Through Darkest Europe

by Harry Turtledove

  But that had nothing to do with what they were talking about. “You don’t need to move out, Dawud. Certainly not yet. We won’t get stains on the sheets tomorrow night. We’ll see what happens and go on from there. We’ll see if anything happens.”

  “Not yet, eh? You could do plenty worse. She’s pretty. She’s smart.” Dawud eyed Khalid. “The other question is, how much better could she do?”

  “Blessings upon you for your boundless generosity, my master,” Khalid said. Arabic could be snottiest when it sounded sweetest.

  “Anytime,” Dawud replied easily.

  There were plenty of other questions, as they both knew perfectly well. Annarita was Christian. She was Italian. They weren’t altogether certain she wasn’t working for the Aquinists. Khalid thought that unlikely—he wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with her if he hadn’t—but he didn’t know it for sure.

  If the spark struck, he would have to worry about it more. In the meantime … Khalid pointed to the TV. “Nice to know the Grand Duke tries to keep his people interested in something besides grappa, Aquinism, and rebellion.”

  “They care about polo here. They care about it more than I do, as a matter of fact. I was just killing time till you came back—if you came back tonight.” Dawud kept right on needling.

  The Italians were maniacal polo fans. So were most Europeans. They hadn’t invented the game, but they had latched on to it. Every town here had a team. Every city had several. European teams competed in international tournaments. They’d never won one, but they’d made some respectable showings.

  “I’m here. I’m going to bed—by myself.” Only with the last couple of words did Khalid react to his friend’s teasing.

  The next morning, the TV news and the papers were full of stories about German invaders. Italians and Germans had trouble getting along, almost the way Arabs and Persians did in the Muslim world. By calling all the Crusaders Germans, the news warned the locals not to trust them. Whether the locals went along with any of that was liable to be a different question.

  “Of course it is,” Dawud answered when Khalid said as much over breakfast. “If you’d heard mostly lies from your leaders for the past hundred years, would you want to believe them now?”

  “How much truth would the Aquinists tell them?” Khalid asked.

  “If we’re very, very lucky, we won’t have to find out,” Dawud said.

  Two days later, the Ministry of Information brought a handful of captured Crusaders down to Rome from the north. When Major Badoglio asked Khalid and Dawud if they wanted to question one of the men, they jumped at the chance. The prisoner was tall and fair and had a bandaged arm. His name was Gottlieb Schrempf.

  “‘Gottlieb’ would be ‘Amadeo’ in Italian,” Badoglio said helpfully.

  “How about ‘Schrempf’?” Khalid asked.

  “I don’t know. It sounds like a fart, doesn’t it?” the major replied.

  Khalid turned to the would-be Crusader. “What were you doing in Italy?” he asked in Arabic. Schrempf just shrugged. Khalid tried the same question in Italian. The German shrugged again. Khalid turned to Major Badoglio. “How are we supposed to talk to him?”

  Badoglio eyed the prisoner. “Loquerisne Latine?” he asked.

  Comprehension lit up the man’s tired, blunt features. “Sic. Hoc ille.”

  “He understands Latin,” Badoglio said. “Another sign he’s an Aquinist, of course. I learned it in the university—sort of like a madrasa—but he isn’t likely to have.”

  “Ask him why he came to Italy,” Khalid said.

  Badoglio did. “Deus vult!” Gottlieb Schrempf replied. Khalid knew what that meant, all right.

  “If God wills that he’s going to win, why is he sitting here in an interrogation room? Ask him that,” Dawud said.

  Major Badoglio put the question into Latin. Gottlieb Schrempf answered in the same tongue. Badoglio translated his response back into Italian: “He says he must be here because he is a sinner. Even though he’s a sinner, he’s sure his side will come out on top in the end.”

  “What does he think we’ll do with him?” Khalid asked.

  More translations followed. Questioning this way was slow and clumsy, but you could do it. Through Badoglio, the Aquinist prisoner said, “I don’t care. Whatever happens to me here on earth, I’m sure to spend eternity in heaven. Devils will torment you misbelievers till the end of time.”

