Tassi didn’t respond to that, either-not with words, at least. But she didn’t need words to be very distracting. Hajjaj supposed he could have picked her up bodily and thrown her out of the library. But that would have been undignified, and a man would suffer almost anything before losing his dignity. Not, he thought as his arms went round her, that I’m suffering too much.
Fourteen
Every news sheet, every rumor, that came to the farm in southern Valmiera brought Merkela ferocious joy. “They’re losing,” she gloated. “They’re running. They’d running like whipped, bleeding dogs with their tails between their legs.” Then, suddenly, her grim delight faded. “Gedominu!” she exclaimed. “What did you just put in your mouth?”
The baby had started crawling not long before. That meant she and Skarnu had to keep a closer eye on him than ever. She reached down, grabbed him, and stuck a finger in his mouth. She got something out of there, then wiped her hand on her trousers. “What was it this time?” Skarnu asked with clinical curiosity.
“Just a dust bunny, powers above be praised,” Merkela answered. She glared at Gedominu with mock fury. “At least you didn’t swallow that dead cockroach a couple of days ago.” Gedominu laughed. He thought it was funny-though he’d squealed in outrage when his mother took the bug away from him. Merkela set him down once more. He started to crawl backwards, but then decided to go ahead instead.
Adventures with Gedominu notwithstanding, Skarnu hadn’t forgotten what Merkela was saying. Every news sheet, every rumor, that came to the farm brought him nothing but frustration. “Aye, they’re losing,” he said. “Aye, they’re running. They’re running in the west. They’re running in Jelgava. But what are they doing here? Not bloody much, powers below eat them.”
“That’s not true,” Merkela said.
And, in fact, it wasn’t true, or it wasn’t strictly true. The Algarvians occupying Valmiera had sent a lot of men west to fight the Unkerlanters, and a few north to fight the Lagoans and Kuusamans in Jelgava. Their grip on the countryside had loosened. Skarnu worried much less than he had before about an Algarvian patrol swooping down on the farm here.
But the redheads still held the southern coast strongly against invasion from across the Strait of Valmiera. They still held the kingdom’s towns- with no small aid from the Valmieran constabulary and from the many traitors they’d recruited to do their dirty work for them. True, the underground could strike more readily than it had. Still, its strikes remained pinpricks, and everywhere else, or so it seemed, Mezentio’s men were taking hammer blows.
“I want tosmash the Algarvians,” Skarnu said. “I want to smash them till they can’t get up again. Our army fell to pieces. I was there. I watched it happen. We never knew what hit us. We need revenge for that now if we’re ever going to be able to hold our heads up once this war finally ends.”
“Ends?” Merkela stared at him as if she’d never heard the word before. She pursed her lips. “Do you know, I never thought about the war ending. Never once. Either the Algarvians would have us down, or we’d have them down. Having them down is what I look forward to… Gedominu!” She grabbed their son. This time, she got whatever was in his hand before he could stick it in his mouth.
“I look forward to having them down, too,” Skarnu said. “But I also look forward to knocking them down. It won’t be the same if a pack of foreigners does it all for us.”
“I don’t care how it happens,” Merkela said. “I just want it to happen.”
“I want to have something to do with it,” Skarnu said stubbornly. “I want to march into Priekule at the head of an army and go back to my mansion and clean out my sister and every sign the Algarvians were ever there. I want to do that myself, with my countrymen. I don’t want a bunch of foreigners telling me, ‘All right, little boy, it’s safe to go home now.’ “
“Priekule. Mansion.” Merkela spoke the words as if they were foreign to her. And so they were, even if they were in Valmieran. Skarnu had discovered that the capital and what went on there didn’t seem real to a lot of Valmierans from the countryside. As for the other… Merkela murmured, “Most of the time, I forget what blood you bear.”
Before the war, being a marquis had mattered more to him than almost anything else. Now he said, “Our son bears my blood, and he bears yours, too. And when the war is over, I intend to wed you and set you up in that mansion… unless you decide you’d sooner dwell somewhere else. In that case, wherever it is, I’ll live there with you.”
She shook her head. “It’s like something out of a fairy tale. Nobles don’t come to farms and want to marry peasant girls, not in real life they don’t.”
“No, they don’t get that lucky,” Skarnu said, which brought a smile to her face. He went on, “Having the Algarvians swallow up the whole kingdom isn’t something out of a fairy tale, either. It’s out of a nightmare.”
Merkela nodded. Before she could say anything, someone knocked on the door. At a good many times over the past couple of years, that would have brought panic to Skarnu. No more. Merkela walked to the door and opened it. “Raunu!” she exclaimed, real pleasure in her voice. “Come in. Let me pour you a mug of ale.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” Skarnu’s veteran sergeant said. “Don’t mind if you do, either.” He looked down at Gedominu, who had drool on his chin-he was cutting a tooth. “He’s just about big enough to march.”
“Seems that way,” Skarnu agreed. Merkela came back with not one but three mugs of ale on a wooden tray, and a pitcher from which to refill them, too. Skarnu eyed Raunu. “But you didn’t come here to tell me what a big boy I’ve got, not unless I miss my guess.”
“No.” Raunu took a pull at his ale, then nodded to Merkela. “Now this is your own brewing-I can taste it.”
“Aye.” She looked pleased, but not for long. “Skarnu’s right. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t need him to do something. A while ago, you would have needed us both to do something. That’s not so simple anymore.” Her glance toward Gedominu was fond, but also wistful. She missed the days when she could easily go forth against the redheads, too.
“Well, I’m always glad to come here,” Raunu said, “but you’re right-it’s got to do with business.” He nodded to Skarnu. “We’ve had some practice wrecking the redheads’ ley-line caravans, you and me-and you to, milady,” he added, as if Merkela were already a marchioness. “But you’ve got other things on your mind for a spell.” She nodded. Her eye kept going back to Gedominu.
“Where?” Skarnu asked. “What needs doing?”
“Up in the north,” Raunu answered. “They’ll be moving a good many caravans before long, using the ley lines through that rugged country to get soldiers to Jelgava by the shortest way. It’d be nice if some of ‘em didn’t get there.”
“It would be nice if a lot of them didn’t get there,” Skarnu said, and both Raunu and Merkela muttered agreement. He added, “Fitting if we give them a hard time up in the north, too.” That puzzled his lover and the sergeant. He didn’t try to explain, but still thought he was right. Four years earlier, Mezentio’s men had moved footsoldiers and, more important still, masses of behemoths through country Valmiera had thought too rough for such maneuvers. The Valmierans, full occupied with another Algarvian attack down in the south, hadn’t noticed the stroke till it had already slipped between their ribs and into their heart. Revenge, even a small measure of revenge, would be sweet.
“You’ll come, then?” Raunu asked. He meant it seriously; the underground wasn’t like the army, even if most of its members had been soldiers.
“Of course I will,” Skarnu answered.
As he’d gone down to the southern seacoast, so he rode the ley-line caravan from the little town of Ramygala up to the wooded hills and gullies of northern Valmiera. He felt like a stranger there, half a foreigner, wary of opening his mouth: the local dialect was a long way from the brand of Valmieran he spoke. “Don’t worry about it,” Raunu told him when he worried out loud. “The cursed Algarvians can’t tell the difference between how they talk here and the right way.”