Authors: Harry Turtledove
After the rite was accomplished—most enjoyably accomplished—they lay side by side. Even then, Lurcanio’s hands roamed over her body. “You are generous to a soldier in a kingdom not his own,” he said. “You will not be sorry.”
Krasta rarely thought about being sorry. She’d never thought about it in the afterglow of lovemaking. She’d sometimes been angry then, which spoiled things, but never sorry. “Soon you Algarvians will rule the world, I think,” she said, which was and was not an answer.
“And you have chosen the winning side?” Lurcanio ran his fingers through her bush. “You see? You are a practical woman after all. Good.”
Even though Talsu sometimes wore his Jelgavan army uniform tunic and trousers on the streets of Skrunda, his home town, no Algarvian soldier who saw him had ever given him a rough time about it. He was glad. He did not have so many clothes as to make it easy for him to set any of them aside. Nor was he the only young man in Skrunda in pieces of uniform. That was true of most of the former soldiers the Algarvians hadn’t scooped into their captives’ camps.
Like his former comrades, he made money where he could, pushing a broom or carrying sacks of lentils or digging a foundation. One day, after lugging endless sacks of beans and clay jars of olive oil and sesame oil from wagons into a warehouse the Algarvians were using, he came home with half a dozen small silver coins stamped with the image of King Mezentio. They rang sweetly when he set them on the table at which his family ate.
“What have you got there?” his father demanded. Traku was a wide-shouldered man who looked as if he ought to be a tough but was in fact a tailor. His trade having left him shortsighted, he bent close to the coins to see what they were. Once he did, he growled a curse and swept them off the table and on to the floor. The cat chased one as it rolled.
“What did you go and do that for, Father?” Talsu crawled around on hands and knees till he’d found all the money. “Powers above, it’s not like we’re rich.”
“I don’t want that ugly whoreson’s face in my house,” his father said. “I don’t want the fundament of that ugly whoreson’s brother stinking up our throne, either. No redhead’s got any business sitting on it. It’s not their kingdom. It’s ours, and they can’t take it away from us.”
“Silver is silver,” Talsu said wearily. “Theirs spends as good as ours. Theirs spends better than ours, because they’ve buggered up the exchange rate so the redheaded soldiers can buy pretties for their mistresses on the cheap.”
“They’re thieves and robbers,” Traku said. “They can keep their cursed money, and pile my curse on top of all the others that are already there.”
In from the kitchen came Talsu’s mother and younger sister. His mother, Laitsina, carried a bowl of stew. His sister, Ausra, had a fresh-baked loaf of bread on a tray. The bread was an unhealthy brownish-tan color, not because it hadn’t been baked properly but because the flour wasn’t all it might have been. Ground beans, ground peas—Talsu hoped there wasn’t any sawdust mixed into it.
And the stew was more peas and beans and turnips and carrots, with only a few bits of meat here and there, more for flavor than for nourishment. Talsu wasn’t all that sure he cared for the flavor it gave. “What is this stuff?” he asked, holding a bit out on his spoon.
“The butcher says it’s rabbit,” his mother answered. “He charges for it like it’s rabbit, too.”
“I haven’t heard very many cats yowling on the roofs lately, though,” Ausra said with a twinkle in her eye. She glanced over to the little gray tabby that had bounded after the Algarvian silverpiece. “You hear that, Dustbunny? Stick your nose outside and you’re liable to be a bunny for true.”
Talsu made sure his next spoonful of stew held no meat. After that, though, he ate it. If it wasn’t all it might have been, the army had inured him to worse. And his mother had paid for it. With things as they were, the family couldn’t afford to let anything go to waste.
His mother might have been thinking along with him, for she said, “Dear, it would be a shame not to use the silver Talsu worked so hard to get.”
“It’s Algarvian money,” Traku said stubbornly. “I don’t want Algarvian money. We should have beaten King Mezentio’s men, not the other way around.”
He looked at Talsu as if he thought Jelgava’s defeat were his son’s fault. He’d been just too young to fight in the Six Years’ War, which if anything made him take its victory even more to heart than if he’d served, for he didn’t know firsthand what the soldiers who’d won that victory had endured to do it.
