Authors: Harry Turtledove
Smoke rose from Eoforwic, where the Forthwegians still battled desperately to drive back the Algarvian armies. The Unkerlanters across the Twegen still stayed quiet, though Spinello could see distant smoke in the south, where Swemmel’s men had forced a bridgehead over the river. They weren’t trying to break out of it yet, but the Algarvians hadn’t been able to crush it, either. When Spinello let himself think about that, he worried.
But he had plenty of other things to worry about, too. The sentry spelled out one of them: “Are we going back into Eoforwic today, sir? I wouldn’t mind a holiday, and that’s a fact.”
With a chuckle, Spinello said, “I wouldn’t, either, old man. Neither would Algarve, come to that. When the Forthwegians and Unkerlanters and islanders decide to give us one, though—that’s another question. So aye, we’ll be going back into town.”
“I thought you were going to tell me that.” The corners of the sentry’s mouth turned down; like so many Algarvians, he wore his heart on his sleeve. “I’d just as soon sit this one out, if it’s all the same to you.”
“I’m going in,” Spinello said. “I could use the company.” He and the sentry grinned at each other. They were both going in, and they both knew it. They both hoped they would both come out again when the day was done.
Spinello found himself in charge of a force he would have laughed at if he were throwing it against the Unkerlanters. A lot of the soldiers he led had sat out most of the war on occupation duty in Valmiera. They were both older and fatter than they might have been. Some of them held their sticks as if not quite sure what to do with them. But they went forward when he told them to go, and he didn’t suppose he could ask for more than that.
He was none too thrilled about going forward himself. He’d fought block by block, house by house, in Sulingen till he took a beam through the chest. He’d been lucky, in an odd, painful way: that was early enough in the fight there to let a dragon take him out of the city. Had he stayed unhurt till the end, he wouldn’t have come out of Sulingen alive.
Eoforwic hadn’t been knocked about quite so badly as Sulingen, not yet. Most blocks of flats still stood, though window frames gaped bare like the eye sockets of countless skulls. Spinello wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t rather have seen rubble. Anyone could be watching from those upper stories. They made perfect sniper’s nests.
He couldn’t read the Forthwegian warning whitewashed on walls here and there, but he knew about what it said:
anyone blazes from a building, the building gets wrecked, and we won’t bother clearing out the people who live there first.
That kind of warning hadn’t stopped the sniping, but had slowed it down. Ordinary Forthwegians didn’t want to be driven from their homes, or killed in them, any more than anyone else did.
He wondered how many people in those flats weren’t Forthwegians at all, but sorcerously disguised Kaunians. He wondered if Jadwigai had been foolish enough to go into the city, or if she’d had the sense to flee out into the countryside where she was less likely to get killed.
And then he remembered that that constable back in Gromheort had told him Vanai was supposed to have come to Eoforwic. He laughed to himself. He wouldn’t recognize her if he saw her—he was sure of that. If she looked like a Kaunian, his countrymen would long since have seized her. And if she didn’t, he wouldn’t know her from any other dumpy Forthwegian girl.
Even a dumpy Forthwegian girl is better than a cold, empty bed,
he thought. But then girls, Forthwegian or Kaunian, dumpy or elegantly lean, slipped out of his mind. Ahead lay enough rubble to satisfy even the most ambitiously destructive wrecker of all time.
“Fan out, men,” he called. “There’ll be rebels in there, sure as we’re all missing foreskins.” He watched the troopers take cover and slowly shook his head. No, most of them hadn’t spent the past three years honing themselves against the Unkerlanters. Even against the Forthwegians, more would fall than might be true with better soldiers.
As he ducked behind a tumbledown wall himself, a beam charred wood a couple of feet above his head. Part of a broadsheet still clung to the brickwork: a bearded Forthwegian strangling a dragon painted in Algarvian colors. Spinello snorted. Nothing subtle there. Nothing very interesting, either. Even the Unkerlanters turned out better broadsheets.
Eggs started bursting on the rubble. Now Spinello nodded. Unlike foot-soldiers, the men who handled egg-tossers had to know what they were doing. And the Unkerlanters, as they had for some weeks, just kept sitting quietly on the far side of the Twegen River. Spinello thought that was funny. He suspected the Forthwegians weren’t laughing.
