Jaws of Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  They both shook their heads. “I will not live under King Swemmel,” said the one who’d spoken before. “He kills his whole kingdom.”

  When the other Grelzer took his meat off the fire, Ceorl pointed to it and said, “You want to share that?” As usual, he had his eye on the main chance. The Grelzer plainly wanted nothing of the sort. He glared at Ceorl as a dog with a bone might glare at another dog who’d looked at it. But, unlike a dog, he thought before he fought, and reluctantly nodded. He started cutting up the gobbet so everyone could get a couple of bites from it.

  Sidroc wolfed down his portion. He had some bread in his pack, but he didn’t take it out. What he showed, he would have to share. If he went hungry now, he might be able to eat more a little later. Meanwhile, the Yaninan shook the Kaunian from Valmiera awake so he could get his little portion.

  “Thank you,” the blond said around a yawn. He’d been asleep when the other trapped soldiers talked about what to do next, but he had the same idea: “We had better get moving.” The accent he gave to Algarvian was even stranger than that of the Grelzers. But he still thought straight, for he went on, “The longer the Unkerlanters have to tighten the noose around us, the more trouble we will be in.”

  Ceorl said, “I’m sick to death of marching.”

  “If you stay here, you’ll get your death whether you’re sick or not,” Sidroc said. Ceorl glared at him. They still didn’t like each other. Had they not had worse worries, they might have fought.

  With a groan, the Algarvian lieutenant heaved himself to his feet. “He’s right,” he said. “We’ve got no good chances, but moving fast is our best one.”

  Sidroc groaned, too, as he made himself stand. He wanted to sleep, with luck for about a week. But he wasn’t ready to sleep forever, not yet, and so he trudged off with the rest.

  Everything inside the Mandelsloh pocket painted a picture of the disintegration of the army trapped there. Unkerlanter dragons had caught a column of supply wagons out in the open and smashed it to bits. The wagons lay burnt and scattered like savaged toys; the animals that had drawn them were bloated and starting to stink.

  A battery of Algarvian egg-tossers had suffered a similar fate. The engines made to fling death at the Unkerlanters wound up on the receiving end of what they were supposed to dish out. Their tumbled and broken disarray argued that this fight would not be won, not by the Algarvians.

  And a ley-line caravan had taken an egg and now blocked the line it was intended to travel. Soldiers struggled to move it aside so other caravans might pass. How much good will that do? Sidroc wondered. They still can’t get through the ring Swemmel’s buggers have around us.

  The lieutenant leading the motley little group of which Sidroc was a part must have had the same thought. He didn’t let them get close enough to the wrecked caravan to be ordered to help shift it. They just went on their way, one band among many without much hope but without much choice, either. With only one choice, in fact: Break out or die.

  More dragons appeared overhead. Sidroc promptly dove into the crater a bursting egg had left behind. His comrades took cover, too. He waited for more eggs to fall, for the earth to shake at their bursts, for the screams of wounded men to start. Nothing of the sort happened. After a moment, the blond from the Phalanx of Valmiera said, “Those are Algarvian dragons.”

  Algarvian dragons had flown over the Mandelsloh pocket before, but not very often. When they did, they sometimes dropped food or medicines for the soldiers. Sidroc looked, up to the sky with sudden hope. The thought of getting his hands on a food package made his belly growl and his mouth water.

  But no food parcels plummeted down. In a way, they were only cruel hoaxes, since the dragons couldn’t possibly bring in enough even to come close to supplying all the men trapped around Mandelsloh. Every little bit helped someone, though.

  Instead of food packets, leaves of paper fluttered in the air, slowly dancing toward the ground. Sidroc grunted. “What sort of lies are they telling us?” he asked nobody in particular. The Unkerlanters sometimes dropped leaflets urging their foes to surrender and promising them good treatments if they did. The leaflets would have been much more persuasive had those foes not known what had happened to Raniero of Grelz.

  Sidroc didn’t even have to climb out of his hole to get his hands on a leaflet. Two of them swirled down into the crater; one hit him in the shoulder. He grabbed it and turned it right side up.

