Through Darkest Europe

by Harry Turtledove

  “Neither do I,” Khalid said with a sigh. “If it’s a choice between eating what’s probably pork and either going hungry or making a fuss, I’ll eat it. If I don’t know, I feel … a little less guilty, anyhow.”

  “It just comes to you in the line of duty. And you don’t go out of your way to shove it aside,” Dawud said. “You’re also not going out of your way to look for it.”

  “That’s right.” Khalid nodded. “That horrible waiter at the hotel in Rome, pimping pork to Muslims on the prowl for something haram the way he’d pimp his ‘nice, clean sister’ in case they were looking for a girl … That’s the kind of man I’d like to string up by the thumbs.”

  Dawud clucked in mild reproof. “You’re not respecting his fundamental dignity as a human being, you know.”

  “Kus ummak!” Khalid came out with the same obscenity Major General Procacci had fired at him a couple of days before. “That greasy bastard had no dignity to respect. And I wouldn’t give you better than even money that he qualifies as a human being.”

  “He’s just making a living, trying to get along the best way he knows how,” Dawud said. “That’s what he’d tell you.”

  “As if I’d believe anything he told me. He’s nothing but another—” Khalid broke off, he hoped in the nick of time. He’d been about to say something like He’s nothing but another lying, cheating, thieving European. Some of the Grand Duke’s soldiers might be sprawled somewhere close enough to overhear, and might know enough Arabic to understand.

  But that wasn’t the only reason a man from the Muslim world shouldn’t say or even think such things. Why were he and Dawud here on the outskirts of Turin at all? To help Italy, and eventually the other Europeans nations, out of their backwardness and fully into modern civilization. And to keep the Aquinists from imposing a fresh Jahiliyah on this backward, isolated fragment of the world.

  If he was going to do that, or as much of that as one man could, it was hardly fair or right for him to stereotype Europeans the way so many people from the rest of the world did. Automatic contempt for everything and everybody on this side of the Mediterranean didn’t do anybody any good.

  But every time I see that filthy pimp of a waiter, I still want to punch him in the nose, Khalid thought. That, he told himself, wasn’t stereotyping. It was reacting to one obnoxious individual. Europeans weren’t all paragons, any more than Arabs or Persians or Chinese were.

  As if to prove not all Europeans were paragons, the Aquinists up ahead opened fire on the Grand Duke’s sentries. The loyal soldiers shot back. If there were any disloyal soldiers up there, they probably shot back, too. Nothing made you want to kill somebody like having him try to kill you. You’d do whatever you could to stop him.

  An Italian soldier came up to Khalid and Dawud. Saluting, the man asked, “Sirs, you are the gentlemen from the Maghrib, isn’t that right?”

  Khalid wore a captain’s rank badges, Dawud a senior lieutenant’s. Being able to give orders to enlisted men without getting backtalk could prove useful. In the Italian Army, as in most European armed forces, officers came from higher social strata than the men they led and insisted on getting more deference than their counterparts in the wider world claimed.

  None of that explained why both Maghribis hesitated before answering. The soldier might want to make sure he was delivering his message to the right people. Or he might be an Aquinist, itching to hose down some infidels with his assault rifle.

  As Khalid said, “Yes, we’re the Maghribis,” Dawud unobtrusively picked up his own rifle. He might look as if he were about to start cleaning it, but he could open up in a hurry if he had to.

  He didn’t have to. The soldier only saluted again. “Sirs, if you’ll please come with me, Lieutenant Colonel Juvarra would like to talk with you.”

  The man might be leading them into an ambush or a trap. It seemed more likely, though, that he just wanted to lead them back to the Italians’ new commander. Grunting, Khalid got to his feet. Dawud did the same, a little more slowly. They both creaked; they carried too many years to be comfortable sleeping on the ground.

  What had been a pleasant suburb, with the leafy greenness Khalid noticed so strongly, was now a place where a war had just happened. Explosives and fire and bullets and shell fragments had done their worst to buildings. A church that might have stood there for centuries was nothing but a pile of sooty bricks. A dead dog lay in the middle of the street, legs stiff and belly beginning to bloat.

