Even before Lieutenant Recared blew his precious officer's whistle, Unkerlanters started rushing across the square. A few of them fell; the dragons hadn't killed all the redheads. But they had flamed the heart out of the enemy's position. Some of the Algarvians fought on anyhow, and made Swemmel's men pay a price for killing them. The rest- more than usual in this kind of fight- surrendered. They seemed dazed, astonished to be alive.
"Another village down," Recared said proudly. "Little by little, we take back our kingdom."
"A village down is right, sir," Leudast answered, coughing a little and then more than a little. "It'll be a while before the peasants move back here."
Recared opened his mouth in surprise, as if the people who'd once lived in the village hadn't crossed his mind. They probably hadn't; he was, Leudast knew, a city man. After a moment, he did find a reply: "They weren't serving the kingdom with the Algarvians holding this place." Since that was true, Leudast nodded. He couldn't prove Recared had missed the point.
With what light remained to the day, the Unkerlanters pushed north again. Leudast approved of that without reservation. He approved of it even more because it didn't involve fighting. Somewhere up ahead, Algarvians would be holed up in the next village. When he came to them, he'd do whatever he had to do. Till then, he enjoyed the respite.
He didn't enjoy having Recared shake him awake in the middle of the night. "What's gone wrong, sir?" he asked, assuming something had.
Only faint glowing embers illuminated the young lieutenant's face. In that dim, bloody light, Recared looked, for once, far older than his years. "Our crystallomancer just got the order," he said. "We have to countermarch, head back south."
"What?" Leudast exclaimed. "Powers above, why?"
"I don't know, curse it. The order didn't explain." Recared sounded as harassed as an ordinary soldier. "But you're bound to be right, Sergeant: something's gone wrong somewhere."
Hajjaj hoped no one knew he'd left Bishah. He did manage to sneak out of the capital every now and again. So far, he'd managed to keep the secret from those who would have been most interested in learning it: chief among them Marquis Balastro, the Algarvian minister to Zuwayza. Balastro knew Zuwayza was imperfectly happy in her role as Algarve's ally; Hajjaj worked hard to keep him from knowing just how unhappy his kingdom was, not least since Zuwayza would have been even unhappier without Algarve.
As the ley-line caravan glided east out of the Zuwayzi capital, Hajjaj smiled at his secretary and said, "Isn't it astonishing how quickly I've recovered from the indisposition everyone thinks I have?"
Qutuz smiled, too. "Astonishing indeed, your Excellency. And I am very glad to see you looking so well."
"I thank you, my dear fellow, though I think I ought to ask whether you need new spectacles," Hajjaj said. "I don't look particularly well. What I look is old." He paused a moment in thought. "Of course, a man my age who does not look well is liable to look dead."
"May you live to a hundred and twenty," Qutuz replied, a polite commonplace among the Zuwayzin.
"I've been over halfway there for a while now, but I don't think my private ley line will stretch quite so far," Hajjaj said. "Tewfik, now, Tewfik seems bound and determined to take the proverb literally. I hope he makes it."
"Someone does every now and then, or so they say," his secretary answered.
"They say all sorts of things," Hajjaj observed. "Every now and then, what they say is even true- but don't count on it." As foreign minister of a kingdom with a large, unfriendly neighbor and an arrogant cobelligerent, Hajjaj didn't see the advisability of counting on much of anything.
Qutuz leaned back in his seat- King Shazli had laid on a first-class caravan car for Hajjaj and his secretary- and remarked, "The scenery is prettier than usual, anyhow."
"Well, so it is," Hajjaj agreed. "It was high summer the last time I traveled to Najran, and the sun had baked the life out of everything. Gray rock, yellow rock, brown thornbushes- you know what it's like most of the year."
"Don't we all?" Qutuz spoke with a certain somber pride. In high summer, the sun of northern Zuwayza stood right at the zenith or even a little south of it, something seen nowhere else on the mainland of Derlavai. Except at oases and along the banks of the few streams that flowed down from the mountains the year around, life seemed to cease. Qutuz's wave urged Hajjaj to look out the window. "Certainly not like that now, your Excellency."
"No, it isn't." As his secretary had said, Hajjaj could for once enjoy peering through the glass. Late winter was the time for that in Zuwayza, if ever there was such a time: some years, there wasn't. But, by Zuwayzi standards, this had been a wet winter. The thornbushes were green now. Flowers of all sorts carpeted the usually barren hills and splashed them with crimson and gold and azure.
Had the ley-line caravan halted, Hajjaj would have been able to spy butterflies, moving bits of color. Toads would be croaking and creeping in the wadis, the dry riverbeds, that weren't quite dry now. Had Hajjaj been lucky, he might have spotted a small herd of antelope grazing on greenery whose like they wouldn't see again for months.
He sighed. "It won't last. It never does." With another sigh, he added, "And if that's not a lesson for anyone daft enough to want to be a diplomat, curse me if I know what would be."
The ley-line caravan got into Najran late in the afternoon, gliding up over a last little rise before revealing the almost painfully blue sea ahead. The ley line that ran from Bishah to Najran continued on out into the Bay of Ajlun. If it hadn't, Najran would have had no reason for being. As things were, its harbor was too small and too open to the elements to let it become a great port, or even a moderately important one. It was nondescript, isolated- a perfect home for the Kaunian refugees who'd fled west across the sea from Forthweg.
Their tents, these days, considerably outnumbered the ramshackle houses of the fishermen and boatbuilders and netmakers and the handful of merchants who called Najran home. Without the ley line, the Zuwayzin could never have kept them fed. Pale-skinned men and women in tunics and trousers were more common on the streets than naked, dark brown locals. But the Kaunians had universally adapted the wide-brimmed straw hats the Zuwayzin wore. If they hadn't, their brains would have baked in their skulls.
Hajjaj had thought about putting on tunic and trousers himself when he came to visit the refugees. In the end, he'd decided not to. They were guests in his kingdom, after all, so he didn't feel the need to go against his own usages, as he did when meeting diplomats from other, chillier lands.
A carriage waited for him at the caravan depot: much the largest building in Najran. As he and Qutuz climbed in, he told the driver, "The tent city."
"Aye, your Excellency," the man said, touching the brim of his own big hat. He flicked the reins and clucked to the horses. They were sad, skinny beasts, and didn't seem in a hurry to get anywhere- they would pause to graze whenever they passed anything green and growing.
"Fellow ought to take a whip to them," Qutuz grumbled.
"Never mind," Hajjaj said. "We're not going far, and I'm not in that big a hurry." The truth was, he didn't have the heart to watch the horses beaten.
Blond men and women, a lot of them sunburned despite their hats, greeted the carriage as it approached. Hajjaj heard his own name spoken; some of the people in the growing crowd recognized him from his earlier visit. They started taking off their hats and bowing- not theatrically, as Algarvians would have, but with great sincerity. "Powers above bless you, sir!" someone called to Hajjaj, and a moment later everyone took up the cry.