“What are you doing?” Istvan asked.
“Looking for the sun,” Kun replied, as if to an idiot child. After a moment, he condescended to explain more: “The property of this spar, as it is called after a ship’s pole, is to let in light of a certain sort only.”
“What?” Istvan frowned. “Light is light, eh?”
“Not to a mage,” Kun said loftily. Then he gnawed at his lower lip and admitted, “I do not understand the theory as well as I wish I did. But a man does not need to know how a knife cuts to know that it cuts. And so I can use this spar and tell you more light shows ahead of us, which means the sun lies in that direction. Since it is surely after noon, we are marching west.”
“That’s what I wanted to find out,” Istvan said. “Thanks.” The wind shifted, blowing snow into his face. He let out a couple of weary curses and went on, “Fine to know I’m liable to be blazed by the Unkerlanters and not by our own men.”
“I’m glad to know I relieved your mind,” Kun replied. Istvan made a crack about relieving some part of himself a long way removed from his mind.
He and Corporal Kun both laughed. So did Szonyi, who was close enough to hear. He said, “I wish the stars wouldn’t let things like getting blazed by your own side happen. If they’re as wise and strong and all-knowing as everybody says, why do they let things like that happen sometimes?”
“That’s for them to know, not for the likes of us,” Istvan said, which was what his family and other people in his home valley had told him when, as a boy, he’d asked such questions.
Kun said, “Why isn’t it for us to know? We know a lot more than our grandparents and even more than their grandparents. Why shouldn’t we know things like that?”
“Because we aren’t meant to,” Istvan answered.
“Who told you that?” Kun asked. “How did he know? How do you know he knew?”
Istvan grappled with those unfamiliar questions for a little while. Not having any good answers for them, he said, “If you go on talking that way, you might as well not believe the stars have any power at all.”
Kun shook his head; snow flew from his hat. “I have to believe, because I’ve seen spells that call on them work.” He slogged on for another couple of paces. In thoughtful tones, he added, “But the Unkerlanters’ spells work, too, and they’re goat-eating savages who reverence the invisible powers above that aren’t even there.”
Now Istvan asked the hard question, not Kun: “What does that mean?”
“May I be accursed if I know,” the former mage’s apprentice answered. “I’m going to have to think about that for a while.”
“Think about Unkerlanters blazing you instead,” Istvan said. “Think about mountain apes sneaking down and carrying you off before you even know they’re there. Think about avalanches. Think about things you can do something about.”
“What can I do about an avalanche?” Kun asked.
“You can walk soft and try not to start one. And you might be able to run to the side of one if it isn’t too big and you see it soon enough,” Istvan said. Kun trudged on for another few paces, then nodded, yielding the point. Istvan felt proud of himself. He knew Kun was smarter than he was, and knew Kun knew it, too. When they fenced with words, the sergeant seldom made his corporal back up. He had this time.
Sometimes, in clear, quiet weather, you could hear an egg sighing through the air toward you. In the middle of the snowstorm, the first Istvan knew that the Unkerlanters had started tossing was when the egg burst in front of his squad. Even then, the wind muffled the roar and the deep snow in which the egg landed helped muffle the blast of sorcerous energy that came from it. The snow the burst threw up masked the flash of that energy, too.
Before the second egg landed, Istvan was down on his belly in a snowdrift, crawling toward the nearest rocks he could find. “Stagger your cover if you can,” he shouted to his men. “Those Unkerlanter goat-buggers’ll be coming after us as soon as they think we’re in enough trouble.”
Between the bursting eggs and the shrieking wind, he didn’t know how many soldiers in his squad heard him. He worried less than he would have with a squad of men seeing battle for the first time. His troopers were all blooded; they didn’t need him to do their thinking for them. Some of them--Kun, for instance--resented it when he tried.
“Urra! Urra!” Through the wind, through the thunderstorm of bursting eggs, came the Unkerlanter battle cry. Istvan bared his teeth: now he was worried. It sounded as if King Swemmel’s men outnumbered the Gyongyosians who faced them. Their hoarse, angry shouts grew louder.
Istvan shouted, too: “Here they come!”
He blazed at the first figure in rock-gray he saw through the swirling snow. He heard his beam hiss and cursed the sound: every snowflake the beam seared weakened it before it got to its target, and there were a lot of snowflakes in the air. The Unkerlanter went down, but Istvan didn’t think he was out of the fight.
A beam burned a furrow in the snow not far from him. That reminded him he needed to roll away, to make sure he didn’t make a fat, juicy target by staying in one place too long. As he rolled, he also made sure his knife was loose in its sheath. With sticks so weakened, this little battle would be fought at close quarters.
Rolling did one more thing--it coated his long sheepskin jacket with snow, making him all but invisible. Sure enough, an Unkerlanter ran right past him, not having any idea he was there. Istvan rose from the snowy ground like one of the mountain apes he’d been talking about a little while before. But he had better weapons than a mountain ape’s teeth and muscles, better even than the club the ape he’d killed might have been carrying.
He stabbed the Unkerlanter in the back. The fellow let out a scream that held almost as much surprise as pain. He threw out his arms. His stick flew from his hand. Red stained the snow as he fell. Istvan sprang onto him and slashed his throat, spilling more scarlet onto white.
“Arpad! Arpad! Arpad!” Those were Gyongyosians, coming to the rescue of their beleaguered comrades. Istvan feared the Unkerlanter egg-tossers would take a heavy toll on them, but King Swemmel’s men back at the tossers had trouble spying them because of the blizzard, and they made short work of the Unkerlanter footsoldiers.
“Forward!” a Gyongyosian officer shouted.
“Stay spread out,” Istvan added. “Don’t bunch up and let one egg take out a lot of you.” That proved good advice: the Unkerlanters finally realized their attacking party had failed and started lobbing more eggs toward the mouth of the pass. By then, it was too late. Istvan’s countrymen began the business of taking another valley away from Unkerlant. The only thing that could have made Istvan happier was thinking anybody would want the valley once Gyongyos had it.
Eleven
Rain splashed down outside the tailors shop in Skrunda where Talsu helped his father. The bad weather pleased Traku, who said, “We’ll have some wet people coming to buy cloaks today.”
“Aye, but half of them will be Algarvians,” Talsu answered.
His father made a sour face. “They’re the ones with the money,” he said. “If it weren’t for them, we’d have had a lean time of it.” He let out a long, slow exhalation. “I keep telling myself it’s worth it--and telling myself, and telling myself.”
“You keep telling yourself what?” Talsu’s mother asked, coming down the stairs from the living quarters above the shop.
“That you’re nosy, Laitsina,” Traku replied.
Laitsina snorted. “Why do you keep saying that? If you have so much trouble remembering it, it can’t be true.” Before Traku could answer, his wife went on, “Out with it, now.”