Jaws of Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  Seventeen

  Summer was fading fast in the Naantali district. Fernao had watched that happen before. Setubal, the capital of Lagoas and his home town, didn’t have the best weather in the world. Not even the most ardent Lagoan patriot could have claimed otherwise—not when, in peacetime, COME TO BALMY BALVl! broadsheets sprouted like mushrooms on walls and fences every autumn. But even Setubal looked subtropical when measured against the wastelands of southeastern Kuusamo.

  Even before nights turned longer than days, the grass started going from green to yellow. Birds began flying north, first by ones and twos and then in enormous flocks. More and more clouds boiled up from the south, so that even when it was daylight, gloom held sway more often than not.

  The worsening weather perfectly fit Fernao’s mood. The rattle and scrape and bang of hammers and saws and chisels and other tools as Kuusaman construction crews raced to repair the hostel after the Algarvians dropped their steerable egg on it did little to improve his spirits, either.

  “Don’t worry about a thing,” Ilmarinen told him at supper one evening. “If they aren’t ready before the snow starts falling, I’m sure all of us Kuusaman mages know the ancient art of building snow houses. We’d be happy to teach it to you, so you can stay as warm and cheerful as we do.”

  “Thank you so much.” Fernao cast about for a word in Kuusaman, didn’t find it, and switched to classical Kaunian: “Can you quantify exactly how warm and cheerful you will be?”

  “Oh, of course,” Ilmarinen said. “Can you provide me with an appropriation to investigate it with all the latest sorcerous techniques?”

  Fernao took a tiny copper bit from his belt pouch. “Here you are.”

  “Excellent!” Ilmarinen scooped up the coin. “You may expect your answer in about ten thousand years.”

  He laughed uproariously. Fernao laughed, too. Glum or not, he couldn’t help it. Ilmarinen worked hard at being outrageous, and was good at what he did.

  “What’s funny?” Pekka asked as she sat down at the table with them. Fernao explained. Pekka gave Ilmarinen a severe look. “Snow houses, indeed,” she said. “When was the last time you made a snow house or herded reindeer like our ancestors?”

  “Day before yesterday,” he answered, as seriously as if it were true.

  Noise from down the hall covered Fernao’s snort and Pekka’s cough. She said, “I’ll tell you what worries me: all those carpenters. I’m sure the Algarvians will have tried to put spies among them.”

  “Hard for an Algarvian to look like a Kuusaman,” Fernao said. That gave him an excuse to look at her and to admire the way she looked. When the steerable egg burst by the hostel, all he’d worried about was whether she was all right. The sorcery they were working on hadn’t mattered a bit.

  But Pekka and Ilmarinen both shook their heads. “Plenty of masking sorceries,” Pekka said.

  “A good many of them used against the Algarvians here and there,” Ilmarinen added, speaking with considerable authority. He had knowledge and sources for knowledge at which Fernao couldn’t begin to guess. “Wouldn’t be too surprising if they tried to get some of their own back.”

  “There are ways to look behind such masks, I’m sure,” Fernao said.

  “Oh, aye.” Ilmarinen spoke with authority again. “Anything one mage can figure out how to make, another mage can figure out how to break.”

  Pekka gave her order to a serving girl even as she nodded. “That’s right. It leaves me with two worries on my mind: that Mezentio’s mages haven’t done something particularly clever that we don’t notice, and that we do our checks on all the workmen and don’t let any slip past unexamined.”

  Fernao called for a mug of ale. When it came, he sipped slowly. The ale gave him an excuse to pick at his supper. Ilmarinen, on the other hand, ate as if he were stoking a roaring fire. Rising from his seat just as the girl brought Pekka’s food, he leered down at Fernao. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t enjoy,” he said, and went off whistling.

  “He’s a nuisance,” Fernao said.

  One of Pekka’s eyebrows quirked upward. “You just noticed?” she said, and applied herself to her chop.

  Well, you got what you wanted, Fernao thought. You ‘re alone with her, or as alone as you can be inside the refectory with a lot of other people eating, too. Now what are you going to say?

