Jaws of Darkness d-5

by Harry Turtledove

  “I’m not surprised, or not very,” Lurcanio said. “Men are liable to pay more attention to that sort of thing than women do.”

  “I should hope so.” Krasta sat down beside him-carefully, so her tender breasts wouldn’t bounce. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re just… there.” A sudden thought took her by surprise. “But I suppose they’ll matter to me if I decide to nurse the baby myself.”

  “Aye, I’m sure they would.” Lurcanio raised an eyebrow. “And would you do such a thing, or would you hire a wet nurse?”

  “Idon’t know,” Krasta said with an impatient toss of the head. She promptly regretted it, for it jerked the upper part of her body, too. She hissed again, and brought a protective hand up to her breasts. “They’re just… there,” she repeated.

  “Like Algarvians in Valmiera,” Lurcanio said.

  She nodded. “Aye, like Algarvians in Valmiera.” Only after she’d repeated that, too, did she pause to wonder about it. “What an odd way to put things.”

  “Not so odd. We have been here four years, /have beenhere four years,” Lurcanio said. “Considering some of the places I might have gone instead, I have no complaints. You may rest assured that that is the truth. But I do not know how much longer I can stay here.”

  “What do you mean?” Krasta had always hated change. These days, Lurcanio in her bed and Algarvians on the streets of Priekule were what she was used to.

  He stroked her again. That was all he was likely to do. He wasn’t a young man any more, and wouldn’t want her more than once of a night. Voice detached and ironic as usual, he answered, “Unlike some people I could name, I am usually in the habit of meaning what I say, and neither more nor less than that.”

  “But…” Krasta frowned, trying hard to think despite finding the exercise unfamiliar. “Where would you go? What would you do?”

  “Unkerlant or Jelgava, most likely,” he replied. “I would fight for my king and my kingdom. That is one of the things a soldier may be called upon to do from time to time, you know.”

  “But what wouldI do?” Krasta exclaimed. When she did think, she usually thought about herself first.

  Colonel Lurcanio laughed. “I presume that, were I to depart this mansion tomorrow, the very next day you would start trying as hard to convince Viscount Valnu that your baby is his as you’ve spent the last few weeks trying to convince me it is mine.”

  “Itis yours,” Krasta insisted with much more certainty than she felt. All along, though, she’d done her best to make herself believe the baby was Lurcanio’s. And if the Algarvian officer should disappear, would she have to start believing the child was Valnu’s? She glared at Lurcanio. “You’re a horrid man, too, you know.”

  “Thank you,” Lurcanio said, which only annoyed her more. He laughed, but the amusement wouldn’t stay on his face. When it faded, he looked a long way indeed from young. “I have not got my orders yet, you understand, but I fear they may not be far away.”

  Krasta didn’t feel so happy, either. Seeing her lover look not so young reminded her she wasn’t quite so young, either. So did the weariness that came with carrying a child. Fighting back a yawn, she said, “If you Algarvians need all your officers and soldiers in those other kingdoms far away, how will you hold on to Valmiera?”

  She thought about the soldiers she’d seen marching up the Boulevard of Horsemen, the blond soldiers in Valmieran uniform with Algarvian flags on their sleeves. Did the redheads think they could use men like that to hold down the kingdom? If they were right, what did that say about Valmiera? What did lying naked here beside an Algarvian say about her? It was all very confusing.

  Lurcanio patted her. He liked to touch her even when he didn’t feel like doing-or couldn’t do-anything more. “That is a good question, my sweet,” he said. “When King Mezentio figures out a good answer for it, I hope he will let me know. Until then…” He got out of bed and started getting into his clothes. When he was dressed, he bowed to her. “I shall see you in the morning.” He seldom spent nights in her bedchamber.

  Krasta turned out the lamp without bothering to put on pyjamas. A month into summer, the night was fine and warm-nothing like the long, frigid, miserable hours of darkness the winter before. And she’d had it easier than most, because of the Algarvians in the mansion with her. She didn’t dwell on that for long; she just slid under the linen sheets and fell asleep.

  A couple of hours later, distant rumblings woke her-those and flashes of light on the horizon. Thunder? she wondered muzzily. But the day was bright and clear. Then her wits began to work, and she remembered the sorry world in which she lived. “Oh,” she said out loud, around a yawn. “The islanders are dropping eggs on us again.”

