Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

Gurmun spat again. “It can wait. Right now, we haven’t got the dowsers to spend clearing the buried eggs we’ve already passed. We’ve hardly got enough dowsers to clear the ones that are still in front of the redheads.”

“I said, one of these days,” Rathar answered. As far as Gurmun was concerned, the waste of having dowsers go up in bursts of sorcerous energy while clearing unimportant fields made that not worth doing. As long as they died doing something important, he didn’t worry at all. A lot of the younger officers, the men who’d lived their entire adult lives duringKingSwemmel ’s reign, thought the same way. Since Swemmel thought that way, too, Rathar knew he shouldn’t have been surprised, but every so often he still was.

“If we had more dowsers,” Gurmun went on, “I wouldn’t have to run peasants across fields ahead of my behemoths, the way I’ve done a couple-three times. That doesn’t always work as well as you’d like-sometimes the Algarvian mages make their buried eggs sensitive to behemoths, not people.” His horse walked on for a few paces before he added, very much as an afterthought, “And it’s wasteful, too.”

“So it is.” Rathar had used such tactics himself; he didn’t know many Unkerlanter generals who hadn’t. But he didn’t take them for granted, the way Gurmun did. With a sigh, he went on, “I wonder if the kingdom will have any peasants at all left by the time this war finally ends.”

“It doesn’t matter if we only have a few, so long as Algarve hasn’t got any,” Gurmun said once more. Aye, those words might have come straight fromKingSwemmel ’s lips.

At the outskirts of Pewsum, a sentry stepped into the roadway, stick in hand, and snapped, “This is a forward area. Show me your pass.”

GeneralGurmunundid the top couple of buttons on his rock-gray greatcoat, so that the general’s stars on his collar tabs showed. “Are these pass enough?”

The sentry deflated like a pricked pig’s bladder. He lorded it over those beneath him and groveled to those above. Such was life in Unkerlant. “Aye, sir,” he muttered, and got out of the way in a hurry.

“Powers above help the next couple of common soldiers he lands on,” Rathar remarked as he and Gurmun rode past. Gurmun laughed and nodded. He was on top almost all the time, so he found such things funny.

Inside Pewsum, Unkerlanter artisans and mages still labored to repair the ley-line caravan depot. Before pulling out, the Algarvians had done their ingenious best to make sure their foes would get as little use from the town as possible; and that best, as usual, proved quite good. “Stinking redheads,” Gurmun growled. “That depot had better not slow us down, come the day. If it does, some of those worthless wizards will join these beauties here.”

He pointed to a couple of corpses hanging from a gibbet in the market square. They’d been hanging for some time. By now, they were more bone than meat, and didn’t stink too badly. Each was draped with a placard reading, collaborator. Soldiers and civilians walked past them without so much as a glance.

“They caught two,” Gurmun said. “I wonder how many are still running loose.”

“A good many, odds are,” Rathar answered. “The inspectors will root them out.”GeneralGurmun nodded, as Rathar had been sure he would. Swemmel’s inspectors were trained to sniff out treason whether it was there or not. When it really was…

A soldier was reading a news sheet, one prepared by the local army headquarters. He started to wad it up and throw it away. Gurmun called, “Here, fellow, let me have a look at that.”

“Sure, pal,” the trooper said agreeably. His rock-gray tunic had faded almost to white. A scar seamed his cheek, another his leg below the hem of the tunic. More than any of that, though, his eyes marked him as a veteran. They never stopped moving. Had the Algarvians flown dragons over Pewsum, he would have known exactly where to dive for cover.

Gurmun reined in to look at the news sheet. Rathar also stopped, and leaned toward him so he could see some of it, too. Gurmun read aloud: “ ‘In the north, the strong defense the brave soldiers of Unkerlant have shown under the glorious leadership of King Swemmel against the savage Algarvian invader has kept the enemy from making progress, and has tied down his forces so that he cannot move men to the south to hold off our victorious thrusts there.’ “

“That’s good,” Rathar murmured. “That’s very good.”

GeneralGurmunnodded. “I’ve seen worse. Here, wait-there’s more. ‘Constant vigilance is vital in these hard defensive struggles. Although we often fight with the odds against us, our sacrifice ensures victory elsewhere. Always remember that a victory in the south is a victory for the whole kingdom.’ “

“Someone should get a commendation for that,”MarshalRathar said. He called up the map in his head. “Headquarters should be-over there.” He pointed. He and Gurmun rode in the direction he’d chosen. His gift for turning map into terrain didn’t let him down.

At the headquarters-a battered building that had once been a greengrocer’s-another officious sentry tried to stop Rathar and Gurmun. This time, Rathar was the one who flashed his collar tabs. At the sight of the big stars he wore, the sentry turned pale. He couldn’t step away, as the one on the road had, but he did his best to disappear in plain sight.

Inside, Brigadier Sigulf saluted. “An honor to make your acquaintance, gentlemen,” he said. “You’ve done great things for the kingdom.”

“More needs doing,” Gurmun said, his voice flat, almost hostile.

Sigulf looked alarmed, though he made a good game try at holding his face still. He was some years younger even than Gurmun. Except for Vatran, all our generals are years and years younger than I am, Rathar thought. The war had killed some of his contemporaries. KingSwemmel had killed many more.

He took the news sheet from Gurmun and waved it. “This is a fine piece of work.”

“Thanks, lord Marshal,” Sigulf answered. “We’ve done our best to follow the directives we got from Cottbus. We’ve followed all the directives from Cottbus as closely as we could.” That too was the Unkerlanter way.

“Good,” Gurmun said. Like Sigulf, he was steeped in the idea that orders should always be followed exactly. Rathar sometimes wondered. One of the reasons the Algarvians got better results with fewer men was that their officers thought for themselves, and didn’t feel paralyzed when they had no one above them telling them what to do. But that was how they were trained. Rathar wished his commanders were better at seizing the initiative, but that seemed beyond the mental horizon of most of them.

Sigulf went on, “We are making sure we move only at night. And our crystallomancers are sending more messages to regiments that aren’t in place than to ones that are. It gets confusing sometimes, but we’re doing our best.”

“Those are important orders to follow.” Rathar meant every word of it. “You can bet anything you care to name that the Algarvians are stealing as many of our emanations as they can. If your men are confused, think what it must be like for the redheads.”

“Aye, sir,” Brigadier Sigulf said earnestly. “I do think about that. I think about it all the time. If it weren’t for confusing the redheads, all this would be more trouble than it was worth.”

“Don’t say that,”GeneralGurmun growled. “Don’t even think it. You’ve been told what to do, and you’ll bloody well do it. If you don’t feel like doing it, there are plenty of penal companies that can always use one more stupid fool with a stick. Have you got that?”

“Aye, sir,” Sigulf repeated, this time with a distinct quaver in his voice. He sentMarshalRathar a look of appeal.