Jaws of Darkness d-5

by Harry Turtledove

  He found the park without much trouble. Finding the man in charge of the attack took more work, but he finally did. The fellow nodded brusquely. “Aye, I know what we’re supposed to do,” he said. “We’ll bloody well do it, too. You can go back and tell Pybba he doesn’t need to hold my hand. I’m not a baby.”

  “Keep your tunic on.” Ealstan hid a smile. He had that same reaction to the pottery magnate, usually a couple of times an hour. He knew he was here more to get him out of Pybba’s hair than for any other reason. He didn’t care. Right this minute, he couldn’t think of anything he wanted more than to be out of Pybba’s hair.

  When he didn’t say anything more, the local commander nodded again, as if he’d passed a test. “All right, kid. We’ll feed the powers below plenty of dead Algarvians. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

  Thatkid made Ealstan bristle, but he didn’t show it. When you showed things like that, people just laughed. “Right,” he said again, and walked away, almost as fast as he’d walked away from Pybba.

  The park didn’t look like a place where an attack was building. The Forthwegian fighters didn’t gather out in the open. That would have shown them to redheads on dragons overhead or with spyglasses up in tall buildings, and would have invited massacre. Instead they crouched under trees and in the buildings around the park, waiting for the order to go forward. They all wore armbands that said free forthweg, so the Algarvians couldn’t claim they were fighting out of uniform and blaze them on the spot if they caught them.

  As Ealstan was going by, one of the Forthwegian fighters under the oaks called his name. He stopped in surprise. He didn’t recognize the other man. But then, after a moment, he did. It was the fellow who’d been playing drums in another park-the fellow who played so much like the famous Ethelhelm. Now that Ealstan heard him speak, he sounded like Ethelhelm, too.

  “Hello,” Ealstan said. “The face is familiar”-which wasn’t quite true- “but I can’t place your name.” He didn’t know which name Ethelhelm was using. If Ethelhelm had even a dram of brains, it wouldn’t be his own.

  And, sure enough, the musician said, “You can call me Guthfrith.”

  “Good to see you again,” Ealstan told him. “Getting your revenge on the Algarvians, are you, Guthfrith?”

  “It’s about time, wouldn’t you say?” Ethelhelm answered.

  “Probably long past time,” Ealstan said, and the Kaunian half-breed nodded. Ealstan went on, “What have you been doing with yourself lately?”

  “Odd jobs, mostly,” said Ethelhelm-no, I should think of him as Guthfrith, went through Ealstan’s mind. “Did you recognize me, there in that other park? I saw you, and I thought you might have.”

  “I thought I did,” Ealstan replied, “but I wasn’t sure. You didn’t look just the way I thought I recalled you”-you were sorcerously disguised-”but your hands hadn’t changed at all.”

  Ethelhelm-no, Guthfrith-looked down at the hands in question as if they’d betrayed him. And so, in a way, they had. Even now, they looked more as if they should be poised over drums than holding a stick. With a chuckle, he said, “Not everyone has ears as good as yours. I’m not sorry, either. I’d be in trouble if more people did.”

  “You would have been in trouble,” Ealstan said. “Not any more. Now you’re getting your own back.”

  “No.” Guthfrith shook his head. “The thieving redheads have taken away everything I had. I can’t get it back. The most I can get is a piece of revenge. I wasn’t very brave before. Now…” He shrugged. “I try to do better.”

  “That’s all anyone can do,” Ealstan said.

  “Took me a long time to figure it out,” Guthfrith said. “How’s your lady? What was her name? Thelberge?”

  “That’s right.” Ealstan nodded. “She’s fine, thanks. We’ve got a little girl.”

  “Do you?” Guthfrith said, and Ealstan nodded again. Then Guthfrith reminded Ealstan he was also Ethelhelm, for he went on, “You used to go with a blond woman before that, didn’t you? Do you know what happened to her?”

  “Uh-no.” Ealstan’s ears heated in dull embarrassment, but he was not about to tell the musician that Vanaiwas Thelberge. He wished he hadn’t had to tell Pybba about his family arrangements. The more people he told, the more Vanai found herself in danger, for there was no guarantee that the Forthwegians would succeed in ousting the Algarvians from Eoforwic. And if Mezentio’s men won this fight, they would surely take the most savage vengeance they could.

