Authors: Harry Turtledove
“Or maybe that’s nonsense,” he muttered.
“What?” Jadwigai asked.
“Nothing,” he told her. “Or I think it’s nothing, anyway.” He rolled onto his side and leaned on one elbow, studying her. “Ask you something?”
“Go ahead,” she said.
“Why are you still here with me? You might do better to let the Unkerlanters catch up with you. Especially …” Spinello’s voice trailed away.
Especially since we’re killing Kaunians, and they’re not
didn’t strike him as the most politic thing to say, no matter how true it was. He sometimes wondered why she hadn’t cut his throat while he lay sleeping. Asking her that didn’t seem politic, either.
Last thing I need is to put ideas in her head if she hasn‘t got ‘em already.
Jadwigai shook her head. “I’d just be a body to them, I think. They don’t care about Kaunians. We always made jokes about them in my village—it wasn’t that far from the border with Unkerlant.”
She might well have been right. Both sides here in the west fought the war without restraint. Algarvian soldiers did as they pleased with Unkerlanter women in villages they’d overrun. The Unkerlanters sometimes killed Algarvians they captured in lingering, painful ways and left their bodies where their comrades could find them.
“Besides,” Jadwigai went on, “I know you’ll keep me safe when we find the rest of the army.”
“I’ll do my best.” Spinello wondered how good that best would be. A colonel normally would have no trouble getting whatever he wanted for his mistress. But times weren’t normal, and most mistresses weren’t Kaunians. More urgent worries reared their head at the moment. “What have we got left to eat?”
“Bread. Hard and stale, but bread,” Jadwigai answered. “And spirits. If we mix the spirits with swamp water, we can drink the swamp water, too.” She was right again. Spinello shuddered all the same. The swamp water tasted as nasty as it smelled, and that remained true regardless of whether it would give him a flux of the bowels.
The bread wasn’t just hard; it could have done duty for a brick. Spinello and Jadwigai shared. “If I had bad teeth, I’d starve,” he said.
Before Jadwigai could answer, eggs burst off in the distance. “What’s happening to the army?” she asked. “Have you got any idea?”
“In detail? No,” Spinello said. “In general? Aye. They threw more at us than we could stand up against, and they broke us. I was afraid they were going to do that, but they’ve done more than I thought they could. They used columns of behemoths to smash through our lines, then turned in so they’d either surround us or make us fall back … and they did it over and over and over. I didn’t know they had that many behemoths—or dragons, either. I don’t think anybody in Algarve knew what all Swemmel had before this fight started.”
“You might have done better if you had known,” Jadwigai remarked.
“Aye, that’s so.” Spinello admitted what he could hardly deny. “But it’s too late to dwell on it now. Now we have to hope we can stay alive”—when he said
we,
he meant not only himself and Jadwigai, but every Algarvian in the north of Unkerlant—”and somehow stop the enemy.”
More eggs burst. “Do you think we can?” Jadwigai asked.
“Sooner or later, we have to,” Spinello replied. “They’ll run out of men and beasts and supplies. If we have anything at all left by then, we’ll stop them. But when? Where?” He shrugged an elaborate Algarvian shrug. The answer was important, but he couldn’t do much to influence it, not as a harried fugitive he couldn’t. He took off his hat and laid it under his head for a pillow.
Jadwigai lay down beside him in the bushes. They’d made love a few times during the grinding retreat, but they were both too weary now. Spinello reached out to pat her hand. Then he dove headlong into oblivion.
He woke a little before dawn. Jadwigai still slept. With care and worry gone from her face, she looked improbably young. Spinello shook his head. She was as tough as she was pretty. She’d done as well as she could for herself in a situation as near impossible as made no difference. She’d done far better than most of the rest of the Kaunians from Forthweg. And if she stayed with him now, that was bound to be hard self-interest.
He shook her awake, ready to clap a hand to her mouth if she made more noise than she should. She’d done that once or twice. Not now, though. Reason came into her eyes almost at once. “Let’s get going,” Spinello said quietly.
“Aye.” Jadwigai nodded. “Maybe you can blaze some of these marsh birds.”
