Through Darkest Europe

by Harry Turtledove

  When Khalid complained about that, Dawud said, “If you’re too attached to the past, you turn into an Aquinist. If you’re not even attached to the present, chances are you won’t.”

  “People need attachments,” Khalid said. “They don’t need to let the attachments strangle them.”

  The A1 went north to Bologna, then swung more nearly west till it got to Piacenza. At the madrasa in Cairo, Khalid had read the account of a traveler from Piacenza to Jerusalem, translated from Latin into Arabic. The traveler had been a Christian pilgrim who lived about a lifetime before Muhammad began to preach. If not for that, Khalid never would have heard of the town.

  “You’re one up on me,” Dawud told him, “because I never did. I don’t feel very deprived, either.”

  “It’s not what you’d call an impressive place, is it?” Khalid said. Rome was the capital. Florence and Naples had been great cities once upon a time. Turin was a rising industrial center. Piacenza never had been much and never would be. It was a place where ordinary people lived ordinary lives. If you were in any way extraordinary, you escaped from a place like Piacenza as fast as you could. Or you turned Aquinist and did whatever you did for what you reckoned the greater glory of God.

  The highway touched the coast at Genoa. In the days when European ships ruled the Mediterranean, Genoa had rivaled Venice as a port and a center for raiders and traders. That was long ago now. These days, the town seemed almost as much a backwater as Piacenza.

  West past Genoa to Savona, and then north on the A6 to Turin. As the sea disappeared behind him and the column went up into the Po Valley, Khalid felt as if he were leaving the world he’d always known. The Po Valley had the feel of a more northerly land, one with as many affinities to Germany as to Rome. The people in these parts did still speak Italian, although with a nasal accent that reminded Dawud of French. But a surprising number of them—surprising at least to Khalid—were tall and fair. He knew there were lands where yellow hair and blue or gray eyes outnumbered the dark features common in the rest of the world. He hadn’t looked for part of Italy to come so close to being one.

  Oaks and apples and plums and pears grew in these parts. Many of them needed cold in the wintertime to flourish. That they grew here argued that they would get it.

  Aquinists flourished in these parts, too. Bridge supports and culverts and walls seemed all but sure to have the Crusader cross and GOD WILLS IT! painted or chalked on them. Sniping had picked up as soon as the column rumbled out of Genoa. The men doing the shooting seemed more in earnest than their fellows had farther south. They killed several of the Grand Duke’s soldiers, and wounded even more.

  Here and there along the A6 lay the carcasses of wrecked trucks, personnel carriers, and horses with wheels. A rocket-propelled grenade had blown the turret clean off one tank. It lay upside down, a few cubits from the chassis, like an enormous steel ashtray that just happened to have a cannon sticking out of it.

  A small town called Carmagnola sat just south of Turin and just west of the highway. Even from the road, Khalid could see that Carmagnola had been fought over, probably more than once. Every building taller than two stories had big chunks bitten out of it. At the moment, the Aquinists held the place. Instead of the Grand Duke’s gonfalon, the black flag with the red cross flapped defiantly above the battered offices and blocks of flats.

  Khalid had his assault rifle on his lap in the back seat, a round chambered and the safety off. Dawud, who was driving, laid his on the seat next to him. His right hand reached out to make sure he could grab it in an instant. “This is bound to be where things get lively,” he remarked.

  Before Khalid could answer, a bomb went off by the side of the road ahead of them. Some of the horses with wheels had been uparmored to give them a chance against such attacks. The machine in the lead was one of those. Uparmored or not, it flipped over and started to burn. The vehicles that could go off the road started to. Then a personnel carrier ran over a buried mine and brewed up. Leaving the highway was deadly dangerous.

  So was staying on it. Aquinists opened up with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. “Here we go!” Dawud shouted. He hopped out of the horse with wheels, got down on one knee behind the front fender, and started shooting back. Khalid joined him there, though he was far from sure that didn’t give Aquinists on the other side of the road a clean shot at their backs.

