Jaws of Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  “Me, I’ve come to like it better this time of year,” Fernao said. “You can go outside without the mosquitoes’ eating you alive.”

  “It’s only weather,” Pekka said, ignoring snowstorms in mid-autumn with the ease of someone who took hard winters for granted. “What I have to complain about isn’t the snow. It’s those!’

  She pointed first to one of the heavy sticks now emplaced around the hostel and the blockhouse, then to another and another. When she looked up to the sky, she caught a glimpse of a patrolling dragon through a break in the clouds overhead. The dragon was painted in a pattern of sky blue and sea green, the colors of Kuusamo.

  “We have a saying in Lagoas.” Fernao paused, probably translating it into Kuusaman from his own language. “Trying to make soup after the dog has stolen the bone.”

  “Exactly,” Pekka said. “How are the Algarvians going to reach us now? They’ve left most of Valmiera. Their dragons can’t possibly fly here from the lands they still hold. And none of these things were in place when that cursed dragon did attack us.”

  Fernao took her hand. She squeezed his. When Leino came home, she would have a lot of things to worry about, a lot of choices to make. She knew as much. Meanwhile, she enjoyed each day—and each night—as if tomorrow would never come. Later? What was later?

  Slowly, Fernao said, “Saying what the Algarvians can’t possibly do worries me a little. They’ve already done too many things nobody thought they could do.”

  “Too many things nobody thought they would do,” Pekka said, which wasn’t quite the same thing. “Too many things nobody thought anyone would do.”

  Now Fernao squeezed her hand. “What we’ve done here has gone a long way toward keeping people from doing things like that again. That’s mostly thanks to you, you know, to you and your experiments.”

  Pekka shook her head. “Master Siuntio is the one who really deserves the credit. And Master Ilmarinen. I just did the work. They were the ones who saw I’d stumbled onto something important and figured out what it meant.”

  “You don’t give yourself enough credit,” Fernao said. “You never have.”

  “Nonsense,” Pekka said, and then, “I got a letter from my sister this morning.”

  She’d wanted to change the subject, and she succeeded. Fernao walked along in silence for a little while, kicking up snow at every step. At last, he asked, “And what does she have to say?”

  “Nothing too much,” Pekka answered. “Olavin’s solicitors paid a call on her. She wasn’t very happy about that.”

  “I believe it.” In Fernao’s long, pale Lagoan face, his slanted eyes were usually a reminder that he had a little Kuusaman blood in him, too. Now, though, they just made his expression harder to read. After a few more silent paces, he said, “Are we going to have to worry about that one of these days?”

  Pekka had forced the future out of her purview. Now Fernao brought it back. She wished he hadn’t. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.” She kicked up some snow of her own—kicked it at Fernao, in fact. “Let’s go back to the hostel.” She turned and started off without waiting to see whether he followed.

  He did, and went up the steps only a pace behind her. “Whatever happens, we’ll see it through,” he said.

  “What else can we do?” she said, wishing he would keep quiet. Weren’t men supposed to be the ones who didn’t want to commit themselves? That didn’t fit Fernao. He wanted to run away with her. She was the one full of doubts, full of complications. She sighed. Why couldn’t things be simpler?

  Going into the hostel certainly made things no simpler. There stood Ilmarinen, just inside the front entrance. He had been talking with a couple of the workmen still busy repairing the hostel after the Algarvian attack. But when he saw Pekka and Fernao together, he broke off and came over to them. “And what were the two of you doing out there?” he purred.

  By the way he said it, the question could have only one possible answer. But Pekka replied, “Don’t be silly. It’s much too cold outside for that.”

  Ilmarinen looked disappointed. Fernao asked him, “And what have you been doing in here?”

  “Aye, what have you been doing?” Pekka echoed. “Have you finished the calculations I asked you for the other day?”

  To her surprise, Ilmarinen nodded. “They’re finished, all right.”

  “And?” Pekka asked when he said no more.

  “And it’s just what we thought it was,” the master mage answered grimly. “Did you think the calculations would show it wouldn’t work? Not bloody likely, not after we’ve spent all this time tearing up the landscape around here.”

  “You don’t sound happy,” Fernao observed.

