Jaws of Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  “You sound disappointed,” Leudast said.

  “Not me.” Kiun shook his head. “Surprised, maybe, but not disappointed. I haven’t seen the Algarvians back on their heels like this for a long time.” He shook his head again. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Algarvians back on their heels like this. Doesn’t seem natural, you know what I mean?”

  “I think so.” Leudast nodded. “They’re not doing anything themselves. They’re waiting for us to do something. They never used to do that. We used to wait for them, especially in the summertime. It’s not the same fight it was a couple of years ago.” A good thing, too, he thought. If the Algarvians were still kicking us around like that, we’d have long since lost the war.

  Kiun started to answer, then silently toppled, his stick falling from hands that would no longer hold it. He didn’t even twitch; he was dead before he hit the ground. A patch of leaves near his feet started smoldering.

  “Sniper!” Leudast called, and dove for cover. “Sniper up a tree!” he added—the trajectory of the beam that had slain Kiun proved as much.

  If the whoreson stayed quiet, how were they supposed to find him? He’d got Kiun through the head. Kiun had been about there, and the patch of plants on the ground that had caught fire was about there, so the enemy had to be over in that direction. “There!” Leudast pointed northeast. “One of those trees there. Work carefully, boys—he’ll be looking for us.”

  The Unkerlanters slid from tree to bush to rock, trying to show themselves as little as possible. And the sniper evidently knew what he was about, for he sat tight in whatever tree he’d chosen for himself. If the Unkerlanters didn’t spot him, he was free to get away, free to wait for the next unlucky soldier to come within range of his stick. But then a trooper shouted, “There he is!” and pointed to a big, leafy oak—a tree so big and leafy, the mere sight of it had made Leudast suspicious.

  Once seen, the sniper didn’t last long. He wounded one more man—not badly—before tumbling, dead, out of the tree. He was a trouser-wearing Kaunian with an Algarvian banner sewn to the sleeve of his tunic. Leudast kicked the body. “One more down,” he said, and the patrol moved on.

  Colonel Spinello stumbled south and east, trying to pick his way through a marsh east of Sommerda. He was weary and filthy and unshaven. He hoped he wouldn’t meet any Unkerlanter soldiers, for he wasn’t at all sure whether his stick held enough sorcerous energy to blaze. At that, he reckoned himself better off than most of the soldiers in the regiment he’d commanded. He remained alive and able to go on retreating. Most of them were either dead or captive.

  He missed a step and went into muck up to his knees. Before he could sink any deeper, Jadwigai, who remained on firm ground, grabbed him and helped him get back to decent footing himself.

  “Thank you, sweetheart,” he said, and gave her a kiss. She was every bit as worn and dirty as he, but still contrived to look good to him. It wasn’t just that she didn’t grow whiskers to add to a raffish appearance. She’d been so pretty starting out, grime and exhaustion only gave her beauty more sharply sculpted edges.

  “You’re welcome.” She pointed toward a clump of man-high bushes a couple of hundred yards ahead. “If we can get there, we’ll have a pretty good hiding place for the night.”

  “Aye, I think you’re right.” Spinello’s bones creaked when he started moving, but move he did. Unkerlanters were bound to be prowling in this swamp. If they caught up with him, he’d never make it out the other side to reconnect himself to the Algarvian army. He wondered if any Algarvian army remained in northern Unkerlant to be reconnected to. He couldn’t prove it, not at the moment, not by the way Mezentio’s forces had collapsed under the hammer blow the Unkerlanters dealt them.

  He went into muddy water again before reaching the bushes. This time, he pulled himself out without help from Jadwigai. The water was also stagnant and smelly. The last time he’d risked a fire, he’d used a lighted twig to get a leech off his leg. Mosquitoes hovered in buzzing, thrumming clouds.

  As he and Jadwigai had hoped, the bushes marked slightly higher ground. He stretched out, almost ready to fall asleep right there where he lay. Jadwigai sat down beside him. Maybe she was still full of luck—he was still breathing, after all. Or maybe he’d broken the regiment’s luck, and the whole northern army’s as well, when he first brought her to his bed.

  “Or maybe that’s nonsense,” he muttered.

  “What?” Jadwigai asked.

