Jaws of Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  One of Leudast’s men said, “There’ll be another big fight coming up pretty soon. They don’t move behemoths forward unless they mean it.”

  “You’re probably right,” Leudast answered. “Only thing we can do about it is try and whip the redheads and not get hurt too bad ourselves.”

  “That would be good.” The soldier didn’t sound as if he thought it were very likely to happen, though. Had Leudast been the stuffy sort of officer, he would have given the man a hard time and lectured him about efficiency. Since he’d never been able to stand that kind of officer before getting promoted himself, he kept his mouth shut.

  Before long, the regimental commander—himself only a captain—came into the village with orders: “We go forward this afternoon.”

  “Aye, sir.” Leudast nodded. “I thought as much when the behemoths came through earlier in the day.”

  “You’re no fool, are you?” the captain said—his name was Drogden.

  “There’s plenty who’d tell you otherwise, sir,” Leudast said, and got a laugh from Drogden before going on, “My guess is, I’ve just seen a lot of war.”

  “Our whole kingdom has seen a lot of war, and my guess is that we’ve got a good deal more to see yet before the redheads are licked,” Captain Drogden said.

  “My guess is, that’s a pretty good guess,” Leudast said.

  Drogden nodded. He was an older man, close to forty, weather-beaten enough to show he’d seen a lot of war, too. Maybe he was a jumped-up sergeant like Leudast, or maybe he’d spent a long, long time as a lieutenant. “Aye, the Algarvians have no quit in ‘em,” he said. “That’s plain enough. But still and all, things’ll be different once we finally go and break into Algarve.”

  His voice held an odd anticipation. “Different how, sir?” Leudast asked.

  “I’ll tell you how,” the regimental commander said. “We get to pay those whoresons back for everything they did to Unkerlant when their peckers were up, that’s how. We can burn their farms pretty cursed soon. We can wreck their villages. Our mages can tear up their ley line. And, speaking of peckers up, we can throw their women down on the ground and do what we want with them.”

  Leudast grunted. He knew the Algarvians had done such things in the Unkerlanter territory they’d overrun. “Powers above, I’ve never even seen a redheaded woman before,” he said.

  “Neither have I. But if we don’t get blazed, I expect we’re going to. It should be fun.” With a leer, Drogden slapped him on the back. “Spread the word through your company. It’ll give the men something extra to fight for.”

  Most of his troopers, Leudast discovered, had already had that thought for themselves. Some looked forward to it. But one man said, “Far as I’m concerned, we should just kill all the Algarvians, the men and the women both. Then we won’t have to worry about ‘em ever again.” Leudast couldn’t deny that that notion held more than a little appeal for him, too.

  When the attack went in that afternoon, the Unkerlanters pushed forward for a couple of miles without much trouble. Then they came to the Skamandros River, which the rain had made too wide and swift to ford, and discovered that the redheads had wrecked all the bridges over it. They also discovered that the Algarvians had a demon of a lot of well-concealed egg-tossers on the far bank. “What now?” Leudast asked when he saw Captain Drogden again.

  “Now we wait for the artificers to make some new bridges, or else for our dragons and egg-tossers to smash up the redheads and give us some kind of chance to cross,” Drogden answered. “Don’t know what else we can do.”

  “It’s not so bad, sir,” Leudast said. “We’re moving forward, and that counts for more than anything else.”

  Sidroc hadn’t liked Unkerlanters, and they weren’t that much different from Forthwegians. Now that the Algarvian army was forced back into Yanina, and Plegmund’s Brigade with it, he discovered that he really didn’t like Yaninans.

  “Where’s your food?” he demanded of a skinny villager with cold, dark eyes and a big gray mustache. He said it in Forthwegian, and then in Algarvian. The Yaninan looked back at him, shrugged, and spread his hands as if to say he didn’t understand.

  “Blaze the son of a whore,” Ceorl suggested. “That’ll teach him.”

  “It won’t do us any good, though,” Sidroc said. “Here, watch me be as efficient as an Unkerlanter. Go inside the house there and bring out this bastard’s wife. Don’t get rough with her or anything, but bring her.”

