Through Darkest Europe

by Harry Turtledove

  A bomb hidden in streetside rubble had smashed an armored personnel carrier. The vehicle burned merrily. It hadn’t been armored enough. Ammunition inside cooked off with cheerful popping noises. Black, greasy smoke poured from the stricken machine. It stank of fuel and oil, of burning rubber, and, sickeningly, of scorched pork.

  Sure enough, people in the street and on the sidewalk were down, too. Khalid knelt by a man pouring blood from a wounded leg. Bandaging it seemed hopeless. Thinking fast, Khalid pulled several safety pins out of his pockets and roughly closed the wound with them. Then he injected the man with morphine.

  Ambulances screamed up. Attendants threw the injured man on a stretcher and hustled him into the back of one. Khalid dared hope the fellow would live.

  An aid man beckoned to him. “Here—give me a hand with this guy, too. You look like you know what you’re doing.”

  You’re an optimist, Khalid thought. But he went, and helped the fellow who, with luck, really did know what he was about patch up a man with a belly wound and a broken arm.

  Before long, the aid man discovered his Italian wasn’t everything it might have been. “Where are you from?” the man asked.

  “Tunis,” Khalid said.

  “You must have lived there a long time.”

  “I’ve lived there my whole life. I’m from the Maghrib. I’m a Muslim.”

  “Oh.” When the aid man had a moment, he sent Khalid a curious look. “What are you doing here, then?”

  “The same as you, amico—everything I can to keep the Aquinists from grabbing the reins.”

  “Oh,” the man repeated. “You must think that’s pretty important, then, huh? You and your government, I mean.”

  “Sì.” Khalid could answer in one short word, so he did.

  “Good for you,” the Italian said. “All those people want is to tell everybody else what to do, you ask me. Far as I’m concerned, they can eat shit salad with piss dressing.”

  Khalid had never heard it put that way before, which didn’t mean he didn’t like it. “Sounds good to me,” he said. The aid man gave him a grin, then got back to work.

  * * *

  Major General Procacci summoned not only Khalid but also Dawud into his august presence. “You people are nuisances,” the Italian said without preamble. “You’re meddling in my affairs and trying to keep me from holding Turin under proper control.”

  “Close, sir, but not quite right,” Dawud answered. “We’re meddling in your affairs and trying to do a better job of keeping Turin under control.”

  Although the general was a swarthy man, he wasn’t too dark to hide the angry flush that rose from his neck to his forehead. “And you think you know better than I do because…?” he asked with what was meant for devastating sarcasm.

  It failed to devastate, however. “Because that’s why Grand Duke Lorenzo sent us here,” Dawud said helpfully. “If you don’t like what we’re doing, why don’t you complain to him?”

  Major General Procacci opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. Telling your sovereign he hadn’t had such a good idea was at best risky and at worst suicidal, at least if you ever hoped to become a lieutenant general. “Get out of my sight,” he snarled.

  “You do know how to endear yourself to everyone you meet, don’t you?” Khalid said after they got out of the local commander’s sight.

  “Oh, he’s even more lovable than I am,” Dawud replied. “I thought so from the sweet way you talked about him. Now that I see for myself how delightfully he sings, of course I’ll go out of my way to help him play in traffic.”

  “I think you put the fear of God in him for now.” Khalid thrust out a warning forefinger. “And if you ask me ‘Whose God?’, I’ll do something even you’d regret.”

  “Promises, promises,” Dawud said. “But you’re right. He may listen to reason for the next little while. Now if only we had some to spare.”

  “I know what I’d like to do,” Khalid said.

  “Which is?”

  “I’d like to take the fight to the fanatics in the suburbs and outlying towns instead of waiting for them to come after us.”

  “All by yourself?” Dawud said. “I know they make films about heroes like that, but in films they wash the blood off afterwards and nobody dies for real. Or are you showing off for your lady friend?”

  Khalid exhaled through his nose. “Yes, of course by myself,” he said. “Come on, who needs all the soldiers Procacci’s in charge of?”

  “By the way he uses them, he doesn’t think anyone needs them,” Dawud said.

