Authors: Harry Turtledove
That could have been me,
he thought numbly.
If I hadn‘t been out, standing sentry, that could have been me.
“Powers below eat the Algarvians!” someone not far away shouted. “Powers above curse their sorcery!”
Talsu’s stomach lurched again. He knew what kind of sorcery Mezentio’s men used. People had been whispering about it for a couple of years, maybe longer. But … “How are they getting Kaunians from Forthweg into Jelgava?” he said, as much to himself as to anyone else. “They have trouble moving their own soldiers around this kingdom.”
Bitter laughter answered him. “Who says it has to be Kaunians from Forthweg? If they need bodies bad enough, they can start pulling people out of Skrunda or any other town and bloody well killing them.”
That hadn’t occurred to Talsu. Take people out of his home town, line them up, and kill them to tap their life energy? Take, say, his wife, his father, his mother, his sister?
“No,” he said, again largely to himself.
“Why not?” the other surviving irregular said. “They’re Algarvians. They hate all Kaunic peoples as much as we hate them. If they can’t get Kaunians from Forthweg here, you think they won’t grab Jelgavans?”
However much Talsu wished he thought that, he didn’t, not down where it mattered. “We might not have a kingdom left by the time they’re through with us,” he exclaimed.
“That’s why we’ve got to keep fighting the bastards,” the other irregular said. “Whatever they do to us, may it come back on their heads ten times over.”
“A hundred times over,” Talsu said. He couldn’t get the picture of Algarvians seizing his family out of his mind no matter how hard he tried, and he tried as he’d never tried before in all his days.
Vanai had known fear a good many times in the course of the Derlavaian War. Anyone in Forthweg who hadn’t known fear surely had something wrong with him. This, though, this was terror. And terror, she discovered, was a very different beast from mere fear.
“I saw him,” she told Saxburh in classical Kaunian. She held out her hand in the posture of one taking an oath. “By the powers above, I
did see
him.”
Her daughter thought it was funny, and laughed the pure, clean laugh of a happy baby. To Vanai, it was no laughing matter. She knew Spinello’s stride when she saw it, even if the Algarvian officer had acquired a slight limp since going off to fight in Unkerlant. And if that wasn’t he leading soldiers up the street past her block of flats, her eyes were useless.
He wouldn’t recognize her, not when she looked like a Forthwegian these days.
Thelberge,
she thought, shivering.
I can be Thelberge and he’ll never know me.
Of course, he might not care, either. He might blaze her any which way. After all, the rebels in Eoforwic were for the most part Forthwegians.
He might blaze me, but he’ll never bed me again,
she thought fiercely.
Never, by the powers above!.
Logically, bedding her might be—was almost bound to be—the last thing Spinello had in mind at the moment. Logic had nothing to do with anything, though, when she remembered the Algarvian coming again and again to her grandfather’s house in Oyngestun and taking her to bed instead of taking Brivibas into a labor gang. He’d known she despised him. He hadn’t cared—or maybe he had, for sometimes she thought her resentment only excited him more.
I
want to kill him,
she thought.
I
want to kill him with my own hands. Maybe then I’ll feel clean again.
There were a good many stories from before the days when the First Kaunian Kingdom grew into the Kaunian Empire about ravished women avenging themselves on the men who’d abused them. Brivibas had taught her those tales with scorn in his voice: they were legends, maybe even myths, and not sober history. But teach them to her he had; legends or not, they were part of the underpinnings of Kaunianity.
What made things harder was that she couldn’t talk to Ealstan about this. He knew nothing of Spinello, and Vanai wanted to keep it that way. And so, whenever he did manage to come home, filthy and exhausted, she forced the Algarvian to the back of her mind. But she couldn’t force him out of it, any more than she could have pretended a bad tooth didn’t really ache.
Once, after Ealstan kissed her good-bye and patted her on the backside and went out to try to cause the redheads more trouble, a really horrible thought ran through her mind:
What if he and Spinello come up against each other? Spinello has all the might of Algarve behind him. What if he … ?
Vanai violently shook her head. She
wouldn ‘t
think of that—so she told herself. And so, of course, the thought kept coming back again and again, each time more dreadful than the one before. She cursed as foully as she knew how.
