Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

Despite the long stick slung on his own back, Delminio had no trouble shrugging an elaborate Algarvian shrug. “No, it probably wouldn’t make much difference to Swemmel’s bastards, if they ever get here,” he allowed.

“Powers above grant that they don’t,” Bembo said. “Powers above grant that the army stops ‘em somewhere, anywhere.” He’d never imagined sounding plaintive and worried about the Algarvian army, but that was how he felt.

Delminio went on as if he hadn’t spoken, repeating, “It won’t matter much to the Unkerlanters, no. But suppose these Forthwegian whoresons here in town start feeling frisky. Wouldn’t you rather be toting something that’ll knock ‘em over from more than a hundred feet away?”

“Urk,” Bembo said, and meant it most sincerely. “D’youthink it’ll come to that?”

“Who knows?” Delminio shrugged again. “But I’ll tell you this: there’s an awful lot of Forthwegians walking around with their peckers up because they know we’re hurting. Or do you think I’m wrong?”

He sounded as if he hoped Bembo would tell him he was just imagining things. Bembo wished he could do that, but he couldn’t. Before, the Forthwegians on the streets had scrambled out of the way when they saw constables coming. They might not have loved them (Who ever loves a constable? Bembo wondered, not wasting a chance for self-pity), but they feared them, which would do.

Now… If they weren’t laughing behind the constables’ backs, Bembo would have been astonished. Some of them had the nerve to laugh in the constables’ faces. Bembo wouldn’t have minded teaching them a lesson, but he didn’t. Orders were not to do anything that might touch off a riot. The Algarvians had enough to worry about in Forthweg these days without adding the Forthwegians to the mix.

Delminio’s grunt might have meant he thought Bembo’s silence proved his point. Since Bembo thought the same thing, he didn’t push his partner. The stinking Unkerlanters were getting close to the Twegen River, the stream that flowed north to the sea right past the western edge of Eoforwic.

“Do they think they’ll have a happy time if Swemmel’s whoresons take this place away from us?” Bembo asked no one in particular. “Not likely.”

“No, not likely at all,” Delminio agreed. “Other question is, do they care? And that’s not likely, either. Most of’em don’t think about Unkerlanters one way or the other, except that Swemmel’s men are giving us a hard time. They think King Penda will come back if they throw us out, and they’ll all be happy again.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Bembo said. “Wasn’t Swemmel about ready to boil somebody alive because whoever it was wouldn’t hand Penda over to him?”

“Tsavellas of Yanina had him,” Delminio said.

Bembo snapped his fingers. “That’s right. Thanks. I’d forgotten who it was. When I was back in Tricarico, reading about all this stuff in the west in the news sheets, it didn’t seem to matter so much.”

“Only goes to show, you can’t tell ahead of time,” Delminio said, and Bembo nodded. He hadn’t thought much about Forthweg at all, not in the days before the war started. He’d never imagined he would have the bad luck to get stuck in this miserable kingdom for years.

A Forthwegian with a gray-streaked black beard reaching halfway down his chest came out of his shop and shouted at the constables in bad Algarvian: “When you catch villains who theft from me? How I make living, they theft my trunks?”

“Well, however you make a living, it won’t be as an elephant,” Bembo answered. Delminio snickered.

The shopkeeper, who sold luggage, didn’t speak Algarvian well enough to get the joke. “Elephant? What you talk about, elephant?” he said. “Powers below eat elephant. Go catch thefts. What you good for? All you Algarvians, you nothing but crazy peoples.”

Bembo swept off his plumed hat and bowed, as if at a compliment. “Thank you,” he said. Delminio snickered again. The shopkeeper said something in sonorous, guttural Forthwegian. Whatever it was, Bembo didn’t think it was praise. The fellow turned around and stumped back into his shop.

“If the bugger who stole from him starts selling those trunks, maybe we’ll nab him,” Delminio said. “If he doesn’t, how can we get our hands on him?”

“And why should we care?” Bembo added. “You think I want to work hard for somebody who calls me names? If he’d dropped a little silver, now, that’d be a different story.”

“Sure enough,” Delminio agreed. “Far as I’m concerned, the powers below are welcome to all these Forthwegians. I wouldn’t shed a tear if we started shipping them west along with the blonds.”

“Trouble with that is, it’d really spark off an uprising,” Bembo said.

After pondering for a couple of paces, Delminio nodded. “Aye, you’re probably right.” He took another step. “Of course, the uprising’s liable to come anyway. If it does, these buggers ought to be fair game, you ask me.”

“You talk like Oraste,” Bembo said.

“Who?” Delminio waggled a finger. “Oh, your old partner. He seems like a pretty good man to have at your back.”

“He is.” Bembo let it rest there. Along with being a good man to have at one’s back, Oraste believed the way to settle problems was to settle the people who made them-by choice, permanently.

The shift was long and slow and dull. Another argument with a Forthwegian right at the end made it even longer. Delminio was furious, and didn’t even try to hide it. He was all for arresting the local, who was unhappy because somebody’d flung a rock through a window he’d just replaced. Bembo didn’t want to arrest him. He wanted him to shut up and go away. Then his partner and he could go back to the barracks and relax.

“If we drop on him, we have to drag him over to the gaol and fill out all the cursed forms,” he said. “That always takes hours, and we’re already late getting back, and I’m hungry.” He patted his belly. To him, that argument, like the belly in question, carried considerable weight.

In the end, it carried weight for Delminio, too. He contented himself with taking hold of his stick and starting to swing it toward the Forthwegian. That stopped the argument in the middle of the ley line: the Forthwegian turned pale and fled. “We ought to shiphim west,” Delminio said. “Nobody’d miss him a bit.”

“Powers below eat him,” Bembo said. “Let’s go home and see if there’s anything left in the refectory. Those other greedy buggers better not eat everything in sight.” He was almost hungry enough to hurry back to the barracks to make up for lost time-almost, but not quite.

He and Delminio were still three or four blocks away, and squabbling good-naturedly over what the evening’s entree would be, when a great roar ahead staggered them both. The ground shook under Bembo’s feet. Windows shattered without rocks pitched through them.

Bembo listened for the bells that warned of Unkerlanter dragons, but didn’t hear them. He had trouble hearing much of anything. “They somehow snuck one through, the bastards,” he shouted, and even had trouble hearing his own voice.

Delminio’s words came to Bembo as if from very far away: “Was that the barracks?” Bembo’s eyes opened wide. He hadn’t thought of that. He and Delminio started to run.

When they rounded the last corner, Bembo skidded to a stop. Broken glass and pebbles skritched under his boots. The whole front of the barracks was gone. Not far from him, a big chunk of stone had come down on someone-a Forthwegian, by his tunic. The result wasn’t pretty.

“This must have been an enormous egg.” Delminio had to shout it two or three times before Bembo’s battered ears caught it.