  Someone moved, there in the rubble on the outskirts of Carmagnola. Dawud’s rifle barked. The Aquinist threw out his arms and fell down with his head and torso in plain sight. He kept wiggling and thrashing: one more proof of how hard to kill human beings could be. But he wouldn’t cause the advancing column any more trouble.

  A fanatic with a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher popped up and fired at a tank. The unguided rocket missed the turret by bare digits. The coaxial machine gun next to the cannon cut down the Aquinist. Then the tank clanked forward and shoved the burning horse with wheels out of the way. The commander popped up out of the cupola and waved the column forward.

  Dawud and Khalid jumped back into their vehicle. Dawud put it in gear. Khalid sprayed bullets around to encourage their foes to stay under cover. They rolled on toward Turin.

  XIII

  Khalid soon discovered you could find almost anything in Turin. The town made—or had made, till chaos engulfed it—automobiles. A factory, one of the first of its kind, had turned out Pontiaks for the European market. It operated under license from the anonymous society in the Sunset Lands, which had been eager enough to take advantage of low Italian labor costs.

  Now the factory stood idle. The Aquinists had attacked it with mortars and rockets. They didn’t want any part of Italy hooked into the world-spanning modern economy.

  But wizards and witches also advertised their services. For a fee, they would tell fortunes or predict the future. For a bigger fee, they would cast a spell to make someone love you or curse someone who already didn’t. The fanatics had also given a few of them gruesome, old-fashioned ends.

  “‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’” Dawud quoted. “That’s in the Old Testament. Seems the Aquinists believe in it anyhow. Christians have a way of picking and choosing when they go through our half of the Bible, or they could get a thrill out of eating pork, too, instead of just doing it.”

  “There are passages against sorcery in the Qur’an, too,” Khalid said. “In the second sura, the one called The Cow, it says that people who buy spells won’t reach paradise.”

  “For one thing, you don’t expect the Aquinists to pay any attention to the Qur’an, do you?” Dawud returned. “For another, when was the last time anybody in our part of the world got punished for witchcraft?”

  “It’s been a while,” Khalid said. “They take their holy book literally. Most of us don’t take ours that way.”

  “Well, our laws don’t, anyhow,” Dawud said. “Start talking with farmers and peddlers in the Maghrib and you’ll still find that a lot of them would be Aquinists if only they were Christians. Civilization’s just a veneer. It isn’t solid wood like my head.”

  Since he’d laughed at himself, Khalid couldn’t do it for him. The senior investigator didn’t try to tell his colleague he was wrong. Khalid did say, “We’re working toward a solid civilization, not away from one.”

  “That’s true,” the Jew said. “The fanatics use the modern world’s weapons, and printing and the radio, to try to turn back the clock to where it’s not a clock any more—it’s an hourglass.”

  “Too right, they do,” Khalid said. “I wonder if they see the irony of that.”

  “One of the things they do when you become an Aquinist is inoculate you against irony,” Dawud said … ironically. “They need to. The stuff’s more dangerous to them than smallpox.”

  “You certainly missed your shot,” Khalid said.

  “Think so, do you?” the Jew answered. “Well, back in Roman times, someone asked a priest how he could get through his rituals without laughing, so the
disease has been around for a while.”

  “Socrates had an even earlier case,” Khalid remarked.

  “Maybe, but maybe not. He didn’t believe in the other Greeks’ religion, but I think he did have his own.”

  Just then, a couple of the tanks that had fought their way into Turin opened up with their main armament. Greek pagans, even unorthodox Greek pagans, suddenly seemed much less interesting. Something not far from the barracks where Khalid and Dawud were stationed fell in on itself with a rending crash.

  “One of those Roman historians was talking about how the Empire conquered Britain,” Dawud said. “The way he described it was ‘They make a desert and they call it peace.’ I wonder if Lorenzo’s been reading Tacitus—I think it was Tacitus who wrote that.”

  Tacitus was only a name to Khalid. He was a more familiar name than Ssu-ma Ch’ien, but not nearly so familiar as al-Tabari. For that matter, Britain was hardly more than a name to him. Yes, England and Scotland and the Irish kingdoms had sent representatives to Grand Duke Cosimo’s funeral rites. Yes, some of those states had enough offshore oil to be players in the great game of international finance. But the British Isles, off in their own backward corner of a backward continent, seemed much more exotic than the republics of the Sunset Lands, even if the Sunset Lands lay much farther away.