  “No, eh?” Guthfrith’s voice was toneless as he added, “Too bad.”

  Ealstan wanted to explain everything to him. He wanted to, but he didn’t. Aye, the fellow who had been Ethelhelm was a half breed, but he’d got much too cozy with the Algarvians, and stayed that way much too long. If they ever captured him now, he was liable to feed them a genuine, full-blooded Kaunian to save his own neck.

  He looked at Ealstan with something like loathing, though they’d been friendly while Ealstan was casting his accounts for him. Ealstan looked at him in much the same way. Neither of them, plainly, would ever trust the other again. When Ealstan said, “I’ve got to go,” he knew he sounded relieved, and Guthfrith looked the same way.

  “Take care of yourself. Take care of your little girl, too.” By the way Guthfrith sounded, Ealstan was welcome to walk in front of a ley-line caravan.

  “You take care, too.” Ealstan sounded as if he wished the same for Guthfrith. He hurried off toward Pybba’s headquarters, and didn’t look back once. Whatever warmth he’d known for the man who’d been one of the most popular musicians in Forthweg, was dead now.

  He needed a while to get back to the pottery magnate’s place. Algarvian dragons appeared overhead and dropped load after load of eggs on Eoforwic, forcing Ealstan into a cellar. No Unkerlanter dragons flew east from over the Twegen to challenge the beasts painted in green, red, and white. The enemy could simply do as he pleased, and he pleased to knock down big chunks of the Forthwegian capital. He doubtless assumed anyone still inside the city opposed him. Had he been wrong in that assumption, the destruction he wrought helped make him right.

  “Took you long enough,” Pybba growled when Ealstan finally did get back. “I didn’t send you out to buy a month’s worth of groceries, you know.”

  “You may have noticed the Algarvians were dropping eggs again,” Ealstan said. “I didn’t want to get killed on my way back, so I ducked into some shelter till they quit.”

  Pybba waved that aside, as if of no account. Maybe, to him, it wasn’t. “Will the attack go through on time?” he demanded.

  Ealstan nodded. “Aye. The fellow in charge of it told me to tell you he didn’t need any reminders.”

  “That’s my job, reminding,” Pybba said. His job, as far as Ealstan could see, was doing everything nobody else was doing and half the jobs other people were supposed to be doing. Without him, the uprising probably never would have happened. With him, it was going better than Ealstan had thought it would. Was it going well enough? Ealstan had his doubts, and did his best to pretend he didn’t.

  Leino had been in Balvi, or rather, through Balvi, once before, on holiday with Pekka. Then the capital of Jelgava had impressed him as a place where the blond locals did their best to separate outsiders from any cash they might have as quickly and enjoyably as possible.

  Now… Now, with the Algarvian garrison that had occupied Balvi for four years fled to the more rugged interior of Jelgava, the city was one enormous carnival. Jelgavans had never had a reputation for revelry-if anyone did, it was their Algarvian occupiers-but they were doing their best to make one. Thumping Kaunian-style bands blared on every corner. People danced in the streets. Most of them seemed drunk. And anyone in Kuusaman or Lagoan uniform could hardly take a step without getting kissed or having a mug full of something cold and wet and potent thrust into his hand.

  Even though Leino walked through Balvi hand in hand with Xavega, Jelgavan women kept coming up and throwing their arms around him. Jelgav
an men kept doing the same thing with Xavega, who seemed to enjoy it much less. When one of the blond men let his hands wander more freely on her person than he might have, she slapped him and shouted curses in classical Kaunian. By his silly grin, he didn’t understand her and wouldn’t have cared if he had.

  Looking around at the way most of the Kuusaman and Lagoan soldiers were responding to this welcome, Leino spoke in classical Kaunian, too: “They seem to be having a good time.”

  “Of course they do-they are men,” Xavega answered tartly in the same tongue. “And, nine months from now, a good many half-Jelgavan babies will be born. I do not care to have any of them be mine.”

