Jaws of Darkness d-5

by Harry Turtledove

  Xavega was never one to beat around the bush. When the shift ended, she waited for Leino in the corridor. “I was wrong about you,” she announced.

  “Oh?” His heart pounded. “How?”

  “I never thought Kuusaman men could be so… interesting,” she said.

  Sure enough, I agreed with her, Leino marveledThat was all I needed to do. It was probably all he should have done, too. Part of him knew it, anyhow. But that wasn’t the part that said, “Now that we have spent all this time keepingHabakkuk solid, will you come to my cabin and see how much ice we can melt?”

  She couldn’t very well misunderstand that. If she didn’t care for it, she’d slap him across the icy hallway. Instead, she said, “Aye,” and set her hand in his. I’ll be sorry for this later, Leino thought. But that would be later. Now… Now he hurried toward the cabin, Xavega at his side.

  “Leave?” The Algarvian lieutenant stared at Sidroc. “You want leave?”

  “Aye, sir,” Sidroc answered stolidly. Speaking the redheads’ language, he had to be stolid; he wasn’t all that fluent. “I have had none since I came to Unkerlant more than a year and a half ago.”

  “Have any of your comrades had leave?” his company commander asked, and Sidroc had to shake his head. The Algarvian went on, “There are two ways to stop fighting here in the west. You can be wounded. Then you stop long enough for them to repair you. Or you can die. But if they could call you back from that, believe me, they would. Now go back go your squad and stop troubling me with foolish notions. Have you got that?”

  “Aye, sir,” Sidroc repeated. Back to his squad he went.

  Ceorl was stirring the stewpot. He looked up. “Well?”

  “Two ways to get leave,” Sidroc reported. “You can get wounded, or you can get killed. Otherwise, forget it.”

  “Told you so,”SergeantWerferth said. “They’re going to use us up. That’s what we’re here for. I’d hate it even worse if they didn’t treat their own soldiers the same way.”

  “Wonderful.” Speaking Forthwegian, Sidroc had no trouble sounding as sarcastic as he pleased. “I want to go home for a while, curse it. I’d come back.”

  “Of course you would,” Werferth said. “It’s not like anybody except our own kin loves us back there-and even some of them don’t.”

  “Futter ‘em all,” Ceorl said, giving the pot another stir.

  “Futter ‘em all is right,” Sidroc muttered. The trouble was, Werferth was also right. Most Forthwegians had no great use for either the Algarvians or the men from Forthweg who’d taken service in Plegmund’s Brigade. “Ungrateful whoresons. If it weren’t for the redheads, we’d still be stuck with all those stinking Kaunians back in our own kingdom.”

  “Well, that’s the truth.” Ceorl always sounded surprised when he agreed with Sidroc. He tasted the stew and nodded. “It’s as good as it’ll get, not that that’s saying much.”

  Sidroc dug out his mess kit. Ceorl filled the tin tray with carrots and turnips and onions and bits of meat. “What is this stuff?” Sidroc asked, prodding one of those bits with his spoon. “Unicorn? Horsemeat?”

  “No, it’s mutton,” Ceorl said. Sidroc laughed in his face. The ruffian grinned back, unabashed. “Well, close, anyhow. It’s goat.”

  After tasting and chewing-after chewing for quite a while-Sidroc nodded. “All right, I’ll believe that. It must have been in the pot a good long time. It’s not too gamy, and it’s all the way down to tough.”

  Werferth methodically emptied his mess kit. “Next to some of the stuff we’ve eaten, this is downright good. Remember that behemoth that had gone over?” He wrinkled his nose in disgust.

  “Which one?” Sidroc asked. His own tin was almost empty, too. “It’s not like we’ve only done it once.”

  Werferth laughed. So did Ceorl. After a moment, so did Sidroc. Werferth said, “Ah, the happy stories we’ll have to tell our grandchildren.”

  That made Ceorl laugh harder than ever-harder than the joke deserved, as far as Sidroc was concerned. He asked, “What’s so funny?”

  “Grandchildren,” Ceorl answered. “Who’s dumb enough to think we’ll live long enough to have kids, let alone grandchildren?”

