Almonio threw his hands in the air. He just missed knocking another constable's mess tin out of his hands, which would have given the other fellow reason to be angry at him. "What is there to get?" he demanded. "All I want to know is how the battle turned out, and the miserable news sheets won't tell me."
"A natural-born innocent," Bembo said again, to Pesaro. Then he gave his attention back to Almonio. "My dear fellow, if you really need it spelled out for you, I'll do the job: if the news sheets don't give us any news, it's because there's no good news to give. There. Is that simple enough, or shall I draw pictures?"
"Oh," Almonio said, in a very small voice. "But if the Unkerlanters have beaten us down at Durrwangen, if they've beaten us in the summertime…" His voice trailed away altogether.
"We're constables," Sergeant Pesaro said, perhaps as much to reassure himself as to make Almonio (and, incidentally, Bembo) feel better. "We've got a job to do here, and an important job it is, too. Whatever happens hundreds of miles away doesn't matter a bit to us. Not a bit, do you hear me?"
Almonio nodded. So did Bembo. He wasn't so sure his sergeant was right, but he wanted to think so. Anything else was too depressing to contemplate. The wine the refectory served with breakfast was nasty, sour stuff, but he had an extra mug anyhow. Almonio had an extra two or three; Bembo wasn't keeping close track.
When he went out on patrol with Oraste, he found his partner in a dour mood. Oraste was often dour, but more so than usual today. At last, Bembo asked him, "What's gnawing at you?"
Oraste walked on for several paces without answering. Bembo thought he wouldn't answer, but after a bit he did: "How in blazes are we supposed to win the war now?"
"What do you think I am?" Bembo demanded, so fiercely that even rugged Oraste gave back a pace. "A general? King Mezentio? I don't know anything about that business. All I know is, the bigwigs in Trapani will come up with something. They always have. What's one more time?"
"They'd better," Oraste growled, as if he'd hold Bembo responsible if they didn't. "That was what should have happened in this big battle. It didn't. How many more chances do we get?"
"As long as they're fighting way inside Unkerlant, I'm not going to worry about it," Bembo said. "If you've got any sense, you won't worry about it, either. You're the one who was always saying that if I didn't like it here, I could get a stick and go fight the Unkerlanters. Now I'll tell you the same cursed thing."
"Powers below eat you, Bembo," Oraste said, surprisingly little rancor in his voice. "You were supposed to say something funny and stupid, so I could stop brooding about the way things are going. But you don't like it any more than I do, do you?"
Instead of answering that straight out, Bembo said, "I had to explain the facts of life to Almonio this morning. He couldn't figure them out for himself."
"Why am I not surprised? That one…" Oraste grimaced. "The other question is, how come I'm jealous of him?"
Bembo didn't answer that at all.
Shouts from around a corner made them both yank out their sticks and start to run. Bembo was amazed at the relief with which he ran. Catching thieves and robbers was why he was here in Gromheort. As long as he was doing his job, he wouldn't have to worry about anything else.
"What's going on here?" he yelled when he got to the two shouting Forthwegians.
Of necessity, he spoke Algarvian. Both Forthwegians looked as if they understood the language. They were middle-aged, and had probably had to learn it in school back in the days before the Six Years' War; this part of Forthweg had belonged to Algarve then. After glancing at each other, they spoke together: "Why, nothing."
"Don't get wise with us," Oraste said. "You'll be sorry if you do." If he could pummel or blaze a Forthwegian or two, he wouldn't have to think about the way things looked in Unkerlant.
One of the Forthwegians said, "It was nothing, really."
"We were just having a bit of a disagreement," the other one said. "Sorry we got so loud."
Bembo put away his stick, but drew his bludgeon from its loop on his belt and thwacked it into the palm of his left hand. "You heard my partner. Don't get wise with us. We're not in any mood to waste time with Forthwegians who want to act cute. Have you got that?" On reflection, Bembo wondered if he should have put it that way. What it meant was, We're jumpy as cats because the war against Unkerlant isn't going the way we'd like. The Forthwegians didn't have to be theoretical sorcerers to figure that out, either.
But Bembo and Oraste had clubs. They had sticks. They had the power of the occupying authority behind them. Even if the Forthwegians were privately contemptuous, they didn't dare show what they were thinking. One of them said, "Sorry, sir." The other one nodded to show he was sorry, too.
"That's better," Bembo said. "Now, I'm going to try this one more time, and I want a straight answer. What in blazes is going on here?"
"We're both oil merchants," one of the Forthwegians said. "Olive, almond, walnut, flax-seed, you name it. Oil. And we were arguing about which way prices were going to go on account of…" He paused. The pause stretched. He'd just admitted knowing things weren't going so well for Algarve. That wasn't very smart. Lamely, he finished, "…on account of the way things are."
