“Any time a colonel starts poking his nose into things, he’s always trouble,” Skarnu whispered back. An overage lieutenant headed up the little garrison in Pavilosta; he trotted along after the graying colonel, hands waving as he explained this or that.
Whatever he was saying, he failed to impress the senior Algarvian officer. At one point, the colonel said something that had to be downright cruel, for the lieutenant recoiled as if a beam had wounded him. Striking a dramatic pose, he cried, “Do please be reasonable, Colonel Lurcanio!”
Whatever the colonel answered, the lieutenant got no satisfaction from it. Whatever it was, Skarnu couldn’t hear it. He wasn’t quite sure if the Algarvian word he had heard meant reasonable or fair, his command of Algarvian, never great, was badly rusty these days. But that didn’t matter, either.
As soon as he could, he took Merkela aside and murmured, “I had better make myself scarce. If they’re not after me in particular, I’d be amazed.”
“Why do you say that?” Merkela asked.
He didn’t point. He didn’t want to do anything to draw the Algarvian officer’s notice. Quietly still, he answered, “Because that fellow over there is my dear sister’s lover.”
Merkela needed a moment to realize what that meant. When she did, her eyes flashed fire, almost as if she were a dragon. “The whore didn’t just sell her body to the Algarvians-she sold you, too!”
Skarnu didn’t want to believe that of Krasta. Of course, he didn’t want to believe his sister gave herself to the redhead, either, but he had no choice there. He said, “Whether she sold me or not, this Lurcanio’s not likely to be here by accident.”
“No, not likely at all.” Merkela frowned, then grew brisk. “You’re right- you’d better disappear. Vatsyunas and Pernavai have to go with you, too. They can’t sound like proper Valmierans. Raunu can stay-if the redheads come to the farm, I’ll be a widow making ends meet with a hired man.”
She marshaled the people in her life as if she were a general marshaling armies. “That may serve,” Skarnu said, “but it may not, too. Plenty of people in these parts can tell the Algarvians I’ve been living with you.”
She pondered, but not for long. “I’ll say we quarreled, and I cursed well threw you out.” Then she raised her voice to a furious shout: “You stinking cockhound, if you don’t keep your eyes and your hands where they belong, I’ll make sure you sing soprano for the rest of your days!”
People stared. Lurcanio was one of those people. His face twisted into an amused smirk. For a moment, Skarnu gaped-drawing Lurcanio’s attention was the last thing he wanted. But, a little slower than he should have, he saw how Merkela was building her alibi, and remembered that, at the moment, Lurcanio couldn’t recognize him. He did his best to get into the spirit of things, yelling, “Oh, shut up, you noisy bitch! I ought to give you a good one- and I will, too, if you don’t keep quiet.”
“You try it and you’ll be sorrier than you ever have been,” Merkela snarled. She sounded as if she meant it, too; she made a fine actress. And she wasn’t just acting, either. Skarnu wouldn’t have wanted to be the man who laid a hand on her when she didn’t care to be touched.
They kept on quarreling till they left Pavilosta. As soon as they were alone on the road back to the farm, they started to laugh. Skarnu wasn’t laughing, though, when he went off into the woods with Vatsyunas and Pernavai. He felt a coward for leaving a woman-and especially a woman carrying his child-to face the redheads alone. And the Kaunians from Forthweg were city folk, without much notion of how to take care of themselves in what seemed very wild country to them. Skarnu stayed busy showing them what needed doing. He tried to remember that he hadn’t known, either, till he went into the army.
He could sneak back to the farm for food; he didn’t have to hunt. About a week later, Merkela said, “They came today. And sure enough, that redhead who swives your sister is a dangerous man. But Raunu and I played the fool and sent him on his way.”
“Good enough,” Skarnu said. “Better than good enough, in fact. But I won’t come back to stay for a while yet. What do you care to bet they’ll swoop down here again, to see if you were playing tricks?”
“Aye, that Lurcanio would,” Merkela said at once. “He might even come back three times, curse him. Let him. He won’t catch you. And the fight goes on.”
Skarnu nodded. As if they were a spell, he repeated the words. “The fight goes on.”
Istvan studied the scar on his left hand. It still pained him every now and again; Captain Tivadar had cut deep. Istvan didn’t blame his company commander. Tivadar had had to let the sin out of him and out of the men of his squad. Istvan just hoped the cut proved expiation enough.
Corporal Kun came back through the trees toward him. “No sign of the Unkerlanters ahead, Sergeant,” he said.
“All right-good. We’ll move forward, then,” Istvan said. Kun nodded. They were oddly formal with each other. All the men who’d eaten goat were like that these days. They had a bond. It wasn’t one any of them would have wanted, but it was there. Feeling it, Istvan understood how and why criminals and perverts sometimes sought out goat’s flesh. It set them apart from the rest of mankind-the rest of Gyongyosian mankind, at any rate. They had to band together, for no one else would have anything to do with them.
“Sergeant?” Kun asked again in that oddly formal tone.
“Aye? What is it?” Istvan wanted to harass the bespectacled mage’s apprentice as he had before they shared the contents of that stewpot, but found he couldn’t. He looked down at his scar again.
Kun saw where Istvan’s eyes went, and he opened his own left hand. He was similarly marked-and, no doubt, similarly scarred on his soul as well. He let out a long, unhappy breath, then said, “Do you suppose the rest of the company knows. . what happened there, back in that clearing?”
“Well, nobody’s called me a goat-eater, anyhow,” Istvan answered. “A good thing, too-anybody did call me anything like that, I’d have to try to kill him for my honor’s sake: either that or admit it.”
“You couldn’t admit it!” Kun exclaimed in horror. “The stars wouldn’t shine on you if you did.”
“Of course they wouldn’t,” Istvan said. “That’s why I’d have to do what a warrior should do. Maybe people know what happened and they’re keeping quiet because they know what I’d have to do, too. Or maybe they really don’t know. Captain Tivadar was the only one who came up to the clearing, after all, and he wouldn’t blab, not after he cleansed us he wouldn’t.”
Slowly, Kun nodded. “I keep telling myself the same thing. But the other thing I keep telling myself is, that sort of business doesn’t stay a secret. Somehow, it doesn’t.”
Istvan nodded, too. The same fear filled him. Having done what he’d done was bad enough. Having others-people who hadn’t done it, who weren’t linked to one another by that strange bond-know would be far, far worse.
Meanwhile, along with worrying about the state of his sins, he also had to worry about staying alive. Every time he scurried from pine to birch to clump of ferns, he took his life in his hands. Kun hadn’t seen any Unkerlanters in this stretch of the endless forest, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
A flick of motion caught his eye. He swung his stick toward it and blazed without conscious thought. Had it been an Unkerlanter, the fellow would have died. As things were, a red squirrel toppled off a branch and lay feebly kicking among the pine needles. After a minute or so, it stopped moving.
“Nice blazing,” Kun said. “Ought to bring it along and throw it in the pot when we stop. Nothing wrong with squirrel.”
“No,” Istvan said. He didn’t know whether Kun meant that the meat tasted good or that the animal was ritually clean. He didn’t want to ask; that would have involved comparisons with animals that weren’t ritually clean.
As he stopped to pick up the squirrel, he realized he could have blazed a countryman as readily as a foe. If, in some dreadful accident or in the heat of battle, Captain Tivadar went down and did not rise again, who but for Istvan and his equally guilty squadmates would know on what accursed meat they’d supped?