Long Paw put a hand on his back, which hurt, and stumbled a little because his legs hurt, too.

Petite Moulin shot him her open-faced smile. “You are hurt?”

“I’m old,” Long Paw muttered.

There was a stir toward the eastern edge of the fortified camp. The peasants were still burying the dead after the “Battle of San Batiste” (after stripping them of every possible valuable thing). Some of them raised their heads; a small horde of children ran toward the shouting.

“The Berona road,” Petite Moulin said in her Gallish accent.

“The convoy!” Long Paw said. Fatigue and incidental pain fell away, and he and Petite Moulin ran down their company street of tents to see the huge military wagons roll past the outposts and through the great wooden gate that had already been erected in case of a serious assault from Mitla.

Hundreds of wagons stretched away out of sight over the ridge. In fact, Long Paw wasn’t sure he’d ever seen so many wagons in his entire life. They had wheels as tall as a man, and each wagon was drawn by six horses in a complex hitch that wasn’t familiar to Long Paw. The wagons were full almost to bursting, piled high, with their covers laced taut against rain.

The wagoners were greeted with cheers, and they grinned, but the convoy rolled on. Long Paw stopped counting at two hundred wagons; there were still wagons coming over the far distant ridge.

“I’m lookin’ fer Corp’ral Favour,” said an urchin in strongly accented Alban. Long Paw didn’t know him, but there were suddenly hundreds of them; all Etrusca seemed to have dumped their unwanted children on the army.

Petite Moulin shook her head. In Etruscan, she said, “He is still on patrol.”

The boy nodded politely. “Then I am to find Ser Roberto Caffelo.”

Long Paw nodded. “That’s me,” he said.

“Donna Sugo wishes for you,” the boy said.

Petite Moulin and Long Paw looked at each other. Multilingual gears ground in tired brains. Then they both grinned.

“Sauce,” they said together.

Desiderata stood in her chamber, looking at her bed linens and thinking of Blanche. She was hardly a delicate flower; she did not actually need her pillowcases ironed to go to sleep, but Blanche was gone, and Desiderata knew every day how much she had relied on the young woman. And on Diota, executed, her head put on the gate like a traitor.

Desiderata went to the window and looked over the city. Almost at her feet, there were cranes, huge assemblies of wood, driven by enormous wooden wheels, by horses and oxen and even men. Forty cranes towered above the lower town; three on the former Episcopal Palace alone.

“We are rebuilding,” she said to the city. “We are not beaten.”