Garivald wanted to become an officer about as much as he wanted an extra head. “Sir, I don’t have my letters,” he said, thinking that would dispose of that.

“I’ll teach you, if you like,” Andelot offered.

“Would you?” Garivald stared. “Nobody ever said anything like that to me before, sir. My village didn’t even have a school. The firstman there could read, and maybe a few other people, but not that many. I’d give a lot, sir, to be able to read and write.” / could write down my songs. I could make them better. I could make them last forever.

“It would be my pleasure,” Andelot said. “The more men who do know how to read and write, the more efficient a kingdom Unkerlant becomes. Wouldn’t you say that’s so, Corporal?”

“Aye, sir,” Garivald replied. New thoughts crowded in on the heels of his first excitement. If I do write my songs down, I have to be careful. If the inspectors find them, they’ll know who I really am. And if they know who I really am, I’m in a lot of trouble.

He didn’t show what he was thinking. Showing your thoughts could and often did prove deadly dangerous in Unkerlant. He did his best to look interested and attentive when Andelot pulled a scrap of paper, a pen, and a bottle of ink from his belt pouch. He wrote something on the paper in big letters. “Here’s your name-Fariulf.”

“Fariulf,” Garivald repeated dutifully, wondering what his real name looked like. He didn’t ask. If he ever got the hang of this writing business, he’d figure it out for himself.

“That’s right.” Andelot smiled and nodded. “It’s not hard, really-all the characters always have the same sound, so you just have to remember which sound each character makes. See? You have an ‘f sound at each end of your name.”

“Those both say ‘f?” Garivald asked. Andelot nodded. Garivald scratched his head. “Why don’t they look the same, then?”

“Ah,” Lieutenant Andelot said. “You use this form-the royal form, people call it-for the first one because it’s the first letter of a name. You’d do the same thing if it were the first letter of a sentence. The rest of the time, you use small letters.”

“Why?” Garivald asked.

Andelot started to answer, then stopped, chuckled, and shrugged. He looked very young in that moment. “I don’t know why, Corporal. It’s just how we do things. It’s how we’ve always done them, so far as I know.”

“Oh.” Garivald shrugged, too. Rules didn’t have to make sense to be rules. Anyone who’d lived under King Swemmel understood that perfectly well. “All right, you make the one kind of mark for-what did you say, sir?”

“For the first letter of a name or the first letter of a sentence,” Andelot repeated patiently.

“Thanks. I’ll remember now.” And Garivald thought he would. Not least because he couldn’t read or write, he had a very good memory.

To his surprise, Lieutenant Andelot thrust the pen at him. He recoiled from it, almost as if it were a knife. “Here. Take it,” Andelot said. “Write your own name. Go ahead-you can do it. Just copy what I did.”

When Garivald held the pen as if it were a knife, Andelot showed him a better way. Brow furrowed in concentration, he made marks on the paper, doing his best to imitate what the officer had written. “There,” he said at last. “Does that say… Fariulf?” He nearly made the mistake of using his real name. He might get away with that mistake once. On the other hand, he might not.

“Aye, it does.” Andelot beamed at him, so he must have done it right. The officer started to write again, then stopped and fumbled in his belt pouch till he found a bigger leaf of paper. He wrote a lot of characters on it. “These are the royal form and the regular form of all the letters, in the right order. Do you know the children’s rhyme that helps you remember the order and the way each letter sounds?”

“No, sir,” Garivald said simply.

Andelot sighed. “You really must have lived in the back of beyond.” Garivald shrugged again. He probably had. Andelot taught him the rhyme, which had a catchy little tune. He learned it quickly enough to please the lieutenant. “That’s good,” Andelot said. “That’s very good. Here, let me give you more paper. You can have that pen, too, and here’s a bottle of ink. Go practice shaping the letters and keep saying the rhyme so you know what each one sounds like. In a couple of days, I’ll show you how to read more things, too.”

“Thank you, sir,” Garivald said. He went back to his own hole, his head as full of that children’s rhyme as it had ever been with his own songs. He wrote the alphabet several times, reciting the rhyme as he wielded the pen. Then-first looking around to make sure no one could see him-he wrote Garivald as, best he could, being certain to use the royal form of the G.

And then he crumpled up that leaf of paper and threw it in the closest fire. He let out a small sigh of relief as he watched it burn. In Swemmel’s kingdom, no one could be too careful. Fariulf he was, and Fariulf he would have to remain.

Istvan raised an axe and brought it down on a chunk of firewood. The chunk split into two smaller chunks. The Kuusaman guards who watched the woodcutting detail stayed very alert-axes were real weapons. A few feet from Istvan, Kun was chopping away, too.

“Anyone can tell you didn’t grow up cutting wood,” Istvan said.

“I do it well enough.” Kun was touchy about everything. That had got him into trouble with the guards at the captives’ camp a couple of times. It would have been worse trouble if he hadn’t managed to talk his way out of most of it.

“I didn’t say you didn’t,” Istvan answered.

“I’ll say that,” Szonyi told Kun with a grin. “You don’t cut as much wood as the sergeant or I do, not even close.”

“You’re both twice my size,” Kun said-an exaggeration, but not an enormous one: by Gyongyosian standards, he was on the scrawny side.

Even so, Istvan shook his head. “We’d still do more, even if we were your size or you were ours. Anybody can see that. You waste motion.”

“If I were an Unkerlanter, you’d complain I wasn’t efficient enough,” Kun said.

“If you were an Unkerlanter, you’d still be a lousy woodcutter,” Szonyi said. “By the stars, you’d be a lousy woodcutter if you were an Algarvian.”

“Algarvians,” Kun said, and chopped away at the wood scattered before him with great spirit if not with great efficiency.

“They’re strange people.” Szonyi paused for a moment to wipe sweat from his face with a tunic sleeve. Like most early autumn days on the island of Obuda, this one was cool and misty, but cutting wood was plenty of work to keep a man warm. “Even the one who speaks our language is strange, and the other three…” He rolled his eyes. “They’re even worse.”

“Makes you wonder why we ever allied with them,” Istvan said, leaning on his axe. “They’re… foreign.”

Kun laughed. “Of course they’re foreign. They’re foreigners, by the stars. Did you expect them to be just like us?”

Actually, Istvan had expected something like that. The only foreigners with whom he’d had any experience up to now were Unkerlanter and Kuusaman enemies-and trying to kill one another hadn’t proved the best way to strike up an acquaintance-and the natives of Obuda, whom he reckoned contemptible because they bowed down to whoever occupied their island. He said, “I expected them to be more like us than they are, I’ll tell you that.”

“Why?” Kun asked.

“Because we’re on the same side, of course,” Istvan answered. Szonyi nodded vigorous agreement.

“We’re on the same side as the naked black Zuwayzin, too,” Kun said. “Do you think they’ll be just like us?”

Istvan had trouble believing there really were people with black skins who ran around with no clothes on all the time. It sounded like one of the stories big boys told their little brothers so those little brothers would look like fools when they repeated them to their parents. He said, “I’ve never seen a Zuwayzi, and neither have you. And we weren’t talking about them. We were talking about Algarvians.”