Algarvians from a distance. That let the others sidle around to the flank. Leudast had watched this dance of death before. He knew what the right counter would be: having more behemoths waiting to engage the Unkerlanters trying the flanking move. The Algarvians didn't have them. That meant they could either withdraw or die where they stood.
They chose to withdraw. Someplace else, someplace where they found odds that looked better, they would challenge the Unkerlanters again. In the meanwhile… 'Forward!' Leudast shouted, scrambling up out of the mud. He wasn't that much filthier than the men around him, and his voice lent him authority.
Not long before nightfall, his squad and a couple of others fought their way into a village neither the Grelzers nor the Algarvians defended very hard. Captain Recared strode for the firstman's house, to make his headquarters there. He found the place empty, the door standing open. 'Where's the firstman?' he asked a dumpy woman looking out the window of the hut next door.
She jerked a thumb toward the east. 'He done run off,' she answered, her Grelzer accent thick as syrup in Leudast's ears. 'He were in bed with the Algarvians, he were.' She sniffed. 'His daughter were in bed with anything that walked on two legs and weren't quite dead. Little slut.'
Recared nodded and went inside. Leudast nodded, too- wearily. He heard that story, or one just like it, in every village the Unkerlanters recaptured. All those villages had the same look: a lot of houses abandoned because the peasants had fled east to stay under Algarvian protection, hardly any men fit for soldiers showing themselves on the street.
The first few times he'd heard peasants tell tales of woe, he'd been sympathetic. Now… Now sympathy came harder. A lot of these people had run away rather than returning to King Swemmel's rule. From what Leudast had seen, a lot of the ones who'd stayed behind had done so only because they hadn't found the chance to flee.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a scuffle broke out in a house not far away: curses and thumps and a shout of pain. 'Think we ought to do anything about that, Sergeant?' one of his men asked.
Leudast shrugged and then shook his head. 'I think it'll sort itself out without us. When it does…'
He proved a good prophet. A couple of minutes later, three middle-aged men half led, half dragged one of their contemporaries up before him. 'Ascovind here, he done sucked up to the Algarvians and to the miserable little tinpot king they made,' one of the captors said. 'He ought to get what's coming to him.'
'That's a filthy lie!' Ascovind shouted, twisting and trying to break free. 'I never done nothing like that.'
'Liar!' all three of the men shouted at the same time. One added, 'He done told the Grelzers where irregulars hid out. Hurt 'em powerful bad, I bet.'
'What do you want me to do about it?' Leudast asked the men. 'You can save him for King Swemmel's inspectors when they get here, or else you can knock him over the head yourselves. Makes no difference to me one way or the other.'
They dragged Ascovind away. Presently, they came back and he didn't. Leudast had seen the like there a good many times, too. Ascovind should have run off, but he'd probably thought his neighbors wouldn't turn on him when they got the chance. As far as Leudast was concerned, that made him a fool as well as a traitor; he'd probably deserved whatever the other villagers had given him.
And he wouldn't be the only one. Men who'd cursed King Swemmel or who'd just tried to get along; women who'd opened their legs to an Algarvian or to a Grelzer soldier; men and women nobody much liked- aye, the inspectors would be busy here. They'd be busy lots of places. Leudast was glad of his uniform. Nobody could suspect him of treason, not for anything.
The soldiers took as much food as they could find. They had to, to feed themselves. None of the villagers dared say a word. These men in filthy rock-gray who represented King Swemmel could start calling them traitors, too. Leudast shared some of the black bread he got with the prettiest girl he saw. Later, she shared herself with him. They hadn't made the bargain in words, but it was nonetheless real.
Recared's whistle shrilled before sunrise the next morning. 'Forward!' he shouted. Forward Leudast went, on toward Herborn.
Eighteen
Bembo was sleeping the deep, restful sleep of a man with a clean conscience- or perhaps of a man with no conscience- when someone shattered that rest by rudely shaking him awake. His eyes flew open. So did his mouth, to curse whoever would perpetrate such an enormity. But the curses died before they saw the light of day: Sergeant Pesaro loomed over him, fat face filled with fury.
