Jaws of Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  Across the Twegen River, the Unkerlanters sat and waited. Vanai had never thought much about them one way or the other. Now she hated them. Had they come to the Forthwegians’ aid, Eoforwic wouldn’t have an Algarvian left in it. Ealstan was surely right—Swemmel’s men were letting the redheads solve their Forthwegian problem for them.

  When Vanai went into the kitchen again, she found she had problems of her own: problems in the larder. Last time she’d ventured out, she’d got as much food as she could carry back. Now she would have to do it again.

  She went over to the cradle and looked down at Saxburh. The baby smiled to see her, smiled and laughed. Vanai smiled, too, but she had to work at it. She didn’t like the idea of taking Saxburh out with her when she sallied forth to get food, but she liked leaving her behind even less. Saxburh might cry every minute till she got back. Or, worse, she might not be able to come back. Taking the baby out was dangerous, but so was leaving her behind. There were no safe places, no safe choices, in Eoforwic these days.

  Vanai scooped the baby out of the cradle. “Come along, you little nuisance,” she said. Saxburh thought that was very funny. Vanai, unfortunately, didn’t. If she had to carry Saxburh, that was so much less food she could bring back. Before setting out, she renewed the masking spell on herself and cast it on her daughter. On Saxburh, she could see it take effect; the baby looked plumper and a little darker. On her ventures out of the house, Vanai had seen a handful of Kaunians bold enough to look like themselves. She admired their courage without wanting to imitate it.

  Carrying Saxburh downstairs was easy. Carrying her and a lot of groceries back up to the flat would be a lot more work. I’ll worry about that once I get the food, Vanai thought. She’d managed before. She expected she would be able to do it again.

  She paused inside the lobby near the door to make sure everything was quiet before venturing out. Algarvian soldiers wouldn’t know her for a Kaunian now, but they or their Forthwegian counterparts were liable to blaze anyone who appeared unexpectedly.

  No redheads were in sight when she stepped out onto the street, only a couple of Forthwegians—people who looked like Forthwegians, anyhow, just as she did. One, a woman, smiled toward Saxburh. The other, a fighter as unkempt and grimy as Ealstan was these days, paid neither Vanai nor the baby any attention after a quick glance to make sure she wasn’t an Algarvian.

  Satisfied as to that, he tramped on down the middle of the street, a stick in his hands and ready to blaze.

  No matter how Forthwegian Vanai looked, she couldn’t match that display of self-assurance. She stayed close to the walls as she hurried toward the market square where she’d gone so often before Mezentio’s men seized her and flung her into the Kaunian quarter. People still bought and sold things there, but it was a smaller, more furtive place than it had been.

  Getting there wasn’t quite so simple as it had been, either. She had to skirt or climb over piles of rubble that had been houses and shops and blocks of flats. That would have been easier without carrying Saxburh, too. Coming back with food, again, would be even more delightful. You do what you have to do, Vanai thought. You do it, and then you think about how you did it. One thing at a time, that’s all.

  Worried-looking Forthwegians scurried around the market square, getting what they could and cursing the prices they had to pay. The people who sold, most of them, were as hard-faced as the Forthwegian fighter Vanai had seen. Several of them had guards with sticks at their backs to make sure they got paid for their goods.

  Vanai winced when she heard the prices they were asking. “That’s twice as much for flour as I paid the last time I was here,” she complained.

  With a shrug, the man from whom she was buying said, “That’s on account of I used to have twice as much to sell. If you don’t want to pay it, sweetheart, somebody else will.”

  He was doubtless right about that. Vanai paid. She did have plenty of silver. She paid for cheese and beans and almonds and peas, too. Nothing exciting there, only stuff that would keep and could go into easy stews and porridges. She wasn’t worrying about fancy meals these days, only about holding starvation at bay.

  Saxburh started to cry when Vanai was about halfway back to her block of flats. Vanai didn’t know whether the baby was hungry or wet or just sick of being toted around like—quite literally—one more sack of beans. She didn’t care, either. She couldn’t do anything with Saxburh till she got back to the flat, not unless she wanted to put all the food down. And that was about the last thing she wanted to do. In a city at war, getting back out of sight was far and away the smartest course.

