Jaws of Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  “A girl,” Ealstan answered. “Here—I’m tying the cord with one hank of dark brown yarn and one of yellow. Now I’m cutting it. Now …” He held up the baby. She started to cry, and quickly went from purple to pink.

  “Give her to me,” Vanai said. “Give me Saxburh.” That was the girl’s name—the Forthwegian girl’s name—they’d picked. Vanai also thought of her as Silelai—her own mother’s name. If things in Forthweg ever improved for Kaunians, perhaps the baby could use that name, too.

  Ealstan handed her to her mother as if he had in his hands an egg that might burst at any moment. Saxburh had a little hair, incredibly fine. What there was of it was dark. Her eyes were dark blue, but that meant nothing: all babies’ eyes were that color at first. Whether her skin would prove fair or swarthy, whether she’d be lean like a Kaunian or blocky like a Forthwegian— who could say? Too soon for such guesses.

  “Here,” Vanai said, and set the baby on her breast. Saxburh knew what to do; she began sucking right away. That made Vanai’s womb contract painfully. She let out a hiss and began to realize how worn she was. She felt as if she’d been run over by a wagon full of logs.

  And then Ealstan had the nerve to say, “Move a little.” But when, after a groan, she did, he swept off the fouled bedclothes and gave her a pair of drawers and a cloth pad of the sort she wore when her courses came. She set Saxburh down for a moment so she could put them on. The baby’s high, thin wail made Vanai pick her up again in a hurry.

  As Saxburh went back to nursing, Vanai asked Ealstan, “Could you get me something to eat, please? I feel like I haven’t had anything in years.”

  “Of course.” He hurried away and came back with bread and sausage and olives and cheese and two big mugs full of wine. As Vanai fell to like a famished wolf, he raised his mug high. “To our baby!”

  “To our baby!” Vanai echoed with her mouth full. After she swallowed, she took a long pull at her own mug. She wanted to bathe. She wanted to sleep for a year. For the time being, she was content to lie there with Saxburh and try to rest.

  Major Scoufas looked up from his mug of ale at Colonel Sabrino. “Well, your Excellency, now I know you are truly in bad odor at King Mezentio’s court,” the Yaninan dragonflier said.

  Sabrino’s mug held spirits, not ale. He hadn’t got very far down it, though, not yet. “I told you that the day my wing got here,” he replied. “Why do you say you know it now?”

  “Because if your superiors cared for you at all, they would have sent you north to try to stem the Unkerlanter tide there,” Scoufas replied. “But no— they have left you here to keep us Yaninans company. And I happen to know they are sending everything they can possibly spare to the north.”

  That called for a long pull at the mug of spirits. Sabrino wished he could have contradicted Scoufas. Unfortunately, the Yaninan was right. Sabrino said all he could say: “I am a soldier. I can only go where my orders take me. I can only do what my superiors tell me.”

  “I understand that, and the answer does you honor,” Major Scoufas said. “But is it not true that something very like a catastrophe is taking shape for Algarve in the north?” He spoke with a certain avid interest. If Algarve went down to defeat against Unkerlant, Sabrino didn’t see how Yanina could avoid also going down to defeat. That didn’t stop some Yaninans from enjoying Algarve’s misfortune. Having tasted defeat so often themselves, they enjoyed seeing the once-invincible Algarvians learn what the dish tasted like.

  “Disaster?” Sabrino shrugged. “I don’t think it’s so bad as that, Major. Sooner or later—probably sooner—Swemmel’s men will run out of soldiers, and we’ll mend the front, the way we’ve done here in the Duchy of Grelz.”

  He realized, too late, he should have called it the Kingdom of Grelz. Scoufas raised a dark, elegantly arched eyebrow to show he realized the same thing. Using the Unkerlanter name for the region showed how much ground the Algarvians had lost in the past year.

  And he realized he was liable to be talking through his hat when he claimed things would soon get better in the north. The Algarvian army defending that long and vital stretch of front seemed simply to have disappeared. Algarvian reports from the north grew more tight-lipped day by day. Swemmel’s men, by contrast, declared victory after victory and claimed the recapture of town after town. If those claims were lies, the Algarvians might have done a better job of denying them.

