Jaws of Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  “What have you got, Corporal?” somebody called from behind Garivald: an Unkerlanter. At least, I think he’s an Unkerlanter, Garivald thought dizzily. Nothing in the world seemed so certain as it had a moment before.

  “What have I got?” he echoed. “I’ve got a spy, that’s what. Go fetch Lieutenant Andelot right away. He needs to see this, and to hear about it, too.” The Unkerlanter soldier’s eyes widened. He took off at a run. Garivald was only a corporal, but common soldiers obeyed him as if he were Marshal Rathar. Of course, he had to obey sergeants and real officers the same way, while Rathar had to obey only the king, with everyone else in Unkerlant obeying him. The marshal has it easy, Garivald thought.

  Andelot came trotting back with the trooper. “A spy?” he said, and stared down at the dead Algarvian. “How in blazes did he get so far inside our lines, Fariulf?”

  “Because he looked just like a fornicating Forthwegian till I blazed him, sir,” Garivald answered, and explained what had happened.

  “I’ve heard of such sorcery,” Andelot said when he was finished. “Some of the Kaunians here in Forthweg used it to keep the redheads from finding them and killing them. But this is the first time I’ve heard that the Algarvians are using it to try to make themselves look harmless while they come snooping around.”

  “I hadn’t heard of it at all, sir,” Garivald said. “Like I told you, I was taking this fellow back to you so you could question him—he wasn’t supposed to be inside the perimeter.”

  “He must have thought we had a wizard waiting to test him,” Andelot said. “He panicked, and got himself killed, and gave the game away. If he looked like an old Forthwegian, probably I would have just cursed him and told him to make himself scarce. I wouldn’t have guessed he was anything but what he seemed to be.”

  “I sure didn’t, sir,” Garivald said. “I was never so surprised in my life as when I saw him change as soon as he died.”

  “But you did what you were supposed to do by bringing him in,” Lieutenant Andelot said. “And you did what you were supposed to do by blazing him when he tried to escape. No one could possibly have asked for more from you, Sergeant Fariulf.”

  “Serge …” Garivald saluted. “Thank you very much, sir!” He didn’t much want to be promoted. The higher he rose, the more likely people were to take a long look at him, a look he couldn’t afford. But he would also draw long looks if he seemed unhappy about getting a higher rank.

  “You’re welcome. You’ve earned it. Eventually, your pay will show that you’re getting it, too.” Andelot made a wry face. The men who gave out money in the Unkerlanter army plainly didn’t think efficiency was anything they had to worry about. “Do you think you could write me a report of everything that happened here, Sergeant?”

  “ Write you a report?” Garivald was more alarmed than he had been when he saw the sorcerously disguised Algarvian trying to get away from him. “Sir, you only showed me my letters a few weeks ago. How in blazes am I supposed to write a report?”

  “Just write down what happened, the same as if you were telling it to me,” the company commander answered. “Don’t worry about your spelling, or anything fancy like that. You would be amazed at how many men who went to good schools can’t spell some simple words to keep the powers below from eating them. Believe me, you would. I won’t care about that, I promise. But you are the eyewitness. I want the facts down on paper in your words, not mine.”

  “I’ll try, sir,” Garivald said dubiously. He pointed to the Algarvian’s body. “What do we do with that?”

  “Leave him here,” Andelot answered. “I’ll want a mage to look at him just the way he is. I don’t know if he’ll be able to learn anything, but I want to give him a chance.”

  “All right, sir. That makes sense,” Garivald said.

  “Get some paper, Sergeant—I’ll give you some if you can’t find it anywhere else—and go write that report,” Andelot told him. “Get everything down while it’s still fresh in your mind. Don’t leave anything out. Maybe it’ll help if you pretend you’re talking to me instead of writing.”

