It came sooner than it would have at the height of the fighting for the Durrwangen bulge. Fall was on the way, and then another savage Unkerlanter winter. When night arrived, he scurried forward. He favored his left side, which had stiffened up. Every time he heard an Unkerlanter voice, he froze.
The front, fortunately, was fluid hereabouts. The Unkerlanters and his own men had foxholes and outposts, not solid trench lines. A determined- no, a desperate- man could sneak between them.
Dawn was painting the east red when someone called out a nervous challenge: 'Halt! Who comes?'
Sabrino almost wept. The challenge was in Algarvian. 'A friend,' he said. 'A dragonflier blazed down behind the enemy's line.'
Silence. Then: 'Advance and be recognized. Hands high.' Because of the wound, Sabrino's left hand didn't want to go high. He raised it despite the pain. Moving forward as if surrendering, he let his own side capture him.
'Here you go, Constable.' A baker offered Bembo a slice of cheese pie. 'Try this and tell me what you think.'
'Don't mind if I do.' Bembo never minded taking free food and drink from the shops and taverns on his beat. He'd done it in Tricarico, and he did it here in Gromheort, too. He took a big bite and chewed thoughtfully. 'Not bad,' he said, and took another bite to prove it. 'What all's in it?'
'Two kinds of cheese,' the baker began. He spoke good Algarvian.
'Aye, I know that,' Bembo said impatiently. 'What livens it up?'
'Well, there's garlic and onions and leeks,' the baker said, and Bembo nodded each time. Then the Forthwegian looked sly and set a finger by the side of his nose. 'And there's a mystery ingredient. I don't know whether I ought to tell you or not.'
By then, Bembo was finishing the slice of pie. 'You'd better,' he said, his mouth full. 'You'll be sorry if you don't.' Had the whoreson given him mouse turds, or something like that? Surely not- if he had, he wouldn't have told Bembo at all.
'All right, I'll talk,' the baker said, as if he were a captive Bembo was belaboring. 'It's dried chanterelle mushrooms.'
'You're kidding.' Bembo's stomach did a slow lurch. Like all Algarvians, he thought mushrooms disgusting. Forthwegians, on the other hand, were wild for them, and put them in everything but tea. Bembo's hand fell to the leather grip of his bludgeon. 'I ought to loosen your teeth for you, feeding me those miserable things.'
'Why?' the Forthwegian asked in what sounded like honest bewilderment. 'You just said you liked the pie.'
Bembo could hardly deny that. He did his best: 'I liked it in spite of the mushrooms, not because of them.'
'How do you know? Be honest, Constable. How do you know?' The baker speared a mushroom out of the pie with the point of the knife he'd used to slice it. He offered it to Bembo. 'How can you really know till you try?'
'I'd sooner eat a snail,' Bembo said, which was true- he liked snails fine, especially in butter and garlic. The Forthwegian baker made a horrible face. Bembo laughed at that, and wagged a finger at the fellow. 'You see? I'm not the only one.' But the mushroom remained on the end of the knife, a mute challenge to his manhood. He scowled, but then he ate it.
The little boy's way of handling such an unfortunate situation would have been to gulp the mushroom down without tasting it. Bembo was tempted to do just that, but made himself chew slowly and deliberately before swallowing. 'Well?' the baker demanded. 'What do you think?'
'I think you Forthwegians get too worked up over the cursed things, that's what,' Bembo answered. 'Not a whole lot of taste any which way.'
'These are just the dried ones,' the baker said. 'When the fall rains come and the fresh mushrooms start growing, then…' He sighed, as Bembo might have sighed over the charms of a beautiful woman. Bembo was convinced he could have a lot more fun with a beautiful woman than any Forthwegian could with a mushroom.
