Jaws of Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  “That’s right,” Skarnu agreed sourly. “What about it?”

  “Well, sir, if what we hear tell is right, she’s friendly with Viscount Valnu,” the fellow answered. “Valnu, he’s been a big blaze in the underground since dirt, or so they say. Good man to be friendly with, if you ask me—and if that’s how things really go.”

  Not knowing what to say to that, Skarnu didn’t say anything. He drove past the checkpoint and on into Priekule. “Friendly with Viscount Valnu?” Merkela said. “With an underground leader?”

  Skarnu spread his hands helplessly. “I heard the same thing you did. Who knows? Maybe Lurcanio was lying to me when he said what he said. I wouldn’t put it past an Algarvian.” He flicked the reins. “Or maybe this fellow didn’t know what he was talking about. I can’t tell you. All I know is, she’s been with Lurcanio since the redheads marched in, and she never seemed unhappy about it that I heard.”

  So I have been given to understand. That was how Lurcanio had answered when Skarnu asked if Krasta’s baby was his: not a ringing endorsement of her fidelity. Krasta had collected lovers like beads on a string in the days before the war. Who hadn’t, back then? Why would she have changed since? She was constant, even in things like inconstancy.

  As they went deeper into Priekule, Merkela’s eyes got bigger and bigger. “It’s so huge,” she said. “I never believed a city could be this size.”

  She’d thought the provincial towns in which they’d stayed were a match for the capital. Now she was finding out otherwise. Skarnu kept looking around, too; he hadn’t been here for a long time. Something was wrong. At last, he put his finger on it: “The Kaunian Column of Victory is gone! You could see it from almost anywhere in the city.”

  “You already knew the redheads knocked it down,” Merkela pointed out.

  “I knew,” he said, “but I hadn’t seen it.”

  A bonfire blazed on a street corner. Skarnu could still see some of the Algarvian signs burning there: signs that had directed Mezentio’s soldiers to theaters and eateries and, no doubt, brothels as well. No longer, Skarnu thought. Never again.

  But then another thought went through his mind. My sister is a whore, no matter what that fellow said. He shook his head. I have no sister.

  A downcast woman who’d been shaved bald walked by. People whistled and jeered at her: “Mattressback!” “Algarvian slut!” “Stinking bitch!” She seemed to shrink in on herself even more, trying to become invisible.

  “She deserves worse than that,” Merkela said, her voice and eyes cold as the land of the Ice People.

  “Maybe she’ll get it, too,” Skarnu said, which seemed to satisfy her.

  After what seemed both a very long time and hardly any time at all, they came to the mansion on the outskirts of town. An Algarvian signpost still stood at the entranceway, directing Mezentio’s men, Skarnu supposed, to Colonel Lurcanio and whatever he’d done. But then he forgot about that, for Merkela whispered, “You … lived here?”

  “Aye,” Skarnu answered, and saw the astonishment on her face. “And will again—and so will you, if you want to. If you don’t, we’ll live somewhere else. But first we have some business to finish.” He heard his own grimness.

  He hitched the carriage in front of the house and handed Merkela down. Then he strode to the door. She followed, little Gedominu in her arms. He hammered at the door with the knocker.

  A maidservant opened. She looked half nervous, half haughty. Haughty won. “What do you want?” she demanded, almost as sharply as Krasta might have.

  Skarnu knew what she saw: a weatherbeaten man in the clothes of a farmer, with a peasant woman and a brat in tow. What she didn’t see was him. “Hello, Bauska,” he answered, making his voice milder than he’d first intended. “I want to see my sister.” He said the words once more, even if they felt like a lie in his heart.

  Bauska’s eyes kept widening till they seemed to fill her whole face. “My lord Marquis,” she whispered, and dropped a curtsy of the sort Skarnu hadn’t seen since the Algarvians overran Valmiera. “Come with me sir, and—?” She looked a question toward his companions.

  “Merkela, my fiancée,” Skarnu said. “Gedominu, my son and heir.”

  Bauska’s eyes got wider still. Skarnu hadn’t thought they could. The servant led him inside. He’d forgotten how big the place was. What had he done with all this space? Merkela’s eyes were almost as wide as the maidservant’s.

