Authors: Harry Turtledove
General Ikhshid himself strode into Hajjaj’s offices a little past sunrise. As he had on the crystal, he wasted no time: “They’ve broken through in several places. I’ve ordered our men back to the next line of positions farther north. I
hope we
can hold them there.”
“You hope so?” Hajjaj said, and Ikhshid nodded. Like a man picking at a sore, Hajjaj elaborated: “You may hope so, but you don’t think so, do you?”
“No,” Ikhshid said bluntly. “We may slow ‘em up there, but I don’t see how we can stop ‘em. The next line north of
that
is on our old frontier. That’s a lot deeper, because we spent years building it up between the Six Years’ War and the last time Swemmel’s buggers hit us.”
“Can we stop the Unkerlanters there, then?” Hajjaj asked.
“I hope so,” Ikhshid answered, in much the same tones he’d used the last time he said that.
Hajjaj ground his teeth. That wasn’t what he’d wanted to hear, nor anything close to it. He hadn’t thought he would ever wish Ikhshid weren’t quite so honest. “What should the kingdom do if the soldiers can’t hold along that line?” he asked.
“Make peace as fast as we can, and get the best terms King Swemmel will give us.” Again, General Ikhshid spoke without the least hesitation. “If the Unkerlanters break through at the old frontier, powers below eat me if I know how we can stop them—or even slow them down very much—this side of Bishah.”
“It’s summer,” Hajjaj said, looking for hope wherever he might find it. “Won’t the desert work for us?”
“Some,” Ikhshid said. “Some—maybe. What you have to understand, though, and what I don’t think you do, is that the Unkerlanters are a
lot
better at what they’re doing than they were the last time they struck us a blow. We’re some better ourselves: Thanks to the Algarvians, we’ve got more behemoths and dragons than we did then. But curse me if I know whether it’ll be enough.”
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a young captain hurried past Qutuz and saluted. “Sir,” the junior officer said to Ikhshid, “I’m sorry to have to report an enemy breakthrough at Sab Abar.”
Ikhshid cursed wearily. Odds were he hadn’t slept all night. He said, “That’s not good. Sab Abar is in the second defensive line, not the first. If they’ve got through there already … That’s not good at all.”
“How could they have reached the second line so fast?” Hajjaj asked. “How could they have broken through it so fast?”
“They probably got there about as fast as we did,” Ikhshid said unhappily. “It’s not a neat, pretty fight when both sides are moving fast, especially if the whoresons on the other side have got their peckers up. And the stinking Unkerlanters
do,
powers below eat ‘em. They think they can lick anybody right now, and when you think like that, you’re halfway to being right.”
Qutuz asked the next question before Hajjaj could: “If they’ve broken through at this Sab Abar place, can we hold the second line, even for a little while?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to see.” General Ikhshid sounded harried. “We’ll do everything we can, but who knows how much that will be?” He bowed to Hajjaj. “If you’ll excuse me, Your Excellency, I’d better head back. In fact, unless I miss my guess, I’ll be going down south before too long. As I say, we have to do what we can.” With another bow, he tramped away, the young captain in his wake.
“What are we going to do, your Excellency?” Qutuz asked.
“The best we can,” Hajjaj answered. “I have nothing better to tell you, any more than Ikhshid had anything better to tell me. What I have to do now, I think, is let King Shazli know we have … difficulties.”
He didn’t know what Shazli could do. He didn’t know what anyone could do. It was up to Zuwayza’s soldiers now. If they did what he hoped, the Unkerlanters still had their work cut out for them. If they didn’t… If they didn’t, Zuwayza might not need a foreign minister much longer, only an Unkerlanter governor ruling from Bishah, as one had back before the Six Years’ War.
One of the nice things about serving as an Algarvian constable, even an Algarvian constable in occupied Forthweg, was that Bembo hadn’t had to go to war. It was always other poor sods who’d had to travel west and fight the Unkerlanters. They’d hated him for his immunity, too. He’d known they hated him, and he’d laughed at them on account of it.
Now that laughter came home to roost. The war had come home, too, or at least come to Eoforwic, which he had to call home these days. For one thing, the Forthwegians in the city kept on fighting as if they were soldiers. And, for another, Swemmel’s men sat right across the Twegen from Eoforwic. If they ever swarmed across the river …
Bembo clutched his stick a little tighter. These days, he always carried an army-issue weapon, not the shorter one he’d used as a constable. For all practical purposes, he wasn’t a constable any more. All the Algarvians still in Eoforwic came under military command nowadays.
