Jaws of Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  While Tassi and Hajjaj ate and drank, they stuck to small talk. He wondered if she knew the social rules of his kingdom. He had, from time to time, used them to annoy foreigners. Now she seemed as content with delay as he was.

  But, at last, he could avoid things no longer. “Tell me,” he said, “what am I to do with you?”

  “Whatever suits your kingdom best, of course,” Tassi answered. “That is the way of such things, is it not so?” She spoke with a curious bitter resignation.

  Hajjaj shook his head. “Not necessarily. Not entirely. If I thought only about what suited my kingdom best, I would have sent you back to your husband at once. Do you doubt it, even for an instant?”

  “No,” she said in a small voice.

  “All right, then,” Hajjaj said. “We understand each other, at least so far. If you had your choice, what would you do?”

  “Blaze my father when he made the match with Iskakis,” Tassi replied without hesitation. “He could not have done worse if he tried for a hundred years.”

  “You cannot do anything about that now. Of the things you can do, what would you do?”

  “I have no good answers for you,” Tassi said, and Hajjaj nodded: he hadn’t expected her to have any good answers. She went on, “If you are willing to let me stay here, I would like to do that. No one bothers me here. Until now, I have never been in a place where no one bothers me.”

  Well, Hajjaj thought with wry amusement, this is hardly the time to ask if she wants to keep my bed warm. Not even Kolthoum could argue with me about that, not after what she just said. Even so, his eyes traveled the length of her. Maybe it was the way her nipples and the hair between her legs stood out against her light skin that made her seem more naked than a Zuwayzi woman would have. That was the closest he’d come to an explanation that made sense, anyhow.

  She mistook his silence for one of a rather different sort. Or perhaps it wasn’t so different after all. As she had when she dropped to her knees in the doorway, she said, “I would do anything to be able to stay here, anything you might ask me.”

  That could mean only one thing. Hajjaj said, “If I took you up on that, you would not be able to say that no one here bothered you.”

  “I do not think it would be much of a bother,” Tassi said.

  And what is that supposed to mean? Hajjaj wondered. That she wouldn’t mind doing whatever he wanted or that she didn’t think he would want anything very often? He didn’t ask the question. Not asking was better when he didn’t really want to know the answer. Instead, he said, “You are welcome to stay here for as long as you like, but I do not think you can make this your true home. You are a young woman. One day, very likely, you will want to start a family of your own, and you will need to meet a man whose family is of a rank to match yours.”

  Tassi tossed her head so vigorously, her dark curls flew. Yaninans used that gesture when they meant No. She said, “Bloodlines are splendid—in a horse or a unicorn.” A Zuwayzi would have spoken of camels. “But Iskakis has some of the best blood in Yanina, and how much joy did my marriage to him bring me?”

  “Iskakis also has some … special tastes,” Hajjaj pointed out, as delicately as he could.

  “I know.” She grimaced. “He tried them with me a few times. They hurt, if you must know. But even so, I did not much interest him that way.”

  Then he was a fool. But Hajjaj did not say that aloud. Tassi was too likely to judge he wanted pleasure from her body. And he knew he might, though taking it seemed more trouble than it was worth. “You may stay here— unbothered—for as long as you like,” was what he did end up saying.

  “Thank you,” Tassi said softly.

  “You are welcome,” Hajjaj replied, “and you may take that however you like.”

  The ley-line ship slid to a halt. Since it wasn’t moving any more, it settled down into the water instead of gliding above all but the worst of the waves. “Well, we’re here,” Istvan said, “wherever here is and whatever the Kuusamans are going to do with us now.”

  “They don’t dare treat us too badly,” Kun said. “Gyongyos has plenty of Kuusaman captives, and our people can take revenge on them.”

  “They haven’t done anything too horrible yet,” Szonyi said. “They’ve given us plenty of food, even if it is accursed fish all the time. If I eat any more fish, I’ll grow fins.”

