Through Darkest Europe

by Harry Turtledove

  Well, there was only one official set of views, anyhow. The Aquinists kept right on spewing out malice against the Grand Dukes, the Pope, and modern civilization as a whole. Broadsheets and pamphlets full of red crosses and the phrase Deus vult! cluttered Badoglio’s desk.

  One of the broadsheets was a minor masterpiece of its kind, perfectly summing up how the Aquinists thought. In the background, ghostly lancers in funny-looking European armor thundered across the sky. In the foreground, similarly posed modern warriors carried assault rifles the same way. CRUSADE FOR CHRISTIANITY AND FREEDOM! the text said in big red letters. GOD WILLS IT!

  Dawud noticed that one, too. Tapping it with his forefinger, he asked Major Badoglio, “Do you know who drew this one? For what it is, it’s scary-good.”

  “Oh, yes, we know that chap. I wish we didn’t,” Badoglio answered. “He’s a German, and he uses the name Mjölnir. In the pagan religion they had up there before Christianity came, Mjölnir was the hammer of the gods.”

  “I wouldn’t be broken-hearted to see something unfortunate happen to him,” Khalid said. “Art like that can bring people over to his side.”

  “He lives in some little barony or archbishopric where the local lord is an Aquinist himself,” Badoglio said unhappily. “If we’re going to get rid of him, we’ll have to assassinate him. What with the trouble that would stir up with all the other German rulers, we haven’t thought it’s worth the trouble.”

  “Well, I can see that,” Khalid said, “but you may want to think again if you can find some way to do it without drawing too much notice to yourselves. How many men have picked up a rifle because of his broadsheets? How much harm have they done you?”

  “It is a war, you know,” Dawud added. “If Aquinists come down to Italy to hurt you, why shouldn’t you go into Germany to hurt them?”

  “Speaking for myself, I agree with you. But…” Badoglio touched the single star inside a rectangle on his collar tab. “I’m only a major. I don’t make policy. I follow it when the people set over me have decided what it should be. If you want Mjölnir dead so much, you would do better to talk about it with his Supreme Highness than with me.”

  Captain Salgari walked into Badoglio’s office. “Peace be with you, my masters,” he said to Khalid and Dawud in Arabic. Returning to Italian, he spoke to Badoglio: “We just got word that the fanatics hit a convoy coming up the highway to Turin. They did a lot of damage.”

  “Dannazione!” Badoglio said. “That’s the third time they’ve ambushed a column on that road. You’d almost think they knew our units were coming ahead of time.”

  “Maybe they do,” Dawud said. “I mean no disrespect—please believe me—but some people in this country play double games. You might want to see who all knew ahead of time that these units were moving.”

  Badoglio and Salgari glanced at each other. “I have been looking into that, as a matter of fact,” the captain said. “So far, I haven’t come up with anything, but I keep digging.”

  “Good,” Khalid said.

  Major Badoglio stuck another red pin in the map just south of Turin. Scowling, he said, “We have to hold this city, and Milan, too. The Po Valley is home to most of our industry. It should be more progressive than the south. In a lot of ways, it is. But…” He paused the way he had when reminding the Maghribis of his middling rank.

  “Part of the problem is that the Aquinists can easily bring men into the north from Germany and the Swiss cantons and maybe even from France,” Khalid said. Major Badoglio nodded. The other part of the problem was that, while the Po Valley might be progressive, it wasn’t always progressive in ways the Grand Dukes liked. It wanted more say in running its own local affairs. Cosimo hadn’t been ready to let anyone reduce his own authority in any way. By all the signs Lorenzo III had shown, neither was he.

  Mentioning such details wouldn’t make the major or the captain any happier. They already knew how their sovereign felt. No one was likely to change his mind for him. Lorenzo seemed to change his mind even less readily than Cosimo had.

  He did show enthusiasm for eliminating Mjölnir, when Khalid and Dawud put the idea to him. “Nothing I’d like better,” he said, “as long as we can do it so it doesn’t look as though my government is striking at him. If some of the German princes and clerics take that as an act of war, they’ll help the Aquinists even more than they are already.”

