were blonds, their hair soaked and falling down stringily over their faces. “You have to help us, Colonel!” the tallest man exclaimed, his Algarvian fluent enough but accented with the more guttural consonants and flat vowels of Valmieran. “By the powers above, you have to!”
Lurcanio had known him well enough back in Priekule. “I have to, eh? And why is that, Smetnu?” For a refugee without a kingdom to give him orders really was a bit much.
Smetnu had an answer for him, though: “I’ll tell you why. Because I spent four years-more than four years- helping you, that’s why. Didn’t my news sheets sing King Mezentio’s song all over Valmiera?”
“And my broadsheets!” another man added.
“And my plays,” said a third.
“And our acting,” one of the women and the fourth man said together.
The other woman, whose name was Sigulda and who was either married or at least thoroughly attached to Smetnu, said, “If you don’t help us, they’ll catch up with us. And if they catch up with us. .” She drew a thumb across her throat. Her nails were painted red as blood, which added to the effect of the gesture.
And the Valmierans were right. That was all there was to it. Lurcanio bowed. “Very well, my friends. I will do what I can. But I can do, perhaps, less than you think. You will have noticed, Algarve is falling deeper into ruin and disaster with each passing day.”
They nodded. Their own kingdom-the Algarvian version of Valmiera they’d promoted and upheld-had already fallen into ruin. And now that Algarve was breaking under hammer blows from west and east, few of Mezentio’s subjects could spare them any time or aid or effort. If anything, they were an embarrassment, a reminder of what might have been. They were, in spite of everything, Kaunians, and somehow not quite welcome even to watch Algarve’s death throes. The destruction of a great kingdom was, or at least should have been, a private affair.
Unlike most of his countrymen, Lurcanio did feel a certain obligation toward them. He’d worked with them for a long time. Baldu, the playwright, had done some splendid work during the occupation. His dramas deserved to live- unless the Valmierans flung them all into the fire because he’d written them under Algarvian auspices and because some of his characters (not all, by any means) had friendly things to say about the men who’d occupied his kingdom.
Bowing again, Lurcanio asked, “Where would you go?”
“Any place where they won’t hang us or burn us or blaze us!” The actor made as if to tear his hair, which struck Lurcanio as overacting.
“Very good,” he said. “And where might that be, pray tell?”
Silence fell over the Valmierans-a gloomy, appalled silence. Not many places on the continent of Derlavai would be safe for them after Algarve finished losing the war, because all her neighbors would be eager for revenge against anyone and everyone who’d helped her.
“Siaulia?” Lurcanio suggested, and then shook his head. “No, if we lose here, what we hold on the tropical continent will be yielded to the victors. That’s how these things work, I fear.”
“Gyongyos?” Baldu suggested. “Can you get us there?”
It wasn’t an impossible notion. Gyongyos was losing the war, too, but mountains shielded its heartland, and it was a long, long way from the greatest strength of its enemies. That same, unfortunately, didn’t hold true for Lurcanio’s own kingdom. He saw one other problem: “I can probably make sure you reach a port. But the ports in the south are mostly closed because of enemy dragons flying out of Sibiu, and in the north. . It’s a long, long way to Gyongyos. Not many of our ships-or those of the Gongs-get through. The enemy prowls the sea lanes, too. You might have a better chance of reaching some island in the Great Northern Sea. No one would come looking for you there, probably not for years.”
The Valmieran collaborators looked even less happy than before. Lurcanio didn’t suppose he could blame them. Those distant islands were ratholes, nothing else but. Then Smetnu asked, “Can you get us to Ortah?”
“I don’t know,” Lurcanio said thoughtfully. The neutral kingdom was much closer than Gyongyos. Even so … “I don’t know what things are like in the west of Algarve right now. If you try to get to Ortah, you’re liable to run right into the Unkerlanters’ arms. You wouldn’t like that.”