  “All right,” Leino said, reflecting that any Jelgavan man who tried to drag Xavega into a dark corner-not that every couple was bothering to look for a dark corner, not in the midst of this joyous madness-would surely get his head broken for his trouble, or else have something worse happen to him.

  And then he and Xavega rounded a corner, and he discovered that not all the madness was joyous. There hanging upside down from lampposts were the bodies of several Algarvians and the Jelgavans who had helped them run the kingdom under puppet king Mainardo. The crowd kept finding new horrid indignities to heap on the corpses; everyone cheered at each fresh mutilation. Leino was glad he didn’t speak Jelgavan: he couldn’t understand the suggestions that came from the onlookers.

  He glanced toward Xavega. What they were seeing didn’t seem to bother her. She caught his eye and said, “They had it coming.”

  “Maybe,” he answered, wondering if anyone could ever have… that coming to him. Or to her: he pointed. “That one, I think, used to be a woman.”

  “I daresay she deserved it, too,” Xavega snapped. Leino shrugged; he didn’t know one way or the other. He wondered if the people who’d hung the woman up there with those men had known, or cared.

  And then a fierce howl rose from the Jelgavans, for a wagon bearing a blond man with his hands tied in front of him came slowly up the street through the crowd. Leino needed no Jelgavan to understand the roars of hatred from the people. The captive in the wagon shouted something that sounded defiant. More roars answered him. The crowd surged toward the wagon. The fellow with his hands tied had guards, but they didn’t do much-didn’t, in fact, do anything-to protect him. The mob snatched him out of the wagon and beat him and kicked him as they dragged him to the nearest wall. Some of them had sticks. They blazed him. He fell. With another harsh, baying cry-half wolfish, half orgasmic-they swarmed over his body.

  “When they find some more rope, he will go up on a lamppost, too,” Leino said. Classical Kaunian seemed too cold, too dispassionate, for such a discussion, but it remained the only tongue he had in common with Xavega.

  “Good riddance to him,” she said. “These people knew him. They knew what he should have got, and they gave it to him.”

  “I suppose so,” Leino said, and then, after a moment, “I wonder how many in that mob have things of their own to hide, and how many names that Jelgavan did not get to name because they killed him so fast.”

  Xavega gave him a startled look. “I had not thought of that,” she said. But then she shrugged. “If they do not get the names from him, they will surely get them from someone else. A lot of these Jelgavans collaborated with the Algarvians.”

  That was also likely-indeed, almost certain-to be true. “Some of the same ones will probably end up collaborating with us,” Leino said. The thought saddened him. He wondered why. He’d never labored under the delusion that war was an especially clean business.

  A couple of blocks farther on, a fat Jelgavan rushed out of his tavern to press mugs of wine in Leino and Xavega’s hands. Quite impartially, he kissed them both on the cheek and shouted out something in which Leino heard a word that sounded a lot like the classical Kaunian term forfreedom. Then he bowed and went back into his place, only to emerge again a moment later to give wine to a couple of Kuusaman soldiers. By the way they staggered, they’d already had a good deal.

  Xavega let out a scornful sniff. “If the Algarvians knew what things were like here, they could run us out of Balvi with about a regiment and a half of men.”

  “Maybe.” Leino raised an eyebrow. “Would you have said the same thing if you had seen a couple of drunken Lagoan soldiers?”

  “Our men have too much discipline for…” But Xavega’s voice trailed away. Not even she could bring out that claim with a straight face. Too much evidence to the contrary was not just visible but blatantly obvious. Leino laughed. She contented herself with giving him a sour look. That only made him laugh more.

  More shouts of savage glee came from up a side street. They’ve caught another collaborator, Leino thought with something between joy and alarm. Watching a man, even an enemy, die as that one Jelgavan had done was nothing to face with equanimity.

  But these collaborators-there were about a dozen of them-were not going to their end, only to their humiliation. They were women who must have had Algarvian lovers. They’d been stripped to the waist and had red paint smeared in their hair. People shouted curses at them and pelted them with eggs and overripe summer fruit, but no one aimed a stick their way.

  “Little whores,” Xavega said.

  “Most of them are taller than I am,” Leino said.

  Xavega snorted again. “You know what I meant,” she said, and this time he had to nod.