Ever so cautiously, he peered out from behind a battered building. He ducked back again in a hurry. “Seems all right,” he said. “No Forthwegian fighters in sight, anyhow.”
Oraste grunted. “It’s the buggers who aren’t in sight you’ve got to watch out for,” Bembo’s old partner said. He and Bembo and half a dozen real soldiers had been thrown together as a squad. “You never see the one who blazes you.”
“Or if you do, he’s the
last
thing you see,” a trooper added cheerfully.
“Heh,” Bembo said. If that was a joke, he didn’t find it funny. If it wasn’t a joke, he didn’t want to think about it.
Running feet behind him made him whirl, the business end of his stick swinging toward what might be a target. The Algarvians held—and held down—this section of Eoforwic, but their Forthwegian foes kept sneaking fighters into it and making trouble. Bembo had no desire to find himself included in some casualty report no one would ever read.
But the fellow heading his way was a tall redhead in short tunic and kilt: an Algarvian constable like himself. Relaxing a little—relaxing too much was also liable to land you in one of those reports—he asked, “What’s up?”
“Nothing good,” the newcomer answered. “You know how a bunch of our important officers have come down with a sudden case of loss of life?” He waited for Bembo and the men with him to nod, then went on, “Well, the brass—the ones who’re still left alive, I mean—think they’ve figured out what’s gone wrong.”
“Tell, tell!” That wasn’t just Bembo. Several of his comrades spoke up, too. Disliking the men in command was one thing. Wanting to see all of them dead was something else again—at least, Bembo supposed it was.
With the self-importance of a man who knows he has important news, the other constable said, “Well, what happened is—or the big blazes think what happened is—the fornicating Forthwegians have worked out a spell that makes them look like us. What could be better for assassins?”
“Like the cursed Kaunians looking like Forthwegians, by the powers above!” Bembo exclaimed.
“Aye, it sounds wonderful,” Oraste said. “Now all we need is a spell that makes
us
look like Kaunians, so we can go off and cut our own throats and save the Forthwegians and the Unkerlanters the trouble.”
“That isn’t much of a joke,” one of the soldiers said, echoing Bembo’s thought.
“Who says I was joking?” Oraste’s face and voice were cold as winter in the south of Unkerlant.
The soldier glared back at him. That was enough to intimidate most Algarvian constables pressed into combat duty. It would have been plenty to intimidate Bembo, who knew perfectly well that he was softer than the men who went to real war. But Oraste glared right back—anyone who reckoned himself the harder man would have to prove it by beating him. And the soldier looked away first. Bembo was impressed.
He was also worried. “How in blazes are we supposed to know the whoresons with us are proper Algarvian whoresons and not disguised Forthwegian whoresons just waiting to cut our throats?” he asked the fellow who’d brought the bad news.
“They’re still working on that,” the other constable answered. “Some of the Forthwegians don’t trim their beards enough before they go into disguise, so they end up looking fuzzier than we usually do. And some of them have that foul accent of theirs when they try and speak Algarvian. But some of em … We wouldn’t have so many dead men if they were all easy to spot. If you don’t know the fellows around you, keep an eye on ‘em.” He sketched a salute and hurried off to spread the news further.
“Well,
that’s
jolly,” Bembo said. “Can’t trust the Forthwegians, can’t trust the Kaunians”—
and didn‘t we do that to ourselves?
he thought—”and now we can’t trust each other, either.”
“Probably just what the stinking rebels want—us blazing us, I mean,” one of the soldiers said. Bembo wished he could have argued with that, but it seemed pretty self-evidently true.
He would have said so, but the Algarvians chose that moment to start tossing eggs at the Forthwegians just in front of his companions and him. He’d found out in a hurry that a certain number of such eggs were liable to fall short of where they were aimed. He threw himself into a hole some earlier burst had made and hoped none would land on him.
“I hate this!” he shouted to anybody who would listen. But how likely was it that anybody would? And even if somebody would, how likely was it that he could hear one man’s cry of protest through the endless roar of bursting eggs?