  Soldiers of Algarve, help is on the way! it read. A strong counterattack from the east has been launched to regain contact with you and reestablish the front in this area. We expect your rescuers to fight their way through the forces of the barbarous foe and join you within two days’ time. You are urged to break out toward the east to aid this movement and to insure that it is crowned with success no matter what the result of the attack fom the rescuing units.

  He read it through twice. He spoke Algarvian better than he read it. But there still didn’t seem any room for doubt. “They’re going to try,” he said as he came out of the crater. “They’re going to try, but they don’t think they can do it.”

  “That’s what it sounds like to me, too,” Sergeant Werferth said. The Algarvian lieutenant nodded. He read Algarvian perfectly well. And he also had no trouble reading between the lines.

  The Kaunian from Valmieran was holding a leaflet, too. “This attack of theirs will make the Unkerlanters turn away from us,” he said in his odd accent. “This will give us a better chance.”

  He was probably right. He was, in fact, almost certainly right. But his being right didn’t turn the better chance into a good one. Nevertheless … Sidroc started tramping east. “We’d better get moving,” he said. “We want to break out while they’re still trying to break in.”

  No one argued with him. The other soldiers emerged from their holes and slogged east, too. They weren’t any sort of formal unit, just a double handful of men thrown together by chaos. They clung to one another now, though, as if they’d fought shoulder to shoulder for years.

  Until, that is, they tramped past the wreckage of what the Algarvians called a special camp. Eggs had hurled the neat rows of sacrificed corpses this way and that. Several days in the sun had turned them black and bloated and stinking. But they were all unquestionably blond.

  Sidroc stared at the Kaunian from the Phalanx of Valmiera. What was he thinking? What could he be thinking? Had Sidroc been the Algarvian lieutenant, he wouldn’t have waited around to find out. He would have run for his life.

  The blond looked at the stick he carried. Sidroc thought about running for his life even though he wasn’t the Algarvian lieutenant. Slowly, the Valmieran said, “Algarve gave me this stick to fight Unkerlant. Fighting Unkerlant is the most important thing.”

  Everybody relaxed. Sidroc realized he hadn’t been the only anxious trooper. He glanced over at the Valmieran. His private opinion was that the fellow was a little bit crazy. But then, if he weren’t a little bit crazy himself, why the demon had he signed up for Plegmund’s Brigade?

  Crazy or not, he’d read that leaflet right. However hard the Algarvians farther east were trying to break into the Mandelsloh pocket, the Unkerlanters were holding them away. That meant his comrades and he had to break out, to make their own way toward the men fighting to link up with them. It meant the army in the pocket had to leave most of their weapons behind. It meant, in the end, that Sidroc had to throw away his stick and his uniform and swim fifty yards across a freezing river.

  But there were Algarvians on the other side of it. They hauled him out of the water and gave him spirits and dry clothes—a short tunic and kilt, but that couldn’t be helped. And they did the same for the blond from the Phalanx of Valmiera. Exhausted, shivering, half drunk—the spirits went straight to his head—Sidroc stuck out a hand. The Kaunian clasped it.

  Ealstan didn’t need long to discover that raising a revolt against the Algarvians in Eoforwic was not so simple as sorcerously disguising himself as a redhead and g
oing off to assassinate somebody. Maybe his comrades and he had hurt the Algarvians with that murder. He hoped so. But Mezentio’s men had found somebody else to put in the dead man’s slot, and they went right on about the business of grinding the rebellion into the dust.

  Reporting to Pybba one morning, Ealstan pointed west across the Twe-gen and angrily demanded, “What in blazes are the Unkerlanters waiting for? We’re tying up powers above only know how many brigades of Algarvians for them. Why don’t they cross the river and help us?”

  Since the uprising started, Pybba looked to have aged ten years. His voice was grim as he answered, “There’s no good reason. I can think of a couple of bad reasons, if you want ‘em.”

  “Go ahead,” Ealstan said.

  “All right. First thing that springs to mind is that they’re letting the Algarvians solve their Forthwegian problem for ‘em. A Forthwegian who’d fight the redheads’d fight Swemmel’s buggers, too, so they may reckon a lot of us are better off dead.”

  Ealstan grunted. That made entirely too much sense. He said, “The same way we let the Algarvians solve our Kaunian problem for us, eh?”