  With an effort, Khalid wrenched his mind back to the business at hand. “Making a desert is all very well,” he said, “but Lorenzo shouldn’t need to do that to keep Turin loyal to him. Dammit, he’s not the one who smashed up the Pontiak plant and threw all those people out of work. The Aquinists did. Remind the locals of that, and they ought to go after the fanatics with knives.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Dawud said. “Of course, I can’t do anything about it. You need to talk to the Italian commander here.”

  “Yes, I know,” Khalid replied with a sigh. “I do need to talk to him. The problem is, he doesn’t need to listen to me.”

  Major General Renato Procacci was one of Cosimo’s veteran officers now serving under a new ruler. He was in his late fifties, with a bushy graying mustache under a plowshare of a nose that would have made an Armenian jealous. He understood Arabic, but spoke it worse than Khalid did with Italian. Each man used his own language in addressing the other, then, and hoped the other would get the gist.

  “If I chase as many Aquinists as I can out of Turin and kill the rest, I won’t have to worry about them any more.” Procacci had all the virtues attached to straightforward aggressiveness. He also had all the vices attached to it.

  “If you make the people here hate you, General, you’ll spawn two fanatics for every one you get rid of,” Khalid replied.

  “We have plenty of ammunition,” Major General Procacci said.

  “Yes, but—”

  “But what?”

  They eyed each other in perfect mutual incomprehension. The general knew the inspector came from a country more powerful than his own and enjoyed Grand Duke Lorenzo’s favor. But the responsibility for holding Turin was his, not Khalid’s. He reminded Khalid of a meat-eating dinosaur: strong, slow, fierce, and stupid as the day was long.

  As patiently as Khalid could, he said, “If you make people here hate the Aquinists, you won’t have to kill so many of them. You may not even have to kill so many of the Aquinists.” He made a point of not saying If you make the people here hate the Aquinists worse than they hate your soldiers. He was trying to make the major general not hate him. It was one of the more challenging assignments of his career.

  “I don’t care about the people here one way or the other,” Procacci said. “It’s the cursed foreigners I’ve got to get rid of. They’re thick as fleas on a filthy dog.”

  “Yes, but you have homegrown fanatics here, too,” Khalid said.

  “Traitors,” Procacci growled. “That’s all they are, stinking traitors. When we kill them, they get what they deserve.”

  “But the point is not to make more men from Turin move against the Grand Duke, or it ought to be,” Khalid said.

  “No, the point is to punish the ones who do,” the major general insisted. It wasn’t just that he and Khalid were literally speaking different languages. They could have got around that if they were plotting strategy or the like. But they couldn’t plot strategy, because their views of what it ought to be were so different.

  Khalid took another stab at things: “We want the people who live in Turin to be happier under Grand Duke Lorenzo than they would be under the Aquinists.”

  “Happy?” Major General Procacci shook his big, square head. “I don’t care if they’re happy or not. The only thing that matters is whether they do as they’re told.”

  * * *

  He wouldn’t—more likely, he couldn’t—look at it any other way. Khalid gave up on him and went to the Ministry of Information’s headquarters, which was near the Chapel of the Holy Shroud. He didn’t believe the shroud was genuine, which had nothing to do with whether Christians, and especially Aquinists, revered it. Khalid could understand as much. He was sure such a leap of imagination if not faith lay far beyond Renato Procacci.

  A lieutenant colonel named Filiberto Juvarra headed up the local Ministry of Information staff. Unlike Procacci, he not only understood but spoke classical Arabic. He spoke it as well as an Italian was likely to, in fact. After listening sympathetically while Khalid poured out his troubles, Juvarra said, “Yes, that is a problem, my master, but what do you want me to do about it?”

  “Ordering the stubborn fool not to antagonize the Grand Duke’s subjects—his own countrymen—might make a good start,” Khalid said.

