They had freed some of King Donalitu’s captives. But, in Mainardo’s name, they’d taken many more. And Algarvian torturers enjoyed a reputation about as black as that of the men who’d served Donalitu before he fled. Silence, then, remained the safest course.
Going back into the family tailor’s shop made Talsu sigh in relief. Here if anywhere he could breathe free. His father looked up from a cloak he was sewing-for once, for a Jelgavan customer, not for one of the occupiers. “Did you get those hinges I wanted?” Traku asked.
Talsu shook his head. “I went to all three ironmongers in town, and they all say they’re not to be had for love nor money, not in iron and not in brass, either. The Algarvians are taking all the metal they can out of the kingdom. Before long, we’re liable to have trouble getting needles.”
Traku looked unhappy. “Your mother’s been after me to fix those cabinets for weeks. Now I’m finally getting around to doing it, and I can’t get what I need for the job? She won’t be very happy to hear that.”
“You can’t very well put the hinges on if you can’t get them, now can you?” Talsu gave his father a conspiratorial wink.
“Well, that’s true.” Traku brightened, but not for long. “She’ll say I could have gotten ‘em if I’d gone out and done it right away instead of sitting around on my rump all day long.” He managed to sound a lot like his wife-enough so to land him in trouble if she’d heard him.
“They’re talking about tin, or maybe pewter,” Talsu said.
His father made a face. “Not very strong, either one of ‘em. And who says the Algarvians won’t start stealing tin, too, and leave us with nothing but lead?”
“Nobody,” Talsu answered. “I wouldn’t put anything past ‘em. They’d steal anything that wasn’t nailed down.”
“And now they’re stealing the nails, too,” Traku said. He laughed. Talsu grimaced, annoyed he hadn’t thought of the joke himself.
Before he had the chance to try to top it, the door swung open and the bell above it jangled. In came an Algarvian officer, swaggering as Mezentio’s subjects had a way of doing. Talsu had practice changing his tone on the spur of the moment. “Good day, sir,” he said to the redhead. “How may we serve you today?” That was what the occupiers wanted: to have the people they’d conquered serve them.
When the Algarvian answered, it was in classical Kaunian. Talsu and his father exchanged looks of alarm. Talsu remembered scant bits of the old language from his school days, not that he’d had many of those. Traku, further removed and with even less formal schooling, knew only a handful of words. “Do you speak Jelgavan at all, sir?” Talsu asked.
“No,” the redhead answered-in the classical tongue.
Talsu flogged his memory and essayed a few words of classical Kaunian himself: “Talk slow, then.”
“Aye, I shall talk slowly,” the Algarvian said, and then proceeded to start talking too fast. Talsu and Traku both waved their hands in something approaching despair. How dreadful to lose a sale because a foreign soldier spoke the grandfather to their language when they had so little of it themselves. For a wonder, the Algarvian understood the problem. “Here. Is this slow enough?”
“Aye,” Talsu said. “Think so.” He paused again to think. “Want-what?”
“Kilts,” the officer answered. He patted the kilt he was wearing, in case Talsu didn’t get the idea. “Two kilts.” Numbers hadn’t changed much. The Algarvian showed “two” with his fingers anyhow. Instead of thumb and forefinger, he used forefinger and middle finger; to Talsu, that made him seem to give an obscene gesture.
After Talsu translated for his father-which he probably didn’t need to do-Traku nodded. “Aye, I can make ‘em,” he said. “Find out when he wants ‘em, though. That’s the other thing I’ve got to know.”
“I’ll try,” Talsu answered. He looked hopefully at the Algarvian, but the fellow couldn’t have understood a word of Jelgavan. Talsu couldn’t come up with the classical Kaunian word for when, either. He kicked at the floorboards in frustration. But then he had a good idea. Instead of fumbling around for a word he couldn’t find, he pointed to a calendar hanging on the wall behind his father.
“Ah,” the Algarvian said, and then a spate of the classical tongue too fast for Talsu to follow. But he was nodding and smiling, so he must have understood what Talsu meant. To prove he did, he went over and touched the day’s date on the calendar. Then he touched one two weeks hence. Having done so, he looked a question toward Talsu and Traku.
Talsu thought the date looked reasonable, but Traku was the man who had to decide. “Aye,” he said, and then, “as long as the price is right.” He’d been talking as much to his son as to the Algarvian. Now he turned toward the Algarvian and named a price he thought right.
The Algarvian affected not to understand. King Mezentio’s men always overacted in a dicker, though. Traku must have sensed the same thing Talsu did. He found a pencil and a scrap of paper, wrote out the price, and gave it to the Algarvian.
“No,” the fellow said again-the word remained similar to what it had been in the days of the Kaunian Empire. He had a pencil of his own in the breast pocket of his tunic. He scratched out the figure Traku had written and substituted one half as large.
Traku shook his head. To emphasize the point, he crumpled up the piece of paper and tossed it into the trash can. He picked up the cloak he’d been working on and got back to it. “Good day,” Talsu told the Algarvian. He would have enjoyed telling him some other things, too, but didn’t know the words for those in classical Kaunian.
With an exasperated sniff, the redhead opened his belt pouch and took out a sheet of paper of his own. He wrote another price, this one higher. Traku looked at it, shook his head, and kept on sewing. The Algarvian thrust the paper and pencil at him. As if doing the fellow a great favor, Traku wrote a slightly lower price than the one he’d first proposed.
“Haggling with paper and pencil, Father?” Talsu said. “I’ve never seen the like.”
“Neither have I, but I won’t worry about it if I can get the deal I want,” Traku said. “If I can’t, I’ll just keep on doing what I’m doing here.” He spoke slowly and distinctly, in case the Algarvian knew more Jelgavan than he let on.
Pantomime and scribbles took the place of the shouts and insults that often went into a hot dicker. The Algarvian could have taken his act to the stage and made more money than King Mezentio was likely to be paying him. By his agonized grimaces, Traku might have been cutting off his fingers one at a time with pinking shears. Traku’s style was more restrained, but he didn’t bend much. They finally settled on a price closer to his first one than to the redhead’s counteroffer.
“Half now, half on delivery,” Traku said, and Talsu had to try to get that across to the Algarvian. As the fellow had before, he did a good game job of not understanding. At last, looking as if he were biting down hard on a lemon, he paid. Only then did Talsu take out a tape measure and note down his waist size and the length of his kilt. After the measurements were done, the Algarvian bowed and left.
“We’ll make some silver off him,” Traku said.
“Aye,” Talsu agreed. “You fought him hard there.”
“I wish I could have done it with a stick in my hand,” his father answered. Having been too young to fight in the Six Years’ War and too old to be called out with Talsu, Traku imagined army life as being more exciting than the terror-punctuated boredom Talsu had known as a soldier.
“It wouldn’t have made much difference,” Talsu told him, which was undoubtedly true. After a moment, he went on, “Doesn’t seem right, listening to one of Mezentio’s whoresons spouting the old language when we can’t hardly speak it ourselves.”