  “Aye, just like that,” Pybba answered, before realizing exactly what Ealstan had said. When he did, he glared. “Funny fellow. Ha, ha.”

  “I wasn’t joking,” Ealstan said. “How is it different?”

  “Shut up,” the pottery magnate said in a flat, hard voice. “Just shut up. I don’t have time to argue with you. If you want to be a Kaunian-lover once we don’t have the stinking Algarvians on our hands, fine, go right ahead. For now, though, you’d cursed well better keep in mind which is more important.”

  In that moment, Ealstan hated him: hated him with a hatred all the more bitter because Pybba was his own countryman and they would never, ever see eye-to-eye on this. Ealstan had to take a deep breath to keep from telling the pottery magnate exactly what he thought of him. By the look on Pybba’s face, he thought the same thing of Ealstan.

  “Tell me what you need from me,” Ealstan said at last. “I’ll go do it, and then we won’t have to have anything to do with each other for a while.”

  “A bargain,” Pybba said at once. “You’re a stubborn whoreson. You’re almost as stubborn as I am, I think—the only difference is, you’re a fool.”

  Ealstan, of course, reckoned Pybba the fool. “Never mind,” he said. “You got in a last insult. Huzzah for you. Now give me my orders, so I can go do them.”

  “Right.” Pybba pointed toward the center of the city. “We’ve got a force building in a park, getting ready to cut the Algarvians’ corridor to the palace and to the ley-line terminal. Go make sure they’re ready to move. Tell ‘em the attack is still on. The fellow in charge there already knows what time.”

  “Fine. Shall I join it?”

  “If you want to.” Pybba spoke with relentless indifference. A moment later, though, he checked himself and shook his head. “No, you know too cursed much. Can’t have the redheads nabbing you and tearing it out of you.”

  “Right,” Ealstan said tightly. He turned on his heel and strode—almost stomped—out of Pybba’s office and out of the pottery works that was now the headquarters for the rebellion. As he left, he laughed a little. One thing the uprising had done: it had cost the Algarvians their source of Style Seventeen sugar bowls. They would have to use something else instead of hold their little eggs.

  Eoforwic looked like what it was, a city torn by war. Smoke thickened the air. Ealstan hardly noticed; he’d got very used to it. Eggs burst not far away.

  He’d got used to that, too. And he’d got used to glassless windows, to buildings with chunks bitten out of them, and to charred beams sticking up like leafless branches from the wreckage. The Forthwegian capital hadn’t suffered too badly when the Unkerlanters seized it, or when the Algarvians took it away from King Swemmel’s men. It was making up for lost time.

  He found the park without much trouble. Finding the man in charge of the attack took more work, but he finally did. The fellow nodded brusquely. “Aye, I know what we’re supposed to do,” he said. “We’ll bloody well do it, too. You can go back and tell Pybba he doesn’t need to hold my hand. I’m not a baby.”

  “Keep your tunic on.” Ealstan hid a smile. He had that same reaction to the pottery magnate, usually a couple of times an hour. He knew he was here more to get him out of Pybba’s hair than for any other reason. He didn’t care. Right this minute, he couldn’t think of anything he wanted more than to be out of Pybba’s hair.

  When he didn’t say anything more, the local commander nodded again, as if he’d passed a test. “All right, kid. We’ll feed the powers below plenty of dead Algarvians. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

  That kid made Ealstan bristle, but he didn’t show it. When you showed things like that, people just laughed. “Right,” he said again, and walked away, almost as fast as he’d walked away from Pybba.

  The park didn’t look like a place where an attack was building. The Forthwegian fighters didn’t gather out in the open. That would have shown them to redheads on dragons overhead or with spyglasses up in tall buildings, and would have invited massacre. Instead they crouched under trees and in the buildings around the park, waiting for the order to go forward. They all wore armbands that said FREE FORTHWEG, so the Algarvians couldn’t claim they were fighting out of uniform and blaze them on the spot if they caught them.

  As Ealstan was going by, one of the Forthwegian fighters under the oaks called his name. He stopped in surprise. He didn’t recognize the other man. But then, after a moment, he did. It was the fellow who’d been playing drums in another park—the fellow who played so much like the famous Ethelhelm. Now that Ealstan heard him speak, he sounded like Ethelhelm, too.