  She soon found out just how true that was. Something—noting motion in the sky, perhaps—made her look up in spite of the constant struggle to keep her feet. She gasped in horror. Flying straight toward her, hardly higher than the housetops, were half a dozen dragons, all of them painted in gaudy, crazy patterns of red, green, and white—Algarvian beasts. They carried eggs slung under their bellies.

  Vanai shrank back against a wall, not that that would have done the slightest bit of good had they decided to flame her or drop those eggs close by. But they swept on past, so low that their wings kicked dust up from the ground into her eyes. Without a free hand to rub at them, she blinked frantically.

  A moment later, eggs burst in the market square. The noise smote her ears. Saxburh’s wails grew louder. She heard screams behind her, too. “I can’t do anything, sweetheart,” Vanai said, jiggling the baby up and down in the crook of her elbow. “I’m just glad we went out early.”

  Saxburh wasn’t glad, and didn’t care who knew it. Vanai couldn’t do anything about that without slowing down, and she wasn’t about to slow down for anything or anybody, Saxburh included. Getting home was the most important thing she could do. She’d already had that thought. It was especially true now. And she did it, wailing baby or no wailing baby.

  Getting the door to the block of flats open without putting anything down proved another adventure, and getting up the stairs another one still. But she did what needed doing, and she was able to set some of her bundles on the floor in the hallway in front of her flat so she could use a key to open the door. That done, she hustled groceries inside and closed and barred the door behind her.

  By then, Saxburh wasn’t just red in the face; she was a nasty, blotchy purple. “I know,” Vanai said soothingly. “I know. Nobody was paying enough attention to you. Now I can.” She cuddled the baby and nursed her. Saxburh settled down and quickly went to sleep. Vanai wished somebody could calm her down as easily as that.

  She put the grain and nuts and vegetables and cheese in the kitchen cupboards. Then she turned the tap. Only a trickle of water came out. She said something in classical Kaunian that surely would have shocked Brivibas, then something even more incendiary in Forthwegian. Up till now, she’d always been able to rely on the water. If she couldn’t …

  Cursing again, she put a pot under the tap to catch as much water as it would give. Where could she get more? The fancier parts of Eoforwic had a good many fountains. This grimy district? No. She would have to get some from somewhere. You could live a lot longer without food than without water.

  The trickle stopped. Vanai stared in dismay. Maybe people would repair the mains, and the water would come back on again soon. Maybe they wouldn’t, and it wouldn’t. However things turned out, she had to do her best. If I can, she thought. If I can.

  Marshal Rathar could look east across the Twegen River and watch Eoforwic burn. The sight didn’t make him unhappy—not in the least. On that side of the river, Algarvian soldiers were fighting and dying and using up uncounted eggs and behemoths and sorely needed sacks of cinnabar for their dragons— and none of it cost him so much as a single soldier.

  General Gurmun was looking east, too, through a spyglass. Lowering it, he said, “I’ve never been one to have much use for delay, but I’ve got to admit that just sitting here serves us pretty well right now.”

  “It does, doesn’t
it?” Rathar agreed. “I was thinking the same thing, as a matter of fact. King Swemmel is shrewd, no doubt about it.”

  “That he is,” Gurmun said enthusiastically. “The redheads could be fighting us street by street in Eoforwic. Can you imagine how expensive that would be? Instead, they’re fighting the Forthwegians. It saves lots of wear and tear on us, and it gets rid of troublemakers we would have had to worry about later on.”

  “True enough.” Rathar suspected—no, he was certain—the Forthwegians didn’t think of themselves as troublemakers. In their own minds, they were surely patriots. Of course, what they were in their own minds mattered only so much to Rathar. He had to look at them as his sovereign would.

  Gurmun asked, “Do you know what the king plans to do here in Forthweg? He’s not going to let that son of a whore of a Penda come back and king it, is he?”

  “His Majesty has not told me what he plans for Forthweg,” Rathar said carefully. “The only order he has given me in that regard is to make no settlement on my own. He holds everything in his own hands.”

