Authors: Harry Turtledove
“You there, soldier!” a Forthwegian officer snapped at him. “If you haven’t got anything better to do than waddle around like a drunken duck, draw a shovel and go fill in some slit trenches or dig some new ones. We’ve got no room in this camp for idle hands, and I’ll thank you to remember it.”
“Aye, sir,” Leofsig said resignedly. Even as captives, officers maintained the right to give common soldiers orders. The only difference was, even the brigadier who was the captives’ commandant had to obey the orders of the lowliest Algarvian trooper. Leofsig wondered how the brigadier, who was also a belted earl and a proud and touchy man, enjoyed being on the receiving end of commands. Maybe the experience would teach him something about what a common soldier’s life was like. Somehow, Leofsig doubted it.
The shovels made a sadly mismatched collection. A few were Forthwegian army issue; more, though, looked to have been looted from the farm surrounding the captives’ camp. The officer in charge of the latrines, an intense young captain, had nonetheless arranged them in a neat rack he’d built from scrap lumber.
“Ah, good,” he said as Leofsig made his slow approach. “It’s nasty work, to be sure, but someone’s got to do it. Choose your weapon, soldier.” He pointed toward the rack of shovels.
“Aye, sir,” Leofsig said again, and took as long as he could deciding among them. No one expected a captive to move fast; on what the Algarvians deigned to feed them, the captives couldn’t move fast. Leofsig knew as much, and took advantage of it.
“Now get to it,” said the captain, who probably hadn’t been deceived. As Leofsig started off toward the noisome trenches, the officer spoke again, this time with curiosity in his voice: “What did you do to get sent over here? The redheads mostly give this duty to Kaunians.”
“It wasn’t one of the redheads,” Leofsig said sheepishly. “It was one of our own officers. I don’t suppose I looked busy enough to suit him.”
“Seeing how you went about getting a shovel there, I can’t say I’m surprised,” the captain answered. He sounded more amused than angry; Leofsig hadn’t done anything drastic enough to deserve more punishment than latrine duty in a captives’ camp. After a moment, the captain went on, “Maybe it’s just as well you got nabbed. Seeing you, the Kaunians won’t think they’re the only ones getting stuck with the shit detail.”
“Just as well for you, maybe, sir,” Leofsig said, “but I don’t see how it’s just as well for me.”
“Go on,” the Forthwegian officer said again. “You’re not going to get me to waste any more of my time arguing with you.”
Leofsig wouldn’t have minded doing exactly that. Since he hadn’t managed it, he went off to work. He wished he could hold his nose and dig at the same time. A couple of Kaunians in trousers were already working among the slit trenches. The captain in charge of the latrines had been right; they seemed surprised to have a Forthwegian for company. Leofsig started filling in a trench. Flies rose, resentful, in buzzing clouds. Seeing he was doing the same thing they were, the Kaunians went back to it themselves. Leofsig noted that with some small relief, then forgot about them. He was working as fast as he could now, to get the job over with. If the Kaunians liked that, fine. If they didn’t, he thought, too cursed bad.
“You’ve got the wrong man, I tell you!” the prisoner shouted as Bembo marched him up the stairs of the constabulary building in central Tricarico. Bembo had clapped manacles on him; they clanked with every step he climbed.
When the prisoner’s complaints started to get on Bembo’s nerves, he pulled the club off his belt and whacked it into the palm of his hand. “Do you want to see how loud you can yell with a mouthful of broken teeth?” he asked. The prisoner suddenly fell silent. Bembo smiled.
At the top of the stairs, Bembo gave him a shove that took him into the door face first. Clucking at the prisoner’s clumsiness, Bembo opened the door and gave him another shove. This one sent him through the doorway.
The constabulary sergeant at the front desk was at least as portly as Bembo. “Well, well,” he said. “What have we here?” Like a lot of questions Algarvians asked, that one was for rhetorical effect. The next one wasn’t: “Why’d you haul in our dear friend Martusino this time, Bembo?”
“Loitering in front of a jeweler’s, Sergeant,” Bembo answered.
“Why, you lying sack of guts!” Martusino yelled. He addressed the sergeant: “I was just walking past the place, Pesaro—I swear on my mother’s grave. That last stretch of Reform did the trick for me. I’ve gone straight, I have.”
