Recared's whistle shrilled before sunrise the next morning. "Forward!" he shouted. Forward Leudast went, on toward Herborn.

Eighteen

Bembo was sleeping the deep, restful sleep of a man with a clean conscience- or perhaps of a man with no conscience- when someone shattered that rest by rudely shaking him awake. His eyes flew open. So did his mouth, to curse whoever would perpetrate such an enormity. But the curses died before they saw the light of day: Sergeant Pesaro loomed over him, fat face filled with fury.

"Get your arse out of the sack, you son of a whore," Pesaro snarled. "Come with me this instant- this instant, do you hear?"

"Aye, Sergeant," Bembo answered meekly, and came, even though he wore only his light tunic and kilt and the barracks was chilly. He followed Pesaro into the sergeant's office, where, shivering, he plucked up his always indifferent courage enough to ask, "What- what is it?"

The worst he could think of was that Pesaro had found out how he'd spirited away the parents of Doldasai the Kaunian courtesan. By the fearsome expression on Pesaro's face, this was liable to be even worse than that. Pesaro snatched a leaf of paper off his desk and waved it in Bembo's face. "Do you see this?" he shouted. "Do you?"

"Uh, no, Sergeant," Bembo said. "Not unless you hold it still." Thus reminded, Pesaro did. Bembo read the first few lines. His eyes widened. "By the powers above," he whispered. "My leave's come through."

Pesaro's glare grew more baleful yet. "Aye, it has, you stinking sack of moldy mushrooms," he ground out. "Your leave has come through. Nobody else's has, not in this whole barracks, not in this whole stinking town. Not even mine. Powers below eat you, you get to go back to Tricarico for ten mortal days and enjoy yourself in civilization while the rest of us stay stuck with the fornicating Forthwegians."

He looked about to tear the precious paper to shreds. To forestall such a disaster, Bembo snatched it out of his hands. "Thank you, Sergeant!" he exclaimed. "I feel like a man who just won the lottery." That was no exaggeration; he knew how unlikely leaves were. All but babbling, he went on, "I'm sure yours will come through very soon. Not just sure- positive." Aye, he was babbling. He didn't care.

"Ha!" Pesaro tossed his head in magnificent, jowl-wobbling contempt. "Go on, get out of my sight. I'll be jealous of you every minute you're gone- and if you're even one minute late coming back to duty, you'll pay. Oh, how you'll pay."

Nodding, doing his best not to gloat, Bembo fled. He dressed. He packed. He collected all his back pay. He hurried to the ley-line caravan depot and waited for an eastbound caravan. He'd just scrambled aboard it when he realized he hadn't bothered waiting for breakfast. If that didn't speak to his desperation for escape, he didn't know what did.

Almost all the Algarvians in his caravan car were soldiers who'd got leave from the endless grinding war against Unkerlant. Some of them, seeing his constable's uniform, cursed him for a coward and a slacker. He'd heard that before, whenever soldiers passed through Gromheort. Here, he had to grin and bear it- either that or pick a fight and get beaten to a pulp.

But some of the soldiers, instead of reviling him, just called him a lucky dog. They shared food with him, and fiery Unkerlanters spirits, too. By the time the ley-line caravan had got well into Algarve, Bembo leaned back in his seat with a glazed look on his face.

He found he had little trouble figuring out just when the caravan entered his native kingdom. It wasn't so much that redheads replaced swarthy, bearded Forthwegians in the fields. That did happen, but it wasn't what he noticed. What he noticed was something starker: women replaced men.

"Where are all the men?" he exclaimed. "Gone to fight King Swemmel?"

One of the fellows who'd been feeding him spirits shook his head. "Oh, no, buddy, not all of them. By now, a good many are dead." Bembo started to laugh, then choked on it. The soldier wasn't joking.

Changing caravans in Dorgali, a good-sized town in south-central Algarve, came as more than a little relief. Most of the men under fifty in the depot wore uniforms, but some didn't. And hearing women and children use his own language as their birthspeech was music to Bembo's ears after a couple of years of listening to sonorous Forthwegian and occasional classical Kaunian.

Best of all, the civilians among whom Bembo sat on the trip to Tricarico didn't blame him for not being a soldier. Some of them, in fact, started to take his constable's uniform for that of the army. He wouldn't have denied it if a woman hadn't pointed him out for what he really was. But even she didn't do it in a mean way; she said, "You're serving King Mezentio beyond the frontier, too, just as if you were a soldier."

"Why, so I am, dear," Bembo said. "I couldn't have put it better, or even so well, myself." He flirted with her till she got off the caravan car a couple of hours later. That made him snap his fingers in disappointment; if she'd stayed on till Tricarico, something interesting might have developed.

He let out a long sigh of pleasure, like that of a lover returning to his beloved, when the conductor called, "Tricarico, folks! All out for Tricarico!" He grabbed his bag and hurried down onto the platform of the depot. It was, he saw, the platform from which he'd left for Forthweg a couple of years before. He kicked at the paving stones as he left the depot and hurried out into the city- his city.

There were the Bradano Mountains, indenting the eastern skyline. He didn't have to worry about blond Jelgavans swarming out of them, as he had in the early days of the war. He didn't have to worry about Jelgavan dragons anymore, either.

And there was a cab. He waved to it. The driver stopped. Bembo hopped in. "The Duke's Delight," he told the hackman, naming a hostel he'd have no trouble affording. He'd had to give up his flat when he went off to the west.

"You'll be from around these parts," the driver said, flicking the horse's reins.

"How do you know?" Bembo asked.

"Way you talk," the fellow answered. "And nobody who wasn't would know of a dive like that." Bembo laughed. He also got the last laugh, by shorting the driver's tip to pay him back for his crack.

Once he'd got himself a room at the hostel, Bembo walked down the hall to take a bath, then changed into wrinkled civilian clothes and went back out to promenade through the streets of Tricarico. How shabby everything looks, he thought. How worn. That took him by surprise; after so long in battered Gromheort, he'd expected his home town to sparkle by comparison.

As he'd seen on his caravan journey across Algarve, few men between seventeen and fifty were on the streets. Of those who were, many limped or were short a hand or wore an eye patch or sometimes a black mask. Bembo grimaced whenever he saw men who'd come back from the war something less than a full man. They made him feel guilty for his free if not especially graceful stride.

After so long looking at dumpy Forthwegian women and the occasional blond Kaunian, Bembo had thought he would enjoy himself back in his home town. But his own countrywomen seemed tired and drab, too. Too many of them wore the dark gray of someone who'd lost a husband or brother or father or son.

Powers above, he thought. The Forthwegians are having a better time of it than my own folk. For a moment, that seemed impossible. Then, all at once, it made sense. Of course they are. They're out of the war. They aren't losing loved ones anymore- well, except for the Kaunians in Forthweg, anyhow. We have to go right on taking it in the teeth till we finally win. Lurid broadsheets shouted, THE KAUNIANS STARTED THIS WAR, BUT WE WILL FINISH IT! Others cried, THE STRUGGLE AGAINST KAUNIANITY NEVER ENDS! They were pasted on every vertical surface, and gave Tricarico most of what little color it had. People hurried past them head down, not bothering to read.