Two men followed it, both carrying shotguns. One shone a bull’s-eye lantern in John’s face.
“You are?” the man behind the lantern said.
“John Hosten,” he said.
“Arturo Bianci,” the man with the lantern said. His hand was firm and callused, a workingman’s grip. “Come.”
They went into the farmhouse, through a hallway and into the kitchen; there was a big fireplace in one end, with a tile stove built into the side, and a kerosene lantern hanging from a rafter. Strings of garlic and onions and chilies hung also; hams in sacks, slabs of dried fish scenting the air; there were copper pans on the walls. Four men and a woman greeted him.
“No more names,” John said, sitting at the plank table. “This group is big enough as it is, by the way.”
Silence fell as the woman put a plate before him: sliced tomatoes, cured ham, bread, cheese, a mug of watered wine. John picked up a slab of the bread and folded it around some ham; it was an important rite of hospitality, and besides that, meals had been irregular this last week or so.
“We wondered if you could get through, with the refugees,” Arturo said slowly, obviously thinking over the implications of John’s remark.
“Fools.” Unexpectedly, that was the woman; she had Arturo’s looks in a feminine version, earthy and strong, but much younger. “Do they think they can run faster than the tedeschi? All they do is block the roads and hamper the army.”
John nodded; it was a good point. “They’re afraid,” he said. “Rightly afraid, although they’re doing the wrong thing.”
“Not only them,” Arturo said. “Our lords and masters have—” he used a local dialect phrase; John thought he identified “sodomy” and “pig,” but he wasn’t sure. “You think we will lose this war, signore?”
“Yes,” John confirmed. “The chances are about—”
92%, ±3, Center said helpfully.
“—nine to one against you, barring a miracle.”
The other men looked at each other, some of them a little pale.
“I don’t understand it—we are so many, compared to them. It must be treason!” one said.
“Never attribute to treason or conspiracy what can be accounted for by incompetence and stupidity,” John said.
Arturo rubbed a hand over his five o’clock shadow, blue-black and bristly. The sound was like sandpaper.
“I knew we had fallen behind other countries,” he said. “I have relatives who moved to Santander, to Chasson City, to work in the factories there. I might have myself, if I had not inherited this land from my father. That was why I joined the Reform party”—somewhat illegal, but not persecuted very stringently—”so that we might have what others do, and not spend every year as our grandfathers did. I did not know we had become so primitive. These devil-machines the Chosen have . . .”
“Their organization is more important, their training, their attitude,” John said. “They’ve been planning for this for a long time. Your leadership has what it desires, and just wants to keep things the way they are. The Chosen . . . the Chosen are hungry, and eating the whole world wouldn’t satisfy them.”
Arturo nodded. “All that remains is to decide whether we submit, or fight from the shadows,” he said. “We fight. Are we agreed?”
“We are agreed,” one of the men said; he was older, and his breeches and floppy jacket were patched. “But I don’t know how many others we can convince. They will say, what does it matter who the master is, if you must pay your rent and taxes anyway?”
The woman spoke again. “The Chosen will convince them, better than we.”
The men looked at her; she scowled and banged a coffee pot down on one of the metal plates set into the top of the stove.
“It is true,” Arturo said. “If half of what I have heard is so, that is true.”
“It’s probably worse than what you’ve heard,” John said grimly. “The Chosen don’t look on you as social inferiors; they look on you as animals, to be milked and sheared as convenient, then slaughtered.”
Arturo slapped his hand on the plank. “It is agreed. And now, come and see how we have cared for what you sent us!”