Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

To his surprise, though, the guards marched his comrades and him only as far as what proved to be a ley-line caravan depot. “In! To go in!” the Kuusamans commanded. Into the caravan cars went the Gyongyosians.

Kunkept shaking his head, as he had at the harbor. “This is plainly the extension of the ley line the ship that brought us from Becsehely used,” he said, though no such thing was plain to Istvan. “The Kuusamans use every bit of sorcerous energy they can. We don’t. No wonder the war isn’t going the way we wish it would.”

“Silence, there,”CaptainFrigyes said sharply. “I’ll hear no talk of defeatism. Have you got that, Corporal?”

“Aye, Captain,”Kun answered, the only thing he could say-out loud, at any rate. To Istvan, he murmured, “No defeatism, is it? How does he think we got here? Have we invaded Obuda again?”

“We got caught, but that doesn’t mean we’ve got to give up,” Istvan said. His own attitude lay somewhere betweenKun ’s and Frigyes’. Obviously, Gyongyos had lost the fight for Becsehely, and the whole war in the Bothnian Ocean was going Kuusamo’s way. Even so

… “If we let the slant-eyes think we’ll do whatever they say, they’ll end up owning us, do you know what I mean:

Kunjust grunted. Whether that meant he agreed or he didn’t think the remark worth wasting words on, Istvan couldn’t have said.

The ley line went through the forest, straight as the beam from a stick. It passed by a couple of little Obudan villages. The natives hardly looked up from their fields to watch it go past. Before the Derlavaian kingdoms came to their islands, they’d lived a simple life. They hadn’t known metalworking or much magecraft past exploiting obvious power points or how to tame the wild dragons that flew from one island to another and preyed on men and flocks alike. By now they’d grown so accustomed to the marvels of modern civilization, they took them for granted.

When at last the ley-line caravan stopped, it had climbed halfway up the slope of Mount Sorong. Istvan thought they were somewhere near the town of Sorong, the largest native settlement. He wondered how much of Sorong was left these days. Then he shrugged. The Obudans hadn’t been strong enough to hold Gyongyos or Kuusamo away from their island. Whatever happened to them, they deserved it.

“Out! To go out!” shouted the guards on the caravan cars.

Out Istvan went. There straight ahead stood the captives’ camp, behind a palisade with nails sticking out of the timbers like hedgehog spines, to make them all but impossible to climb. Istvan looked around and started to laugh again.

“What to be funny?” a guard demanded.

“This used to be my regiment’s encampment,” Istvan answered. The Kuusaman nodded to show he understood, then shrugged to show he wasn’t much impressed. After a moment, Istvan wasn’t much impressed, either. The Gyongyosians hadn’t been strong enough to hold Kuusamo away from Obuda. Didn’t that mean they deserved whatever happened to them?

That was a chilly thought with which to enter the captives’ camp.

Some of the Gyongyosian barracks still stood. The guards took Istvan and his comrades to a newer, less weathered building. He turned out to have a better cot and more space as a captive of the Kuusamans than he’d had as a Gyongyosian soldier on Obuda. He didn’t know what that said about the relative strength of the two warring kingdoms. Nothing good, probably, not from a Gyongyosian point of view.

“I wish to speak toColonelEino,” Frigyes told a guard. The Kuusaman went off to see if the camp commandant cared to speak with a captive captain.

To Istvan’s surprise, Eino came to the barracks. “What do you want?” he asked. “Whatever it is, it had better be important.”

“It is,” Frigyes said. “I want your word of honor as an officer that you do not abuse us by feeding us the filthy, forbidden flesh of goats. We are in your power. I hope you are not so vile as to make us either starve or become ritually unclean.”

Alarm blazed through Istvan. He glanced atKun and Szonyi. They looked alarmed, too. The scar on his hand seemed to throb. His gaze swung back toColonelEino.

The camp commandant laughed. “Many of your people ask this. I give you my word, it does not happen.” He laughed again, less pleasantly. “You may ask, what is a Kuusaman’s word worth?” Off he went, leaving appalled silence behind him.

ColonelSpinellowas bored. He’d been a great many things since the war took him to Unkerlant-wounded, hungry, freezing, terrified-but never bored, never till now. He yawned till his jaw creaked. He felt like ordering another attack on Pewsum, just to give his men-and himself-something to do.

No matter what he felt like, he refrained. He had no doubt whatever that his brigade was glad about the lull in the fighting. It didn’t break his heart, either. He’d more than half expectedKingSwemmel ’s men to have laid on an attack against Waldsolms by now. Maybe the Unkerlanters were enjoying the lull, too.

If I want something to do, I ought to get Jadwigai into bed with me, he thought, not for the first time. Not for the first time, he turned the thought aside. Tampering with the brigade’s luck would only be bad for his own. He even believed that, which made it easier for him to resist temptation-but not a great deal easier.

Then a shout rang out that sent him springing to his feet: “Field post! The field post’s here!”

Spinello hurried out of the Unkerlanter hut where he’d been brooding. He hadn’t even reached the unpaved street before turning into his usual jaunty self. “Come on, boys,” he called to the other soldiers also hurrying toward the wagon that brought letters from home. “Time to find out how much your girlfriends are trying to squeeze out of you this time.”

The men in the wagon started calling out names. Spinello’s clerks took care of most of them, sorting the envelopes and packages by regiment and company so they could go on up to the front. Every so often, one of the clerks said, “He’s wounded,” or “He’s dead,” or, “He got transferred six months ago. Anybody who’s looking for him here is out of luck.”

“Here’s one forColonelSpinello,” one of the field postmen called.

“That’s me.” Spinello happily reached for it.

Before giving it to him, the fellow in the wagon held it under his nose. “Perfumed!” he exclaimed, which made all the Algarvians in the muddy main street whoop and sigh and roll their eyes and pretend to swoon.

“Powers below eat every bloody one of you,” Spinello said. “You’re just jealous, and you bloody well know it.”

None of the soldiers argued with him. They probablywere jealous, but not in a bad way. Any officer in the Algarvian army who got a perfumed letter only saw his prestige rise-it made his men think he was good at some of the things that made life worth living.

“You going to read it to us, Colonel?” somebody called. A chorus of baying whoops followed that suggestion.

“Read your own letters-if you know how to read,” Spinello replied with dignity. “I’m going to enjoy this one myself.” It came from Fronesia; if the scent, the same one she used herself, hadn’t been enough to tell him as much, her flowing script would have. He smiled. He’d had a splendid time with her back in Trapani, the sort of time that would have made his men whoop even more than they were already whooping if he’d chosen to tell them about it.

Before he tore the envelope open, he glanced up and saw Jadwigai peering out through one of the small windows in the peasant hut she used as her own. She rarely come out onto the street when Algarvians from outside the brigade could see her. One more proof she knows what happens to most Kaunians, Spinello thought, something that hadn’t occurred to him before.