  “As a king should do.” Gurmun was one of Swemmel’s men in a way even Rathar wasn’t: he’d been a boy, not a man, when the king came to power, and had no standards of comparison. Whatever Swemmel decided was automatically right for him.

  And Marshal Rathar dared not show he disagreed. Even if Gurmun didn’t betray him in the hope of becoming Marshal of Unkerlant in his place, someone else was liable to. Unkerlant—especially Unkerlant under King Swemmel—ran on betrayals and denunciations.

  “What would you do here if you were king?” Gurmun asked.

  Watch my back, Rathar thought. Aloud, he answered, “I’m not king. I don’t want to be king. How about you, Gurmun? What would you do?” How do you like the boot on the other foot, Gurmun?

  “Me? I don’t know anything about running a kingdom. I don’t much care, either,” Gurmun answered, as any Unkerlanter who wanted to live to a ripe old age had to do. “All I want is the chance to let my behemoths loose and smash on through the Algarvians again.” He pointed across the river once more. “And I can see my odds of doing that will be better later on than they are right now.” He wasn’t smooth as a courtier, but he got the job done: he didn’t criticize Swemmel and he didn’t show ambition, at least not of the dangerous sort.

  “You’ll get your wish, I expect,” Rathar said. “We’ve got that bridgehead over the Twegen north of Eoforwic, and the other one south of the city. The Algarvians haven’t a chance of breaking either one of those, not with the Forthwegians inside Eoforwic keeping them so busy.”

  “That’s right.” Gurmun nodded. “And we can really use the lull, to get our supply lines straightened out. We outran everything when we chased the Algarvians out of Unkerlant this summer, and the redheads did a cursed good job of sabotaging the ley lines and burning the fields and planting eggs in the roads as they fell back. Powers above only know how we managed to keep bringing things forward.”

  “We did it,” Rathar said. “That’s what matters. I’ll tell you something else, too: I’d rather manage moving things forward than moving them back.” I had too much practice doing that the first two years of the war. He almost said so out loud, but held back. He would have told that to General Vatran, whom he trusted, but not to Gurmun. Gurmun was probably a better soldier—Rathar wondered if even the Algarvians had a finer commander of behemoths—but Vatran knew a confidence when he heard one, while the younger officer didn’t.

  Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, Gurmun’s thoughts ran on an almost parallel ley line: “Vatran’s moving forward down in the south, too. He’s into Yanina here and there, isn’t he? I bet King Tsavellas is pissing on his pompom shoes.”

  Picturing that, Rathar laughed out loud. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

  “And we’re giving the Zuwayzin what they deserve,” Gurmun added.

  “They should never have caused us so much trouble the last time we fought them.”

  “You’re probably right,” Rathar said. If the king hadn’t insisted on attacking them before we’d made ail our preparations, they might not have, either. That, of course, was one more thing he couldn’t say. No one who blamed King Swemmel out loud for any of Unkerlant’s shortcomings could look forward to anything save prison or hard labor or, things being as they were in this war, becoming a sacrificial victim. Rathar knew he enjoyed no more immunity from that rule than did the lowliest common soldier in the Unkerlanter army.

  Gurmun said, “Pity we’ve never bothered going up into the mountains of central Ortah and teaching the Ortahoin a proper lesson, too. They deserve it, perching up there and trading with both sides and thinking they can just sit out the whole war.”

  “No.” Now Rathar shook his head. “Concentration, Gurmun. We hit what’s troubling us. The Ortahoin aren’t going to come down out of their mountains and give us a hard time. We took enough of a bite out of their kingdom to get men through the lowland swamps. We don’t need more trouble with them, not with two pushes going against the redheads and another one up in Zuwayza.”

  “And the war against the Gongs out in the far west,” Gurmun added. “Fair enough, lord Marshal. I see your point.” Getting Gurmun to admit that to anyone was no small feat.

  “The war against the Gongs is like a one-legged fat man walking,” Rathar said. “It’s not going anywhere any time soon. We’ve made sure they can’t break out of the woods, and they’re not really trying any more, either. Their big fight is against the Kuusamans in the islands of the Bothnian Ocean.”

