Jaws of Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  Against good dragonfliers in formation, the order would have been suicidal: break up a smaller force to oppose a larger, better-disciplined one? Madness, nothing but madness.

  The Unkerlanters, though, weren’t good dragonfliers: this wasn’t a wing of freelancers, of the skilled fliers the Algarvians called Swemmel’s falcons. These were just the men who’d been closest to the battle by Mavromouni. And if you could rely on any one thing from such men, you could rely on their holding formation too bloody long.

  Sure enough, when the Algarvians started swooping at their tails and up from below at their dragons’ bellies, they didn’t break out of their box till several of them had already tumbled from the sky. Sabrino had seen that time and again. If they’d just broken up and put two or three dragons on every one of his, as they could have, he would have had a much harder time of it. But they didn’t. They wouldn’t. They never did.

  They paid for their rigidity, too, as they usually did. By the time Sabrino ordered his wing back toward its latest makeshift dragon farm, he’d counted nine Unkerlanter dragons slain. He’d lost three of his own followers. The only thing troubling him was that, even at three losses for one, the foe could afford it better than he.

  Down fluttered his dragons, some of them burned, all of them weary, to the dragon farm in what had probably been some Yaninan peasant’s turnip field. Dragon handlers trotted forward to secure the beasts to their iron stakes and tend to their wounds and feed them whatever meat they’d managed to scrounge from the surrounding countryside. The handlers were all Algarvians. Yaninan handlers, nowadays, tended only Yaninan dragons, and Yaninan dragons flew alongside the rock-gray beasts of Unkerlant.

  Sabrino wondered how Major Scoufas fared these days. Were it not for Scoufas, he would probably have been languishing in a captives’ camp. He wished the Yaninan officer no ill—but if they met in the air, he would do his best to kill him.

  Can I? The question was more interesting than he would have liked.

  Scoufas made a first-rate dragonflier, no doubt about it. He would be flying a fresher dragon, and one brim-full of brimstone and quicksilver. Sabrino kicked at the muddy ground, angry at himself. If you don’t think you can win every time you go up, you ‘d do better staying on the ground.

  That was an obvious truth. Another obvious truth was that he couldn’t afford to do any such thing. He kicked at the wet dirt again. No Algarvian could afford to do anything but whatever he was best at that might hold back the Unkerlanter tide, and to keep doing it till he either got killed or he collapsed from exhaustion. Sabrino knew he wasn’t far from either.

  A road ran not far from the dragon farm. Some Yaninans fled east along it. They couldn’t stomach the Unkerlanter alliance, no matter what King Tsavellas might have to say about it. But others moved west, something Sabrino hadn’t seen before. Maybe they lived farther east, and were hoping to avoid long battles in their own neighborhoods. Or maybe they hated Algarvians as much as their countrymen hated Unkerlanters. Some Yaninans did.

  Being the wing commander, Sabrino got the abandoned farmhouse instead of a tent. With his old bones, he was glad to have the comfort of four walls around him, even beat-up, shabby walls.

  He lit a couple of big tallow candles. They filled the one-room farmhouse with the stink of hot fat. By their flickering light, he started to write a report on the fight his wing had just been through. How many reports have I written in this war? Too bloody many, that’s certain sure.

  And then another, even less happy, thought occurred to him. How many of them have done any bloody good? He didn’t know the answer there, not in numbers, but he knew what he needed to know. Not many. Not enough— that’s certain sure, too.

  He wondered why he bothered. Would anyone in Trapani care if he fell silent? Someone might—his silence could give a superior who wanted to sack him the excuse he needed to do it. That thought alone was plenty to keep Sabrino stubbornly writing. He didn’t make things easy for the foe. Why should he for his alleged friends?

  A sentry knocked on the door and said, “Someone to see you, sir.”

  “I don’t want to see anyone,” Sabrino answered, not looking up.

  “I think you should, sir,” the sentry said.

  That made Sabrino raise an eyebrow. It also roused his curiosity. He stuck his pen into the bottle of ink, got to his feet, and went to open the door. There stood the sentry. And there behind him, in a common soldier’s cloak and boots, stood King Mezentio. “What in blazes are you doing here?” Sabrino asked harshly.

