But it was already too late. The redheads understood what no meant. They were as young and headstrong as he was, and they were the conquerors, and there were two of them. Smiling most unpleasantly, they advanced on him. Gailisa darted around the counter and into the back of the shop, loudly calling for her father. Talsu noticed only out of the corner of his eye; almost all of his attention stayed on the Algarvians.
The fight, such as it was, didn’t last long. One of the redheads swung at him, a looping haymaker that would have knocked him sprawling had it landed. It didn’t. He blocked it with his left forearm and delivered a sharp, straight right. The Algarvian’s nose flattened under his fist. With a howl, the soldier staggered back into shelves piled high with produce. He knocked them over. Vegetables spilled across the floor.
Talsu spun toward the other Algarvian. This fellow didn’t waste time on fisticuffs. He yanked a knife from his belt, stabbed Talsu in the side, and then helped his friend get up. They both ran out of the grocer’s shop.
When Talsu started to run after them, he got only a couple of paces before crumpling to his knees and then to his belly. He stared in dull surprise at the blood that darkened his tunic and spread over the floor. He heard Gailisa’s shriek as if from very far away. The inside of the shop went gray and then black.
He woke puzzled, wondering why he wasn’t seeing the grocer’s shop. Instead, his eyes took in the iron rails of a bed, and a whitewashed wall beyond it. A man in a pale gray tunic peered down at him. “How do you feel?” the fellow asked.
Before Talsu could answer, he became aware of a snarling pain in his flank. He bit back a scream, as he might have done were he wounded in battle. “Hurts,” he got out through clenched teeth.
“I believe it,” said the man in the gray tunic--a healing mage, Talsu realized. “We had to do a lot of work on you while your body was slowed down. Even with the sorcery, it was touch and go for a while there. You lost a lot of blood. But I think you’ll come through pretty well, if fever doesn’t take you.”
“Hurts,” Talsu repeated. He was going to start screaming in a minute, whether he wanted to or not. The pain felt as big as the world.
“Here,” the mage said. “Drink this.” Talsu didn’t ask what it was. He seized the cup and gulped it down. It tasted overpoweringly of poppies. He panted like a dog, waiting for the pain to go away. It didn’t, not really. He did: he seemed to be floating to one side of his body, so that, while he still felt everything, it didn’t seem to matter anymore. It might almost have been happening to someone else.
The mage lifted his tunic and examined the stitched-up wound in his side. Talsu looked at it, too, with curiosity far more abstract than he could have managed undrugged. “He put quite a hole in me,” he remarked, and the mage nodded. “Did they catch him?” Talsu asked, and this time the healer shook his head. Talsu shrugged. The drug didn’t let him get excited about anything. “I might have known.”
“You’re lucky to be alive,” the healer said. “You’ve got more stitches holding you together inside. If we’d come a little later ...” He shook his head again. “But your lady friend made sure we didn’t.”
“My lady friend?” Talsu said vaguely, and then, “Oh. Gailisa.” He knew he ought to be feeling something more than he was, but the drug blocked and blurred it. Too bad, he thought, still vague.
Having been nearly idle through the winter, Garivald was making up for it now that the ground had finally got firm enough to hold a furrow. Along with the rest of the peasants of Zossen, he plowed and sowed as fast as he could, to give the crops as long to grow as possible. He rose before sunset and went to bed after nightfall; only harvest time was more wearing than the planting season.
Along with everything else he had to do, he still had to go into the forest to cut wood for Zossen’s Algarvian occupiers. How he’d hoped the Unkerlanter advance would sweep them out of his village! But it hadn’t happened, and it didn’t look as if it would, either.
He hacked at a tree trunk, wishing it were a redhead’s body. When the Unkerlanters in grimy rock-gray tunics let him see them, he kept right on chopping wood. One of his countrymen said, “You’re the singer, aren’t you?”
“What if I am?” Garivald asked, pausing at last. “What difference does it make?”
“If you aren’t, we might decide not to let you live,” the ragged soldier answered and made as if to turn his stick in Garivald’s direction.
“You’ve already spent awhile killing my hopes,” Garivald said. “I thought the Algarvians would be gone from here by now.” Thought probably took it too far; hoped came closer. But the men who skulked through the woods had taken his songs, had promised great victories, and then hadn’t delivered. If they were unhappy with him, he was unhappy with them, too.
“Soon,” said the soldier who hadn’t surrendered to the redheads. “Very soon. The fight still goes on. It does not always go just as we would have it. But the king will strike another blow against the invaders soon. And when he does, we need you.” Now he pointed at Garivald with his finger, not his stick.
“Need me for what?” Garivald asked in some alarm. If they wanted him to raise the village against the Algarvian occupiers, he was going to tell them they were out of their minds. As far as he could see, that would only get his friends and relatives--and maybe him, too--killed without accomplishing much. Zossen wasn’t on a ley line; a rising here wouldn’t keep the redheads from moving reinforcements wherever they pleased. Zossen, in fact, wasn’t even near a power point, which was why Bang Swemmel’s men had had to keep sacrificing condemned criminals to gain sorcerous energy to make their crystal function.
The crystal. . . Garivald’s hand tightened on the handle of his axe. Even before the ragged soldier spoke, Garivald guessed what he would say. And say it he did: “You have something we want, something buried in the ground.”
Garivald had thought about digging up the crystal and passing it on to the Unkerlanters who kept resisting behind Algarvian lines. He’d thought about it, but he hadn’t done it yet in spite of “Waddo’s urgings. Even trying to do it was risky. But having so many people know about it was also risky. He hadn’t said a word to anyone. Somebody else in the village must have. And what got to the irregulars’ ears also got to the Algarvians’.
“I’ll get it for you,” he said quickly. The irregulars could probably arrange to whisper into the redheads’ ears if he proved recalcitrant.
“Good.” All the ragged soldiers nodded. The fellow who was doing the talking for them went on, “When will you get it for us?”
“When I find it,” Garivald snarled. “Powers above, dogs can’t find the bones they bury half the time. I didn’t leave any special marks to point the way to the cursed thing. If I would have, the Algarvians’d have it by now. I’m going to have to find it.”
“Don’t waste too much time,” one of the other Unkerlanters warned him. “We need it, and no mistake.”
“If you think you can get it faster than I can, go ahead and dig for yourselves,” Garivald said. “Good luck go with you.”
“Don’t play games with us,” the irregulars’ leader said.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Garivald retorted.
He wondered if he’d pushed his countrymen too far. He tensed, ready to rush them with his axe if they tried to blaze him. He might be able to take one of them with him before he fell. But after glancing back and forth among themselves, they slipped away deeper into the protecting woods without another word.
Garivald lugged his load of firewood back to the Algarvians. The only thanks he got were a grunt and a tick against his name so he wouldn’t have to do it again for a while. Had the redheads worked to make people like them, they would have had no small following in the Duchy of Grelz. Garivald knew as much; the peasants hadn’t had an easy time of it during Swemmel’s reign. Some folk clove to the Algarvians because of that, regardless of how they were treated. Most, like Garivald, saw they were getting no better bargain and stayed aloof.