  He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t say anything. He felt as callow and nervous as he had when a youth calling on a girl for the first time. He just sat there, still picking at his food, sipping the ale, and enjoying her company as much as he could. After a bit, she started talking shop. He had no trouble doing that, save for the occasional word that, like quantify, came out in classical Kaunian because he couldn’t come up with it in Kuusaman.

  He called for more ale and for a mouth-puckeringly tart gooseberry pastry so he wouldn’t have to get up and leave as Ilmarinen had. Then he left the pastry half eaten when Pekka finished her supper faster than he’d expected. Getting to his feet in a hurry wasn’t easy or comfortable, but he did it anyway.

  Pekka noticed, of course. “Are you following me?” she asked, sounding somewhere between amused and alarmed.

  “I can’t very well leave the refectory without following you,” he answered, which had the twin advantages of being true and not requiring him to say aye.

  It also got a smile from Pekka, who said, “All right.”

  But Fernao, suddenly bold, went on, “Will you come back to my chamber with me?”

  “What? Why?” Now Pekka definitely sounded alarmed. “Are you planning on stopping more scandal? Remember what happened the last time. We just started some—and made our lives more … complicated.”

  “I know,” Fernao said. By then, they were out in the hall, away from the crowd inside the eating chamber. “Come or not, however you like. I’m not going to try to molest you. I think you know that much. If you don’t, you’d better not come.”

  He limped on toward his chamber. He still hadn’t got used to limping. He didn’t know why—he was going to limp for the rest of his life—but he hadn’t. He looked down at his feet and at the rubber tip to his cane. He didn’t want to look over his shoulder to see whether Pekka was following— part of him didn’t want to, anyhow. But he couldn’t keep his eyes from sliding toward where she would be if she was… and she was. He breathed a silent sigh of relief, then wondered if he should have. He was, he knew, liable to make things worse, not better.

  After opening the door to the bare little room, he stood aside to let Pekka in before him. “Sit down,” he said, shutting the door behind them. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  Pekka didn’t. She stood there in the middle of the floor like a nervous bird that would fly away the instant it saw the slightest motion. The comparison, Fernao feared, was liable to be all too apt.

  “What is it?” Pekka asked in tones as brittle as her stance. “What did you need to bring me here to say? Should we have anything to say to each other that we can’t say where everyone can hear?”

  “I don’t know. By the powers above, I don’t.” But Fernao remembered how they’d clung after the Algarvian egg burst by the hostel, when each had feared the other dead. He took a deep breath and went on in a rush: “By the powers above, though, I do know that I love you. I’ve never felt like this about any other woman before, and I’m not interested in feeling like this about any other woman ever again. There. That’s all.”

  Pekka turned and took a long step toward the door. Fernao thought she was going to flee on the instant. If she did … What would he do if she did? Get drunk and stay drunk for a week was the first thing that came to mind.

  But she stopped and turned back so suddenly, it was more like a whirl.

  Her face was as pale as he’d ever seen it. “Why did you have to go and say a thing like that?” she demanded, and she sounded furious.

  “Because it’s the truth, curse it,” Fernao answered stubbornly, hopelessly. “Because I didn’t care wheth
er I lived when that egg came down till I saw you were all right. If that isn’t reason enough, what is?” He sounded angry, too, and he was—angry at the world that wouldn’t let him have what he wanted most.

  Pekka stared at him. She’d gone even whiter, and he hadn’t thought she could. Tears glistened in her eyes, as they had after she’d made love with him that first—and only—time. In a tiny voice, hardly more than a whisper, she said, “If I told you I felt the same way, what would you do?”

  Fernao’s cane almost slipped from his fingers. Having hoped for words like those, he had trouble believing he’d really heard them. He also had trouble coming up with an answer. Almost too late, he realized words weren’t what he needed. He did let the cane fall, but only because he’d taken Pekka in his arms. He bent down to her at the same time as she was tilting her face up to him.

  Not very much later, and without another word between them, they lay down close together on his bed. They had to lie close together; the bed was too narrow for anything else. Pekka sighed as Fernao went into her. But her eyes were shut. Then, though, with what Fernao thought a deliberate act of will, she opened them and looked up at him from a distance of only a couple of inches. And then, for a little while, Fernao stopped thinking at all.

