“Oh, shut up.” Talsu’s voice was as sour as the beer he was drinking. “Maybe I will go looking for Vartu. You’re no cursed good, not when it comes to making sense you’re not.” He started to get to his feet.

  “Sit tight, sit tight,” Smilsu said. “One thing you’ve got to know is that the redheads have some men who are really good with a stick lurking around here somewhere, waiting to see if they can put a beam through a fellow’s ear. You want to give them a clean blaze at you?”

  “No, but I don’t want to hang around with a fool, either. It might be catching.” Despite his harsh words, Talsu didn’t get up.

  And Smilsu didn’t get angry. He spat out a piece of gristle, then said, “And what if you’re right? What are we supposed to do then? There’s nothing we can do. If the Algarvians don’t get us, the dungeons back of the line will. We’re stuck in the middle. All we can do is hope we win in spite of ourselves.”

  “We can hope the Algarvians kill all our nobles,” Talsu said savagely. “Then we’d be better off.”

  “We’ve been round that barn before—and you want to be careful with what you say, and you want to be careful who you say it to.” Smilsu kept his own voice very low indeed. “Otherwise, you won’t be better off, no matter what happens to the rest of us. Do you hear what I’m telling you, my friend?”

  “I hear you.” Talsu remained furious at the world in general and at the hidebound Jelgavan nobility in particular.

  Because Smilsu kept his mouth shut, the Jelgavan nobility did not take their revenge. The world was another matter. Not ten minutes later, a cold, nasty rain started falling. A couple of weeks earlier in the season or a little higher in the foothills and it would have been snow. Even though Talsu had to make a wet, miserable bed, he didn’t loathe the rain so much as he might have. Like dust and smoke, it cut down the range at which beams were effective. He hoped all those clever Algarvian stick men came down with chest fever from staying out in the bad weather. He wouldn’t grieve a bit.

  The Algarvians, unfortunately, found other ways to be troublesome than with sneaky stick men struggling not to sneeze. They started lobbing eggs in the direction of the Jelgavan encampment. They didn’t know exactly where King Donalitu’s men were resting, but they had a fair notion—fair enough to get Talsu and the other Jelgavan soldiers out of their blankets and digging holes in the rocky, muddy soil.

  He cursed with every shovelful of dirt he flung aside. “Stinking redheads,” he muttered. “Won’t even let a man get a decent night’s sleep.” An egg burst close by. The flash illuminated the camp for a moment, as a lightning bolt would have done. The suddenly released energy also picked up earth and stones and flung them about. A good-sized rock hissed past, only a foot or two from Talsu’s head. He cursed again and dug harder.

  Every so often through the long night, someone would shriek as he was wounded. The redheads weren’t tossing eggs in enormous numbers—this wasn’t anything like the enormous cataclysms of the Six Years’ War, where battlefields became scorched, cratered wastelands. But the eggs the Algarvians tossed did serve their purpose: they hurt a few Jelgavans and kept the rest from getting the sleep they needed. Had Talsu commanded the Algarvian forces, he would have pinned gold stars on the men tossing them.

  At last, sullenly, the darkness lifted, though rain kept pouring down. It had put out all the cookfires during the night. Talsu breakfasted on cold, soggy porridge, on cold, greasy—almost slimy—sausage, and on beer that even insistent rain had trouble making any more watery than it already was. He enjoyed it about as much as he’d enjoyed trying to sleep in the wet hole he’d dug for himself.

  Colonel Dzirnavu would have thrown a tantrum because the rain interfered with cooking his fancy breakfast. Colonel Adomu would have eaten what his men did and then led them in an attack on the egg-tossers that had harassed them in the night. Talsu didn’t know what Colonel Balozhu ate. Balozhu did appear at an hour earlier than Dzirnavu would have stirred abroad. He carried an umbrella and looked more like a schoolmaster than a noble who commanded a regiment.

  “No point trying to move forward in this,” Balozhu said after peering in all directions. “You couldn’t hope to blaze a man till you got close enough to hit him over the head with your stick. We’ll keep scouts out ahead of us, maybe send forward a patrol, but as for the rest, I think we’ll sit tight till this finally decides to blow over.”

