“Oh, aye, I expect we did,” Ethelhelm answered. His flat argued that he’d been bringing back plenty from all his swings around the kingdom. It had so many things Ealstan’s lacked. . But Ealstan couldn’t dwell on that, for the musician was continuing, “But you’d better not call Forthweg a kingdom, you know.”
“Why not?” Ealstan asked, taken by surprise. “What else are we?”
“A province of Algarve,” Ethelhelm said. “And if you don’t believe me, you can ask the redheads.”
Forthweg had been provinces of other kingdoms before. For the hundred years leading up to the Six Years’ War, both Algarve and Unkerlant had done their best to make the Forthwegians forget they’d ever been a kingdom. Both had failed. During the chaos after the war, Forthweg wasted no time regaining its freedom.
When Ealstan made a detailed suggestion about where the Algarvians could put their opinion and what they could do with it once it got there, Ethelhelm laughed, but not for long. “You want to be careful where you say that kind of thing, you know,” he remarked. “Some people would make you regret it.”
“You should talk,” Ealstan retorted. “The songs you sing, it’s a wonder Mezentio’s men haven’t found a deep, dark dungeon cell for you.”
“It’s no wonder at all,” the band leader answered. “I’ve paid off so bloody many of them, I’m probably supporting a couple of regiments in Unkerlant by myself.” He grimaced. “I have to stay rich. If I can’t keep paying the whoresons off, they’ll start listening to the words again.”
“Oh.” Ealstan didn’t know why he sounded startled. His father had paid off the Algarvians, too, to keep them from noticing Leofsig. “Well, by your books, you can keep on paying them for quite a while.”
“Good,” Ethelhelm said. “I intend to. I have to, as a matter of fact.” He made another horrible face. “And I’ll tell you something else, too-not everything they want from me is money.”
“Is that so?” Ealstan could tease Ethelhelm: “You have a couple of redheaded women fighting over who gets to make you her pet?”
“Powers above be praised, I’m spared that,” Ethelhelm answered with another laugh. “But I might enjoy myself if they were.” He and Ealstan both laughed this time, conspiratorially. Algarvian women had a reputation for looseness, just as Algarvian men had a name for corruption. What people said about Algarvian men turned out to be largely true, which made thinking about redheaded women more intriguing. But Ethelhelm sobered. “No, I won’t enjoy this, if I end up having to do it: they want the band to perform for Plegmund’s Brigade.”
“Oh,” Ealstan said again-this time a sound of pain and sympathy, not surprise. “What are you going to do?”
“Talk it over with the boys some more first,” the band leader replied. “It’s just what we want, right? — giving shows for a brigade full of traitors. But if it’s the only way we can stay out of trouble with the Algarvians, we may have to.”
At not quite eighteen, some things looked very clear to Ealstan. “If you do play, how are you any different from the fellows who carry sticks for King Mezentio?”
Ethelhelm’s lips tightened. “I wish you hadn’t asked it quite that way.” Now that the words were out of his mouth, Ealstan also wished he hadn’t asked it quite that way. He didn’t want to lose Ethelhelm as a client or as a friend. But he didn’t want to lose his respect for him, either. After a pause, the musician went on, “I don’t know what to tell you about that. There’s some truth to it. But if we don’t play for the Brigade, the Algarvians are liable to shut us up. Is that better?”
He meant it seriously. This time, Ealstan thought before he answered. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I just don’t know. We have to make some compromises with the Algarvians if we want to live.”
“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” the band leader agreed.
Ealstan waved around the flat. The wave encompassed thick carpets, fine furnishing, books, paintings, drums and viols and flutes. “The other thing you have to ask yourself is, how much is all this worth to you?”
Ethelhelm gave him an odd look. “I never thought I’d see my conscience sitting in a chair talking to me. What do you think I’ve been asking myself ever since the Algarvians came to me? It’s not an easy question.”
“Why not?” It was easy for Ealstan.
Now Ethelhelm did look exasperated. “Why not? I’ll tell you why not. Because I’ve worked a long, long time, and I’ve worked really hard all that time, to get where I am. And now I have to throw it away by making the redheads angry?