  Khalid and Dawud looked at each other. Dealing with foes who intended to die and didn’t care if they did was different from, and worse than, fighting people who wanted to go on living just as much as you did. The Crusaders would go after their enemies without worrying about what happened to them while they did it. How were you supposed to stop fighters like that?

  Badoglio said something in Latin. Dawud coughed; though Khalid thought he knew the Christians’ sacred and scholarly tongue, he didn’t let on that he did. “Sorry,” Badoglio said. “I asked him where he comes from and how he got into Italy.”

  “I am from the Archbishopric of Ochsenhausen,” Schrempf said, not without pride. Khalid wouldn’t have been so proud of it, not when he doubted whether anyone more than five parasangs from the border had ever heard of the place. Badoglio had to bring out a map of Germany to discover that the archbishopric lay in the southern part of the country, not far from the boundary with the Swiss cantons. It was, luckily, a large map. Ochsenhausen wouldn’t have shown up otherwise.

  “How did you get into Italy?” the major asked again.

  “Oh, that was easy,” Schrempf said. “In the cantons, all the Aquinist seminaries fed us and gave us beds. And plenty of people on this side of the border helped us through. The Grand Duke’s heretics didn’t know we were close by till we started shooting at them.”

  “Then they shot back.” Khalid pointed at the Crusader’s bandaged arm.

  After Badoglio translated the comment, Gottlieb Schrempf shrugged again. “It happened, so God must have willed that it should happen. His will be done—amen!” He seemed content enough. That in itself was plenty to frighten Khalid.

  IX

  “Are you sure we want to do this?” Dawud asked as Khalid pulled the nondescript little Ochipway onto the street. Like the rest of Europe, the Italians imported their cars; they didn’t make any themselves.

  Rome’s traffic flow wasn’t much heavier than Tunis’; Tunis also predated the automobile by centuries. But Rome’s drivers routinely did things only drunks and lunatics would have imagined in Tunis. They ignored signs and lights whenever they thought they could get away with it. They double-parked, even on narrow streets where any parking was against the rules. They pulled halfway onto the sidewalk to pick someone up or drop someone off. They refused to yield or to signal, and they leaned on their horns.

  They stopped for security checkpoints only because they knew they’d get shot if they didn’t. They complained so much, those stops took longer than they would have otherwise.

  Once upon a time, Roman roads had been the finest in the world. Bouncing through Rome on his way to the Via Cassia, Khalid wondered whether they’d been resurfaced since the days of the Caesars. Once he got on the northbound highway, he discovered that long stretches of it did still have their ancient paving blocks. He hoped the Ochipway’s suspension would hold up.

  Dawud had other things on his mind. “I’m sure glad I went to the dentist not long before we came up here,” he said. “Otherwise, I’d be wearing all my fillings in my lap.”

  “Fillings?” Khalid said, dodging potholes. “What about your teeth?”

  “Well, those, too,” Dawud said. “I was trying to give this wretched road the benefit of the doubt.” Another jounce almost put him through the roof of the car even though he’d tightened his safety belt. That was one more thing the Italian drivers seldom bothered with. They seemed to want to let God’s will be done on the highway. To an evolutionist like Khalid, if you didn’t wear a belt, it was God’s will that you were too stupid to live to
reproduce.

  The countryside was greener than it would have been most places in the Maghrib. It wasn’t green, the way it would have been in France or England or Irokoyistan in the northeast of the Sunset Lands. Summer in Italy was the dry season, as it was on the other side of the Mediterranean. But the weather here was a little cooler and damper.

  Italian cattle were of varieties different from those in the Maghrib. They were also smaller and skinnier. They hadn’t been bred so systematically or for so long. They weren’t just meat or milk machines. They were animals you could imagine living on their own. Every so often, one would shake a warning horn at another that might steal grass from it.

  “I wonder if they still use oxen, or maybe donkeys, to plow here,” Khalid said.

  “That would be something to see, all right,” Dawud agreed. “They wouldn’t do the job as well as a tractor, or as fast, but they’d be a lot more fun to watch.”