  “That’s my point,” Khalid said. The Jew was bound to know that perfectly well, but when he felt like being difficult you had to spell things out for him letter by letter. This seemed to be one of those times. Khalid went on, “If he doesn’t feel like doing anything with them, maybe he won’t mind somebody else borrowing them for a while.”

  “Anyone who doesn’t speak Arabic for beans will mind if you borrow them.” Yes, Dawud was being mulish. That didn’t mean he was wrong. He was far too likely to be right. Europeans always resented it when people from the Muslim world stepped in and took care of things for them. They said it showed the Muslims lacked confidence in their ability to handle anything themselves.

  Which it did. Some Europeans were capable enough. Others … A string of misfortunes over the past century or so showed that quite a few Europeans didn’t want to bother taking the pains a complex technological situation required. Bridges run up on the cheap or not maintained, machinery not oiled or repaired, someone who mattered drunk at the worst time, bribes instead of inspections, minor mathematical errors that didn’t get caught and ended up not being so minor—the list was long and depressing.

  Thoughtfully, Khalid said, “I wonder how Lieutenant Colonel Juvarra feels about pushing out with the troops instead of holing up and waiting for the Aquinists to hit us.”

  “And if Procacci tells him to go hang himself?” Dawud inquired.

  “I don’t know how the Army will feel about it, but I’m sure the Ministry of Information would be tickled to show off what fine officers it has,” Khalid said. “Before I talk to Juvarra, I’ll telephone Rome and get authorization to put him in charge here.”

  “The good news with that is, you know the Ministry of Information will fall all over itself doing what you want. Isn’t playing politics fun?”

  “Well, that’s one word for it,” Khalid said.

  “It’s fun if you do it well, and you sound like you’re going to do it well.” But Dawud hadn’t finished: “The bad news is, the Aquinists will know that Juvarra’s in charge and what he’s going to do before Major General Procacci finds out. Or don’t you think they’re tapping the lines between here and Rome?”

  Khalid sighed. “I would be, if I were in their shoes. But I’d rather do something than do nothing. We’ve had too much of that here already. The fanatics won’t know exactly what we’re up to, not from listening to me talk with Rome.”

  “No, not from that. But they’ll have, ah, friends on Procacci’s staff—and probably on Juvarra’s staff, too.” Dawud was full of truths Khalid would rather not have heard.

  In spite of that, Khalid made the calls he needed to make. Sure enough, the higher-ups at the Ministry of Information were eager to let one of theirs give an Army general a black eye if he could. But they didn’t have the authority to supplant Procacci. They had to get Lorenzo’s approval first.

  Major Badoglio was the man who called back. “It’s authorized,” he said. “I’m sure the Army will love you till the end of time. Someone else here in Rome is ringing up Juvarra. That way, the general won’t be able to prove you had anything to do with the bayonet in his back.”

  “Grazie.” After a moment, that didn’t seem like enough, so Khalid added, “Mille grazie.” A thousand thanks likely weren’t enough, either, but he’d done his best. And, while Major General Procacci might not be able to prove anything, he wouldn’t be in too much doubt. Too bad, Khalid
thought. He wouldn’t have got dumped if he didn’t need dumping.

  From the yelling and screaming and carrying on at the major general’s headquarters when Procacci found out a mere lieutenant colonel—and a lieutenant colonel from the despised Ministry of Information, at that!—was replacing him in command, Khalid would have guessed a mortar bomb had smashed the building. Only the lack of an explosion before the explosion told him anything different.

  Sure enough, Procacci didn’t have to be a Turinese fortune-teller to divine who’d arranged his sacking. He stormed over to confront Khalid and Dawud as soon as he saw them. He was fearsome in his wrath—more fearsome, unfortunately, than he’d been against the Aquinists. Khalid had seen that he didn’t speak much Arabic. He trotted out what he had, which included a good deal dragged straight from the sewers.

  Khalid listened for a while. Procacci cussed him out in Italian, too. In his own language, he taught Khalid a few things the Maghribi hadn’t known before. When the general showed signs of starting to repeat himself, Khalid said, “I am sorry, sir. I truly am. But you wouldn’t take the fight to the enemy.”

