Authors: Harry Turtledove
Whoever the other fellow was, he led Mezentio’s men on a long chase, and one that took them away from Ealstan. Seizing his luck, he hurried toward his block of flats. What better time than when all the redheads nearby were going after someone else?
Before long, I’ll be in the part of town they’ve held for a while, and then they won’t pay any attention to me.
But that thought had hardly crossed Ealstan’s mind before another redhead barked out, “Halting!”
Feet skidding on broken bits of brick, Ealstan did halt. The Algarvian had a stick aimed straight at him. If he tried to run, he was a dead man. He smiled a broad, foolish smile, trying to look anything but dangerous.
The Algarvian, a plump fellow, came cautiously toward him. Ealstan noticed the redhead wore the uniform of a constable, not a soldier. Some small hope blossomed in him; Mezentio’s soldiers had proved much more brutal in Eoforwic than the Algarvian constabulary. The plump redhead tried to say something more in Forthwegian, made a complete hash of it, and, to Ealstan’s surprise, started over again in slow, bad, but understandable classical Kaunian: “You following me?”
“Aye, I follow you,” Ealstan replied in the same language.
“Good.” The Algarvian seemed unaware of the irony of his using the speech of the folk his own people killed. Even so, that he knew enough of it to use kept Ealstan’s hope alive. Then the constable gestured with his stick, and Ealstan wondered how long his hope—and he—would live. “What you doing here?” the redhead demanded, hard suspicion in his voice.
“I am going home,” Ealstan said, which had the advantage of being literally true. “I mean no one any harm.” For the moment, that was true, too.
“Likely telling,” the constable sneered. “Why you
out?
You being fighter?”
“No, I am not a fighter,” Ealstan said carefully.
But if I’m not a fighter, what
am
I
doing out and about?
Inspiration struck, in the form of a couple of worthless toadstools sprouting from the dirt next to the bottom couple of courses of a wall. Moving slowly so as not to alarm the constable, he bent, picked them, and held them out. “I was gathering mushrooms, sir. These are very good. Would you like them?”
“No! Not liking!” The Algarvian made a horrible face. “You Forthwegian crazy. Mushrooms?
Faugh!”
The last was a guttural noise of disgust.
But he didn’t call Ealstan a liar. That meant he’d been in Forthweg a while, and knew of the passion Forthwegians—and Kaunians in Forthweg— had for mushrooms, a passion Algarvians emphatically didn’t share. “May I go now, sir?” Ealstan asked.
With an elaborate Algarvian shrug, the constable shook his head. “How I knowing you not being a fighter, eh?” he said. Ealstan’s heart sank. Then the fellow did a very Algarvian thing: he stuck out his hand, palm up.
Trying not to shout for joy, Ealstan dug into his belt pouch and gave the redhead silver. “This is all I have, sir,” he said. It wasn’t; he wanted to keep some in reserve in case he had to pay off another venal constable or soldier. But he thought it would do.
And it did. The redhead had a belt pouch, too. The coins vanished into it. “Going on,” he told Ealstan.
“I thank you,” Ealstan said gravely. He thought he remembered seeing this fellow around Eoforwic for a while, and also thought him a human being, or as close to a human being as an Algarvian constable was likely to come.
By the time another Algarvian noticed him, he was well inside the territory the redheads had retaken. The soldier paid him no particular attention; plenty of Forthwegians trudged through the wreckage of Eoforwic, or else scrabbled through it, looking for whatever they might find.
A couple of Algarvians were pasting broadsheets on walls that hadn’t been knocked down. Ealstan hadn’t seen these before. They showed King Swemmel as a bleeding hog, with his blood spilling out of Unkerlant and pouring over eastern Derlavai toward Algarve and even the lands beyond. Facing the hog stood an Algarvian with a butcher’s apron and an outsized cleaver. The legend read, HELP US STOP THE FLOOD!
He’d seen worse broadsheets. He liked the Unkerlanters only a little better than the Algarvians. Plenty of Forthwegians liked them less than they liked the redheads. Plegmund’s Brigade might get some new recruits. Of course, with the Unkerlanters already having overrun half of Forthweg, and with them rampaging forward in the south, too, how much good would a few new Forthwegian footsoldiers do King Mezentio? Not much, or so Ealstan hoped.
