Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

Every which way also included behind Garivald. He’d learned as an irregular to know where he would retreat before he had to fall back. He’d had that lesson brutally reinforced in Swemmel’s regular army, too. A soldier who didn’t think ahead wouldn’t get many chances to think at all.

“Mezentio!” Aye, the redheads still knew their business. As soon as the Unkerlanters started blazing at them, some of them dove for cover and blazed back. Others scrambled forward. Then they flopped down in turn, while the troopers in back of them ran past them and toward the Unkerlanter front line.

“Get up there, curse it!” Garivald yelled at a soldier too deep in his hole to fight. “You’ve got a better chance if you blaze at them, too.”

The soldier couldn’t have been older than sixteen. He’d had his father yelling at him back in his home village, not an underofficer with all the savage weight ofKingSwemmel ’s army behind him. His father, losing his temper, might beat him. A corporal, losing his temper, could do or cause to be done far worse than that. Garivald didn’t think he could ever make himself give a man over to the inspectors for sacrifice, but the youngster didn’t need to know that.

And his curses did what they were supposed to do: they got the kid up and fighting. He might want to blaze Garivald along with or instead of the Algarvians, but he was blazing at them. Garivald blazed at one of them, too. The fellow kept running, so he must have missed. He cursed again, this time at himself.

He looked back over his shoulder. If the redheads kept coming, he’d have to scurry back toward that next hiding place. He hoped no one else had marked it-it wouldn’t hide a pair of men.

Just as he was about to jump out of his hole and fall back, what seemed like all the eggs in the world descended on the Algarvians. The Unkerlanters had moved a lot of egg-tossers into the bridgehead. A crystallomancer must have reached the men who served them, and the efficient way they responded would have warmedKingSwemmel ’s heart-assuming anything could.

Whatever such efficiency would have done to Swemmel’s heart, it wreaked havoc on the Algarvians. Their onslaught petered out, smashed under a blizzard of bursts of sorcerous energy. The ground shook under Garivald’s feet-not as it would have when one side or the other started sacrificing, but simply because so many eggs were coming down close to him.

“Take that, you whoresons!”LieutenantAndelot screamed at the redheads. He was only a youngster himself. This probably seemed like a great lark to him.

“We ought to go after the stinking buggers,” somebody said.

But, youngster or not, Andelot knew how to follow orders. “No,” he said. “For the time being, we’re just supposed to hold this bridgehead.”

“When do we break out, sir?” the soldier asked.

“When the generals tell us to,” Andelot answered. Garivald found himself nodding. Sure enough, that was how things worked.

Once driven off, the Algarvians didn’t resume their attack. From what the handful of surviving old-timers Garivald had talked with said, that was a change from the earlier days of the war. Mezentio’s men didn’t have the reserves of strength they’d once enjoyed. As far as he was concerned, they were quite bad enough as they were.

Andelot came over to him. “What’s up, sir?” he asked cautiously. He didn’t like drawing official attention to himself.

“Don’t worry, Fariulf-you’re not in trouble,” Andelot said, which did nothing to keep Garivald from worrying. “I just wanted to say you did a good job of handling that fellow who wasn’t blazing at the redheads.”

“Oh,” Garivald said. “Thank you, sir.”

“I think you’ve got the makings of a good soldier-a fine soldier, even,” Andelot said. “Would you like to move up in the army? You might be an officer by the time the war ends. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”

Garivald wanted to become an officer about as much as he wanted an extra head. “Sir, I don’t have my letters,” he said, thinking that would dispose of that.

“I’ll teach you, if you like,” Andelot offered.

“Would you?” Garivald stared. “Nobody ever said anything like that to me before, sir. My village didn’t even have a school. The firstman there could read, and maybe a few other people, but not that many. I’d give a lot, sir, to be able to read and write.” /could write down my songs. I could make them better. I could make them last forever.

“It would be my pleasure,” Andelot said. “The more men who do know how to read and write, the more efficient a kingdom Unkerlant becomes. Wouldn’t you say that’s so, Corporal?”

“Aye, sir,” Garivald replied. New thoughts crowded in on the heels of his first excitement. If I do write my songs down, I have to be careful. If the inspectors find them, they’ll know who I really am. And if they know who I really am, I’m in a lot of trouble.

He didn’t show what he was thinking. Showing your thoughts could and often did prove deadly dangerous in Unkerlant. He did his best to look interested and attentive when Andelot pulled a scrap of paper, a pen, and a bottle of ink from his belt pouch. He wrote something on the paper in big letters. “Here’s your name-Fariulf.”

“Fariulf,” Garivald repeated dutifully, wondering what his real name looked like. He didn’t ask. If he ever got the hang of this writing business, he’d figure it out for himself.

“That’s right.” Andelot smiled and nodded. “It’s not hard, really-all the characters always have the same sound, so you just have to remember which sound each character makes. See? You have an ‘f sound at each end of your name.”

“Those both say ‘f?” Garivald asked. Andelot nodded. Garivald scratched his head. “Why don’t they look the same, then?”

“Ah,”LieutenantAndelot said. “You usethis form-the royal form, people call it-for the first one because it’s the first letter of a name. You’d do the same thing if it were the first letter of a sentence. The rest of the time, you use small letters.”

“Why?” Garivald asked.

Andelot started to answer, then stopped, chuckled, and shrugged. He looked very young in that moment. “I don’t know why, Corporal. It’s just how we do things. It’s how we’ve always done them, so far as I know.”

“Oh.” Garivald shrugged, too. Rules didn’t have to make sense to be rules. Anyone who’d lived underKingSwemmel understood that perfectly well. “All right, you make the one kind of mark for-what did you say, sir?”

“For the first letter of a name or the first letter of a sentence,” Andelot repeated patiently.

“Thanks. I’ll remember now.” And Garivald thought he would. Not least because he couldn’t read or write, he had a very good memory.

To his surprise, LieutenantAndelot thrust the pen at him. He recoiled from it, almost as if it were a knife. “Here. Take it,” Andelot said. “Write your own name. Go ahead-you can do it. Just copy what I did.”

When Garivald held the pen as if it were a knife, Andelot showed him a better way. Brow furrowed in concentration, he made marks on the paper, doing his best to imitate what the officer had written. “There,” he said at last. “Does that say… Fariulf?” He nearly made the mistake of using his real name. He might get away with that mistake once. On the other hand, he might not.

“Aye, it does.” Andelot beamed at him, so he must have done it right. The officer started to write again, then stopped and fumbled in his belt pouch till he found a bigger leaf of paper. He wrote a lot of characters on it. “These are the royal form and the regular form of all the letters, in the right order. Do you know the children’s rhyme that helps you remember the order and the way each letter sounds?”