  “Maybe.” Garivald knew he still didn’t sound convinced. He did have to get paper from the lieutenant. Once he got it, he sat apart from his men and started to work. He wrote awkwardly, as a child might have. That annoyed him. It also made his writing harder to read, he knew. He guessed at the spelling of about every other word, and found he had to imitate a conversational style, as Andelot had suggested: it was the only one within his grasp. He couldn’t very well imitate other things he’d read, because he hadn’t read anything to speak of.

  At last, after what seemed like forever and was in fact two leaves of paper, he finished. When he brought Lieutenant Andelot the report, he trembled even more than he had when first going into battle. No man relishes the feeling that he’s just made a fool of himself. He had to force his voice to steadiness to say, “Here you are, sir.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” Andelot replied. His mention of Garivald’s new rank made Garivald feel better and more nervous at the same time. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.” He began to read, then looked up and nodded. “You make your letters very clearly.”

  “You’re too kind,” Garivald muttered. He had the feeling that was the kind of compliment you got when no others seem to present themselves.

  And, sure enough, Andelot said, “Anyone would know, though, that you haven’t had much in the way of formal schooling.”

  “I haven’t had any, sir, and you know it,” Garivald said.

  “Well, so I do.” Andelot kept reading. He put down the first leaf and methodically worked his way through the second. When he finished that one, too, he glanced up at the nervously waiting Garivald. He tapped the report with his index finger. “This isn’t at all what I expected, Sergeant.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Garivald said. “I did the best I could.”

  Andelot looked surprised. “Sorry? Powers above, what for? Do you think I meant you did a bad job? … Oh, I see you do. No, no, no, Sergeant—just the opposite, in fact. This is splendid work. Except for the spelling—which you can’t help, of course—I would be sure you’d been writing reports for years.” He shook his head. “No, that’s not true. I would think you’d been writing romances or poems, not reports. Reports aren’t made to be interesting, and most of them aren’t. This, though”—he tapped again—”this makes me feel it happened to me, not to you. Only a real storyteller, a born storyteller, has that gift. You’ve got it.”

  “I—I don’t know what to say, sir,” Garivald said. Maybe I really can write down my songs, or write new ones. That would have been a safer ambition in almost any other kingdom besides Unkerlant, but he had it even so.

  “You don’t need to say anything,” Andelot told him. “You do need to know that I’m going to have you write more reports whenever you happen to need to. That will give you good practice writing, and I’ll have the fun of reading them.”

  He had to mean it. He wouldn’t say something like that just to make Garivald feel good. Real officers didn’t much care how underofficers felt. Why should they? They could tell underofficers what to do, and what else mattered? Garivald said, “I’ll try it again, sir, but I don’t want the kind of surprise that stinking redhead gave me.”

  “I don’t blame you a bit, Fariulf,” Andelot said. “The cursed Algarvians have given us too many surprises, all through this fight. That’s the way Algarvians are. They always come up with new things. But we gave them a surprise, too, you know. We did—we stodgy old Unkerlanters.”

  “We did?” Garivald asked in honest amazement. “What kind of surprise?”

  “We didn’t fall over and die when they hit us, and they thought we would,” Andelot said. “The Forthwegians did, and the Sibs, and the Valmierans, and the Jelgavans—and they chased the Lagoans right off the mainland of Derlavai with their tails between their legs. But they hit us, and we kept hitting back—and look where we are now.”

  Garivald
didn’t particularly want to be in a bridgehead in the middle of Forthweg. Even so, though, he nodded. Andelot had a point.

  Fernao plowed through a Kuusaman news sheet as he ate an omelette for breakfast. By now, after a couple of years reading Kuusaman, he took it almost as much for granted as he did Lagoan. Some of the mages from his kingdom grumbled about it, but Lagoans always grumbled whenever they had to pay more attention to Kuusamo and its ways than they wanted to.

  “Anything interesting?” Ilmarinen asked from across the table. He was working his way through a plate of smoked salmon and onions and capers and pickled cucumbers.

  “I don’t know about interesting, but this report on something that went wrong on the island of Obuda is strange,” Fernao answered. He passed the sheet to Ilmarinen, who put on spectacles to read it. “It sounds like something happened there that was too big to ignore, and bigger than the writer really wanted to admit.”