  Talsu couldn’t argue with any of that, not even to himself—had he proposed to argue with the colonel and count, jumping off a cliff would have put him out of his misery faster and less messily. But, as he squelched off to stand against a tree, he remained vaguely dissatisfied. Maybe I’m tired, he thought, unbuttoning his fly. No doubt he was tired. Was he tired enough for his wits to be wandering? If he was, how could he tell?

  He put the question to Smilsu when relieving his friend on sentry-go: “Isn’t the idea behind this war to stamp the cursed redheads into the dirt?”

  “You’ve got that look in your eye again—or maybe it’s the rain.” Smilsu thought for a little while, then shrugged. “You really want to advance in this stuff?”

  “It might catch the Algarvians by surprise,” Talsu said. He added what he thought the final convincer. “Colonel Adomu would have done it.”

  Unconvinced, Smilsu said, “Aye, and look what it got him, too. Dead men don’t have a whole lot of fun.”

  “We advanced more under Adomu than under Dzirnavu and Balozhu put together,” Talsu said.

  Smilsu sent him a quizzical look. “You’re the one who wants the nobles dead, right? So why are you so cursed eager to fight their fight for ’em?”

  Talsu hadn’t looked at it that way. It was his turn to stop and think. At last, he said, “Just because I can’t stand the nobles doesn’t mean I love the Algarvians. No good Kaunian should do that.”

  “Tell it to Dzirnavu—but he got his, didn’t he?” Smilsu chuckled, then sobered. “The redheads don’t love us, either, not even a little they don’t.”

  “Cursed robbers, cursed thieves, cursed bandits—as if what they love should matter to us.” Talsu grimaced. If Algarvians and what they loved and didn’t love hadn’t mattered to Jelgava, he wouldn’t have been out here in the foothills of the Bratanu Mountains with chilly rain dripping down the back of his neck.

  Smilsu put it a slightly different way: “If one of those whoresons points his stick your way and blazes you down, it’ll matter a lot that he doesn’t love you.”

  “Aye, aye, aye.” Talsu waved, yielding the point. “I still wish we were giving the redheads a good kick in the balls.” Smilsu started to say something; Talsu shook his head to show he wasn’t finished. “If we don’t, sooner or later they’ll give us one, and you can take that to the bank and turn it into goldpieces.”

  “They’re busy,” Smilsu said. “They’ve got the Sibs and Forthwegians to hold down, they’re in a sea fight with Lagoas, and the Valmierans are trying to smash through their lines down south. With all that in their mess kit, they aren’t going to be bothering us any time soon.”

  “There—you’ve gone and proved my point,” Talsu said. “If they can’t bother us, what better time to bother them?”

  “Ahh, you bother me, so I’m going back to camp.” Off Smilsu went, dripping. Talsu stood in the warm glow surrounding any man who has won an argument. Then he wondered, What good did it do me? The glow faded.

  11.

  When Vanai heard the knock on the door, her first thought was that it meant trouble. She’d grown quite good at telling Kaunians from Forthwegians simply by the way they knocked. Kaunians did it as softly as they could to make themselves heard inside, almost as if they were apologizing for causing a disturbance. The Forthwegians of Oyngestun came less often to the house she shared with her grandfather. When they did, they forthrightly announced themselves.

  This knock—it came again as Vanai hurried toward the door—did not seem to fall into either the apologetic or the forthright school. What it said was, Open up or suffer the consequences, or, perhaps, Open up and suffer the consequences anyway.

  “What is that dreadful racket?” Brivibas called from his study. “Vanai, do something about it, if you please.”

  “Aye, my grandfather,” Vanai said. Brivibas sensed something out of the ordinary, too, which worried her. He paid as little heed as he could to such mundanities as knocks on the door. No ancient Kaunian author Vanai knew and no modern journal of things anciently Kaunian mentioned them; thus, they might as well not have existed for him.

  She opened the door, telling herself she was imagining things and a Forthwegian tradesman would be standing there irritably wondering what took her so long. But the man standing there was no Forthwegian. He was tall and lanky, with a red chin beard and mustaches waxed to needle points. On his head, cocked at a jaunty angle, sat a broad-brimmed hat with a bright pheasant feather sticking up from the band. He wore a short tunic above a pleated kilt, and boots and knee socks. He was, in short, an Algarvian, as Vanai had feared from the first.