  Captain Frigyes said, “They are islanders. They eat fish themselves. They give us the same rations they give their own warriors. That is honorable.” No matter how honorable it was, Istvan’s company commander had been sunk in gloom ever since the Kuusamans captured him on Becsehely. He’d been ready to lay down his life to power the sorcery that would help drive the enemy off the island. He’d been ready, aye, but he hadn’t got the chance—and Becsehely had fallen, as so many other islands in the Bothnian Ocean had fallen to Kuusamo.

  “We did all we could, Captain,” Istvan said, not for the first time. “The stars will still shine on us. We didn’t do anything to make them want to withhold their light.”

  “We failed,” Frigyes said. “We should have held Becsehely, and we failed.”

  “Too many Kuusaman ships,” Kun said, reasonable and logical as usual. “Too many Kuusaman dragons. Too many Kuusaman soldiers. Once they got ashore, sir, how could we hope to hold the island?”

  “With our life’s blood,” Frigyes answered. “But we had no chance to give it.” He held his head in his hands, not bothering to hide his misery.

  The iron door to the compartment housing the captives came open with a nasty squeal of hinges—even a lubber like Istvan could tell this ship had seen better years. A couple of Kuusaman troopers aimed sticks at the Gyongyosians. “To come out,” one of them said, speaking Istvan’s language very badly. “To go off this ship. To move—now.” The last word held the snap of command.

  One by one, Istvan and his countrymen got to their feet and filed out of the compartment and into the corridor beyond. The Kuusamans stepped back. If anyone thought of seizing a stick and raising a revolt, he never got the chance. Istvan didn’t even think of it. He walked along the corridor and up the narrow iron stairway to the deck of the transport. It was the first time he’d seen the sky since going aboard the ship after Becsehely fell.

  Then he saw the skyline—and started to laugh. A Kuusaman guard on deck swung his stick toward him. “Why you to laugh?” the little, slant-eyed fellow asked. By his tone, no captive had any business laughing.

  Istvan didn’t care. “Why? Because this is Obuda, that’s why,” he answered. He knew the shape of Mount Sorong—not much of a mountain by his standards, but still a peak of sorts—as well as he knew the shape of his own foot. “I fought here. I didn’t expect to see the place again, I’ll tell you that.”

  “You soldier here?” the guard said, and Istvan nodded. The guard shrugged. “Soldier no more. Now you to be captive here.”

  Kun said, “This harbor wasn’t here when we were fighting on Obuda.”

  Istvan nodded. Since the island fell, the Kuusamans had run up an enormous number of piers—and all of them looked to have ships tied up at them. Gyongyos and Kuusamo had fought over Obuda not least because several ley lines converged there, making it important for one navy or the other to hold the place. The Kuusamans weren’t just holding it these days—they’d taken it and made it their own.

  “They couldn’t have got this much work out of the Obudans,” Istvan said as the guards marched him and his comrades toward the gangplank. “There weren’t that many of them, and they’re lazy buggers anyhow.” He never had thought much of the islanders.

  “They didn’t even bother,” Kun said positively. “Most of this port was hammered together by sorcery.”

  “How can you tell?” Istvan asked.

  “Because all the piers and all the pilings are just alike,” Kun answered. “That means they used the law of similarity a lot—it can’t mean anything else.” He scowled. “I wish we could afford to throw magecraft around like
this. We’d stand a lot better chance in the fight, I’ll tell you.”

  Under the sticks of the Kuusaman guards, the captives marched off the pier and onto the beach of Obuda. More Kuusamans waited for them there. One of the little men turned out to speak pretty good Gyongyosian. “I am Colonel Eino,” he said. “I am the commandant of the captives’ camp here. I want you to understand what that means. What that means is that, as far as you are concerned, I am the stars above. If anything good happens to you, it will happen because of me, and because of whatever you have done to please me. And if anything bad happens to you, it will also happen because of me, and because of whatever you have done to make me angry. Do not make me angry. You will be very sorry if you do.”

  “Blasphemous, goat-eating son of a whore,” Istvan muttered. The captives around him—even Kun, that hard-boiled city man—nodded. Colonel Eino might know the Gyongyosian language, but he didn’t know Gyongyosians.

  Istvan’s close comrades weren’t the only ones to be appalled. More mutters rose from other soldiers captured on Becsehely—several hundred of them had filed off the transport. Some of them shouted instead of muttering.