  “You want it to look like a murder, not an assassination,” Dawud said.

  “That’s right. That’s exactly right!” The Grand Duke nodded. “If we send men after him, they can rob his house and steal his car and keep whatever they bring away with them.” His smile was lopsided, the smile of a ruler who know how a particular kind of useful subject worked. “They’ll hate that, won’t they?”

  “Of course, your Supreme Highness.” Khalid sounded ironic, too.

  “So they will; so they will.” Lorenzo eyed him. “Are you and the Pezzola woman happy together?”

  Sure enough, the Ministry of Information had been informing the sovereign. “We are so far, sir,” Khalid said. He saw no point to denying what Lorenzo plainly knew.

  “Well, good. I’m glad to hear it. Nice to know she’s settled, at least for now. She made me nervous—she still does. She was too close to my father. I don’t know whether her ideas came out of his mouth or his still come out of hers.”

  “She’s very able, sir. You should take her more seriously. She’d do you a lot of good,” Khalid said.

  “Not when she reminds me so much of my old man,” Lorenzo said. Khalid didn’t know how to respond to that, so he kept quiet. The Grand Duke went on, “Father wasn’t always staring over your shoulder. Maybe that means you can be happy with her. Here’s hoping. I’ll tell you something else, too. If you want to take her back to the Maghrib with you when you go home, she won’t have any paperwork problems. I promise you that.”

  “Thank you, your Supreme Highness. We’ll have to see how things go. I don’t know whether she wants to leave Italy, either. From some of the things she’s said, she’d like to stay here and make things better for women if she can.”

  “If she can, yes. That’s always the question,” Grand Duke Lorenzo said. “But you’re right. You—and she—don’t have to decide right away. In the meantime, do you have any sneaky notions for disposing of this pestilential Mjölnir without leaving a trail that points back to Italy?”

  “As a matter of fact, sir…” Dawud began.

  * * *

  After making love with Khalid, Annarita made as if to cover herself with the sheet. “The Ministry of Information probably has a camera hidden in the room,” she said.

  “Not much point to it if they do,” he answered. “They already know we’re together. They, or Lorenzo, let us know they know. That makes us hard to blackmail. And I doubt a camera would teach them much they hadn’t figured out for themselves.”

  Her eyes sparkled. “Don’t be too sure. The kind of people who plant cameras in bedrooms are liable to enjoy looking more than doing.”

  “Heh,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised. And just so you know, you intimidate Lorenzo even more than you thought.” He summarized what the Grand Duke had said.

  Annarita frowned. “I wasn’t so close to Cosimo as he thinks. Cosimo didn’t let anyone in that close.”

  “I can’t speak to that. I don’t know anything about it, though it does sound like the man I met and the man the Maghrib dealt with. But Lorenzo wouldn’t be sorry to see you out of Italy, whether his reasons are good or bad.”

  Her frown deepened. “That only makes me want to stay more.” Khalid nodded; he would have guessed she’d say that.

  Recognizing her pride, he said, “You do need to think of what’s best for you, not just how you can stick your thumb in Lorenzo’s eye.”

  She glanced at her right thumb. The nail was long and sharp enough to do damage if she used it that way. By the look on her face, she would have loved to. But all she said was, “The other t
hing I need to think about is what’s best for Italy. We lose too many people to countries with more chances for them as is.”

  “If you have no chance for yourself here, though…” Khalid let her draw her own conclusions instead of sketching them for her. When she’d had time enough to do so, he went on, “Even if the Grand Duke and the King of France and people who think like them win and the Aquinists lose, educated women are likelier to do well for themselves in the Muslim world than they are in Europe.”

  “Dr. Cadorna wouldn’t agree with you,” Annarita said tartly. “She’s my hero. She’s a hero to a lot of Italian women.”

  “I can see how she would be, but I think you’re wrong.” Khalid held up a hasty hand—Annarita looked furious. “Not wrong to have her for a hero. Wrong to say she wouldn’t agree with me. You don’t think it was harder for her to win a place at a hospital here in Rome than it would have been in Tunis or Alexandria or Damascus?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose it was, when you put it that way.” Annarita did recognize truth when she heard it: one more reason Khalid esteemed her. After a moment, she went on, “She’s inspired so many to try to follow in her footsteps, though.”

