Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

“Took you long enough,” Pybba growled when Ealstan finally did get back. “I didn’t send you out to buy a month’s worth of groceries, you know.”

“You may have noticed the Algarvians were dropping eggs again,” Ealstan said. “I didn’t want to get killed on my way back, so I ducked into some shelter till they quit.”

Pybba waved that aside, as if of no account. Maybe, to him, it wasn’t. “Will the attack go through on time?” he demanded.

Ealstan nodded. “Aye. The fellow in charge of it told me to tell you he didn’t need any reminders.”

“That’s my job, reminding,” Pybba said. His job, as far as Ealstan could see, was doing everything nobody else was doing and half the jobs other people were supposed to be doing. Without him, the uprising probably never would have happened. With him, it was going better than Ealstan had thought it would. Was it going well enough? Ealstan had his doubts, and did his best to pretend he didn’t.

Leino had been in Balvi, or rather, through Balvi, once before, on holiday with Pekka. Then the capital of Jelgava had impressed him as a place where the blond locals did their best to separate outsiders from any cash they might have as quickly and enjoyably as possible.

Now… Now, with the Algarvian garrison that had occupied Balvi for four years fled to the more rugged interior of Jelgava, the city was one enormous carnival. Jelgavans had never had a reputation for revelry-if anyone did, it was their Algarvian occupiers-but they were doing their best to make one. Thumping Kaunian-style bands blared on every corner. People danced in the streets. Most of them seemed drunk. And anyone in Kuusaman or Lagoan uniform could hardly take a step without getting kissed or having a mug full of something cold and wet and potent thrust into his hand.

Even though Leino walked through Balvi hand in hand with Xavega, Jelgavan women kept coming up and throwing their arms around him. Jelgavan men kept doing the same thing with Xavega, who seemed to enjoy it much less. When one of the blond men let his hands wander more freely on her person than he might have, she slapped him and shouted curses in classical Kaunian. By his silly grin, he didn’t understand her and wouldn’t have cared if he had.

Looking around at the way most of the Kuusaman and Lagoan soldiers were responding to this welcome, Leino spoke in classical Kaunian, too: “They seem to be having a good time.”

“Of course they do-they are men,” Xavega answered tartly in the same tongue. “And, nine months from now, a good many half-Jelgavan babies will be born. I do not care to have any of them be mine.”

“All right,” Leino said, reflecting that any Jelgavan man who tried to drag Xavega into a dark corner-not that every couple was bothering to look for a dark corner, not in the midst of this joyous madness-would surely get his head broken for his trouble, or else have something worse happen to him.

And then he and Xavega rounded a corner, and he discovered that not all the madness was joyous. There hanging upside down from lampposts were the bodies of several Algarvians and the Jelgavans who had helped them run the kingdom under puppet king Mainardo. The crowd kept finding new horrid indignities to heap on the corpses; everyone cheered at each fresh mutilation. Leino was glad he didn’t speak Jelgavan: he couldn’t understand the suggestions that came from the onlookers.

He glanced toward Xavega. What they were seeing didn’t seem to bother her. She caught his eye and said, “They had it coming.”

“Maybe,” he answered, wondering if anyone could ever have… that coming to him. Or to her: he pointed. “That one, I think, used to be a woman.”

“I daresay she deserved it, too,” Xavega snapped. Leino shrugged; he didn’t know one way or the other. He wondered if the people who’d hung the woman up there with those men had known, or cared.

And then a fierce howl rose from the Jelgavans, for a wagon bearing a blond man with his hands tied in front of him came slowly up the street through the crowd. Leino needed no Jelgavan to understand the roars of hatred from the people. The captive in the wagon shouted something that sounded defiant. More roars answered him. The crowd surged toward the wagon. The fellow with his hands tied had guards, but they didn’t do much-didn’t, in fact, do anything-to protect him. The mob snatched him out of the wagon and beat him and kicked him as they dragged him to the nearest wall. Some of them had sticks. They blazed him. He fell. With another harsh, baying cry-half wolfish, half orgasmic-they swarmed over his body.

“When they find some more rope, he will go up on a lamppost, too,” Leino said. Classical Kaunian seemed too cold, too dispassionate, for such a discussion, but it remained the only tongue he had in common with Xavega.

“Good riddance to him,” she said. “These people knew him. They knew what he should have got, and they gave it to him.”

“I suppose so,” Leino said, and then, after a moment, “I wonder how many in that mob have things of their own to hide, and how many names that Jelgavan did not get to name because they killed him so fast.”

Xavega gave him a startled look. “I had not thought of that,” she said. But then she shrugged. “If they do not get the names from him, they will surely get them from someone else. A lot of these Jelgavans collaborated with the Algarvians.”

That was also likely-indeed, almost certain-to be true. “Some of the same ones will probably end up collaborating with us,” Leino said. The thought saddened him. He wondered why. He’d never labored under the delusion that war was an especially clean business.

A couple of blocks farther on, a fat Jelgavan rushed out of his tavern to press mugs of wine in Leino and Xavega’s hands. Quite impartially, he kissed them both on the cheek and shouted out something in which Leino heard a word that sounded a lot like the classical Kaunian term forfreedom. Then he bowed and went back into his place, only to emerge again a moment later to give wine to a couple of Kuusaman soldiers. By the way they staggered, they’d already had a good deal.

Xavega let out a scornful sniff. “If the Algarvians knew what things were like here, they could run us out of Balvi with about a regiment and a half of men.”

“Maybe.” Leino raised an eyebrow. “Would you have said the same thing if you had seen a couple of drunken Lagoan soldiers?”

“Our men have too much discipline for…” But Xavega’s voice trailed away. Not even she could bring out that claim with a straight face. Too much evidence to the contrary was not just visible but blatantly obvious. Leino laughed. She contented herself with giving him a sour look. That only made him laugh more.

More shouts of savage glee came from up a side street. They’ve caught another collaborator, Leino thought with something between joy and alarm. Watching a man, even an enemy, die as that one Jelgavan had done was nothing to face with equanimity.

But these collaborators-there were about a dozen of them-were not going to their end, only to their humiliation. They were women who must have had Algarvian lovers. They’d been stripped to the waist and had red paint smeared in their hair. People shouted curses at them and pelted them with eggs and overripe summer fruit, but no one aimed a stick their way.

“Little whores,” Xavega said.

“Most of them are taller than I am,” Leino said.

Xavega snorted again. “You know what I meant,” she said, and this time he had to nod.

They passed an empty square half overgrown with rank grass, not something Leino would have expected to see in the middle of a large, crowded city like Balvi. At the edge of the square sprouted a small brickwork of memorial tablets, all of them obviously new. Leino tried his classical Kaunian on a few of the locals: “Excuse me, but whom do these tablets remember?”