“You may be right,” said Hajjaj, who feared Balastro was. “But whether you are right or wrong has nothing to do with whether King Shazli has met the undertakings he gave to Algarve. He has, and you have no right to ask anything more of him or of Zuwayza than he has already delivered.”
“There we differ,” Balastro said. “For if the nature of the war has changed, what Zuwayza’s undertakings mean has also changed. If your kingdom gives no more than it has given, you are more likely to be contributing to Algarve’s defeat than to our victory. Do you not wonder that we might want something more from you than that?”
“I wonder at very little I have seen since the Derlavaian War began,” Hajjaj replied. “Having watched a great kingdom resort to savagery that would satisfy the barbarous chieftain of some undiscovered island in the northern seas, I find my capacity for surprise greatly shrunken.”
“No barbarous chieftain faces so savage and deadly a foe as Algarve does in Unkerlant,” Balastro said. “Had we not done what we did when we did it, Unkerlant would have done it to us.”
“Such a statement is all the better for proof,” Hajjaj observed. “You say what might have been; I know what was.”
“Do you know what will be if Unkerlant beats Algarve?” Balastro demanded. “Do you know what will become of Zuwayza if that happens?”
There he had the perfect club with which to pound Hajjaj over the head. He knew it, too, and used it without compunction. With a sigh, Hajjaj said, “What you do not understand is that Zuwayza also fears what may happen if Algarve should beat Unkerlant.”
“That would not be as bad for you,” Balastro told him.
Hajjaj didn’t know whether to admire the honesty of the little qualifying phrase at the end of the sentence or to let it appall him. He wanted to call for Qutuz to bring more wine. But who could guess what he might say if he got drunk? As things were, he contented himself with a narrow, rigidly correct question: “What do you seek from us?”
“Real cooperation,” Balastro answered at once. “Most notably, cooperation in finally pinching off and capturing the port of Glogau. That would be a heavy blow to King Swemmel’s cause.”
“Why not just loose your magics against the place?” Hajjaj said, and then, because Balastro had well and truly nettled him, he could not resist adding, “I am sure they would serve you as well as they did down in the land of the Ice People.”
Algarvian news sheets, Algarvian crystal reports had said not a word about the disaster that had befallen the expeditionary force on the austral continent. They admitted the foe was advancing where he had been retreating, but they never said why. Lagoas, on the other hand, trumpeted the botched massacre- or rather, the botched magecraft, for the massacre had succeeded-to the skies.
Balastro glared and flushed. “Things are not so bad there as the islanders make them out to be,” he said, but he didn’t sound as if he believed his own words.
“How bad are they, then?” Hajjaj asked.
The Algarvian minister didn’t answer, not directly. Instead, he said, “Here on Derlavai, magecraft would not turn against us as it did in the land of the Ice People.”
“Again, this is easier to say than to prove,” Hajjaj remarked. Even if it did prove true, slaughtering Kaunians still repelled him. He took a deep breath. “We have done what we have done, and we are doing what we are doing. If that does not fully satisfy King Mezentio, he is welcome to take whatever steps he finds fitting.”
Marquis Balastro got to his feet. “If you think we shall forget this insult, I must tell you you are mistaken.
“I meant no insult,” Hajjaj said. “I do not wish you ill, as King Swemmel does. But I do not wish quite so much ill upon Unkerlant as Algarve does, either. If only one great kingdom thrives, as you say, what room is there for the small kingdoms of the world, for the Zuwayzas and Forthwegs and Yaninas?”
“In the days of the Kaunian Empire, the blonds had no room for us Algarvians,” Balastro answered. “We made room for ourselves.”
Somehow, in the person of a plump, naked envoy, Hajjaj saw a fierce, kilted barbarian warrior. Maybe that was good acting from Balastro-or maybe the barbarian warrior never lay far below the surface in any Algarvian. Hajjaj said, “And now you condemn Zuwayza for trying to make a little room for ourselves? Where is the justice in that?”
“Simple,” Balastro said. “We were strong enough to do it.”
“Good day, sir,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister said, and Balastro departed. But, watching his broad retreating back, Hajjaj nodded and smiled a little. For all Balastro’s bluster, Hajjaj didn’t think the Algarvians would abandon Zuwayza. They couldn’t afford to.
But then Hajjaj sighed. Zuwayza couldn’t abandon Algarve, either. Hajjaj would have been willing to make the break, provided he could have got decent terms from Swemmel. But Swemmel didn’t care to give decent terms. Hajjaj sighed again. “And so the cursed war goes on,” he said.
Twelve
A stack of small silver coins and another of big brass ones, almost as shiny as gold, stood in front of Talsu. Similar stacks of coins, some larger, some smaller, stood in front of the other Jelgavans sitting at the table in a silversmith’s parlor. A pair of dice lay on the table. If Algarvian constables burst into the parlor, all they would see was gambling. They might keep the money for themselves-being redheads, they probably would-but they’d have nothing to get very excited about.
So hoped Talsu and all the other men, some young, some far from it, at the table. The silversmith, whose name was Kugu, nodded to his comrades. He peered at the world through thick spectacles, no doubt because he did so much close work. “Now, my friends,” he said, “let’s go over the endings of the declension of the aorist participle.”
Along with the others, Talsu recited the declensions-nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative-of the participle for singular, dual, and plural; masculine, feminine, and neuter. He got through all the forms without a hitch, and felt a certain modest pride at managing it. Despite getting through them, he wondered how his ancient ancestors had managed to speak classical Kaunian without pausing every other word to figure out the proper form of adjective, noun, or verb.
Jelgavan, now, Jelgavan was a proper language: no neuter gender, no dual number, no fancy declensions, a vastly simplified verb. He hadn’t realized how sensible Jelgavan was till he decided to study its grandfather.
Kugu reached out and picked up the dice on the table. He rolled them, and got a six and a three: not a good throw, not a bad one. Then he said, “We are gambling here, you know, and for more than money. The Algarvians want us to forget who we are and who our forefathers were. If they know we’re working to remember.. They knocked down the imperial arch. They won’t be shy about knocking over a few men.”
“Curse ‘em, the redheads have never been shy about knocking over a few men, or more than a few,” Talsu said.
Somebody else said, “They can’t kill all of us.”
“If what we hear coming out of Forthweg is true, they’re doing their best,” Talsu said.
Everyone stirred uncomfortably. Thinking of what had happened to Kaunians in Forthweg led to thoughts of what might happen to the Kaunian folk of Jelgava. Somebody said, “I think those stories are a pack of lies.”
Kugu shook his head. Lamplight reflected from the lenses of his spectacles, making him look for a moment as if he had enormous blank yellow eyes. He said, “They are true. From things I’ve heard, they are only a small part of what is true. Algarve doesn’t aim to kill just our memories. We are in danger ourselves.”
Then why aren‘t we fighting back more? Talsu wanted to shout it. He wanted to, but he didn’t. Aye, these men were here to study classical Kaunian, which argued that they had no use for the redheads. But Talsu didn’t know all of them well. He hardly knew a couple of them at all. Any of them, even Kugu himself, could have been an Algarvian spy. Back before the war, King Donalitu had had plenty of provocateurs serving him-men who said outrageous things to get others to agree with them, whereupon those others vanished into dungeons. A man would have to be insanely foolhardy to think the Algarvians couldn’t match such ploys.