  Though much the shorter of the two, Ilmarinen contrived to look down his nose at Fernao. “Should I? What the Algarvians visited on Yliharma, now we can visit on Trapani. Shall I throw my hat in the air? Shall I shout huzzah? Now we can match the barbarians in barbarism. Huzzah indeed!”

  “Better that we be able to match them than that we not be able to match them,” Pekka said. “That’s the assumption we’ve been working on.”

  “No.” Ilmarinen shook his head. “The assumption we’ve been working on is that they had better not be able to match our new sorcery. And they bloody well can’t, not so far as we can tell. But that we use what we have for the same purposes as they use what they have …” He shook his head again. “No, by the powers above.”

  “We can do many more things with ours,” Fernao said. “Once the war is over, it will turn the world upside down. But for now …” He shrugged. “For now, we do what needs doing, and that means beating Algarve.”

  “They’re using it the right way up in Jelgava, throwing the Algarvians’ spells back in their faces,” Ilmarinen said. “Mezentio’s mages deserve that, and so do his soldiers. But the other? No.” He sounded very certain.

  “How is it any different from sending dragons over their cities to drop eggs on them?” Pekka asked.

  “That’s just war,” Ilmarinen said. “Everybody does it. The other—you wouldn’t, we wouldn’t, just be hurting a city if that ever happened, and you know it.”

  Pekka grimaced. He wasn’t wrong, however much she wished he were. But she didn’t think she was wrong, either, as she answered, “We have to do what needs doing.”

  “Do we?” Ilmarinen said. “Don’t you suppose the Algarvian mages say the same old thing—the same old lie—just before their soldiers start blazing Kaunians, or however they go about killing them to get their life energy?”

  “That’s not fair,” Pekka said. “We’re not killing anyone to get the energy for our magecraft.”

  “No, that’s true—we’re not. And so what?” Ilmarinen said. “If we use it the way you have in mind, we’ll be killing plenty on the other end.”

  “That’s different,” Fernao said. “If you can’t get a man to listen to you, you hit him. If he hits you, you get a club. If he hits you with a club, you get a sword. If he hits you with a sword, you get a stick. If he blazes at you with a stick, you go after him with a behemoth, and so on.”

  “I don’t like thinking of myself as a murderer,” Ilmarinen said. “I’ll do it, mind you, but I don’t like it.”

  “Think of the Algarvians as murderers, then,” Pekka said. “They are, you know. Even Master Siuntio thought this fight was worth making—and Mezentio’s mages killed him, remember.”

  “I’m not likely to forget, not when they came so bloody close to killing me, too,” Ilmarinen replied. “But I’m sick of war. I’m sick of killing. Aren’t you?”

  “Of course I am,” Pekka said. “But the fastest way to win it is the way Fernao said: to knock the Algarvians down till they can’t get up any more. Do you truly think anything else would do the job?”

  “I’m not surprised you agree with him,” Ilmarinen said, and then laughed. “Ah, there—I’ve gone and made you angry. I wonder why.”

  “You’ve made me angry, all right,”
Pekka said tightly. “And I’ll tell you why: because you didn’t try to answer my question, that’s why. You just took a cheap blaze at me. Now answer, if you’d be so kind. Do you think anything else would do the job, or not?”

  This time, Ilmarinen hesitated before speaking. Even so, he didn’t quite answer her question. What he said was, “There’s more to you than meets the eye. Do you know that?”

  “I don’t much care,” Pekka said. “I’m going to ask you a third time, and I expect a straight answer. Can we beat the Algarvians and the Gyongyosians any other way than by knocking them flat?”

  Asking Ilmarinen for a straight answer could easily prove as frustrating as asking a toddler to stop making a nuisance of himself. Pekka didn’t get one now, either. The master mage smiled at her till she wanted to punch him in the teeth. He said, “I’ll give you the calculations tonight.” Then, irrepressible, he leered. “I’ll just slide them under the door, so I’ll be sure not to interrupt anything.” With a sweet, carnivorous smile, he strode away.

  Pekka glared after him. Fernao set a hand on her shoulder. “The more he gets you angry, the more he wins. That’s what he’s after, you know.”

