Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

Fear ran through him in the wake of that thought. Replacement or no replacement, he hurried off toward the camp. By the time he got there, everything was over. If it were an earthquake, it had struck the irregulars alone. Their fires were thrown higgledy-piggledy; a couple of small shrubs burned close by.

There were rents in the ground from which smoke still rose. At first, when Talsu smelled burnt meat, he thought the odor was left over from cooking earlier in the evening. Then he realized what it was really coming from, and his stomach did a slow lurch. That was burnt meat, all right, but some of the burnt meat still shrieked and begged to die.

That could have been me, he thought numbly. If I hadn‘t been out, standing sentry, that could have been me.

“Powers below eat the Algarvians!” someone not far away shouted. “Powers above curse their sorcery!”

Talsu’s stomach lurched again. He knew what kind of sorcery Mezentio’s men used. People had been whispering about it for a couple of years, maybe longer. But… “How are they getting Kaunians from Forthweg into Jelgava?” he said, as much to himself as to anyone else. “They have trouble moving their own soldiers around this kingdom.”

Bitter laughter answered him. “Who says it has to be Kaunians from Forthweg? If they need bodies bad enough, they can start pulling people out of Skrunda or any other town and bloody well killing them.”

That hadn’t occurred to Talsu. Take people out of his home town, line them up, and kill them to tap their life energy? Take, say, his wife, his father, his mother, his sister?

“No,” he said, again largely to himself.

“Why not?” the other surviving irregular said. “They’re Algarvians. They hate all Kaunic peoples as much as we hate them. If they can’t get Kaunians from Forthweg here, you think they won’t grab Jelgavans?”

However much Talsu wished he thought that, he didn’t, not down where it mattered. “We might not have a kingdom left by the time they’re through with us,” he exclaimed.

“That’s why we’ve got to keep fighting the bastards,” the other irregular said. “Whatever they do to us, may it come back on their heads ten times over.”

“A hundred times over,” Talsu said. He couldn’t get the picture of Algarvians seizing his family out of his mind no matter how hard he tried, and he tried as he’d never tried before in all his days.

Vanai had known fear a good many times in the course of theDerlavaianWar. Anyone in Forthweg who hadn’t known fear surely had something wrong with him. This, though, this was terror. And terror, she discovered, was a very different beast from mere fear.

“I saw him,” she told Saxburh in classical Kaunian. She held out her hand in the posture of one taking an oath. “By the powers above, Idid see him.”

Her daughter thought it was funny, and laughed the pure, clean laugh of a happy baby. To Vanai, it was no laughing matter. She knew Spinello’s stride when she saw it, even if the Algarvian officer had acquired a slight limp since going off to fight in Unkerlant. And if that wasn’t he leading soldiers up the street past her block of flats, her eyes were useless.

He wouldn’t recognize her, not when she looked like a Forthwegian these days. Thelberge, she thought, shivering. I can be Thelberge and he’ll never know me. Of course, he might not care, either. He might blaze her any which way. After all, the rebels in Eoforwic were for the most part Forthwegians.

He might blaze me, but he’ll never bed me again, she thought fiercely. Never, by the powers above!.

Logically, bedding her might be-was almost bound to be-the last thing Spinello had in mind at the moment. Logic had nothing to do with anything, though, when she remembered the Algarvian coming again and again to her grandfather’s house in Oyngestun and taking her to bed instead of taking Brivibas into a labor gang. He’d known she despised him. He hadn’t cared-or maybe he had, for sometimes she thought her resentment only excited him more.

Iwant to kill him, she thought. Iwant to kill him with my own hands. Maybe then I’ll feel clean again. There were a good many stories from before the days when the First Kaunian Kingdom grew into the Kaunian Empire about ravished women avenging themselves on the men who’d abused them. Brivibas had taught her those tales with scorn in his voice: they were legends, maybe even myths, and not sober history. But teach them to her he had; legends or not, they were part of the underpinnings of Kaunianity.

What made things harder was that she couldn’t talk to Ealstan about this. He knew nothing of Spinello, and Vanai wanted to keep it that way. And so, whenever he did manage to come home, filthy and exhausted, she forced the Algarvian to the back of her mind. But she couldn’t force him out of it, any more than she could have pretended a bad tooth didn’t really ache.

Once, after Ealstan kissed her good-bye and patted her on the backside and went out to try to cause the redheads more trouble, a really horrible thought ran through her mind: What if he and Spinello come up against each other? Spinello has all the might of Algarve behind him. What if he…?

Vanai violently shook her head. Shewouldn ‘t think of that-so she told herself. And so, of course, the thought kept coming back again and again, each time more dreadful than the one before. She cursed as foully as she knew how. If only I hadn‘t picked the wrong time to look out the window!

But she had to go into the kitchen, and when she went into the kitchen she couldn’t very well help looking out the window. Seeing Algarvian soldiers prowling through this part of Eoforwic would have been enough of a jolt even without recognizing Spinello. The Forthwegian rebels had securely held it only days before. Little by little, the redheads were pounding the uprising to bits.

Across the Twegen River, the Unkerlanters sat and waited. Vanai had never thought much about them one way or the other. Now she hated them. Had they come to the Forthwegians’ aid, Eoforwic wouldn’t have an Algarvian left in it. Ealstan was surely right-Swemmel’s men were letting the redheads solve their Forthwegian problem for them.

When Vanai went into the kitchen again, she found she had problems of her own: problems in the larder. Last time she’d ventured out, she’d got as much food as she could carry back. Now she would have to do it again.

She went over to the cradle and looked down at Saxburh. The baby smiled to see her, smiled and laughed. Vanai smiled, too, but she had to work at it. She didn’t like the idea of taking Saxburh out with her when she sallied forth to get food, but she liked leaving her behind even less. Saxburh might cry every minute till she got back. Or, worse, she might not be able to come back. Taking the baby out was dangerous, but so was leaving her behind. There were no safe places, no safe choices, in Eoforwic these days.

Vanai scooped the baby out of the cradle. “Come along, you little nuisance,” she said. Saxburh thought that was very funny. Vanai, unfortunately, didn’t. If she had to carry Saxburh, that was so much less food she could bring back. Before setting out, she renewed the masking spell on herself and cast it on her daughter. On Saxburh, she could see it take effect; the baby looked plumper and a little darker. On her ventures out of the house, Vanai had seen a handful of Kaunians bold enough to look like themselves. She admired their courage without wanting to imitate it.

Carrying Saxburh downstairs was easy. Carrying her and a lot of groceries back up to the flat would be a lot more work. I ’llworry about that once I get the food, Vanai thought. She’d managed before. She expected she would be able to do it again.

She paused inside the lobby near the door to make sure everything was quiet before venturing out. Algarvian soldiers wouldn’t know her for a Kaunian now, but they or their Forthwegian counterparts were liable to blaze anyone who appeared unexpectedly.