“Well, we cursed well didn’t,” Talsu said—he knew what soldiering was like. “Maybe we would have, if our precious noble officers had known their brains from their backsides. I can’t say one way or the other about that, because they didn’t.” He tore a chunk of bread off the loaf and took a big bite out of it.
Traku stared. “Those are the same lies you see on the Algarvian broadsheets all over town.”
“They aren’t lies,” Talsu said. “I was there. I saw with my own eyes. I heard with my own ears. I’ll tell you, Father, I’ve got no love for the redheads, and I don’t think they’ve got any business putting a king of their own over us. If King Donalitu comes back, that’ll be fine. But if the Algarvians hang every duke and count and marquis before he comes back, that’ll be even better.”
Close to a minute of silence followed. He hadn’t tried to hide his bitterness toward the Jelgavan nobility since trudging back to Skrunda, but he hadn’t been so blunt about it, either. At last, his father said, “That’s treason.”
“I don’t care,” Talsu said, which produced more silence. Into it, he went on, “And I don’t think it is, not really, because the nobles don’t run Jelgava any more. The Algarvians do, and I haven’t said anything about them.” He put the coins he’d earned back on the table. “You can have these if you want them. If you don’t, I’ll take them out and buy beer or wine and lemon juice.”
His mother scooped up the Algarvian silver. “Laitsina!” his father said.
“It’s money,” his mother said. “I don’t care whose face is on it. If our king comes home, I’ll shout myself silly for joy. Until he comes home -and after he comes home, too—I’ll spend whatever money people will take. And if you have any sense, so will you, and you’ll take any money the redheads give you, too.”
“That’s trading with the enemy,” Traku protested.
“That’s making a living,” Laitsina replied. “The Algarvians are here. Are we supposed to starve because they’re here? That’s foolishness. With the kind of food we can get nowadays, we’re close enough to starving as is.”
Ausra meowed, to remind Traku what sort of meat was liable to be in the stew. Her father gave her a dirty look. Talsu looked down into his bowl so Traku would not be able to see him laughing.
“Bah!” Traku said. “How can I say one thing when everyone else in my family says something else? But it’s a sorry day for Jelgava—I will say that.”
“That’s so. It is a sorry day for Jelgava,” Talsu said. “But we’ve had too many sorry days lately, and the Algarvians haven’t given us all of them. If you don’t believe me, Father, ask anybody else who was in the army and managed to come home again in one piece.”
He expected the argument to boil up once more, but his father only looked disgusted. “If we’d done everything as we should have, we’d have won the war. Since we didn’t win, we couldn’t have done everything right.” Traku settled down and ate his stew and bread and said not another word till they were gone. Even then, he talked about the coming of cooler weather and other innocuous things. Talsu concluded he’d won his point. He hadn’t done that very often before going into the army.
Next morning, after bread and sesame oil and a cup of beer almost as bad as he’d had in King Donalitu’s service, he went out to see what sort of work he could find for the day. During the night, the Algarvians had slapped a new set of broadsheets up on walls and fences all over Skrunda. They bore Mainardo’s beaky profile—very much like his brother Mezentio’s—and the legend, A KING FOR THE COMMON PEOPLE.
Seeing that slogan, Talsu slowly nodded. It wasn’t the worst tack the redheads could have taken. Talsu knew how many commoners were disgusted with the Jelgavan nobility and the way the nobles, no doubt with Donalitu’s approval, had governed the kingdom and botched the war.
A couple of women walking toward him along the street glanced at one of the broadsheets. She turned to her friend and said, “That might not be so bad, if only he weren’t a redhead.”
“Oh, aye, you’re right,” the other woman said. After casually passing judgment, they strode past Talsu, intent on their own affairs.
He turned the corner, heading for the market square. A crowd of half a dozen or so had gathered in front of another broadsheet. A man a little older than Talsu’s father who leaned on a cane said, “If we cursed King Donalitu, we’d wind up in his dungeons. Anybody think that, if we curse this new stinking whoreson the redheads have foisted on us, we won’t wind up in an Algarvian dungeon?”
Nobody told him he was crazy. A woman with a basket full of green and yellow squashes said, “I’ll bet the Algarvians have even worse dungeons than we do, too.” Nobody argued with her, either. Like everyone else who heard her, Talsu took it for granted that, however fierce King Donalitu’s inquisitors “were, those of the redheads would have no trouble outdoing them.
