Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

“You might have done better if you had known,” Jadwigai remarked.

“Aye, that’s so.” Spinello admitted what he could hardly deny. “But it’s too late to dwell on it now. Now we have to hope we can stay alive”-when he saidwe, he meant not only himself and Jadwigai, but every Algarvian in the north of Unkerlant-”and somehow stop the enemy.”

More eggs burst. “Do you think we can?” Jadwigai asked.

“Sooner or later, we have to,” Spinello replied. “They’ll run out of men and beasts and supplies. If we have anything at all left by then, we’ll stop them. But when? Where?” He shrugged an elaborate Algarvian shrug. The answer was important, but he couldn’t do much to influence it, not as a harried fugitive he couldn’t. He took off his hat and laid it under his head for a pillow.

Jadwigai lay down beside him in the bushes. They’d made love a few times during the grinding retreat, but they were both too weary now. Spinello reached out to pat her hand. Then he dove headlong into oblivion.

He woke a little before dawn. Jadwigai still slept. With care and worry gone from her face, she looked improbably young. Spinello shook his head. She was as tough as she was pretty. She’d done as well as she could for herself in a situation as near impossible as made no difference. She’d done far better than most of the rest of the Kaunians from Forthweg. And if she stayed with him now, that was bound to be hard self-interest.

He shook her awake, ready to clap a hand to her mouth if she made more noise than she should. She’d done that once or twice. Not now, though. Reason came into her eyes almost at once. “Let’s get going,” Spinello said quietly.

“Aye.” Jadwigai nodded. “Maybe you can blaze some of these marsh birds.”

“Maybe.” But Spinello remembered a coot he’d killed. It hadn’t been worth eating once dead. Of course, when you got hungry enough.. .

The sun was still low in the southeast when they came on a couple of squads’ worth of soldiers. For a moment, Spinello thought himself a dead man. Then he realized they were Algarvians, stragglers like himself. No, not stragglers: just defeated men in full retreat. They even had a crystallomancer with them. “We’re supposed to have a strongpoint in Volkach,” the fellow said. “If we can get there, maybe we’ll get back to the real war.” Under his breath, he added something like, “If there’s any real war left up here.” But he didn’t say it loud enough to make Spinello ask him to repeat it.

As they fought their way through the swamp, one of the troopers asked, “Where’d you pick up the twist, Colonel?” He sounded curious and a little jealous, as he might have had Spinello carried a knapsack full of smoked pheasant and fine wine.

Unlike a knapsack, Jadwigai could speak for herself. “I’m not a twist, you-” What she called him proved she’d learned soldierly Algarvian. “I was-Iam -the luck of the Alberese Regiment.”

“Oh!” To Spinello’s surprise, the soldier bowed to her as if to an Algarvian duchess. “I’ve heard about you. A lot of folks up here have heard about you.”

“Aye, that’s right.” Another soldier nodded. He turned to Spinello. “Anybody gives you a hard time about her, Colonel, you just yell. There’s plenty of people won’t let anything happen to her.”

“That’s good to hear,” Spinello said.

He sounded less happy when they came out of the swamp and up onto solid ground. The vast plains of northern Unkerlant were ideal ground for behemoths. Back in the early days of the war, that had all been to Algarve’s advantage. Now, when the Unkerlanters could put three, four, five beasts in the field for every Algarvian animal, moving across the plains made sweat trickle from his armpits and down the small of his back.

Swemmel’s men had been through here, on their way farther east. Bloated, stinking corpses, many of them still wearing kilts, lay here and there. But no Unkerlanters were in sight now. “Get your bearings on this Volkach place,” Spinello told the crystallomancer. “Is it still holding?”

After squatting over his crystal, the mage nodded. “About ten miles, they tell me,” he said. “We can do it.”

“We have to do it,” Spinello said, and the other worn, beaten, dirty Algarvians nodded. Actually, there was one alternative. If they didn’t get to Volkach, they would die. For that matter, if the Unkerlanters had a tight perimeter around the town, they were in trouble.

But they stumbled into Volkach late that afternoon, though nervous pickets almost blazed them for enemy soldiers. They’d had to hide a couple of times while Unkerlanter columns went by. Swemmel’s men, though, were after bigger game than a few handfuls of holdouts, and kept right on hurrying east. Back when the war was new, Algarvian soldiers had stormed west the same way.

The officer in charge in the Unkerlanter town was a major. He commanded most of a regiment of soldiers, a few egg-tossers, and half a dozen behemoths-not enough to do anything with, but too much for the Unkerlanters to gobble down at a gulp. It was the biggest Algarvian force Spinello had found in one place in a couple of weeks. The major seemed relieved to see him there, and cared not at all that a Kaunian girl sat beside him.

“What will we do, sir?” the fellow asked, as if Spinello had any answers. “Whatcan we do? We can’t hold on here much longer-Volkach isn’t anything but a shield that lets our men farther east retreat. And everything in the north is ruined. Everything, I tell you!”

“I know.” After all Spinello had been through since the Unkerlanter blow fell, he thought he knew better than the major did, but what point to saying so? “Sooner or later, we’re bound to stop them.” He hoped he wasn’t whistling in the dark. He wanted a bath and food and clean clothes.

Before he could ask for any of them, the major said, “If only the islanders hadn’t invaded Jelgava. We’d get the reinforcements we need then.”

“Maybe,” Spinello said, and then, in spite of everything, he fell asleep where he sat.

Leino saluted Captain Brunho and spoke in classical Kaunian: “Sir, I request your leave to transfer fromHabakkuk to the forces now on the ground in Jelgava.”

Brunho studied him: a tall, somber Lagoan staring down at a stubby little Kuusaman. “May I ask why?” he said, also in the old language-the only tongue the two of them had in common.

“Of course, sir.” Leino had to stay polite. If he affronted the captain, he wouldn’t get what he wanted. “I want to have the chance to give the Algarvians what they deserve. We have largely won the war at sea, and my duties onHabakkuk these days have more to do with maintenance than anything else. This ship is not new anymore. It is proved. It no longer needs me. The land war does.”

“You want to do something you have not done before,” Brunho said.

Though Leino couldn’t tell whether the captain approved of his lust for novelty, he nodded. “Aye, sir.” And it was true. But it wasn’t the whole reason. The other side of the coin was that he wanted to get away from Xavega. Volunteering to go forward into battle would let him break clean without hurting her and without making her angry. However much he enjoyed his time in bed with her, he couldn’t spend all his time with her in bed, and he still found her annoying when they weren’t in bed. She also intimidated him enough that he didn’t want to come right out and tell her so.

Brunho stroked his chin. “You are not the first mage aboardHabakkuk to make this request.”

“You see, sir?” Leino said. “We have the chance to strike directly at Algarve now. I am not surprised I am not the only one who wants to take it.”

“If we lose too many mages fromHabakkuk, our ship here will abruptly cease to be a ship,” Captain Brunho said. “An iceberg in the warm waters off the coast of Jelgava would not last long.”