  Scoufas said, “If you were truly a lucky man, Colonel, or a well-favored one, you might have been sent off to Jelgava and escaped from Unkerlant altogether.”

  That held some truth, too, but rather less. Not many Algarvian formations were leaving Unkerlant to fight in the east. Mezentio didn’t have enough men in Unkerlant to hold back Swemmel’s soldiers as things were. The east would just have to take care of itself.

  And if it doesn‘t? Sabrino wondered. If it can’t? He finished the spirits at a gulp. Then we‘re in even more trouble than we were before.

  He eyed Major Scoufas. “You may not like Algarvians all that well, but I suggest you remember one thing: before the Unkerlanters get into Algarve— if we’re so unlucky as to have that happen—they have to go through Yanina.”

  Like most Yaninans, Scoufas had an expressive face. The emotion he expressed wasn’t delight, nor anything close to it. Sabrino smiled. Maybe Scoufas thought he was allowed to snipe at Algarvians but they couldn’t say anything about his kingdom. That wasn’t how things worked, no matter what he thought.

  Before either wing commander made the occasion more unpleasant, a Yaninan crystallomancer burst into the peasant hut where they were drinking and spoke rapidly in his own language. Yaninan always put Sabrino in mind of wine pouring out of a jug, glug glug glug. But he didn’t speak it, and had to ask, “What’s he saying?”

  “The Unkerlanters seem to be stirring down here after all,” Scoufas replied. “They’re trying to cross the Trusetal River and set up a bridgehead on the east side.”

  “Can’t have that.” Sabrino sprang to his feet. “If they get a company over today, it’ll be a brigade tomorrow, complete with behemoths.”

  Scoufas dipped his head in the Yaninan equivalent of a nod. “Aye, that is so,” he said. “We may not love each other, but there is nothing like a common foe to point out where our interests lie.”

  “True enough,” Sabrino said. “Shall we go pay a call on the common foe and try to make him extinct rather than common?”

  “Extinct?” Scoufas frowned; he needed a moment to understand the wordplay, which robbed Sabrino of half his pleasure in it. But then the Yaninan smiled. “Oh, I see. Aye, indeed it would be well if the Unkerlanters were extinct.” They both hurried out of the hut, shouting for their men.

  The Yaninan dragon handler with the big black mustache had taken it upon himself to minister to Sabrino’s dragon. He was as good as any Algarvian could have been. His name was Tsaldaris. He had no breeding to speak of; had he come from a notable family, he would have been flying dragons, not handling them. He spoke Algarvian after a fashion: enough to talk about dragons, at least. As Sabrino mounted the screeching, bad-tempered beast, Tsaldaris said, “Careful. Cinnabar—pfuif He made a disgusted noise and held thumb and forefinger close together to show he’d had little to give the dragon.

  “Any hope of getting more any time soon?” Sabrino asked, fastening his harness so the dragon couldn’t pitch him off no matter how much it wanted to.

  Tsaldaris tossed his head, as Yaninans did when they meant no. “Supply got unicorn’s prick up arse,” he said, which, Sabrino feared, summed things up altogether too well.

  Sabrino waved to Major Scoufas. Scoufas waved back. Sabrino looked to his own men. They were ready. He’d known they would be. And so were the Yaninans. They made perfectly good dragonfliers. Their trouble was, they had not enough dragons and not enough men trained to fly them, especially when facing a foe who came in such great numbers as the Unker-lanters did.

  At Sabrino’s nod, Tsaldaris loosed the chain that hel
d his dragon to its stake. Screaming fury at the world, the dragon leaped into the air with a great thunder of wings. Algarvian dragons painted in varying patterns of green and white and red rose with it. So did their Yaninan counterparts, those beasts painted simply red and white. Some carried eggs slung beneath them; others would protect those dragons and do what damage they could with their flames. Sabrino cursed the dearth of cinnabar. “The land of the Ice People,” he muttered. “The Mamming Hills.” Plenty of cinnabar both places. The Algarvians would never get to use any of it, not any more.

  Flying west, though, always made him feel better. When he was flying west, he was going on the attack. He’d had too much of the Unkerlanters’ coming to him. He was, he’d always been, a man who wanted to make things happen, not one who sat back and waited for them to happen to him.