  She took it for granted. Why not? It had happened before, a good many times. It would doubtless happen again, too. She sighed and went back to sleep.

  When she came down to breakfast the next morning, she found Colonel Lurcanio in a foul temper. “How are we supposed to go about fighting a proper war if they keep dropping eggs on our heads?” he demanded.

  “They have dragons,” Krasta said, spreading butter and Jelgavan marmalade on toast. “Don’t you have dragons, too?”

  “Of course we have dragons, too,” Lurcanio answered irritably. He was going to be difficult. Krasta could feel it. And she was right. More irritably still, Lurcanio went on, “We have dragons fighting to keep the Lagoans and Kuusamans on Sibiu from dropping eggs on Algarve herself. We have dragons, some dragons, fighting the islanders down in Jelgava. And we have dragons in the west, in Unkerlant and Forthweg, fighting Swemmel’s men.”

  “Unkerlantand Forthweg?” Krasta asked. “I hadn’t heard that before.”

  “And you have not heard it now, either. Forget I said it,” Lurcanio told her. He passed a hand across his face. It was still early morning, but he looked weary. After a moment, he looked up at Krasta again. “Where was I? Ah, aye. With all those dragons flying over the rest of Derlavai, how many do you think Algarve has left to put in the air above Priekule?”

  “Not enough-that’s plain,” Krasta said. “And so eggs land on Valmierans. You people should have thought this out better before you got into such a big war, if you want to know what I think.”

  Lurcanio stared at her out of red-rimmed eyes. He started to laugh. Krasta started to get angry. Then her Algarvian lover said, “Out of the mouths of babes.” He got up, walked around the table, and kissed her. “You are right, my sweet. We probably should have thought this out better. But it is rather too late to worry about that now, would you not agree?”

  “Lurcanio…” she said as he went back to his seat.

  He looked her way in some surprise. She hardly ever called him by name. “What is it?” he asked, his voice more serious than usual, the mocking note so often in it now entirely gone.

  “You’re going to lose the war, aren’t you?” The words came forth in a rush, blurted out before Krasta had the chance to think about whether she really wanted to ask that question.

  “Eat your breakfast,” Colonel Lurcanio told her, as if she were a child asking something whose answer had to be too hard for it to understand. But then he shook his head, a gesture aimed more at himself than at Krasta. “Things are not easy these days,” he said slowly. “I do not know when they will be easy again. I do not know if they will ever be easy again. But I tell you this: if Algarve goes down, we shall go down fighting. Do you doubt it, even for a moment?”

  “No.” Krasta shivered, though the day already promised considerable heat.

  “We shall go down fighting,” Lurcanio repeated, as if she hadn’t spoken. “We shall put sticks in the hands of the veterans left alive from the Six Years’ War, and in the hands of fourteen-year-old boys still sore from their circumcisions. For if we lose this war as we lost the last one, what shall be left for Algarve?”

  For once in all the time they’d spent together, Krasta wanted to go around the table and comfort him. But she didn’t. She just sat where she was.
She wished the baby inside her would let her drink brandy, even so early in the day. But the mere thought made her belly clench.

  Lurcanio shrugged and smiled, as if deliberately pushing worry to one side. “Well,” he said, “the evil time has not yet come for us. And, while it may come, it also may not. I intend to do what I can to enjoy myself in the meanwhile.”

  No, the evil time hasn’t come for the Algarvians yet, Krasta thought. What about for the Kaunians of Forthweg? What about for Kaunians all over Derlavai?

  She couldn’t ask Lurcanio that question. That she couldn’t ask it of him was probably the most important reason she hadn’t got up and gone around the breakfast table to him. She was, in an odd way and with certain gaps, truly fond of him. But he was an Algarvian, and she had yellow hair. Walls would always stand between them, whether he fully realized it or not.

  He rose and bowed to her. “And now I needs must go do what needs doing, to hold the evil time at bay as best I can. If you will excuse me”-one of his eyebrows twitched-”or even if you will not…” He bowed again and left.