  In the Maghrib, you couldn’t tell a farmer from anyone else by his clothes. Here, the peasants—that seemed the better word to Khalid—often wore colorless homespun: baggy linen shirts over clinging wool trousers. Instead of using keffiyehs or turbans, they kept the sun off their heads with wide-brimmed hats woven from straw.

  “I kind of like the hats,” Khalid said. “They may do a better job than what we wear.”

  “They look stupid, though,” Dawud said. “Unless they ever come into fashion back home, people would stare at you and call you names if you put one on.” He paused to light a cigar. “I should wear one, not you. Everybody already knows I have no sense of style.”

  “You said it. I didn’t,” Khalid replied.

  “Oh, I know I have no sense of style, too,” Dawud said cheerfully. “The difference is, I don’t care.”

  “If you say so.” Khalid sounded distracted, and was. Another truck was racing up behind. Of course it would want to pass. He slid over to let it by, something few Italians would have done.

  Pass him it did. A plume of stinking black smoke poured from its exhaust. “That smells worse than your stogie,” Khalid remarked as he slowed to get away from the worst of it.

  “I am affronted.” Dawud didn’t sound affronted. He didn’t quit smoking the cigar, either.

  The truck was elderly. In the Maghrib, it would have been junked years before. In Italy, it soldiered on for as long as it would run. It was piled high, higher, highest with what looked like sacks of beans or grain. Whoever’d tied them on did a haphazard job of it. The springs were so old and tired, the truck rode low. Khalid wondered why the chassis didn’t strike sparks from the paving stones every time the truck hit a bump or a pothole.

  Before long, they came to a checkpoint. Khalid was sure he saw the truck driver pass money to the men with guns. They waved him on. Khalid made a note of the numbers and letters on his plate. The numbers were in the European style, not the one he was more used to, but he could deal with them, as he dealt with the Latin alphabet.

  “For now, we just have to hope he wants to go on, and that those sacks don’t have machine guns and cartridge belts stashed in them,” he said.

  “That wouldn’t be so good, would it?” Dawud said. “I don’t think the bribe was big enough to cover anything like that, though—it was only one bill.”

  “Ah, was it? Thanks. I didn’t notice that. Probably just ordinary smuggling, then,” Khalid said. Dawud might look sloppy—might, in fact, make a point of looking sloppy—but he didn’t miss much.

  The Italians manning the checkpoint gave the Maghribis’ identity documents dubious looks. Seeing that they had a field telephone, Khalid said, “Call the Ministry of Information in Rome. Ask for Major Giacomo Badoglio. He will tell you who we are.”

  He wondered whether merely making the offer would be enough to intimidate the soldiers. But one of them spoke into the telephone in a dialect he couldn’t begin to follow. Whoever was on the other end of the line must not have had any trouble with it, though. The man on the telephone here slammed down the handset in a hurry. He said something to his superior.

  “Pass on!” that worthy said to Khalid.

  “They’re doing their job,” Khalid said once they’d got out of earshot of the checkpoint.

  Dawud nodded. “So they are. I wondered if they’d pretend to call Rome, tell us the Ministry of Information had never heard of us, and either shake us down for money or shoot us, depending.”

  “Urk!” Khalid said. “You come up with all kinds of pleasant notions, don’t you?”

  “I try.” Dawud probably thought he spoke with becoming modesty. Khalid thought he laid it on with a trowel.

  They stopped at a little town called Montevarchi for a snack and more coffee. Anywhere in the Muslim world, such a stop would have been as ritualized as a visit to a mosque. One or two of the leading five or six anonymous societies would have sold gasoline. There would have been a couple of low-end eateries out of the same number of possibilities, and one better one out of three or four. One of the three leading coffeehouses would have had an entry at the stop. You wouldn’t get wonderful food or terrific coffee, but what you did get would be good enough. And you would know ahead of time just how good good enough was likely to be.