“It’s the best chance we have, I think,” Smetnu said. The other Valmierans nodded. The news-sheet man went on, “
He was probably-almost certainly-right. “Very well,” Lurcanio said. He went into the farmhouse and wrote out a ley-line caravan pass for all six of them, explaining who they were and how they’d served Algarve. They took it and made for Carsoli’s caravan depot. Lurcanio hoped it would do some good. His own honor, at least in this small matter, remained untarnished. His kingdom’s honor? He resolutely refused to think about that.
Somewhere not far from Garivald, a wounded man moaned. Garivald wasn’t sure whether he was an Unkerlanter or an Algarvian. Whoever he was, he’d been moaning for quite a while. Garivald wished he would shut up and get on with the business of dying. The noise he was making wore on everyone’s nerves.
Dragons dropped eggs on the Algarvian town ahead, a place called Bonorva. It lay south and east of Gromheort. The plains of northern Algarve weren’t much different from those of Forthweg. The Algarvians themselves had fought just as hard in Forthweg as they were here in their own kingdom. Indeed, they were still fighting in Forthweg: Gromheort stubbornly held out against everything King Swemmel’s men could throw at it.
Lieutenant Andelot nodded to Garivald. “Well, Fariulf, even with their fancy steerable eggs, they weren’t able to throw us back. Not enough men, not enough behemoths, not enough anything.”
“Looks that way, sir,” Garivald agreed. With ingrained peasant pessimism, he added, “We don’t want it to rain right at harvest time, though. It’d be a shame to get killed with the war about won-or any other time, come to that.”
Andelot nodded. “We can’t get slack, though. The redheads are still fighting. It’s good we’re on their soil-they should know what they put us through, powers below eat them-but these are their homes. They won’t want us to take them away, any more than we wanted them to take away our homes in Unkerlant.”
He spoke like a man from Cottbus. Odds were, he hadn’t lost his home to the Algarvians. He knew that would be bad, but he didn’t know how bad it was. Garivald had watched the invaders storm into, storm past, his home village. He’d lived under their boot. He’d watched them hang a couple of irregulars in the market square. They might have hanged him there, when they found he was putting together patriotic songs. Instead, they’d hauled him off to Herborn to boil him alive, and the irregulars had rescued him before he got there.
“Better for everybody if this cursed war had never happened,” he said.
“Aye, of course,” Andelot replied. “But it’s a little too late to wish for that now, wouldn’t you say?”
Garivald only grunted. Andelot was right, no doubt about it. But Garivald could still wish, even if he knew what he wished for had no chance of coming true.
The next morning, he trudged past a column of Algarvian refugees Unkerlanter dragons had caught on the road. It wasn’t pretty. It must have happened only the day before. The bodies didn’t stink yet, but the almost cheerful odor of burnt meat lingered in the air. The dragonfliers had dropped eggs first, then come back so their beasts could flame the redheads the eggs hadn’t knocked over-and, he was sure, some they had.
“Good riddance,” was all Andelot said, and, “When the civilians run from us, they clog the roads. That makes it harder for Mezentio’s soldiers to get where they need to go.”
“Aye,” Garivald answered. He’d hated the Algarvians ever since they broke into his kingdom. He’d killed his share of them-more than his share, very likely. He should have wanted all of them dead. A substantial part of him did want all of them dead, or thought it did. But. . some of the scattered, twisted, charred corpses were very small. He thought of Syrivald and Leuba, his own son and daughter, no doubt as dead as these Algarvians. Thinking of them didn’t make him want to see more redheads dead. It just made him wish no more children had to die, regardless of what color hair they had.
Somewhere not far away, a woman started screaming. Garivald had heard women scream on that particular note before. So had the men in the squad he led. Some of them, he was sure, had made Algarvian women scream on that note. They grinned and nudged one another.
“Keep moving,” Garivald called to them. “We haven’t got time to stop and have fun.” They nodded and tramped on, but the grins stayed on their faces.
He’d thought his countrymen would run the Algarvians out of Bonorva that afternoon. So had Andelot, who’d said, “We’ll be sleeping on real beds tonight, men.” They all got a rude surprise. As they neared the outskirts of the city, Algarvian egg-tossers greeted them with a heavier pounding than any in which Garivald had been on the
