Later than it should have, the caravan left the depot. So much for efficiency, Garivald thought. Unkerlanters spent a lot of time talking about it and not very much practicing it. He shrugged resignedly. That was nothing he didn’t already know.

Looking out the window proved poor sport. The landscape was battered and cratered. Every time the ley-line caravan glided through an Algarvian town, the place was in ruins. The redheads had done everything they could to hold back his countrymen. They hadn’t been able to do enough.

Mile after mile of wreckage and devastation and ruin went by. Here and there, in the countryside, Algarvians tended to their crops. Most of the people in the fields were women. Garivald wondered how many men of fighting age the redheads had left. Too many if they’ve got any at all, he thought.

Then he wondered how many men of fighting age his own kingdom had left. One of the soldiers in the compartment with him was close to fifty; the other looked at most seventeen. Unkerlant had won a great victory, and had paid a great price.

For a moment, he wondered if the price had been too great. Only for a moment-then he shook his head. Whatever his kingdom had paid to beat Algarve, it would have paid more had Mezentio’s men overrun all of Unkerlant. He’d seen how the Algarvians had ruled the stretches they’d occupied. Imagining that kind of rule going on and on, year after year, across the whole kingdom made him shiver even though the caravan car was stuffy and warm, almost hot.

Then he shivered again. No matter how brutally the Algarvians had ruled in Unkerlant, more than a few Grelzers-and, he supposed, more than a few men from other parts of the kingdom as well-had chosen to fight on their side and against King Swemmel. He’d had no love for Swemmel himself, not till the redheads showed him the difference between bad and worse. That anyone could have chosen Mezentio over Swemmel only proved how much better things might have been in his homeland.

For that matter, things were better in Algarve than they were in his homeland. He wondered why the redheads had tried to conquer Unkerlant. What did they want with it? Their farmers were richer than Unkerlanter peasants dreamt of being. And their townsfolk … To his eyes, their townsfolk all lived like nobles, and rich nobles at that.

How can they have lived the way they did when we live the way we do? He wondered about that, too. If the redheads managed such prosperity, why couldn’t his own kingdom? Unkerlant was far bigger than Algarve, and had more in the way of natural riches-he knew how many problems the Algarvians had had because their dragons ran out of quicksilver. But it didn’t seem to matter, not in the way people lived.

Maybe we’ll live like that, too, once the war is done. We won’t have it hanging over us like a thundercloud at harvest time. He could hope that might be so. He could hope, but he had trouble believing it. Mezentio’s subjects had lived better than Swemmel’s before the war, too. Of course, Unkerlant had gone through the Twinkings War while Garivald was a boy. That might have had something to do with it. Or it might not have, too-Algarve, after all, had fought and lost the Six Years’ War.

Garivald shrugged again, yawned, and gave it up. Here, he knew all too well how little he knew. He was a peasant who’d had his letters for less than a year. Who was he to try to figure out why his kingdom had a harder time than the Algarvians at doing so many different things? He could see it was true. Why remained beyond him.

He fell asleep not long after the sun went down. By then, the ley-line caravan had left Algarve and gone into Forthweg. The Forthwegians were better off than his own countrymen, too, but to a lesser degree. He didn’t know why that was so, either, and he refused to dwell on it. Sleep was better. After some of the places he’d slept during the war, a ley-line caravan car might have been a fancy hostel.

When he woke, he was in Unkerlant once more. It wasn’t the Duchy of Grelz, but it was his kingdom. And it had taken a worse battering than either Forthweg or Algarve. The Algarvians had wrecked things coming west, then the Unkerlanters pushing back toward the east. Counterattacks from both sides meant war had touched many places not once, not twice, but three or four times or even more.

As in Algarve, most of the people in the fields were women. Here, though, great stretches of land seemed to have no one cultivating them. What sort of crop would the kingdom have this year? Would it bring in any crop?