  “They’re losing that one, too,” Gurmun said with somber satisfaction.

  “Good. If they were winning in the island war, they would have more energy to put into the fight against us,” Rathar said. “And the Kuusamans and Lagoans are really running the Algarvians out of Jelgava.”

  “Of course they are—the cursed Algarvians are fighting us a lot harder than they’re fighting the islanders,” Gurmun said.

  “We owe them more than the Kuusamans and Lagoans do,” Rathar said. “They know it, too, and they don’t want to pay off. Look at it from their eyes, and their strategy makes pretty good sense.”

  Gurmun screwed up his face. “I don’t want to look at anything from Algarvian eyes. Powers below eat all the redheads.”

  “Powers below eat ‘em, aye,” Rathar said. “But sometimes you have to try to see things through their eyes. If you don’t, you won’t understand what they’re trying to do, and you’ll have a harder time beating them.” That made Gurmun look thoughtful. He did want to beat the Algarvians. Rathar could fault him for a few things, but never for lack of desire.

  “The next interesting question—” Gurmun began.

  Before he could say what he thought the next interesting question would be, a crystallomancer came running into the headquarters calling, “Marshal Rathar! Marshal Rathar!”

  “I’m here,” Rathar said. “What in blazes has gone wrong now?” By the young mage’s tone, something had.

  Sure enough, the fellow said, “Sir, we’ve just lost two of the bridges into the bridgehead south of Eoforwic. We almost lost the third one, too.”

  “What?” Rathar and Gurmun said together, in identical tones of angry disbelief. Rathar went on, “How the demon did the redheads get so fornicating lucky?”

  “Sir, it wasn’t luck,” the crystallomancer said. “They’ve got some new sorcery that’s letting them really aim some of the eggs they drop from dragons. The people down at the bridgehead don’t know just how they’re doing it, but they’ve watched eggs swerve in midair and land on the bridges or right by them in the river.”

  Marshal Rathar spent the next little while cursing Algarvian ingenuity. Then he turned to General Gurmun and said, “We have to let Addanz know about this. If the redheads can figure out a way to steer dropping eggs, our mages can figure out a way to stop them.”

  “They’d better be able to, anyhow,” Gurmun said. “If they can’t, King Swemmel will find himself
a new archmage in one demon of a hurry, and Addanz will likely find himself down in the cinnabar mines in the Mamming Hills: the king’ll squeeze some use out of him, anyhow.”

  Rathar reckoned the commander of behemoths almost surely right. Swemmel had a low tolerance for failure. Swemmel, come to that, had a low tolerance for almost everything. Rathar and Gurmun followed the crystallomancer down the street to the house where he and his comrades worked. With Rathar in overall command of all of Unkerlant’s fighting fronts, the crystallomancers didn’t fit into the house where he worked and slept.

  When Addanz’s image appeared in a crystal, Rathar explained what had happened. The Archmage of Unkerlant nodded. “I have heard somewhat of this from the Kuusamans,” he said. “Apparently, even Mezentio’s men have trouble doing what they do. Only a handful of their mages are capable of such rapid kinetic sorcery. It may prove a nuisance, but no worse.”

  “If they knock down our last route into that bridgehead, it’ll be a lot worse than a nuisance,” Rathar growled. “And if you know what Mezentio’s mages are up to, why aren’t you trying to stop it?”

  “We have already begun work on countermeasures,” Archmage Addanz said. “But these things do take a certain amount of time, and—” He blinked. “Powers above, what was that?”

  Rathar didn’t answer him. That had been an egg bursting close by, close enough to startle him into biting his tongue. He tasted blood. He and General Gurmun dashed out of the crystallomancers’ headquarters, leaving it to the mages to break the etheric connection. Rathar needed only an instant to see what had happened: an egg had burst squarely on the building where he’d been living.

  “Was that one of their steered eggs?” Gurmun asked.

  “How should I know?” Rathar trotted toward his headquarters. “Let’s see if anyone’s left alive in there.

  “They don’t want you left alive,” Gurmun said.

  “That’s all right,” Rathar told him. “I don’t want them left alive, either— and I’m going to get my wish.”