  “No.” Pekka shook her head. “You’re close, but you’re not quite right. The more he drives me crazy, the more he wins. He’s good at it, too. He’s been driving everyone crazy for the past fifty years.”

  “Well, then, don’t worry about him,” Fernao said.

  She laughed as mockingly as Ilmarinen had. “Tell the sun not to come up tomorrow, as long as you’re in a mood to give advice.”

  She wondered if that might anger Fernao. Instead, he answered soberly: “I’ve been where the sun sometimes doesn’t come up for weeks—the land of the Ice People. It can happen. And you can ignore Ilmarinen.”

  “It’s not easy,” she said, and then seized his hand. “Come to my room. If anything will help me do it, that will.” Had she ever been so blunt with Leino? She had trouble remembering. In any case, right now she wanted to forget.

  Ilmarinen did slide papers under her door, and chose a very distracting moment to do it, too. A little while later, Fernao said, “I wonder if he did that on purpose.”

  He ran his hand along her flank. The distraction hadn’t ruined things. Pekka felt sated and lazy—too lazy to get up and get the papers on the instant. She said, “He could tell by sorcery if he wanted to badly enough, but I don’t think he would bother. I hope he wouldn’t bother.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Fernao answered. “Are you going to see what the calculations say?”

  “Eventually,” Pekka said. “Part of me wants to know, but the rest, the rest”—she confessed to Fernao what she would never have told anyone else— “wonders if Ilmarinen isn’t absolutely right, though I wouldn’t tell him that in a thousand years, not when we have to do this come what may.” She felt a little better when Fernao leaned over and kissed her, but much better when he nodded to show he felt the same way.

  The Unkerlanter mage nodded to Leudast.“There you are, Lieutenant,” the fellow said. “All your flesh is the same age again.”

  Leudast tried the leg that had been wounded. Without a doubt, it felt worse than it had before the sorcerer cast his spell. But he could still use it. He nodded. “Thanks,” he said. “The fellow who helped heal my wound by aging it warned me to make sure I got rid of the spell once it had served its purpose.”

  “I believe that,” the wizard said. After a moment’s thoughtful hesitation, he went on, “Do you mind if I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.” Leudast had a pretty good idea of what was coming.

  And, sure enough, the wizard said, “How did your healer decide to use that particular charm on you? Very often, we reserve it for, ah, special cases.”

  “What do you mean, special cases?” Leudast asked in turn. The mage didn’t answer. But Leudast had little trouble drawing his own conclusions. It had to mean something like, people more important than a lieutenant with a peasant accent. He said, “Marshal Rathar personally promoted me.”

  That had impressed the healer who’d treated him. It impressed this mage, too. He said, “No wonder the man used it with you, then.”

  Not what you know—who you know. Leudast had had that thought before. Anybody could become a sergeant. Going that far was easy, if you were a good soldier—and if the Algarvians didn’t kill you, of course. He’d been pretty lucky, getting away with only two wounds. He wondered how many Unkerlanter soldiers who’d started the war with the redheads were still in it. Then he wondered how many of them had become officers. He’d been lucky in more than staying alive, and he knew it.

  “You’re ready to go, Lieutenant.” Now that the sorcerer knew Leudast knew Marshal Rathar—or at least that Rathar knew him—he was noticeably more polite.

  “Thanks very much.” Leudast used a little politeness himself. He strode out of the Yaninan farmhouse the regimental healer was using, out into a rain that was beginning to freeze. His leg did hurt a good deal more than it had before he’d had the other wizard’s spell removed. He limped a little. He didn’t care. He’d already waited longer than he should have to get rid of that magic. Over the next month, he knew exactly how much the limb would improve.

  And I know I won’t get killed in the next month, too, he thought. Had he been about to die, his leg would have told him of it. I can be as reckless as I want on the field. The Algarvians can’t touch me. For a month, I’ve got a charmed life.

  But was that really true? What would happen if, say, he picked up a stick right now and blazed out his own brains? He’d be dead, and his leg wouldn’t have warned him about it.

  He shook his head to clear it. Thinking about such things was as likely to make that head ache as drinking too deep from a jar of spirits. He laughed under his breath. It wasn’t nearly so much fun, either.