  Ceorl laughed. “I’ll do it. I think I know what you’ve got in mind.”

  In he went. The Yaninan villager looked alarmed. He looked a lot more alarmed when the woman cried out. But when he took a step toward the house, Sidroc aimed his stick at the fellow’s face. “Don’t even think about it, pal,” he said. Either the words or the gesture got through; the Yaninan froze, though his mouth twisted in a snarl of hate.

  Out came Ceorl, manhandling a graying woman about half his size. Sidroc knew no Yaninan, but he was sure she was calling Ceorl everything she could. Ceorl realized that, too. “I hope the old shitter stays clammed up,” he said. “I’d enjoy doing in this bitch.”

  “We’ll find out in a minute.” Sidroc switched back to Algarvian: “One more time, pal. Where is the food? She’ll be sorry if you keep quiet.”

  Looking daggers at him, the Yaninan answered in pretty good Algarvian of his own: “Dig under the water barrel.” He looked as if he wanted to say a good deal more than that, but he bit it back. That was one of the wiser things he’d ever done.

  “No.” Sidroc gestured. “You dig, pal. And you had better come up with some good stuff, too.”

  He went into the house with the Yaninan, and watched the skinny old man dig up the dirt floor. What came out was plenty to satisfy him: hams and sausages, all securely wrapped to keep them safe while they were out of sight. At his delighted exclamation, Ceorl came in to see, too. “Well, all right,” the ruffian said enthusiastically. “I guess we let the old whore live.”

  “You see?” Sidroc said to the Yaninan. “You just saved your wife.”

  “But the two of you, this is too much for you,” the man with the gray mustache said.

  “We’ve got friends.” Sidroc grabbed a long string of sausages. “Come on, Ceorl. Lend a hand.”

  Between them, they did a good job of plundering the peasants’ larder. When they showed their comrades what they’d got, they were the heroes of the moment. “Haven’t eaten this well since we got out of Forthweg,” Sergeant Werferth said. He was exaggerating, but not by a great deal.

  Sudaku, the blond from the Phalanx of Valmiera who’d broken out of the Mandelsloh pocket with the men of Plegmund’s Brigade, nodded. “Good food,” he said in Algarvian. He was eating enough for two himself.

  “If we had more spirits, we’d have more spirits,” Ceorl said, and laughed loudly at his own wit. Sidroc chuckled, too. He wasn’t going to let a fellow Forthwegian down, not even a son of a whore like Ceorl.

  Werferth said, “Maybe you ought to go shake down that Yaninan of yours again. If he hid the food under the water barrel, he’s probably got a distillery on the roof.”

  “I would not be a bit surprised,” Sidroc said—in Algarvian, so the men who weren’t Forthwegians but had attached themselves to the now motley unit could understand. He nodded to Ceorl. “What do you say we go have a look?”

  “Probably find that ugly bastard and his uglier woman drunk and screwing their brains out.” Ceorl started to heave himself to his feet.

  Before he got upright, eggs started landing not far away. He threw himself flat. So did Sidroc. So did all the men who’d been sharing the booty they’d found. Veterans knew better than to stay on their feet, or even sitting, when the Unkerlanters started getting frisky.

  More of the eggs landed west of the Yaninan village than square on it. That cheered Sidroc, but not for long. A couple of minutes later, Algarvians— and a few Forthwegians, and a couple of the Valmieran Kaunians who’d taken service with King
Mezentio—came running back from their forward positions. In the din, he needed a little while to catch what they were shouting. When he did, he wished he hadn’t; it was, “Behemoths! Unkerlanter behemoths!”

  Sergeant Werferth stuck his head up in the hope of spotting an Algarvian officer—or perhaps in the hope of not spotting one. When he didn’t, he spoke in Algarvian: “I am in charge here. We are going to get over that river east of the village as quick as we can. We have no hope of fighting their behemoths without some of our own.”

