Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

He’d seen worse broadsheets. He liked the Unkerlanters only a little better than the Algarvians. Plenty of Forthwegians liked them less than they liked the redheads. Plegmund’s Brigade might get some new recruits. Of course, with the Unkerlanters already having overrun half of Forthweg, and with them rampaging forward in the south, too, how much good would a few new Forthwegian footsoldiers doKingMezentio ? Not much, or so Ealstan hoped.

An Algarvian colonel, a short, handsome fellow with the jaunty ferocity of a fighting cock, was giving orders to some of the men he led: “Come on, my dears. Don’t just stand there now that the fornicating Forthwegians have thrown in the sponge. The Unkerlanters are sitting on their arses just across the Twegen. Pretty soon they’ll decide they’re done with their holiday and get around to fighting us again. We’d better be ready for them, right?”

“Right, ColonelSpinello,” one of the redheads said, in the indulgent tones soldiers used when they were fond of an officer.

“We’d better dig in, then,” Spinello said. “We’d better do it deep and tight, as deep and tight as I was into that Kaunian girl of mine back when the war was new.” He sighed. His men laughed. Ealstan’s hands folded into fists. With a deliberate effort of will, he made them relax. Don’t give yourself away. The Algarvian colonel kissed his bunched fingertips. “That Vanai, she was a special piece, she was. I trained her myself.”

Ealstan stumbled and almost fell, though he hadn’t tripped on anything. Mezentio’s soldiers laughed, as if they’d heard this colonel’s stories a great many times before. They probably had. Ishouldn‘t have left my stick behind after all, Ealstan thought. Even without it, I’ll find a way to kill him. But that vow still left his feet unsteady beneath him, as if he were drunk or stunned. I amstunned. What do I do when I set home to Vanai? What do I say? What can /do? What canI say? Good questions, all of them. He had perhaps five minutes to find good answers.

Bembo’s belt pouch was nicely heavy with silver these days. As he strutted through the streets of downtown Eoforwic-or what was left of them-he was even acting as a constable again, not as a soldier any more. He should have been happy, or at least happier. He should have been, but he wasn’t.

Some of the constables had gone back to business as usual the minute the Forthwegian rebels finally surrendered and marched off to captives’ camps- those who hadn’t tried fitting back in among the ordinary people of Eoforwic, or the survivors thereof. Up in the tropical continent of Siaulia, there were supposed to be big birds that hid from danger by sticking their heads in the sand. Bembo’s complacent comrades reminded him of those big birds.

“They won’t look across the river,” he told Oraste-he had his old partner back, for Delminio had been badly wounded at the start of the fighting. “It’s going to happen, but they don’t want to think about it.”

“Shut up,” Oraste said. “I don’t want to think about it, either.”

“But you never want to think about anything.” Bembo was still no braver than he had to be, but before his spell as a soldier he would never have dared say anything like that to Oraste. “It’s different with those other buggers. They want to forget about the Unkerlanters, and how can we?”

Oraste looked west, toward the Twegen. “We’ll fight like mad bastards when they cross the river,” he said.

“Of course we will,” Bembo agreed. “But how much good will it do us?”

His partner’s shrug was not the usual Algarvian production. “How much good has fighting the stinking Unkerlanters done us so far?” Oraste asked bleakly. “Sometimes you go into something and you figure you won’t come out the other side, that’s all. You’re futtering stuck, that’s all.”

Bembo shivered, though the day was mild enough. He watched soldiers methodically preparing defenses against the attack they too knew was coming. One of the soldiers looked up from his pick-and-shovel work and called, “Hey, constable! When they come, you think they’ll pay any attention to which uniform you’re wearing?”

His laugh, Bembo thought, was singularly unpleasant. His question was singularly unpleasant, too, especially since the obvious answer wasno. Bembo stuck his nose in the air. That only made the soldier laugh harder.

Forthwegian civilians with hods hauled rubble from hither to yon under the sticks of Algarvian guards. “They might as well be Kaunians,” Bembo remarked.

With another one of those businesslike shrugs, Oraste answered, “Better they get their throats cut than I get mine.”

“Better nobody gets his throat cut,” Bembo said, but Oraste looked at him as if that were beyond the realm of possibility. Given the sorry state of the world these days, it probably was.

Oraste walked on for a few paces, then nudged him in the ribs. Oraste being who and what he was, the nudge sent Bembo staggering sideways and almost knocked him flat. Oraste grabbed him and held him up. “Come over here with me,” he said, steering Bembo away from the Forthwegian laborers.

“Why?” Bembo asked. “Do you want to murder me in privacy?”

“Only sometimes,” Oraste said patiently. “Not right now. Now I want to make a bet with you.”

“Ah?” That got Bembo’s notice, all right. “What do you have in mind?”

Before answering, Oraste looked around to make sure nobody but Bembo was in earshot. Then he said, “Name however much you want, and I’ll lay you two to one that none of those Forthwegians who gave up ever comes home again. I figure it serves ‘em right if we use ‘em just like Kaunians.”

“We said we’d treat ‘em like war captives,” Bembo reminded him.

“I know what we said,” his partner answered. “And if you think we’ll really do it, put your money where your mouth is.”

Bembo thought it over. Oraste suggestively jingled his belt pouch. But Bembo hesitated only a couple of seconds before shaking his head. “Find another sucker, Oraste. I won’t touch that one. I think you’re too likely to be right.”

Oraste snapped his fingers. “There, you see? You’re not as dumb as you look, and all this time I thought you were.”

“Funny,” Bembo said. “Ha, ha. Very funny.” He paused. “What do you want to bet that the Unkerlanters are getting rid of all the Forthwegians they don’t like, too?”

“I’ll bet on it, if you want,” Oraste said. “Will you bet against it?”

“Me? Are you crazy?” Bembo shook his head again, even more decisively this time. “That’s not a sucker bet. That’s an idiot bet.”

“Never can tell,” Oraste said. “Plenty of idiots running around loose in Algarve. A lot of em wear fancier uniforms than we ever will.”

“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Bembo agreed. “The way things are these days, I don’t care if I ever get promoted. All I want to do is get back to Tricarico in one piece.”

“Why not wish for the moon while you’re at it?” Oraste waved toward the west. “You suppose the Unkerlanters want any of us to get home?” He seemed to have forgotten saying he didn’t want to think about Swemmel’s men.

Instead of answering, Bembo just sighed. He didn’t suppose anything of the sort. He wished he did. He said, “I never wanted to meet those Unkerlanter whoresons up close like this.”

“You haven’t met ‘em up close yet-they’re still on the other side of the Twegen,” Oraste said. “Well, most of them are, anyway. When they’re close enough to yell, ‘Swemmel!’ and blaze at you, that’s up close. By all the stories, they do worse than that if they catch you, too.”

Bembo’s shiver was no littlefrisson of horror, such as he might have known while hearing a scary story at an evening’s entertainment with plenty of food and good northern wine around. It was too large, too robust, for that. And it had nothing to do with the weather. It was plain, honest fear. If the Unkerlanters caught you, bad things happened. That, to Algarvians in the west, was an obvious truth.