  A pretty little girl, perhaps three years old, ran by with a doll under her arm. Pretty, aye—but with hair closer to bronze than to gold, and with cat-green eyes. Merkela hissed something under her breath. Harshly, Skarnu asked, “Is she Krasta’s, too?”

  “No, my lord,” Bauska answered quietly. She went pale first, then red. “She’s mine. Her name is Brindza.”

  Merkela started to snarl something. Skarnu shook his head. “Later,” he said. “First things first.” A little to his surprise, she nodded. They followed Bauska into a drawing room. There sat Krasta and, to Skarnu’s surprise, Viscount Valnu. The man from the patrol had known whereof he spoke after all. And Valnu was a big blaze among the underground leaders in Priekule, playing the most dangerous of double games with the redheads.

  “Skarnu!” Krasta exclaimed, springing to her feet. She knew him, at any rate. Her belly bulged, just a little. “Welcome home!” She threw her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek. Then she pointed to Merkela. “Who is your … friend?”

  “My fiancée,” Skarnu corrected, and gave Merkela’s name again, and Gedominu’s. His voice like iron, he went on, “I stayed with my own kind, you see.”

  Krasta glared at him. He looked back stonily, expecting a tantrum from her and not about to put up with one. But she surprised him. One hand went to that bulging belly; the forefinger of the other pointed at Valnu. “Nothing wrong with the blood of my child, not with him as the father.”

  “Him?” Skarnu’s eyes swung to Valnu in astonishment. The fellow with the stick had said friendly, but that friendly? “You?”

  “So I have been given to understand,” Valnu said—the exact same words Lurcanio had used. Where Lurcanio had sounded bedeviled, though, he merely seemed amused.

  “But… But…” Merkela seemed about to burst from the outrage trapped inside her that now, against all expectations, couldn’t escape.

  “I will add that there have been times when the marchioness proved most useful to those opposing Algarve,” Valnu said.

  Which means there were also times when she wasn‘t, Skarnu thought. But, plainly, he couldn’t just throw Krasta out of the mansion into the cold, perhaps with her head shaved, as he’d intended doing. She saw as much, too, and looked as smug as a mouse with a hole too deep for the cat’s paw. That made him want to slap her all over again. We’ll find out, he thought, but couldn’t help sighing. We won’t find out for quite a while, curse it.

  If Ealstan could have blazed the Algarvian major with his eyes, the man would have fallen over dead. The redhead ignored him and all the lesser Forthwegian rebels who stood behind Pybba. He bowed to Pybba, as he might have bowed to a fellow noble in Trapani. “My superiors have agreed to the terms you propose, sir,” he said in good Forthwegian.

  “All right,” Pybba answered heavily. “All right, powers below eat you. We give over the fight, and you treat the men who surrender as proper captives.”

  “Better than you deserve, in my opinion,” the Algarvian said. “My superiors feel otherwise, however, and so …” He shrugged one of his people’s theatrical shrugs. “The truce will hold till tomorrow noon. At that time, you shall come forth from your holes—those you have left. Anyone who does not yield himself up to us at noon tomorrow shall be reckoned a bandit, and we shall treat him as one when we catch him.” He sliced a thumb across his neck.

  They’d been doing that all along. Maybe they’d decided it made the rebels fight harder. If treating the Forthwegians as war captives let Mezentio’s men regain their grip on Eoforwic, that must have
seemed a worthwhile bargain to them.

  “Curse you,” Pybba said. The Algarvian only bowed again. Then he turned his back and marched away through the wreckage of the Forthwegian capital.

  “It’s over,” somebody said in a dull voice. “Everything’s over.”

  Pybba shook his head. “It’s not over till noon tomorrow, when I get to hand myself to the Algarvian general and thank him kindly for not murdering all of us—only most of us. The rest of you”—he looked from one shabby, filthy, disgruntled Forthwegian to the next—”you can surrender, or you can try and disappear. Of course, the redheads will kill you if you try and disappear and don’t quite make it.”

  “Odds are they’ll kill us anyhow,” Ealstan said. “The ordinary fighters will probably do all right, but us? Why would the Algarvians want to let us live?”

  “I’m not telling anybody what to do, not anymore,” Pybba said. “Look what that already got us. Maybe I’ll see some of you here tomorrow, and maybe I won’t.” Broad shoulders slumped, he strode off.

