voice to a furious shout: “You stinking cockhound, if you don’t keep your eyes and your hands where they belong, I’ll make sure you sing soprano for the rest of your days!”
People stared. Lurcanio was one of those people. His face twisted into an amused smirk. For a moment, Skarnu gaped-drawing Lurcanio’s attention was the last thing he wanted. But, a little slower than he should have, he saw how Merkela was building her alibi, and remembered that, at the moment, Lurcanio couldn’t recognize him. He did his best to get into the spirit of things, yelling, “Oh, shut up, you noisy bitch! I ought to give you a good one- and I will, too, if you don’t keep quiet.”
“You try it and you’ll be sorrier than you ever have been,” Merkela snarled. She sounded as if she meant it, too; she made a fine actress. And she wasn’t just acting, either. Skarnu wouldn’t have wanted to be the man who laid a hand on her when she didn’t care to be touched.
They kept on quarreling till they left Pavilosta. As soon as they were alone on the road back to the farm, they started to laugh. Skarnu wasn’t laughing, though, when he went off into the woods with Vatsyunas and Pernavai. He felt a coward for leaving a woman-and especially a woman carrying his child-to face the redheads alone. And the Kaunians from Forthweg were city folk, without much notion of how to take care of themselves in what seemed very wild country to them. Skarnu stayed busy showing them what needed doing. He tried to remember that he hadn’t known, either, till he went into the army.
He could sneak back to the farm for food; he didn’t have to hunt. About a week later, Merkela said, “They came today. And sure enough, that redhead who swives your sister is a dangerous man. But Raunu and I played the fool and sent him on his way.”
“Good enough,” Skarnu said. “Better than good enough, in fact. But I won’t come back to stay for a while yet. What do you care to bet they’ll swoop down here again, to see if you were playing tricks?”
“Aye, that Lurcanio would,” Merkela said at once. “He might even come back three times, curse him. Let him. He won’t catch you. And the fight goes on.”
Skarnu nodded. As if they were a spell, he repeated the words. “The fight goes on.”
Istvan studied the scar on his left hand. It still pained him every now and again; Captain Tivadar had cut deep. Istvan didn’t blame his company commander. Tivadar had had to let the sin out of him and out of the men of his squad. Istvan just hoped the cut proved expiation enough.
Corporal Kun came back through the trees toward him. “No sign of the Unkerlanters ahead, Sergeant,” he said.
“All right-good. We’ll move forward, then,” Istvan said. Kun nodded. They were oddly formal with each other. All the men who’d eaten goat were like that these days. They had a bond. It wasn’t one any of them would have wanted, but it was there. Feeling it, Istvan understood how and why criminals and perverts sometimes sought out goat’s flesh. It set them apart from the rest of mankind-the rest of Gyongyosian mankind, at any rate. They had to band together, for no one else would have anything to do with them.
“Sergeant?” Kun asked again in that oddly formal tone.
“Aye? What is it?” Istvan wanted to harass the bespectacled mage’s apprentice as he had before they shared the contents of that stewpot, but found he couldn’t. He looked down at his scar again.
Kun saw where Istvan’s eyes went, and he opened his own left hand. He was similarly marked-and, no doubt, similarly scarred on his soul as well. He let out a long, unhappy breath, then said, “Do you suppose the rest of the company knows. . what happened there, back in that clearing?”
“Well, nobody’s called me a goat-eater, anyhow,” Istvan answered. “A good thing, too-anybody did call me anything like that, I’d have to try to kill him for my honor’s sake: either that or admit it.”
“You couldn’t admit it!” Kun exclaimed in horror. “The stars wouldn’t shine on you if you did.”
“Of course they wouldn’t,” Istvan said. “That’s why I’d have to do what a warrior should do. Maybe people know what happened and they’re keeping quiet because they know what I’d have to do, too. Or maybe they really don’t know. Captain Tivadar was the only one who came up to the clearing, after all, and he wouldn’t blab, not after he cleansed us he wouldn’t.”