  Those shouts bothered Eino not at all. “I care nothing for what you think of me,” he said. “I care only that you obey me. When the war is over—when we have won it—you will go back to Gyongyos again. Until then, you belong to Kuusamo. Remember that.” He turned his back, ignoring the new shouts that rose from the captives.

  The Kuusaman guards didn’t speak so much Gyongyosian. Of course, they didn’t need to, either. They shouted, “To march!”—and march the captives did.

  “Somewhere not far from here, we beat these buggers back from the beaches.” Istvan heaved a sigh. “But they’re like roaches, seems like. Stomp ‘em once and they just come back again.”

  He’d expected to have to march all the way to the captives’ camp, wherever on the island it turned out to be. He looked toward the forest that grew almost down to the beach. Parts of it were still battered from the fight his countrymen had put up before the Kuusamans finally seized Obuda. His own memories of that losing campaign were of hunger and fog and fear.

  To his surprise, though, the guards marched his comrades and him only as far as what proved to be a ley-line caravan depot. “In! To go in!” the Kuusamans commanded. Into the caravan cars went the Gyongyosians.

  Kun kept shaking his head, as he had at the harbor. “This is plainly the extension of the ley line the ship that brought us from Becsehely used,” he said, though no such thing was plain to Istvan. “The Kuusamans use every bit of sorcerous energy they can. We don’t. No wonder the war isn’t going the way we wish it would.”

  “Silence, there,” Captain Frigyes said sharply. “I’ll hear no talk of defeatism. Have you got that, Corporal?”

  “Aye, Captain,” Kun answered, the only thing he could say—out loud, at any rate. To Istvan, he murmured, “No defeatism, is it? How does he think we got here? Have we invaded Obuda again?”

  “We got caught, but that doesn’t mean we’ve got to give up,” Istvan said. His own attitude lay somewhere between Kun’s and Frigyes’. Obviously, Gyongyos had lost the fight for Becsehely, and the whole war in the Bothnian Ocean was going Kuusamo’s way. Even so … “If we let the slant-eyes think we’ll do whatever they say, they’ll end up owning us, do you know what I mean:

  Kun just grunted. Whether that meant he agreed or he didn’t think the remark worth wasting words on, Istvan couldn’t have said.

  The ley line went through the forest, straight as the beam from a stick. It passed by a couple of little Obudan villages. The natives hardly looked up from their fields to watch it go past. Before the Derlavaian kingdoms came to their islands, they’d lived a simple life. They hadn’t known metalworking or much magecraft past exploiting obvious power points or how to tame the wild dragons that flew from one island to another and preyed on men and flocks alike. By now they’d grown so accustomed to the marvels of modern civilization, they took them for granted.

  When at last the ley-line caravan stopped, it had climbed halfway up the slope of Mount Sorong. Istvan thought they were somewhere near the town of Sorong, the largest native settlement. He wondered how much of Sorong was left these days. Then he shrugged. The Obudans hadn’t been strong enough to hold Gyongyos or Kuusamo away from their island. Whatever happened to them, they deserved it.

  “Out! To go out!” shouted the guards on the caravan cars.

  Out Istvan went. There straight ahead stood the captives’ camp, behind a palisade with nails sticking out of the timbers like hedgehog spines, to make them all but impossible to climb. Istvan looked around and started to laugh again.

  “What to be funny?” a guard demanded.

  “This used to be my regiment’s encampment,” Istvan answered. The Kuusaman nodded to show he understood, then shrugged to show he wasn’t much impressed. After a moment, Istvan wasn’t much impressed, either. The Gyongyosians hadn’t been strong enough to hold Kuusamo away from Obuda. Didn’t that mean they deserved whatever happened to them?

  That was a chilly thought with which to enter the captives’ camp.

  Some of the Gyongyosian barracks still stood. The guards took Istvan and his comrades to a newer, less weathered building. He turned out to have a better cot and more space as a captive of the Kuusamans than he’d had as a Gyongyosian soldier on Obuda. He didn’t know what that said about the relative strength of the two warring kingdoms. Nothing good, probably, not from a Gyongyosian point of view.

