He checked his water bottle. It was full. He’d filled it at the last water hole, only half a mile or so south of where he was now. The Zuwayzin hadn’t poisoned that one. He’d seen men drink from it, and they’d taken no harm. The naked black savages hadn’t missed many water holes. They weren’t perfectly efficient themselves —just far too close for comfort.

  Sergeant Magnulf trudged by. His boots scuffed through sand. His shoulders slumped, ever so slightly. Even his iron determination, which had never faltered during the war against Gyongyos, was wearing thin here. “Tell me again, Sergeant,” Leudast called to him. “Remind me why King Swemmel wants this land bad enough to take it away from anybody. Remind me why anybody who’s got it isn’t happy to give it to the first fool who wants it.”

  Magnulf looked at him. “You need to be more efficient with your mouth, soldier,” he said tonelessly. “I know you didn’t mean to call King Swemmel a fool, but somebody else who was listening might get the idea you did. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?”

  Leudast considered. If they arrested him for disloyalty to King Swemmel, they’d take him out of this Zuwayzi wilderness. He wouldn’t have to worry about black men who wanted to blaze him—or, as army rumor had it, to cut his throat and drink his blood. On the other hand, he would have to worry about Swemmel’s interrogators. He might escape the Zuwayzin. The interrogators … no.

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” he replied at last. “I’ll watch what I say.”

  “You’d better.” Magnulf wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his tunic. The Unkerlanters called the tunic’s color rock gray, but it didn’t match any of the rocks hereabouts, which were various ugly shades of yellow. That also struck Leudast as inefficient, but he kept his mouth shut about it. Magnulf went on, “I’ll even answer your question. The king wants this land back because it used to belong to Unkerlant, and so it ought to again.

  And the Zuwayzin don’t want us to have it on account of it blocks our path toward better country farther north.”

  ”Is there better country farther north?” Leudast asked, again speaking more freely than he should have. “Or does this miserable desert go on forever?”

  “There’s supposed to be better country,” Magnulf said. “I suppose there must be better country—otherwise, the Zuwayzin couldn’t raise so many soldiers against us.”

  That made sense. Along with the rest of the men in his company, Leudast slogged north. Thornbushes grew here and there among the rocks. Very little else did. Very little lived here, either—snakes and scorpions arid a few little pale foxes with enormous ears. Scavenger birds circled overhead, their wings looking as wide as those of dragons. They thought the Unkerlanter army would come to grief in the desert. Leudast remained far from sure they were wrong.

  He tramped past a dead behemoth. The big beast hadn’t been blazed; its corpse bore no mark he could see. Maybe it had just keeled over from trying to haul the weight of its armor and weapons and riders through the desert. Since he felt like keeling over himself, Leudast knew a certain amount of sympathy for the poor brute. The army had its own scavengers; they’d already taken away the ironmongery the behemoth had carried on its back.

  Magnulf pointed. “There’s the line,” he said: Unkerlanters crouching and sprawling behind stones, blazing away at the Zuwayzin who blocked their path. As Leudast got down behind a rock himself so he could crawl forward, one of his countrymen shrieked and clutched at his shoulder. This terrain was made for defense. A handful of men could hold up an army here—and had.

  “Come on, you reinforcements, take your places,” an officer shouted. “We’ll get those black bastards out of there soon enough—see if we don’t.” He ordered some of the soldiers already in line forward to flank out the Zuwayzin who’d stalled the advance.

  Leudast blazed away at the rocks behind which the enemy sheltered. He had no idea whether his beams hit anyone. At the least, they made the Zuwayzin keep their heads down while his comrades slid around by the right flank.

  But more Zuwayzin waited on the right. They hadn’t been blazing, perhaps hoping to draw the very attack the officer had commanded. They broke it. After a few minutes, Unkerlanters came streaming back to the main line, some of them helping wounded comrades escape the enemy’s beams.

  When the Zuwayzin attacked in turn, the Unkerlanters threw them back. That cheered Leudast—till he heard an officer say, “We’re the ones who are supposed to be moving forward, curse it, not the black men.”