Slowly, Kun nodded. “I keep telling myself the same thing. But the other thing I keep telling myself is, that sort of business doesn’t stay a secret. Somehow, it doesn’t.”
Istvan nodded, too. The same fear filled him. Having done what he’d done was bad enough. Having others- people who hadn’t done it, who weren’t linked to one another by that strange bond-know would be far, far worse.
Meanwhile, along with worrying about the state of his sins, he also had to worry about staying alive. Every time he scurried from pine to birch to clump of ferns, he took his life in his hands. Kun hadn’t seen any Unkerlanters in this stretch of the endless forest, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
A flick of motion caught his eye. He swung his stick toward it and blazed without conscious thought. Had it been an Unkerlanter, the fellow would have died. As things were, a red squirrel toppled off a branch and lay feebly kicking among the pine needles. After a minute or so, it stopped moving.
“Nice blazing,” Kun said. “Ought to bring it along and throw it in the pot when we stop. Nothing wrong with squirrel.”
“No,” Istvan said. He didn’t know whether Kun meant that the meat tasted good or that the animal was ritually clean. He didn’t want to ask; that would have involved comparisons with animals that weren’t ritually clean.
As he stopped to pick up the squirrel, he realized he could have blazed a countryman as readily as a foe. If, in some dreadful accident or in the heat of battle, Captain Tivadar went down and did not rise again, who but for Istvan and his equally guilty squadmates would know on what accursed meat they’d supped?
Horrified, he violently shook his head. That was the curse speaking inside him. Tivadar had cleansed when he might have condemned, and Istvan wanted to repay him for that with death? Some part of the goat’s meat had to be working inside him, corrupting him.
“No,” he said aloud.
“No what, Sergeant?” Kun asked. Istvan didn’t answer. A moment later, an Unkerlanter’s beam burned a hole in a tree trunk behind him, and almost burned off part of his beard, too. Throwing himself flat and rolling toward another tree felt more like a relief than anything else. Compared to what had been going through his mind, worries about his own death or mutilation seemed simple and clean.
“Urra!” the Unkerlanters shouted. “Swemmel! Urra!” Either they had an accomplished mage with them, to make a few men sound like a host, or they outnumbered the Gyongyosians approaching them.
Again, Istvan saw something move. This time, a human howl of pain rewarded his blaze. His own men were shouting, too, trying to sound like more than they were. He yelled along with the rest of them: “Arpad! Arpad!” He didn’t know how much good crying out his sovereign’s name would do, but it couldn’t hurt.
And then, as if the stars chose to grant a favor he hadn’t even asked for, eggs began falling on the Unkerlanters. Moving egg-tossers forward along the miserable tracks through these miserable woods wasn’t easy; Istvan hadn’t known the Gyongyosians had any close by. For once, the surprise he got was pleasant.
The Unkerlanters didn’t think so. How they howled when bursts of sorcerous energy knocked down trees and sent men flying-but not for long. Some of them kept on yelling Swemmel’s name, but they didn’t sound nearly so fierce as they had before.
“Come on! Let’s make them pay!” That was Captain Tivadar. Istvan hadn’t known the company commander was so close by, either. The horrid thought that had sprung up like a toadstool from the rot at the bottom of his mind returned once more. He shook his head again, and asked the stars to hold that idea away from the minds of his squadmates.
Going forward seemed easier. As long as he was fighting, he wouldn’t have to think. That suited him fine. “Ekrekek Arpad!” he cried.
No one asked whether he’d liked the goat he ate, not while the Gyongyosians were advancing. By what seemed another special miracle, the egg-tossers lengthened their range so their eggs didn’t burst on men from their own side. That didn’t happen all the time, either, as Istvan remembered too well from the fighting on Obuda.
He snorted as he ran past a dead Unkerlanter. You could lift that island out of the Bothnian Ocean and throw it down anywhere in this vast forest, and it would vanish without a trace. He wished the stars would lift it from the ocean and throw it down somewhere near here, with luck someplace where it would crush a good many of Swemmel’s soldiers.