  “Nothing,” he told her. “Or I think it’s nothing, anyway.” He rolled onto his side and leaned on one elbow, studying her. “Ask you something?”

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  “Why are you still here with me? You might do better to let the Unkerlanters catch up with you. Especially …” Spinello’s voice trailed away. Especially since we’re killing Kaunians, and they’re not didn’t strike him as the most politic thing to say, no matter how true it was. He sometimes wondered why she hadn’t cut his throat while he lay sleeping. Asking her that didn’t seem politic, either. Last thing I need is to put ideas in her head if she hasn‘t got ‘em already.

  Jadwigai shook her head. “I’d just be a body to them, I think. They don’t care about Kaunians. We always made jokes about them in my village—it wasn’t that far from the border with Unkerlant.”

  She might well have been right. Both sides here in the west fought the war without restraint. Algarvian soldiers did as they pleased with Unkerlanter women in villages they’d overrun. The Unkerlanters sometimes killed Algarvians they captured in lingering, painful ways and left their bodies where their comrades could find them.

  “Besides,” Jadwigai went on, “I know you’ll keep me safe when we find the rest of the army.”

  “I’ll do my best.” Spinello wondered how good that best would be. A colonel normally would have no trouble getting whatever he wanted for his mistress. But times weren’t normal, and most mistresses weren’t Kaunians. More urgent worries reared their head at the moment. “What have we got left to eat?”

  “Bread. Hard and stale, but bread,” Jadwigai answered. “And spirits. If we mix the spirits with swamp water, we can drink the swamp water, too.” She was right again. Spinello shuddered all the same. The swamp water tasted as nasty as it smelled, and that remained true regardless of whether it would give him a flux of the bowels.

  The bread wasn’t just hard; it could have done duty for a brick. Spinello and Jadwigai shared. “If I had bad teeth, I’d starve,” he said.

  Before Jadwigai could answer, eggs burst off in the distance. “What’s happening to the army?” she asked. “Have you got any idea?”

  “In detail? No,” Spinello said. “In general? Aye. They threw more at us than we could stand up against, and they broke us. I was afraid they were going to do that, but they’ve done more than I thought they could. They used columns of behemoths to smash through our lines, then turned in so they’d either surround us or make us fall back … and they did it over and over and over. I didn’t know they had that many behemoths—or dragons, either. I don’t think anybody in Algarve knew what all Swemmel had before this fight started.”

  “You might have done better if you had known,” Jadwigai remarked.

  “Aye, that’s so.” Spinello admitted what he could hardly deny. “But it’s too late to dwell on it now. Now we have to hope we can stay alive”—when he said we, he meant not only himself and Jadwigai, but every Algarvian in the north of Unkerlant—”and somehow stop the enemy.”

  More eggs burst. “Do you think we can?” Jadwigai asked.

  “Sooner or later, we have to,” Spinello replied. “They’ll run out of men and beasts and supplies. If we have anything at all left by then, we’ll stop them. But when? Where?” He shrugged an elaborate Algarvian shrug. The answer was important, but he couldn’t do much to influence it, not as a harried fugitive he couldn’t. He took off his hat and laid it under his head for a pillow.

  Jadwigai lay down beside him in the bushe
s. They’d made love a few times during the grinding retreat, but they were both too weary now. Spinello reached out to pat her hand. Then he dove headlong into oblivion.

  He woke a little before dawn. Jadwigai still slept. With care and worry gone from her face, she looked improbably young. Spinello shook his head. She was as tough as she was pretty. She’d done as well as she could for herself in a situation as near impossible as made no difference. She’d done far better than most of the rest of the Kaunians from Forthweg. And if she stayed with him now, that was bound to be hard self-interest.

  He shook her awake, ready to clap a hand to her mouth if she made more noise than she should. She’d done that once or twice. Not now, though. Reason came into her eyes almost at once. “Let’s get going,” Spinello said quietly.

  “Aye.” Jadwigai nodded. “Maybe you can blaze some of these marsh birds.”

