She did, and asked, “What do you want with me?” in pretty good Algarvian.
Bembo took the small scissors from his belt pouch. “I want a little lock of your hair, sweetheart, to make sure you’re not a Kaunian in disguise.”
“What will you do with it afterwards?” she asked in some alarm. “Make nasty magic against me?” She started to shrink away.
A fat lot of good our sorcery s done in Unkerlant, Bembo thought sourly, but even the Forthwegians are afraid of it. “No, no, no, by the powers above!” he exclaimed. “I’ll give it back to you, every single hair. You can dispose of it.”
She eyed him, plainly trying to decide whether he was telling the truth. At last, grimacing, she nodded. Bembo came up to her, stroked her cheek on the pretext of brushing the hair back from it, and snipped a lock. The hair he’d cut stayed dark. He handed it back to the girl, as he’d promised. She put it in her belt pouch and went off with her proud nose in the air.
“You see, darling?” Bembo called after her. “I keep my word.” She kept walking.
“Nice try, lover boy,” Oraste said. Bembo stuck his nose in the air.
They tramped on through the gray, battered, sorry-looking streets of Gromheort. Every so often, they would stop somebody and cut off a lock of hair. Explaining what they wanted was a lot harder when the people they stopped didn’t speak Algarvian. Trying to explain in Kaunian was hard for Bembo, to say nothing of the irony he couldn’t help feeling while using that language to search for sorcerously disguised blonds. “We should have learned some Forthwegian,” he told Oraste.
His partner shook his head. “All those other languages are just a bunch of grunting noises, anybody wants to know what I think. These whoresons don’t want to understand Algarvian, they’ll understand a club smacked into the side of their pot, they will. And you can take that to the bank.”
“I like the way you think,” Bembo said, halfway between mocking admiration and the genuine article. “Nothing’s ever hard for you, is it?”
By way of reply, Oraste grabbed his crotch. Bembo threw back his head and laughed. He couldn’t help himself. He and Oraste kept on prowling, kept on snipping, and caught not a single camouflaged Kaunian.
When they got back to the barracks at the end of their shift, though, Bembo had an inspiration. He went up to Pesaro and said, “What are all the crazy buggers in this whole stinking kingdom doing this time of year?”
“Driving me daft,” Pesaro said, giving him a sour look. Nobody from his squad of constables had come up with any Kaunians, and he wasn’t very happy about that.
Bembo refused to let himself get too annoyed. He said, “They’re all going out into the country to hunt fornicating mushrooms, that’s what. The blonds are as wild for those nasty things as the real Forthwegians are. If the gate guards checked everybody who came in and went out. .”
Slowly, a smile replaced the glower on Pesaro’s plump face. “Well, curse me!” he exclaimed. “There, do you see? You’re not as foolish as you look. Who would have believed it?”
“I’ve had good ideas before,” Bembo protested indignantly.
“Oh, so you have,” Pesaro said. “The one good idea you never could figure out was keeping your big mouth shut.” He pondered, stroking the tuft of hair on his chin. “But that is smart, dip me in dung if it’s not. Aye, I’ll pass it up the line.” He stroked his chin again. “Something else like that, too-if we shut off a whole city block, say, and snipped everybody in it, I bet we’d catch a few blonds by surprise.”
“That’s good, Sergeant,” Bembo said, partly because he meant it, partly because Pesaro was the fellow who told him what to do every day. “That’s really good. Maybe we’ll both get promoted.” He snapped his fingers. “Powers above, why think small? Maybe we’ll both get sent home!”
“That is a big thought,” Pesaro said. “Too big, most likely. And they won’t promote me, not without a drop of noble blood in my whole line unless I’m descended from some viscount’s bastard back three hundred years or so. They like quality in officers, so they do, even constabulary officers. You might get bumped up, though.”
“Lots of officers getting killed these days,” Bembo observed. “Not so many in the constabulary, I grant you, but lots and lots of soldiers. They’ll run short before too long, and then they’ll either promote commoners or they’ll bloody well do without officers. The Unkerlanters don’t fret too much about a man’s blood, by all I’ve heard.”
“That’s on account of most of their nobles got bumped off a long time ago,” Pesaro said. “Besides, who wants to be like the fornicating Unkerlanters?” But the sergeant’s tone was thoughtful, almost wistful; Bembo knew he’d put a flea in his ear.
No trips back to Tricarico came from either Bembo’s suggestion or Pesaro’s. No promotions came from them, either. Bembo cursed his superiors till the next time he got paid, when he found a two-goldpiece bonus. He wasn’t even too resentful to find out that Pesaro’s was twice as big. Pesaro was a sergeant, after all.
A few days later, he and Oraste stretched a rope dead line across a narrow street. The rope had a sign on it, written in Algarvian and Forthwegian: CLIPPING STATION. At the other end of the street, two more Algarvian constables stretched out another rope with an identical sign attached. All the Algarvians drew their sticks. “Nobody goes by without getting snipped!” Bembo yelled in his own language. One of the other pair spoke Forthwegian and translated. “Line up!” Bembo added. Again, his opposite number turned the words into Forthwegian.
Oraste spoke up: “Form your line. Over the rope one at a time. Get clipped. Anybody gets out of line, he gets blazed.” Once more, the Forthwegian-speaking constable did the honors.
Grumbling, the people trapped between the two ropes queued up. Bembo gestured them forward one by one. Oraste clipped. “This is all a waste of time, you know,” a Forthwegian told Bembo in excellent Algarvian.
“Mind your own business.” After a moment, Bembo recognized the fellow: the one who’d lost a son to a man from Plegmund’s Brigade. He’s a fine one to tell us what to do and how to do it, the plump constable said. Aloud, he said, “Fat lot you know about it, anyhow.”
“I know you’re looking for hair that turns yellow when it’s cut,” the Forthwegian answered; gossip was nothing to be sneezed at. “I also know any Kaunian with half a wit would dye his hair black before he risked a trap like this.”
Bembo stared. Back in Tricarico, folk of Kaunian blood had dyed their hair red to fit in with the Algarvian majority. Black hair didn’t make Kaunians look like Forthwegians-but this chap was right: it could further ward Kaunians sorcerously disguised to look like their neighbors. “Get out of here,” Bembo snarled, and the Forthwegian with the graying beard disappeared in a hurry.
A man three people after him in line did turn out to be a Kaunian with undyed hair. Bembo and Oraste beat the blond with their bludgeons. Oraste covered him while the rest of the line went through. He was the only Kaunian the constables caught. But even as they frog-marched him off toward the ley-line caravan depot for what would likely be his last journey, a question kept echoing and reechoing in Bembo’s mind: how many blonds had they missed?
The dye had an acrid reek Vanai found distasteful. She applied it twice, as the directions on the jar told her to do. Then, again following the directions, she combed her hair without drying it. Flicking her eyes to right and left, she could see the dark locks that fell damply to her tunic-and would probably end up staining it. Instead of going for a mirror, she asked Ealstan, “What do I look like now?”
“Strange,” he answered, and then found a word that meant the same thing but sounded nicer: “Exotic. There aren’t any black-haired folk on Derlavai with fair skin and light eyes. Maybe on some of the islands in the Great Northern Sea, but I don’t know of any even there.”