Through Darkest Europe

by Harry Turtledove

  “How can you tell?” Khalid asked.

  “Hear how fast it fires? That’s a Japanese model. They use them a lot in the German states, and in England, too. We buy most of our automatic weapons from the Sultanate of Delhi, and you can hear the difference.”

  Like Europe, Japan had done what it could to stand aloof from the rising tide of the world civilization. Then the Japanese decided that they had to adapt or go under. They’d adapted very well. Comics could always get a laugh by spoofing the way Japanese businessmen spoke Arabic. Japanese native costume was colorful. Those businessmen unfailingly chose gray or white robes and white keffiyehs, though.

  Europe didn’t feel like adapting or going under. It wanted to kick up its heels. Another machine gun answered the first. It did spit death at a slower rhythm. Khalid suspected it was suitable for all ordinary murderous uses, though. He asked, “How are things here?”

  Pavarotti gestured theatrically. “Half the people in town don’t think the Grand Duke—God bless him!—is a proper Christian. Christ on His Cross, at least a quarter of the people in town don’t think the Pope—God bless him, too—is a proper Christian. And we’ve got these Crusader madmen filtering down from the rest of Europe so they can go to heaven and send us to hell. It’s a fine kettle of crabs. Oh, you bet it is.”

  “How can you hold things together if half the people are against you?” Khalid asked. He didn’t know the Italian officer was right about that, but he hadn’t seen anything to make him disbelieve it.

  Pavarotti eyed him. The man looked tired and worried and very cynical. “You’re the experts from the Maghrib. You’re supposed to have all the answers tied up in pink ribbon for us.”

  “And then you wake up,” Dawud ibn Musa said. “What are we? Just a couple of infidels.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything about that if you didn’t,” Captain Pavarotti replied. “I’m glad you had the sense to wear our clothes. People in robes get shot at a lot. Even Italians in robes get shot at a lot.”

  One of the machine guns cut loose with another burst. Khalid thought it was the one that belonged to the Grand Duke’s men. It wasn’t close enough to alarm him into asking. Instead, he said, “If your country falls to the fanatics, that won’t make anyone’s life better. Plenty of people’s will get worse, but nobody’s will get better.”

  “You know that, my master. I know that. Anyone with eyes in his head and a brain bigger than a wall lizard’s knows that.” Now Pavarotti just looked disgusted. “But all these fools, what they care about is going to heaven. You can beat ’em like donkeys while they’re on earth, as long as they take the up elevator after they check out.”

  As he had with Major Badoglio, Khalid asked, “Would it help if the Pope said that backing the Aquinists was a sure ticket to riding in the other direction?”

  “It might, with some people,” Pavarotti answered. “Not with everybody. The ones who want to follow the Aquinists anyway, they still will. The Aquinists might say that his Holiness had shown he was a heretic and choose an Antipope for their own mouthpiece. The Church has gone through splits like that before. Nobody wants another one.”

  That was about what Khalid had heard from Badoglio. He decided he would do better not to push Marcellus IX against the Aquinists. As things were, the Pope had some influence over all of Western Europe. If he suddenly found himself with none over half of the volatile continent, things would only get worse.

  “Can we see what it’s like on the streets?” he asked.

  Pavarotti eyed in him some surprise. “Are you sure? It’s getting dark. Same as mosquitoes and rats, the Aquinists come out at night.”

  Well, we could wait till tomorrow morning. That was what Khalid wanted to say. What came out of his mouth was, “Well, we came up here to find out what things were like.” Sometimes a sense of duty was a terrible thing to have. It was even worse when your sense of duty had you.

  * * *

  Captain Pavarotti kitted out the Maghribis the way he would have with replacements from his own service’s ranks. He gave them uniform tunics and trousers that more or less fit, boots that were on the large side, and helmets and bulletproof vests. “The helmets are just for keeping fragments out of your brain pans,” he warned. “Chances are they won’t stop pistol rounds, and for sure they won’t stop anything from a rifle or a machine gun. So don’t get cocky.”

  “How about this vest?” Even in a uniform, Dawud looked untidy.