“Maybe.” But Spinello remembered a coot he’d killed. It hadn’t been worth eating once dead. Of course, when you got hungry enough …
The sun was still low in the southeast when they came on a couple of squads’ worth of soldiers. For a moment, Spinello thought himself a dead man. Then he realized they were Algarvians, stragglers like himself. No, not stragglers: just defeated men in full retreat. They even had a crystallomancer with them. “We’re supposed to have a strongpoint in Volkach,” the fellow said. “If we can get there, maybe we’ll get back to the real war.” Under his breath, he added something like, “If there’s any real war left up here.” But he didn’t say it loud enough to make Spinello ask him to repeat it.
As they fought their way through the swamp, one of the troopers asked, “Where’d you pick up the twist, Colonel?” He sounded curious and a little jealous, as he might have had Spinello carried a knapsack full of smoked pheasant and fine wine.
Unlike a knapsack, Jadwigai could speak for herself. “I’m not a twist, you—” What she called him proved she’d learned soldierly Algarvian. “I was—I
am
—the luck of the Alberese Regiment.”
“Oh!” To Spinello’s surprise, the soldier bowed to her as if to an Algarvian duchess. “I’ve heard about you. A lot of folks up here have heard about you.”
“Aye, that’s right.” Another soldier nodded. He turned to Spinello. “Anybody gives you a hard time about her, Colonel, you just yell. There’s plenty of people won’t let anything happen to her.”
“That’s good to hear,” Spinello said.
He sounded less happy when they came out of the swamp and up onto solid ground. The vast plains of northern Unkerlant were ideal ground for behemoths. Back in the early days of the war, that had all been to Algarve’s advantage. Now, when the Unkerlanters could put three, four, five beasts in the field for every Algarvian animal, moving across the plains made sweat trickle from his armpits and down the small of his back.
Swemmel’s men had been through here, on their way farther east. Bloated, stinking corpses, many of them still wearing kilts, lay here and there. But no Unkerlanters were in sight now. “Get your bearings on this Volkach place,” Spinello told the crystallomancer. “Is it still holding?”
After squatting over his crystal, the mage nodded. “About ten miles, they tell me,” he said. “We can do it.”
“We have to do it,” Spinello said, and the other worn, beaten, dirty Algarvians nodded. Actually, there was one alternative. If they didn’t get to Volkach, they would die. For that matter, if the Unkerlanters had a tight perimeter around the town, they were in trouble.
But they stumbled into Volkach late that afternoon, though nervous pickets almost blazed them for enemy soldiers. They’d had to hide a couple of times while Unkerlanter columns went by. Swemmel’s men, though, were after bigger game than a few handfuls of holdouts, and kept right on hurrying east. Back when the war was new, Algarvian soldiers had stormed west the same way.
The officer in charge in the Unkerlanter town was a major. He commanded most of a regiment of soldiers, a few egg-tossers, and half a dozen behemoths—not enough to do anything with, but too much for the Unkerlanters to gobble down at a gulp. It was the biggest Algarvian force Spinello had found in one place in a couple of weeks. The major seemed relieved to see him there, and cared not at all that a Kaunian girl sat beside him.
“What will we do, sir?” the fellow asked, as if Spinello had any answers. “What
can
we do? We can’t hold on here much longer—Volkach isn’t anything but a shield that lets our men farther east retreat. And everything in the north is ruined. Everything, I tell you!”
“I know.” After all Spinello had been through since the Unkerlanter blow fell, he thought he knew better than the major did, but what point to saying so? “Sooner or later, we’re bound to stop them.” He hoped he wasn’t whistling in the dark. He wanted a bath and food and clean clothes.
Before he could ask for any of them, the major said, “If only the islanders hadn’t invaded Jelgava. We’d get the reinforcements we need then.”
“Maybe,” Spinello said, and then, in spite of everything, he fell asleep where he sat.
Leino saluted Captain Brunho and spoke in classical Kaunian: “Sir, I request your leave to transfer from
Habakkuk
to the forces now on the ground in Jelgava.”
Brunho studied him: a tall, somber Lagoan staring down at a stubby little Kuusaman. “May I ask why?” he said, also in the old language—the only tongue the two of them had in common.
“Of course, sir.” Leino had to stay polite. If he affronted the captain, he wouldn’t get what he wanted. “I want to have the chance to give the Algarvians what they deserve. We have largely won the war at sea, and my duties on
Habakkuk
these days have more to do with maintenance than anything else. This ship is not new anymore. It is proved. It no longer needs me. The land war does.”
