The veteran underofficer snorted. “A blanket suits me fine, Captain,” he answered. “As for the ladies, well, if you know a blind one, she might think I suited well enough.” He ran a hand over his tough, battered features.
“You’re not homely,” Skarnu said, on the whole sincerely. “You’re … distinguished-looking, that’s what you are.”
Raunu snorted again. “And I’ll tell you what distinguishes me, too: that none of the ladies wants to look at me.”
“Shows how much you know,” Skarnu answered. “Take Pernava, now. If she doesn’t reverence the ground you walk on. .”
“It’s not the same.” Raunu shook his head. “She looks at you the same way. It’s because we took her and Vatsunu in instead of giving ‘em to the cursed redheads, that’s all. It’s not because she’s hot for us. She isn’t-she’s got him instead.”
Like Skarnu, he used the Valmieran forms of Pernavai and Vatsyunas’ names, not the classical versions they’d worn in Forthweg. Having ordinary names kept them from drawing Algarvian notice.
And Skarnu had to admit the justice of Raunu’s comment. “All right,” he said, “but she’s not the only woman around, either.”
“You’ve got a woman and you’re happy, so you think everybody needs one,” Raunu said. “Me, I’m fine without, thanks. And when the itch gets strong, I can go into Pavilosta and scratch it without spending a whole lot of silver.”
Skarnu threw his hands in the air. “I’ll shut up,” he said. “This is one argument I’m not going to win-I can see that.” He picked up his hoe, which had fallen down between rows of ripening barley, and beheaded several dandelions growing in a little clump.
“Don’t just let them lie there,” Raunu warned him. “Merkela’ll use the leaves for salad greens.”
“I know.” Skarnu picked up the dandelions and stuffed them into his belt pouch. “This farm was fine for two, and it’s done pretty well for three. Things are liable to be lean if it’s got to feed five, though. Every little bit helps.”
“Pemava and Vatsunu don’t eat as much as two regular Valmierans would,” Raunu said. “They look at what Merkela sets out like they’ve never seen so much food in all their born days.”
“By the look of them, they haven’t seen much food any time lately, that’s for sure,” Skarnu said, and Raunu nodded. Skarnu’s hand gripped the hoe handle as if it were an Algarvian’s neck. “And from what they say about the way the redheads treat our kind back in Forthweg …” He grimaced and hacked down some more weeds, these inedible.
Raunu nodded, once more. “Aye. If I hadn’t wanted to go on fighting Mezentio’s men before, hearing the stories from Forthweg would tip me over the edge. Tip me? No, by the powers above-it’d throw me over the edge.”
“Me, too,” Skarnu said. But not everyone felt that way. For the life of him, he couldn’t understand why. Some of the farmers around Pavilosta were only too glad to let the Algarvians have the Forthwegian Kaunians who’d escaped into the countryside when the ley-line caravan was sabotaged. Some of the local peasants let it go at that. Others went out of their way to betray fugitives to the redheads. Vatsyunas and Pernavai weren’t safe even here. If one of those locals should walk by and spy them working in Merkela’s fields. .
If that happened, the Algarvians were all too likely to learn this farm was a center of local resistance. Logically, Skarnu supposed that meant he and Merkela and Raunu should have sent the Kaunian couple from Forthweg packing when they came out of the woods, lost and hungry and afraid. Somehow, logic hadn’t had much to do with it then.
With shouldered hoes, Skarnu and Raunu trudged toward the farmhouse when the sun sank in the west. Vatsyunas was feeding the chickens, Pernavai weeding with Merkela in the herb garden near the house. Neither of them had known the first thing about farming. Before war swallowed Forthweg, he’d been a dentist and she’d taken care of their two children and those of several of their neighbors. They didn’t know where the children were now. The two girls hadn’t come out of the wreck of the ley-line caravan. Vatsyunas and Pernavai hoped they still lived, but didn’t sound as if they believed it.
“And now they are come in, home from their moils and toils,” Vatsyunas said in what he thought was Valmieran. And so it was, after a fashion: Valmieran as it might have been spoken centuries before, when it remained much closer to classical Kaunian than it was these days. Neither the dentist nor his wife had known any of the modern language when they arrived. Now they could make themselves understood, but no one would ever believe Valmieran was their native tongue.
Merkela got up and dusted off the knees of her trousers. “I’m going in to have a look at the stew,” she said. “I killed that hen-you know the one I mean, Skarnu, the one that wasn’t giving us more than an egg a week.”
“Aye, that one’s better off dead,” Skarnu said. Merkela had made such calculations before. Now they took on a new urgency. If she was wrong too often, people would go hungry. The farm had less margin for error than before the fugitives came.
Chicken stew, bread to sop up the gravy, ale.
Vatsyunas said, “I had liefer drink wine at meats, but”-he took a long pull at his cup of ale-”having gone so long without much in the way of either wine or aliment, I’m not fain to play the ungrateful cull the now.”
Just listening to him made Skarnu smile. His speech improved week by week; eventually, Skarnu hoped, he would sound pretty much like everyone else. Meanwhile, he was a lesson in how the Valmieran language had got to be the way it was today.
After another long draught, Vatsyunas set the cup down empty. He said, “What I am fain for is vengeance ‘gainst the scurvy coystril knaves, the flame-haired barbarians of Algarve, who used me so.” He looked from Raunu to Merkela to Skarnu. “Can it be done, without foolishly flinging away the life with which you gifted me anew on taking in my lady and me?”
Pernavai spoke very quietly: “I too would have revenge on them.” She was so pale, she looked almost bloodless. Skarnu wondered what Mezentio’s men had done to her. Then he wondered if Vatsyunas knew everything the redheads had done to her. That was a question to which he doubted he’d find an answer.
He didn’t quite know what to tell the escaped Kaunians from Forthweg, who didn’t know he’d been one of the people who’d wrecked the ley-line caravan that carried them. Cautiously, he said, “All of Valmiera cries out for vengeance against the Algarvians.”
“No!” Pernavai and Vatsyunas spoke together. Her golden hair flew round her head as she shook it. Vatsyunas was bald, but somehow managed to look as if he were bristling even so. He said, “Did you speak sooth, why would the countryside not seethe with strife? Why are so many here so glad to give over to the red wolves their kinsfolk from the distant Occident?”
“Why, an what we hear be true, do so many here give themselves to the conquerors body and soul?” Pernavai added.
Her words were bitter as wormwood to Skarnu, who remembered the news sheet listing his sister with that Algarvian colonel. What did the whoreson call himself? Lurcanio, that was it.
Meanwhile, Merkela spoke up while he was still contemplating his own embarrassment: “We have traitors, aye. When the time comes, we’ll give them what they deserve.” She raised her proud chin, drew a thumbnail across her throat, and made a horrible gargling noise. “Some have gotten it already.”
“In sooth?” Vatsyunas breathed, and Merkela nodded. The dentist from Forthweg asked, “Know you, then at whose hands these treacherous wretches of whom you speak lie dead? Right gladly would I join with them, for to commence the requital of that which can never be requited.”
“And I.” Pernavai spoke less than her husband, but sounded no less determined.
Before either Skarnu or Merkela could answer, Raunu said, “Even if we knew anything about that, we’d have to be careful about saying very much. What people don’t know, nobody can squeeze out of ‘em.”
“Think you we’d betray-?” Vatsyunas began angrily, but he fell silent when his wife touched his arm. They spoke back and forth in quick classical Kaunian, for them a birthspeech. As usual, Skarnu could make out words, but