  “Pistol rounds, probably,” Pavarotti said. “Rifle? Well, maybe. If you’re lucky. If it’s a glancing hit. Don’t count on it.”

  “Thanks for easing my mind,” Dawud told him.

  “Anytime.” The Italian was putting on his own vest and tightening his helmet’s chin strap. “If I get shot leading you around tonight, remind me not to be angry at you.”

  “I’ll make a note of it,” Dawud answered. Captain Pavarotti chuckled.

  They left the Ministry of Information building by a side door that opened on an alley. The short hallway leading to the door was dark; it had another door at the opposite end, one that Pavarotti made sure to close behind them. Khalid appreciated the precautions. He might have wished them less necessary.

  The bulletproof vest was heavy. So was the assault rifle he carried. Pavarotti had flat-out refused to let him and Dawud go out with no more than a pistol. With this thing, he could spray lead out to six or seven hundred cubits. In the daytime, he stood a decent chance of hitting what he aimed at from farther away than that.

  Pavarotti murmured in Italian to one of the perimeter guards. As quietly as the man could, he opened the wood-and-wire gate and let the little party out into unsecured Florence.

  As soon as Khalid tramped past the barbed wire and sandbags, he started trying to look every which way at once. The streets were dark, dark, dark, except where the gibbous moon poured down a little wan light. It kept going in and out of the clouds, which made the moon shadows seem to move. Since Khalid wanted to shoot anything that moved, he got even jumpier than he had been before.

  Captain Pavarotti acted calm enough. So did Dawud—the Jew rarely showed he was rattled. Khalid had to hope he didn’t look too nervous. Be what you wish to seem: advice that went back to the ancient Greeks. Socrates’ followers had probably had just as much trouble following it as Khalid did.

  From one of the deeper shadows that showed a blown-out window came a click and a whoosh and a thread of fire. A split second later, a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the front of the Ministry of Information building.

  “Down!” Pavarotti shouted in Italian. Khalid didn’t blame him for losing his Arabic at a moment like that. A rocket that could punch through hardened steel also did a terrific job of housebreaking. Half the front wall fell in on itself.

  Another grenade whooshed away from that window, trailing flame. Captain Pavarotti fired into it, not with a burst on full automatic but squeezing the trigger for each shot to be more accurate. You could still empty your magazine in ten or fifteen seconds doing that. An anguished shriek rewarded him.

  But the second rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the Ministry of Information building even before the shriek rang out. More of it fell in and fell down. Flames started dancing in the ruins. They quickly grew and spread.

  “We could have been in there,” Dawud said. Khalid heard him as if from far away; the rifle fire stunned his ears. Dawud went on, “If we’d left a few minutes later, or if they’d fired a few minutes sooner…”

  “It didn’t happen,” Khalid said firmly, as much to calm himself as to answer his countryman.

  “Come on!” Captain Pavarotti hopped to his feet. He might have been round, but he was young enough to have stayed agile. “We’ve got to help them out!” He clapped a hand to his forehead. “All our records, going up in smoke!”

  No bureaucrat from the Maghrib could have sounded more tormented at that thought. Maybe Italy had some touches of civilization after all.

  Khalid and Dawud follow
ed Pavarotti back toward his headquarters. The soldiers manning the perimeter had run back to aid their comrades. That left no one to open a gate for the men outside the wire. Pavarotti had a cutter on his belt. He snipped a gate well enough to squeeze through the gap. The Maghribis followed again.

  People scrambled out of the burning building. Some used the side door by which Khalid and Dawud had left with Captain Pavarotti. Others chose the holes the grenades had torn in the building. Some helped injured companions get away. Some of the ones who did were injured themselves.

  Pavarotti paused for a moment to order a few men, ones carrying weapons, back to the perimeter. “They’ll use the firelight to shoot at us,” he said. “Make the cazzi keep their heads down.”

  “Cazzi?” That wasn’t a word Khalid’s course in Italian had taught him.

  “Pricks,” Dawud said helpfully.

  “C’mon!” Pavarotti shouted. “Bound to be people still in there. We don’t want to let ’em cook.” He plunged into the burning Ministry of Information building.