  “I’ll be here with you, if they don’t blaze me first,” Ealstan called after him. Then, stick in hand, he too left the square where the arrogant Algarvian major—as if there were any other kind—had delivered the surrender terms his kingdom would deign to accept.

  As soon as he was out of sight of his comrades, he gently set the stick on some rubble, then took off his armband and tossed it down on top of the stick. He didn’t like lying to Pybba, but a lie here might help cover his trail. If he failed to come in to surrender after saying he would, people might think he’d been killed between now and then. Who wanted to search for a dead man?

  Of course, if he wasn’t careful, people might be right. The block of flats he shared with Vanai and Saxburh lay in a district the redheads had already reconquered. He still had to get there without drawing their notice. They couldn’t cover every inch of Eoforwic … could they?

  He began to wonder in earnest before he’d gone very far. Like cockroaches and lice and fleas, Algarvian soldiers seemed to be everywhere, and seemed intent on making sure none of the Forthwegian fighters got out of the small part of Eoforwic they still held. The Algarvians had mages and ferociously barking dogs to try to keep their foes penned up.

  Mages or no mages, dogs or no dogs, Ealstan wouldn’t have worried back in Gromheort. He’d known the town his whole life, and felt sure he could have gone anywhere there without having foreigners notice. But he was a relative stranger in Eoforwic himself. Some of Mezentio’s men might have been here as long as he had. He didn’t know the secret ways a local would.

  And even had he known those ways, how much good would it have done him? Not much was left standing in Eoforwic, and most of what might have been secret was now buried. He didn’t want to climb over rubble, so he had to skirt it as best he could.

  Somewhere close by, a dog growled a warning. Ealstan froze. He wished he hadn’t left his stick behind. Without it, though, he could hope to pass himself as somebody who’d never been a fighter. Then a Forthwegian cried out in fright. The dog snarled and barked. An Algarvian shouted, “Halting!” in accented Forthwegian. “Halting or blazing!”

  By the sound of thudding feet, the other Forthwegian didn’t halt. By the Algarvian’s curses, he missed his blaze. “To me! To me! After the whoreson!” he yelled in his own language. More thudding feet told of other redheads rushing to his aid.

  Ealstan huddled against the wreckage of what had been a butcher’s shop.

  There’d been plenty of butchery in Eoforwic since the place went up in flames. Three Algarvian troopers ran right past him. None gave him a second glance, or even a first. They knew he wasn’t the man their shouting comrade was after.

  Whoever the other fellow was, he led Mezentio’s men on a long chase, and one that took them away from Ealstan. Seizing his luck, he hurried toward his block of flats. What better time than when all the redheads nearby were going after someone else?

  Before long, I’ll be in the part of town they’ve held for a while, and then they won’t pay any attention to me. But that thought had hardly crossed Ealstan’s mind before another redhead barked out, “Halting!”

  Feet skidding on broken bits of brick, Ealstan did halt. The Algarvian had a stick aimed straight at him. If he tried to run, he was a dead man. He smiled a broad, foolish smile, trying to look anything but dangerous.

  The Algarvian, a plump fellow, came cautiously toward him. Ealstan noticed the redhead wore the uniform of a constable, not a soldier. Some small hope blossomed in him; Mezentio’s soldiers had proved much more brutal in Eoforwic than the Algarvian constabulary. The plump redhead tried to say something more in Forthwegian, made a complete hash of it, and, to Ealstan’s surprise, started over again in slow, bad, but understandable classical Kaunian: “You following me?”

  “Aye, I follow you,” Ealstan replied in the same language.

  “Good.” The Algarvian seemed unaware of the irony of his using the speech of the folk his own people killed. Even so, that he knew enough of it to use kept Ealstan’s hope alive. Then the constable gestured with his stick, and Ealstan wondered how long his hope—and he—would live. “What you doing here?” the redhead demanded, hard suspicion in his voice.

  “I am going home,” Ealstan said, which had the advantage of being literally true. “I mean no one any harm.” For the moment, that was true, too.

  “Likely telling,” the constable sneered. “Why you out? You being fighter?”

