“I’ll take more, Elfryth,” Hestan said. Leofsig and Sidroc pushed their plates toward her, too. If his mother hadn’t said there was plenty and plainly meant it, Leofsig would have made do with one helping. He’d grown resigned to being hungry a lot of the time. Feeling full, as he did after his seconds, seemed strange, almost unnatural.
After supper, Ealstan came to him for help with a bookkeeping problem their father had set him. Leofsig looked at it, then shook his head. “I know I ought to know how to solve it, but I’m cursed if I can remember right now.” He yawned enormously. “I’m so tired, I can’t even see. That’s how I am most nights. You don’t know how lucky you are that Father decided to keep you in school.”
“It doesn’t teach much, not any more,” his brother answered. “I’m learning a lot more from Father than from the masters.”
“You’re missing the point,” Leofsig said. “You could be out hauling rocks instead. Plenty your age are. Then you’d be too tired to think, too.”
“Oh, I understand that,” Ealstan said. “What makes me sizzle is watching Sidroc not even working at the watered-down pap the Algarvians still let the schoolmasters teach.”
“If Sidroc wants the masters to stripe his back, that’s his affair,” Leofsig said. “If he wants to try to get through life on gab, that’s his affair, too. I don’t know why you’re wasting your time worrying about it.”
“Because he goes off and does what he pleases, and I have the masters’ work and Father’s, too, that’s why,” Ealstan snapped. Then he paused and looked sheepish. “It could be worse, couldn’t it?”
“Just a bit,” Leofsig said dryly. “Aye, just a bit.” But he paused, too. “It could be worse for me, too, now that I think on it.”
This time, Ealstan did not miss the point even for a moment. “Of course it could,” he said. “You could be a Kaunian.” He lowered his voice. “At least you know. So many people don’t even want to, or else say the blonds have it coming.” He looked around, then spoke more softly stilclass="underline" “Some of those people are right in this house.”
“Aye, I know that,” Leofsig said. “If you ask me, Sidroc wishes he were an Algarvian. Uncle Hengist, too, though not so bad.”
Ealstan shook his head. “That’s not it--close, but not right. Sidroc just wants to be on top, and the Algarvians are.”
“If he wants to be on top--” Leofsig broke off. Ealstan hadn’t been through the army, and didn’t take crudity for granted. Leofsig shrugged. “You know him better than I do--and you’re welcome to him, too, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Thanks,” his younger brother said in a way that wasn’t thankful at all. They both chuckled. Then Ealstan grew serious once more. “I’d like to pop him right in the face for the way he rides me about the problems Father sets me, but I don’t quite dare.”
“Why not?” Leofsig asked. “I think you can thump him--and if you have trouble, I’ll pitch in. A set of lumps’ll shut him up.”
“Maybe I can, maybe I can’t, but that’s not it,” Ealstan said. “And if I ever do mix it up with him, I want you to stay out of it.”
Leofsig frowned. “I’m not following this. What are big brothers for, if they’re not for thumping people who give little brothers trouble?”
Ealstan licked his lips. “If you thump him, he’s liable to go to the redheads and remind them nobody ever let you out of that captives’ camp. I don’t know that he would, but I don’t know that he wouldn’t, either.”
“Oh.” Leofsig pondered that. Slowly, he nodded. “When you lift up a rock, you find all sorts of little white crawling things under it, don’t you? That he’d do such a thing to his own flesh and blood . . . But he might, curse it. You’re right. He might.” He rubbed his chin. His black beard was a man’s now, thick and coarse, not soft fuzz like Ealstan’s. “I don’t want him having that kind of hold on me. I don’t want anyone having that kind of hold on me.”
“I don’t know what we can do about it,” Ealstan said.
“I’ve frightened him once or twice already, when he started blowing in that direction,” Leofsig said. “If I put him in fear of his life . . .” He spoke altogether matter-of-factly. Before going into King Penda’s levy, he’d been as mild as anyone would expect from a bookkeeper’s son. Now the only thing holding him back was doubt about how well the ploy would work. He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “The stinking worm might just run straight to the Algarvians.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Ealstan said. “I don’t know what to do.
Maybe sitting tight and waiting would be best. It’s always worked pretty well for Father.”
“Aye, so it has.” Leofsig gnawed at the inside of his lower lip. “I don’t like it, though. Powers above can’t make me like it, either.” He pounded a fist down onto his thigh. “I wonder if Uncle Hengist would sell me, too.”
Ealstan looked startled. “He’s never said anything--”
“So what?” Leofsig broke in. “Sometimes the ones who don’t blab beforehand are more dangerous than the ones who do.”
In Skrunda, as in so many Jelgavan towns, ancient and modern lived side by side. A couple of blocks beyond the market square stood an enormous marble arch from the later days of the Kaunian Empire celebrating the triumph of the Emperor Gedimainas over the Algarvian tribe known as the Belsiti. Below a relief of kilted barbarians being led away in chains, Gedimainas’ inscription declared to the world what a hero and conqueror he was.
Talsu took the arch and its inscription as much for granted as he did the oil-seller’s shop next to it on the street. He’d walked under it a couple of times a week ever since he’d got big enough to go so far from home. He rarely bothered looking up at the relief or at the vaunting inscription below it. He could barely make sense of the inscription, anyhow; he hadn’t studied classical Kaunian in school, and Jelgavan, like Valmieran, had drifted a long way from the old language.
He headed toward the arch this particular morning because he was carrying four pairs of trousers his father, Traku, had made for a customer who lived half a mile down the street the monument straddled. A crowd had gathered under the arch. Some were Jelgavans, some Algarvians in their broad-brimmed hats, tight tunics, kilts, and knee stockings.
“You can’t do that,” one of the Jelgavans exclaimed. Several ofTalsu’s countrymen nodded. Somebody else said, “That arch has stood there for more than a thousand years. Knocking it down would be an outrage!” More Jelgavans nodded.
“Why do they want to knock down the arch?” Talsu asked somebody at the back of the little crowd. “It’s not doing anything to anybody.” He consciously noticed it for only the third or fourth time since coming home to Skrunda after the Jelgavan defeat the year before.
Before the fellow could answer, one of the Algarvians did, in Jelgavan accented but clear: “We can destroy it, and we will destroy it. It is an insult to all the brave Algarvians of ancient days, and to the Algarvic kingdoms of today: to Algarve, to Sibiu, and even to Lagoas, that is misguided enough to be our foe.”
From the middle of the crowd, a woman called, “How is it an insult if it tells the truth?”
“Algarvians went on to triumph,” the redheaded officer replied. “That proves all the vile things this Kaunian tyrant said about our ancestors were false. They have stood too long. They shall stand no more.” He turned to a mage. Looking over the people in the crowd, Talsu saw that eggs had been affixed to the pillars upholding the arch. All of a sudden, he didn’t want to stand right there.
The oil seller didn’t like his shop standing right there, either. Bursting out of it, he cried, “You people are going to drop a million tons of rock right through my roof!”