An Algarvian colonel, a short, handsome fellow with the jaunty ferocity of a fighting cock, was giving orders to some of the men he led: “Come on, my dears. Don’t just stand there now that the fornicating Forthwegians have thrown in the sponge. The Unkerlanters are sitting on their arses just across the Twegen. Pretty soon they’ll decide they’re done with their holiday and get around to fighting us again. We’d better be ready for them, right?”
“Right, Colonel Spinello,” one of the redheads said, in the indulgent tones soldiers used when they were fond of an officer.
“We’d better dig in, then,” Spinello said. “We’d better do it deep and tight, as deep and tight as I was into that Kaunian girl of mine back when the war was new.” He sighed. His men laughed. Ealstan’s hands folded into fists. With a deliberate effort of will, he made them relax.
Don’t give yourself away.
The Algarvian colonel kissed his bunched fingertips. “That Vanai, she was a special piece, she was. I trained her myself.”
Ealstan stumbled and almost fell, though he hadn’t tripped on anything. Mezentio’s soldiers laughed, as if they’d heard this colonel’s stories a great many times before. They probably had.
I
shouldn‘t have left my stick behind after all,
Ealstan thought.
Even without it, I’ll find a way to kill him.
But that vow still left his feet unsteady beneath him, as if he were drunk or stunned.
I
am
stunned. What do I do when I set home to Vanai? What do I say? What
can /
do? What
can
I say?
Good questions, all of them. He had perhaps five minutes to find good answers.
Bembo’s belt pouch was nicely heavy with silver these days. As he strutted through the streets of downtown Eoforwic—or what was left of them—he was even acting as a constable again, not as a soldier any more. He should have been happy, or at least happier. He should have been, but he wasn’t.
Some of the constables had gone back to business as usual the minute the Forthwegian rebels finally surrendered and marched off to captives’ camps— those who hadn’t tried fitting back in among the ordinary people of Eoforwic, or the survivors thereof. Up in the tropical continent of Siaulia, there were supposed to be big birds that hid from danger by sticking their heads in the sand. Bembo’s complacent comrades reminded him of those big birds.
“They won’t look across the river,” he told Oraste—he had his old partner back, for Delminio had been badly wounded at the start of the fighting. “It’s going to happen, but they don’t want to think about it.”
“Shut up,” Oraste said. “I don’t want to think about it, either.”
“But you never want to think about anything.” Bembo was still no braver than he had to be, but before his spell as a soldier he would never have dared say anything like that to Oraste. “It’s different with those other buggers. They want to forget about the Unkerlanters, and how can we?”
Oraste looked west, toward the Twegen. “We’ll fight like mad bastards when they cross the river,” he said.
“Of course we will,” Bembo agreed. “But how much good will it do us?”
His partner’s shrug was not the usual Algarvian production. “How much good has fighting the stinking Unkerlanters done us so far?” Oraste asked bleakly. “Sometimes you go into something and you figure you won’t come out the other side, that’s all. You’re futtering stuck, that’s all.”
Bembo shivered, though the day was mild enough. He watched soldiers methodically preparing defenses against the attack they too knew was coming. One of the soldiers looked up from his pick-and-shovel work and called, “Hey, constable! When they come, you think they’ll pay any attention to which uniform you’re wearing?”
His laugh, Bembo thought, was singularly unpleasant. His question was singularly unpleasant, too, especially since the obvious answer was
no.
Bembo stuck his nose in the air. That only made the soldier laugh harder.
Forthwegian civilians with hods hauled rubble from hither to yon under the sticks of Algarvian guards. “They might as well be Kaunians,” Bembo remarked.
With another one of those businesslike shrugs, Oraste answered, “Better they get their throats cut than I get mine.”
“Better nobody gets his throat cut,” Bembo said, but Oraste looked at him as if that were beyond the realm of possibility. Given the sorry state of the world these days, it probably was.
Oraste walked on for a few paces, then nudged him in the ribs. Oraste being who and what he was, the nudge sent Bembo staggering sideways and almost knocked him flat. Oraste grabbed him and held him up. “Come over here with me,” he said, steering Bembo away from the Forthwegian laborers.
“Why?” Bembo asked. “Do you want to murder me in privacy?”
“Only sometimes,” Oraste said patiently. “Not right now. Now I want to make a bet with you.”
“Ah?” That got Bembo’s notice, all right. “What do you have in mind?”