  “Oh. That.” The Kuusaman master mage’s voice went hard and flat. “I know about that.” Fernao believed him; he knew all sorts of things he had no business knowing. “Some of the people who ran our captives’ camp for the Gongs made a big mistake there. Most of them are too dead to court-martial now, but we would if we could. Stupidity is usually its own punishment. It was here.”

  “Now you’re going to have to tell me, you know,” Fernao said.

  “Or else what?” But Ilmarinen was grinning. He loved to gossip, and made no bones about it. After an odorous bite of salmon and onions, he went on, “Well, for one thing, they let some sort of mage get in with the ordinary captives.”

  “Uh-oh,” Fernao said.

  “Uh-oh, indeed,” Ilmarinen agreed. “And then they put some Algarvian leviathan-riders into the camp, too. And, just in case you haven’t heard, the Gongs have figured out how to work the sorceries that make me hope Algarve and Unkerlant end up destroying each other—but we’re never that lucky, are we?”

  “Er—no,” Fernao said. “From what I know of the Gyongyosians, that surprises me. They’re warriors, aye, but not murderers.”

  “You’re right. They aren’t murderers—not that kind of murderers, any-

  how. But so what?” Ilmarinen paused for another bite. Fernao remembered to eat, too. The Kuusaman master mage continued, “They’re warriors, sure enough—and they volunteer, they really and truly do volunteer, to put their necks to the knife for the greater glory of Gyongyos and for the stars that don’t give a fart about them.”

  “Oh.” Fernao wished he hadn’t started eating again. “And that’s what happened on Obuda?”

  “That’s what happened on Obuda, all right,” Ilmarinen said. “Smashed things up pretty well—about like a real earthquake, say.” He shrugged. “Now we’re putting the pieces back together, and we won’t let it happen again. A bad nuisance, but only a nuisance.”

  “And a lot of dead Gyongyosians,” Fernao said. “Dead for nothing.”

  Ilmarinen nodded. “For nothing much, anyhow. I gather the officer who led this thought doing something was better than sitting around doing nothing and waiting for the war to end. Only goes to show that sometimes sitting around isn’t so bad.”

  “You should have thought of that before you went to the blockhouse by yourself,” Fernao said.

  After impressive deliberation, Ilmarinen made a face at him. “If we were all as smart as we knew how to make everyone else … very likely the world would be as much of a mess as it is right now.”

  “Aye, very likely.” Fernao had wondered if the old man would be able to get an aphorism out of his cynical start. He’d had his doubts when Ilmarinen paused there, but the theoretical sorcerer had come through. “Are you ready for the experiment tomorrow?”

  “I am always ready for experiments,” Ilmarinen answered. “Sometimes, unfortunately, experiments are not ready for me.” He popped more onions and capers and soft pink-orange fish into his mouth. “I tell you this: I’d a hundred times sooner experiment than stand in front of a chamber full of eager second-raters and tell them what I know.”

  “I rather like to teach,” Fernao said.

  “I haven’t minded teaching you” Ilmarinen said; Fernao realized only later the size of the compliment he’d got. The old man went on, “But these people who want it spelled out and have to have it that way because they can’t see it if it isn’t… They’d make a lovely rock garden, don’t you think? Don’t they think? They don’t, and that’s the trouble.”

  Fernao finished his own breakfast and went off to teach a class of mages—mostly Lagoans, with a few Kuusamans to fill out the twenty. Sure enough, the questions he got were of the sort Ilmarinen disliked: “Show me how these two verses work.” “What does this formula mean?” “Do we really need to know that?”

  “No, you don’t really need to know that,” he answered, his own temper fraying. “If you want to kill yourself when you try this spell, go ahead and forget it.”

  “You’re not being very helpful,” complained the woman who’d asked the question.

  “You’re not being very imaginative,” Fernao said. “Would I have talked about this if you didn’t need to know it?”

  “Well, you never can tell,” the woman said.

