Authors: Harry Turtledove
He’d also expected the Jelgavans to send more dragons over Tricarico than they had. He’d been a boy during the Six Years’ War, and vividly remembered the terror dropped eggs had spawned. There hadn’t been so many then, but even a few were plenty and to spare. Jelgava’s dragon farms had bee anything but idle since.
A caravan hummed slowly past, sliding a couple of feet above the ground along its ley line. The lamps at the front of the coach had dark cloth wrapped around them so they gave out only a little light: with luck, too little to be spotted by Jelgavan dragonfliers high in the air.
The caravan steersman doffed his plumed hat to Bembo. Bembo swept off his own to return the compliment. He smiled a little as he set the hat back on his head. Even in wartime, the courtesies that made Algarvian life endured.
When he rounded a corner, the smile disappeared. A wineshop was not so securely shuttered as it might have been; light spilled out through the slats to puddle on the pavement. Bembo took the club off his belt and whacked the door with it. “Close up in there!” he called. A moment later, after a couple of startled exclamations, the shutters creaked as someone adjusted them. The betraying light disappeared. Nodding in satisfaction, Bembo walked on.
A Kaunian column of pale marble gleamed even by starlight. In ancient days, Tricarico, like a lot of northern Algarve, had belonged to the Kaunian Empire. Monuments lingered. So did occasional heads of blond hair among the red- and auburn- and sandy-haired majority. Bembo would just as soon have shipped blonds and monuments alike over the Bradano Mountains. The Jelgavans thought they gave a kingdom of Kaunian blood a claim to what Kaunians had once ruled.
A woman leaned against the column. Her legs gleamed like its marble; her kilt was very short, scarcely covering the swell of her buttocks. “Hello, sweetheart,” she called, peering toward Bembo as he approached. “Feel like a good time tonight?”
“Hello, Fiametta,” the constable said, lifting his hat. “Go peddle it somewhere else, or I’ll have to notice you’re here.”
Fiametta cursed in disgust. “All this dark is terrible for business,” she complained. “The men can’t find me—”
“Oh, I bet they can,” he said. He’d let her bribe him with her body a time or two, in the easy-going days before the war.
She snorted. “And when somebody does find me, who is it? A constable! Even if you want me, you won’t pay for it.”
“Not with money,” Bembo allowed, “but you’re out here on the job, not sitting in Reform sewing tunics or something.”
“Reform would pay me better than this—and I’d meet more interesting people, too,” Fiametta came over and kissed Bembo on the end of his long, straight nose. Then she flounced off, putting everything she had into it, and she had quite a lot. Over her shoulder, she called, “See? I’m going somewhere else.”
Somewhere else
was probably no farther than the other side of the column, but Bembo didn’t follow her. She’d done what he’d told her, after all. One of these days, he might feel like telling her to do something different again.
He turned on to a side street, one with houses and apartment houses on it, not shops and offices. Once or twice every block, he had to rap on a window sill or a doorway and shout for people to let lamps die or cover their windows better. Everyone in Tricarico surely knew the new regulations, but every Algarvian was born thinking regulations applied to the other fellow, not to him. A rotund man, Bembo fumed when he had to trudge up to the fourth floor of an apartment house to get some fool to draw his curtains.
When he came out of the apartment house, someone disappeared down the dark street with remarkable haste. Bembo thought about running after the footpad or whatever he was, but not for long. With his belly, he wouldn’t have had a prayer of catching him.
He came up to another house with a hand’s breadth of open space between the edges of the curtains. He raised his club to whack the sill, then froze, as if suddenly turned to stone. Inside, a pretty young woman was getting out of her clothes and into a loose kilt and tunic for the night.
Bembo had never felt so torn. As a man, he wanted to say nothing and keep watching: the more he saw of her, the better she looked. As a constable, though, he had his duty. He waited till she was sliding the night tunic down over herself before he rapped the wall and called, “Darken this house!” The woman jumped and squeaked. The lamp died. Bembo strode on. Duty had triumphed—and he’d had a good peek.
He used the club several more times—though never so entertainingly—before emerging on to the Avenue of Duchess Matalista, a broad street full of fancy shops, barristers’ offices, and the sort of dining establishments the nobility and rich commoners patronized. When he saw light leaking from places like those, he had to be more polite with his warnings. If a baron or a well-connected restaurateur complained about him, he’d end up on permanent night duty in the nasty part of town.