  “Oh.” That brought Sidroc back to earth-to the muddy earth of Unkerlant-with a bump. It wasn’t that Ceorl was wrong. Ceorl was too likely to be right. Sidroc turned to Werferth. “See, Sergeant, there’s another reason I need leave. I should have told the lieutenant. How am I going to meet a girl in this miserable country?”

  “Drag one down on the floor and have a couple of your pals hold her,” Werferth said. “It’s not like we haven’t done that before, either.”

  “Curse it, that’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Sidroc said. “Even if we do father brats on these Unkerlanter women, we’ll never find out about it. I want to meet a nice girl, settle down-if I live, I mean.”

  “If you don’t, you won’t have to worry about it, that’s bloody sure.” Ceorl laughed again, nastily, showing off bad teeth.

  AndSergeantWerferth let out the grunt he used to show his patience had run short. “Powers above, Sidroc, you come home from the war, what in blazes makes you think a nice girl’d want anything to do with you?”

  This time, Ceorl practically wet himself, he thought that was so funny. Sidroc started to scowl at Werferth, then carefully made his face blank instead. You’ll pay for that, Sergeant, powers below eat you -and they will. Aye, you’ll pay. It’ll look just like an accident, or like the Unkerlanters got you. Plenty of chances to make that happen.

  He went off to a little stream not far away to clean out his mess kit. By the time he got back, his face wasn’t even blank any more. He looked like his usual self instead. If he seethed inside, nobody needed to know it. In fact, Werferth needed not to know it, or Sidroc wouldn’t get his chance. Werferth hadn’t lived long enough for gray to streak his beard by being careless.

  “Behemoths!” The cry made everybody in Plegmund’s Brigade who heard it grab for his stick. Sidroc was no slower than any of his comrades. He might want to make something unfortunate happen toSergeantWerferth, but he didn’t want the Unkerlanters to make anything unfortunate happen to him.

  Here came the thump of the great beasts’ feet against the ground, the rattle and clank of their chainmail. Panic seized him-the noise came from the east, from the direction he’d thought safe. If Swemmel’s soldiers had managed to bring behemoths into the rear of Plegmund’s Brigade… If they’ve done that, we ‘re all dead men right now, and I won’t have to worry about killing Werferth because they’ll take care of it for me -and they’ll get me while they’re at it.

  Then somebody let out another shout, this one holding nothing but relief: “They’reour behemoths, powers above be praised!”

  Sure enough, the behemoths that tramped into the clearing had Algarvians atop them. The redheads looked as nervous about encountering the men of Plegmund’s Brigade as the Forthwegians did at their unexpected appearance. “You boys look too much like Unkerlanters for your own good,” one of them called.

  “Your behemoths look too much like Unkerlanter beasts foryour own good,” a trooper retorted.

  Sidroc nodded, but then hesitated-that proved true only at first glance. It wasn’t only that Algarvian behemoth armor differed from what the Unkerlanters used. But the behemoths themselves seemed different. After a moment, he figured out how and why. “They’re young beasts,” he blurted.

  An Algarvian on one of those behemoths heard him and nodded. “If the world were a perfect place, we’d leave ‘em on the farm for another year- maybe for another two years,” he said. “But the world’s not perfect. Ready or not, they’re got to go into the fight.”

  Thinking back on all the behemoths Algarve had left dead on the field on both sides of the Durrwangen bulge, Sidroc nodded. True, the Unkerlanters had also lost a lot of behemoths there. But Unkerlant seemed to have plenty left. The same didn’t hold true for Algarve.

  “Er-whereis the
fight?” Sidroc’s company commander asked. He should have been left on the farm a while longer, too, but here he was.

  “Didn’t they tell you?” asked a fellow on behemothback, and the young lieutenant shook his head. So did the behemoth crewman, who went on, “We’re supposed to make sure Swemmel’s buggers don’t cross over the river line. What do they call that river? The Fliss?”

  “No, the Fluss,” the Algarvian lieutenant said. “But the Unkerlanters already have a bridgehead on this side.”

  Now the men on the behemoths cursed. “Nobody bothered telling us that,” one of them said. “It’s a demon of a lot harder to dig them out of a bridgehead than it is to keep them from getting one in the first place.”