  “Your mother’s—” Yes, Procacci was repeating himself. For good measure, he added the gesture to avert the evil eye and the one the Italians called the fig. Then he stomped away.

  “Now someone will have to make sure he doesn’t go over to the Aquinists,” Khalid remarked, with luck after the Italian was out of earshot.

  “I don’t know. I almost hope he does,” Dawud said. When Khalid sent him a startled look, he explained himself: “Wouldn’t it be nice to have at least one Aquinist commander who didn’t hit us with everything he had?”

  If that wasn’t an epitaph for Renato Procacci’s military career, Khalid couldn’t imagine what would be. “You’re right,” he said, shoveling his own spadeful of dirt onto the career’s grave.

  * * *

  As Khalid had seen before, Dawud ibn Musa contrived to look hopelessly unmilitary even in uniform, bulletproof vest, and helmet. The tunic and trousers were rumpled; they didn’t fit well. He wore the helmet at a slight angle on his head, as if it were a jaunty Italian hat. He did seem to know what he was doing with the assault rifle he toted.

  Eyeing Khalid, he said, “We’ll be about as useful as a couple of impacted wisdom teeth, you know.”

  “Oh, yes.” Khalid wasn’t panting to shoot it out with fanatics half his age, either. “But the Italians need to see we think fighting the Aquinists is important enough for us to risk our lives, not just theirs, especially after we got their general sacked.”

  Cannons and truck-mounted rockets had been pummeling the fanatics in Candiolo, south of Turin, for three hours. Now batteries that had been masked opened up on Volpiano, northeast of the city. After fifteen minutes in which, with luck, the guns and rockets caught the Aquinists there by surprise, officers’ whistles shrilled. The attacking force moved out of Turin. Khalid and Dawud trotted along with the Italian soldiers.

  “Lorenzo!” the Italians shouted, and “The Grand Duke!” and “Italy!” Half of them had cigarettes dangling from their mouths. They were young enough not to get winded even so. Cigar-smoking Dawud also kept up. Khalid clumped along. Military boots felt as if they weighed a talent apiece.

  As soon as Khalid got away from the built-up area in the center of Turin, he noticed how green everything was. In the Mediterranean world, where rain fell from late fall into early spring, this was the driest time of the year, with fields and hillsides bare and brown or yellow.

  But the Po Valley wasn’t part of that world by geography, even if politically and culturally it had been joined to the Mediterranean for millennia. Once upon a time, they’d called this land Gaul south of the Alps. Summer was the rainy season here, as it was farther north. And all the grass and trees and bushes seemed brighter and leafier than they ever got under the fierce Mediterranean sun.

  One thing that meant was, they gave the Aquinists better cover than plants farther south would have. Bullets cracked past and over Khalid. He couldn’t even spot muzzle flashes, much less the men who were shooting at him. He threw himself down on his belly. The luxuriant weeds gave him better cover than he would have got farther south, too.

  “Forward!” the officers shouted. They blew their whistles over and over. “For Italy and Grand Duke Lorenzo!”

  By now, in contact with the enemy, the soldiers mostly stayed quiet. A war cry might give away their position. The Aquinists kept still, too, except for occasional cries of “God wills it!”

  Khalid scrambled up, dashed forward, and threw himself flat again. He found himself only a cubit or so from a fanatic who lay twisted in death. The man wore dungarees, a dark green wool tunic, and rubber-soled canvas shoes. It wasn’t a uniform, but the clothes would do well enough in the field.

  He did have a helmet: an Egyptian model, probably war surplus, that had to be older than Khalid. It might not protect as well as a modern helmet, but it was bound to be better than nothing. It hadn’t kept him alive, not when the bullet that killed him tore out his throat like a wolf.

  Up again. Forward. A bellyflop behind some bushes. Motion in front of him: big fair men in denim and wool and old-fashioned helmets. He fired a burst at them, then rolled over to a downed carport that offered some cover. They would shoot at where he’d been. Not staying there till they did seemed a good idea.