He had just asked—asked! it graveled a proud man—a jeweler to close his curtains tighter when a hiss in the air made him look up. He saw moving shadows against the stars. Before he could fill his lungs to shout, the egg he’d heard falling burst a couple of hundred yards behind him. Others crashed down all around Tricarico.
Bursts of light as their protective shells smashed sent shadows leaping crazily and chopped motion into herky-jerky bits. The bursts were shatteringly loud. Bembo clutched at his ears. Blasts of suddenly released energies knocked him off his feet. The pavement tore his bare knees.
Howling with pain, he scrambled up again and ran toward the nearest burst. The egg had come to earth on the Avenue of Duchess Matalista in front of an eatery where a supper for two cost about a week of Bembo’s pay It had blown a hole in the cobblestones and had blown in the front of the restaurant; he didn’t know how the roof was staying up.
The egg had also blown in the front of the milliner’s shop across the street, but Bembo didn’t worry about that: the milliner’s was closed and empty. Screaming, bleeding people came staggering out of the restaurant. A woman got down on her hands and knees and vomited an expensive meal into the gutter.
Fire was beginning to lick at the exposed roof timbers. Careless of that, Bembo dashed into the restaurant to help whoever hadn’t managed to escape. Shards of glass crunched under his boots. That glass had been almost as deadly as the raw energy of the egg itself. The first person the flickering flames showed him had had his head almost sliced from his body by a great chunk that still glittered beside the corpse.
Someone farther in groaned. Bembo yanked up the table that pinned an old woman, stooped, got her arm around his shoulder, and half-dragged, half carried her out to the street. “You!” he snapped to the woman who’d thrown up. “Bandage this cut on her leg.”
“With what?” she asked.
“Your kerchief, if you’ve got one. Your scarf there. Or cut cloth off her tunic or yours—you’ll have a paring knife in your bag there, won’t you?” Bembo turned to a couple of men who didn’t look too badly hurt. “You and you—in there with me. She’s not the only one left inside.”
“What if the roof caves in?” one man asked.
“What if an egg falls on us?” the other added. More eggs
were
falling. Sticks bigger and heavier than a man could carry had been set up along some of Tricarico’s ley lines. They blazed spears of light up into the sky at the Jelgavan dragons, but there weren’t enough of them, not nearly enough.
That didn’t matter, not to Bembo. “We’ll be very unhappy,” he answered. “Now come on, or I curse you for cowards.”
“If you weren’t a constable and immune, I’d call you out for that,” growled the fellow who’d fretted about eggs.
“If you’d come without arguing, I wouldn’t have had to say it,” Bembo returned, and plunged back into the eatery without waiting to see whether the two men would follow. They did; he heard them kicking through the broken glass that covered the floor.
They worked manfully, once they got down to it. They and Bembo dragged out customers and servitors and, from the kitchens, a couple of cooks. As the flames began to take hold and the smoke got thicker, Bembo had to make his last trip out crawling and dragging a man after him. He couldn’t breathe if he stood upright. He could hardly breathe while he crawled; his lungs felt scorched and filled with soot. The glass sliced the palms of his hands.
A horse-drawn pumper clattered up and began pouring water on the flames. Hacking and spitting up lumps of thick black phlegm, Bembo wished the crew could turn the hoses on the inside of his chest.
They were fighting a losing battle here; the eatery was going to burn. Before long, the crew realized as much. They began playing water on the buildings to cither side, neither of which had yet caught fire. Maybe they wouldn’t, now. Even if they didn’t, though, the water would damage whatever they held.
“I thank you, sir,” the old woman Bembo had first rescued said from the sidewalk.
He reached for his hat, only to discover he wasn’t wearing it. It had to be back in the eatery, which meant it was gone for good. Bembo instead, he said, “Milady, it was my duty and”—another coughing spasm cut off his words—“my duty and my honor.”
“That’s well said.” The old woman—a noble, by her manners—inclined her head to Bembo.
He bowed again. “Milady, I just hope we’re giving the Jelgavans worse than we’re getting. The news sheets say we are. Every braggart blabbing out of a crystal says we are, but how do we
know?
The Jelgavans’ news sheets are bound to be telling them they’re beating the stuffing out of us.”
“How long have you been a constable, young fellow?” the woman asked, a hint of amusement in her voice.
Bembo wondered what was funny. “Almost ten years, milady.”
The old woman nodded. “That appears to be enough to have left you a profoundly cynical man.”