  That was only too true. Sidroc wondered if the Algarvians would call off the attack on realizing they were walking into a saw blade. No such luck; Mezentio’s men didn’t seem to think that way. Sidroc’s company commander said, “We’ll do our duty, of course.”

  “Let’s go do it, then, or try.” The behemoth crewman looked up to the heavens as if he were a Gyongyosian. “They don’t let us know the bridgehead’s already in place? Powers above, sometimes you’d think they really want us to get killed.”

  “Forward!” said the lieutenant with Plegmund’s Brigade. He didn’t blow his whistle, which proved he had some measure of sense.

  Forward Sidroc went. He’d probed Unkerlanter bridgeheads before. Going after one of them was like grabbing a porcupine. But then Ceorl said, “We’ll better drive ‘em back over the river if we can. If we don’t, they’ll flood men through and swarm all over us. They’ve done it before, the whoresons.”

  Sidroc wished he could have disagreed. Unfortunately, the ruffian was right. Sidroc eyed a spot on the back ofSergeantWerferth ’s tunic. Right about there, he thought. Aye, right about there, especially if they drive us back. It’ll look like one of their beams.

  The Unkerlanters were indeed on the eastern side of the Fluss, and there in greater numbers than even the men of Plegmund’s Brigade had thought. They had behemoths on this side of the Fluss, too, behemoths that promptly got into a brawl with their Algarvian counterparts and made the Algarvian beasts useless for spearheading any further advance.

  “We have to do it ourselves,” Sidroc said bitterly. “Isn’t that how it always works? Whenever they find a tough job, who do they hand it to? Us, that’s who.”

  “They’d sooner spend us than their own men,” Werferth said, as he had before. Sidroc came close to forgiving him for that-close, but not close enough.

  Before long, the Unkerlanters proved to have enough behemoths on this side of the river not only to keep the Algarvian behemoths in play but also to mount attacks of their own. They lumbered forward to toss eggs at Sidroc and his comrades at a range from which the Forthwegians couldn’t reply. Sidroc went to earth, digging himself in behind a fallen tree. The other men of Plegmund’s Brigade were quick to do the same.

  On came the Unkerlanter behemoths, footsoldiers trotting along behind. “Those men on foot should be up farther,”SergeantWerferth said from close by Sidroc, as if the Unkerlanters were his troops. “We’re going to make them pay.”

  Sidroc intended to make them pay. He waited quietly in his hole till an incautious behemoth drew too close. Then he flung one of the little pottery-encased sorcerous eggs the Algarvians had been issuing lately. As he’d hoped, it landed right under the behemoth, rolling beneath the animal’s armored skirt before bursting. Mad with pain and fear, the behemoth rampaged back the way it had come, trampling a luckless footsoldier who stood in its path.

  Other Unkerlanter footsoldiers started blazing at Sidroc when he stayed up too long to admire his handiwork. Werferth knocked him down. “Back in your hole, sonny boy,” the veteran said. “We’ll need you next time around.”

  “Right,” Sidroc said. “Thanks, Sergeant.” Only after the words were out of his mouth did he remember how angry at Werferth he was supposed to be. He shrugged. He didn’thave to do anything about it now. If he decided he still wanted to later, he could take care of it. He’d have more chances. He was sure of that.

  LieutenantLeudastsprang to one side, away from the wounded behemoth that now ran wild, far out of its crew’s control. Trailing blood, the behemoth thundered west, back toward the Fluss River. It would keep spreading chaos through the Unkerlanter bridgehead till its injuries made it fall over or till someone finally killed it.

  “Steady, men!” Leudast called. “Keep up the advance. We can do it.”

  In spite of his words, the Unkerlanter counterattack faltered. The Algarvians and their Forthwegian flunkies weren’t going to be able to smash in the bridgehead and drive his countrymen back over the river. That much seemed clear. The enemy lacked both men and behemoths for the job. But no breakthrough was coming here, either, not until more Unkerlanter men and beasts and egg-tossers made it over the Fluss.

  Little by little, both sides realized they wouldn’t accomplish much, and the fighting tapered off. What point to risking your neck when getting killed wouldn’t get you victory? What point to risking your neck even when getting killed willget you victory? Leudast wondered. He shook his head. That was a subversive thought for a soldier to have.