  “Maybe.” But Spinello remembered a coot he’d killed. It hadn’t been worth eating once dead. Of course, when you got hungry enough …

  The sun was still low in the southeast when they came on a couple of squads’ worth of soldiers. For a moment, Spinello thought himself a dead man. Then he realized they were Algarvians, stragglers like himself. No, not stragglers: just defeated men in full retreat. They even had a crystallomancer with them. “We’re supposed to have a strongpoint in Volkach,” the fellow said. “If we can get there, maybe we’ll get back to the real war.” Under his breath, he added something like, “If there’s any real war left up here.” But he didn’t say it loud enough to make Spinello ask him to repeat it.

  As they fought their way through the swamp, one of the troopers asked, “Where’d you pick up the twist, Colonel?” He sounded curious and a little jealous, as he might have had Spinello carried a knapsack full of smoked pheasant and fine wine.

  Unlike a knapsack, Jadwigai could speak for herself. “I’m not a twist, you—” What she called him proved she’d learned soldierly Algarvian. “I was—I am—the luck of the Alberese Regiment.”

  “Oh!” To Spinello’s surprise, the soldier bowed to her as if to an Algarvian duchess. “I’ve heard about you. A lot of folks up here have heard about you.”

  “Aye, that’s right.” Another soldier nodded. He turned to Spinello. “Anybody gives you a hard time about her, Colonel, you just yell. There’s plenty of people won’t let anything happen to her.”

  “That’s good to hear,” Spinello said.

  He sounded less happy when they came out of the swamp and up onto solid ground. The vast plains of northern Unkerlant were ideal ground for behemoths. Back in the early days of the war, that had all been to Algarve’s advantage. Now, when the Unkerlanters could put three, four, five beasts in the field for every Algarvian animal, moving across the plains made sweat trickle from his armpits and down the small of his back.

  Swemmel’s men had been through here, on their way farther east. Bloated, stinking corpses, many of them still wearing kilts, lay here and there. But no Unkerlanters were in sight now. “Get your bearings on this Volkach place,” Spinello told the crystallomancer. “Is it still holding?”

  After squatting over his crystal, the mage nodded. “About ten miles, they tell me,” he said. “We can do it.”

  “We have to do it,” Spinello said, and the other worn, beaten, dirty Algarvians nodded. Actually, there was one alternative. If they didn’t get to Volkach, they would die. For that matter, if the Unkerlanters had a tight perimeter around the town, they were in trouble.

  But they stumbled into Volkach late that afternoon, though nervous pickets almost blazed them for enemy soldiers. They’d had to hide a couple of times while Unkerlanter columns went by. Swemmel’s men, though, were after bigger game than a few handfuls of holdouts, and kept right on hurrying east. Back when the war was new, Algarvian soldiers had stormed west the same way.

  The officer in charge in the Unkerlanter town was a major. He commanded most of a regiment of soldiers, a few egg-tossers, and half a dozen behemoths—not enough to do anything with, but too much for the Unkerlanters to gobble down at a gulp. It was the biggest Algarvian force Spinello had found in one place in a couple of weeks. The major seemed relieved to see him there, and cared not at all that a Kaunian girl sat beside him.

  “What will we do, sir?” the fellow asked, as if Spinello had any answers. “What can we do? We can’t hold on here much longer—Volkach isn’t anything but a shield that lets our men farther east retreat. And everything in the north is ruined. Everything, I tell you!”

  “I know.” After all Spinello had been through since the Unkerlanter blow fell, he thought he knew better than the major did, but what point to saying so? “Sooner or later, we’re bound to stop them.” He hoped he wasn’t whistling in the dark. He wanted a bath and food and clean clothes.

  Before he could ask for any of them, the major said, “If only the islanders hadn’t invaded Jelgava. We’d get the reinforcements we need then.”

  “Maybe,” Spinello said, and then, in spite of everything, he fell asleep where he sat.

  Leino saluted Captain Brunho and spoke in classical Kaunian: “Sir, I request your leave to transfer from Habakkuk to the forces now on the ground in Jelgava.”

  Brunho studied him: a tall, somber Lagoan staring down at a stubby little Kuusaman. “May I ask why?” he said, also in the old language—the only tongue the two of them had in common.

