“Unh?” Cort looked up, following Dirk’s pointing arm. “ ‘Course you do. They’re all over the land, at least one in every district. Haven’t you ever seen a Hollow Hill before?”
“Hollow Hill?” Dirk turned to him, interested. “Where the Little People live?”
“Little People?” Cort asked, puzzled. “Maybe they’re little where you come from, but in our country, the Fair Folk are anything but little! They’re taller than the biggest of us, and fair of hair and skin. Beautiful they are, men and women alike, and deadly with their magic! They may choose to help or choose to harm, and a man never knows which!”
“That last part sounds like the People of the Hollow Hills, back home,” Dirk mused. “I’ve heard of the tall kind, of course, but I’ve never been in their country before.”
“You are from far away,” Cort grunted.
“And Corporal Korgash? You think the Fair Folk left him in an ordinary person’s cradle?”
“He’s the right coloring and size,” Cort grunted, “blond and light-skinned, and more than six feet tall. Besides, he’s ugly enough for the Fair Folk to have wanted to be rid of him.” With that, he lapsed back into the misery of his hangover. Probably because of his stomach and his general malaise, he never thought twice about the conversation, and never remembered it, either.
It had taken the sergeants most of the morning to find all the troopers and gather them together to hear the captain’s order. Cort had been awfully glad of Dirk then; he had taken word to the master sergeant, letting Cort stay in bed. Then he had helped corral the Blue Company and feed each man his “hair of the dog”; he confided later that he had put the white pills in with the beer. By that time, Cort had managed to pull himself together enough to address the men, telling them that the captain wanted them back at headquarters right away, and had found the strength to stand against the wind of their massed groan and torrent of cursing. When the worst of it had passed, he had ordered them to form up into columns, then chivvied them into moving out of the town and onto the trail. From there, he had slumped and let the sergeants take over. It was pretty routine, and any sergeant would tell you that he could manage the men better than any officer—unless the order was one he didn’t want to take the blame for, of course. When Cort had needed to issue a command, he had muttered it to Dirk, who had ridden to the head of the column to relay the order to the master sergeant, letting Cort suffer through his hangover in relative peace.
But between the hangovers and a startling lack of eagerness to reach their destination, the troopers moved far more slowly than they had coming down to the town. Night caught them only halfway to the mountains and the captain, so Cort sent up the order to pitch camp.
The hangovers had worn off enough for the men to have worked up appetites, and for Cort to be able to stroll around the camp to keep up morale. Dirk stayed beside him, though, probably worried that Cort might collapse. Cort didn’t scold him—he wasn’t all that sure that Dirk might not be right.
“Why the plague is he calling us back?” one trooper grunted. “Only a single lousy night of liberty!”
“Just a bastard,” his mate griped. “All officers are.” Then he caught sight of Cort approaching and ducked his head, staring down into his cooking pot.
Cort managed a mirthless smile and walked on. “Don’t worry, I know it’s not true,” Dirk told him. “I also know that thinking all officers are heartless brutes helps keep soldiers in line.”
“Especially the ones who are heartless brutes,” Cort agreed. “There are always the ones who’d disobey every order and savage every civilian, if they didn’t think the captain was a tougher old dog than any of them.”
“What the clash could be so all-powered important to call us back so sudden?” another trooper grunted.
“Maybe the captain’s got a new girlfriend he wants to impress,” the other trooper guessed, “so he needs us all there to parade for her.”
“Maybe you’d better tell them the real reason,” Dirk said as they sauntered past the cookfire.
“Tomorrow,” Cort told him, “when I’m feeling fit again.”
“You can guess what it is, of course.”
“What else?” Cort said, with an impatient shrug. “The captain’s found another job for us, and it can’t wait. Probably paying us double to come protect some slob of a boss from his neighbor, when he’s too slack to keep his men in fighting trim. Oh, don’t look so shocked—that’s one of the good things about being a mercenary, being able to speak your mind about the bosses.”
“But if a bruiser tried that, his bully would hear about it and siring him up at dawn the next day, huh?”
“Why would he wait for dawn?” Cort asked. He reflected that this foreigner had a great many odd ideas.
“Ever wonder why the bosses are always fighting?” Dirk asked. “From what I see, most of their battles are about some small strip of land right on the border, which they both claim. A skirmish like that would be really easy to settle by making both men sit down and discuss it reasonably.”
“True, if the quarrel were really about that strip of land,” Cort agreed, “but it isn’t—it’s just an excuse to fight. The attacking boss actually wants the whole domain, and his rival boss as a prisoner into the bargain.”
“Too bad somebody can’t make ‘em stop,” Dirk grunted.
“What are you trying to do, ruin our business?” Dirk shrugged. “You’re telling me the bosses and their men don’t really want to resolve their disputes, just want an excuse to fight every few years. There’re so many of them, each lording it over a dozen square miles or so, that the warfare is constant—As soon as one battle stops, another begins a few miles away.”
Cort nodded. “Tragic, isn’t it? Sometimes I wish there really were some way to end it—but then I tell myself I’m a fool, that it makes good business for us.”
“There is that,” Dirk agreed. “So much for the only force that could make the bosses behave.”
“The only force?” Cort frowned. “What do you mean?”
“If the mercenaries banded together, they could tell the bosses to stay in their own domains, and make it stick.”
“Easily,” Cort said, with a snort that might have been a laugh if he’d been feeling better. “Any three mercenary companies could easily beat any one boss—but why bother? That’s how we make our money, after all—by fighting the bosses’ battles for them.”
“So the mercenaries could stop the fighting,” Dirk sighed, “but they won’t. They have a vested interest in warfare.”
“You could put it that way,” Cort agreed, “especially since every now and then, one of the captains manages to become a bully himself.”
“And never thinks of pushing for boss, and conquering all the others?”
“Are you joking?” Cort asked. “All the other bosses would ally against him on the instant, and all the mercenary captains, too. No one’s going to risk the rise of a boss of bosses who would be able to tell any one of them what he could and couldn’t do.”
“Right,” Dirk said sourly. “No bully wants to be bullied, eh? But he always is.”
“There’s always someone stronger than a bully—and they call him boss.” Cort nodded. “But there isn’t a bully of bosses, and they’re bound and determined that there never will be.”
They had come to the edge of the camp. Cort looked out over it with a sigh. “I take first watch. If ever I didn’t want it, this is the night.”
“Go to bed,” Dirk said. “I’ll take your shift. What is it, just walking the perimeter and making sure the sentries stay awake?”