  The air stank of smoke and sewage. Men had relieved themselves in the open, wherever they could without getting shot. Some men, no doubt, had fouled themselves. Khalid felt lucky that he hadn’t; he’d needed to clamp down tight more than once. And the smell of death was still faint, but it would grow.

  Soldiers were tearing down the Aquinists’ broadsheets and putting up the Grand Duke’s in their place. Khalid nodded to himself. Juvarra could see that needed doing. Procacci might not have paid any attention to what he would have viewed as an unimportant detail.

  Here and there, civilians came out of hiding. They stared in amazement at what the fighting had done to their peaceful town. Too many people who had lived in Volpiano would be staring up sightlessly at the sky. And this wasn’t an especially fierce battle, or one that had lasted for long.

  Occasional rifle fire echoed on the nearly empty streets of Turin. Aquinist holdouts were making nuisances of themselves. Chances were they hoped they could sneak clear before Lorenzo’s men hunted them down and killed them.

  Lieutenant Colonel Juvarra had moved his headquarters up near the polo field, in the direction of Volpiano. The only horses on the field at the moment were the ones with wheels: it was doing duty as a car park for them, tanks, and personnel carriers. Juvarra greeted the Maghribis as friends. Some of his staff officers, holdovers from Major General Procacci’s tenure, were more reserved. One or two of them looked as if Khalid and Dawud, not the fanatics, were the enemy.

  “Now that we’ve got Volpiano, we can swing left and clear some more of the suburbs,” Juvarra said. The new commander sounded like a man who’d got the bit between his teeth. “As long as we keep pushing the Aquinists, they can’t push us so much.”

  “That will be good,” Khalid said. “You need to remember, though, the most important thing here is to make sure the people in these parts want to live under the Grand Duke, not the Aquinists.”

  “If we don’t beat the God-cursed Aquinists, the people won’t get to make that choice,” Juvarra said.

  “Even if you do beat the fanatics, if the people would rather see them in charge, you’ll lose the war. It will take longer than if they whip you in the field, but you will,” Dawud said. “Without the people behind you, all you have are guns. Most of the time, guns aren’t enough by themselves.”

  Juvarra sent the Jew a thoughtful stare. “You play a deep game, don’t you?”

  “It’s not just fighting,” Dawud answered. “It’s politics, too, and religion. If you don’t keep an eye on all those things, you’ll lose. Give the Aquinists credit. They understand that much. They wouldn’t be so dangerous if they didn’t.”

  “I can see why you wanted someone from the Ministry of Information in charge here, then,” Juvarra said. “They don’t train Army officers to juggle that many balls at once.”

  “No?” Khalid said. The lieutenant colonel shook his head. “Too bad,” Khalid told him. “They’d better start, then, because they’ll need plenty of people who can.”

  * * *

  The column that went from Turin to Milan was smaller than the one that had come up from Rome to Turin. The journey was shorter this time, too. All the same, Khalid was glad to travel in the middle of the column, not up at the front. The fanatics harried it several times, but did it less harm than they must have hoped. The soldiers in the column were very alert, as they had reason to be. They sprayed roadside bushes and trees with machine-gun fire. Nothing blew up when they did, but the Aquinists who lived through those volleys wou
ldn’t be in much shape to cause trouble.

  Milan was a bigger city than Turin. Back when this was Cisalpine Gaul, it had gone by the name of Mediolanum. More than two thousand years had ground the name down a bit, but it might still have been recognizable to one of the Gauls forcibly yanked from his time into this one.

  When Khalid remarked on that, Dawud replied, “I wonder if they’d started working on the Duomo back then.”

  He was joking. They couldn’t have started on a Christian cathedral before Christ walked the earth. But they had started on it back in the late eighth century of the Hijra calendar: the late fourteenth century by the one Christians used. Now, more than six hundred years later, it remained incomplete. So many things in Europe moved slowly, when they moved at all.

  “When we get to Milan,” Dawud said, “I wonder whether the Aquinists will be shooting at us or it’ll be the Army officers commanding the Grand Duke’s garrison.”