  Later, Fernao did some complaining of his own to Pekka: “I wanted to pound my head against the wall. We’ve made this as simple as we can. Have we really made it simple enough for the people who’ll have to use it? Can we make it simple enough for these people to use it?”

  Instead of giving him the sympathy he craved, she annoyed him by laughing. “I’ve spent years trying to pound sorcery into the heads of people who don’t much want to learn it,” he said. “The ones we have here are pretty bright.”

  “Powers above help our kingdoms!” he exploded.

  “I hope they will. I hope they do,” she answered, and he found nothing to say to that. Then she added, “They must be looking out for me. Otherwise, how would I have met you?”

  Fernao’s annoyance evaporated. His ears heated. That must have been visible from the outside as well as palpable from within, for Pekka giggled. Fernao bowed. “You do me too much credit, I think.”

  Pekka shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she answered. “If I did, would you make me so happy?” Before his head swelled to the point where her chamber couldn’t hold it, she added, “If I didn’t think so, would I have let my life get so complicated when I didn’t intend to?”

  He found nothing to say to that, either. His life wasn’t complicated. His life had been complicated before they found themselves together, because he’d wanted to be with her when she hadn’t wanted to be with him. Now, as far as he was concerned, everything was fine. Of course, he wasn’t torn in two directions at once. However much he wished Pekka weren’t, he knew she was.

  They lay close together on her narrow bed after making love that night when she suddenly said, “It’s snowing.”

  “How can you tell?” he asked.

  “The way the air feels—all still and quiet,” she said, and turned on the bedside lamp. “There—you see?” Sure enough, the light showed snowflakes softly striking the double-glass window that helped hold cold at bay.

  “It doesn’t have to be still and quiet for snow,” Fernao said. “Down in the land of the Ice People, it blows like this.” He held his forearm parallel to the mattress. Then he added, “And I’d sooner look at you than at snow any day.” Pekka kissed him. He gathered her in. Before too long, he sighed. “Ten years ago, I could have promised you twice in a row. Now I have to be lucky for that—not that I’m not lucky, you understand.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Pekka said. “The holding is fine, too, all by itself.” She reached out to turn off the lamp. They fell asleep in each other’s arms—and woke up a couple of hours later, Fernao with an arm asleep, Pekka with a leg that seemed dead below the knee. As they untangled themselves and Fernao got into his clothes to go back to his own room, he yawned and thought, So much for romance.

  Something
closer to romance came the next day, when they rode out to the blockhouse under furs in a sleigh, as they’d done when they first began experimenting down in the Naantali district. He’d been conscious of Pekka as an attractive woman even then. Now … If his hands wandered a bit, and if hers did, the furs kept the driver from noticing.

  But when they and the other theoretical sorcerers got down from the sleighs and went into the blockhouse, Pekka was all business. “You know what we’re going to try today,” she said. “We’re going to use the energy from the sorcery we’ve developed to touch off a landslide and close off a pass in the Bratanu Mountains, to make the Algarvians have a harder time moving men and supplies from their kingdom east into Jelgava. I don’t think anyone has ever projected so much sorcerous power so far and so precisely in the history of the world.”

  That’s bound to be true, Fernao thought. It’s a demon of a long way from here to the border between Jelgava and Algarve. Some of the excitement of what they’d been doing came back to him. Making everything cut and dried so people with no spark, no flair, of their own could use it had drained away a lot of that excitement. He was glad to feel it return; he’d wondered if it would.

  “I begin,” Pekka said, and chanted the ritual phrases Kuusamans used before every conjuration. Fernao had snickered behind his hand when he first heard them. He’d heard them so many times by now, magecraft undertaken without them would have felt strange, unnatural.

  He’d only half understood them when he first heard them. He’d understood hardly anything of the Kuusaman cantrips that followed. He did these days. He wouldn’t have wanted to try drafting an original spell in Kuusaman, but he had no trouble following one now. If anything went wrong, he knew much more than he had about how to repair it.