If only I hadn‘t picked the wrong time to look out the window!
But she had to go into the kitchen, and when she went into the kitchen she couldn’t very well help looking out the window. Seeing Algarvian soldiers prowling through this part of Eoforwic would have been enough of a jolt even without recognizing Spinello. The Forthwegian rebels had securely held it only days before. Little by little, the redheads were pounding the uprising to bits.
Across the Twegen River, the Unkerlanters sat and waited. Vanai had never thought much about them one way or the other. Now she hated them. Had they come to the Forthwegians’ aid, Eoforwic wouldn’t have an Algarvian left in it. Ealstan was surely right—Swemmel’s men were letting the redheads solve their Forthwegian problem for them.
When Vanai went into the kitchen again, she found she had problems of her own: problems in the larder. Last time she’d ventured out, she’d got as much food as she could carry back. Now she would have to do it again.
She went over to the cradle and looked down at Saxburh. The baby smiled to see her, smiled and laughed. Vanai smiled, too, but she had to work at it. She didn’t like the idea of taking Saxburh out with her when she sallied forth to get food, but she liked leaving her behind even less. Saxburh might cry every minute till she got back. Or, worse, she might not be able to come back. Taking the baby out was dangerous, but so was leaving her behind. There were no safe places, no safe choices, in Eoforwic these days.
Vanai scooped the baby out of the cradle. “Come along, you little nuisance,” she said. Saxburh thought that was very funny. Vanai, unfortunately, didn’t. If she had to carry Saxburh, that was so much less food she could bring back. Before setting out, she renewed the masking spell on herself and cast it on her daughter. On Saxburh, she could see it take effect; the baby looked plumper and a little darker. On her ventures out of the house, Vanai had seen a handful of Kaunians bold enough to look like themselves. She admired their courage without wanting to imitate it.
Carrying Saxburh downstairs was easy. Carrying her and a lot of groceries back up to the flat would be a lot more work.
I
’
ll
worry about that once I get the food,
Vanai thought. She’d managed before. She expected she would be able to do it again.
She paused inside the lobby near the door to make sure everything was quiet before venturing out. Algarvian soldiers wouldn’t know her for a Kaunian now, but they or their Forthwegian counterparts were liable to blaze anyone who appeared unexpectedly.
No redheads were in sight when she stepped out onto the street, only a couple of Forthwegians—people who looked like Forthwegians, anyhow, just as she did. One, a woman, smiled toward Saxburh. The other, a fighter as unkempt and grimy as Ealstan was these days, paid neither Vanai nor the baby any attention after a quick glance to make sure she wasn’t an Algarvian.
Satisfied as to that, he tramped on down the middle of the street, a stick in his hands and ready to blaze.
No matter how Forthwegian Vanai looked, she couldn’t match that display of self-assurance. She stayed close to the walls as she hurried toward the market square where she’d gone so often before Mezentio’s men seized her and flung her into the Kaunian quarter. People still bought and sold things there, but it was a smaller, more furtive place than it had been.
Getting there wasn’t quite so simple as it had been, either. She had to skirt or climb over piles of rubble that had been houses and shops and blocks of flats. That would have been easier without carrying Saxburh, too. Coming back with food, again, would be even more delightful.
You do what you have to do,
Vanai thought.
You do it, and then you think about how you did it. One thing at a time, that’s all.
Worried-looking Forthwegians scurried around the market square, getting what they could and cursing the prices they had to pay. The people who sold, most of them, were as hard-faced as the Forthwegian fighter Vanai had seen. Several of them had guards with sticks at their backs to make sure they got paid for their goods.
Vanai winced when she heard the prices they were asking. “That’s twice as much for flour as I paid the last time I was here,” she complained.
With a shrug, the man from whom she was buying said, “That’s on account of I used to have twice as much to sell. If you don’t want to pay it, sweetheart, somebody else will.”
He was doubtless right about that. Vanai paid. She did have plenty of silver. She paid for cheese and beans and almonds and peas, too. Nothing exciting there, only stuff that would keep and could go into easy stews and porridges. She wasn’t worrying about fancy meals these days, only about holding starvation at bay.
