Authors: Harry Turtledove
“It went so well, I’m getting drunk to celebrate.” Spinello took another swig from the mug. “Want some?” Without waiting for an answer to match his own. “I’m glad you’re here, sweetheart. I can tell you more of the truth than I can my own men. Isn’t that funny?”
“I don’t know.” The brigade’s mascot took a small sip. She made a face, but then sipped again. “What is the truth?”
“The truth,” Spinello said grandly—aye, he’d poured down some spirits, all right—”is that we’re in trouble. They’re going to try to smash us flat, and they have a pretty bloody good chance of doing it.” He emptied the mug and then filled it again.
“Oh.” Jadwigai took a longer pull from her own mug of spirits. She looked west, sighed, and drank again. When she spoke once more, it was to herself, and in the classical Kaunian that was her birthspeech: “Well, I bought myself a little extra time.”
Spinello eyed her profile, the way her pale lashes fluttered, the pulse in the hollow of her throat.
She thinks the luck is gone,
went through him.
So do I. And if it is …
He used classical Kaunian, too: “Will you do something for me?”
“What?” she asked, but her eyes said she already knew before he asked the next question.
He did ask it, but, for some reason, in Algarvian: “Will you sleep with me? I won’t touch you if you say no—by the powers above, I
won’t
—but I want you, and I don’t think we’ve got much time.”
Jadwigai set the mug down on a stool. “Aye,” she whispered. “You could force me. We both know all about that. Since you don’t, since you haven’t— why not?”
It wasn’t much of a recommendation, but Spinello decided he would take it—and Jadwigai. Altogether sober, he might not have. He might have thought that, no matter what he said, she couldn’t very well tell him no, not unless she wanted to go from pampered mascot to cursed Kaunian in the blink of an eye. With spirits coursing through him, with Jadwigai unbuttoning her Algarvian-issue tunic, such thoughts never once entered his mind.
When she was naked, she lay down on the Algarvian-issue cot he used in lieu of the benches lining the walls of the hut. He shed his own uniform in a hurry. “I’ll do my best to make you enjoy it, too,” he promised.
Rather to his surprise, his best turned out to be good enough. He’d never managed to kindle Vanai. Of course, she’d despised him, which was half the fun of bedding her. The only time she’d shown any warmth was the last time, when he told her he’d been sent to Unkerlant—and that, without a doubt, was because it
was
the last time.
Jadwigai might have feared him, but she didn’t hate him. Maybe that made the difference. “You see?” he said, grinning at her after she let out a gasp that sounded distinctly startled.
She nodded. “Aye. I do see.” Sure enough, she seemed astonished.
“My turn now.” Spinello mounted her. He’d wondered if he would find her a maiden, as he had Vanai, but no. What had happened there in western Forthweg before she became the brigade’s pet? Maybe—no, certainly—such questions were better left unasked. Considering how much pleasure she gave him, Spinello didn’t want to ask any questions just then.
Afterwards, she said, “You were gentle. You were kind. You have been, all along. All the soldiers here have been kind to me. And yet…”
“What?” Spinello asked lazily. He felt too pleased with the world, too pleased with himself, to worry about any question Jadwigai might put.
Or so he thought, till she said, “How can you be like this with me and … the other way with so many Kaunians?”
Spinello shrugged. “It’s war. It’s revenge. It’s just one of those things.” He could afford to answer like that. His people built the special camps. They didn’t have to dwell in them.
Jadwigai might have had something sharp to say about that. She’d never been shy, and letting him have her might have made her think she could be frank—and she’d been drinking, too. But, before she could reply, thunder rolled in from the west. Only it wasn’t thunder. It was countless eggs, all bursting at once.
“Oh, by the powers above!” Spinello exclaimed, and sprang from the cot. He dressed with frantic haste. Jadwigai clothed herself almost as fast as he did. Even so, he hadn’t finished buttoning his tunic before eggs started bursting in and all around Gleina, too.
“It’s the attack, the one we’ve been waiting for,” Jadwigai said.
“It certainly is.” Spinello didn’t think he’d ever heard so many eggs burst all at the same time—it might have been a continuous wall of noise, and it went on and on. He’d never imagined he would hear worse than what he’d known in Sulingen, but this fit the bill.
Someone pounded on the door to the hut, shouting, “Colonel Spinello! Colonel Spinello, sir!”