  “No, I am not a fighter,” Ealstan said carefully. But if I’m not a fighter, what am I doing out and about? Inspiration struck, in the form of a couple of worthless toadstools sprouting from the dirt next to the bottom couple of courses of a wall. Moving slowly so as not to alarm the constable, he bent, picked them, and held them out. “I was gathering mushrooms, sir. These are very good. Would you like them?”

  “No! Not liking!” The Algarvian made a horrible face. “You Forthwegian crazy. Mushrooms? Faugh!” The last was a guttural noise of disgust.

  But he didn’t call Ealstan a liar. That meant he’d been in Forthweg a while, and knew of the passion Forthwegians—and Kaunians in Forthweg— had for mushrooms, a passion Algarvians emphatically didn’t share. “May I go now, sir?” Ealstan asked.

  With an elaborate Algarvian shrug, the constable shook his head. “How I knowing you not being a fighter, eh?” he said. Ealstan’s heart sank. Then the fellow did a very Algarvian thing: he stuck out his hand, palm up.

  Trying not to shout for joy, Ealstan dug into his belt pouch and gave the redhead silver. “This is all I have, sir,” he said. It wasn’t; he wanted to keep some in reserve in case he had to pay off another venal constable or soldier. But he thought it would do.

  And it did. The redhead had a belt pouch, too. The coins vanished into it. “Going on,” he told Ealstan.

  “I thank you,” Ealstan said gravely. He thought he remembered seeing this fellow around Eoforwic for a while, and also thought him a human being, or as close to a human being as an Algarvian constable was likely to come.

  By the time another Algarvian noticed him, he was well inside the territory the redheads had retaken. The soldier paid him no particular attention; plenty of Forthwegians trudged through the wreckage of Eoforwic, or else scrabbled through it, looking for whatever they might find.

  A couple of Algarvians were pasting broadsheets on walls that hadn’t been knocked down. Ealstan hadn’t seen these before. They showed King Swemmel as a bleeding hog, with his blood spilling out of Unkerlant and pouring over eastern Derlavai toward Algarve and even the lands beyond. Facing the hog stood an Algarvian with a butcher’s apron and an outsized cleaver. The legend read, HELP US STOP THE FLOOD!

  He’d seen worse broadsheets. He liked the Unkerlanters only a little better than the Algarvians. Plenty of Forthwegians liked them less than they liked the redheads. Plegmund’s Brigade might get some new recruits. Of course, with the Unkerlanters already having overrun half of Forthweg, and with them
rampaging forward in the south, too, how much good would a few new Forthwegian footsoldiers do King Mezentio? Not much, or so Ealstan hoped.

  An Algarvian colonel, a short, handsome fellow with the jaunty ferocity of a fighting cock, was giving orders to some of the men he led: “Come on, my dears. Don’t just stand there now that the fornicating Forthwegians have thrown in the sponge. The Unkerlanters are sitting on their arses just across the Twegen. Pretty soon they’ll decide they’re done with their holiday and get around to fighting us again. We’d better be ready for them, right?”

  “Right, Colonel Spinello,” one of the redheads said, in the indulgent tones soldiers used when they were fond of an officer.

  “We’d better dig in, then,” Spinello said. “We’d better do it deep and tight, as deep and tight as I was into that Kaunian girl of mine back when the war was new.” He sighed. His men laughed. Ealstan’s hands folded into fists. With a deliberate effort of will, he made them relax. Don’t give yourself away. The Algarvian colonel kissed his bunched fingertips. “That Vanai, she was a special piece, she was. I trained her myself.”

  Ealstan stumbled and almost fell, though he hadn’t tripped on anything. Mezentio’s soldiers laughed, as if they’d heard this colonel’s stories a great many times before. They probably had. I shouldn‘t have left my stick behind after all, Ealstan thought. Even without it, I’ll find a way to kill him. But that vow still left his feet unsteady beneath him, as if he were drunk or stunned. I am stunned. What do I do when I set home to Vanai? What do I say? What can / do? What can I say? Good questions, all of them. He had perhaps five minutes to find good answers.

  Bembo’s belt pouch was nicely heavy with silver these days. As he strutted through the streets of downtown Eoforwic—or what was left of them—he was even acting as a constable again, not as a soldier any more. He should have been happy, or at least happier. He should have been, but he wasn’t.