Garivald had plenty of time to wonder. He had to change ley-line caravans twice, and didn’t get in to Linnich for another day and a half. A couple of inspectors met the departing soldiers. Garivald didn’t think much of it; someone had to pay the men their mustering-out bonuses. “How long in Algarve?” one of the men asked him.

“Since the minute our soldiers got there,” Garivald said proudly.

“Uh-huh,” the fellow said, and scribbled a note. “You have your letters, Sergeant?”

He’d asked other men that question; Garivald had heard them answer no. More proudly still, he nodded. “Aye, sir, I do.”

“Uh-huh,” the inspector said again. “Come along with me, then.” He led Garivald toward a back room in the depot.

“Is this where you’ll pay me off?” Garivald asked.

Instead of answering, the inspector opened the door. Two more inspectors waited inside, and three unhappy-looking soldiers. One of the inspectors aimed a stick at Garivald’s face. “You’re under arrest. Charge is treason of the kingdom.”

The other sergeant tore the brass squares of rank from Garivald’s collar tabs. “You’re not a sergeant any more-just another traitor. We’ll see how you like ten years in the mines-or maybe twenty-five.”

Hajjaj had never felt so free in his life. Even before he’d gone off to the university at Trapani, he’d had nothing but public service ahead of him-in those long-ago days before the Six Years’ War, service to Unkerlant, and service to his own revived kingdom in the years since. He’d worked hard. He’d been influential. Without false modesty, he knew he’d served Zuwayza well.

And then King Shazli had chosen to go his own way, not Hajjaj’s. Now a new, more pliant, foreign minister served the king. Hajjaj wished them both well. He wasn’t used to not worrying about things outside his own household. Now, though, affairs of state were passing him by. I could get used to that, he thought. I could get used to it very soon.

He had wondered if Shazli would also order him to give Tassi back to Iskakis of Yanina. That hadn’t happened. It didn’t look like happening, either. Propitiating Unkerlant was one thing. Propitiating Yanina was something else again, something over which not even defeated Zuwayza needed to lose much sleep.

“You ought to write your memoirs,” Kolthoum told Hajjaj one blazing summer day when they both stayed within the house’s thick mud-brick walls to have as little as they could to do with the furnace heat outside.

“You flatter me,” he told his senior wife. “Ministers from great kingdoms write their memoirs. Ministers from small kingdoms read them to find out how little other people remember of what they said.”

“You don’t give yourself enough credit,” Kolthoum said.

“There are more problems than you think,” Hajjaj said. “What language should I use, for instance? If I write in Zuwayzi, no one outside this kingdom will ever see the book. If I use Algarvian. . Well, Algarvian is a stench in everyone’s nostrils except in Algarve, and people there have more urgent things to worry about than what an old black man who wears no clothes has to say. And I’m so slow composing in classical Kaunian, the book would probably never get finished. I can write it, certainly-one has to-but it’s less natural to me than either of the other tongues.”

“I notice you don’t mention Unkerlanter,” Kolthoum remarked.

Hajjaj answered that with a grunt. Like anyone else who’d grown up back in the days when Zuwayza was part of Unkerlant, he’d learned some of the tongue of his kingdom’s enormous southern neighbor. He’d taken patriotic pride in forgetting as much of it as he could since. He still spoke a bit, but he wouldn’t have cared to try to write it. And even if he had, hardly anyone east of Swemmel’s kingdom understood its tongue.

But none of that was to the point. The point was that he wouldn’t have used Unkerlanter to save his life. Kolthoum knew as much, too.

Tewfik walked into the chamber where Hajjaj and his senior wife were talking. With a short, stiff bow, the ancient majordomo said, “Your Excellency, you have a visitor: Minister Horthy of Gyongyos has come up from Bishah to speak with you-if you’d be so kind as to give him a few minutes, he says.”

Horthy didn’t speak Zuwayzi. Tewfik didn’t speak Gyongyosian-or a lot of classical Kaunian, either. The Gyongyosian minister to Zuwayza must have had some work to do, getting his message across. But that was beside

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