  Khalid also didn’t want to cook himself. But he wanted even less to hang back under Dawud’s eyes and those of the Italians. As he clambered over the bricks that had come down, he thought, not for the first time, that much of what got called courage was really just unwillingness to look bad in front of other people. Flames and a few flashlights gave what light there was. The grenades had knocked out the building’s power. A man lay groaning, his leg trapped and probably smashed under a toppled file cabinet. Khalid levered it off him with a length of wood. Dawud grabbed him and dragged him away. He left a trail of blood. That couldn’t be good. But, even if they had to cut off that ruined leg, he’d probably live.

  A man with a badly burned face staggered out. He had a hand clapped over his eyes, which also wasn’t a good sign. “Here.” Khalid took him by the elbow. “I’ll get you away.”

  “Grazie, amico,” the Italian said. “I can’t see.”

  “This way.” Khalid led him to the biggest hole in the front wall. “Careful, now. There are bricks here.”

  “Hang on to me so I don’t fall, then.”

  Khalid did. He had to hold the man up once or twice when he stumbled over a brick or a piece of brick. “All right,” he said. “Now you’re out.” A bullet snapped past them. “And now you’d better get down. The fanatics are shooting at us.”

  “If I’m blind, they may as well kill me.” But the Italian went to the sidewalk. He might say he didn’t mind dying, but his body didn’t believe him.

  Khalid plunged back into the building. The flames were hotter now. He flung up an arm to protect his own face. Here came Pavarotti, with a wounded man on his back. “Where are the fucking fire engines?” he shouted.

  “I wish I knew,” Khalid said. “Are there more people back there?”

  “Not live ones, I don’t think,” the captain answered. “You may as well get out. You’ve done all right, Mussulman.”

  After a beat, Khalid realized that meant Muslim. Real Crusaders had called his ancestors such names all those centuries before. Evidently, Europeans never got rid of any old ideas. Not even the Europeans who were supposed to be modern and progressive.

  Something over his head creaked and shuddered. If the upper floor came down, he wouldn’t get out in one piece, or at all. Coughing in the smoke, he hurried back the way he’d come.

  Fire engines did scream up then. Some of the men on them shot back at the Aquinist gunmen. Captain Pavarotti eased his comrade to the ground. He paused long enough to light a cigarette, then nodded at Khalid. “All right,” he said with a twisted smile. “Now you’re here. Now you’ve had a look for yourself. How do you like things in Florence?”

  * * *

  Major Badoglio eyed Khalid and Dawud. “Good to see you both,” he said. “I hear you had adventures in Florence?”

  “A rest home,” Dawud said, his voice bland.

  “If you want to rest forever, that is,” Khalid put in.

  “If I’d known you would come so close to doing that, I never would have let you go,” Badoglio said. “I didn’t want to have to walk into your embassy and explain how I sent you to the place where you got killed. I especially didn’t want the people there thinking I had sent you to Florence so you would get killed.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Khalid said. “We didn’t want that, either.”

  “Maybe for reasons different from yours,” Dawud added.

  “There are places where they keep order better than in Florence,” Major Badoglio said. “There are also places, I’m afraid, where they don’t keep it nearly so well.”

  “Any place where they don’t, I’m afraid of that,” Dawud said.

  “Now that you mention it, so am I,” Khalid said. “Florence just falls to pieces as soon as the sun goes down.”

  “We may be getting the upper hand there, though, in spite of the attack on the Ministry of Information headquarters,” Badoglio said. “The Po Valley in the north, the country from Naples south…” He shook his head. “Not so much.”

  “You really want to be in control of your own country,” Khalid said, remembering how Lorenzo had claimed the northern cities of Milan and Turin followed his lead. Maybe he’d been misled, or maybe he’d just lied. “If you’re not, it doesn’t belong to you any more.”

  Major Badoglio scowled at him. “I may be nothing but a backward European, Senior Investigator, but I can figure that out for myself without flying you in from the Maghrib to tell me.”

  Europeans had a touchy pride. You stepped on it at your peril. “Sorry,” Khalid said, more or less sincerely. “Walking barefoot through the obvious, I suppose.” He spread his hands, trying to look as harmless and apologetic as he could.