  “Hello,” Ealstan said. “The face is familiar”—which wasn’t quite true— “but I can’t place your name.” He didn’t know which name Ethelhelm was using. If Ethelhelm had even a dram of brains, it wouldn’t be his own.

  And, sure enough, the musician said, “You can call me Guthfrith.”

  “Good to see you again,” Ealstan told him. “Getting your revenge on the Algarvians, are you, Guthfrith?”

  “It’s about time, wouldn’t you say?” Ethelhelm answered.

  “Probably long past time,” Ealstan said, and the Kaunian half-breed nodded. Ealstan went on, “What have you been doing with yourself lately?”

  “Odd jobs, mostly,” said Ethelhelm—no, I should think of him as Guthfrith, went through Ealstan’s mind. “Did you recognize me, there in that other park? I saw you, and I thought you might have.”

  “I thought I did,” Ealstan replied, “but I wasn’t sure. You didn’t look just the way I thought I recalled you”—you were sorcerously disguised—”but your hands hadn’t changed at all.”

  Ethelhelm—no, Guthfrith—looked down at the hands in question as if they’d betrayed him. And so, in a way, they had. Even now, they looked more as if they should be poised over drums than holding a stick. With a chuckle, he said, “Not everyone has ears as good as yours. I’m not sorry, either. I’d be in trouble if more people did.”

  “You would have been in trouble,” Ealstan said. “Not any more. Now you’re getting your own back.”

  “No.” Guthfrith shook his head. “The thieving redheads have taken away everything I had. I can’t get it back. The most I can get is a piece of revenge. I wasn’t very brave before. Now …” He shrugged. “I try to do better.”

  “That’s all anyone can do,” Ealstan said.

  “Took me a long time to figure it out,” Guthfrith said. “How’s your lady? What was her name? Thelberge?”

  “That’s right.” Ealstan nodded. “She’s fine, thanks. We’ve got a little girl.”

  “Do you?” Guthfrith said, and Ealstan nodded again. Then Guthfrith reminded Ealstan he was also Ethelhelm, for he went on, “You used to go with a blond woman before that, didn’t you? Do you know what happened to her?”

  “Uh—no.” Ealstan�
��s ears heated in dull embarrassment, but he was not about to tell the musician that Vanai was Thelberge. He wished he hadn’t had to tell Pybba about his family arrangements. The more people he told, the more Vanai found herself in danger, for there was no guarantee that the Forthwegians would succeed in ousting the Algarvians from Eoforwic. And if Mezentio’s men won this fight, they would surely take the most savage vengeance they could.

  “No, eh?” Guthfrith’s voice was toneless as he added, “Too bad.”

  Ealstan wanted to explain everything to him. He wanted to, but he didn’t. Aye, the fellow who had been Ethelhelm was a half breed, but he’d got much too cozy with the Algarvians, and stayed that way much too long. If they ever captured him now, he was liable to feed them a genuine, full-blooded Kaunian to save his own neck.

  He looked at Ealstan with something like loathing, though they’d been friendly while Ealstan was casting his accounts for him. Ealstan looked at him in much the same way. Neither of them, plainly, would ever trust the other again. When Ealstan said, “I’ve got to go,” he knew he sounded relieved, and Guthfrith looked the same way.

  “Take care of yourself. Take care of your little girl, too.” By the way Guthfrith sounded, Ealstan was welcome to walk in front of a ley-line caravan.

  “You take care, too.” Ealstan sounded as if he wished the same for Guthfrith. He hurried off toward Pybba’s headquarters, and didn’t look back once. Whatever warmth he’d known for the man who’d been one of the most popular musicians in Forthweg, was dead now.

  He needed a while to get back to the pottery magnate’s place. Algarvian dragons appeared overhead and dropped load after load of eggs on Eoforwic, forcing Ealstan into a cellar. No Unkerlanter dragons flew east from over the Twegen to challenge the beasts painted in green, red, and white. The enemy could simply do as he pleased, and he pleased to knock down big chunks of the Forthwegian capital. He doubtless assumed anyone still inside the city opposed him. Had he been wrong in that assumption, the destruction he wrought helped make him right.