  She thought about slamming the door in his face, but didn’t have the nerve. Besides, she doubted that would do any good. Trying to keep a quaver from her voice, she asked, “What—what do you want?”

  He surprised her by sweeping off his hat and bowing almost double, then astonished her by replying in Kaunian rather than the Forthwegian she’d used: “Is this the home of the famous scholar Brivibas?”

  Was it a trap? If it was, what could she do about it? The occupiers had to know where Brivibas lived. They didn’t need to waste time on politeness, either. Had they wanted her grandfather for dark reasons of their own, they could have broken down the door and sent soldiers storming in. Despite the obvious truth in all that, she couldn’t bring herself to say anything more than, “Who wishes to learn?” She kept on speaking Forthwegian.

  The Algarvian bowed again. “I have the honor to be Major Spinello. Will you do me the courtesy of announcing me to your—grandfather, is that correct? I wish to seek his wisdom in matters having to do with antiquities in this area.” He kept using Kaunian. He spoke it very well, and even used participles correctly. Only his trilled “r”s declared his native language.

  Vanai gave up. “Please step into the front hall,” she said in her own tongue. “I will tell him you wish to see him.”

  Spinello rewarded her with another bow. “You are very kind, and very lovely as well.” That made her retreat faster than the Forthwegian army ever had. The redhead did keep his hands to himself, but she didn’t let him get close enough to do anything else.

  Brivibas looked up in some annoyance when she poked her head into the study. “Whoever that was at the door, I hope you sent him away with a flea in his ear,” he said. “Drafting an article in Forthwegian is quite difficult enough without distractions.”

  “My grandfather”—Vanai took a deep breath, and also took a certain amount of pleasure in dropping an egg on Brivibas’s head—“my grandfather, an Algarvian major named Spinello would speak with you concerning antiquities around Oyngestun.”

  Brivibas opened his mouth, then closed it again. He tried once more: “An—Algarvian major?” Each word seemed to require a separate effort. “What am I to do?” he muttered, apparently to himself. But the answer to that, even for a scholar, was only too obvious. He rose from his chair. “I had better see him, hadn’t I?”

  He followed Vanai back to the hall that led to the street door. Spinello was examining a terra-cotta relief of a cobbler at work hanging there. After bowing to Brivibas and yet again to Vanai, he said, “This is a splendid copy. I’ve seen the original in the museum at Trapani.”

  That he should recognize such an obscure piece and recall where the original was displayed flabbergasted Vanai. Her grandfather said only, “A shame it was carried away from its original site.”

  Spinello wagged a finger at him, like an actor playing an Algarvian on the stage. “The original site for this one was in Unkerlant, if I recall,” he said in his excellent Kaunian. “The local barbarians probably would have smashed it when they were drunk.”

  “Hmm,” Brivibas said. Vanai watched him weighing one dislike against another. At last, brusquely, he nodded. “It could be so. And now, if you will, tell me why a major of the occupying army seeks me out.”

  Spinello bowed again. Watching him made Vanai dizzy. He said, “I am a major, true: I serve my king, and serve him loyally. But I am also an antiquarian and, being an antiquarian, I seek to learn at the feet of the great scholar whose home, I discover, is in the otherwise unimpressive village where I find myself stationed.”

  Vanai thought he laid it on with a trowel. She looked for her grandfather to send him away, probably with his ears ringing. But Brivibas proved no more immune to flattery than most men. After coughing a couple of times, he said, “In my own small way, I do what I can.”

  “You are too modest!” Spinello cried. However well he spoke Kaunian, he did so with Algarvian theatricality. “Your studies on late imperial pottery in the Western Kaunian Empire? First-rank! Better than first-rank!” He kissed his fingertips. “And the monograph on the bronze coinage of the usurper Melbardis? Again, a work scholars will use a hundred years from now. Could I ignore the opportunity to seek wisdom from such a man?”

