Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

This one landed on the muddy beach not a hundred yards in front of Istvan’s trench. Its shrieks tore at his ears. Then, all at once, they stopped. Cautiously-a few eggs were still bursting-he stuck up his head to see what had happened. The dragon lay dead. The Kuusaman dragonflier was holding the stick he took into the air with him. He must have put a beam through the dragon’s eye at close range.

Seeing Istvan, he threw the stick down on the beach and held his hands high. “I-to surrender!” he shouted in horrible Gyongyosian.

Istvan hadn’t expected to capture a dragonflier, but he wouldn’t complain. “Come on, get in this trench before your own people drop an egg on you,” he called.

“I-to thank,” the dragonflier said, and jumped down and ran over to Istvan. “You-no-to kill?” he asked anxiously as he slid into the trench.

In his boots, Istvan would have sounded anxious, too. But the Gyongyosian sergeant shook his head. “No. You Kuusamans, you’ve got captives from my kingdom, too. Once you start killing captives, where do you stop?”

Istvan had to repeat himself with simpler words to get the enemy dragonflier to follow that, but the fellow finally nodded. “Good,” he said. “I- yours-to be.” For a little while, Istvan wondered what was so good about being a captive, but only for a little while. The Kuusaman had come through the war alive. Istvan wondered if he would be able to say the same.

Skrunda wasn’t a big city. Jelgava held dozens, probably hundreds, of towns like it. As in so many of those towns, the people of Skrunda liked to think of it as bigger than it really was. News-sheet vendors hocked their wares as zealously as they did in Balvi, the capital, down in the southeast.

“Habakkuk explained!” one of them shouted, waving a sheet with great abandon. “Floating home of air pirates!”

Talsu couldn’t remember the last time he’d bought a news sheet. They’d been full of lies ever since the Algarvians overran his kingdom. But he’d seen graffiti praising Habakkuk all over Skrunda. He’d also seen that the redheads didn’t love them: they gathered work crews together to wash them off or paint over them. And so he dug into a trouser pocket and came up with a couple of coppers for the news-sheet vendor.

“Here you go, pal,” the fellow said, and handed him the sheet he’d been waving.

“Thanks,” Talsu answered. He kept his nose in the news sheet all the way back to the tailor’s shop where he worked with his father.

That almost got him into trouble, for he noticed a couple of Algarvian constables just in time to get out of their way. He scowled after they swaggered past. Jelgava, like Valmiera to the south, was a Kaunian kingdom. Redheads in a land of blonds, kilts in a land of trousers, seemed shockingly out of place even though King Donalitu had fled to Lagoas and exile more than three years before, even though King Mezentio of Algarve had promptly named his younger brother Mainardo as King of Jelgava in Donalitu’s place.

A whitewashed patch on a fence probably told where a graffito shouting HABAKKUK! had been painted. Talsu walked past it with a thoughtful grunt. He also nearly walked past the tailor’s shop, and the rooms above it where he and his family lived.

His father was working on a tunic of Algarvian military cut in a fabric too heavy for Jelgava’s weather when Talsu walked in. Traku frowned to see the news sheet-Talsu’s father, in truth, spent a good deal of time frowning. “What sort of nonsense are the redheads spouting today?” he asked. He might make uniforms for the occupiers-especially, as now, for Algarvians sent west to fight in freezing Unkerlant-but he didn’t love them.

Neither did Talsu. He’d fought them before his kingdom collapsed, and he’d tried to fight them here in Skrunda, too. He’d spent some months in a Jelgavan dungeon from trusting the wrong people then. No, he had no reason to love Algarvians.

He set the news sheet on the counter. “I bought the miserable thing because it said it would tell me what Habakkuk was.”

“Ah.” That interested Traku, too. He reached for the news sheet. “And does it?”

“Itsays Habakkuk is an iceberg, or a swarm of icebergs, fixed up with sorcery so they’ll sail the ley lines like regular ships and carry a whole great load of dragons while they’re doing it,” Talsu answered.

Traku skimmed through the article. “Aye, that’s what itsays, all right,” he remarked when he was through. “The next question is, do you believe it?”

“I don’t know,” Talsu answered. “We’ve had dragons from Kuusamo or Lagoas or wherever they’re from drop more eggs on Skrunda lately than they did in the whole war up till now, so they’ve gotsomething new, I expect.”

“Maybe.” Traku nodded. “I’ll give you that much, anyhow. But giant chunks of ice with dragons on top of them? I doubt it.” He wadded up the news sheet and flung it in the trash can. “My guess is, the redheads came up with this fancy nonsense because they can’t build real ships as fast as Lagoas and Kuusamo can, and they’re making all the news sheets print it to distract people.”

“You’re probably right,” Talsu agreed. He’d got good at searching out the truth buried in Algarvian lies. This story sounded more like a lie than anything he could easily swallow. He went on: “I saw one other thing in the news sheet-or rather, I didn’t see it.”

“What’s that?” his father asked.

“No more boasting about how the redheads were going to chase the Unkerlanters right out of that town down in the south-Herborn, that’s the name of the place,” Talsu said. “When the Algarvians stop bragging about something, it’s because they haven’t done it or they can’t do it.”

Traku’s opinion of that needed only one word: “Good.”

Talsu nodded. He pointed to the tunic his father was working on. “Do you need any help with that?”

“No, thanks,” Traku answered. “I’ve done just about all the handwork it needs.” He showed the stitches he’d applied himself. “After that, it’s just a matter of laying out the rest of the thread and putting on the finishing touches. You can do some more work on that kilt over there, if you feel like you’ve just got to get some work in this very minute.”

“All right, I’ll do that, then.” Talsu picked up the kilt, which at the moment was only a piece cut out from a bolt of heavy woolen fabric. As he did so, he remarked, “I never thought I’d have to worry about making one of these, not back before the war started I didn’t.”

“Who would have, in a Kaunian kingdom?” Traku said. “We wear trousers, the way decent people are supposed to.” He paused to set thread along a seam he hadn’t sewn. “I do hear that, down in Balvi, there were women wearing kilts even before the war, so they could show off their legs. Trollops, that’s what I call ‘em.”

“Oh, aye, trollops is right,” Talsu said, not without a certain interest. He went on. “You see a few Jelgavan women-even a few Jelgavan men-in Skrunda wearing kilts nowadays. But they just want to lick the Algarvians’ boots.”

“They want to lick ‘em somewhere north of the boots,” Traku said with a coarse laugh.

Talsu laughed, too, deliciously scandalized. Hearing the racket from downstairs, his sister Ausra called, “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” Talsu and Traku said in the same breath. The way they echoed each other set them both laughing again, harder than ever.

“What’s so funny?” That wasn’t Talsu’s sister: it was his mother. And she came down into the tailor’s shop to get an answer for her question.

“Nothing, Laitsina,” Traku repeated, this time in more placating tones.

Laitsina looked from her husband to Talsu and back again. “Men,” she said, a distinct sniff in her voice. “You sit around here telling each other filthy stories, and then you expect me to pretend I don’t know you’re doing it. You don’t ask for much, do you?” With another sniff, she went back up the stairs.