  SergeantKiunsaid, “I don’t like fighting those fornicating Forthwegians for beans. For one thing, they always fight hard.”

  “They’re volunteers,” Leudast answered. “They aren’t conscripts, the way the redheads are.” He didn’t mention how impressers went through Unkerlanter villages herding young men into Swemmel’s army. He didn’t need to mention it. He’d joined the army that way. So, very likely, had Kiun, and so, very likely, had most of the men they led.

  “Other thing is,” Kiun went on, “they look more like us and they dress more like us than the Algarvians do. That means you’re liable not to figure out who they are till too late.”

  “That’s so,” Leudast said. “It’s not as bad as with the Grelzers, but it’s so.”

  “Grelzers.” Kiun rolled his eyes. “May we see the last of the stinking traitors, and soon.”

  Leudast nodded. He hadn’t had anything in particular against the folk of the Duchy of Grelz before entering it. All he’d known about them was that they had what was, in his ear, a funny accent. Capturing Raniero, the redhead who’d called himself their king, had won him wealth and rank, no matter what it had done to Raniero himself afterKingSwemmel paraded him through Herborn.

  But fighting Grelzers… At the beginning of the war through the Duchy, some of the men who wore the dark green tunics of what called itself the Kingdom of Grelz had been halfhearted about fighting their Unkerlanter brethren. A good many had thrown down their sticks and surrendered the first chance they got.

  That didn’t happen anymore. With most of Grelz inKingSwemmel ’s hands these days, the Grelzers who kept on fighting against him were the ones who’d joined the late, not much lamented Raniero because they hated the King of Unkerlant with a deep and abiding passion, not because they’d been looking for advantage from the Algarvians. Few of the ones who wore dark green these days bothered trying to surrender. Few of the ones who did yield went back to captives’ camps.

  With a sly grin, Kiun said, “Bet you almost wouldn’t’ve minded getting chased back over the Fluss, Lieutenant.”

  “You can’t say things like that,” Leudast answered, which didn’t mean the underofficer was wrong.

  “I just thought you’d like to get back to Leiferde and your lady friend there,” Kiun said, his smile disarming now. “I’ve got a lady friend back there myself, matter of fact.”

  “Have you?” Leudast said, and Kiun nodded. “I didn’t think you meant anything you shouldn’t have,” Leudast continued, “but you never can tell who may be listening.”

  Kiun’s grimace said he understood exactly what Leudast meant. KingSwemmel saw traitors everywhere. That he saw so many had helped create a good many here in the Duchy of Grelz. It had probably helped create a good many elsewhere in Unk
erlant, too. But any Swemmel could reach suffered for it: a potent argument against treason.

  Captain Recared, the regimental commander, came up to Leudast. “I think things here have settled down for a while,” he said.

  “Aye, sir.” Leudast nodded. “Just one more little fight.”One more little fight I’m lucky I lived through. How many didn ‘t this time? How many have I got left?

  “We’ve held the bridgehead,” Recared went on, and Leudast nodded again. His superior said, “That’s what really matters. Sooner or later, we’ll break out and give the Algarvians another good kick in the teeth.”

  “We’ve given them a lot of kicks, the past year and a half,” Leudast said. “Feels good to be the foot and not the backside.”

  Recared laughed. He’d seemed impossibly young when he first took command of the regiment where Leudast commanded a company. His features were still youthful-he couldn’t have been much above twenty years old- but he’d been through a lot since then, just as all Unkerlanter soldiers had. All of us who are still breathing, anyhow, Leudast thought.

  “You saw how they threw a few behemoths at us and tried to make them count for a lot,” Recared said. “That’s what they’re reduced to these days. They’re still dangerous-I expect they’ll always be dangerous-but we can beat them.”

  They’re still dangerous-but we can beat them. Almost three years before, Leudast had been near the border between Unkerlanter and Algarvian-occupied Forthweg. He and his comrades had been on the point of attacking the Algarvians, but the redheads struck first. After that, Leudast had done nothing but retreat for a long time, till Mezentio’s men finally stalled in the snow of an Unkerlanter winter just outside Cottbus.

  He’d done more retreating the following summer, down in the south, and missed some of the fight in Sulingen because he’d been down with a leg wound that still pained him now and again. But he’d come a long way east since then.