“Thank you,” he said. She laughed out loud. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why.
With the dawn, Talsu peered down from the Bratanu Mountains into Algarve. Smoke rose from the burning town of Tricarico. He smiled. His officers had assured him that Jelgava was doing far more damage to Algarve than the cowardly Algarvian air pirates were inflicting on his own kingdom.
His officers had also assured him that soon, very soon, Jelgava’s ever-victorious forces would sweep out of the mountains and across the plains of Algarve. The Jelgavan army had visited fire and devastation on those plains in the last months of the Six Years’ War. He saw no reason why Jelgava should not do the same thing again.
He saw no reason why Jelgava should not already have done it again, in fact. All of Algarve’s neighbors hated her. All of them that mattered were at “war against her. They were many. She was one, and beset from east and west and south. Why, then, were his countrymen not yet out of the mountains and racing to join hands with the Forthwegians? He scratched at his almost invisibly pale mustache, which he wore close-trimmed, not in any wild Algarvian style. It was a puzzlement.
A delicious smell distracted him. Turning his head, he saw Colonel Dzirnavu’s servant carrying a covered silver tray toward the regimental commander’s tent. “Ha, Vartu, what have you got there?” he asked.
“His lordship’s breakfast—what else?” the servant answered.
Talsu made an exasperated noise. “I didn’t think it was the chamber pot,” he said. “What I meant was, what will the illustrious count enjoy for his breakfast?”
“Not much, if I’m any judge,” Vartu said, rolling his eyes. “But if you mean,
What is he having for breakfast? —
I’ve got fresh-baked blueberry tarts here, and poached eggs and bacon on toasted bread with butter sauce poured over them, and some nice ripe cheese, and a muskmelon from by the seashore. And in the pot—not a chamber pot, mind you—is tea flavored with bergamot leaves.”
“Stop!” Talsu held up a hand. “You’re breaking my heart.” His belly rumbled. “You’re breaking my stomach, too,” he added.
“See what you miss because the blood in your veins isn’t blue enough?” Vartu said. “Red blood’s good enough to spill for our dear Jelgava, so it is, but it won’t get you a breakfast like this at the front, no indeed. And now I’ve got to get moving. If the hot stuff gets cold or the cold stuff warms up, the other thing his lordship will bite off is my head.”
Neither soldier had spoken loudly; the colonel’s tent lay only fifteen or twenty feet away. Vartu ducked inside. “Curse you, what took you so long?” Dzirnavu shouted. “Are you trying to starve me to death?”
“I humbly crave pardon, your lordship,” Vartu answered, abject as a servant had to be in the face of a noble’s wrath. Talsu jammed his own face against the brownish green sleeve of his uniform tunic so no one would hear him giggle. Dzirnavu was as round as a kickball. He looked as if he’d take years without food to starve to death.
With the regimental commander’s breakfast attended to, the cooks could get around to feeding the rest of the soldiers. Talsu lined up with the other men in tunics and trousers of the same horse-dung color as his. When he finally got up to the kettles, he held out a tin plate and a wooden cup. One bored-looking cook plopped a ladleful of barley mush and a length of grayish sausage on the plate. Another poured sour beer into the cup.
“My favorites,” Talsu said: “dead man’s cock and what he pissed through it.”
“Listen to the funny man,” said one of the cooks, who’d probably heard the stale joke two or three times already. “Get out of here, funny man, before you end up wearing this pot.”
“Your sweetheart’s the one who knows about dead man’s cock,” the other cook put in.
“Your wife, you mean.” Laughing, Talsu sat down on a rock, took the knife from his belt, and cut off a bite-sized chunk of sausage. It was greasy, and would have been flavorless except that it was heading toward stale. Along with the porridge, it filled his belly. That was the most he would say for it. He wondered if Colonel Dzirnavu had ever tasted what his men ate. He doubted it. If Dzirnavu tasted sausage like that, the Algarvians in Tricarico would hear him screaming.
Presently, the regimental commander deigned to emerge from the tent. With green-brown tunic and trousers stretched tight to cover his globular frame, with bejeweled medallions of nobility glittering on his chest, with rank badges shining from his shoulder straps, he resembled nothing so much as a heroic coconut. “My men!” he said, and the sagging flesh under his chin wobbled. “My men, you have not advanced far enough or fast enough to satisfy our most magnificent sovereign, his Radiant Splendor, King Donalitu V. Press ahead more bravely henceforward, that he may be more pleased with you.”