Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

“Go on, get away!” The Forthwegian was so young, his voice cracked. But he was easily old enough to blaze her down. “Or else keep coming.” He sounded as if he wanted her to.

“I’m leaving,” she said hastily, so as not to give him an excuse to do just that. She turned and retreated, letting out a sigh of relief as she put a building between her and the hothead. She’d had guards, Algarvian and Forthwegian, growl at her before, but never an encounter like this.

Icould escape, she thought. Icould. It would be easy, if… She still knew the spell that would let her look like a Forthwegian. She should have known it. She was the one who’d devised it, reconstructed a botched charm in a cheap, stupid book calledYou Too Can Be a Mage into sorcery that really did something. She always kept a bit of dark brown yarn and a bit of yellow with her, in case she got the chance.

But the guards wouldn’t growl and snarl and curse if she approached the edge of the Kaunian quarter while looking like a Forthwegian. They would blaze without warning. They’d done it before. No Forthwegians were supposed to be inside the district, and no Kaunians were supposed to go outside it unless they were ushered forth to go to their doom.

Since the redheads had stopped letting Kaunians out, Vanai had wondered what she would do inside the quarter. But the Algarvians didn’t bother with Kaunian-manned manufactories. Maybe they should have. Had they been as efficient as Swemmel of Unkerlant claimed he was, maybe they would have. Or maybe not. They valued the Kaunians only for the life energy they gave up on dying, not for what they might accomplish alive. And so, whether the Kaunians worked or not didn’t seem to matter to Mezentio’s men.

A young Kaunian who’d never dyed his hair nodded to Vanai and said, “So you got caught on the outside, did you?”

“Aye.” She nodded, then rested a hand on her bulging belly. “I think carrying a baby made the spell wear off faster than it should have. Whatever it was, the spell gave out and I got nabbed.”

“Too bad for you,” the young blond man said. “Being a Kaunian these days isn’t much fun.”

“Being a Kaunian in Forthweg never was much fun,” Vanai answered. “But you’re right, of course-it’s worse now.” She paused in some surprise. “I’ll tell you one thing, though: speaking my own language again feels good.” She’d used Forthwegian, not classical Kaunian, whenever she talked with anyone but Ealstan out in Eoforwic, and more and more with him once she assumed her Forthwegian disguise.

“Sure enough.” The young man scowled. “We can even write in our own language in here. Why not? The penalty for writing in classical Kaunian is death, and the redheaded barbarians are going to kill us anyhow.” He laughed without any great mirth, but then scowled again. “Couldn’t you speak Kaunian with your man?” He pointed at her abdomen.

“Some,” she said. “But he was-he is-a Forthwegian.”

“Oh.” The young blond fellow looked revolted for a moment. Then his face froze. He walked away from Vanai as if she didn’t exist.

Back in Oyngestun, her home village, both Forthwegians and Kaunians would have reacted the same way to the thought of a union between their people. Here in Eoforwic, in what had been the capital and most sophisticated city of Forthweg, such marriages and other alliances had been more readily tolerated back before the Algarvians overran the kingdom. So Vanai had heard, anyhow. Maybe the fellow she’d been talking with had been dragged here from a little village of her own. Or maybe, like some Kaunians, he was as blindly prejudiced against Forthwegians as so many Forthwegians were against Kaunians.

She wandered aimlessly through the Kaunian quarter for a while. When the Algarvians first herded the Kaunians they hated into this little district, it had been disastrously crowded. It wasn’t any more. A lot of Kaunians had already been shipped west-and only the tiny handful of them lucky enough to escape their captors had ever come back to Forthweg. A lot had slipped out of the Kaunian quarter sorcerously disguised as Forthwegians before the redheads started getting wise to them.

Vanai took a certain somber pride in that. Even though she’d been caught, she’d helped a lot of her people go free. But, on the other hand, even though she’d helped a lot of her people go free, she’d been caught. It all depended on how you looked at things.

A bell began to clang in a little square a couple of blocks away. She hurried toward it. So did plenty of other Kaunians, men, women, and children, spilling out of blocks of flats and houses. Seeing all those blond heads around her, Vanai was very conscious of belonging to a separate people. Not for the first time, she wondered what it would be like to live in Valmiera or Jelgava far to the east, where almost everyone was of Kaunian blood.

Whatever the Algarvians were doing to the Jelgavans and Valmierans, they couldn’t possibly stuff them into tiny districts and have their neighbors help keep them there. She was sure of that.

And they couldn’t possibly set up feeding stations in the middle of the district. That bell might have summoned cattle on a farm. The only difference was, Kaunians knew how to queue up.

“Here,” an Algarvian said when Vanai got to the head of the queue. He gave her a chunk of barley bread, a chunk of crumbly white cheese, and some salted olives. It wasn’t fancy food, but it was enough to keep her going till the next time the bell rang. She’d feared the redheads would starve the Kaunians they’d trapped, but that turned out not to be so. The Algarvians didn’t care if Forthwegians starved. But if Kaunians died of hunger before they could be sacrificed, they were wasted as far as Algarve was concerned. And so they got something close to enough to eat.

Vanai was just spitting out an olive pit when more bells began to chime, these not in the Kaunian quarter but all over Eoforwic. She needed a moment to understand what that meant. Then someone close by spelled it out for her, exclaiming, “Dragons! Unkerlanter dragons!”

KingSwemmel’s dragonfliers didn’t come over Eoforwic very often; the capital of Forthweg lay a long way east of land Unkerlant still held, and Swemmel’s forces had trouble sparing dragons from the more urgent fight against Algarve. But every once in a while they would load eggs under some of their stronger beasts and pay a call on the city and the ley-line junctions it contained.

The day was cool and cloudy, with a threat of rain. That made the Unkerlanter dragons, painted rock-gray, all the harder to spot. Only after Vanai watched eggs fall from beneath a dragon’s belly and heard them burst not far from the Kaunian quarter did she realize that standing in the street and watching wasn’t the smartest thing she could do.

She ran into a block of flats and then down into the cellar. Even if an egg landed on the building, that was the safest place she could go. She wasn’t the only one to see as much, either. Plenty of other Kaunians had got there ahead of her. She wondered whether they lived in the block of flats or had fled there from the street, as she had.

“I hope every one of those eggs comes down right on an Algarvian’s head,” an old woman said.

“Powers above, make it so,” Vanai exclaimed.

“I wouldn’t even mind too much if an egg came down on me,” a man said. “Then the redheads couldn’t use my life energy.”

“No!” Vanai said. “I want to outlive them. I’m going to have a baby. I want my baby to outlive them, too.”

“That’s right.” The old woman nodded vigorously, though Vanai could hardly see her in the gloomy, shadow-filled cellar. “That’s the best revenge. They lose their life energy and we keep ours.”