  After some of the Italians dropped mortar bombs on the Aquinists, he advanced once more. He saw something he’d never seen before: a fanatic trying to surrender. Cradling a bleeding arm in his good hand, the Aquinist smiled like a beaten dog and said, “Kamerad!”

  “Go back that way.” Khalid jerked a thumb over his shoulder. If the fellow would talk, they might get something useful out of him. The man gabbled guttural thanks in a language Khalid didn’t understand. He stumbled southwest, toward the rear.

  A moment later, a shot rang out behind Khalid. He whirled, in case it was another fanatic who wanted to sell himself dear. It wasn’t. An Italian soldier had plugged the would-be prisoner of war. As the Aquinist writhed in the grass, the soldier finished him with a head shot.

  Khalid wanted to swear at the Italian, but knew he couldn’t. If the soldier thought the Aquinist looked dangerous for any reason or none, he’d get rid of him. By the nature of things, giving yourself up was deadly dangerous. Not everyone who tried managed to do it. This poor bastard hadn’t.

  A few hundred cubits farther on, several Aquinists holed up in a house had no intention of quitting the fight. Their makeshift strongpoint gave them good fields of fire. A dead soldier who’d been careless lay stretched out partly behind a parked car. Thus warned, Khalid didn’t show himself.

  An Italian with a launcher for rocket-propelled grenades came up. So did another man carrying a canvas sack full of the grenades. He loaded one into the business end of the tube. The Italian carrying it went to one knee behind another parked car.

  He pulled the trigger. With a hissing whoosh, the rocket zoomed toward the house. It blew out half the wall facing the shooter. Anything designed to slam through hardened steel made a demon housebreaker.

  “Another one?” asked the soldier with the sack of reloads.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  The second grenade brought down the rest of that wall and part of the roof. Two or three fanatics ran away, doing their best to keep the ruins between them and the Grand Duke’s men. Khalid hoped some Aquinists hadn’t got away.

  Someone fired from the house as Lorenzo’s men started to approach it. They drew back. The soldier with the launcher gave it another grenade. It began to burn. When the soldiers did move up, no one was left to give them trouble.

  Beyond the burning house, Khalid and Dawud bumped into each other again. The Jew was limping. “You all right?” Khalid asked.

  “Fell over my own feet and twisted my ankle,” Dawud answered. “I’m so graceful, I should have been a dancer.”

  A few glum Aquinist prisoners did shamble off into captivity, thei
r hands clasped on top of their heads. “Satan will pay you back in the world to come!” one of them shouted.

  An Italian soldier herding the prisoners along kicked the mouthy one in the seat of the pants. “Shut up, asshole,” he said. “Worry about the next world when you’re dead. You keep talking shit, that’ll be pretty damn quick.”

  “Now there’s a modern attitude,” Dawud said.

  “If that’s what you want to call it,” Khalid said. “You can do something about this world. The next one’s out of your hands.”

  “That’s a modern attitude, too,” Dawud said. More firing broke out ahead. They hadn’t subdued all the Aquinists in the suburb. Dawud grimaced. “Now they’ll get another chance to hurt me or kill me. I’d sooner stick around in one piece, because I’m a lot surer about this world than the next one—which is also a modern attitude.” Shaking his head, he jogged toward the fighting. The limp didn’t slow him much, not least because he hadn’t been fast to begin with.

  Khalid trotted forward, too. He fired a four-round burst at an Aquinist who was looking in a different direction. The man went down with a shriek, clutching at his belly. You didn’t want to think you’d caused somebody so much pain. On the other hand, the Aquinist probably would have cheered if he’d done that instead.

  Some of the fanatics in Volpiano died. Some went into captivity. More pulled back to cause trouble elsewhere. Lieutenant Colonel Juvarra might not be another Julius Caesar or Amr ibn al-As in the making, but he’d won himself a victory here. In these hardscrabble times, you took what you could get.

  XIV

  Khalid pulled back the foil lid on a ration pack. The little sausages and pasta in tomato sauce were uninspiring. They’d do a decent job of plastering over the empty spot in his midsection, though. He shoveled a forkful into his mouth.

  Dawud was digging into the same kind of entree. Between mouthfuls, he said, “I don’t want to know what goes into the sausages.”