “The same thing’d happen to them if they stayed here. We’re just moving ‘em so we can keep track of ‘em easier, and you’ll help or I’ll report you. Have you got that?”
“Aye,” Almonio answered miserably.
“You’d better.” Pesaro raised his voice to a parade-ground roar: “Kaunians, come forth! Come forth or it will be worse for you!”
He spoke only Algarvian. A constable named Evodio, who remembered the classical Kaunian that had been beaten into him in school, translated Pesaro’s bellows into the language the blonds were more likely to understand.
But, regardless of the language in which they were hailed, no Kaunians came forth. As Bembo had said, they remembered what had happened the last time the Algarvian constables from Gromheort visited Oyngestun.
“If that’s the game they want to play, by the powers above, we’ll play it,” Pesaro said. “By pairs, men. Go through the houses and bring them out.”
As he and Oraste got started, Bembo said, “We went down this street the last time we were here.”
“Did we?” Oraste shrugged. “Why bother remembering?” He pounded on a door and shouted, “Kaunians, come forth!”
To Bembo’s surprise, the door opened. The elderly Kaunian who stood in the entry hall spoke slow, clear Algarvian: “I am here. What do you want?”
“Come with us, grandpa,” Bembo said, and jerked a thumb back toward the village square. “All you blonds are going back to Gromheort.”
“We’ve seen this old buzzard before,” Oraste said.
“So we have, by the powers above,” Bembo said, nodding. “He’s the one with the cute granddaughter, right?” He didn’t wait for his partner to agree, but turned back to the Kaunian. “Come on, grandpa. Where is she?”
“Vanai is not here,” the old man answered. “She has not been here since the early winter. She ran off with a Forthwegian lout. I do not know where they went.”
“A likely story,” Oraste said with a sneer.
Bembo was inclined to believe the Kaunian; the fellow would have had trouble sounding so indignant were he lying. But you never could tell. “We’re going to have to search your place,” he said.
“Go ahead. You will not find her,” the Kaunian said, and then, “If I am to be taken to Gromheort, what may I bring with me?”
“You’re not going to be taken, pal-you’re going to walk,” Oraste answered. “You can take whatever you can carry, but if you don’t keep up, you’re going to get what’s coming to you, and that’s for sure.” He looked as if he would enjoy giving the old man what he thought was coming to him.
“I will keep up,” the Kaunian said. He stood aside. “Come search. Try not to steal too much.” He shook his head. “What difference does it make? I have spent my whole life here, but I doubt I shall ever see this place again. My empire of knowledge has fallen, just as the great Empire did in times gone by.”
“What’s he talking about?” Oraste asked.
“Why do you think I know?” Bembo replied in some annoyance. He pointed at the old man. “Pack what you’re going to take, and be quick about it. Then go to the square. Come on, Oraste. Let’s make sure that gal isn’t hiding here.”
“Oh, aye.” A murky light sparked in Oraste’s eyes. “If we catch her, I know how to make her pay.”
When they went inside, Bembo stared in astonishment. He turned to the Kaunian. “What in blazes do you do with all these books?” He’d never seen so many in one place in his life.
“Read them. Study them. Cherish them,” the blond answered. “I have spent my life seeking understanding. And what has it got me? One sack to carry on the road to Gromheort.” He bowed stiffly. “I suppose I should thank you for paring existence down to essentials.”
“What’s he talking about?” Oraste repeated. He sounded more irritable this time, more ready to strike out at what he didn’t understand.
“It doesn’t matter,” Bembo told him. “Come on. Let’s look for the girl. We can’t waste time about it. We’ve got plenty of other Kaunians to shift.”
He and Oraste tore through the house with practiced efficiency. They found no one lurking in pantries or behind or under furniture or anywhere else. “Maybe the old bugger was telling the truth,” Oraste said. “Who would have believed it?”
“Stranger things have happened,” Bembo answered. “Did you get anything good when we split up there?”
“This and that,” the other constable said. “Don’t know what all of it’s worth, but some of it’s cursed old, that’s for sure. How about you?”
“About the same,” Bembo told him. “Somebody ought to do something about these books. They’re probably worth a good bit to somebody, but not to anybody I know.”
“Most of ’em are Kaunian garbage, anyway,” Oraste said. “You ask me, the mice and the silverfish are welcome to ‘em. Come on, Bembo. Like you said, he’s not the only stinking blond we’ve got to fetch.”
They did their job well enough to keep Sergeant Pesaro from screaming too loudly at them. By early afternoon, all the Kaunians the constables could flush out were standing in the square. With Evodio translating, Pesaro said, “Now we go back to Gromheort. Have you got that? Anybody who doesn’t keep up will be sorry to the end of his days-and that won’t be a long way off. Let’s go.”
“Curse you, you pox-ridden redheaded barbarian!” a blond shouted in pretty good Algarvian. “Why should we do what you-?”
Oraste pulled his stick off his belt and blazed the Kaunian, with deliberate malice, in the belly. The man fell, shrieking and writhing. A woman-probably his wife-screamed. Over their cries, Oraste shouted, “Anybody else want to get gay with us? We’ll give you what he got.”
