Authors: Harry Turtledove
Naturally, he did his best to put himself in the way of King Mezentio, who circulated through the reception hall. Being a resourceful man, he soon succeeded in drawing the king’s notice. “Your Majesty!” he cried, and bowed low enough to gladden a protocol officer’s heart without spilling a drop of wine or losing a single olive from his flatbread.
“Powers above, straighten up!” Mezentio said irritably. “Do you think I’m King Swemmel, to need all that head-knocking nonsense? He thinks it makes people afraid of him, but what does an Unkerlanter know? Nothing to speak of— Unkerlanters grow like onions, with their heads in the ground.”
“Even so, your Majesty,” Sabrino said, nodding. “If only there weren’t so many of them.”
“By the hamhanded way he’s fighting that war against Zuwayza, Swemmel is doing his best to make them fewer,” the king answered. “And my congratulations, by the way, on how well you and your wing fought above Wihtgara. I was very pleased by the reports I read of your exploits.”
“I shall pass on your praise to my dragonfliers,” Sabrino said with another bow. “They, after all, are the ones who earned it for me.”
“Spoken as a good officer should speak,” Mezentio said. “Tell me, Count, in your fighting above Forthweg, did you find many of Kaunian blood opposing you on dragons painted in Forthwegian colors?”
“Speaking solely from my own experience, your Majesty, that’s hard to say,” Sabrino replied. “One often doesn’t get close enough to the foe to see exactly who he is. When the dragons fly high, going up there’s a chilly business, too, so the men who fly them are often bundled against the cold. I’m given to understand, though, that the Forthwegians set a good many obstacles in the way of Kaunians who seek to fly dragons, the same as they do against Kaunian officers of any sort.”
“I know for a fact that last is true.” Mezentio frowned. “Curious how the Forthwegians look down their beaky noses at the Kaunians inside their own borders, but follow like lapdogs when the Kaunians in the east seek to savage us.”
“They’ve paid for their folly,” Sabrino said.
“Everyone who harms Algarve shall pay for his folly,” Mezentio declared. “Everyone who has ever harmed Algarve shall pay for his folly. We lost the Six Years’ War. This time, come what may, we shall win.”
“Certainly we shall, your Majesty,” Sabrino said. “The whole world is jealous of Algarve, of what we are and of the way we’ve pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps even after everyone piled on to us in the Six Years’ War.”
“Aye, the whole world is jealous—the whole world, and especially the Kaunian kingdoms,” Mezentio said. “You mark my words, Count: those yellow-haired folk still hate us for destroying their cozy little empire more than a thousand years ago. If they could kill us all, they would. Since they can’t, they seek to crush us so we may never rise again.”
“It won’t happen.” Sabrino spoke with great sincerity.
“Of course it won’t,” Mezentio said. “Are we as stupid as Unkerlanters, to let them scheme and plot to destroy us without making plans of our own?” The king laughed. “And the Unkerlanters are stupid indeed, with Swemmel always bellowing ‘Efficiency!’ at the top of his lungs and then blundering into one idiotic war after another.” He turned away from Sabrino toward a noble who stood waiting to be recognized. “And how are you, your Grace?”
Sabrino went back for another goblet of wine. That was more time than he’d enjoyed with the king in any other meeting. And Mezentio not only knew who he was—which he’d expected—but also where his wing had served—which he hadn’t. He didn’t fight to gain royal notice, but he wouldn’t turn down royal notice if it came his way.
He drifted through the room, greeting men he knew, flirting with serving women and the companions of nobles who happened to live in Trapani, and keeping his ears open for gossip. There was plenty; the only trouble was, he didn’t always know to what it referred. When one white-goateed general said to another, “We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down,” what door was he talking about? Whoever was standing behind it wouldn’t care to have it kicked in on him. Of that Sabrino was certain.
A commodore in naval black spoke to a colleague: “Well, this ought to set the history of warfare on the sea back about a thousand years.”
Laughing, his friend answered, “They pay off on what you do. They don’t pay off on how you do it.” Then he noticed Sabrino was listening. Whatever he said after that was in a voice too low for the dragonflier to hear. Annoyed at having been caught, Sabrino took himself elsewhere.