“I’m here.” Spinello opened the door. The crystallomancer outside looked as if he’d just taken a punch in the jaw: he was wobbling, glassy-eyed. “Are you all right? What’s going on?”
“Sir, there are at least three breakthroughs on our brigade’s front, and I’m getting shouts for help from the north and south,” the mage answered.
“Tell ‘em no,” Spinello said. “We’ve got nothing to give.”
“I know that, sir,” the crystallomancer said. “One of the mages … one of ‘em got killed while I was talking with him, sir. The energy, it’s … hard for a man to take.” That no doubt explained his punch-drunk state.
More eggs burst, all over Gleina. Spinello smelled smoke and heard flames crackling. A metal fragment of eggshell buried itself in the doorframe a few inches from his head. He hardly even flinched. “We’ve got to fight back as hard as we can,” he said. “If the Unkerlanters break through our lines, the powers below will eat our whole army in the north.”
The crystallomancer nodded, but just then a man on a unicorn splashed with green and brown paint galloped through the village shouting, “Behemoths! Unkerlanter behemoths! There’s millions of’em, and they’re all heading this way!”
Spinello peered west. The cloud of dust there wouldn’t hold millions of behemoths, but it would hold dozens or hundreds. And it wasn’t the only such cloud he saw. “We aren’t going to hold Gleina,” he said, and then, “I wonder if we can hold Waldsolms.” One more thought flashed through his mind:
I
wonder if we can hold anywhere.
He looked back over his shoulder at Jadwigai. “You ready to move fast, sweetheart?” She nodded, her eyes enormous but less afraid than they had been before Spinello first lowered his mouth to her pink-tipped breasts. “Good,” he told her. “Now we have to see if we can stay ahead of Swemmel’s little chums till we’re able to throw them back. If we ever are. Come on.” More dragons painted in Unkerlanter rock-gray flew low over Gleina as they fled the burning village.
News-sheet vendors cried their wares as Ealstan came home from Pybba’s pottery works. “Heavy fighting in northern Unkerlant!” they shouted. “Algarvians inflict heavy losses on Swemmel’s savages in fierce defensive battles!”
Ealstan fumbled in his belt pouch and came up with a couple of coppers for a sheet. The redheads had occupied Forthweg for close to five years now. He’d learned to read between the lines of their lies to get some notion of the truth hiding behind them. When they talked about “fierce defensive battles,” that meant the Unkerlanters were hitting them hard. He was always willing—no, eager—to read about anybody hitting the Algarvians hard.
With his nose in the news sheet, he almost walked past his block of flats. He almost broke his neck going upstairs, because he kept trying to read and climb steps at the same time. He almost walked too far down the hall and gave the coded knock on the door to the wrong flat. And he still had the news sheet in front of his face when Vanai opened the right door.
She looked indignant when he finally lowered the sheet. Kissing her didn’t mollify her much. But when he said, “I think the redheads are really in trouble this time,” she was suddenly all smiles.
“Tell me,” she urged. “Tell me right now.”
“They’re talking about defensive battles,” Ealstan said. “Whenever they talk about defensive battles, that means they’re taking a pounding. And they’re talking about fighting in Sommerda, and Sommerda was a long way behind their line not so long ago. They think people are too stupid to look at a map to find out where these places are, but they’re wrong.”
“We can look at a map.” Vanai went and pulled an atlas from a bookshelf. “You got this for me when I had to hide here all the time.” She made a face and corrected herself: “The last time I had to hide here all the time, I mean.” She didn’t leave the flat these days. Her sorcerous disguise still worked, but for shorter and shorter—and ever less predictable—stretches of time.
Ealstan flipped the atlas open to a map of Derlavai. He started to laugh. “I didn’t realize it was
this
old.”
“I did,” Vanai told him. “It dates from back before the Six Years’ War.” No kingdom of Forthweg showed on the map; Algarve ruled the eastern half of the land, with Unkerlant holding the west. She went on, “This map doesn’t show where Sommerda is. Go to the one of Unkerlant.”
“All right.” Ealstan turned pages till he found it. When he did, he whistled in surprise. “Even I hadn’t realized it was
that
far east of the Cottbus River. Powers above, the Algarvians
are
in trouble if the Unkerlanters have come that far this fast.”
“Good.” Vanai wrapped her arms around her enormous belly. Surely the baby couldn’t wait more than another few days. “I hope they take back all their own kingdom. Then I hope they come into Forthweg and take it away from the Algarvians, too. I hope they do it fast. It’s the only way I can think of to have even a few Kaunians left alive here.”