  He didn’t need long to spot the Unkerlanter bridgehead. Eggs were bursting all around the edges of it. Most of them looked to be Unkerlanter eggs—King Swemmel’s soldiers had far more tossers than did the Yaninans facing them, too. And … Sabrino started cursing again, this time in good earnest. The Unkerlanters had thrown a plank bridge across the Trusetal River—their artisans were clever at such things—and were sending behemoths across to the eastern bank.

  Sabrino had two crystals with him—one to link him to his own squadron leaders; the other, with somewhat different emanations, to Major Scoufas. He spoke into both of them at the same time: “Those behemoths are our target. If we can slay them and wreck that bridge, the footsoldiers on the ground ought to be able to close out the rest of the Unkerlanters this side of the river.”

  Had they been Algarvian soldiers, he would have been sure of it. With Yaninans, one could only hope. However good their dragonfliers were, their footsoldiers had singularly failed to cover themselves with glory. No, plurally, for the Yaninans had failed again and again. But Sabrino couldn’t say that, no matter how true it was, for fear of offending Major Scoufas, who was as touchy as any Yaninan.

  The dragons carrying eggs dove on the bridge. The Unkerlanters had heavy sticks mounted nearby to protect it, of course. One dragon—an Algarvian beast—went straight into the Trusetal. Sabrino cursed yet again: one more comrade he would never see again. But eggs burst in large numbers, in the river and on both banks. Then one struck the bridge, square in the center. The burst of sorcerous energy pitched two behemoths into the water and set the bridge afire. Sabrino whooped.

  Whooping still, he gave new orders: “Now we attack the behemoths on the east bank of the Trusetal.”

  “Cover us, if you would be so kind,” Major Scoufas said. “My men and I will show you what your allies can do.”

  Although Sabrino had been about to order his own dragonfliers to swoop down on the Unkerlanter behemoths, he was willing to salve Scoufas’ pride, and so he answered, “Let it be as you say.”

  “My thanks,” the Yaninan told him, and gave his own orders in his own language. Sabrino understood not a word of them, but what they were was hardly in doubt. And, almost as if diving on targets in a practice field, the Yaninans carried out the attack. The behemoths below scattered, as targets would not and could not, but that mattered little, for what was a behemoth’s speed when measured against a dragon’s? If Scoufas and his men had to get a little closer to flame the behemoths than they would have needed to do with more cinnabar in them, what difference did that make?

  But, just as Sabrino began to gloat in good earnest, Captain Orosio’s face appeared in the crystal that kept the wing commander in touch with his fellow Algarvians. “Enemy dragons!” the squadron leader shouted. “A whole great swarm of them, coming out of the west!”

  They were painted rock-gray, of course, and Sabrino hadn’t seen them against the clouds. I’m getting old, he thought. If he wanted to get much older, he would have to fight hard now. “Melee!” he ordered. “If we break up their formation, we have the edge.” The Unkerlanters did fine as long as they acted in accordance with someone else’s plan. If they had to think for themselves, to decide quickly, they had trouble.

  A wild melee it was, too, once the Algarvians got in amongst the Unkerlanters. Dragons spun crazily through the sky. Sabrino tried to flame one of Swemmel’s sparrowhawks—that was the name the Algarvians gave the Unkerlanters’ best dragonfliers—but couldn’t come close enough to do it.

  When an Unkerlanter dragon got on his tail, he had to fly like a man possessed to keep from getting flamed himself. But he managed to blaze the enemy dragonflier with his stick—a lucky blaze, but he was glad to take it— and the rock-gray beast went wild, attacking every dragon around it. Since the Unkerlanters had far more dragons in the air than he did, that helped his side more than theirs.

  It didn’t do enough to help the Yaninan dragonfliers down below, though. The Unkerlanters had enough dragons to assail the Algarvians and Yaninans at the same time. Major Scoufas’ image appeared in Sabrino’s crystal. “We have to pull out!” he shouted.

  “We haven’t got rid of the bridgehead,” Sabrino said, blazing at another Unkerlanter dragonflier and missing.

  “If we stay, we still will not be rid of the bridgehead—and the Unkerlanters will be rid of us,” Scoufas replied.