“Forward!” he called, and blew his shiny new officer’s whistle. He’d lost the old one in an Unkerlanter swamp.
Forward his men went. They weren’t so young or so dashing as the soldiers he’d led in Unkerlant, but they cleared the surviving Forthwegians from the wreckage and lost only a couple of men doing it. Crouched in amongst the reconquered rubble, Spinello felt proud of them till a question crossed his mind:
now that we’ve got it, what the demon good is it?
He shrugged a fancy Algarvian shrug. If soldiers spent all their time worrying about things like that, how would they fight their wars?
Talsu peered down at the road leading toward Skrunda from behind a rock most of the way up a low hill. Another irregular shared the cover of the boulder with him. “By the powers above, it’s good to have King Donalitu back in Jelgava, back in Balvi, again,” the other fellow said.
“It’s good to have the Algarvians getting kicked out of Jelgava.” Talsu didn’t quite agree with his comrade, but didn’t want to cause a quarrel, either.
“It’s the same thing, near enough,” the other man said. He was older than Talsu, and leaner, with a scar seaming his left cheek. He looked like a murderer. From what he’d said, he’d been a dyer before the war. The skin of his hands still bore strange mottling.
“Not quite.” Talsu couldn’t let that go unchallenged.
“What’s the difference, then?”
“Well… when I was in the dungeon, the fellow who squeezed me wasn’t an Algarvian. He was as Jelgavan as we are. He’d worked for the king before he worked for the redheads, and I’ll bet he goes back to working for the king once the redheads run away or get beaten. Some of our troubles’ll go with ‘em—some, but not all. People like that interrogator will still be here.”
“You can’t help people like that,” the other Jelgavan said.
“Why not?” Talsu asked.
“Because they’re part of the way things work,” his comrade said. “You can’t get rid of them, any more than you can get rid of the pits in olives.”
“You can do that,” Talsu said. “It just takes work.”
He started to add something to that, but the other irregular gave him a shot in the ribs with an elbow and pointed west, toward Skrunda. Talsu’s head swung that way. A column of Algarvian soldiers—a couple of regiments’ worth—was coming east along the road, along with three or four behemoths and a motley collection of wagons.
“They’re still moving men forward to fight the Lagoans and Kuusamans,” Talsu said.
“They’re trying to,” his companion answered. “Our job is to make sure they don’t have an easy time of it.”
How many men were hidden here and there along these hills? Talsu didn’t know. How had the irregulars’ leaders heard the redheads would move soldiers along this road? He didn’t know that, either, though he could make guesses he thought good. Some Jelgavans sold out their fellows to the Algarvians. Why shouldn’t others sell out the redheads to their countrymen?
Maybe some of the Algarvians there were the ones who’d seized him when he went with Kugu the silversmith for what he’d thought would be his introduction to the underground but turned into his introduction to the dungeon. Talsu knew that was wildly unlikely, but hoped it was true just the same.
Do you really need that kind of help to want vengeance?
he wondered. A moment later, he shook his head.
No, I don’t need it, but it would be nice.
Somewhere on a hilltop not far away, the irregulars had an egg-tosser or two. Talsu didn’t see the first egg fly through the air, but he did watch it burst just in front of the Algarvian column. The next egg, better aimed, landed among the redheads. The burst of sorcerous energy flung men and pieces of men high into the air.
“Let’s see how they like
that,
by the powers above!” the Jelgavan next to Talsu said with a fierce whoop of glee.
The Algarvians, of course, liked it not at all. Talsu had been away from real war for close to four years. He’d forgotten how quickly trained men could react—and he wondered if soldiers from the Jelgavan army could ever have reacted so quickly. Mezentio’s men spread out even before the third egg hit. Then they swarmed up the hills on either side of the road, blazing as they came.
Talsu stuck his head out from behind his side of the boulder for a quick blaze at the enemy. A beam zipped past his own head, close enough for him to feel the heat and smell the lightning in the air. He ducked back into cover in a hurry.
Over on the other side of the boulder, the dyer was cursing. “Some of the bastards blaze while the rest run,” he complained. “How are we supposed to blaze at them?”
“You weren’t in the army during the war, were you?” Talsu said with a dry chuckle, which startled a nod from the other Jelgavan. “That’s just one of the chances you take in this business.”