  He sits at a desk, but he fights for Algarve, just as much as if he had a stick in his hand. Krasta had known that for four years, but knowing it and having it hit home were two different things. He’s worth even more than an ordinary soldier, because he can do things no ordinary soldier can do.

  And you… may have his baby inside you. No matter what Lurcanio would do to her if she bore a blond, Krasta hoped with all her heart the child was Valnu’s.

  After the impressers hauled Garivald into King Swemmel’s army, he hadn’t got much in the way of training. He hadn’t got any training, as a matter of fact. They’d given him a uniform and a stick and told him to obey the officers and underofficers set over him if he knew what was good for him. Then they’d taken him to the front in northern Unkerlant, stuck him in a squad there, and thrown him at the Algarvians. He still had trouble recalling that his name was supposed to be Fariulf.

  And now, less than a month after he’d followed a behemoth over and through the Algarvian trenches when the assault began, he found himself a corporal, and a corporal in a foreign kingdom at that, for his regiment had pushed into Forthweg a couple of days earlier. Forthwegian peasant villages didn’t look much different from their Unkerlanter equivalents, except that the locals painted their houses in brighter colors and that the men wore beards.

  No, another difference: therewere a lot of men in the villages. That took some getting used to. “When the redheads came through, these Forthwegians knuckled under,” one of Garivald’s squadmates said. “They didn’t fight back, not like we did.”

  And so more of them are left alive, Garivald thought. He kept that notion buried down deep; getting a name for the subversive kind of grousing might have proved fatally inefficient. What he did say was, “The redheads put up a tougher fight down in the south than they’re doing up here.”

  “That’s ‘cause half the Grelzers are traitors,” another trooper said, which wasn’t quite true but came too close to truth for comfort. The fellow went on, “Besides, what do you know about it, Corporal? Even if you did get promoted, you’re a new fish.”

  Garivald started to answer that. He’d seen plenty of fighting down in Grelz, even if not formally as one of King Swemmel’s soldiers. His irregulars-Munderic’s, till he took over the band-had harassed the Algar-vians and their Grelzer puppets… and even a few Forthwegians, the ruffians in the outfit called Plegmund’s Brigade.

  But, in the end, Garivald kept his mouth shut and let the question go with just a shrug. He didn’t want people knowing Corporal Fariulf was really Garivald, the fellow who’d led irregulars and written songs and done other things to draw the unfriendly notice of people in Cottbus. King Swemmel and those who followed him trust no one who’d fought the redheads on his own. After all, such people might turn and fight him one day, too.

  Dragons streaked by overhead, flying east. They were all painted the rock-gray of Garivald’s tunic. “Haven’t seen many Algarvian dragons lately,” he remarked. That seemed a safe enough way to change the subject.

  “Don’t miss those bastards, either, not even slightly.” Two soldiers said it at the same time, in almost identical words. Garivald hadn’t had to worry about Algarvian dragons down in Grelz. Mezentio’s men hadn’t had so many that they bothered using them against irregulars. Almost every beast they put in the air flew against King Swemmel’s main army.

  But now Garivald was part of that main army. If the Algarvians put dragons in the air here in the north, they would be flying them at his comrades and him. But if the Algarvians put dragons in the air here in the north, swarms of Unkerlanter dragons would try to knock them down. Garivald had never seen so many dragons in his whole life. He’d never imagined that so many dragons could be gathered together and fed and flown over one stretch of the front.

  “Halt! Who comes?” a sentry called as someone approached their camp-fire. The answer came back in Forthwegian. Some Unkerlanters, especially those from the northeast, could make sense of the related language, but it was just tantalizing noise to a Grelzer like Garivald. The sentry was a northern man. When he said, “Come ahead, then,” in his dialect of Unkerlanter, the Forthwegian must have been able to follow him, for he approached the fire.

  Except, as he got close, he provednot to be a Forthwegian. Oh, he had dark hair and a dark beard, as Forthwegian men did, but he was tall and slim and had blue eyes and a short, straight nose, nothing like the beaks belonging to Forthwegians and their Unkerlanter cousins. And, instead of a sensible knee-length tunic, he wore a short tunic and trousers, garments Garivald had heard of but, till now, had never seen.