“You want to do something you have not done before,” Brunho said.
Though Leino couldn’t tell whether the captain approved of his lust for novelty, he nodded. “Aye, sir.” And it was true. But it wasn’t the whole reason. The other side of the coin was that he wanted to get away from Xavega. Volunteering to go forward into battle would let him break clean without hurting her and without making her angry. However much he enjoyed his time in bed with her, he couldn’t spend all his time with her in bed, and he still found her annoying when they weren’t in bed. She also intimidated him enough that he didn’t want to come right out and tell her so.
Brunho stroked his chin. “You are not the first mage aboard
Habakkuk
to make this request.”
“You see, sir?” Leino said. “We have the chance to strike directly at Algarve now. I am not surprised I am not the only one who wants to take it.”
“If we lose too many mages from
Habakkuk,
our ship here will abruptly cease to be a ship,” Captain Brunho said. “An iceberg in the warm waters off the coast of Jelgava would not last long.”
“You have plenty to keep
Habakkuk
safe, and the margin for security is large.” Leino knew that was true; he’d made the staffing arrangements for sorcerers himself. “And I repeat, maintaining the ship is now routine. For most of the tasks involved, you do not need mages of the highest rank. The fight on the mainland, though …”
“These are almost the same arguments the other mage used against me,” Brunho said with a wintry smile. “Since I had a difficult time disagreeing then, I am not surprised at having a difficult time disagreeing now. Your request for transfer is approved.” He reached into his desk. “I have some forms for you to fill out.”
“I thought you might,” Leino said dryly. The forms were printed in both Kuusaman and Lagoan. Like any cooperative project,
Habakkuk
produced twice as much paperwork as it would have had one kingdom undertaken it. With a sigh, the Kuusaman mage inked a pen and set to work.
Escaping from Xavega
appeared nowhere on any leaf of paper, no matter how large it loomed in his mind.
When Leino finally finished the forms, he pushed them across the desk at Captain Brunho. The Lagoan officer just accepted them; for all the sense he could make of them, they might have been written in demotic Gyongyosian. “I thank you for your services,” he said in the one tongue he and Leino did share. “Gather your effects and report to the starboard bow. I already have a boat scheduled to take the other mage ashore. You may share it.”
“Thank you, sir,” Leino said. After saluting—by Captain Brunho’s upraised eyebrow, he might have done it better—he hurried away.
His effects, as Brunho called them, fit into a duffel bag. It was a heavy bag, because a lot of those effects were sorcerous tomes. Walking with the bag over his right shoulder and with a list to the left, he made his way to the starboard bow.
To his surprise, he found Xavega there, the sea breeze blowing her coppery hair out behind her and also blowing at her kilt so she had to use one hand to hold it down. He hadn’t intended to say good-bye, just to go. Better that way, he’d judged. Now he had no choice.
Or so he thought, till Xavega said, “Farewell, Leino. I am leaving
Habakkuk.”
Leino gaped. Then he started to laugh. “So you’re the other mage!” he exclaimed. Xavega looked blank, and he realized he’d been startled into Kuusaman. He translated his words into classical Kaunian.
“The other mage?” Xavega still looked puzzled.
“I am leaving
Habakkuk,
too.” Leino set down his duffel on
Habakkuk
’s ice-and-sawdust deck. “We have just been sailing here. It is all routine. I wanted the chance to fight the Algarvians on the mainland.”
Xavega threw her arms around him and kissed him. A nearby Lagoan sailor whistled enviously. Squeezed against Xavega’s firm, soft warmth, Leino couldn’t imagine why he’d wanted to leave her. He knew he would remember as soon as he no longer felt her breasts pressing against him, but that would be later. Now … Now he wanted to go back to his cabin with her.
No time for that. They got into the boat, and sailors lowered it down to the sea. Another mage, a Lagoan, stood at the stern to seize the sorcerous energy in the ley line and propel the boat toward the distant shore. Xavega said, “When I volunteered to go to the mainland, I did not think I would see you again.”
“Why not?” Leino asked. He hadn’t expected to see her, either, but he didn’t care to come right out and say so.
“Well …” Xavega hesitated, but then spoke with her usual frankness: “You are a Kuusaman, after all.”
Her usual frankness and her usual ignorance,