  “There’s a cheerful thought!” Dawud said. “We didn’t get rid of Procacci because he belonged to the Army. We got rid of him because the only thing he wanted to do was catch whatever the Aquinists threw at him.”

  “You know that. I know that,” Dawud replied. “The only thing the soldiers in Milan know is, we had one of their own sacked in Turin.”

  The commander in Milan was another major general, this one named Benito Dallolio. He made his headquarters in the shadow of the Duomo. Even unfinished, the cathedral was massive. It was in the style architects called Gothic. The tall, thin arches and spiky spires came from a building tradition altogether different from the mainly Muslim one that had spread around the world with modern civilization. You wouldn’t find its like anywhere outside of Europe, as you wouldn’t find a pagoda anywhere but in China or Japan.

  Khalid didn’t have as long to look it over as he would have liked. As soon as he and Dawud gave their names, the sentries outside the headquarters hustled them into Major General Dallolio’s presence.

  “Should I be pleased to meet you, my masters, or not?” Dallolio asked in reasonably good classical Arabic. Khalid gave him a point for being able to use the international tongue. Dallolio was younger than Major General Procacci, and leaner. He would have been strikingly handsome if not for a scar that made a badlands of his right cheek and jaw.

  “We are not your masters, General.” Khalid rejected the polite formula. “If we can help you, we will.”

  “Help me out the door, do you mean?” Dallolio said. “That’s what happened to poor Renato, eh? Did you two tell him you weren’t his masters, too?”

  “We have no problem with anyone who wants to go after the Aquinists, sir,” Dawud said in his excellent Italian. Even if the general could speak Arabic, using his language in his country seemed only courteous. Dawud continued, “Major General Procacci seemed happier letting them come after him.”

  “I’d find your excuses easier to believe if you’d put another soldier in his slot, not one of those damned snoops from the Ministry of Information.” No, Dallolio didn’t want to keep things smooth.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Juvarra looked to be the best man we could find in Turin.” Khalid knew his own Italian would never be as good as Dawud’s. It had got better with all the practice he’d had since landing in Rome. “He pushed the fanatics out of Volpiano. Now he’s moving west from there.”

  “Renato Procacci could have done the same thing.” Major General Dallolio stuck to Arabic. Maybe, as Khalid often did with Italian, he felt the practice would do him good.

  “Yes, Procacci could have done it. No one’s arguing that he couldn’t,” Dawud said. “But he wouldn’t do it. That was the trouble.”

  “He might not have cared for taking orders from men who weren’t in the chain of command,” Dallolio said.

  Dawud grinned impudently. “From filthy Muslim foreigners, you mean.”

  “I didn’t say that,” the commandant of Milan replied, his tone stiff.

  “I didn’t say you said it. I said you meant it,” Dawud said. “But if he’d been taking the fight to the Aquinists when we got there, we wouldn’t have had to tell him to do it. Everybody would have been happier then. Well, everybody except the Aquinists.”

  Benito Dallolio lit a cigarette. One thing smoking did was give you time to gather your thoughts. Beaming, Dawud drew a cigar from the breast pocket of his tunic. Dallolio offered his lighter. Dawud took it, lit the cigar, and puffed happy clouds of smoke.

  After a few puffs of his own, Dallolio said, “I hope you will not have cause to doubt my military judgment.”

  “So do we. Believe me, sir, so do we,” Khalid said.

  “If you do doubt me, the Ministry of Information will hear about it. So will the Grand Duke.” The general didn’t sound like a man asking questions.

  Dawud said, “Placed where you are, doing what you’re doing, did you expect you wouldn’t have anybody looking over your shoulder? At least you know we’re doing it. How many officers and clerks on your staff and in town here send reports on you to other people you don’t know anything about?”

  With a quick, harsh gesture, Dallolio stubbed out the cigarette. The ashtray was made from the base of an expended artillery round. He lit another one even while the first still sent up a thin ribbon of smoke. “You ask intriguing questions, don’t you?”

  “That’s one of the things we’re in Milan to do,” the Jew answered. “Sometimes people don’t like it. They—”

  “People like Procacci,” Dallolio broke in.

  “That’s right,” Khalid said.