A woman put a hand on his arm. She wasn’t a servant; the green of her silk tunic was darker than that of the national banner, and she wore more gold and emeralds than a servant could even have dreamt of. As Algarvian women sometimes did, she came straight to the point: “My friend’s drunk himself asleep, and I don’t want to go back to my flat alone.”
He looked her up and down. “Your friend, my dear, is a fool. Tell me your name. I want to know whose fool he is.”
“I am Ippalca,” she answered, “and you are the famous Count Sabrino, the man in all the news sheets.”
“My sweet, I was famous long before the news sheets ever heard of me,” Sabrino said. “When we get back to your flat, I will show you why.” Ippalca laughed. Her eyes glowed. Sabrino slid an arm around her waist. Together, they left the Salon of King Aquilante V.
“Efficiency.” Leudast made the word into a curse. It had already doomed a lot of Unkerlanter soldiers. He looked around. After the homelike fields of western Forthweg, this Zuwayzi waste of sunbaked rock and blowing sand seemed a particularly cruel joke.
He checked his water bottle. It was full. He’d filled it at the last water hole, only half a mile or so south of where he was now. The Zuwayzin hadn’t poisoned that one. He’d seen men drink from it, and they’d taken no harm. The naked black savages hadn’t missed many water holes. They weren’t perfectly efficient themselves —just far too close for comfort.
Sergeant Magnulf trudged by. His boots scuffed through sand. His shoulders slumped, ever so slightly. Even his iron determination, which had never faltered during the war against Gyongyos, was wearing thin here. “Tell me again, Sergeant,” Leudast called to him. “Remind me why King Swemmel wants this land bad enough to take it away from anybody. Remind me why anybody who’s got it isn’t happy to give it to the first fool who wants it.”
Magnulf looked at him. “You need to be more efficient with your mouth, soldier,” he said tonelessly. “I know you didn’t mean to call King Swemmel a fool, but somebody else who was listening might get the idea you did. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?”
Leudast considered. If they arrested him for disloyalty to King Swemmel, they’d take him out of this Zuwayzi wilderness. He wouldn’t have to worry about black men who wanted to blaze him—or, as army rumor had it, to cut his throat and drink his blood. On the other hand, he would have to worry about Swemmel’s interrogators. He might escape the Zuwayzin. The interrogators … no.
“Thank you, Sergeant,” he replied at last. “I’ll watch what I say.”
“You’d better.” Magnulf wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his tunic. The Unkerlanters called the tunic’s color rock gray, but it didn’t match any of the rocks hereabouts, which were various ugly shades of yellow. That also struck Leudast as inefficient, but he kept his mouth shut about it. Magnulf went on, “I’ll even answer your question. The king wants this land back because it used to belong to Unkerlant, and so it ought to again.
And the Zuwayzin don’t want us to have it on account of it blocks our path toward better country farther north.”
”
Is
there better country farther north?” Leudast asked, again speaking more freely than he should have. “Or does this miserable desert go on forever?”
“There’s supposed to be better country,” Magnulf said. “I suppose there must be better country—otherwise, the Zuwayzin couldn’t raise so many soldiers against us.”
That made sense. Along with the rest of the men in his company, Leudast slogged north. Thornbushes grew here and there among the rocks. Very little else did. Very little lived here, either—snakes and scorpions arid a few little pale foxes with enormous ears. Scavenger birds circled overhead, their wings looking as wide as those of dragons. They thought the Unkerlanter army would come to grief in the desert. Leudast remained far from sure they were wrong.
He tramped past a dead behemoth. The big beast hadn’t been blazed; its corpse bore no mark he could see. Maybe it had just keeled over from trying to haul the weight of its armor and weapons and riders through the desert. Since he felt like keeling over himself, Leudast knew a certain amount of sympathy for the poor brute. The army had its own scavengers; they’d already taken away the ironmongery the behemoth had carried on its back.
Magnulf pointed. “There’s the line,” he said: Unkerlanters crouching and sprawling behind stones, blazing away at the Zuwayzin who blocked their path. As Leudast got down behind a rock himself so he could crawl forward, one of his countrymen shrieked and clutched at his shoulder. This terrain was made for defense. A handful of men could hold up an army here—and had.
“Come on, you reinforcements, take your places,” an officer shouted. “We’ll get those black bastards out of there soon enough—see if we don’t.” He ordered some of the soldiers already in line forward to flank out the Zuwayzin who’d stalled the advance.