Ealstan nodded. He couldn’t deny that. He had his own worries about the Unkerlanters. If they overran Forthweg, would King Penda ever return? Or would King Swemmel try to rule the kingdom as his father had in the distant days when the atlas was printed? That mattered a great deal to him. But he had to admit that Vanai’s concern was more urgent.
Kaunian-lover.
In Forthweg, even before the Algarvians overran it, that had been a name with which to tar a man. Ealstan didn’t care. He reached out and touched Vanai’s hand.
She looked up, startled; she’d been studying the map hard. But she’d been thinking along with him, too, as she often did. She said, “I wonder if the Kaunians who are left will have to go on disguising themselves— ourselves—as Forthwegians. That would be the end of Kaunianity in Forthweg.”
“I know,” Ealstan said quietly. He didn’t know what to do about it. He didn’t think anyone could do anything about it. He also didn’t think he could say that to Vanai. What he did say was, “Turn to the map of Jelgava. I want to see where the fighting’s moved there.”
“All right.” Vanai turned pages with what looked like relief.
“The news sheet says there’s fighting in Salacgriva, and says that’s an oceanfront town,” Ealstan said. He and Vanai bent over the map, their heads close together. “Why, those lying whoresons!” he exclaimed. “Salacgriva is more than halfway from the sea to Balvi.”
“They
are
in trouble,” Vanai said softly. “I’ve dreamt for so long that they would be, and now they finally are. But will anything still be standing by the time they’re finally beaten?”
That was another question with no good answer. Instead of trying to answer it, Ealstan kissed her. She smiled at him, which made him think he’d done about as well as he could do.
When he went off to work the next morning, the news-sheet vendors were yelling about the terrible price the Unkerlanters had paid for overrunning Sommerda. Ealstan smiled and walked on without buying a sheet. He could figure out what that meant: Sommerda had fallen. The news sheets were putting the best face they could on it, but they couldn’t deny the brute fact.
Pybba waited for Ealstan when he walked into the pottery. “Do you sleep in your kilns?” Ealstan asked him. As far as he could tell, Pybba was always there. He talked about having a home, but that seemed talk and nothing else.
“Only when I’m in my cups. Get it—my cups?” Pybba laughed uproariously. “Now that you’re finally here, you lazy good-for-nothing, come on into my office. We’ve got things to talk about, you and I.” He pointed with a stubby finger, much scarred from old burns, toward the door to his sanctum.
With that door slammed shut behind them, Ealstan spoke first: “Mezen-tio’s bastards really are taking it on the chin now.”
“Aye, they are,” Pybba agreed. “That’s one of the things I want to talk to you about: won’t be long, if things keep going the way they are, before we’ll be able to rise up against the redheads, throw ‘em out of Eoforwic, maybe throw ‘em out of the whole of Forthweg, too.”
Excitement blazed through Ealstan. “That would be wonderful,” he breathed. “And about time, too.”
Voice dry, the pottery magnate answered, “It does help to have the Algarvians distracted, you know. But we’ve got to rise up before the Unkerlanters do all the work for us, or else we’ll never get our own kingdom back again.”
Ealstan nodded. How not, when the same thought had gone through his mind the night before? “What can I do to help?” he breathed.
“Well, you’ve already done this and that,” Pybba allowed. “That little spell you came up with to let you look like an Algarvian and get your wife out of the Kaunian quarter—we’ve used that a couple of times, and it’s worked.”
“Good,” Ealstan said.
“The redheads are looking for Kaunians who look like Forthwegians,” Pybba said. “They aren’t looking for Forthwegians who look like them. One of their special constables, a whoreson who had to be part bloodhound by the way he sniffed out everything we did, isn’t among those present any more thanks to that little spell, and we don’t miss him one bloody bit, either.”
“Good,” Ealstan said again, this time with savage gusto.
“Aye, not so bad.” Pybba raised a shaggy eyebrow. “I almost forgive you for taking up with a Kaunian girl.”
“That’s nice.” Ealstan raised an eyebrow, too. “And I almost forgive you for just almost forgiving me.”
He’d hoped to anger Pybba. Instead, he made him laugh. “If you were as pure as you think you are …” the pottery magnate began, but then he checked himself. “Maybe you are, by the powers above. When you come down to it, that’s a scary thought. Go on, get back to work.” His voice rose to a familiar bellow. “You think I pay you for sitting around doing nothing?”