He wasn’t so persuasive as he might have been; the manacles kept him from talking with his hands. Sergeant Pesaro looked dubious. Bembo snarled. “Oh, he’s gone straight, all right—straight back to his old tricks. After I spotted him, I grabbed him and searched him. He had these in his belt pouch.” Bembo reached into his own pouch and pulled out three golden rings. One was a plain band, one set with a polished, faceted piece of jet, and one with a fair-sized sapphire.
“I never saw them before,” the prisoner said.
Pesaro inked a pen and started to write. “Suspicion of burglary,” he said. “Suspicion of intent to commit burglary. Maybe they’ll get sick of this and finally hang you, Martusino. It’d be about time, if anybody cares what
I
think.”
“This fat son of a sow is framing an innocent man!” Martusino cried. “He planted those rings on me, the stinking lump of dung. Like I just said, I never saw ‘em before in my life, and there’s not a soul can prove I did.”
Being a constable required Bembo to take more abuse than most Algarvians would tolerate, as it let him deal out abuse with more impunity than most Algarvians enjoyed. But he took only so much.
Sack of guts
had come up to the edge of the line and
fat son of a sow
went over it. He pulled out his club again and hit Martusino a good lick. The prisoner howled.
“Struck while resisting arrest,” Pesaro noted, and scribbled another line on the form he was filling out. Martusino yelled louder than ever, partly from pain, partly from outrage. Pesaro shook his head. “Oh, shut up, why don’t you? Take him for his pretty picture, Bembo, and then to the lockup, so I don’t have to listen to him any more.”
“I’ll do that, Sergeant. He’s giving me a headache, too.” Bembo gestured with the club. “Go on, get moving, or I’ll give you another taste.”
Martusino got moving. Bembo escorted him to the recording section, to get the particulars on him down in permanent form. A pretty little sketch artist took his likeness. Bembo marveled at the way she could get a man’s essence on to paper with a few deft strokes of pencil and charcoal stick. It wasn’t sorcery, not in any conventional sense of the word, but it seemed miraculous all the same.
He also marveled at the way the sketch artist filled out her tunic. “Why won’t you go out to supper with me, Saffa?” he asked, not quite whining but not far from it, either.
“Because I don’t feel like wrestling,” Saffa answered. “Why don’t I just slap your face now? Then it’ll be as if we’d gone to supper.” She bent her head to her work.
Martusino was rash enough to laugh. Bembo trod on his foot, hard. The prisoner yelped. Bembo did his best to grind off a toe or two, but didn’t quite succeed. Saffa kept right on sketching. Such things happened all the time in constabulary stations. Sometimes worse things happened. Everyone knew that. No one saw any need to make a fuss about it.
When she was done with Martusino’s portrait, she told Bembo, “You’ll have to take the manacles off him for a little while. He needs to sign the sketch, and we’ll need fingermarks from him, too.”
One of the constables in the recording section covered Martusino with a small stick while Bembo unlocked the manacles. Unwillingly, the prisoner scrawled his name below the picture of him Saffa had drawn. Even more unwillingly, he let her ink his fingertips and set the impressions of the marks on the paper beside the sketch.
“You’re out of business for a while now, chum,” Bembo said genially. “Walk off with anything else that doesn’t belong to you, and our mages will lead us straight to your door.” The manacles closed on Martusino’s wrists again.
“I didn’t take anything this time,” the prisoner protested.
“Aye, and they get babies from out behind the fig trees,” Bembo said. He and Martusino both knew a crooked wizard could break the link between a criminal and his sketch, signature, and fingermarks. Having signature and fingermarks to go with the image, though, made breaking the link harder and more expensive for the fellow who wanted it broken.
“We’re done here,” Saffa said.
Bembo took Martusino off to the lockup. Martusino knew the way; he’d been there before. As he and Bembo drew near, the bored-looking warder hastily closed a small book and shoved it into a desk drawer. Bembo caught just a glimpse of a bare female backside on the cover. “I’ve got a present for you, Frontino,” he said, and gave the prisoner a shove.
“Just what I always wanted.” Frontino’s expression belied his words. He examined Martusino. “This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this lug, but I’ll be cursed if I can remember his name. Who are you, pal?”
Martusino hesitated for a split second. Before he could give a false name, Bembo hefted the club. Martusino abruptly decided playing the game by the rules would be a good idea. He answered the warder’s questions without backtalk after that. Bembo had questions to answer, too, some of them duplicating the ones Pesaro had asked. When they were over, Frontino took a small stick out of the desk drawer—Bembo got another glimpse of that interesting book cover—and aimed it at Martusino. At his nod, Bembo undid the manacles. The constable also held his club at the ready.