  “Questions bother some people,” Dawud added. “Questions make them wonder if they ought to do things differently, not the way they and their father and their grandfathers always did them. Wondering things like that makes them uncomfortable.”

  “When you do things the way you always have, when you deal with people in the old-fashioned ways, you know where you stand and how everything ought to work,” Dallolio said. “That keeps things simple. It keeps you from fussing and worrying a thousand times a day.”

  “It does if you’re a general, certainly. Maybe not so much if you’re a private,” Khalid said.

  Major General Dallolio blinked. Dawud warmed to the theme: “It does if you’re a man. Maybe not so much if you’re a woman. It does if you’re a Catholic in Italy or a Muslim in the Maghrib. Maybe not so much if you’re a Jew. One of the intriguing questions you can ask is, Why do we do it this way when that way would be fairer?”

  “You want to turn Italy into a republic like the one you come from.” The general made it sound like an accusation.

  Yes, Khalid thought. “No,” he said. “What we want to do is keep the Aquinists from dragging Italy back to the days when the Church and the state would kill you for thinking things like that, not just for saying them.”

  “That’s what you want in the short term,” Dallolio said. “In the long run, the Grand Duke is the same kind of roadblock to you that the Aquinist Correctors are right now.”

  Yes, Khalid thought again. Benito Dallolio was a man to be reckoned with. Not many people looked ahead so clearly. “For your lifetime and mine, sir, our interests go hand-in-hand,” the investigator said.

  “And if your grandson ends up buying and selling mine, that’s just the turn of the card, eh?” Dallolio said.

  “Would you rather your grandson were a serf who couldn’t write his name?” Dawud asked. “That’s your other choice, isn’t it?”

  Dallolio lit yet another cigarette. No wonder his right index and middle fingers had yellow stains. “I ought to hate you,” he said. “I ought to hate you both. Instead, I’ve got to work with you. You’re right—the other choice is worse. Life’s grand sometimes, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  Not far from the Duomo and Major General Dallolio’s headquarters stood the Basilica of Saint Ambrose. That was a truly ancient building; it had gone up more than two centuries before the Hijra era began. Some of the inscribed stones outside the basilica were older
still. Dawud pointed to one of them. “Look!” he said. “It mentions Pliny.”

  “Pliny…” Khalid knew he’d heard the name lately, but couldn’t remember where. He’d had too many ancient Romans dropped on him at once.

  Dawud snorted disdainfully. “The one who died trying to rescue people when Vesuvius erupted.”

  “Oh. Him.” Khalid nodded. Now he knew which Roman Pliny was. He couldn’t get too excited about knowing, but know he did.

  They went inside. The paintings and mosaics surprised him. Christianity didn’t ban portrayals of human beings, the way Judaism and Islam did. Neither the eldest faith nor the youngest took the prohibition seriously any more, but neither was likely to use such images inside a synagogue or a mosque. Christianity took them for granted. Christian painters had been the world’s finest till Muslim artists, armed with geometrical perspective, passed them by.

  A sarcophagus was carved with crowds of round-faced, curly-haired people. “That’s got to be late Roman,” Dawud said.

  “It does?” The nuances of Roman art were also lost on Khalid.

  “It does,” Dawud answered firmly. A moment later, he found a card describing the sarcophagus. “Ha! Told you so. This was Stilicho’s. He was a German general who helped prop up the Roman Empire around Ambrose’s time.”

  “If you say so.”

  Under the church were catacombs where distinguished people had lain for century after century. One desiccated corpse, no more than a bit of skin and hair over bone, wore a bishop’s golden miter and robes of fresh maroon velvet.

  Again, Dawud found the card. “Thought so,” he grunted. “That’s Ambrose himself—or they say it is, anyway.”

  “Looks like he’s been here long enough,” Khalid said. “He was a little tiny fellow, wasn’t he?” Ambrose couldn’t have been more than three and a third cubits tall.

  “People in those days tended to run smaller. They didn’t get the nutrition we do now.” But, having said that, Dawud eyed the saint’s body again. “He’d still be the runt of the litter, chances are. He did it with brains—he didn’t have to be built like a wrestler.”