  “Let it go, then.” Badoglio still looked and sounded irked. But he didn’t seem like a man on the point of exploding into a temper tantrum. “The main question is, how do we bring the country, and especially the towns, back under our control? This country doesn’t belong to the Aquinists and the Crusaders.”

  “It does if your people think it does,” Dawud said. “If they’d rather have the fanatics tell them what to do, and not the Grand Duke, his Supreme Highness has more trouble than he knows what to do with.”

  “Some of them do,” the major said slowly. “How do we bring them back to their proper allegiance?”

  “As I’m sure you already know, there are two main ways.” Khalid did his best to make sure Badoglio didn’t think he thought the Italian major was ignorant. “You can try to make them love Lorenzo, so they turn against his foes of their own accord. That’s the better path. If it doesn’t work, you can try to make them fear him so much, they don’t dare back the Aquinists because they know what will happen to them if they do.”

  “With the second one, we run the risk of turning them all against the Grand Duke,” Badoglio said. “That can work—one Roman Emperor’s motto was ‘Let them hate me, as long as they fear me’—but it’s dangerous.”

  “Yes. That’s what I said,” Khalid replied.

  Dawud said, “Caligula didn’t last very long before they assassinated him, did he?”

  “No, he—” Major Badoglio broke off in surprise. “I wouldn’t have looked for someone from your side of the Mediterranean to know which Emperor it was.”

  Khalid certainly hadn’t known. Dawud was the image of nonchalance. “Why not? He ruled over there the same as he did here,” he said.

  “Well, yes, but…” Instead of going on, Badoglio gestured toward Dawud’s keffiyeh and robes.

  “No, Caligula wasn’t a Muslim. He wasn’t even a Jew,” Dawud said. “But I’ve got news for you, Major: he wasn’t a Christian, either. And I promise you, sir, he didn’t wear trousers.”

  “That’s … probably enough, Dawud,” Khalid said.

  “It’s all right. I think I had that coming,” Badoglio said. “If you gentlemen will excuse me, I need to talk with my colleagues about how we can detach some of the people from the Aquinists. T
hose madmen should be hunted animals, not fish swimming safe in the middle of a school that makes them impossible to spot.”

  “You’re right. They should.” Khalid clasped hands with the Italian. “Always good to talk with you, Major.” Again, he was more or less sincere.

  “He’s able enough. He’s loyal enough. If Lorenzo had more like him, he’d do better for himself,” Dawud said as they left the Ministry of Information and picked their way through the security arrangements around it. The Aquinists wouldn’t have so easy a time attacking this headquarters as they had in Florence.

  “That’s true, that’s true, and that’s true, respectively,” Khalid said.

  “Of course, the Grand Duke does have one other thing going for him,” Dawud said. Khalid made a questioning noise. The Jew went on, “Major Badoglio said it himself. The Aquinists are fanatics. They’re maniacs. And one of the things fanatics and maniacs do is, they go too far and make the people with working brains hate them.”

  “Here’s hoping,” Khalid said.

  Budding civil war or no budding civil war, Rome’s traffic stayed as appalling as ever. Cars, buses, trucks, motorcycles, motor scooters, bicycles … They all jostled for position on winding streets that followed the tracks of ox carts and flocks of sheep in ancient days. There wasn’t nearly enough room for all of them. The drivers’ complete lack of manners only made things worse, or at least more crowded. Everyone blared away with his or her horn. There weren’t many females behind the wheel—pious Christians frowned on their women learning such secular skills—but the ones who did drive were at least as nasty as the men.

  Dawud pointed to a coffeehouse. “Let’s stop,” he said. “I could use a pick-me-up.”

  Khalid would rather have walked around the corner and headed back to the hotel. But his colleague looked so desperately decaffeinated that he gave in. “Oh, all right,” he said. “Not for long, though.”

  The man who served them muttered when they both spooned plenty of extra sugar into their little cups. Khalid realized that marked them as men from the Muslim world. Dawud didn’t seem to care. He knocked his back as if it were brandy and said, “I’d like another, please.”