Ealstan hadn’t spent a long time working toward anything. The only thing he had that he couldn’t bear to give up was Vanai, and he’d already given up everything else for her. He got to his feet. “I think I’d better go.”
“Aye, I think maybe you’d better,” Ethelhelm replied. “I haven’t told them we would yet, you know. I just haven’t told them we wouldn’t, either.”
With a nod, Ealstan left. As usual, he noted the stairwell didn’t stink of cabbage or of anything worse. As much as all the fine furnishings in Ethel-helm’s flat, that reminded him of what the band leader had to lose.
Heat smote when he left the block of flats. Summer in Eoforwic, like summer in most of Forthweg, was the savage season of the year, the sun beating down from high, high in the sky. Tempers could fray. His almost had, and so had Ethelhelm’s. He sighed, seeing himself in Ethelhelm’s place, listening to himself telling the Algarvians they had no business raising Plegmund’s Brigade, let alone expecting him to play for it.
But he was his father’s son, too. After a moment, he laughed at himself- easy enough for a man with nothing to lose. Ethelhelm had rather more than that. Ealstan had already known as much. This whole block of flats told him as much. Ethelhelm didn’t want to lose it, either. Ealstan hadn’t known that, but he did now. He wondered how the bandleader would get around it, and if Ethelhelm could. For Ethelhelm’s sake and his own, he hoped so.
He passed a recruiting broadsheet for Plegmund’s Brigade, and another, and another. The Algarvians made sure there were plenty about. Had Sidroc finally joined it, as he’d kept saying he would, or had he found better sense somewhere? For his cousin’s sake, Ealstan hoped that last was true.
He walked by another one of those ubiquitous broadsheets. This one, though, had ALGARVE’s DOGS scrawled across it in bold strokes of charcoal. Seeing that made Ealstan smile. In spite of Plegmund’s Brigade, not all, or even most, of his countrymen had any use for their occupiers.
He saw several more defaced broadsheets on his way back toward his own block of flats. They all had different slogans on them: either they’d been written by different hands or by one fellow with a lot on his mind. One of the slogans read, STOP KILLING KAUNIANS! Ealstan almost burst into tears when he spied it. He sometimes wondered if he were the only Forthwegian who cared. Being reminded he wasn’t felt good.
A Forthwegian dashed round a corner and ran toward and then past him with what looked like a woman’s leather handbag pressed to his side. And so it was: a moment later, a couple of Algarvian constables, whistles shrilling, rounded that same corner in hot pursuit. They pointed at the fleeing Forthwegian and shouted, “Stopping thief!”
No one on the crowded street showed the least interest in stopping the thief. Cursing, sweating, the Algarvians pounded after him. They didn’t get far before somebody stuck out a leg and tripped the one who was in front. His partner fell over him. Both of them howled.
They got up with filthy tunics and with bleeding elbows and knees-the kilts they wore made their scrapes worse by leaving knees bare. Each of them yanked his bludgeon off his belt and started belaboring the Forthwegian they thought had tripped them. After he went down with a groan, the Algarvians started beating all the Forthwegians they could reach. One of them swung at Ealstan, but missed.
And then a Forthwegian leaped on one of the constables. The other Algarvian dropped his bludgeon, grabbed for his stick, and blazed the Forthwegian. The fellow let out a shriek that echoed through the street. The redhead he’d jumped scrambled to his feet.
A rock-probably a pried-up cobblestone-whizzed past the Algarvians’ heads. An instant later, another rock caught one of them in the ribs. They both started blazing then, blazing and shouting for help at the top of their lungs. Ealstan had no idea whether any help for them was close by. He didn’t wait around to find out, either, especially not after a beam zipped past his head and burned a scorched, smoking hole in the wooden front of the leather-goods shop by which he was standing.
Forthwegians fell, screaming and thrashing. But more rocks flew, too, along with curses. One of the Algarvians went down when a stone caught him in front of the ear. His comrade stood over him, still blazing. Then someone tackled the standing constable from behind. Baying like wolves, the mob swarmed over both redheads.
Ealstan cheered to see them go down. But he didn’t linger to help stomp them to death. He hadn’t seen a riot in Eoforwic, but the stories he’d heard about the one that had happened not long before Vanai and he came to the