Another quick blaze from Talsu. The Algarvian at whom he aimed went down, but he didn’t know whether he’d hit the man: like the redhead, he dove for the dirt, too, whenever somebody started blazing at him. He turned to his comrade, intending to tell him something on the order of,
That’s how it’s done.
Whatever he’d been about to say, he didn’t. The other irregular sprawled bonelessly in the dust, blazed through the head. Blood pooled beneath his body. He was still twitching a little, but Talsu had seen enough men killed to know another one.
He snapped off another blaze. But the Algarvians were coming hard and fast. Before long, they’d be on his flank if he didn’t fall back. Keeping the boulder between himself and most of them, he scurried back over the crest of the hill. He wasn’t the only one in full retreat, either. He didn’t think the irregulars’ leaders had expected Mezentio’s men to hit back so fiercely. He wasn’t particularly surprised himself. The Algarvians had always been aggressive, even back in the days of the Kaunian Empire.
Talsu threw himself down behind a bush and watched the crestline.
Aye, I still remember a trick or two,
he thought with somber pride.
Now if one of those cursed redheads forgets …
And one of Mezentio’s men did. He charged over the top of the hill. He couldn’t have done a better job of exposing himself if he’d tried for a week.
Not a smart thing to do,
Talsu thought, and blazed him. The redhead wore a look of absurd surprise as he crumpled.
But not all of Mezentio’s men were fools. The Algarvians couldn’t have done nearly so much harm if they had been fools. Many more of them came over the rise with proper care. Talsu fell back again, and then again. He saw more of his comrades who weren’t so lucky.
He got away into the deeper hills where the irregulars had been sheltering for a long time. The Algarvians didn’t pursue so hard as they might have. Some of the raiders were jubilant about that. “They know better than to stick their noses in here too far,” one of them said. “If they tried it, they’d be sorry.”
Although Talsu didn’t argue with those bold spirits, he didn’t think they were right, either. The redheads had been on their way east to fight the Kuusamans and Lagoans. Once they’d broken up this harassing attack, wouldn’t they get back to their chief business as fast as they could? If they had any sense, they would. And anyone who looked at things with an ounce of sense would see the same thing.
Maybe the irregulars didn’t have a whole lot of sense. Maybe they’d been so starved for victories for so long, anything looked bigger than it really was. Maybe …
Maybe all sorts of things,
Talsu thought, laughing at himself. Whatever the truth was, he couldn’t do anything about it.
Later that evening, the Algarvians did something about it, or tried to.
They sent a few dragons over the hills. A few eggs came hissing down out of the sky. A couple of them burst near the irregulars’ camps. None of them did any harm. That raised the Jelgavans’ spirits, too.
“Hardly even worth being afraid of the stinking Algarvians anymore,” somebody said. Somebody else nodded. Several men clapped their hands.
Maybe they’re right,
Talsu thought hopefully.
A couple of nights later, the Algarvians showed they still deserved fear.
The night was very black, one of those late-summer nights when the air was so warm, so clear, so still, the stars in the sky hardly twinkled. On sentry-go, Talsu kept staring up at them.
Somewhere between midnight and dawn, not long before a replacement was supposed to come and he was supposed to go back to camp, he felt something wrong. For the first moment or two, he didn’t know what it was.
Earthquake?
he wondered. Jelgava got them from time to time, though Skrunda’s neighborhood hadn’t been hit hard in his lifetime.
When the ground quivered beneath his feet, he thought at first he was right. But the shaking didn’t build, as an earthquake did; it just went on for a while. Looking back in the direction of the camp, he saw purple flashes, as if lightning were striking close by. But where would lightning come from, out of as clear a sky as he’d ever seen?
Fear ran through him in the wake of that thought. Replacement or no replacement, he hurried off toward the camp. By the time he got there, everything was over. If it were an earthquake, it had struck the irregulars alone. Their fires were thrown higgledy-piggledy; a couple of small shrubs burned close by.
There were rents in the ground from which smoke still rose. At first, when Talsu smelled burnt meat, he thought the odor was left over from cooking earlier in the evening. Then he realized what it was really coming from, and his stomach did a slow lurch. That was burnt meat, all right, but some of the burnt meat still shrieked and begged to die.