Before answering, Oraste looked around to make sure nobody but Bembo was in earshot. Then he said, “Name however much you want, and I’ll lay you two to one that none of those Forthwegians who gave up ever comes home again. I figure it serves ‘em right if we use ‘em just like Kaunians.”
“We said we’d treat ‘em like war captives,” Bembo reminded him.
“I know what we said,” his partner answered. “And if you think we’ll really do it, put your money where your mouth is.”
Bembo thought it over. Oraste suggestively jingled his belt pouch. But Bembo hesitated only a couple of seconds before shaking his head. “Find another sucker, Oraste. I won’t touch that one. I think you’re too likely to be right.”
Oraste snapped his fingers. “There, you see? You’re not as dumb as you look, and all this time I thought you were.”
“Funny,” Bembo said. “Ha, ha. Very funny.” He paused. “What do you want to bet that the Unkerlanters are getting rid of all the Forthwegians they don’t like, too?”
“I’ll bet on it, if you want,” Oraste said. “Will you bet against it?”
“Me? Are you crazy?” Bembo shook his head again, even more decisively this time. “That’s not a sucker bet. That’s an idiot bet.”
“Never can tell,” Oraste said. “Plenty of idiots running around loose in Algarve. A lot of em wear fancier uniforms than we ever will.”
“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Bembo agreed. “The way things are these days, I don’t care if I ever get promoted. All I want to do is get back to Tricarico in one piece.”
“Why not wish for the moon while you’re at it?” Oraste waved toward the west. “You suppose the Unkerlanters want any of us to get home?” He seemed to have forgotten saying he didn’t want to think about Swemmel’s men.
Instead of answering, Bembo just sighed. He didn’t suppose anything of the sort. He wished he did. He said, “I never wanted to meet those Unkerlanter whoresons up close like this.”
“You haven’t met ‘em up close yet—they’re still on the other side of the Twegen,” Oraste said. “Well, most of them are, anyway. When they’re close enough to yell, ‘Swemmel!’ and blaze at you, that’s up close. By all the stories, they do worse than that if they catch you, too.”
Bembo’s shiver was no little
frisson
of horror, such as he might have known while hearing a scary story at an evening’s entertainment with plenty of food and good northern wine around. It was too large, too robust, for that. And it had nothing to do with the weather. It was plain, honest fear. If the Unkerlanters caught you, bad things happened. That, to Algarvians in the west, was an obvious truth.
And the Unkerlanters did not have to catch Mezentio’s men to make bad things happen to them. Bembo grabbed Oraste’s arm. “Dragons!” he shouted. They both dove for cover as the rock-gray beasts swooped down on Eoforwic from Unkerlanter dragon farms on the far side of the river.
“Powers below eat them,” Oraste said, his face buried in the dirt. Bembo lay perhaps a foot away from him. Between them, some sort of nasty mushroom thrust up from the ground. Bembo was amazed some Forthwegian hadn’t picked it and taken it off as a prize.
A moment later, as eggs began bursting uncomfortably close by, he found more urgent things about which to be amazed. “The whoresons pretty much left us alone while we were fighting the Forthwegians here,” he said. “Why in blazes are they bothering us now?”
“Of course they left us alone then—we were doing them a favor,” Oraste said. “Now we aren’t killing Forthwegians who might cause ‘em trouble further down the ley line, so they don’t have to bother being nice to us anymore.”
That exercise in cynicism might have upset Bembo more if he hadn’t come to a similar conclusion himself. “We need to get to a shelter,” he bawled.
“Go ahead, if you want to,” Oraste said. “Me, I think you’ll get your stupid self killed if you stand up.”
Again, he had a point. Bembo stayed where he was. Enough piles of wreckage lay around to do a good job of shielding him and Oraste unless an egg burst right on top of them. Somebody much too close by started screaming. Bembo couldn’t tell if he was Algarvian or Forthwegian. Agony, the constable had discovered, sounded the same in any language.
Bembo rolled from his belly to his back. He saw no dragons, but eggs, more of them than ever, kept bursting all over Eoforwic. “They’ve got their tossers limbered up, too,” he said in dismay.
“Well, if they’re going to pound on us, odds are they’ll pound on us with everything they’ve got, eh?” Oraste said.
“There won’t be anything left of this place by the time they’re through with it,” Bembo said. “There wasn’t much left of it before they started.”