  That was a bitter truth the men of Plegmund’s Brigade and the Algarvians had learned in too many encounters throughout eastern Unkerlant. Sidroc said, “Once we’re over the bridge”—he hoped there was a bridge; he’d swum one stream to escape Swemmel’s soldiers, and didn’t want to have to try it again—”we’d better wreck it, to keep the enemy from getting a foothold on the other side.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Ceorl said. Sergeant Werferth only shrugged. He’d always paid more attention to the proper rules of soldiering and less to what would save his own neck than made Sidroc comfortable.

  But he was the one who’d ordered the retreat. He didn’t expect his men to do the impossible; too many of them had died trying. Sidroc’s boots squelched through mud. That would slow the behemoths down, too, even if it wouldn’t slow them down so much as he would have liked.

  “Here! Over here!” That was an Algarvian voice, and one full of the authority the redheads effortlessly assumed. “Here is the crossing of the Skamandros. We shall pass over it, hold it open as long as we can, and then destroy it to keep the Unkerlanters from following.”

  “There, you see?” Sidroc said cheerfully. “I ought to be an officer.”

  “You ought to get a good kick in the slats.” Ceorl also sounded cheerful, as if he would have enjoyed delivering the kick. All things considered, he probably would have.

  The bridge, when they reached it, was wooden and narrow: a miserable, rickety piece of work, like a lot of the things Sidroc had seen in Yanina. “Behemoths would have a demon of a time crossing on this,” he said as he started across it himself.

  “Don’t want footsoldiers crossing, either,” Werferth said. “Swemmel’s whoresons are downright nasty when it comes to grabbing bridgeheads.” He was, without a doubt, right about that. Sidroc sighed with relief when he stepped into the mud on the far bank. The Unkerlanters would be a while crossing, anyhow.

  A couple of Algarvian mages stood on the eastern bank of the Skamandros. One said to the other, “We’ll give it a few minutes more and then bring down the bridge. We don’t want to let the Unkerlanters get close enough to try a counterspell and stop us.”

  “That’s the truth,” the other wizard said. “I’ve still got hopes of living to get old and gray and crotchety. A few behemoths in the wrong place don’t do those plans any good.”

  They both laughed. Algarvians took pride in absurdity. Sidroc didn’t. He was just glad he’d got over the river before the redheads sorcerously smashed the bridge.

  “To me!” called the Algarvian officer who’d known where the crossing was. “There’s a village ahead. We can shelter in it.”

  “Who knows?” Sidroc said. “Maybe the stinking Yaninans will have more hams buried under the water barrel. Here’s hoping.” Marching made him weary, as it always did, but he wasn’t hungry. That in itself made a pleasant novelty.

  He hadn’t gone far before a rending crash behind him announced the demise of the bridge. If Swemmel’s sorcerers had tried a counterspell, it hadn’t worked. Sergeant Werferth said, “Keep moving, boys. The sooner we get to this village, wherever it is, the happier we’ll be.”

  The village wasn’t far ahead. Yapping dogs announced its presence before the road came out from among a grove of fruit trees and let Sidroc see it. He’d had the same thing happen more than once back in Unkerlant.

  “Keep moving,” the Algarvian officer commanded, leading from the front as his kind usually did. “We’re going to dig in here. We’re going to stop the Unkerlanters in their tracks.” As his kind usually did, he sounded utterly certain of that. What difference did it make that powers-above-only-knew-how-many similar declarations had been wrong before?

  Sidroc knew what difference it made. “We’d cursed well better stop Swemmel’s bastards,” he said. “We haven’t got a lot of room left to play around with.” He scowled at the village ahead, and at the dogs trying to nerve themselves for a run at the soldiers tramping up the road towards them.

  “We’ve got to keep trying, no matter what,” Sergeant Werferth said. “If we don’t, we’re cooked, on account of—” He suddenly stopped talking. He suddenly stopped walking, too, crumpling down to the roadway as if he were a marionette with cut strings. He twitched a couple of times and lay still.

  “He’s dead,” Ceorl said in slow wonder. “I fornicating can’t believe it. I was fornicating sure he’d outlive every fornicating one of us.”

  That thought had gone through Sidroc’s mind, too. Now only anger filled him. He pointed ahead. “The beam came from that first house there. I saw it. Now we pay back the bastard who did it.”

