Authors: Harry Turtledove
Talsu waited, but that didn’t happen. What did happen was a flash of light somewhere off to the west, almost at the edge of his vision. And after that, he felt no more of the sorcery that had wrecked his comrades in the steeper hills to the south.
What
had
the Kuusamans done? The first fellow he’d talked to, the one who’d spoken classical Kaunian really well, had worn a mage’s badge. Had he had something to do with whatever had just happened?
How should I know?
Talsu wondered. It didn’t really matter, anyhow. What mattered was that the redheads’ magic had failed them.
Did the Kuusamans here even know what their sorcerers had done? Talsu doubted it. That didn’t really matter, either. The redheads in these parts hadn’t been able to stop their foes through force of magecraft. Now they would have to try through force of arms.
And I don’t think they’ve got the force of arms to do it, not when their flank s been turned.
He wasn’t, he didn’t have to be, part of the battle for Skrunda and the surrounding territory. Watching it unfold without risk to him was a rare luxury, like expensive wine or extra-soft wool for a pair of trousers. A steady stream of Kuusaman soldiers slogged past him, heading into the fight. He waved to the men of each company. They were doing his kingdom an enormous favor. He wondered if they thought of it that way, or whether they were as resigned to doing as they were told as he had been during his army days. The latter, he would have bet.
Dragons flew low overhead, dragons hard to spot because they were painted in Kuusaman sky blue and sea green. No Algarvian dragons that he saw rose to challenge them. He hadn’t seen many Algarvian dragons here in Jelgava, not at any time and especially not the past year or so.
Where are they?
he thought.
Defending Algarve itself, I suppose, and trying to hold back the Unkerlanters. But Mezentio’s soldiers in these parts are paying a big price because the redheads don’t have enough.
That left him something less than brokenhearted.
He trudged forward, sticking to the fields by the side of the track so the advancing Kuusamans would get the benefit of the best ground. Before he’d gone very far, he passed a crater in the ground and a corpse with nastily mangled legs. He gulped. Even if the Algarvians didn’t have soldiers covering this route, they’d buried eggs in the ground to slow up an enemy advance. Haifa mile farther on lay a dead behemoth with its right hind leg only a bloody mess. Talsu gulped again.
Here came some kilted Algarvians back toward him. They weren’t part of a counterattack. None of them carried a stick, and all of them held their hands high over their heads. They were captives, herded along by a couple of bowlegged little Kuusamans. When Jelgava fell, a handful of Algarvians had taken a battalion’s worth of Talsu’s countrymen into captivity. Now they were tasting the humiliation they’d dished out. Some of them looked weary. More had that beaten-dog grin of relief at being alive.
Going down onto lower ground meant Talsu couldn’t see Skrunda anymore. But he knew where it lay, and made for it without hesitation. He kept peering northwest, for fear he’d see a great column of greasy black smoke rising into the sky. That would mean the redheads were fighting there, or else that they’d fired the town to help cover their retreat. He hoped they would do no such thing, but knew he couldn’t be sure what they might try.
To the Kuusamans, he was just one more civilian now. He did his best to stay out of their way, too. Some of them were liable to blaze first and ask questions later.
Then the road rose and let him see his home town again. He felt like cheering—it looked more or less intact. He hurried toward it with the eagerness of a lover rushing toward his beloved. And he was rushing toward his beloved, too, for Gailisa was there—or he hoped with all his heart she was.
He trudged into Skrunda an hour or so later. The first thing he saw was two Jelgavan bodies hanging from lampposts. The placards tied round their necks said, THEY FOUGHT AGAINST ALGARVE. Neither of them was anybody Talsu knew well. He let out a silent sigh of relief at that.
He made for the grocer’s shop his father-in-law ran. Maybe Gailisa would be there. If she wasn’t, her father would surely know where she was—and he would know about Talsu’s mother and father and sister, too.
But the grocer’s shop wasn’t there anymore. Talsu stared in startled dismay. He’d been away from Skrunda for a couple of months now. How many times had dragons come over the town and dropped eggs on it? In one of those visits, the grocer’s shop had gone up in flames, as his own family’s tailor’s shop had earlier. Now he had to hurry toward the tent city on the west side of town, where refugees like his family had been staying. Maybe he could find Gailisa’s father there, too.