  “Tell it to the Zuwayzin—maybe they haven’t heard,” somebody not far from Leudast muttered. That struck him as dangerously inefficient speech, but he wasn’t inclined to report it. For the moment, he was content to be able to hold his position and not have to retreat.

  He swigged from his water bottle. That wouldn’t last indefinitely, and, except for the known water holes, the dowsers hadn’t had any luck finding new supplies. Leudast found himself unsurprised: if no water was out there to find, the best dowsers in the world couldn’t find it. That meant the army had to depend on the familiar holes and on what ley-line caravans and animals could bring forward. By the knots of mages Leudast had seen working along the ley lines, the Zuwayzin had done their best to make them impassable. That did nothing to add to his peace of mind.

  And then he stopped worrying about such minor details as perhaps dying of thirst in a few days. Off to the left, the west, eggs smashed against stone. Leudast automatically hugged the ground. Hard on the heels of those roars came exultant cries in a language he did not know and despairing ones in a language he did: “The Zuwayzin! The Zuwayzin are on our flank!”

  “Camels!” Sergeant Magnulf used the word as vilely as Leudast had used efficiency before. “Bastards snuck around our cavalry again.” He bit out a few curses of a more conventional sort, then gathered himself. “Well, no help for it.” He looked westward to gauge how close the attackers were. “Fall back!” he shouted. “Fall back—form a line so we’re not enfiladed any more. Whatever happens, we have to hang on to that water hole back there.”

  He was thinking about water, too, though in a more immediate sense than Leudast had been. In this sun-baked country, not thinking about water was impossible. No doubt the Zuwayzin were also thinking about it, and making for that water hole themselves. At least Magnulf was thinking, which seemed to be more than any of the Unkerlanter officers could say.

  Leudast scrambled back toward a stone that offered good shelter against attack from the west. As happened whenever a force found itself outflanked, some soldiers panicked and fled toward the rear. As often happened when they did, they paid the price for panic: Zuwayzi beams cut them down.

  Howling with triumph, the Zuwayzin stormed forward. Leudast blazed a black man who showed too much of himself. Several other Zuwayzin also went down, dead or shrieking in pain. Then the enemy started flitting from rock to rock again, having learned a good many Unkerlanters still held fight.

  More eggs crashed down around Leudast. The Zuwayzin must have taken apart some light tossers and carried them on camelback. Sand and shattered rock pelted him. He wanted to claw a hole in the ground, jump in, and pull the hole shut over him. He couldn’t. And, if he stayed curled up behind this rock, the Zuwayzin could move forward and blaze him at their leisure.

  Understanding that was easy. Making himself get up on one knee and blaze at the enemy was much harder, but he did it. He thought he wounded another Zuwayzi, too. But he could not stay where he was any more, for the Zuwayzin were still advancing. He slipped away to another stone, and then to another.

  “We have to save the water hole!” an officer shouted, realizing only now what Magnulf had seen at once. “If we lose that water hole, we lose our grip on this whole stretch of desert.” He shouted orders pulling more men from what had been the advance and shifting them to the turned flank.

  It wasn’t going to be enough. Leudast could see it wasn’t going to be enough. The Zuwayzin could see it wasn’t going to be enough, too. They knew what forcing the men of Unkerlant away from the water hole would mean. They were more clever than the Gongs, probably more clever than the Forthwegians, too. When they struck, they struck hard, and straight for the heart.

  Leudast wondered if he had enough water to make it back to the next clean hole. It was, he knew, a long way to the south—a dreadfully long way, if a man was retreating with the enemy nipping at his heels. Maybe he could fill up the bottle before the black men reached this water hole.

  More eggs fell—but these fell on the Zuwayzin. Dragons overhead had made the scavenger birds fly off. As the dragons wheeled, he saw their upper bodies were painted rock-gray: the color Unkerlant used. Now he shouted in triumph and the Zuwayzin in dismay. Unkerlanter egg-tossers well back of the line began adding their gifts to the ones the dragons were delivering.

  A man in a rock-gray tunic took shelter behind the rock next to Leudast’s. “How’s it look, soldier?” he asked, an officer’s sharp snap in his voice.