  “Now we pay back the whole fornicating village,” said Sudaku, the man from the Phalanx of Valmiera. He might be only a Kaunian, Sidroc thought, but he’s a pretty cursed good soldier.

  A low growl ran through the men—Forthwegians, Kaunians, and Algarvians. Everyone who’d known Werferth had liked him. And he was one of their own, and a civilian sniper had blazed him. They shook themselves out into a skirmish line and advanced on the village at a purposeful trot. Most of the dogs in front of it fled, yelping in dismay. The soldiers blazed the ones that didn’t.

  Another beam winked at them from that farmhouse window. This time, it didn’t hit anybody. A couple of soldiers blazed back, while others moved toward the farmhouse. Along with the rest, Sidroc trotted into the village. “Out!” he shouted in Algarvian. “Out! Out! Out!” A dozen, a score, of voices took up the cry. A couple of men even knew how to say it in Yaninan.

  Confused and frightened-looking villagers started coming forth. Sidroc blazed the first one he saw, a woman a few years older than he was. She fell with a shriek. The rest of the Yaninans cried out in horror. Then their yells turned to agony, too, for all the men who fought for Mezentio started blazing at them. It was vengeance swift and sure, vengeance a hundredfold for the soldier their countryman had slain.

  Afterwards, Sidroc remembered the massacre in red fragments. An old man with no teeth yammering in mushy terror, mouth open very wide, till Sidroc’s beam blew out the back of his head. A young man charging the soldiers but falling before he could use his fists, the only weapons he had. A young woman running and then twisting every which way as three beams caught her at once. A fat grandmother standing and dying so she almost blocked the doorway to her house. The little girl who came out when the grandmother’s body didn’t block the doorway well enough, and who died a moment later, too.

  It didn’t take long, the massacre. “They had it coming,” Sidroc said. A few Yaninans still writhed and moaned. Most lay where they had fallen.

  “Of course they had it coming,” the young Algarvian officer said. “Now dig in. I don’t know how long the line of the Skamandros will hold the Unkerlanters. Not long enough, curse it.” He was likely right about that. Sidroc got to work.

  Twenty

  Somewhere not far ahead, the Algarvians waited. Leino knew it. Sometime soon, they would try to strike back. The Kuusaman mage didn’t know that, not for a fact, but he felt it in his boots. Mezentio’s men had already yielded half of Jelgava—more than half, farther to the south. If they were going to hold the armies of Kuusamo and Lagoas away from their own border, they would have to strike back soon.

  He started to say as much to Xavega, but she picked that moment to look up from the grimoire she was studying and announce, “It’s too hot in here.”

  “Well, so it is,” Leino said. “You could always go outside the tent for some air.�
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  “It will be too hot out there, too.” Even in clean, abstract classical Kaunian, Xavega had no trouble sounding querulous. “This is autumn. The weather should be changing.”

  “It has changed,” Leino said. Xavega shook her head, sending copper curls flying, but he went on, “It was much too hot. Now it is only too hot. Jelgava is a warm kingdom, much warmer than either Kuusamo or Lagoas.”

  “Disgusting,” Xavega said. “I am always as sweaty as if we had just finished making love.” She put the grimoire aside and glanced over at him. “Since I am already sweaty, shall we?” Without waiting for an answer, she started undoing the toggles of her tunic.

  Leino went to her. Everything they had that was worth keeping, they had in bed: here in this tent, in a couple of narrow, lumpy, uncomfortable cots. He stroked her. She was sweaty. In short order, so was he. He might have been bloody, too; her nails had scored his back.

  Afterwards, she dressed quickly—no lazing in the afterglow. And she went back to studying the grimoire with the same dour intensity. After a few minutes, she looked up and said, “This is the strangest sorcery I have ever had to learn.”

  “I think it is fascinating,” Leino said. And, whenever he studied that sorcery, he saw Pekka’s handprints all through it. She hadn’t said much about what she was doing; ever since the war started, she’d been very close-mouthed about her work. But everything Leino saw in these spells corresponded to the little hints he’d got from her. He understood now why she’d kept so quiet. “This is a cleaner way to get more out of sorcery than the Algarvians do with all their murders. What could be better than that?”