Maybe Gailisa’s father and Gailisa herself had been in the grocer’s shop when eggs fell on and around it. Talsu tried not to think about that.
A couple of people who knew him nodded cautiously as he hurried past them. A couple of others turned their backs. Some folk in Skrunda still thought the Algarvians had let him out of their dungeon because he’d betrayed his countrymen for them. There was very little truth in that, but how could he prove it?
He was about the plunge into the tent city and make for the tent where he’d been sheltering before he had to flee when someone called his name: “Talsu!”
“Ausra!” he said, whirling toward his sister, recognizing her voice even before he saw her. She threw herself into his arms. He squeezed the breath out of her and kissed her on the cheek. “Are you all right? Is Gailisa? Are Father and Mother?”
“Aye, we’re all fine,” she answered, and he kissed her again, harder this time. But she went on, “Gailisa’s father …”
“Oh, powers above!” Talsu said. “I saw the shop on the way here. He didn’t get out?”
Ausra shook her head. “I’m afraid not. Gailisa’s taken it pretty hard.”
“I believe that,” Talsu said, though he’d always thought of his father-in-law as a plump, not particularly good-natured nonentity, one of the least interesting people he’d ever known. “When did it happen? The ruins looked pretty fresh.”
“Just last week,” his sister told him. He ground his teeth. Ausra took his arm. “But come on. I don’t think the redheads are looking for you anymore.”
“I didn’t see any Algarvians in town,” Talsu said, “and I think Skrunda is as good as free, because the Kuusamans have broken through beyond the town, and the redheads will have to pull back or be trapped.”
“How do you know that?” Ausra asked.
“Because I showed the Kuusamans the route they could use to break through,” Talsu answered proudly. This time, Ausra kissed him.
That was nice, but the looks on the faces of Traku and Laitsina and, best of all, Gailisa were finer still a couple of minutes later. And kissing his wife was ever so much finer than kissing his sister. “You’re home!” Gailisa said. “You’re safe!” She started to laugh and cry at the same time.
“I’m home. I’m safe,” he agreed. “And we’re free. We’re rid of the redheads for good.”
“Here you go, Sergeant,” Kun said as he and Istvan cut wood together in the captives’ camp on Obuda. “You might want these.” He took a few sickly-green leaves from his pocket and held them out to Istvan.
“Oh, I might, might I?” Istvan didn’t take the rather wilted leaves. “Stars above, why?”
Kun leaned closer and spoke in a hissing whisper: “Because they’ll give you a good two-day dose of the galloping shits, that’s why.”
Istvan gaped at him. “Are you out of your mind? Why would I want a dose of the shits? They’re too stinking easy to get here anyway, the kind of slop the slanteyes feed us.”
“Will you take the accursed weeds before the guards start giving us the fishy stares?” Kun snapped. Startled—Kun didn’t usually sound so vehement—Istvan did stick the leaves in his own pocket and go back to chopping. Kun started swinging his axe again, too. Nodding, he said, “That’s more like it.”
“More like what?” Istvan said plaintively. “I still haven’t got the faintest idea what under the light of the stars you’re talking about.”
Corporal Kun rolled his eyes, as he had a habit of doing when sorely tried. “You’re such a natural-born innocent, who can guess how you’ve managed to live this long? But if you’ve got any sense at all, you’ll chew those leaves tonight right around suppertime.” His axe bit into a chunk of pine. Chips flew. He smote again. The chunk split in two.
“I’m not going to do any such thing till you tell me why and have it make sense,” Istvan said stubbornly.
That only made Kun roll his eyes again. “Just as you say, then.” He was most dangerous when most exquisitely polite. “Tonight, you’ve got yourself a choice. You can leak out your arsehole and go into the infirmary and feel better in a couple of days, or else you can leak out of a cut throat and not feel better ever again. That’s it. Depending on how you choose, it may be the last choice you ever get to make.”
“Oh!” No matter how naive Istvan was, he couldn’t very well misunderstand that. He attacked the chunk of pine in front of him with more violence than it really needed. “They’re going to do it tonight?”
“No, I just want to give you the shits,” Kun replied. “That way, when you get over them, you can come back and beat the stuffing out of me. I really enjoy having people beat the stuffing out of me, especially when they’re twice my size.”
“You have leaves of your own?” Istvan asked.
“Of course not,” the former mage’s apprentice said. “I really enjoy having my own throat cut, too, so I gave you all the leaves I had.”