  Sabrino cursed as he pondered. Had he not judged Scoufas right about the first part of that, he would have ignored the second; men and dragons fought to be used up at need. As things were … “Aye,” he said bitterly, and began the tricky business of getting his wing free. They’d hurt the Unkerlanters, but Swemmel still had men—and, worse, behemoths—on this bank of the Trusetal.

  All things considered, Garivald was pleased with the crop he and Obilot had managed to plant. They’d started late, with the mule they’d hired from Dagulf. But, looking over the soft green of growing barley and rye, he thought they should end up with plenty to get them through the winter.

  “Not so bad,” he told her after a long day of weeding.

  “No, not so bad,” she agreed. “The farther we are from anybody else, the better, too.” She dipped a horn spoon into the porridge of barley and leeks they were eating for supper.

  Garivald grunted. “That’s true enough, by the powers above. I didn’t think I’d end up a hermit, but you never know, do you?”

  “No.” Obilot’s eyes went far away. Back to whatever she’d had before the Algarvians swarmed into the Duchy of Grelz? Maybe. Garivald had never had the nerve to ask such questions, and she’d never said what drove her into the irregulars. All she said now was, “You never know.”

  Sooner or later, they would have to go back into Linnich. The farm had no salt lick; they could trade herbs and vegetables from the garden plot for salt, and for tools, and maybe for some chickens or ducks, too. When spring came again, they would need a draught animal for the plowing. Garivald was in no hurry. Not even the thought of seeing Dagulf cheered him. His friend reminded him of all he’d lost when Zossen vanished off the face of the earth.

  And he wasn’t sure he could trust Dagulf, not any more. They hadn’t seen each other for a couple of years. A lot had happened in that time. A lot could have happened, too. The only way to find out would be the hard way.

  Filled with such gloomy thoughts, Garivald was glad to lie down on the benches against the wall of the hut he and Obilot had taken for their own and go to sleep. As usual, a day in the fields made him sleep as if he were stuffed into a rest crate till the next morning.

  When he woke, he ate more barley porridge and went out to the fields to begin all over again. He might not do exactly the same thing day after day, but he always had plenty to do. No one who lived on a farm ever complained of too little to do, not between planting time and harvest.

  He’d just thrown a rock at a rabbit—and, to his disgust, missed, for it would have gone into the pot had he hit it—when three men came up the path leading to Linnich. They were the first men he’d seen on the path since he and Obilot found this farm. Now that spring had come, it was hardly a path at all, being much overgrown. Whoever had used t
his place before he came hadn’t had much use for company, either.

  Those three men saw him, too. One of them waved. Without thinking, Garivald waved back. He cursed himself for a fool afterwards, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered one way or the other. Two of the men carried sticks slung on their back; the third had his in his hand. If they were bandits, Garivald was in trouble. If they served King Swemmel, he was liable to be in more trouble still.

  “Hail!” called the one who’d waved. “Are you Fariulf?”

  “Aye, that’s me,” Garivald answered with something approaching relief. If they were using his false name, they didn’t want him for the crime of fighting the Algarvians without doing it under King Swemmel’s auspices. He hadn’t done much as Fariulf to get into trouble. “What do you want?” he added as the men came forward.

  Obilot was watching from the garden. He wondered if she would get a stick from inside the farmhouse and start blazing. But he stood between her and the three oncoming men, who’d got very close by then.

  “Are you hale?” asked the fellow who was doing the talking. He answered his own question: “Aye, I can see you are. Come along with us.”

  “Come along with you where?” Garivald asked.

  “Someplace you should have been long before this: King Swemmel’s army,” replied the—the impresser, Garivald realized he had to be. “You think you can sit out the war here in the middle of nowhere? That’s not how things work, pal. Come along quiet-like and nothing bad’ll happen to you till the cursed Algarvians have their chance at your worthless hide.” By then, all three aimed their sticks at him.

  Considering what they could have done to him, considering what they surely would have done to him had they known his real name, going into the Unkerlanter army didn’t strike Garivald as such a bad bargain. All he said was, “Let me tell my woman good-bye.” He pointed back toward Obilot.

  He expected them to refuse; impressers had an evil name. Maybe they were relieved he didn’t put up more of a fuss, for the man who talked for them replied, “Go ahead, but make it snappy.”