"I'll tell you what you were doing," Bembo said. "You were disturbing the peace, that's what you were doing. Creating a disturbance. That happens to be a crime. We'll have to haul you up before a judge."
Both Forthwegians looked appalled, as he'd known they would. "Isn't there some other arrangement we might make?" asked the oil merchant who'd done most of the talking.
"Aye," Oraste rumbled. "We might not bother with a fornicating judge. We might whale the stuffing out of you ourselves instead." He sounded as if he'd enjoy pounding on the Forthwegians. The reason he sounded that way, as Bembo knew perfectly well, was that he would enjoy it.
Unlike Oraste, Bembo didn't usually beat people for the sport of it. He said, "Maybe you boys might find some reason why we wouldn't want to do that."
The oil merchants found several interesting reasons. Those reasons clinked in the constables' belt pouches as they went back to walking their beat. Oraste reached out and hit Bembo in the belly- not much of a punch, but the flesh gave a good deal under his fist. "You're soft," he remarked. "Soft in more ways than one."
"You just want to smash everything flat," Bembo answered. "They're oil merchants. They greased our palms. That's what they're for, right?"
"Funny," Oraste said. "Funny like a man with a wooden leg."
Bembo sent him an injured look. "When we get back to Tricarico, we'll be rich, or close to it, anyway. It's not like we've got a lot to spend our money on here. The wine and the spirits are cheap, and nobody wants to go to the brothel every night."
"Speak for yourself," Oraste said- like any Algarvian, he was vain about his manhood. "The whores here aren't as expensive as they are back home." His lip curled. "Of course, they aren't as pretty as they are back home, either."
Oh, I don't know. Bembo almost said it, remembering his steamy passage with Doldasai. He was vain about his manhood, too. But then he remembered he couldn't talk about that. Nobody'd grabbed her or her mother and father when the Algarvians raided the Kaunian quarter in Gromheort. From that, Bembo figured the blonds had got and used the sorcery that let them look like Forthwegians and slipped out of the quarter before the raids. Nobody'd ever said anything about their disappearance where he could hear, but some high-ranking officers wouldn't be happy that they weren't enjoying what he'd had once. Keeping his mouth shut came no easier for him than for any other boastful Algarvian, but a keen sense of self-preservation made him do it.
Their remaining time on the beat passed easily enough. When they got back to the constabulary barracks, Bembo pounced on the latest edition of the news sheet. "Ha!" he said. "Here's news of the fighting, or of some fighting, anyway."
"What's it say?" Oraste asked.
"I'll read it." Bembo did, in a deep, artificial, portentous voice: " 'In severe defensive struggles southeast of Durrwangen, Algarvian forces inflicted severe casualties on the foe. Despite heavy bombardment by egg-tossers and fierce attacks from Unkerlanter dragons and behemoths, his Majesty's forces withdrew to already prepared rearward positions, yielding only about a mile of ground and shortening their lines in the process.' " He returned to his normal tones to ask Oraste, "What do you make of that?"
His partner pondered, but not for long. "Sounds like a demon of a lot of dead soldiers to me."
"Ours or theirs?"
"Both," Oraste said.
Bembo gave forth with a theatrical sigh. "I was hoping you'd tell me something different, because that's what it sounds like to me, too."
"Where is everyone?" Krasta demanded of Colonel Lurcanio as the carriage pulled up in front of Viscount Valnu's house. She gave her Algarvian lover a peeved look. "Are you sure you got the date right?" She hoped- oh, how she hoped- Lurcanio had got it wrong. If he had, she'd never let him live it down.
But he nodded and pointed through the gloom. "A few carriages are there- do you see?" Even so, his voice was doubtful as he added, "I admit, I expected a good many more."
"Is someone else giving another entertainment?" Krasta asked.
Lurcanio shook his head. In dark night, with no street lamps, Krasta could barely see the motion. He said, "No. I would have heard of that. And if by some chance I did not, you would have."
He was right; Krasta realized as much at once. "We'll just have to find out, then, won't we?" she said as the carriage pulled to a stop. "Where everyone else has gone, I mean."
"Aye. So we will." Now Lurcanio's voice had an edge to it. "Perhaps people have not gone anywhere. Perhaps they have simply chosen not to come."
"Don't be ridiculous." Krasta didn't wait for him to hand her down, but descended from the carriage herself and hurried toward Valnu's house. Over her shoulder, she added, "Why would anybody be as stupid as that?"
Lurcanio caught up with her faster than she might have wanted. "There are times when you can be quite refreshingly naive," he remarked.