“Bugger ‘em,” Bembo said under his breath. “They don’t pay me enough to be a hero.” He laughed a nasty laugh. They doubtless didn’t pay those young toughs in Plegmund’s Brigade enough to be heroes, either. All he had to do was pound the pavement here in Gromheort. The Forthwegians would get shipped off to the west to fight King Swemmel’s troopers. They might not make heroes, but a lot of them would end up dead.
Once he’d got round the corner from the men of Plegmund’s Brigade, he started swaggering once more. Why not? No one who’d seen him embarrass himself was around now. As far as he was concerned, what had happened back there might as well have belonged to the days of the Kaunian Empire.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than he saw a Kaunian on the street. He reached for his bludgeon. A Forthwegian woman who saw him and the blond called out in Algarvian: “Make him wish the powers below had hold of him instead of you!”
“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Bembo answered, even though the woman was ten years older than he was, shapeless, and homely to boot. She got even homelier when she smiled, which she did now. Bembo didn’t have to look at her for long, though. He swung his attention-and his anger-toward the Kaunian. “You there! Aye, you, you miserable son of a whore! Who let you out of your kennel?”
The Forthwegian woman giggled and clapped her hands and hugged herself with glee. She stared avidly. If anything dreadful happened to the Kaunian, she wanted to watch. The blond turned out to speak Algarvian. Bowing to Bembo, he said, “I am sorry, sir.”
“Sorry doesn’t cut it.” Bembo advanced on him, club upraised. The Forthwegian woman clapped her hands again. “Sorry doesn’t begin to cut it,” the constable growled. “I already asked you once, what are you doing running around loose? This isn’t your part of Gromheort, and you’ll pay for poking your nose out of the part that is.”
“Do what you want to me.” The Kaunian bowed again. This time, he kept on looking down at the cobbles. “My daughter is sick. None of the Kaunian apothecaries has the drug she needs. And so”-he shrugged-”I went outside to find it. If you had a daughter, sir, would you not do the same?”
Since he’d got out of the Kaunian district, odds were he’d already bribed one Algarvian constable. Bembo was as sure of that as he was of his own name. “Have you got any money left?” he demanded.
“Aye, some,” the blond answered, and the Forthwegian woman let out an angry, thwarted screech. The Kaunian went on, “If it is all the same to you, though, I think I would sooner take a beating. I will need the money for more medicine, and for food.”
Bembo stared at him. Either the blond was serious, or else he’d just come up with the most outlandish scheme to escape a beating Bembo had ever heard of. He didn’t know whether to admire the fellow’s nerve or to beat him to within an inch of his life to teach him not to try that sort of nonsense again. The Forthwegian woman had no doubts. “Wallop him!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “He deserves it. He said so himself. Wallop him!”
Reluctantly-he didn’t want to do anything the noisy woman suggested- Bembo decided he had to give the Kaunian a lesson. If the blonds got the idea they could shame the Algarvians into leaving them alone, who could guess how much trouble they’d cause? And so, raising the bludgeon, he advanced on the blond.
He hoped the Kaunian would run. The fellow was skinny and looked agile. The constable wasn’t like to be able to catch him. He could prove his own ferocity and still not beat a man who wasn’t fighting back.
But the Kaunian just stood there waiting. Bembo didn’t soften. Instead, he got angry. The club thudded down on the Kaunian’s back. The blond grunted, but held his ground. That made Bembo angrier. His next stroke laid open the Kaunian’s scalp.
And that proved too much for the blond to bear. With a howl of pain, he turned and fled. His trousers flapped at his ankles. Bembo tried to kick him in the backside, but missed. He ran after him for half a block. By then, he was panting; his heart thudded in his chest. He slowed, then stopped. He’d done his duty.
“You should have blazed him!” the Forthwegian woman shouted. “It would have served him right.”
“Oh, shut up, you old hag,” Bembo said, but not very loud. He didn’t want her screeching at him anymore. What he wanted was a simple, quiet tour on the beat, a tour where he didn’t have to do anything but stop in at some shops he knew to cadge a few cups of wine and some cakes and sausages and whatever else he might happen to crave. He sighed. What he’d been through felt too much like work. And his day wasn’t even half over yet.
A few blocks later, he came to the park where he and Oraste had met and blazed a drunken Kaunian mage. It was daytime now, not the middle of the night, and all-or at least most-Kaunians were closed up in their own district nowadays. On the other hand, the park was even more decrepit than it had been a few months before. No one had bothered cutting grass or trimming weeds. He could hardly make out the paved paths along which Oraste and he had walked.
He wanted to go through the park as much as he would have wanted to go fight Unkerlanters alongside the men of Plegmund’s Brigade. He stood at the edge, indecisive. A gust of wind sprang up and wrapped long stalks of grass around his ankles, as if trying to pull him in. He made a disgusted noise and hopped back.
But that wouldn’t do. He realized as much, however unhappy the knowledge made him. Sergeant Pesaro would have some pungent things to say if he funked the job. And if Pesaro didn’t just ream him out but told
Dry grass scrunched under his sandals. Sure enough, staying on the paths was next to impossible. Weeds and shrubs grew higher than a man’s middle. Here and there, they grew higher than a man’s head. When Bembo looked back over his shoulder, he could hardly see the street from which he’d come.
That wasn’t quite true. If he didn’t come back from his shift, people would go looking for him. But would they find him soon enough to do him any good? He had his doubts.
A Kaunian Emperor from the days of old might have held court on the benches in the middle of the park without anyone outside being the wiser. When Bembo got to them, he found not a Kaunian Emperor but a couple of Forthwegian drunkards. By their unkempt, shaggy beards and filth, they made the park their home.
Bembo’s hand went not to his bludgeon but to the short stick he carried next to it. The Forthwegians watched him. He nodded to them. They didn’t move. He walked past them. Their eyes followed him. He didn’t want to turn his back on them, but he didn’t want them to see he was afraid, either. He ended up sidling away from them crab-fashion.
A rustling in the bushes made him whip his head around. Another Forthwegian, as grimy and disreputable as the two on the benches, waved his arms and shouted, “Boo!”
He laughed like a loon. So did the other two drunks. “You stupid bald-arsed bugger!” Bembo screamed. “I ought to blaze you in the belly and let you die an inch at a time!” As a matter of fact, he wasn’t sure he could blaze the Forthwegian; his hand shook like a fall leaf in a high breeze.
The fellow who’d frightened him hawked and spat. “Oh, run along home to mother, little boy,” he said in good Algarvian. “You cursed well don’t belong anywhere they let grown-ups in.” He laughed again.
“Futter your mother!” Bembo was still too rattled to hang on to his aplomb as a proper Algarvian should.
His shrill voice made all the Forthwegians start laughing. He thought about blazing them. He thought about blazing the tall grass that choked the paths, too, in the hope of roasting them alive. The only thing wrong with that was, he might end up roasting himself, too.
Instead, after cursing all the drunks as vilely as he knew how, he pushed on down the path toward the far side of the park. He passed two more Forthwegians, both of them curled up asleep or blind drunk in the grass with jars of spirits or wine beside them. One wore a tattered Forthwegian army tunic.
Seeing that made Bembo laugh, and he was sure his laugh was last and best. “Worthless clots!” he said, as if the three back by the benches were still close enough to hear. “This is what you get. This is what all of Forthweg gets. And oh, by the powers above, do you ever deserve it.”
Every time Ealstan saw a broadsheet praising Plegmund’s Brigade, he felt like tearing it from the wall to which it was pasted. He didn’t much care what happened to him afterwards-after what Sidroc had done to his
