Neither of them said anything where Uncle Hengist could hear. After what had happened to Sidroc, if he knew where Ealstan was, he might let the Algarvians know, too. Nobody wanted to find out whether he would.
“If you want to work with me, you may,” Hestan said. “Numbers are as stubborn as cobblestones, but not so backbreaking to wallop into place.”
“You’d make more money, too,” Uncle Hengist pointed out. His mind always ran in that direction.
“I still don’t think it’s safe,” Leofsig said. “Nobody pays attention to one laborer in a gang. But the fellow who casts accounts for you, you notice him. You want to be sure he knows what he’s doing. If he saves you money, you tell people about him. After a while, talk goes to the wrong ears.”
“I suppose that’s wise,” his father said. “Still, when I see you come dragging in the way you do sometimes, I wouldn’t mind throwing wisdom out the window.”
“I’ll get by,” Leofsig said. Hestan grimaced, but nodded.
Conberge came in and set stoneware bowls and bone-handled spoons on the table. “Supper in a minute,” she said.
“It smells good,” Leofsig said. His stomach growled agreement. The bread and olive oil he’d eaten at noon seemed a million miles away. Any sort of food would have smelled wonderful just then.
“Same old stew: barley and lentils and turnips and cabbage,” Conberge said. “Mother chopped a little smoked sausage into it, but only a little. You’ll taste it more than it will do you any good, if you know what I mean. It’s probably what you smell.”
Elfryth brought in the pot and ladled the bowls full. As she was sitting down, she asked, “Where’s Sidroc?” Uncle Hengist called his son, loudly. After another couple of minutes, Sidroc came in, sat down, and silently began to eat.
He was burly as Leofsig had become despite not doing hard physical labor. He looked like Leofsig, too, though his nose was blobbier than Leofsig’s sharply hooked one. It took after that of his mother; she’d been killed when an Algarvian egg wrecked their house, and he and Uncle Hengist had lived, not always comfortably, with Leofsig’s family ever since.
After finishing his first bowl of stew, Sidroc helped himself to another, which he also devoured. Only then did he speak: “That. . . wasn’t so bad.” He rubbed his temples. “My head hurts.”
He’d had headaches ever since he’d hit his head in the brawl with Ealstan. He still didn’t remember what the brawl had been about, for which Leofsig and his father and mother and sister thanked the powers above. Ealstan’s disappearance afterwards, though, had left both him and Uncle Hengist suspicious, most suspicious indeed. Leofsig wished his brother hadn’t had to run off. But Ealstan couldn’t have known Sidroc would wake up without remembering. He couldn’t have known Sidroc would wake up at all.
“Have you finished your schoolwork?” Hengist asked Sidroc.
“Oh, aye--as much of it as I could do,” Sidroc replied. He’d been an indifferent scholar before the knock on the head and hadn’t got better since. After taking a big swig from his wine cup, he went on, “Maybe I’ll sign up for Plegmunds Brigade after all. I wouldn’t have to worry about poems and irregular verbs there.”
Everyone else at the table, even Uncle Hengist, winced. The Algarvians had set up Plegmund’s Brigade to get Forthwegians to fight for them in Unkerlant. Leofsig had fought the Algarvians. He would sooner have jumped off a tall building than fought for them. But Sidroc had been talking about the Brigade even before the fight with Ealstan.
Fifteen
Officially, Hajjaj was far in the north, up in Bishah. Any number of witnesses would swear at need that the Zuwayzi foreign minister was hard at work in the capital, right where he should be. Hajjaj didn’t want any of them to have to take such an oath. That would mean something had gone wrong, something had made the Algarvians suspicious. Better by far they never, ever come down to Jurdhan.
He strolled along the main street, such as it was, of the little no-account town: one elderly black man wearing only a straw hat and sandals among many black men and women and children, all dressed, or not dressed, much as he was.
Nudity had its advantages. By leaving off the bracelets and anklets and gold rings and chains he would normally have worn, Hajjaj turned himself into a person of no particular importance. He would have had a harder time doing that with shabby clothes. When he walked into Jurdhan’s chief--by virtue of being Jurdhan’s only--hostel, no one gave him a second glance. That was just what he wanted.
He went upstairs (the hostel was one of a handful of buildings in town to boast a second story) and walked down the hall to the chamber where, he’d been told, the man he was to meet awaited him. He