  Afterwards, he wondered if she would bolt from his chamber as she had the first time. They’d surprised themselves by becoming lovers then. This time, they’d known what they were doing. And Pekka understood as much, for she asked, “What are we going to do now?” It was a serious question, not the dismay-filled one she’d asked after they joined before.

  “Whatever you like,” he answered. “I know you’re the one with the hard choices to make. You need to know I’d be glad to marry you and live with you in Kajaani or Setubal or wherever you please, if that’s what you want to do. I hope it is.”

  “I don’t know,” Pekka said. “Right now, I have no idea what I’m going to do. I have to th—”

  Fernao knew what he was going to do right then, and he did it: he kissed her. That not only kept her from talking, it kept her—and him—from thinking for some time longer. He hadn’t known he could make love twice in such quick succession, not in his mid-thirties and not after the battering his body had taken.

  But, no matter how pleasantly worn he and Pekka were after gasping their way to delight for a second time, Pekka asked her question over again: “What are we going to do now?”

  “We’ll just have to see,” Fernao said. Pekka frowned thoughtfully, then nodded.

  Colonel Sabrino had never been in Yanina before. When the war against Unkerlant began, he’d been stationed in the north, flying out of Forthweg. He wished with all his heart he weren’t in Yanina now. Had the Algarvians and Yaninans and Grelzers and the soldiers from Plegmund’s Brigade and the Phalanx of Valmiera been able to halt King Swemmel’s latest bludgeon of an assault, he wouldn’t have been in Yanina. As things were …

  As things were, the tattered remnants of his wing of dragonfliers and the equally ragged remains of Major Scoufas’ were flying out of a makeshift dragon farm on the outskirts of the town of Kastritsi, north and west of Patras, King Tsavellas’ capital. The Unkerlanters had paused only a couple of miles outside of Kastritsi; the people there fled east as fast as they could go, on foot or in wagons or on unicorns and horses and donkeys. They clogged the roads, making it harder for the soldiers trying to hold back Swemmel’s men to get where they needed to go.

  Some of the men fleeing Kastritsi should have been in Tsavellas’ army. Some of them, almost without a doubt, were in Tsavellas’ army, but had somehow got their hands on civilian clothes.

  When Sabrino remarked on that, Captain Orosio nodded. “Next thing’ll be, they’ll start running without bothering to take their uniforms off first.” He spat. “It won’t be long, I bet.”

  “I wish I thought you were wrong,” Sabrino said.

  “So what in blazes are we going to do about it?” the squadron commander asked.

  Before answering, Sabrino looked toward the center of Kastritsi. The taller buildings—those still standing, anyway—sported strangely painted onion domes that reminded him he was in a foreign kingdom. He sighed. “I don’t think we can do anything about it except to go on fighting the Unkerlanters as hard as we can for as long as we can. Have you got any better ideas?”

  Orosio sighed, too, and spat again. “I was hoping you did, sir. You’ve been right a lot of times before.”

  “What if I have?” Sabrino said. “How much good has it done me? How much good has it done Algarve?”

  Orosio had no reply for that. Since Sabrino didn’t, either, he didn’t see how he could blame the younger man. From over by the tents where the dragonfliers slept—when they slept—a Yaninan waved to him. He waved back, polite as usual. Then the Yaninan waved again, more urgently this time. Captain Orosio said, “Sir, I think he wants you.”

  “I think he does, too,” Sabrino said with another sigh of his own. “I was hoping he didn’t.”

  “Major Scoufas, he want to see you,” the fellow said when Sabrino went over to him.

  “Does he?” Sabrino said, and the Yaninan dipped his head in his kingdom’s gesture of agreement. Sabrino headed for Scoufas’ tent. He had nothing against the Yaninan officer. Scoufas made a good dragonflier and a good wing commander. It wasn’t his fault that most of his kingdom’s fighting men were unenthusiastic and that the kingdom lacked many of the tools it needed to do a proper job of fighting.

  As often happened with commanders, Scoufas was busy with paperwork when Count Sabrino ducked into his tent. Scoufas shoved the leaves of paper aside with every sign of relief. “I propose that we fly forth and attack the Unkerlanters threatening Kastritsi,” he said.