Evodio turned that into classical Kaunian, though Bembo didn’t think it needed any translating. Pesaro said, “Get moving.” Evodio translated that, too. All the Kaunians started east except the blazed man. Even his wife, her face stunned and empty, trudged out of Oyngestun.
Some of the Forthwegians who lived in the village jeered as the blonds left. Some waved mocking good-byes. Some had already started going through the houses of the people who’d lived side by side with them for so many years.
Bembo said, “Curse them, they have a better chance to clean out the Kaunians than we got.” He sighed. “Being a constable’s a tough job.” Self-pity came easy to him.
Oraste raised a gingery eyebrow. “You want to go fight the Unkerlanters instead?”
“Powers above, no!” The mere thoug
ht was enough to make Bembo turn and curse the Kaunians shambling along the road.
The old Kaunian scholar spoke in his own language. Several of his countrymen smiled. Seeing that Bembo did not follow, he shifted to Algarvian: “It is a proverb from the days of the Kaunian Empire, and still true today, I think. ‘Speech is a mirror of the soul: as a man speaks, so is he.’ “
Bembo yanked his bludgeon off his belt and belabored the old man till blood streamed down his face from a split scalp. “Quote proverbs at me, will you?” he shouted. “I’ll teach you one: keep your lousy mouth shut. Have you got it? Have you?” He raised the bludgeon again.
“Aye,” the Kaunian choked out. Bembo strutted along, feeling better about the world. Oraste slapped him on the back, which made him happier yet.
Garivald woke with the sun in his face. When he looked around, he saw other men-some wrapped in rock-gray Unkerlanter army blankets, some in captured Algarvian tan ones, some in peasant homespun-lying on pine boughs among the trees. He shook his head in slow wonder, as he did almost every morning when he woke. He wasn’t a peasant any more, or not an ordinary peasant. He was an irregular, fighting King Mezentio’s men far behind their lines.
He wriggled out of his own blanket-the redhead who’d carried it into southern Unkerlant wouldn’t need it, not ever again-sat up, and stretched. Then he put on his sandals and got to his feet. His belly rumbled. Not far away, a stewpot was bubbling above a slow fire. He hurried over. “What’s in there?” he asked the fellow stirring the pot with a big iron spoon.
“Barley mush and a little bit of blood sausage,” the cook answered. Like Garivald, like most Unkerlanters, he was stocky and swarthy, with dark hair and a strong hooked nose, but his accent said he came out of the north, not from the Duchy of Grelz. “Want a bowl?”
“Hmm.” Garivald rubbed his chin, as if thinking it over. Bristles rasped under his fingers; chances to shave here in the woods seldom came. His belly rumbled again. He quit being coy. “Aye!”
“Here you go, then.” The fellow tending the pot grabbed a cheap earthenware bowl and filled it full of mush. “Mind you wash it before you give it back.”
“I’ll remember,” Garivald said. He would have to work to remember, and knew it. Back in Zossen, his home village, his wife Annore would have cleaned up after him. Washing things was women’s work, not men’s.
Sudden tears stung his eyes. To make sure the cook didn’t see them, he bent his head over the bowl and began to eat. How he missed his wife! How he missed his son and daughter, too, and how-oh, how! — he missed the village where he’d spent all thirty-two (he thought it was thirty-two, but he might have been out one either way) years of his life.
Another Unkerlanter irregular came up to the cook and got a breakfast bowl of barley. After taking it, he nodded to Garivald and said, “How about a song, pal?” By his soft speech, he was a local like Garivald.
“By now you’ve heard me sing, haven’t you?” Garivald asked, and the other fellow nodded. In some exasperation, Garivald went on, “Then why would you want to hear me again? I’m better at making the words than I am at singing them.”
He sometimes wished he’d never discovered he had to power to shape words into pleasing patterns. He would still be back with his family then, back in Zossen. . and back under Algarve’s thumb. Now he was a free man-free, but alone.
He knew how lucky he was not to be a dead man. Some of the songs he made had been for the irregulars in the woods around Zossen. But the Algarvians had found out who shaped the tunes that helped rouse the countryside against them. They’d seized him and taken him off to Herborn, the capital of the Duchy of Grelz (now the reborn puppet Kingdom of Grelz, with Mezen-tio’s cousin on the throne) to do away with him. If Munderic’s irregulars hadn’t ambushed the redheads and rescued him, he’d long since have been boiled alive.
The other irregular paused between spoonfuls of barley porridge to say, “You’re not that bad. And if you’ve got something new, I’d get to hear it first.”
“Nothing new this morning,” Garivald said, and went back to finishing his own breakfast. He knew he probably wouldn’t have been rescued if it weren’t for his songs, and he did spend time letting people hear his unspectacular voice. But nobody, in his experience, felt like singing early in the morning.
To his relief, the other fellow didn’t press him, but went back to try to wheedle a second bowl of mush from the cook. He had no more luck there than he’d had with Garivald, and slouched off cursing his fate.
Garivald rose and hurried away, which didn’t prove the best idea he’d ever had: he almost bowled over Munderic, the leader of this band. “Sorry,” he stammered, and stepped out of the way.