  “To try to follow? Sure. Of course. But it’s still as if a woman needs to throw a triple six with the dice to succeed here, where on the other side of the Mediterranean she can manage with—oh, I don’t know—say, a five or higher on at least one die. Your odds are better.”

  “That makes doing well here mean more,” Annarita insisted.

  “I’m sure it does, for a handful of women who are lucky and talented, both. On the far side of the sea … I won’t say anybody with an education and drive can do well. That’s not always true, even for men. But we don’t put so many roadblocks and ambushes in a woman’s path, either. We’ve mostly got past that, the way we’ve mostly got past holding people back because of their religion.”

  Annarita raised an eyebrow. “What would Dawud ibn Musa say about that?”

  “Ask him yourself next time you see him,” Khalid replied. “If you’re asking me, I think he’d say being mostly past that kind of discrimination doesn’t mean we’re all the way past it. If we were, chances are he’d outrank me. I know that. But I also know we know we have these problems and we need to work on them. Here, most people don’t even see that they are problems. The Aquinists will tell you discriminating by faith and by sex is what God wants them to do.”

  “So it’s not heaven on earth over there?” Annarita gibed.

  “Of course not. We’re people. We screw up. We do it all the time. We try not to do it the same old ways over and over. Sometimes that means we do better. Sometimes it just means we find new ways to screw up.”

  “You’ve got all the answers, don’t you?” she said.

  “Not me, sweetheart.” Khalid shook his head. He didn’t think he’d ever had such an intense conversation with a naked woman, not even when his marriage was falling apart around his ears. He continued, “The Aquinists have all the answers. If you don’t believe me, just ask them. What we mostly have on the other side of the Mediterranean are questions.”

  “Questions,” Annarita echoed. She seemed to weigh the word on scales inside her head. Slowly, she nodded. “Well, you could do worse, I think. The people who say they know all the answers are the ones who know the answers that keep folks they don’t like in their place.”

  Once Khalid worked through the convolutions of that, he found himself nodding with her. “That’s how it goes, all right,” he said.

  “And it’s always gone that way, ever since the first tyrant made other people do things because he had some big fellows with clubs standing behind him,” Annarita said. “It isn’t fair. It isn’t right.”

  “Not even close,” Khalid agreed. “A republic where all the people can say what they want and do as they please if they don’t hurt anyone else makes it harder for the bossy ones to order other people around. Not impossible—republics mess things up, too, believe me. But harder.”

  “I … need to think about that,” she said slowly.

  “Well, you’ve got some time. It doesn’t look as though Dawud and I will be flying back to Tunis day after tomorrow.” Khalid took her in his arms and kissed her. “I’m damned glad of it, too.”

  “So am I,” she said. As far as he was concerned, that was definitely the right answer.

  * * *

  The map in Major Badoglio’s office had acquired some new red pins south of Turin. The city wasn’t quite under siege by the Aquinists, but it was hard-pressed. “The way the fanatics keep hitting our columns, they have to be getting word from a traitor about when we’re moving,” Badoglio growled.

  “If we catch the son of a whore, we ought to string him up by his nuts to make any others think twice,” Captain Salgari said savagely.

  Khalid and Dawud exchanged glances. Khalid wasn’t at all sure the young Italian officer was exaggerating. By the way Salgari sounded, he expected to be taken literally. The law in Italy was what Grand Duke Lorenzo said it was. The idea of a constitution and a legal system more important than the ruler’s whim or will hadn’t really taken hold on the north shore of the Mediterranean.

  Things could have been worse, though. Instead of worrying about Lorenzo’s whims, Italians might have been worrying about the iron doctrine of an Aquinist Corrector. When that occurred to Khalid, he reflected that things could almost always get worse.

  “Maybe if we ride along with some of the Grand Duke’s men, we can find out how they’re getting betrayed,” he said.