  “You do?” Sabrino said in some surprise. In all the time he’d been associated with the Yaninans over in the Duchy of Grelz, he’d never heard such words from any of them. Scoufas flew more than bravely enough, but he hadn’t been aggressive in seeking out missions.

  But now the Yaninan dipped his head. “Aye. We must drive the barbarous invaders from the soil of my kingdom.”

  If your countrymen had fought harder in Unkerlant, those barbarous invaders might not be on the soil of your kingdom now. But what point to saying that to Scoufas? He couldn’t change what had already happened, any more than Sabrino himself could.

  And, as far as Sabrino was concerned, helping Scoufas defend a Yaninan town now made it less likely that he’d have to try to keep the Unkerlanters from overrunning an Algarvian town sometime in the not too indefinite future. The mere thought was enough to make him nervously glance eastward.

  Scoufas not only noticed him doing it but understood why. The Yaninan’s chuckle held more sorrow than mirth. “It makes a difference when it is one’s own kingdom, does it not?” he said.

  “Aye,” Sabrino said harshly. “Have we got enough eggs and cinnabar to give the Unkerlanters a proper pounding?”

  “Not so much as we would like,” Scoufas answered. “Never so much as we would like, is it not so?” He waited for Sabrino to nod, then went on, “But we must do what we can with what we have—is that not so as well?”

  “Aye,” Sabrino repeated, even more harshly than before. “When do you want to fly?”

  “Let the dragon handlers load eggs aboard our dragons. Let them give the beasts what meat they have laced with brimstone and with what cinnabar they can find,” the Yaninan wing commander said. “An hour’s time should be plenty, would you not agree?”

  Sabrino rose and bowed. “I shall be honored to have your company in an hour’s time, Major.” He bowed again, then strode out of Scoufas’ tent and shouted for his own men to ready themselves for a raid.

  They came from their tents with an eagerness that still delighted him after five years of fighting. How can anyone beat us? he thought proudly. But if that question didn’t have an answer, what was he doing fighting here in Yanina and not going after the Unkerlanters in their own kingdom or relaxing back in Tr
apani following a victorious war?

  “Yaninans are a lot happier about fighting now that they’re doing it at home, aren’t they, Colonel?” one of the dragonfliers said.

  “As long as they are happy,” Sabrino said—again, what point to worrying about how things had been before?

  He climbed aboard his dragon while the bushy-mustached Yaninan handler was still feeding it chunks of meat yellow with brimstone or scarlet with cinnabar—too few of the latter, though. Brimstone was easy to come by. Quicksilver … He thought about Algarve’s failure in the land of the Ice People and his kingdom’s failure to reach the Mamming Hills, then realized he was worrying about what had gone before whether he wanted to or not.

  With a wave, the handler unchained the dragon from its stake. “Luck to you good,” the fellow said in rudimentary Algarvian. Sabrino waved back, then booted the dragon into the air. It rose with a scream of fury and a thunder of wings. Other beasts painted in Algarvian and in Yaninan colors joined it. Between them, they had about forty dragons.

  The raid … was a raid. Sabrino wondered how many hundred he’d flown in the course of the war. The dragons dropped their eggs on the Unkerlanters busy digging themselves in west of Kastritsi, then swooped low to flame whatever men and beasts they could catch out in the open. Swemmel’s soldiers had a good many heavy sticks. A couple of Yaninan dragons tumbled out of the sky. Sabrino didn’t see any Algarvian dragons go down. He hoped he hadn’t missed anything. I’ll find out after we fly home, he thought.

  His dragon’s flame was shorter than it should have been, and faded faster. All the Algarvian and Yaninan animals had the same predicament. Major Scoufas appeared in one of the crystals Sabrino carried. “We have done what we can do, I think,” Scoufas said.

  “I think you’re probably right,” Sabrino agreed.

  “We have hurt them,” Scoufas said.

  “No doubt of it,” Sabrino said. The raid was a pinprick, a fleabite, nothing more. If it delayed the fall of Kastritsi by so much as an hour, he would have been astonished. Scoufas was no fool. He had to see that, too. But, these days, even delays of less than an hour to the relentless Unkerlanter advance were not to be sneezed at. Sabrino spoke into the crystal attuned to his own squadron leaders. They pulled their men out of the attack and flew back with the Yaninans toward their latest dragon farm.