  “Ahem!” Brivibas ran a finger inside the neck of his tunic, as if it had suddenly become too tight for comfort. He turned pink. Vanai couldn’t remember the last time he’d flushed. He coughed again, then said, “Perhaps we should discuss this in the parlor, rather than standing here in the hall. My granddaughter, would you be good enough to pour wine for the major and me—and for yourself, of course, if you would care for some?”

  “Aye, my grandfather,” Vanai said tonelessly. She was glad to escape to the kitchen, even though the goblet of wine the Algarvian major would drink meant one goblet fewer that she and Brivibas could share.

  When she went back to the parlor, Spinello was knowledgeably praising the ornaments in the chamber. He took his goblet and beamed at Vanai. “And here is the finest ornament of them all!” he said, lifting the wine cup in salute to her.

  She was glad she hadn’t taken any wine. She had nothing that made her linger in the parlor. As soon as she gave her grandfather his goblet, she could—and did—leave. Her ears felt on fire.

  She stayed in the kitchen, soaking peas and beans and chopping an onion for the meager stew that would be supper. She didn’t have enough of anything. Since the war ended, she’d given up on the idea of having enough of anything. That she and Brivibas weren’t starving she reckoned no small accomplishment.

  Her grandfather’s voice and Spinello’s drifted across the courtyard to her. She could not make out much of what they said, but tone was a different matter. Spinello sounded animated. Spinello, though, was an Algarvian—how else would he sound? She hadn’t heard her grandfather so lively in … She tried to recall if she’d ever heard him so lively. She had trouble being sure.

  After what seemed like forever, Brivibas escorted Spinello out to the street once more. Then her grandfather came to the kitchen. His eyes were wide with wonder. “A civilized Algarvian!” he said. “Who would have imagined such a thing?”

  “Who would have imagined such a thing?” Vanai echoed coldly.

  Brivibas had the grace to look flustered, but said, “Well, he was, however strange you may find that. He discoursed most learnedly on a great many aspects of classical Kaunian history and literature. He is, as it happens, particularly interested in the history of sorcery, and sought my assistance in pinpointing for him some of the power points the ancient Kaunians utilized in this area. You will perceive at once how closely this marches with my own researches.”

  “My grandfather, he is an Algarvian.” Vanai set the peas and beans and onions over the fire to start cooking.

  “My granddaughter, he is a scholar.” Brivibas coughed on a note different from the one he’d used when Spinello praised him; no doubt he was remembering the unkind things he’d said about non-Kaunian scholars in the past. “He has shown himself to be really quite an excellent scholar. I have a great deal to teach him.” Vanai busied herself with supper. After a while, Brivibas gave up justifying himself and went away. He came back to eat, but the meal passed in gloomy silence.

  That, however, did not solve the problem of Major Spinello. The Algarvian returned a couple of days later. He did not come emptyhanded, either: he carried a bottle of wine, another bottle full of salted olives, and greasy paper enclosing a couple of pounds of ham cut so thin, each slice was almost transparent.

  “I know times are not easy for you,” he said. “I hope I can in some small way be of assistance.” He laughed. “Call it my tuition fee.”

  The food was very welcome. Neither Brivibas nor Vanai said how welcome it was. Spinello likely knew. He never showed up without some sort of present after that: dried fruit, a couple of dressed squab, fine olive oil, sugar. Vanai’s belly grew quieter than it had been in a long time. Her spirit…

  She did not go out on to the streets of Oyngestun that often. When she did, though, she discovered she had more to fear from her own folk than from the Algarvian soldiers. Small boys threw mud at her. Kaunian youths her own age spat on her shadow. Blond girls turned their backs on her. Adults simply pretended she did not exist.

  In the night, someone painted ALGARVIANS’ WHORE on the front of the house she shared with Brivibas. She found a bucket of whitewash and covered over the big red letters the best she could. Her grandfather clucked sadly. “Disgraceful,” he said. “That our own folk should not understand the call of scholarship…” He shook his head. If the villagers harassed him, too, he’d never spoken a word of it.

  “They understand that they’re hungry and we’re not,” Vanai said. “They understand we have an Algarvian visitor every few days and they don’t.”

  “Shall we throw the food away?” Brivibas asked, more than usually tart. Vanai bit her lip, for she had no good answer to that.