'Get your arse out of the sack, you son of a whore,' Pesaro snarled. 'Come with me this instant- this instant, do you hear?'
'Aye, Sergeant,' Bembo answered meekly, and came, even though he wore only his light tunic and kilt and the barracks was chilly. He followed Pesaro into the sergeant's office, where, shivering, he plucked up his always indifferent courage enough to ask, 'What- what is it?'
The worst he could think of was that Pesaro had found out how he'd spirited away the parents of Doldasai the Kaunian courtesan. By the fearsome expression on Pesaro's face, this was liable to be even worse than that. Pesaro snatched a leaf of paper off his desk and waved it in Bembo's face. 'Do you see this?' he shouted. 'Do you?'
'Uh, no, Sergeant,' Bembo said. 'Not unless you hold it still.' Thus reminded, Pesaro did. Bembo read the first few lines. His eyes widened. 'By the powers above,' he whispered. 'My leave's come through.'
Pesaro's glare grew more baleful yet. 'Aye, it has, you stinking sack of moldy mushrooms,' he ground out. 'Your leave has come through. Nobody else's has, not in this whole barracks, not in this whole stinking town. Not even mine. Powers below eat you, you get to go back to Tricarico for ten mortal days and enjoy yourself in civilization while the rest of us stay stuck with the fornicating Forthwegians.'
He looked about to tear the precious paper to shreds. To forestall such a disaster, Bembo snatched it out of his hands. 'Thank you, Sergeant!' he exclaimed. 'I feel like a man who just won the lottery.' That was no exaggeration; he knew how unlikely leaves were. All but babbling, he went on, 'I'm sure yours will come through very soon. Not just sure- positive.' Aye, he was babbling. He didn't care.
'Ha!' Pesaro tossed his head in magnificent, jowl-wobbling contempt. 'Go on, get out of my sight. I'll be jealous of you every minute you're gone- and if you're even one minute late coming back to duty, you'll pay. Oh, how you'll pay.'
Nodding, doing his best not to gloat, Bembo fled. He dressed. He packed. He collected all his back pay. He hurried to the ley-line caravan depot and waited for an eastbound caravan. He'd just scrambled aboard it when he realized he hadn't bothered waiting for breakfast. If that didn't speak to his desperation for escape, he didn't know what did.
Almost all the Algarvians in his caravan car were soldiers who'd got leave from the endless grinding war against Unkerlant. Some of them, seeing his constable's uniform, cursed him for a coward and a slacker. He'd heard that before, whenever soldiers passed through Gromheort. Here, he had to grin and bear it- either that or pick a fight and get beaten to a pulp.
But some of the soldiers, instead of reviling him, just called him a lucky dog. They shared food with him, and fiery Unkerlanters spirits, too. By the time the ley-line caravan had got well into Algarve, Bembo leaned back in his seat with a glazed look on his face.
He found he had little trouble figuring out just when the caravan entered his native kingdom. It wasn't so much that redheads replaced swarthy, bearded Forthwegians in the fields. That did happen, but it wasn't what he noticed. What he noticed was something starker: women replaced men.
'Where are all the men?' he exclaimed. 'Gone to fight King Swemmel?'
One of the fellows who'd been feeding him spirits shook his head. 'Oh, no, buddy, not all of them. By now, a good many are dead.' Bembo started to laugh, then choked on it. The soldier wasn't joking.
Changing caravans in Dorgali, a good-sized town in south-central Algarve, came as more than a little relief. Most of the men under fifty in the depot wore uniforms, but some didn't. And hearing women and children use his own language as their birthspeech was music to Bembo's ears after a couple of years of listening to sonorous Forthwegian and occasional classical Kaunian.
Best of all, the civilians among whom Bembo sat on the trip to Tricarico didn't blame him for not being a soldier. Some of them, in fact, started to take his constable's uniform for that of the army. He wouldn't have denied it if a woman hadn't pointed him out for what he really was. But even she didn't do it in a mean way; she said, 'You're serving King Mezentio beyond the frontier, too, just as if you were a soldier.'