  “Seeing how things fare in the field,” the King of Algarve answered. “And that should be, ‘What in blazes are you doing here, your Majesty?’ May I come in?”

  “Aye.” Numbly, Sabrino stood aside. Mezentio walked in and closed the door behind him. Sabrino said, “I have some spirits, if you want any.”

  “No, thank you, your Excellency.” Mezentio took off his hat and cocked his bald head to one side. “Who knows? You might poison them.”

  Sabrino shook his head. “I wouldn’t go that far. I might say, ‘I told you so.’ I cursed well did tell you so, your Majesty, and you, powers below eat you, you wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “And do you think it would have made a counterfeit copper’s worth of difference if I had?” Mezentio retorted. “We had no chance to take Cottbus without doing what we did, and we couldn’t whip Unkerlant unless we took Cottbus. And so—”

  “So what?” Sabrino said. If Mezentio felt like executing him for the lèse majesty of interrupting, he didn’t much care. “So fornicating what? We did it, and we still didn’t take fornicating Cottbus, and how many Kaunians and Unkerlanters are dead now who’d be alive if we’d left well enough alone? How many tens of thousands?”

  Mezentio shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t care. The Kaunians have been our deadly foes since time out of mind. They deserve whatever happened to them. If they all had a single neck, I would have been rid of every one of them at the same time. I may yet manage that.”

  “You would do better to make peace,” Sabrino said. “How many Lagoans and Kuusamans think our name is a stench in the nostrils of civilization these days? All of them, or near enough.”

  “Who will make peace with me now? What sort of peace would it be?” Mezentio asked, two questions for which Sabrino had no good answers. The king went on: “Unfortunately, you are in large measure correct about the islanders, and as for Swemmel of Unkerlant—you know the answer there as well as I do. And so I shall triumph or I shall die, and Algarve with me.” He glared at Sabrino. “And you, your Excellency, you shall remain a colonel till one of those or the other happens. I wondered if you’d changed your ways, but I see that was another wasted hope.”

  Sabrino laughed. King Mezentio glared harder than ever. Laughing still, Sabrino said, “Why am I not surprised, your Majesty?”

  Rain spattered the surface of the Twegen River. Blowing in from out of the west, it spattered Colonel Spinello’s face, too. As he looked across from the ruins of Eoforwic to the Unkerlanter emplacements on the other side of the river, Spinello didn’t mind the rain so much. Were he down in the south of Unkerlant, it would long since have turned to sleet and snow.

  What he minded was the feeling he needed eyes in the back of his head. The Forthwegians who’d fought so long and hard had surrendered, aye—or most of them had. But some still blazed at the Algarvians in Eoforwic whenever they saw a chance. Spinello’s brigade took a casualty or two from snipers almost every day.

  He looked back over his shoulder. Hanging there from a balcony was the corpse of a Forthwegian his men had caught a couple of days before. Along with the noose, the fellow had a placard tied round his neck, THIS IS WHAT YOU GET IF YOU BLAZE AT AN ALGARVIAN, it warned in Algarvian, classical Kaunian, and presumably Forthwegian, although Spinello couldn’t read that last.

  That kind of warning would have deterred him. Some Forthwegians, though, were willing, even eager, to kill Algarvians regardless of whether it cost them
their lives. It usually did, and painfully, but they were still hard to guard against.

  He peered across the Twegen again. The river wasn’t very wide. Had the Unkerlanters wanted to force a crossing, they probably could have done it. Instead, they seemed content for the time being to pound Eoforwic to pieces while they built up their forces. Some of them were walking along the river-bank as openly as if they were back in their own kingdom.

  “Crystallomancer!” Spinello shouted in some annoyance. He had to shout it more than once, which annoyed him further.

  “Here, sir,” a smooth-cheeked youngster said at last.

  Spinello shook his head. The youth looked like an apprentice, not a real soldier. But he would have to do. “Connect me to our egg-tossers,” Spinello said. “Those whoresons over there need to learn some respect for us.”

  “Aye, sir.” The crystallomancer did make the etheric connection with commendable speed. “Go ahead, sir.”

