Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

The brandy didn’t taste right, any more than tea had lately. Krasta drank it anyway, and drank it fast. She needed not to think about Lurcanio for a little while. That was what she needed, but she didn’t get it. Valnu said, “I hear your… friend has gone down to the seashore for a while.”

“What if he has?” Krasta said. The brandy was hitting her hard, maybe because she hadn’t drunk any for a while, maybe just because she was pregnant.

When Valnu leaned toward her across the little table they shared, the smile stayed on his face for the benefit of the fellow behind the bar, but his voice came low and urgent: “You silly little twat, are the Kuusamans and the Lagoans going to land down there? Does Lurcanio think they are?”

“He thinks so, aye, but he isn’t sure. He’s going to talk with some of the Algarvians there,” Krasta answered. Only afterwards did she realize she should have been insulted.

Valnu grunted. “That’s a little more than I knew before, but not so much as I would have liked.” His shrug was almost as ornate as a redhead’s. He gulped his ale, then got to his feet. “I must dash. Always delighted to see you. And theother news you gave me was fascinating, too; it truly was.” He left some coins on the tabletop and hurried out.

“Another brandy, milady?” the tapman asked.

“No.” Krasta got up and left, too.

Out on the Boulevard of Horsemen, a band played a stirring march- Valmieran-style music, not Algarvian. And up the Boulevard came the first blond soldiers in Valmieran uniform Krasta had seen since the surrender. She stared, as a lot of other people were staring. But then she realized it wasn’tquite Valmieran uniform: each soldier wore a red, green, and white patch sewn onto the left sleeve of his tunic, to show he served not King Gainibu but King Mezentio of Algarve.

Only a couple of companies of the soldiers marched down the Boulevard of Horsemen, but they were enough. Krasta hurried back into the tavern and poured down another brandy, and then another after that. The spirits didn’t come close to taking away the taste of what she’d seen.

“A roundup?” Bembo sent Delminio a reproachful look. “Do we have to?”

His new partner nodded. “Aye, we have to. You’ll have done them before, won’t you, back in whatever no-account town you served in before you got sent here?”

“Gromheort.” Bembo didn’t know why he bothered supplying the name. Delminio wouldn’t care. “I’ve done ‘em, but I never liked em. Any way I can get out of it? My old sergeant would sometimes excuse one of the fellows in my squad. Evodio just wasn’t any use for that business-didn’t have the stomach for it. Even when Pesaro made him do it, he’d drink himself blind afterwards.”

“Your sergeant must have been a softy,” Delminio said, which made Bembo snort in disbelief. But the other constable went on, “Here, you get a choice. You can do what you’re told, or you can put on a footsoldier’s uniform and head for Unkerlant.”

“You just talked me into it,” Bembo said.

“I thought I would.” Delminio tapped his fingernail on the refectory tabletop. “We have had a few fellows who went off to fightKingSwemmel ’s whoresons. Strange birds-stupid birds, if you ask me. We haven’t had many, and none at all I can think of the past year or so.”

“I believe that.” Bembo shivered, though it was warm inside the refectory. Things in Unkerlant hadn’t been going Algarve’s way the past year or so. Fine choice, he thought. /can stifle my conscience and do as I’m told, or go off and get myself killed. But he’d already made his choice, and told Delminio as much. He hardly knew why he was fussing about a conscience distinctly vestigial. It’s nothing I haven’tdone before.

Before going into the Kaunian quarter, he and Delminio and the other constables drew army-issue sticks. Bembo waved to Oraste. His old partner from Gromheort waved back. “Going hunting,” he said. Rounding up Kaunians bothered him not at all.

Some of the guards outside the quarter were Forthwegians. “We should send them in for the roundup,” Bembo said. “They hate the blonds more than we do.”

But Delminio shook his head. “It looks like it’s a good idea, but it just doesn’t work. Some of the Kaunians would use their stupid little spell and get away.”

Bembo grunted. “I suppose so. It’s a good thing they haven’t got a spell to let ‘em look like Algarvians.”

His partner’s hand writhed in a very old sign for turning away evil omens. “Bite your tongue. Powers above, wouldn’t that be all we needed?”

A pompous constabulary captain strode out in front of the men he’d led to the district. He made exactly the sort of speech Bembo had known he would make, full of the greater glory of Algarve and a lot of other things every man there had surely heard too many times before. Then he said, “We have to meet our quota. Nothing and nobody will keep us from meeting our quota. Now let’s go do it.”

The constables tramped into the Kaunian quarter. As Bembo strode past the officer, he saw him looking about ready to burst a blood vessel. “What’s his trouble?” he asked Delminio. “Did he think we were going to burst into cheers?”

“Probably,” Delminio answered. “Have you ever known a captain who wasn’t a cursed fool?” Bembo stared at him in astonished delight. He didn’t make such a bad partner after all.

Cries of alarm and the sound of running feet ahead warned that the Kaunians knew the roundup was under way. Bembo scowled. “Now we’re going to have to dig the buggers out of their hiding places,” he grumbled. “There are times when this job looks a lot too much like work.” It did, however, look a great deal better than going off to fight in Unkerlant.

Not all the Kaunians were hiding, not yet. Something came hurtling down from the sill of an upper-story window in a block of flats. It landed on the head of a constables three ranks in front of Bembo. The noise was that of a brickbat smacking a calabash. The constable went down as if blazed-perhaps more surely than if he’d been blazed. He thrashed briefly, then lay still. Blood poured out of him, pooling among the cobblestones. His bowels let go; Bembo wrinkled his nose at the sudden stink. Flies began gathering almost at once.

The constables shouted and pointed. Bembo didn’t know why they bothered. None of them had any better idea than he did from which window the missile-by the shards, he judged it a flowerpot full of dirt-had come.

“Every blond in that building!” the captain screamed. “I want every blond in that building out here, and I want all those whoresons out here in nothing flat. Capture squads, forward!” His whistle shrilled as if he were ordering footsoldiers into battle against the Unkerlanters.

Bembo and Delminio weren’t in a capture squad. They were in a holding squad, to make sure none of the Kaunians escaped once captured. They waited in the street for their comrades to start bringing out blonds. They waited in the very middle of the street, and kept looking nervously up toward the buildings on either side of it.

“Kaunian bastards have their nerve,” Delminio said angrily.

Shrieks and screams rang out inside the block of flats. Before long, Kaunians started stumbling out of the building. The men were all bruised and bloody. The women were bruised and bloody, too, and some of them came down the steps without trousers. “Revenge,” Bembo said.

Delminio nodded. “Makes me wish I was in a capture squad,” he said. Bembo answered that with a shrug. Rape had never been his favorite sport.

A Kaunian spat on the dead Algarvian constable’s corpse. All that got him was another beating from the constables in the holding squad. Bembo swung his bludgeon with as much zeal as anyone else. “We can’t kill the bastard- that’d waste his life energy,” he said. “But we can sure as blazes make him wish he was dead.”