“We failed,” Frigyes said. “We should have held Becsehely, and we failed.”
“Too many Kuusaman ships,”Kun said, reasonable and logical as usual. “Too many Kuusaman dragons. Too many Kuusaman soldiers. Once they got ashore, sir, how could we hope to hold the island?”
“With our life’s blood,” Frigyes answered. “But we had no chance to give it.” He held his head in his hands, not bothering to hide his misery.
The iron door to the compartment housing the captives came open with a nasty squeal of hinges-even a lubber like Istvan could tell this ship had seen better years. A couple of Kuusaman troopers aimed sticks at the Gyongyosians. “To come out,” one of them said, speaking Istvan’s language very badly. “To go off this ship. To move-now.”The last word held the snap of command.
One by one, Istvan and his countrymen got to their feet and filed out of the compartment and into the corridor beyond. The Kuusamans stepped back. If anyone thought of seizing a stick and raising a revolt, he never got the chance. Istvan didn’t even think of it. He walked along the corridor and up the narrow iron stairway to the deck of the transport. It was the first time he’d seen the sky since going aboard the ship after Becsehely fell.
Then he saw the skyline-and started to laugh. A Kuusaman guard on deck swung his stick toward him. “Why you to laugh?” the little, slant-eyed fellow asked. By his tone, no captive had any business laughing.
Istvan didn’t care. “Why? Because this is Obuda, that’s why,” he answered. He knew the shape of Mount Sorong-not much of a mountain by his standards, but still a peak of sorts-as well as he knew the shape of his own foot. “I fought here. I didn’t expect to see the place again, I’ll tell you that.”
“You soldier here?” the guard said, and Istvan nodded. The guard shrugged. “Soldier no more. Now you to be captive here.”
Kunsaid, “This harbor wasn’t here when we were fighting on Obuda.”
Istvan nodded. Since the island fell, the Kuusamans had run up an enormous number of piers-and all of them looked to have ships tied up at them. Gyongyos and Kuusamo had fought over Obuda not least because several ley lines converged there, making it important for one navy or the other to hold the place. The Kuusamans weren’t just holding it these days-they’d taken it and made it their own.
“They couldn’t have got this much work out of the Obudans,” Istvan said as the guards marched him and his comrades toward the gangplank. “There weren’t that many of them, and they’re lazy buggers anyhow.” He never had thought much of the islanders.
“They didn’t even bother,”Kun said positively. “Most of this port was hammered together by sorcery.”
“How can you tell?” Istvan asked.
“Because all the piers and all the pilings are just alike,”Kun answered. “That means they used the law of similarity a lot-it can’t mean anything else.” He scowled. “I wishwe could afford to throw magecraft around like this. We’d stand a lot better chance in the fight, I’ll tell you.”
Under the sticks of the Kuusaman guards, the captives marched off the pier and onto the beach of Obuda. More Kuusamans waited for them there. One of the little men turned out to speak pretty good Gyongyosian. “I amColonelEino,” he said. “I am the commandant of the captives’ camp here. I want you to understand what that means. What that means is that, as far as you are concerned, I am the stars above. If anything good happens to you, it will happen because of me, and because of whatever you have done to please me. And if anything bad happens to you, it will also happen because of me, and because of whatever you have done to make me angry. Do not make me angry. You will be very sorry if you do.”
“Blasphemous, goat-eating son of a whore,” Istvan muttered. The captives around him-evenKun, that hard-boiled city man-nodded. ColonelEino might know the Gyongyosian language, but he didn’t know Gyongyosians.
Istvan’s close comrades weren’t the only ones to be appalled. More mutters rose from other soldiers captured on Becsehely-several hundred of them had filed off the transport. Some of them shouted instead of muttering.
Those shouts bothered Eino not at all. “I care nothing for what you think of me,” he said. “I care only that you obey me. When the war is over-when we have won it-you will go back to Gyongyos again. Until then, you belong to Kuusamo. Remember that.” He turned his back, ignoring the new shouts that rose from the captives.
The Kuusaman guards didn’t speak so much Gyongyosian. Of course, they didn’t need to, either. They shouted, “To march!”-and march the captives did.
“Somewhere not far from here, we beat these buggers back from the beaches.” Istvan heaved a sigh. “But they’re like roaches, seems like. Stomp ‘em once and they just come back again.”
He’d expected to have to march all the way to the captives’ camp, wherever on the island it turned out to be. He looked toward the forest that grew almost down to the beach. Parts of it were still battered from the fight his countrymen had put up before the Kuusamans finally seized Obuda. His own memories of that losing campaign were of hunger and fog and fear.
To his surprise, though, the guards marched his comrades and him only as far as what proved to be a ley-line caravan depot. “In! To go in!” the Kuusamans commanded. Into the caravan cars went the Gyongyosians.
Kunkept shaking his head, as he had at the harbor. “This is plainly the extension of the ley line the ship that brought us from Becsehely used,” he said, though no such thing was plain to Istvan. “The Kuusamans use every bit of sorcerous energy they can. We don’t. No wonder the war isn’t going the way we wish it would.”
“Silence, there,”CaptainFrigyes said sharply. “I’ll hear no talk of defeatism. Have you got that, Corporal?”
“Aye, Captain,”Kun answered, the only thing he could say-out loud, at any rate. To Istvan, he murmured, “No defeatism, is it? How does he think we got here? Have we invaded Obuda again?”
“We got caught, but that doesn’t mean we’ve got to give up,” Istvan said. His own attitude lay somewhere betweenKun ’s and Frigyes’. Obviously, Gyongyos had lost the fight for Becsehely, and the whole war in the Bothnian Ocean was going Kuusamo’s way. Even so
… “If we let the slant-eyes think we’ll do whatever they say, they’ll end up owning us, do you know what I mean:
Kunjust grunted. Whether that meant he agreed or he didn’t think the remark worth wasting words on, Istvan couldn’t have said.
The ley line went through the forest, straight as the beam from a stick. It passed by a couple of little Obudan villages. The natives hardly looked up from their fields to watch it go past. Before the Derlavaian kingdoms came to their islands, they’d lived a simple life. They hadn’t known metalworking or much magecraft past exploiting obvious power points or how to tame the wild dragons that flew from one island to another and preyed on men and flocks alike. By now they’d grown so accustomed to the marvels of modern civilization, they took them for granted.
When at last the ley-line caravan stopped, it had climbed halfway up the slope of Mount Sorong. Istvan thought they were somewhere near the town of Sorong, the largest native settlement. He wondered how much of Sorong was left these days. Then he shrugged. The Obudans hadn’t been strong enough to hold Gyongyos or Kuusamo away from their island. Whatever happened to them, they deserved it.
“Out! To go out!” shouted the guards on the caravan cars.
Out Istvan went. There straight ahead stood the captives’ camp, behind a palisade with nails sticking out of the timbers like hedgehog spines, to make them all but impossible to climb. Istvan looked around and started to laugh again.
“What to be funny?” a guard demanded.
“This used to be my regiment’s encampment,” Istvan answered. The Kuusaman nodded to show he understood, then shrugged to show he wasn’t much impressed. After a moment, Istvan wasn’t much impressed, either. The Gyongyosians hadn’t been strong enough to hold Kuusamo away from Obuda. Didn’t that mean they deserved whatever happened to them?