the hang of this writing business, he’d figure it out for himself.
“That’s right.” Andelot smiled and nodded. “It’s not hard, really-all the characters always have the same sound, so you just have to remember which sound each character makes. See? You have an ‘f sound at each end of your name.”
“Those both say ‘f?” Garivald asked. Andelot nodded. Garivald scratched his head. “Why don’t they look the same, then?”
“Ah,”LieutenantAndelot said. “You usethis form-the royal form, people call it-for the first one because it’s the first letter of a name. You’d do the same thing if it were the first letter of a sentence. The rest of the time, you use small letters.”
“Why?” Garivald asked.
Andelot started to answer, then stopped, chuckled, and shrugged. He looked very young in that moment. “I don’t know why, Corporal. It’s just how we do things. It’s how we’ve always done them, so far as I know.”
“Oh.” Garivald shrugged, too. Rules didn’t have to make sense to be rules. Anyone who’d lived underKingSwemmel understood that perfectly well. “All right, you make the one kind of mark for-what did you say, sir?”
“For the first letter of a name or the first letter of a sentence,” Andelot repeated patiently.
“Thanks. I’ll remember now.” And Garivald thought he would. Not least because he couldn’t read or write, he had a very good memory.
To his surprise, LieutenantAndelot thrust the pen at him. He recoiled from it, almost as if it were a knife. “Here. Take it,” Andelot said. “Write your own name. Go ahead-you can do it. Just copy what I did.”
When Garivald held the pen as if it were a knife, Andelot showed him a better way. Brow furrowed in concentration, he made marks on the paper, doing his best to imitate what the officer had written. “There,” he said at last. “Does that say… Fariulf?” He nearly made the mistake of using his real name. He might get away with that mistake once. On the other hand, he might not.
“Aye, it does.” Andelot beamed at him, so he must have done it right. The officer started to write again, then stopped and fumbled in his belt pouch till he found a bigger leaf of paper. He wrote a lot of characters on it. “These are the royal form and the regular form of all the letters, in the right order. Do you know the children’s rhyme that helps you remember the order and the way each letter sounds?”
“No, sir,” Garivald said simply.
Andelot sighed. “You really must have lived in the back of beyond.” Garivald shrugged again. He probably had. Andelot taught him the rhyme, which had a catchy little tune. He learned it quickly enough to please the lieutenant. “That’s good,” Andelot said. “That’s very good. Here, let me give you more paper. You can have that pen, too, and here’s a bottle of ink. Go practice shaping the letters and keep saying the rhyme so you know what each one sounds like. In a couple of days, I’ll show you how to read more things, too.”
“Thank you, sir,” Garivald said. He went back to his own hole, his head as full of that children’s rhyme as it had ever been with his own songs. He wrote the alphabet several times, reciting the rhyme as he wielded the pen. Then-first looking around to make sure no one could see him-he wroteGarivald as, best he could, being certain to use the royal form of the G.
And then he crumpled up that leaf of paper and threw it in the closest fire. He let out a small sigh of relief as he watched it burn. In Swemmel’s kingdom, no one could be too careful. Fariulf he was, and Fariulf he would have to remain.
Istvan raised an axe and brought it down on a chunk of firewood. The chunk split into two smaller chunks. The Kuusaman guards who watched the woodcutting detail stayed very alert-axes were real weapons. A few feet from Istvan, Kun was chopping away, too.
“Anyone can tell you didn’t grow up cutting wood,” Istvan said.
“I do it well enough.”Kun was touchy about everything. That had got him into trouble with the guards at the captives’ camp a couple of times. It would have been worse trouble if he hadn’t managed to talk his way out of most of it.
“I didn’t say you didn’t,” Istvan answered.
“I’ll say that,” Szonyi toldKun with a grin. “You don’t cut as much wood as the sergeant or I do, not even close.”
“You’re both twice my size,”Kun said-an exaggeration, but not an enormous one: by Gyongyosian standards, hewas on the scrawny side.
Even so, Istvan shook his head. “We’d still do more, even if we were your size or you were ours. Anybody can see that. You waste motion.”
“If I were an Unkerlanter, you’d complain I wasn’t efficient enough,”Kun said.
“If you were an Unkerlanter, you’d still be a lousy woodcutter,” Szonyi said. “By the stars, you’d be a lousy woodcutter if you were an Algarvian.”
“Algarvians,”Kun said, and chopped away at the wood scattered before him with great spirit if not with great efficiency.
“They’re strange people.” Szonyi paused for a moment to wipe sweat from his face with a tunic sleeve. Like most early autumn days on the island of Obuda, this one was cool and misty, but cutting wood was plenty of work to keep a man warm. “Even the one who speaks our language is strange, and the other three…” He rolled his eyes. “They’re even worse.”
“Makes you wonder why we ever allied with them,” Istvan said, leaning on his axe. “They’re… foreign.”
Kunlaughed. “Of course they’re foreign. They’reforeigners, by the stars. Did you expect them to be just like us?”
Actually, Istvanhad expected something like that. The only foreigners with whom he’d had any experience up to now were Unkerlanter and Kuusaman enemies-and trying to kill one another hadn’t proved the best way to strike up an acquaintance-and the natives of Obuda, whom he reckoned contemptible because they bowed down to whoever occupied their island. He said, “I expected them to be more like us than they are, I’ll tell you that.”
“Why?”Kun asked.
“Because we’re on the same side, of course,” Istvan answered. Szonyi nodded vigorous agreement.
“We’re on the same side as the naked black Zuwayzin, too,”Kun said. “Do you think they’ll be just like us?”
Istvan had trouble believing there really were people with black skins who ran around with no clothes on all the time. It sounded like one of the stories big boys told their little brothers so those little brothers would look like fools when they repeated them to their parents. He said, “I’ve never seen a Zuwayzi, and neither have you. And we weren’t talking about them. We were talking about Algarvians.”
“Aye, but you were saying that foreigners shouldn’t-”Kun began.
“No to talk!” a guard shouted in bad Gyongyosian. “To work! To chop!”
With something close to relief, Istvan went back to cutting wood. Kun had a way of twisting things till they seemed upside down and inside out. The former mage’s apprentice got back to work, too, but he didn’t stop talking. He never does, Istvan thought, which wasn’t quite fair. Kun continued, “Foreigners shouldn’t be different from us if we’re going to ally with them? I think that’s a silly notion.”
“No to talk!” the Kuusaman guard yelled again. This time, Kun did shut up-for a while.
After what seemed like forever, the wood-chopping detail finished its work. The Kuusamans carefully counted the axes before sending the captives back to their barracks. Istvan didn’t know how anyone could hope to sneak an axe away, but the guards took no chances.
In the barracks, CaptainFrigyes and Borsos the dowser and the Algarvian who spoke Gyongyosian-his name was Norandino, which struck Istvan as a thoroughly barbarous appellation-had their heads together. Istvan didn’t like that. Both Frigyes and, from what he’d been able to see, Algarvians in general were much too fond of blood sacrifice and the sorcerous power that sprang from it to suit him.
By the way Frigyes looked up in alarm, he and Borsos and Norandino had been plotting something. Whether it had to do with cutting some large number of Gyongyosian throats here, Istvan didn’t know. He hoped he wouldn’t ever have to find out.
Norandino said something in questioning tones, too low for Istvan to make out the words. Frigyes answered a little more loudly: “Oh, aye, they’re reliable enough. Nothing to worry about with them.”
Istvan knew he should have felt reassured, complimented, even flattered. What he felt instead was