  “Thank you.” Spinello stared into the crystal at the image of a gruff officer who might have fought in the Six Years’ War. He quickly explained what he wanted.

  “Aye, we can do that,” the veteran said. “Can’t have those bastards think they rule the roost even if they do, eh?” He gestured sharply, Spinello supposed to his own crystallomancer. Spinello’s crystal flared and then went inert.

  A few minutes later, eggs began bursting on the east side of the Twegen. The rain kept Spinello from seeing as much as he would have liked, but Swemmel’s soldiers wouldn’t go for their afternoon stroll along the riverbank any more. He was sure of that. They’d hide in holes the way he did, the ones not too seared by sorcerous energy to worry about hiding ever again.

  All that might have been true. But the Unkerlanters also took revenge. Spinello wondered how many egg-tossers they had, there on the other side of the Twegen. Plenty to knock down big chunks of Eoforwic that had somehow stayed standing through the Forthwegian uprising. Plenty to stir around the chunks that had already fallen down and to make big chunks into little ones.

  And plenty to make Spinello laugh, there in his hole with his face pressed to the earth and with his heart pounding from fear he couldn’t quell. The Unkerlanters could have pounded Eoforwic just as hard while the Algarvians were crushing the uprising. They could have, but they hadn’t. And why should they have? he wondered. We were doing their dirty work for them. Now they have to do their own.

  The other obvious implication there was that Swemmel’s soldiers thought they could overrun Eoforwic whenever they chose. He’d been fighting them for three years. He had the nasty feeling they knew what they were about.

  What does that say about Algarve? he thought at the ground quivered beneath him like an animal in pain. Does it say we’re going to lose the war? If he looked at things rationally, he couldn’t see how it would say anything else. But war wasn’t altogether a rational business. He’d seen enough of it to know that, too. If our secret sorceries come to fruition, or even if the Lagoans and Kuusamans get sick of staying allied to that madman of a Swemmel…

  It could happen. Many stranger things had happened. Being something of a student of history, Spinello knew as much. Lagoas and Kuusamo were civilized kingdoms. Why would they stay in harness with a barbarian maniac like Swemmel, especially when they were all fighting against another civilized kingdom like Algarve?

  Kaunians. The word tolled in his mouth like an iron bell, seeming louder than all the eggs bursting around and behind him. But then he shook his head. Lagoans and Kuusamans weren’t Kaunian folk. Lagoans were Algarvic, with blood ties to Algarve and Sibiu. Why should they care what happened to blonds? They’d fought plenty of wars against Kaunian Valmiera.

  They don’t want Algarve lord of all Derlavai. That made Spinello laugh, too, though he didn’t really find it funny. So they help Swemmel against us, and Unkerlant becomes lord of all Derlavai. What good does that do them?

  He laughed again. That’s the next war. It isn‘t this one. Who worries about tomorrow when he’s fighting to stay alive today?

  The Algarvians were fighting to stay alive today, fighting in a way Lagoas and Kuusamo weren’t—and having less luck with it. Somewhere not far away from Spinello, someone started screaming. He cursed. The scream had words, and some of them he recognized as Algarvian. He wouldn’t have cared much what happened to a Forthwegian, but a countryman was a countryman.

  Before he thought about what he was doing, he popped out of his hole and ran toward the screams. One of his troopers was doing the same thing. “Get down, Colonel!” the soldier yelled, his voice coming to Spinello by fits and starts through the roar of the bursting eggs.

  “Shut up,” Spinello said. The soldier didn’t argue. Spinello almost wished he would have. I’ve got a ribbon with my wound badge, he thought. Do I really want another one? He might easily get killed, too, but he refused even to think about that. He couldn’t do anything about it, anyhow.

  You could dive into a hole, fool, the rational part of his mind insisted. But then he spotted the wounded Algarvian and loped toward him. The trooper followed. It was, he saw as he stooped beside the hurt man, the crystallomancer who’d put him in touch with the egg-tossers.

  “Belly,” the trooper said, glancing at the wound. “That’s not so good.”