In the market square, a farmer was unloading big yellow wheels of cheese. “Give you a hand with those?” Talsu called: the fellow was taking them off a good-sized bullock cart.
“I suppose you’ll want one for yourself if I say aye,” the farmer answered, pausing with hands on hips.
“Either that or the price of one in coin,” Talsu said. “Fair’s fair. I’m not trying to steal from you, friend; I’m trying to work for you.”
“You’re a townman. What do you know about work?” The farmer tossed his head so that the flat leather cap he wore almost flew off. But then he shrugged. “You want to show me what you know about, come do it.”
“I thank you,” Talsu said, and sprang into action. He got the cheeses down from the wagon, stacked them on the burlap mat the farmer had already spread on the cobbles, and set a few of the best ones standing upright so customers could see how fine they were. That done, he told the farmer, “You ought to have a sign you could fasten to the side of the cart there, so people could see it all the way across the square.”
“A sign?” The farmer shook his head now. “Don’t much fancy such newfangled notions.” But then he rubbed his chin. “It might draw folks, though, eh?”
“Like a bowl of honey draws flies,” Talsu said solemnly.
“Maybe,” the farmer said at last—no small concession from a man of his sort. “Well, pick yourself a cheese, townman. You earned it, I will say.” He dug in his pocket. “And here you are.” He handed Talsu a silver coin: a Jelgavan minting, not one with Mezentio’s face on it. “That for your idea. Fair’s fair, like you said.”
“I thank you,” Talsu said again, and tucked it away. He knew just which cheese he wanted, too—a fine round one, golden as the full moon rising. He carried it back to his family’s home.
When he returned to the market square, he discovered half a dozen Algarvian soldiers making off with a large part of the farmer’s stock in trade. They were laughing and chattering in their own language as they hauled away the cheeses. The farmer could only stand and stare, furious but helpless. “Shame!” somebody called, but no one said or did anything more.
Several copies of the broadsheet with King Mainardo’s profile on it looked out over the square. Maybe the Algarvian-imposed king was for the common people, as the broadsheets claimed. The Algarvian soldiers looked to be out for themselves and themselves alone. Somehow, Talsu was not surprised.
Putting a crook in Skarnu’s hands no more made him a shepherd than putting a hoe in his hands had made him a proper cultivator. Gedominu’s sheep seemed to sense his inexperience, too. They strayed much more for him than they did for the farmer. So he was convinced, at any rate.
“Come back, curse you!” he growled at a yearling. When the yearling didn’t come back, he trotted after it and got the crook around its neck. It bleated irately when brought up short. He didn’t care. He wanted it back with the rest of the small flock, and he got what he wanted.
A couple of Algarvians rode unicorns down the road along the edge of the meadow. One of them waved to Skarnu. He lifted the crook in reply. The redheads kept on riding. They took Raunu and him for granted these days. The two Valmieran soldiers—two farm laborers, they were now—had been working for Gedominu as long as the redheads had occupied this district. No one, yet, had bothered letting the Algarvians know Skarnu and Raunu were as much newcomers as they were themselves. With luck, no one would.
Gedominu came limping out towards Skarnu. He glanced at the flock. “Well, you’ve not lost any of ‘em,” he said. “That’s pretty fair.”
“Aye, could be worse,” Skarnu said, and the farmer nodded. Skarnu did his best, these days, to talk in understatements, to make himself fit in with the people among whom he was living. That did even more to make him seem to belong than imitating their rustic accent. When he’d first tried that, he’d laid it on too thick, so that he’d sounded more like a performer in a bad show than a true man of the countryside. As with spies, a little of the local dialect served better than a lot would have done.
“Come have a bite of supper,” Gedominu said: understatement again. “Then we’ll look for some more fun.” That was also an understatement, of a slightly different sort.
Together, Skarnu and Gedominu chivvied the sheep back toward the pen where they would spend the night. Gedominu accomplished more without a crook than Skarnu with one. But neither had much trouble, for the animals went willingly enough. They knew grain would be waiting for them, to supplement what nourishment they got from the dwindling grass of the meadows.
Up on the barn roof, Raunu was hammering new shingles into places; rain a few days before had revealed some leaks. With carpenter’s tools in his hands, the veteran sergeant looked far more at home than he did when he had to try to deal with crops or livestock.