Istvan’s ears heated. Maybe Kun didn’t deliberately treat him as if he were an idiot. On the other hand, maybe Kun did, too—and maybe he’d earned it with that particular question. But he didn’t worry about it for long. He asked, “Did you give Szonyi some of these precious leaves, too?”
If he’d hit the wood harder than he had to, Kun splintered the piece in front of him with his next couple of blows. At last, he answered, “I tried to give him some, but he wouldn’t let me. He’d rather take his chances with Captain Frigyes. You can, too, if you think he and the Algarvians and Major Borsos will really do anything worthwhile.”
Istvan wished he thought that. Dying for Gyongyos … What could be more fitting for a warrior from a warrior race? But he wouldn’t be dying for Gyongyos here; he was too mournfully sure of that. He would be dying for Captain Frigyes, for no one and nothing else. Even if Frigyes and Borsos and the redheads made a sorcery to blast the island of Obuda down to the bottom of the Bothnian Ocean, how much would that help Gyongyos and Ekrekek Arpad in the war against Kuusamo? Not very much, not so far as Istvan could see.
“Never mind,” he said. Now that it came down to the sticking point, he couldn’t stomach betraying his countrymen’s plot to the Kuusamans, but he didn’t want to be part of it, either. Escaping with a sore belly seemed a better way out of the dilemma than most. “I just wish you could have got Szonyi to see sense.”
“So do I,” Kun told him. “But he’s not in the mood to listen. And he told me, ‘Don’t waste the sergeant’s time, getting him to nag me, either. I know what I’m doing.’ I don’t think he does, but…” He shrugged.
“I’m glad you tried,” Istvan said. He also resolved to try to talk to Szonyi himself, no matter what the trooper had told Kun. Wood-chopping seemed to take forever. At last, the guards released the labor detail. Istvan hurried off to try to find his longtime comrade.
But Szonyi wouldn’t talk to him, not about that. “I’ve made up my mind,” was all he would say. “I’d rather go out giving the enemy one more lick than spend the rest of my days rotting away here on Obuda.”
Istvan found no good reply to that. He finally set his hand on Szonyi’s shoulder and said, “May the stars enfold you in their light forevermore, then.”
“May it be so.” Szonyi gave him an anxious glance. “You and Kun won’t betray us, will you? I know you’ve talked about it.”
“No, by the stars, neither one of us,” Istvan said. “May they leave us in eternal darkness if I lie. I just don’t think you’ll do as much as Captain Frigyes thinks you will.”
“I think you’re wrong, Sergeant.” Szonyi turned away. Istvan started to argue some more, then saw it would do no good. He walked off, shaking his head.
When he saw Kun a few minutes later, the one-time mage’s apprentice raised a questioning eyebrow. Istvan shook his head. Kun sighed and shrugged.
Along with their suppers, both of them ate the leaves. Istvan had expected, or at least hoped for, a little leisure before they acted and a little dignity while they were working. He got neither. The effect put him in mind of having an egg burst in the middle of his guts. Both he and Kun raced for the latrines at a dead run. Kun’s face was pale as milk. Istvan had no doubt he looked the same way.
Neither of them made it to the slit trenches. They both had to yank down their leggings and squat in the middle of the compound while guards cursed them in Kuusaman and Gyongyosian. Istvan stayed on the ground, clutching at his belly. Kun tried to get to his feet, then sank down again. “Must be something we ate,” he moaned. That was true, too, if not quite in the way he meant it.
The guards had to drag them to the infirmary. They threw them onto cots in a room of their own and gave them chamber pots. That suited Istvan perfectly. He spent a lot of unpleasant time squatting over his as night replaced day.
“When?” he asked Kun when they chanced to be squatting side by side.
“I don’t know,” Kun answered. “We’ll find out when it happens. In the meantime, shut up.” That was doubtless good advice. Istvan tried to tell his guts the same thing. They wouldn’t listen to him.
At some point that evening, Istvan asked, “What time is it now?” Since things had started for him, he’d lost a good deal of interest in the outside world, but that still mattered.
Not to Kun, not at the moment. “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” he grunted. That he was squatting again no doubt made him even shorter with questions than he would have been otherwise. After a bit, he added, “And I already told you to shut up. Who knows who’s liable to be listening?”