  “Corporal?” he asked Garivald: that was a word nearly identical in Forthwegian and Unkerlanter. When Garivald nodded, the local bowed low before him, as if he were at least a colonel rather than a junior underofficer. He said something that might have beenThank you or might as easily not have been. Then he jabbed a thumb at his own chest and said, “I-Kaunian.”

  “Kaunian?” Garivald said. “I thought Kaunians were blond.” He didn’t think a whole lot of Kaunians were left alive in Forthweg, either, but saying that didn’t strike him as the best way to make this fellow his friend. As things turned out, it wouldn’t have mattered, for the local plainly didn’t understand his dialect. In some exasperation, Garivald called out to the sentry: “Come back here and translate for me, Rivalin.”

  “Aye, Corporal,” Rivalin said. “I’ll do my best.”

  “That’s all you can do,” Garivald agreed. “Ask him why his hair isn’t yellow if he’s one of these Kaunian buggers.”

  Rivalin spoke in his own dialect, exaggerating some of the sounds and slurring others till Garivald could scarcely make out what he was saying. The Kaunians seemed to get it, though, and answered quickly. Too quickly: He and Rivalin had to go back and forth a couple of times before the sentry turned to Garivald again. “Corporal, he says he is a blond, only he dyed his hair for some kind of a magical disguise he had that made him look like a Forthwegian so the redheads wouldn’t grab him.”

  “Oh.” Garivald started to nod, then checked himself. “Wait a minute. If he had this magical disguise, why did he need to dye his hair? Wouldn’t the magic take care of that for him?”

  More back-and-forth between Rivalin and the Kaunian. At last, Rivalin returned to a brand of Unkerlanter Garivald could readily understand: “Corporal, Ithink he’s saying he did it on account of his hair would turn yellow again if it got cut while he had the spell on, but I’m not quite sure.”

  “Oh,” Garivald repeated. “All right, now ask him why he decided to quit his disguise and start wearing those silly clothes.”

  When Rivalin translated that, the Kaunian spoke with considerable heat-so much heat that the Unkerlanter sentry had to ask him to slow down several times. When the torrent of words finally ebbed, Rivalin answered, “I don’t think he’s got a whole lot of use for Forthwegians.”

  “Powers
above,” one of the troopers behind Garivald said, “I haven’t got a whole lot of use for Forthwegians, either.” Garivald shrugged. Except for the men of Plegmund’s Brigade, these were the first Forthwegians he’d ever seen.

  The Kaunian spoke again. “He says he wears those clothes on account of those clothes are what Kaunians wear,” Rivalin reported. Garivald shrugged again. Forthweg was a lot warmer than the Duchy of Grelz. Why anybody would want to wear trousers up here… Even the Algarvians weren’t so foolish. And then, through Rivalin, the Kaunian said, “He wants to know how to join up with us, Corporal. He wants to start killing Algarvians. Says it’s his turn now.”

  “I can’t do anything about that. You know I can’t,” Garivald said, and Rivalin nodded. Garivald went on, “Take him to Lieutenant Andelot. Maybe he’ll figure out what to do with him-and he’ll be out of our hair.”

  “Right.” Rivalin grinned at him. “You haven’t been a corporal very long, Fariulf, but you know eggs is eggs.” He led the Kaunian away.

  “I should hope I know eggs is eggs,” Garivald said. “I know we need a new sentry, too.” He named another man and sent him out to take Rivalin’s place.

  When Rivalin came back, he looked astonished. “I think they’re going to recruit that whoreson,” he said.

  “Why not?” Garivald said. “He wants to blaze some redheads. If he gets a couple before they get him, that’s a bargain for us. And even if he doesn’t, they blaze him instead of an Unkerlanter. That’s a bargain, too.”

  Rivalin eyed him. “You sure the impressers just scooped you off your farm?”

  “Too right I am,” Garivald answered. “I wish I were back there now, getting my crop in.” He paused. “Part of me wishes that, anyway. The rest… Well, it’s not like I don’t owe the Algarvians anything.”

  Heads solemnly went up and down. A lot of the newer soldiers in Swemmel’s army came from lands regained from the redheads. They’d seen how the Algarvians ruled the countryside they held. A lot of them had kinsfolk missing or dead, the way Garivald did. And a lot of them fought as if the war were a personal struggle against Algarve. In some fights, not a great many captives got taken.