  “Not too bad, sir—not now,” Leudast answered, glancing over at the newcomer. That tunic was one a common soldier might have worn, but the collar bore a large star. Leudast’s eyes widened. Only one man in Unkerlant was entitled to wear that emblem. “Not too bad, my lord Marshal,” he corrected himself, wondering what a man like Rathar was doing at the front.

  Rathar answered that question without his asking it: “Can’t find out what’s going on if I don’t see for myself.”

  “Uh, aye, sir,” Leudast said. The marshal hadn’t just come to see. He’d conic to fight, and carried a stick like any other footsoldier’s. He used it, too, popping up to blaze at the Zuwayzin. Of course, he’d fought in the Six Years’ War and the Twinkings War, which meant he’d been around combat longer than Leudast had been alive. His happy grunt had to mean he’d got a beam home.

  Looking around, Leudast saw Rathar had also brought his crystallomancer with him. The marshal barked out a stream of orders, which the mage relayed to his colleagues back with the reserves. Those orders sent men and egg-tossers and dragons up toward the battle. Anyone who disobeyed them or delayed by even a heartbeat speedily regretted it.

  For the first time since plunging into the Zuwayzin desert, Leudast began to feel hope. Up till now, the Unkerlanters’ campaign had been bungled. Listening to Rathar’s crisp commands, he didn’t think the bungling would go on much longer.

  It was Count Brorda’s birthday, a holiday in Gromheort. An Algarvian dwelt in Brorda’s castle these days, but he hadn’t bothered canceling the holiday. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to antagonize the Forthwegians over whom he sat in judgment, although Ealstan had a hard time imagining an Algarvian who cared a fig about what the folk of Gromheort thought.

  More likely, the occupiers were just too lazy to bother changing what they’d found when they overran the city.

  Whatever the cause, Ealstan was glad to escape school. He’d grown as sick of Algarvian irregular verbs as he had been of their classical Kaunian equivalents. And besides, the first fall rains had brought out the mushrooms.

  Forthwegians were mad for mushrooms—not surprising, when so many good ones grew in their kingdom. They ate them fresh, they ate them dried, they ate them pickled, they ate them in salads, they ate them with olives: they ate them with any excuse, or none.

  Markets were always full of mushrooms, but Ealstan, like most Forthwegians, was convinced the ones he picked himself were better than any he could buy. Like most Forthwegians, he knew the differences between the edible varieties and the ones that were poisonous; like his schoolmasters, his father had operated on the principle that a warmed backside made blood flow more freely to the brain. And so, armed with a cloth sack, he sallied forth with his cousin Sidroc to see what he could find.

  “It will be good to get out of the city,” Sidroc said. Lowering his voice, he went on, “It will be good to get away from the cursed redheads, too.”

  “I won’t say you’re wrong, because I think you’re right,” Ealstan said. “I just hope they let us out. All their checkpoints are still up.”

  But the Algarvian soldiers at the checkpoint on the west side of town, seeing the sacks they carried, waved them through. “Mushrooms?” a soldier asked. Ealstan and Sidroc nodded. The Algarvian stuck out his tongue and made a horrible face to show what he thought of them. He spoke in his own language. His comrades laughed and nodded. They didn’t fancy mushrooms, either.

  “More for us,” Ealstan said as soon as he was out of earshot of the guard who spoke Forthwegian. Sidroc nodded again.

  Before long, the two cousins split up. That way, they would bring a wider assortment of mushrooms back to the house they still shared. That way, too, they wouldn’t quarrel if they both spotted a fine one at the same time. They’d quarreled over mushrooms before, more than once. Now they knew better.

  Every so often, Ealstan would see someone else digging in a field or at the base of a tree. He didn’t offer to go and help any of these people. Some folks loved to chat and share. Rather more, though, were inclined to be surly, to say nothing of greedy. He learned that way himself. If a pretty girl came along and wanted to give him a hand, he might let her. He laughed at himself. He liked the idea, but knew better than to find it likely.

  He worked his way north, getting his shoes soggy and his knees dirty.