As soon as that roar let up, someone shouted, “Forward!” Bembo scrambled to his feet and went forward with the rest of the soldiers and constables. He was no hero. He’d never been a hero. But he couldn’t bear to have his comrades reckon him a coward.
Would you rather have them reckon you a dead man?
he asked himself as he advanced. The answer was evidently aye, because he kept going. Sometimes saving face counted for as much as saving his neck.
The houses and blocks of flats ahead had been battered before. They were more battered now, with smoke and dust rising from them in great clouds. Broken glass glittered in the streets and on the slates of the sidewalks. It could slice right through a boot. Bembo noticed it as he ran, but it was the least of his worries. That thunderstorm of eggs hadn’t got rid of all the Forthwegian fighters up there: someone was blazing at the Algarvians from a building ahead.
Bembo threw himself flat behind what had been a chimney before it came crashing down in ruin. He was used to going after people who tried to get away from him, not after men who stood their ground and blazed back. No one cared what he was used to. He stuck up his head and waited to see where the Forthwegian’s beam came from. When he did spot it, he blazed, and was rewarded with a howl of pain.
More eggs started bursting ahead. Bembo hunkered down again. Every block of Eoforwic the Algarvians took from the rebels had to get pounded flat before they could be sure of holding on to it.
“Forward!” That hateful shout again. Forward Bembo went, cursing under his breath.
From a doorway twice its natural size, somebody stepped out and flung what looked like a cheap sugar bowl. The Forthwegian fell an instant later, blazed by three beams. But then the bowl landed among the oncoming Algarvians, and the burst of sorcerous energy trapped inside flung pottery fragments in all directions.
Something bit Bembo’s leg. He yelped and looked down at himself. Blood trickled along his calf, but the leg still bore his weight. He ran on toward a doorway. When he dashed into the meager shelter it gave, he discovered he shared that shelter with Oraste. “I’m wounded!” he cried dramatically.
His old partner glanced down at the cut on his leg. “Go home to mama when this is done,” Oraste said. “She can kiss it and make it better.”
“Well! I like that!” Bembo struck a heroic pose—carefully, so as not to expose any of his precious person to lurking foes. “Here I am, injured in service to my kingdom, and what do I get? Mockery! Scorn!”
“About what you deserve,” Oraste said. “I’ve seen people get hurt worse if they scratch themselves while they’ve got a hangnail.”
“Powers below eat you!” Bembo cried. “I’m going to put in for a wound badge when we come off duty.”
“You’ll probably get one, too. From what I’ve seen, the only way you can keep from getting a wound badge is if you get killed—and then they probably give the bastard to your next of kin.” Oraste’s cynicism knew no bounds.
Before Bembo could let out another indignant squawk, somebody up ahead yelled, “Forward!” again. Oraste left the shelter of the doorway without the least hesitation. Bembo had to follow him. On he ran, puffing, marveling that the fear of looking bad in front of his comrades once more proved stronger than the fear of death.
A Forthwegian’s head appeared in a second-story window. Bembo blazed at the Forthwegian, who toppled. Bembo ran on. He had no idea whether the man he’d just blazed was a fighter or an innocent bystander. He didn’t care, either. The fellow had shown up in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had to pay for that. If the penalty was death, too bad.
Better his than mine or one of my pals’,
Bembo thought.
More Forthwegians were holed up in a furniture shop not far ahead. No chance they were innocent bystanders: they blazed at the oncoming soldiers and constables. Bembo wasted no time ducking for cover. He wasn’t ashamed to do it, for he was far from the only one doing it.
Then several eggs crashed down around the furniture shop, and one right on it. “Surrender!” an Algarvian yelled to the Forthwegians still inside. “You can’t win!” He switched to Forthwegian so rudimentary, even Bembo could follow it: “Coming out! Hands high!”
“You no to kill we?” one of the Forthwegians called back in equally bad Algarvian.
“Not if you give up right now,” the soldier answered. “Make it snappy— this is your last chance.”
To Bembo’s surprise, half a dozen Forthwegians did come out of the wrecked shop, their faces glum, their hands up over their heads. When more eggs burst not far away, they all flinched. Not one of them tried to take shelter, though. They must have been sure the Algarvians would blaze them if they did. And they were, without a doubt, right.