  His company occupied the rest of the village, or what was left of it. The Algarvians had made a stand here a few days before, and most of the huts— actually, the houses were a good deal finer than those in peasant villages in Unkerlant—had either burned or gone up in bursts of sorcerous energy in the nasty process of forcing them out. The ones who hadn’t got out still lay here and there; no one had bothered burying the corpses. Only the chilly weather kept the stink from being worse than it was.

  Some of the men who couldn’t fit into the handful of houses still boasting walls and roofs kept dry in tents plundered from the redheads. The rest made do with their greatcoats and stout felt boots. The Unkerlanter army did issue those to everyone, even if Swemmel’s men might not get tents or, for that matter, much in the way of food.

  But, regardless of whether Swemmel’s quartermasters got supplies to them, the soldiers had no trouble keeping themselves fed. Brass pots bubbled over fires the rain made smoky but couldn’t douse. Even the men who had only greatcoats seemed contented enough. One thing Unkerlanters knew was how to take care of themselves in the cold and rain.

  Once upon a time, Leudast had assumed everybody all over the world knew such things. The trouble the redheads had in the snow the first winter of the war taught him otherwise. So did the fancy food and shelters he and his comrades kept taking from dead Algarvians. How could anyone who needed so much help to fight a war in bad weather seriously expect to win it?

  Trying without much luck not to limp on his injured leg, Leudast went over to one of the stewpots and took out his mess tin. A cook with the hood to his greatcoat protecting his face ladled the tin full. “There you go, sir,” he said. His voice was curiously neutral; Leudast hadn’t been with the company long enough to have created much of an impression for good or ill.

  “Thanks,” he said now, and dug in with a tin spoon. The stew was hot, which felt good. It had barley and oats and some rather nasty vegetables—the Yaninans ate things Unkerlanters didn’t—and bits of meat. Prodding one of those with his spoon, Leudast asked, “Do I want to know what this is?”

  “Could be cursed near anything, sir,”
the cook answered. “There’s chunks of two, three different beasts in the pots these days: behemoth and horse and unicorn, maybe even some real pork, too, but I’m not sure about that.”

  “I won’t worry about it,” Leudast said. “Whatever it is, it’ll keep me going—and it doesn’t taste too bad.” The cook beamed when he added that.

  Eggs started bursting, not very far to the east. As always, the Algarvians fought hard over every inch of ground they yielded. They counterattacked whenever they saw the chance. It was as if they were saying to the Unkerlanters, If you think you can beat us, you ‘re going to have to pay the price.

  The ground shook under Leudast’s feet. For a moment, he thought the eggs accounted for that, but then somebody said, “More behemoths coming in.

  He looked back toward the west, toward Unkerlant. Sure enough, the big, burly beasts were plenty to make the ground tremble. “What’s it like up ahead?” one of the men on the lead behemoth called as the beasts squelched forward.

  “What do you think it’s going to be like?” Leudast answered. “There are redheads up there, and they won’t kiss you when they see you.”

  “We’ll kiss them, by the powers above.” The fellow riding the behemoth leaned over to pat the heavy stick mounted on the beast’s armored back. “We’ll kiss them with this. We’ll kiss anybody who gets in our way, you bet we will.”

  “Good. They deserve it.” Leudast paused, then asked, “Have you had any trouble from the Yaninans?”

  “Not much. They’d be sorry if they gave us any, I’ll tell you that,” the man on the behemoth said. “Some of ‘em like us better than Mezentio’s whoresons, and that’s fine. Some of ‘em like the Algarvians better, I expect, but they haven’t had the nerve to show it, and they’d better not. The army is on our side.”

  Leudast snorted. “Aye, I’ve heard the same thing. And it’ll do us just as much good as it ever did the Algarvians.”

  “It can soak up some casualties,” the behemoth crewman said. “Better the Yaninans than us.”

  “You’re right about that. We’ve paid our share and then some,” Leudast said. The fellow on the behemoth nodded and waved. The beast trudged forward. Its big feet came out of the mud, one after another, with heavy squelching sounds despite the snowshoes that spread its weight. The whole long column of behemoths followed. By the time they all went through, the road was a river of ooze stinking of behemoth dung.