'Well, I'm off,' he said, wiping greasy fingers on his kilt. 'No surprises next time, mind you, or you'll get a surprise you won't like so bloody well.' He went on his way, hoping he'd put a little fear into the baker's heart. The strangled guffaw he heard as he closed the door behind him made him doubt it. He wasn't usually the sort who roused fear in people. Oraste, now… Oraste even roused fear in Bembo, his partner.
Bembo swaggered along, every now and then flourishing his club. Oraste, at the moment, roused fear in nobody; he was down with a nasty case of the grippe. Bembo hoped he wouldn't catch it. He feared he would, though. People who worked with people who got sick often got sick themselves. Nobody'd ever quite figured out why. It probably had something to do with the law of similarity.
Or maybe it's the law of contagion, Bembo thought. Contagion. Get it? He laughed. Without Oraste at his side, he had to tell jokes to himself. He found them funnier than Oraste would have. He was sure of that.
Seeing a company of Algarvian footsoldiers tramping toward the ley-line caravan depot, he stuck up his arm to halt traffic on the cross street. His countrymen cursed him as they passed. By now, he was used to that. They were on their way to Unkerlant, and he got to stay here in Gromheort. The way things were in Unkerlant these days, he wouldn't have wanted to go there himself.
Behind the Algarvians came another company in uniform: bearded Forthwegians who'd joined Plegmund's Brigade. Their countrymen, forced to wait at the cross street while they passed, cursed them more foully than the Algarvian soldiers had cursed Bembo. Disciplined and stolid, the new recruits for the Brigade kept on marching. They puzzled Bembo. If some foreign king occupied Algarve, he couldn't see himself volunteering to fight for the fellow.
Of course, I'm a lover, not a fighter, he thought. He wouldn't have said that aloud had Oraste been tramping along beside him. His partner seldom found his jokes funny, but Oraste would have howled laughter at that.
A little storefront had a big sign in unintelligible Forthwegian. Below it, in smaller letters, were a couple of words of perfectly understandable Algarvian: Healing Charms. The paint that served as their background was a little newer, a little cleaner, than the rest of the sign. Bembo wondered if the sign had said the same thing in classical Kaunian before Gromheort changed hands.
He might have walked on by had he not chosen that moment to sneeze. He didn't want to spend several days on his cot aching and feverish and generally feeling as if he'd stepped in front of a ley-line caravan car. If a charm would stop his sickness before it really got started, he was all for it. He went inside.
Two men and a woman sat in a gloomy, nasty waiting room. They all looked up at him in varying degrees of alarm. He'd expected nothing less. 'Relax,' he told them, hoping they understood Algarvian- after the baker, he was feeling spoiled. 'I'm here for the same reason you are.'
One of the men murmured in Forthwegian. The other two people eased back into their seats. The woman chuckled nervously. The man who knew some Algarvian asked, 'And why is that?'
'To keep myself from coming down with the grippe, of course,' Bembo answered. He sneezed again. 'Powers above, I hope I'm not too late.'
'Oh,' the man said. He translated once more. The other man said something. They all smiled. The man patted the chair next to him. 'Here. You can go next.'
'Thanks.' Bembo took such privileges for granted. He sat down.
A few minutes later, the door to the back room opened. A man and a woman came out. The man took one look at Bembo and scooted past him, out the front door, and onto the street. That didn't surprise Bembo, either- the fellow was the type who would have dealt with constables before. The woman looked Bembo up and down, too. After a brittle silence, she asked, 'What you want?' in halting Algarvian.
Before Bembo could speak, the man sitting by him said, 'He's after your famous cure for the grippe.'
'Ah.' The woman nodded. She pointed to Bembo. 'You come with me.'
'Aye, Mistress,' he answered, and followed her into the back room. It had the impressive disorder he'd seen before among mages of a certain type, although he would have been mightily surprised if she held any formal ranking. When she gestured, he sat down in one of the chairs. She sat in the other, which faced his.
'Grippe, eh?' she said.
'That's right,' Bembo agreed. 'My partner's down with it now, and I don't want to catch it myself.'