Leudast blazed away at the rocks behind which the enemy sheltered. He had no idea whether his beams hit anyone. At the least, they made the Zuwayzin keep their heads down while his comrades slid around by the right flank.
But more Zuwayzin waited on the right. They hadn’t been blazing, perhaps hoping to draw the very attack the officer had commanded. They broke it. After a few minutes, Unkerlanters came streaming back to the main line, some of them helping wounded comrades escape the enemy’s beams.
When the Zuwayzin attacked in turn, the Unkerlanters threw them back. That cheered Leudast—till he heard an officer say, “We’re the ones who are supposed to be moving forward, curse it, not the black men.”
“Tell it to the Zuwayzin—maybe they haven’t heard,” somebody not far from Leudast muttered. That struck him as dangerously inefficient speech, but he wasn’t inclined to report it. For the moment, he was content to be able to hold his position and not have to retreat.
He swigged from his water bottle. That wouldn’t last indefinitely, and, except for the known water holes, the dowsers hadn’t had any luck finding new supplies. Leudast found himself unsurprised: if no water was out there to find, the best dowsers in the world couldn’t find it. That meant the army had to depend on the familiar holes and on what ley-line caravans and animals could bring forward. By the knots of mages Leudast had seen working along the ley lines, the Zuwayzin had done their best to make them impassable. That did nothing to add to his peace of mind.
And then he stopped worrying about such minor details as perhaps dying of thirst in a few days. Off to the left, the west, eggs smashed against stone. Leudast automatically hugged the ground. Hard on the heels of those roars came exultant cries in a language he did not know and despairing ones in a language he did: “The Zuwayzin! The Zuwayzin are on our flank!”
“Camels!” Sergeant Magnulf used the word as vilely as Leudast had used
efficiency
before. “Bastards snuck around our cavalry again.” He bit out a few curses of a more conventional sort, then gathered himself. “Well, no help for it.” He looked westward to gauge how close the attackers were. “Fall back!” he shouted. “Fall back—form a line so we’re not enfiladed any more. Whatever happens, we have to hang on to that water hole back there.”
He was thinking about water, too, though in a more immediate sense than Leudast had been. In this sun-baked country, not thinking about water was impossible. No doubt the Zuwayzin were also thinking about it, and making for that water hole themselves. At least Magnulf
was
thinking, which seemed to be more than any of the Unkerlanter officers could say.
Leudast scrambled back toward a stone that offered good shelter against attack from the west. As happened whenever a force found itself outflanked, some soldiers panicked and fled toward the rear. As often happened when they did, they paid the price for panic: Zuwayzi beams cut them down.
Howling with triumph, the Zuwayzin stormed forward. Leudast blazed a black man who showed too much of himself. Several other Zuwayzin also went down, dead or shrieking in pain. Then the enemy started flitting from rock to rock again, having learned a good many Unkerlanters still held fight.
More eggs crashed down around Leudast. The Zuwayzin must have taken apart some light tossers and carried them on camelback. Sand and shattered rock pelted him. He wanted to claw a hole in the ground, jump in, and pull the hole shut over him. He couldn’t. And, if he stayed curled up behind this rock, the Zuwayzin could move forward and blaze him at their leisure.
Understanding that was easy. Making himself get up on one knee and blaze at the enemy was much harder, but he did it. He thought he wounded another Zuwayzi, too. But he could not stay where he was any more, for the Zuwayzin were still advancing. He slipped away to another stone, and then to another.
“We have to save the water hole!” an officer shouted, realizing only now what Magnulf had seen at once. “If we lose that water hole, we lose our grip on this whole stretch of desert.” He shouted orders pulling more men from what had been the advance and shifting them to the turned flank.
It wasn’t going to be enough. Leudast could see it wasn’t going to be enough. The Zuwayzin could see it wasn’t going to be enough, too. They knew what forcing the men of Unkerlant away from the water hole would mean. They were more clever than the Gongs, probably more clever than the Forthwegians, too. When they struck, they struck hard, and straight for the heart.
Leudast wondered if he had enough water to make it back to the next clean hole. It was, he knew, a long way to the south—a dreadfully long way, if a man was retreating with the enemy nipping at his heels. Maybe he could fill up the bottle before the black men reached this water hole.