  One of the reasons he enjoyed hunting mushrooms—aside from the pleasure of eating them later—was that he never knew ahead of time what he’d find. He tossed a few meadow mushrooms into his sack, just to make sure he didn’t come home empty-handed. They were good enough, but no better than good enough.

  Chanterelles were better than good enough. He picked some egg-yellow ones because of their fine flavor, and some vermilion ones because his father enjoyed them, even if he himself found them acrid. Then, in some open woods he found a clump of orange Kaunian Imperial mushrooms. He studied them with care before plucking them from the ground; they were related to death caps and destroyers, both deadly poisonous. Only after he made sure they were safe did they go into the sack. They would be delicious.

  And he felt like cheering when he stumbled upon an indigo milky mushroom. It wasn’t one of his favorites as far as flavor went, but his mother always clapped her hands when he came home with one because the exotic color made any dish in which she used it more interesting.

  Then he came to a stand of trees with oyster mushrooms and ear mushrooms growing on their trunks, especially on the southern sides where sunlight did not reach them. The oyster mushrooms were particularly fine: fresh and grayish white, not old and tough and yellow. He went from tree to tree picking all he could; some grew higher than he could reach, even by jumping. He wondered what Sidroc would bring home—probably a mix altogether different from his.

  He was so intent on harvesting those mushrooms, he didn’t notice anyone else was picking from the same stand of trees till they came round from opposite sides of the same big oak and almost bumped into each other. Nearly dropping his sack of mushrooms, Ealstan jumped back in surprise.

  So did the other gatherer, a Kaunian girl not far from his own age.

  They both laughed shakily. “You startled me,” they both said at the same time, with identical pointing forefingers. That made them laugh again.

  “There are plenty for both of us,” Ealstan said, and the girl nodded. She might have been a year or so older than he was. Doing his best not to be too obvious about it, he eyed her figure, which her Kaunian-style tight tunic and trousers revealed in more detail than the long, loose tunics Forthwegian women wore. The knees of those trousers were dirty; she’d come out for the same reason he had, all right.

  “Aye, there are.” She nodded again. She was looking at his dirty knees, too. Then, suddenly, she pointed to the sack he carried. “What have you got in there? Maybe we can trade a little, so we each have more different kinds.”

  Kaunians in Forthweg were no less fond of mushrooms than any other Forthwegians. “All right,” Ealstan said. He grinned at her and dug out some of the orange mushrooms he’d found. “What will you give me for those Kaunian Imperials here? They ought to suit you.”

  She studied him before answering, her blue eyes hooded. Kaunians, he knew, got touchy if you said what they thought was the wrong thing, or even the right thing in the wrong tone of voice. He must have passed the test, for she nodded and showed him some dull brown mushrooms from her sack. “I found these horns of plenty under dead leaves, if you’d like some of them.”

  “All right,” he said again, and they made the trade. He went on, “You must have had sharp eyes to spot them. Sometimes you can walk through a big patch and never even know it, because they’re the same color as the leaves.”

  “That’s true. I’ve done it.” The Kaunian amended her words with the precision of her people: “I’ve done it a couple of times and then seen them, I mean. Who knows how many times I’ve done it without even noticing?”

  After that, they started talking about mushrooms and, almost coincidentally, about themselves. He found her name was Vanai, and that she lived in Oyngestun; she’d come east to hunt mushrooms, while he’d gone west from Gromheort. “How are things there?” he asked. “Are the redheads any better than they are in the city?”

  “I doubt it,” Vanai answered bleakly. She added a word in Kaunian, a word Ealstan knew: “Barbarians.” Kaunians sometimes applied that word to Forthwegians. Hearing it slapped on the Algarvians made Ealstan chuckle and clap his hands together. Vanai looked sharply at him. “How much Kaunian do you speak?” she asked in that language.

  “What I have learned in school,” he said, also in Kaunian. It was the first time he’d ever been glad he’d paid attention to his lessons. Only a couple of hours before, he’d laughed at himself for imagining he might meet a pretty girl while out picking mushrooms. Now he’d gone and done it, even if she was a Kaunian.

  “You speak well,” she said, falling back into Forthwegian. “Not quickly, as you would your birthspeech, but well.”