His father blinked; maybe that hadn’t occurred to him. “Aye, I suppose so,” he said. “I wouldn’t get as much for it, though.”
Talsu rang coins on the counter. The music was sweet. “You don’t need to worry. We don’t need to worry.” He checked himself. “We don’t need to worry for a little while, anyhow.”
Vanai was glad to be out of the house she shared with her grandfather and even gladder to be out of Oyngestun. With so many Kaunians shipped off to the west to labor for the redheads in the war against Unkerlant, the village felt as if it had a hole in it, like a jaw with a newly pulled tooth. She and Brivibas might have been among those taken for labor. Remembering what a few days of work on the roads had done to her grandfather, Vanai knew she was lucky to escape.
She also remembered, all too well, the price she’d paid to get Brivibas back from the labor gang. She had no great love for the Unkerlanters--they struck her as being even more barbarous than their Forthwegian cousins--but she hoped with all her heart that they gave Major Spinello a thin time of it.
Meanwhile, she had mushrooms to find. With rain coming a little early this year, she thought the crop would be fine. And, at last, she’d persuaded her grandfather to let her search by herself. That had proved easier than she’d thought it would. He didn’t cling to her as he had before she gave Spinello what he wanted.
And so, while Brivibas went south, Vanai headed east, in the direction of Gromheort. When they separated, her grandfather coughed a couple of times, as if to say he knew why she was going in that direction. She almost walloped him with the mushroom basket she was carrying. Before she swung it, though, she noticed it was the one that belonged to Ealstan, the Forthwegian from Gromheort. Brivibas would surely have noticed, too, and would have taken a certain satisfaction in being proved right in his suspicions.
“But he’s not right,” Vanai said--most emphatically, as if someone were about to contradict her. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He never knows what he’s talking about.”
A troop of Algarvians on unicorns came trotting up the road from Gromheort toward Oyngestun. The redheaded riders leered at Vanai. They whooped as they passed her and called out lewd suggestions, some of which she understood because of Spinello. She breathed a silent sigh of relief when they kept on riding. Had they decided to ravish her one after another and then cut her throat, who could have stopped them? She knew the answer to that: no one. They were the occupiers, the conquerors. They did as they pleased.
Along with sighing in relief, Vanai cut across fields instead of staying close by the road. The going was harder that way, and her shoes soon got wet and muddy. She didn’t care. The next Algarvians who came along the highway--three crews mounted on their behemoths--could have seen her as nothing more than a blond-headed speck in the distance. Not one of them waved or called out to her. That suited her fine.
She came across a nice patch of meadow mushrooms, and put some in her basket--Ealstan’s basket, actually--to make sure she wouldn’t go back to Oyngestun empty-handed. A little later, she clapped her hands in glee when she found some chanterelles, yellow and vermilion growing together. She like the yellow ones better--vermilion chanterelles tasted acrid to her--but gathered some of each.
And then, at the edge of an almond grove, she almost stepped on some bright orange imperial mushrooms. They were still small, but unmistakable because of their color. As she plucked them from the ground, she recited a snatch of ancient poetry: they’d been favorites back in the days of the Kaunian Empire.
But her pleasure at picking them evaporated a moment later. The mushrooms remained, but the Kaunian Empire was only rubble. Even the Kaunian kingdoms of the east had fallen into the Algarvians’ hands these days, and as for Forthweg .. . The Forthwegian majority despised the Kaunians still living among them, and the Algarvians delighted in showing the Forthwegians the Kaunians were even worse off than they.
After Vanai discovered the imperial mushrooms, she had no luck for quite a while. She saw three or four Forthwegian men down on their hands and knees in the middle of a field, but did not go over to them. They were unlikely to be willing to share whatever they’d found, and not so unlikely to try to make sport with her as the Algarvians might have done. She put some bushes between herself and them and went on her way.
The sun was nearing its high point in the north when she came into the oak wood where she and Ealstan had accidentally exchanged baskets--and where they’d met the year before that, too. With her grandfather miles away, she could at last admit to herself that she hadn’t come there altogether by accident. For one thing, she did want to give him his basket if she saw him again. And, for another, he’d been a sympathetic ear, and she hadn’t had many of those lately.
She walked among the trees. Her muddy shoes scuffed through leaves and acorns. Some of the oaks’ gnarled roots lay close to the surface. She wondered if she ought to try digging for truffles. In the days of the Kaunian Empire, rich nobles had trained swine to hunt the precious fungi by scent. Without such aid, though, finding them was a matter of blind luck. She shook her head--she didn’t have time to waste, and not much in the way of luck had come her way lately.