“It’s all right.” Munderic was burly even by Unkerlanter standards. He’d done a better job of shaving than most of the men who followed him. That should have made him look more pleasant. Somehow, it didn’t. He went on, “I was looking for you, as a matter of fact.”
“Were you?” Garivald asked in what he hoped wasn’t too hollow a voice. He wasn’t sure he wanted to draw the leader’s notice.
Want it or not, he had it. Munderic nodded briskly. “Aye. High time you were blooded. Songs are all very well, but you ought to be able to fight, too. The Algarvians are moving a couple of squads between Lohr and Pirmasens. We’re going to make sure they don’t have a happy time on the road.”
Back in Zossen, fifty or sixty miles away, Garivald had heard of Lohr and Pirmasens, but he couldn’t have told where they lay. He still couldn’t, not exactly; he was too new to what seemed to him a vastly distant part of the world. “Give me a stick and I’ll do what I can,” he said.
Munderic slapped him on the back. “I know you will.” His grin showed a couple of broken teeth. “It’ll make your songs better, too, because you’ll know more of what you’re singing about.”
“I suppose so,” Garivald answered. He nodded to Munderic as he might have to a schoolmaster-not that he’d ever had any schooling himself. “How do you know the Algarvians will be moving?”
“I have ears in Lohr. And I have ears in Pirmasens,” the leader of the irregulars answered. He had ears in half a dozen villages around this stretch of wood; Garivald already knew as much. Munderic continued, “If I hear the same thing in both places, it’s likely true.”
“Or it’s an Algarvian trick to draw you out,” Garivald said.
Munderic pondered that. “You’ve got a nasty, suspicious mind,” he said at last. “I won’t tell you you’re wrong, because the redheads could be doing that. But I don’t think they are this time.”
“I hope you’re right,” Garivald told him.
“I’m betting my life on it,” Munderic said, “for I’ll be along, you know. I don’t send people out to do what I won’t.” Now Garivald was the one who had to ponder and nod.
At Munderic’s order, the irregulars gave him a stick captured from some Algarvian. It bore a small enamelwork shield of green, white, and red, and was a bit shorter, a bit lighter, than the Unkerlanter military model. Hefting it, Garivald said, “Feels more like a stick for blazing rabbits than one for people.”
The man who gave it to him wore a filthy, tattered rock-gray tunic that had probably been on his back since the Algarvians’ advance the summer before overran this part of Unkerlant and left him a soldier stranded in enemy-held territory. “Don’t be a bigger fool than you can help,” he said, and pulled up his left sleeve to show the long, straight scar left behind after a beam burned a chunk of meat from his arm. “A stick just like that did this.” He laid his right finger on the scar. “It can happen to you, too-or it can happen to an Algarvian. Try and see that it does. You’ll be happier afterwards, believe me.”
“Aye, you’re bound to be right about that.” Garivald remembered the captured irregulars the Algarvians had hanged in Zossen. Who had they been? Just a couple of men nobody’d ever heard of. If they caught him and hanged him in Pirmasens or Lohr, who would he be there? No one at all,
just a stranger without any luck. He didn’t want to end his days like that, or on the wrong end of a stick, either.
Munderic led his raiders out of their woodland shelter in the dark, quiet hours between midnight and dawn. Garivald yawned and yawned, trying to make himself wake up. “This is our time,” Munderic said. “The Algarvians think they can do as they please during the day, but the night belongs to us.”
Despite that proud boast, the irregular leader and the rest of the band moved like hunted animals when they emerged from the forest and came out into the open country bordering it. Once, a dragon screeched high overhead. They stopped moving altogether, freezing as rabbits will when an owl hoots.
At last, Munderic said, “Come on. It’s gone.” Garivald looked up into the sky. He didn’t see the dragon, but he hadn’t seen it before, either. He wondered how-or if-Munderic knew it had flown on.
Even at night, he could see good farmland was going to waste around these parts. Rank weeds overran fields that hadn’t been planted in barley or rye. Grass grew tall in meadows where cattle and sheep hadn’t grazed. Sadly, Garivald shook his head. So many things would be a long time going back to the way they had been, if in fact they ever did.
Where the road ran through one of those ungrazed meadows, Munderic halted and held up a hand. “We wait here,” he said. “We’ll dig ourselves in along both sides of the track, and when the redheads come by, we’ll make them pay. Be sure they can’t spy any spoil from your digging, mind. It’s not an ambush if they know it’s there.”
Garivald had nothing with which to dig. He stood there feeling useless and helpless till another Unkerlanter let him borrow a short-handled spade: a soldier’s tool, not a farmer’s, one with which a man could dig while on his knees or even on his belly. “Heap up some of the dirt in front of your hole,” advised the fellow whose spade he was using. “It’ll help block a beam.”
“Aye,” Garivald said. “Thanks.” By the time he finished, the eastern sky had gone from gray to pink. Starlings started their metallic twittering. In the gray morning twilight, Munderic strode along the road to see what an Algarvian footsoldier would spy. He had a couple of men pull up grass and weeds to hide their holes better. He didn’t criticize Garivald, which made the peasant proud.
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