Saxburh started to cry when Vanai was about halfway back to her block of flats. Vanai didn’t know whether the baby was hungry or wet or just sick of being toted around like—quite literally—one more sack of beans. She didn’t care, either. She couldn’t do anything with Saxburh till she got back to the flat, not unless she wanted to put all the food down. And that was about the last thing she wanted to do. In a city at war, getting back out of sight was far and away the smartest course.
She soon found out just how true that was. Something—noting motion in the sky, perhaps—made her look up in spite of the constant struggle to keep her feet. She gasped in horror. Flying straight toward her, hardly higher than the housetops, were half a dozen dragons, all of them painted in gaudy, crazy patterns of red, green, and white—Algarvian beasts. They carried eggs slung under their bellies.
Vanai shrank back against a wall, not that that would have done the slightest bit of good had they decided to flame her or drop those eggs close by. But they swept on past, so low that their wings kicked dust up from the ground into her eyes. Without a free hand to rub at them, she blinked frantically.
A moment later, eggs burst in the market square. The noise smote her ears. Saxburh’s wails grew louder. She heard screams behind her, too. “I can’t do anything, sweetheart,” Vanai said, jiggling the baby up and down in the crook of her elbow. “I’m just glad we went out early.”
Saxburh wasn’t glad, and didn’t care who knew it. Vanai couldn’t do anything about that without slowing down, and she wasn’t about to slow down for anything or anybody, Saxburh included. Getting home was the most important thing she could do. She’d already had that thought. It was especially true now. And she did it, wailing baby or no wailing baby.
Getting the door to the block of flats open without putting anything down proved another adventure, and getting up the stairs another one still. But she did what needed doing, and she was able to set some of her bundles on the floor in the hallway in front of her flat so she could use a key to open the door. That done, she hustled groceries inside and closed and barred the door behind her.
By then, Saxburh wasn’t just red in the face; she was a nasty, blotchy purple. “I know,” Vanai said soothingly. “I know. Nobody was paying enough attention to you. Now I can.” She cuddled the baby and nursed her. Saxburh settled down and quickly went to sleep. Vanai wished somebody could calm
her
down as easily as that.
She put the grain and nuts and vegetables and cheese in the kitchen cupboards. Then she turned the tap. Only a trickle of water came out. She said something in classical Kaunian that surely would have shocked Brivibas, then something even more incendiary in Forthwegian. Up till now, she’d always been able to rely on the water. If she couldn’t …
Cursing again, she put a pot under the tap to catch as much water as it would give. Where could she get more? The fancier parts of Eoforwic had a good many fountains. This grimy district? No. She would have to get some from somewhere. You could live a lot longer without food than without water.
The trickle stopped. Vanai stared in dismay. Maybe people would repair the mains, and the water would come back on again soon. Maybe they wouldn’t, and it wouldn’t. However things turned out, she had to do her best.
If I can,
she thought.
If I can.
Marshal Rathar could look east across the Twegen River and watch Eoforwic burn. The sight didn’t make him unhappy—not in the least. On that side of the river, Algarvian soldiers were fighting and dying and using up uncounted eggs and behemoths and sorely needed sacks of cinnabar for their dragons— and none of it cost him so much as a single soldier.
General Gurmun was looking east, too, through a spyglass. Lowering it, he said, “I’ve never been one to have much use for delay, but I’ve got to admit that just sitting here serves us pretty well right now.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Rathar agreed. “I was thinking the same thing, as a matter of fact. King Swemmel is shrewd, no doubt about it.”
“That he is,” Gurmun said enthusiastically. “The redheads could be fighting
us
street by street in Eoforwic. Can you imagine how expensive that would be? Instead, they’re fighting the Forthwegians. It saves lots of wear and tear on us, and it gets rid of troublemakers we would have had to worry about later on.”
“True enough.” Rathar suspected—no, he was certain—the Forthwegians didn’t think of themselves as troublemakers. In their own minds, they were surely patriots. Of course, what they were in their own minds mattered only so much to Rathar. He had to look at them as his sovereign would.