  “Maybe you can get yourselves killed, too,” Major Badoglio said. “Is that why you came to Italy?”

  “We can get killed anywhere here,” Dawud said. It was true, of course, but did he have to sound so blithe about it? “Somebody with a bomb under his clothes can blow us up on the street. A truck bomb can blow us up, too, and the street with us. An Aquinist in the hotel kitchen can poison our pasta. All kinds of interesting, entertaining ways to go.”

  “Entertaining?” Captain Salgari said. “Are you sure that’s the word you’re trying to use?”

  “I’m sure the Aquinists would be entertained, anyhow,” Dawud answered. Salgari threw his hands in the air.

  Over the next few days, Major Badoglio was more helpful. He issued the Maghribis Italian Army uniforms, bulletproof vests, and helmets. The steel domes, painted a matte brown, looked martial enough but protected less of the head than the model the Maghrib used. The assault rifles Badoglio had them sign for weren’t the same as the ones on the far side of the sea, but a good many Muslim countries also armed their troops with them. They were easy to handle and to field-strip, and lethal enough for all ordinary purposes.

  The Italians’ all-terrain vehicles came from Arkansistan. The Maghribis made their own. As with radar, though, the Grand Duchy preferred not to buy from its neighbors. Khalid could understand their thinking. He had no trouble driving this model. Gearshifts and foot pedals worked the same the world around. The Italians called the blocky, cloth-topped machine the horse with wheels. He liked that.

  Off they went: horses with wheels, trucks full of soldiers, others full of supplies, and armored personnel carriers and light tanks to protect the soft-skinned machines.

  Khalid and Dawud had driven up the Via Cassia as far as Florence. If anything, the horse with wheels had a rougher ride than the small car they’d taken before. It could do more than the car dreamt of trying, but couldn’t do it nearly so comfortably. Comfort was a civilian virtue, not one the military cared about.

  No one at the police strongpoints challenged the military column. Here and there, even on the Rome side of Florence, snipers plinked away at it. The armored personnel carriers and tanks fired back. The retaliation was overwhelming. Machine guns pockmarked houses and barns. Cannon rounds simply flattened a few. Livestock died. A chicken hit by a heavy machine-gun round exploded into a puff of feathers. Farmers and their families were none too safe, either. The soldiers seemed to have no
idea whether they were killing any of the Aquinists who shot at them. They also didn’t seem to care much.

  “As long as the strozzi keep their heads down, that’ll do,” a lieutenant told the Maghribis as the column bivouacked just south of Florence. He tore open his ration pack, pulled the lids off tins, and poured hot water into pouches of dehydrated soup and instant coffee.

  He ate with every sign of enjoyment. Khalid wished he could match the Italian’s appetite, or perhaps his impaired sense of taste. Military rations could keep you alive for a long time. Eating them regularly would certainly make it seem like a long time, anyhow.

  Dawud also found his supper less than delightful. He discovered ways to deal with it, though, that eluded Khalid’s less agile mind. Holding up an empty plastic bag, the Jew said, “Look what I’ve got here.”

  “Air?” Khalid asked.

  Dawud looked at him with mingled pity and scorn. His lip curled. “You don’t know anything, do you? It’s dehydrated water.”

  “Right.” Khalid nodded toward the Italian lieutenant, who was still busily stuffing himself. In a low voice, he went on, “Don’t tell him, or he’ll want some, too.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” Dawud said. “Of course, you could pull the same trick on about a quarter of the junior officers in our army.”

  They slept in the little all-terrain vehicle, one wrapped in blankets on the front seat, the other in back. After the luxurious Roman hotel, it wasn’t a grand way to pass a night. Getting wakened by two different fire fights, one before the moon rose and the other after, didn’t make things any more restful for Khalid. The sentries were on their toes. No fanatics slipped past them and put the column in real danger.

  North of Florence, the road wasn’t called the Via Cassia any more. Instead, it went by the romantic name of A1. There were highways in the Maghrib with names like that, even if the Italians used a different alphabet. Sometimes being modern seemed a quest to drain everything even remotely interesting out of everyday life.