  “It might … if I could,” Juvarra said, real regret in his voice. “But you need to remember: I am a lieutenant colonel, while he is a major general. He can give me orders. Much as I might like to, I can’t give him any.”

  Put that way, the statement seemed obvious. Like a lot of things that seemed obvious, it wasn’t. Yes, any flavor general outranked a lieutenant colonel. On the other hand, the Ministry of Information was a service nearer and dearer to the Grand Dukes’ hearts than the Army.

  So Khalid asked, “Are you saying that you can’t give him orders or only that you won’t?”

  Juvarra eyed him. “You do find interesting questions, don’t you? What I’m saying is, I can’t give him any orders he is obliged to follow. Grand Duke Lorenzo may possibly be able to do so.”

  “Possibly?” Khalid said.

  “Possibly,” the officer from the Ministry of Information repeated. “As local commander, Major General Procacci enjoys a good deal of autonomy. Lorenzo would not have put him here if the hadn’t expected him to exercise that autonomy.”

  “But he’s exercising it so it helps Lorenzo’s foes, not so it does them harm,” Khalid protested.

  “The major general would not agree with me if I told him so. From what you say, the major general does not agree with you,” Juvarra replied. “Does he not have a right to his opinion, which may be as good as yours?”

  “His opinion may be as good as mine. The only problem with that is, his opinion isn’t,” Khalid snapped. Lieutenant Colonel Juvarra just shrugged. Khalid had done his best to convince the Italian. Failing, he stormed out of the Ministry of Information building. Now he wondered whether, behind him, Juvarra was on the telephone to Procacci.

  A great many people waited in line to get into the Chapel of the Holy Shroud. Khalid had to remind himself that not all of them would be partisans of the Aquinists. A man or woman might retain the simple piety of his or her youth and also retain the simple loyalty to the Grand Dukes learned with it. A man or woman might.

  Or might not.

  Khalid did assume that either Juvarra or Procacci or both of them had agents listening to the sermons the priests delivered when they celebrated Mass in the chapel. Which was good, as far as it went. Did it go far enough? He always worried about Aquinist infiltrators in the Army and in the Ministry of Information. If the priests declared that Lorenzo would burn
in hell and so would anyone who didn’t follow the Aquinist Correctors and the agents felt the same way, would their superiors ever hear about the seditious sermons? It seemed unlikely.

  Who will watch the watchmen? Khalid remembered the meaning, but not the Latin Major Badoglio had quoted. Dawud would. He’d learned the Christians’ language of prayer and cross-border communication. Khalid kept in his mind only the translation into the tongue the larger world used for the same purposes. It would have to do.

  A man ran out of an alleyway tucking a can of spray paint inside his jacket. Khalid wondered whether he’d painted a red cross or DEUS VULT! or both. The man gave him a bared-teeth snarl—he was in uniform. He thought about chasing the Italian, but didn’t. He hadn’t come north to go after small-scale troublemakers like that.

  Back forty or fifty years before, a Turk named Ablanalp had invented the valve that made such sprays possible. They had all kinds of uses, paint, cookery, and deodorants among them. From what Khalid had read, Ablanalp never dreamt how important they would be to graffiti scrawlers. Spraying your message was much quicker and easier than daubing it on with a brush.

  Ministry of Information personnel were putting up posters of their own. These showed armored skeletons on horseback. Skulls stared out from under knightly helms. On their left arms, the skeletons bore shields showing the red cross. Instead of lances, they held bombs with burning fuses in their bony right hands. The slogan on the posters was short and to the point: TERROR KILLS!

  Khalid nodded to himself. That was some of the best propaganda he’d seen from the Grand Duke’s side. Not only did it get Lorenzo’s message across, it also mocked the Aquinists’ broadsheets. People who saw one of these posters might laugh because of it. The Aquinists wouldn’t. God rarely issued fanatics a sense of humor.

  An explosion a couple of blocks away was fierce enough to stagger Khalid and to blow glass out of a good many windows that had kept it till now. He ran toward the blast. One of that size was bound to leave wounded in its wake. Now he had a proper military first-aid kit on his belt. He might be able to do some good.