  “Of course, sir.” Leino had to stay polite. If he affronted the captain, he wouldn’t get what he wanted. “I want to have the chance to give the Algarvians what they deserve. We have largely won the war at sea, and my duties on Habakkuk these days have more to do with maintenance than anything else. This ship is not new anymore. It is proved. It no longer needs me. The land war does.”

  “You want to do something you have not done before,” Brunho said.

  Though Leino couldn’t tell whether the captain approved of his lust for novelty, he nodded. “Aye, sir.” And it was true. But it wasn’t the whole reason. The other side of the coin was that he wanted to get away from Xavega. Volunteering to go forward into battle would let him break clean without hurting her and without making her angry. However much he enjoyed his time in bed with her, he couldn’t spend all his time with her in bed, and he still found her annoying when they weren’t in bed. She also intimidated him enough that he didn’t want to come right out and tell her so.

  Brunho stroked his chin. “You are not the first mage aboard Habakkuk to make this request.”

  “You see, sir?” Leino said. “We have the chance to strike directly at Algarve now. I am not surprised I am not the only one who wants to take it.”

  “If we lose too many mages from Habakkuk, our ship here will abruptly cease to be a ship,” Captain Brunho said. “An iceberg in the warm waters off the coast of Jelgava would not last long.”

  “You have plenty to keep Habakkuk safe, and the margin for security is large.” Leino knew that was true; he’d made the staffing arrangements for sorcerers himself. “And I repeat, maintaining the ship is now routine. For most of the tasks involved, you do not need mages of the highest rank. The fight on the mainland, though …”

  “These are almost the same arguments the other mage used against me,” Brunho said with a wintry smile. “Since I had a difficult time disagreeing then, I am not surprised at having a difficult time disagreeing now. Your request for transfer is approved.” He reached into his desk. “I have some forms for you to fill out.”

  “I thought you might,” Leino said dryly. The forms were printed in both Kuusaman and Lagoan. Like any cooperative project, Habakkuk produced twice as much paperwork as it would have had one kingdom undertaken it. With a sigh, the Kuusaman mage inked a pen and set to work. Escaping from Xavega appeared nowhere on any leaf of paper, no matter how large it loomed in his mind.

  When Leino finally finished the forms, he pushed them across the desk at Captain Brunho. The Lagoan officer just accepted them; for all the sense he could make of them, they might
have been written in demotic Gyongyosian. “I thank you for your services,” he said in the one tongue he and Leino did share. “Gather your effects and report to the starboard bow. I already have a boat scheduled to take the other mage ashore. You may share it.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Leino said. After saluting—by Captain Brunho’s upraised eyebrow, he might have done it better—he hurried away.

  His effects, as Brunho called them, fit into a duffel bag. It was a heavy bag, because a lot of those effects were sorcerous tomes. Walking with the bag over his right shoulder and with a list to the left, he made his way to the starboard bow.

  To his surprise, he found Xavega there, the sea breeze blowing her coppery hair out behind her and also blowing at her kilt so she had to use one hand to hold it down. He hadn’t intended to say good-bye, just to go. Better that way, he’d judged. Now he had no choice.

  Or so he thought, till Xavega said, “Farewell, Leino. I am leaving Habakkuk.”

  Leino gaped. Then he started to laugh. “So you’re the other mage!” he exclaimed. Xavega looked blank, and he realized he’d been startled into Kuusaman. He translated his words into classical Kaunian.

  “The other mage?” Xavega still looked puzzled.

  “I am leaving Habakkuk, too.” Leino set down his duffel on Habakkuk’s ice-and-sawdust deck. “We have just been sailing here. It is all routine. I wanted the chance to fight the Algarvians on the mainland.”

  Xavega threw her arms around him and kissed him. A nearby Lagoan sailor whistled enviously. Squeezed against Xavega’s firm, soft warmth, Leino couldn’t imagine why he’d wanted to leave her. He knew he would remember as soon as he no longer felt her breasts pressing against him, but that would be later. Now … Now he wanted to go back to his cabin with her.

  No time for that. They got into the boat, and sailors lowered it down to the sea. Another mage, a Lagoan, stood at the stern to seize the sorcerous energy in the ley line and propel the boat toward the distant shore. Xavega said, “When I volunteered to go to the mainland, I did not think I would see you again.”