One by one, the men on trumpet and flute, on viol and double viol, began tuning up. When the piper added his instrument’s whining drone, Vanai nodded; bagpipes were part of the classical Kaunian tradition, too. Crouched behind his drums, Ethelhelm seemed shorter and more solid than he had striding out onto the stage.
But then he stood up again, and used to good advantage the height his Kaunian ancestry gave him. Stretching out his hands to the crowd, he asked, “Are you ready?”
“Aye!” The shout--in which Ealstan joined--was deafening. But Ealstan noticed that Vanai sat quiet beside him.
Ethelhelm nodded to the rest of the band, once, twice, three times. He brought his drumsticks down hard as they went into their first song. Forthwegian music didn’t have the thumping beat that characterized Kaunian tunes. Neither was it one aimless tootling and tinkling noise after another, which was how Algarvian music struck Ealstan’s ears. Strong and sinuous, it had a power all its own--at least, as far as he was concerned.
He couldn’t see much of Vanai’s face: she still kept the hood pulled forward.
But the way she sat told him she was anything but entranced with the music. He sighed. He wanted her to enjoy what he enjoyed.
The first several songs the band played were old favorites. One of them, King Plegmund’s Quickstep, went back four hundred years, back to the days when Forthweg was mightier than either Unkerlant or Algarve. Hearing it made Ealstan proud and worried at the same time: this was the Plegmund after whom the Algarvians had named their puppet brigade. Now Ealstan didn’t want to know what Vanai was thinking.
But after the Quickstep was done, Ethelhelm grinned and called, “Enough of the stuff they put your granddad to sleep with. Do you want to hear something new now?”
“Aye!” This time, the crowd roared even louder than it had when asking the band to begin. Again, though, Vanai sat on her hands.
She stayed indifferent through the first couple of new tunes, even though they were the ones that had put the band on the map. But then, as Ethelhelm flailed away at his drums, his voice went low and raspy as he broke into a brand-new song, one so new Ealstan had never heard it before:
The beat was strong and insistent, about as close to a Kaunian style as Forthwegian music came. People who wanted to could lose themselves in that beat and pay no attention to the words Ethelhelm was singing. Ealstan almost did, but only almost. And Vanai... Vanai leaned forward as if drawn by a lodestone.
She turned to Ealstan. “He can’t say that!” she exclaimed. “What’s going to happen to him if he says things like that? Doesn’t he think the Algarvians are listening? Doesn’t he think some of the people in here will tell them every word he sings? He’s mad!” But she was smiling. For the first time in the performance, she was smiling. “He’s mad, aye, but, oh, he’s brave.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Ealstan said. But then, he wasn’t a Kaunian or even part Kaunian. To Vanai, a song that said whether you were blond or dark didn’t matter had to hit with the force of a bursting egg. And such a song had to hit hard in Eoforwic, too: Forthwegians and Kaunians had both rioted against the redheads here.
When the song ended, Vanai cheered louder than anyone though she stayed careful of her hood. She turned and gave Ealstan a quick kiss, saying, “You were right after all. I’m very glad I came.”
Setubal felt different from the way it had during Cornelu’s last time of exile there. Then Lagoas had been at war with Algarve, aye, but hadn’t seemed to take the fight seriously. Her navy and the Strait of Valmiera protected her from invasion, and she’d been looking east as well as toward Sibiu and the mainland of Derlavai, fearful lest Kuusamo spring on her back if she committed herself to the fight against Mezentio. It had been enough to drive Cornelu and his fellow Sibian refugees wild.
No more. If Lagoas didn’t have an army fighting on the mainland, she did have one fighting in the land of the Ice People. And she and Kuusamo were assuredly on the same side now--and what had happened to Yliharma made everyone in Setubal shudder. The Algarvians could have attacked the capital of Lagoas instead. For that matter, they could attack Setubal yet. Maybe they were just pausing to gather more Kaunians to kill.
“It is good to see the Lagoans worried,” Cornelu said to Vasiliu, another exile, as they sat together in the barracks assigned to Sibian naval men who’d managed to escape their kingdom.
“It is always good to see Lagoans worried,” his countryman answered. They both chuckled, neither with much humor. Lagoas had stayed neutral in the Derlavaian War till the Algarvians overran Sibiu. That rankled. And, though Lagoas and Sibiu had fought on the same side in the Six Years’ War, they were old enemies and rivals, being too much alike to make good friends. Lagoas, however, had for the past couple of hundred years been bigger and stronger.
“To be just, we should be worried here, too,” Cornelu said. “If these Algarvians unleash their sorcery against Setubal, do you think it will spare us because we were born in Sibiu?”
“Nothing Mezentio does is meant to spare Sibians,” Vasiliu snarled. Like Cornelu, like most from the five islands off the southern coast of Algarve, he had a long, dour face, a face on which anger and worry fit more readily than good cheer. He was scowling now. “What I wonder is whether the happy-go-lucky Lagoans are doing anything to stop Mezentio from serving them as he served Yliharma.”
“I wonder if they can do anything--short of slaughtering people, I mean,” Cornelu said. “And if they start slaughtering people, how are they different from Mezentio’s cursed mages?”
“How? I’ll tell you how, by the powers above: they’re on our side,” Vasiliu answered. “Swemmel won’t let the Algarvians kick him without kicking back. Why should anyone else?”
“We’ll all be monsters by the time this war ends, if it ever does.” Cornelu rose from his cot. With training that had been enforced with switches during his cadet days, he smoothed the blanket so no one could see the wrinkles his backside had made. “And the Lagoans won’t kill Kaunians like Mezentio, and they won’t kill their own like Swemmel. So what does that leave them?”
“A kingdom in trouble,” Vasiliu said at once.
Cornelu paced back and forth, back and forth. “They ought to be able to do something? he said, though he knew that wasn’t necessarily so: sometimes--too often--there was no help for a situation. The image of Costache burned through his mind. He wondered which of the Algarvian officers quartered on her she was sleeping with. He wondered if she was sleeping with all of them. He wondered if he would have to greet a bastard or two when he came back to Tirgoviste, if he ever did.
Vasiliu pulled him back to the here-and-now by bluntly asking, “What?”
“Curse me if I know. I’m no mage,” Cornelu replied. “And if I were a mage with an answer, I’d go to King Vitor, not to you.” He paused. “I knew a Lagoan mage who might give me answers, though, if he’s got any. I brought him back from the land of the Ice People on leviathan-back.”
“If he doesn’t give you anything you want after that, visiting the austral continent has frozen his heart,” Vasiliu exclaimed. “A ghastly place, by everything I’ve ever heard and read.”
“What I saw of it doesn’t make me want to argue with you,” Cornelu agreed. “I’ll see if I can hunt up this Fernao.”