  “I know.” Spinello didn’t want to look at it. “Here, son.” He gave the crystallomancer a long draught of opium-laced spirits. It wasn’t much, but it was the best he could do. When he started to put a dressing on the wound, the crystallomancer, only half conscious, tried to fight him off.

  The trooper grabbed the wounded man’s hands. “We’re going to have to get him to the healers,” he said as Spinello worked.

  Spinello tapped his wound badge. “My pals didn’t let me down when I got hurt. Time to pay them back.” The common soldier only nodded. He wore a wound badge, too, and already had two ribbons under it.

  When they lifted the crystallomancer, he shrieked like a cursed soul.

  Then, mercifully, he did pass out. They half carried, half dragged him back to a battered building—more battered now than Spinello remembered it— where healers were hard at work. The place smelled of smoke and unwashed men and the butcher-shop odor of blood and the latrine stink of pierced entrails. Spinello did his best to hide his shudder. He’d been in places like this before, when he was the one who suffered. The smells made his body remember, and remember too well.

  “Hey, quacks!” the trooper said, perhaps hiding his own unease with bravado. “We’ve got another one for you to practice on.”

  A harried healer hurried over. He took one look at the crimsoned, soaking bandages and winced. “Belly wound, eh? We can’t do much with that here. We’ll have to put him on ice and ship him back to Algarve. Maybe they can help him back there, maybe not. He’ll have some kind of chance, anyway.”

  With a nod, Spinello said, “That’s about what I thought.” A dragon had flown him out of Sulingen after a sniper put a beam through the right side of his chest. Now he could take a more detached interest in the proceedings.

  A couple of eggs burst close enough to make the ground shake under his feet. Irritably, the healer said, “Don’t they ever run out of those cursed things?”

  Almost on cue, the pounding of Eoforwic eased. “Who knows?” Spinello said in glad surprise. “Maybe they do.”

  “Not bloody likely.” The healer put on a pair of long, thick, obviously insulated gloves. He called for a colleague, who did the same thing. The two men lifted the crystallomancer and set him down in a box that looked something like a coffin and something like a rest crate. Without the gloves, the spell inside the box would have sorcerously frozen their hands and arms in short order, too. The healer muttered a charm over the box. Then he scrawled on the outside a diagnosis in the much-abbreviated classical Kaunian medical men used. With a nod to Spinello, he said, “We’ll get him out of here. What happens after that is in the hands of the powers above.”

  “I hope he comes through all
right,” Spinello said. “We’ll need all the mages of any sort we can get our hands on.”

  “I wish I could say you were wrong,” the healer answered. “When we start using our secret sorceries—”

  “Aye, by the powers above!” Spinello broke in eagerly. “You’re a sorcerer yourself. How soon do you think that will be?”

  “I don’t know,” the healer said. “I wish I did. But only Mezentio and, I suppose, a few of our first-rank mages could tell you for certain. I will say this, though—it had better be soon.”

  “It certainly should,” Spinello said. “We’ve lost everything we ever got in Unkerlant, and so many men to go with that. We’re practically back to the point where we were when we started fighting Swemmel. And the east…” He didn’t want to think about the east. He didn’t want to think about the Unkerlanters’ not being checked here in the west, either—they were only gathering themselves for the next leap forward.

  “All true, every word of it.” The healer sounded glum. “But that’s not the worst. The worst is, where are we going to get the blonds to make the secret sorceries work?”

  “I don’t know,” Spinello answered. “I wish I did. We can start grabbing ordinary Forthwegians, I suppose—or Yaninans, those filthy traitors.”

  On that gloomy note, he took his leave. He saw some ordinary Forthwegians going through the ruins of Eoforwic. Every so often, one of them would stoop and put something in a basket. Gathering mushrooms, he thought, and made a face at the very idea. Algarvians didn’t eat mushrooms. As far as Spinello was concerned, people who did deserved whatever happened to them.

  Snow already lay thick on the ground in the Naantali district. Pekka wasn’t surprised; it would be snowing down in Kajaani, too, and Kajaani had the sea to moderate its climate. Some of the mages from the northern, more temperate parts of Kuusamo and Lagoas complained about the weather. They couldn’t do anything about it—what mage could?—but that didn’t stop them from complaining.