Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

And so… He was, in his own way, an honest man. There were live ashes in the hearth. He got a little fire going and tossed the note into it. The paper charred, blackened, and burst into flames. He ate his bread and oil, and washed them down with not one mug of wine but two.

When he walked outside, the sentry in front of the house stiffened to attention. Spinello’s resolution wavered a little, perhaps under the influence of wine. “Have you seen Jadwigai?” he asked.

“Your wench? No, sir. I would’ve remembered.” The Algarvian soldier’s eyes lit up, as any man’s would when he thought of Jadwigai. “I thought she was in there with you.”You lucky whoreson. He didn’t need to say it. Again, Spinello could read it in his eyes.

“No.” Spinello let it go at that. Jadwigai would know when sentries went off duty and when they came on. If she’d timed her disappearance to just before the last fellow went off, he wouldn’t wonder that she hadn’t returned and his replacement wouldn’t know she was gone. The only risk would have been waking Spinello when she got out of bed. And if she had wakened him, she would have just had to put up with him one more day before trying again.

“Is something wrong, sir?” Like any Algarvian, the sentry had a nose for scandal.

“No, not a thing.” Spinello lied without hesitation. “She went off somewhere without telling me, that’s all.”

“That’s liable not to be healthy, the way things are around here these days,” the sentry remarked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Spinello said dryly. The sentry chuckled. Spinello went on, “Next to Unkerlant, this is a fornicating walk in the fornicating park.” The sentry laughed again. He wore the ribbon for a frozen-meat medal, the decoration King Mezentio had given out by the tens of thousands to the men who’d come through the first winter’s fighting in Unkerlant. Spinello had one, too.

Smoke rose from Eoforwic, where the Forthwegians still battled desperately to drive back the Algarvian armies. The Unkerlanters across the Twegen still stayed quiet, though Spinello could see distant smoke in the south, where Swemmel’s men had forced a bridgehead over the river. They weren’t trying to break out of it yet, but the Algarvians hadn’t been able to crush it, either. When Spinello let himself think about that, he worried.

But he had plenty of other things to worry about, too. The sentry spelled out one of them: “Are we going back into Eoforwic today, sir? I wouldn’t mind a holiday, and that’s a fact.”

With a chuckle, Spinello said, “I wouldn’t, either, old man. Neither would Algarve, come to that. When the Forthwegians and Unkerlanters and islanders decide to give us one, though-that’s another question. So aye, we’ll be going back into town.”

“I thought you were going to tell me that.” The corners of the sentry’s mouth turned down; like so many Algarvians, he wore his heart on his sleeve. “I’d just as soon sit this one out, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I’m going in,” Spinello said. “I could use the company.” He and the sentry grinned at each other. They were both going in, and they both knew it. They both hoped they would both come out again when the day was done.

Spinello found himself in charge of a force he would have laughed at if he were throwing it against the Unkerlanters. A lot of the soldiers he led had sat out most of the war on occupation duty in Valmiera. They were both older and fatter than they might have been. Some of them held their sticks as if not quite sure what to do with them. But they went forward when he told them to go, and he didn’t suppose he could ask for more than that.

He was none too thrilled about going forward himself. He’d fought block by block, house by house, in Sulingen till he took a beam through the chest. He’d been lucky, in an odd, painful way: that was early enough in the fight there to let a dragon take him out of the city. Had he stayed unhurt till the end, he wouldn’t have come out of Sulingen alive.

Eoforwic hadn’t been knocked about quite so badly as Sulingen, not yet. Most blocks of flats still stood, though window frames gaped bare like the eye sockets of countless skulls. Spinello wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t rather have seen rubble. Anyone could be watching from those upper stories. They made perfect sniper’s nests.

He couldn’t read the Forthwegian warning whitewashed on walls here and there, but he knew about what it said: anyone blazes from a building, the building gets wrecked, and we won’t bother clearing out the people who live there first. That kind of warning hadn’t stopped the sniping, but had slowed it down. Ordinary Forthwegians didn’t want to be driven from their homes, or killed in them, any more than anyone else did.

He wondered how many people in those flats weren’t Forthwegians at all, but sorcerously disguised Kaunians. He wondered if Jadwigai had been foolish enough to go into the city, or if she’d had the sense to flee out into the countryside where she was less likely to get killed.

And then he remembered that that constable back in Gromheort had told him Vanai was supposed to have come to Eoforwic. He laughed to himself. He wouldn’t recognize her if he saw her-he was sure of that. If she looked like a Kaunian, his countrymen would long since have seized her. And if she didn’t, he wouldn’t know her from any other dumpy Forthwegian girl.

Even a dumpy Forthwegian girl is better than a cold, empty bed, he thought. But then girls, Forthwegian or Kaunian, dumpy or elegantly lean, slipped out of his mind. Ahead lay enough rubble to satisfy even the most ambitiously destructive wrecker of all time.

“Fan out, men,” he called. “There’ll be rebels in there, sure as we’re all missing foreskins.” He watched the troopers take cover and slowly shook his head. No, most of them hadn’t spent the past three years honing themselves against the Unkerlanters. Even against the Forthwegians, more would fall than might be true with better soldiers.

As he ducked behind a tumbledown wall himself, a beam charred wood a couple of feet above his head. Part of a broadsheet still clung to the brickwork: a bearded Forthwegian strangling a dragon painted in Algarvian colors. Spinello snorted. Nothing subtle there. Nothing very interesting, either. Even the Unkerlanters turned out better broadsheets.

Eggs started bursting on the rubble. Now Spinello nodded. Unlike foot-soldiers, the men who handled egg-tossers had to know what they were doing. And the Unkerlanters, as they had for some weeks, just kept sitting quietly on the far side of the Twegen River. Spinello thought that was funny. He suspected the Forthwegians weren’t laughing.

“Forward!” he called, and blew his shiny new officer’s whistle. He’d lost the old one in an Unkerlanter swamp.

Forward his men went. They weren’t so young or so dashing as the soldiers he’d led in Unkerlant, but they cleared the surviving Forthwegians from the wreckage and lost only a couple of men doing it. Crouched in amongst the reconquered rubble, Spinello felt proud of them till a question crossed his mind: now that we’ve got it, what the demon good is it?

He shrugged a fancy Algarvian shrug. If soldiers spent all their time worrying about things like that, how would they fight their wars?

Talsu peered down at the road leading toward Skrunda from behind a rock most of the way up a low hill. Another irregular shared the cover of the boulder with him. “By the powers above, it’s good to haveKingDonalitu back in Jelgava, back in Balvi, again,” the other fellow said.

“It’s good to have the Algarvians getting kicked out of Jelgava.” Talsu didn’t quite agree with his comrade, but didn’t want to cause a quarrel, either.