  It wasn’t like that in Montevarchi. The eateries and coffeehouse here didn’t represent anonymous societies that stretched across continents, sometimes across the ocean to the Sunset Lands. They represented their owners, and Montevarchi. The pasta Khalid and Dawud got was plainly made at the eatery, and sauced and spiced differently from any they’d had in Rome. The coffeehouse, on the other hand, served hot mud.

  “Can’t win ’em all,” Dawud said philosophically.

  “At least it’s got a jolt to it,” Khalid said.

  “Can’t win ’em all,” the Jew repeated. Khalid didn’t need long to decide he was right. They got back into the Ochipway and headed on to Florence.

  * * *

  Rome was the center of the Grand Dukes’ power. It was the capital of Italy. Being such a place, it was also more likely to be loyal to Lorenzo III than an ordinary provincial town. Things were bad enough in Rome. Khalid wanted to see how they were in those provincial towns.

  One of the first things he saw, on the outskirts of the city, was a dead tank. It hadn’t just caught fire from a gasoline bomb, either. The hole in its side armor half a cubit below the turret said it had taken a direct hit from a rocket-propelled grenade.

  He and Dawud had to pass through two checkpoints before they got into the center of Florence. Red crosses were painted on walls and fences everywhere, sometimes with DEUS VULT! close by, sometimes not.

  The great church—the Duomo—and the Old Palace dominated the skyline. Southeast of the Duomo stood the Church of the Holy Cross. Though formerly held by a different order, it had belonged to the Aquinists for more than two hundred years: ever since it became obvious that Europe was falling behind the more progressive parts of the world. Now it lay in ruins, smashed by what looked like artillery fire.

  The hotel for which Khalid and Dawud had reservations was a shabby little building. Plainly, it had been built before such refinements as electricity and running water reached Italy. The tub sat on green bronze lion’s feet, in the ornate Egyptian style of a hundred years before. The lamps were converted from gas-burners.

  “Well, it could be worse,” Dawud said once he’d surveyed the room.

  “How, exactly?” Khalid inquired.

  “They’ve taken out the sconces that used to hold torches and wallpapered over the soot stains,” Dawud replied after a visible pause for thought.

  “Oh, joy,” Khalid said. “The Ministry of Information’s local headquarters is only two or three blocks away. That’s why they put us up in this dump. Do you remember how to get there?”

  “I think so. We can stroll the streets together—till people start shooting at us, anyhow.”

  He might have been his usual sardonic self. More likely, he was speaking the simple truth. Plywood and cardboard covered a lot o
f shattered windows. Bullets pocked plaster and scarred brick- and stonework. The air was sour with smoke; a faint whiff of decay lay under that smell. Everyone on the streets seemed nervous of everyone else.

  Barbed wire and sandbags protected the Ministry of Information building. All by itself, that told Khalid a good deal of what he needed to know about how things were. If the Grand Duke’s servants weren’t worried about attack, they wouldn’t have warded themselves so well.

  A sergeant sent a private back into the headquarters to make sure the Maghribis were expected. Coming back, the private pointed his thumb up at the sky. “They’re waiting for you, all right,” the sergeant said. He unlocked the gate to the checkpoint, which was made from a plank frame with barbed wire nailed to it. “Step right in. Make yourselves at home.”

  “Ha!” Dawud said. It might not have been mannerly, but it squeezed a laugh from the Italian underofficer.

  A captain named Enrico Pavarotti met them at the door. He was short and plump—fat, really—and owned a resonant tenor voice. “A privilege, my masters. A privilege,” he said. He spoke fair Arabic, with the musical local accent. “We have coffee and little cakes. We can try some while we talk, if that should please you.”

  “That sounds fine,” Dawud said. Like Captain Pavarotti, he was always ready for a snack.

  They had more than coffee and little cakes. They had olives and dry sausages and salted fish and cheese and peppers that growled without quite snarling. With a spread like that, you could munch your way through the day and never worry, or even notice, you were missing regular meals.

  As they were helping themselves, a machine gun started hammering off in the distance. “Dannazione!” Pavarotti said, falling back into Italian. With a frown that pulled his mouth into the same shape as the bushy black mustache bracketing it, he made himself return to Arabic: “That’s one of the fanatics’ guns.”