Vanai started to ignore that, too. She found she couldn’t. Finding she couldn’t, she wished she could, for tears stung her eyes. “I can’t help it, either,” she said, choking a little on the words. “I can’t help what the Algarvians have done to us, and I wish so much I could. That just makes all-this-that much harder to take.”
“I know,” he said. “I wish I could do something about the redheads, too, but I just can’t, curse it.” He slammed a fist down onto the mattress, hard enough to make Vanai bounce up a little.
He was a Forthwegian, not a Kaunian. The Algarvians’ yoke lay less heavily on his folk than on Vanai’s. But he’d fled his family, fled Gromheort, on account of her. And his brother was dead because his cousin had joined the puppet brigade the conquerors had created. She could hardly say he and his hadn’t suffered on account of the occupation.
Instead of saying anything, she reached for him. He was reaching for her, too. Before long, they were making love. As her pleasure built, she could forget the miserable little flat in which she was caged. She knew the escape wouldn’t last long, but cherished it while it did.
Afterwards, drifting toward sleep, Ealstan said, “One day, by the powers above, I’ll bring you back to Gromheort. You see if I don’t.”
That did make her burst into tears. She so much wanted to believe it, and so much doubted she could. And even if she did … “People there don’t like mixed couples. They didn’t like them before the war. They’ll like them even less now.”
“People are fools,” Ealstan said. “Who cares what they like and don’t like?”
“If more Forthwegians liked Kaunians, the redheads couldn’t do what they’re doing here,” Vanai said. She felt Ealstan’s nod rather than seeing it. People of her own blood-her grandfather, for instance-despised Forthwegians, too, but she didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to think about anything. She ground her face into her pillow. After a while, she slept.
Eight
Don’t just stand there!” Major Spinello shouted. Somehow, he managed to stay dapper when all the Algarvians he commanded looked like a pack of tramps. “You’d bloody well better not just stand there. We’ve got to keep moving. If we aren’t moving forward, you can bet your last copper the cursed Unkerlanters will be.”
Trasone waved a hand. Spinello swept off his hat and bowed, as if he were recognizing a duke, not an ordinary trooper. Trasone said, “Nothing to worry about, sir. I mean, with the Yaninans guarding our flank, we’re safe as can be, right?”
Sergeant Panfilo let out a warning grunt. Several other Algarvian soldiers tramping down the dusty road cursed their allies. And Spinello threw back his head and laughed. “You’re a menace, you are,” he told Trasone. “Aye, the Yaninans are heroes, every stinking one of em. But we saved their bacon when they looked like giving way, now didn’t we?”
“Aye.” Trasone cocked his head to one side and spat out the husk of a sunflower seed. “We had to double back to do it, though. I thought the idea was that they would cover our flank so we could smash all the Unkerlanters in front of us and go on into the hills for the cinnabar.”
“Oh, aye, that’s the idea they had back in Trapani,” Spinello agreed. A wave of his hand told how much, or rather how little, the officers and nobles back in Trapani knew. “Only trouble is, every once in a while the Unkerlanters have ideas, too. They kept an army in front of us and hit us from the side with another one, that’s all.” Another wave said it was perfectly simple if you looked at it the right way.
But Trasone wasn’t in the mood to look at it like that. “If they’ve got enough soldiers to hold some in front of us and to hit us from the flank with more, how are we going to keep on moving forward?” he demanded.
Panfilo grunted again, and this time followed the grunt with words: “Worrying about how isn’t your job. Doing what you’re told is.”
“I do what I’m told.” Trasone gave the sergeant a dirty look. “You don’t suppose I’d’ve come all this way because I like the scenery, do you?”
That made Spinello laugh once more, but he grew serious again in a hurry. “The Unkerlanters have more men than we do. Nothing we can do about that-except to go on killing the whoresons, of course. But if they’ve got more, we’ve got better. And that’s why we’ll win the war.”
Where Trasone and Panfilo and just about everybody else in the battalion trudged south and west along that road, cursing and coughing in the clouds of dust their comrades kicked up, Spinello strutted along as if on parade. Trasone didn’t know whether to envy him or to feel like strangling him.
Somebody-he couldn’t see who-said, “We may be better than the lousy Unkerlanters, but bugger me with a cheese grater if the Yaninans are.”
“They’re our allies,” Spinello said. “We’re better off with ‘em than without ‘em.”
He’d mocked ideas that came out of the capital of Algarve before, but he was echoing one there. When Trasone said, “Allies,” he made the word into a curse. “If they were fighting my granny, I’d bet on gran.”
“Nasty old bitch, is she?” Spinello said, which jerked a startled guffaw from Trasone. But instead of going on to defend the Yaninans some more, Spinello half changed the subject: “They do say the Sibs taking service with Mezentio are really good fighters, and this brigade of Forthwegians they’re putting together is supposed to be full of tough customers, too.”
Having fought in Sibiu, Trasone knew the men who came out of the island kingdom could indeed fight hard. But that wasn’t the point, or wasn’t the whole point. “Do we really need all those foreign buggers? And if we do, are there going to be any Algarvians left alive by the time this war is through?”
“It’s like any other brawl,” Sergeant Panfilo said. “Last man standing wins.”
The road came up to and into a wood full of pines and beeches and birch. Pointing ahead, Trasone said, “How many Unkerlanters are hiding in there? And how many of us’ll be standing by the time we come out the other side?”
Nobody answered. Any Algarvian officer who fought in Unkerlant hated forests. The Unkerlanters were better woodsmen, and had the advantage of preparing their positions ahead of time. Digging them out always cost.
A kilted soldier at the edge of the woods waved the battalion forward. Forward Trasone went, not without a pang. He’d had other Algarvians wave him forward into woods-and forward into trouble.
He waited nervously for Unkerlanters in hidden holes to start blazing at his comrades and him from behind-or for a whole swarm of squat men in rock-gray tunics to charge from one side of the road or the other, half of them drunk, all of them roaring, “Urra!” as loud as they could. If they got the chance, they’d knock the Algarvians into the undergrowth and maul them like wild beasts.
With every quiet, peaceful step he took, he grew more suspicious. Sparrows chirped. A rabbit peered out at the Algarvians, then ducked back behind a bush. “All right,” Trasone said. “Where are they?”
“Maybe we really did clear this wood,” Panfllo said. “Stranger things have happened… I suppose.”
“Name two,” Trasone challenged.
Before the sergeant could take him up on it, the earth began to shake beneath their feet. Here and there along the road, purplish flames shot up out of the ground. Men caught in them screamed horribly, but not for long. Along either side of the roadway, trees shivered like men caught naked in an Unkerlanter winter. Some of them toppled. As they did, their crowns caught fire. More Algarvians screamed in torment.
Trasone was screaming, too, screaming in terror. Sergeant Panfilo’s shout had words in it: “Magecraft! Unkerlanter magecraft!”
He was right, of course. Knowing he was right didn’t make the sorcerous onslaught any easier for Trasone or his comrades to bear. Had King Swemmel’s men started tossing eggs at him, normally he would have scraped a hole in the ground and waited them out as best he could. He didn’t want to do that here, not when any hole he dug was liable to close up on him as soon as he dove into it.