“Strip off,” the warder told Martusino. “Come on, come on—everything. You know the drill, so don’t make me tell you anything twice.”
Martusino shed shoes and stockings, then pulled off tunic, kilt, and finally drawers. “Skin and bones,” Bembo said disdainfully. “Nothing but skin and bones.” The prisoner gave him a dirty look, but seemed to think another comment would earn him another clout. He was right.
Frontino rose, gathered up the belongings, and stuffed them into a cloth bag. Then he threw Martusino a tunic, a kilt, and cloth slippers all striped in black and white—lockup garb. Sullenly, the prisoner put it on. It didn’t fit very well. He knew better than to complain. “The judge decides you’re innocent, you’ll get your own junk back then,” the warder said. He and Bembo both grinned; they knew how unlikely that was. He went on, “Otherwise, come see me when you get out of Reform. I may have some trouble remembering where I stashed it, but I expect I will if you ask me nice.”
If you pay me off,
he meant.
Helpfully, Bembo said, “Pesaro thinks they may just up and hang him this time.”
Martusino scowled. The warder shrugged. “Well, in that case he probably won’t be coming back for it. It won’t go to waste.” Bembo nodded. In that case, Frontino would keep what he wanted and sell the rest. Warders rarely died poor.
“They won’t hang me,” Martusino said, though he sounded more hopeful than confident.
“Come on.” Frontino unlocked the big iron lock on the outer door to the lockup. “Go on in.” Martusino obeyed. Bembo and the warder watched him through the barred window. The inner door had a sorcerous lock. The warder mumbled the words to the releasing spell. The inner door flew open. Martusino went in among the rest of the prisoners awaiting their punishment. Frontino mumbled again. The door slammed shut.
“What would happen if a prisoner who knew some magecraft went to work on that inner door?” Bembo asked.
“It’s supposed to be proof against anyone below a second-rank mage,” the warder answered, “and fancy mages don’t go into the ordinary lockup—you’d best believe they don’t, Bembo my boy. We have special holes for them.”
“I’ve heard fancy whores say things like that,” Bembo remarked.
Frontino snorted and gave him a shot in the ribs with an elbow. “I didn’t know you were such a funny fellow,” he said.
“I don’t want too many people to know,” Bembo said. “If they did, I’d have to go up on the stage and get rich and famous, and I don’t suppose I could stand that. I’d rather stay a simple constable.”
“You’re pretty simple, all right,” Frontino agreed.
Bembo laughed, but not the way the warder thought he did: he’d expected Frontino to say something like that, and was amused to be right. Something else crossed his mind. “Say, what was that you were reading?” he asked. “It looked pretty interesting.”
“Talk about your fancy whores,” the warder said, and pulled the book out of the desk. When Bembo could tear his eyes away from that arresting cover illustration, he discovered the romance was called
Putinai: the Emperor’s Lady.
Frontino gave it his most enthusiastic recommendation: “She does more screwing in a week than an army of cabinetmakers could in a year.”
“Sounds good.” Bembo read the fine print under the title: “Based on the exciting true history of the turbulent Kaunian Empire.” He shook his head. “Kaunians have always been filthy people, I guess.”
“I’d say so,” the warder agreed. “Putinai does
everything,
and loves every bit of it, too. You can borrow the book after I’d done with it
—if
you promise to give it back.”
“I will, I will,” Bembo assured him, with something less than perfect sincerity.
Frontino must have recognized that, for he said, “Or you could spring for one yourself. Seems like every third romance these days is about how vile the Kaunian Empire was and how the bold, fierce Algarvian mercenaries finally overthrew it. Our ancestors were tough bastards, if half what you read is true.”
“Aye,” Bembo said. “Well, maybe I will buy one. A little extra cash in my pockets wouldn’t hurt, though.”
“Maybe we can take care of that.” Frontino got out the bag in which he’d stored Martusino’s clothes and effects, and took from it the burglar’s belt pouch. He and Bembo divided up the silver and the couple of small goldpieces they found inside.
“I get the odd coin,” Bembo said, scooping it up. “Pesaro’s going to want his cut, too.” Frontino nodded. That was how things worked in Tricarico.