  “I wish to speak to Colonel Eino,” Frigyes told a guard. The Kuusaman went off to see if the camp commandant cared to speak with a captive captain.

  To Istvan’s surprise, Eino came to the barracks. “What do you want?” he asked. “Whatever it is, it had better be important.”

  “It is,” Frigyes said. “I want your word of honor as an officer that you do not abuse us by feeding us the filthy, forbidden flesh of goats. We are in your power. I hope you are not so vile as to make us either starve or become ritually unclean.”

  Alarm blazed through Istvan. He glanced at Kun and Szonyi. They looked alarmed, too. The scar on his hand seemed to throb. His gaze swung back to Colonel Eino.

  The camp commandant laughed. “Many of your people ask this. I give you my word, it does not happen.” He laughed again, less pleasantly. “You may ask, what is a Kuusaman’s word worth?” Off he went, leaving appalled silence behind him.

  Colonel Spinello was bored. He’d been a great many things since the war took him to Unkerlant—wounded, hungry, freezing, terrified—but never bored, never till now. He yawned till his jaw creaked. He felt like ordering another attack on Pewsum, just to give his men—and himself—something to do.

  No matter what he felt like, he refrained. He had no doubt whatever that his brigade was glad about the lull in the fighting. It didn’t break his heart, either. He’d more than half expected King Swemmel’s men to have laid on an attack against Waldsolms by now. Maybe the Unkerlanters were enjoying the lull, too.

  If I want something to do, I ought to get Jadwigai into bed with me, he thought, not for the first time. Not for the first time, he turned the thought aside. Tampering with the brigade’s luck would only be bad for his own. He even believed that, which made it easier for him to resist temptation—but not a great deal easier.

  Then a shout rang out that sent him springing to his feet: “Field post! The field post’s here!”

  Spinello hurried out of the Unkerlanter hut where he’d been brooding. He hadn’t even reached the unpaved street before turning into his usual jaunty self. “Come on, boys,” he called to the other soldiers also hurrying toward the wagon that brought letters from home. “Time to find out how much your girlfriends are trying to squeeze out of you this time.”

  The men in the wagon started calling out names. Spinello’s clerks took care of most of them, sorting the envelopes and packages by regiment and company so they could go on up to the front. Every so often,
one of the clerks said, “He’s wounded,” or “He’s dead,” or, “He got transferred six months ago. Anybody who’s looking for him here is out of luck.”

  “Here’s one for Colonel Spinello,” one of the field postmen called.

  “That’s me.” Spinello happily reached for it.

  Before giving it to him, the fellow in the wagon held it under his nose. “Perfumed!” he exclaimed, which made all the Algarvians in the muddy main street whoop and sigh and roll their eyes and pretend to swoon.

  “Powers below eat every bloody one of you,” Spinello said. “You’re just jealous, and you bloody well know it.”

  None of the soldiers argued with him. They probably were jealous, but not in a bad way. Any officer in the Algarvian army who got a perfumed letter only saw his prestige rise—it made his men think he was good at some of the things that made life worth living.

  “You going to read it to us, Colonel?” somebody called. A chorus of baying whoops followed that suggestion.

  “Read your own letters—if you know how to read,” Spinello replied with dignity. “I’m going to enjoy this one myself.” It came from Fronesia; if the scent, the same one she used herself, hadn’t been enough to tell him as much, her flowing script would have. He smiled. He’d had a splendid time with her back in Trapani, the sort of time that would have made his men whoop even more than they were already whooping if he’d chosen to tell them about it.

  Before he tore the envelope open, he glanced up and saw Jadwigai peering out through one of the small windows in the peasant hut she used as her own. She rarely come out onto the street when Algarvians from outside the brigade could see her. One more proof she knows what happens to most Kaunians, Spinello thought, something that hadn’t occurred to him before.

  He took out the letter from his mistress, unfolded it, and began to read. The first part was all conventional enough. Fronesia missed him, she hoped he was safe, she hoped he got leave soon so she could see him, she suggested several things she might do to make his leave more entertaining if he got it. A couple of the things she suggested sounded entertaining enough to make him want to head back toward Trapani whether he had leave or not.