  They passed an empty square half overgrown with rank grass, not something Leino would have expected to see in the middle of a large, crowded city like Balvi. At the edge of the square sprouted a small brickwork of memorial tablets, all of them obviously new. Leino tried his classical Kaunian on a few of the locals: “Excuse me, but whom do these tablets remember?”

  On his third try, he found a man who could answer him in the old language. “Not ‘whom,’ man from another kingdom, but ‘what,’ “ the fellow said, his accent odd in Leino’s ears but understandable. “Once an assembly hall from the days of the Kaunian Empire stood here. But the Algarvian barbarians, may the powers below eat them, destroyed it. We could not mourn it as we should have while falseKingMainardo ruled here. Now that he is gone, we show we remember.”

  “Thank you,” Leino said. He’d heard about Algarvian wrecking in the Kaunian kingdoms, but this was the first he’d seen of it himself.

  “I thank you, man from another kingdom,” the Jelgavan replied. In classical Kaunian, the usual word forforeigner also meantbarbarian -that was the word the man had applied to the Algarvians. He found a politer substitute for Leino. After bowing, he added, “I thank you for setting us free and for giving us back our own true and rightful king.”

  “Er-you are welcome,” Leino said, and got away in a hurry. From everything he’d seen ofKingDonalitu aboardHabakkuk, the Jelgavans were welcome to him.

  Here and there in Balvi, signs in the Algarvians’ slithering script remained; no doubt they told garrison troops and soldiers on leave from the horrors of the west how to get about in the city. Even as that thought crossed Leino’s mind, he noticed a couple of Jelgavans busily tearing down one of those signs.

  A Lagoan soldier wearing the silver gorget that marked a military constable held up his hand. He spoke in his own language. Xavega angrily answered. He shrugged and said something else. She answered even more angrily.

  “What does he want?” Leino asked: he had next to no Lagoan of his own, just as Xavega had never bothered learning Kuusaman.

  In classical Kaunian, she replied, “He says all mages are to report to a center they have set up near the palace. He says we cannot enjoy ourselves here even for a day, but that we have to report at once so we can return to duty once more.”

  “It makes sense,” Leino said. Xavega kept right on grumbling; whether it made sense or not, she didn’t like it.

  Perhaps noting as much, the military constable came up and spoke in Lagoan. Then, to Leino’s surprise, he added a few words in Kuusaman: “Come with me. I take you there.”

  �
��You don’t have to do that,” Leino said.

  This time, the Lagoan surprised him by laughing. “I think maybe I do have to do that. You come with me.” Leino shrugged and nodded. Xavega looked ready to bite nails in half once the military constable put that into Lagoan, but she nodded, too.

  At the center, a bored-looking Kuusaman clerk checked their names off a duty roster. In his own language, he said, “The two of you haven’t had the special training, isn’t that right?”

  “Aye, that’s so,” Leino answered. He translated for Xavega, who looked miffed at not hearing Lagoan or at least classical Kaunian. She grudgingly nodded again.

  “All right.” The clerk went right on speaking Kuusaman, and made a couple of more check marks. “I’ll assign you to the training center north of here. Shall I billet the two of you together?”

  “What’s he saying?” Xavega asked. Leino translated again. She nodded once more and told the clerk, “Aye, put us together,” in classical Kaunian. He evidently followed that language even if he chose not to speak it, for he made more checks still.

  Leino had leftHabakkuk to find a painless way to break things off with Xavega. He still didn’t know exactly why she’d left-to get at the Algarvians, he supposed. And she’d seen having him around as one more comfort she’d grown used to.

  And you-you really hate the idea of going to bed with her, Leino thought. He didn’t care for most of Xavega’s opinions or for large chunks of her rather bad-tempered character, but when they lay down together…

  If I had any gumption, I would say, “No, put us apart. “He said not a word. He let the clerk finish the paperwork. The fellow pointed to a bench. “Wait there. Before long, a carriage or a wagon will take you to the ley-line caravan depot for your trip to the center. Things are a little crazy now.” Leino went over and sat down. Xavega perched beside him. With an inward sigh, he slipped his arm around her waist and drew her close. For once most obliging, she snuggled up against him.