Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

“Oh, by the powers above,” Ealstan said softly. “Here comes the head.” He let out a startled squawk. “No-here comes the baby.”

Once Vanai had pushed out the head, everything else was easy. That was the hard part, both figuratively and literally. Shoulders, torso, and legs followed in short order. So did the afterbirth. Ealstan made gulping noises. “You’ll have to throw away these sheets,” Vanai said, before asking the question she should have asked first: “Is it a boy or a girl?”

“A girl,” Ealstan answered. “Here-I’m tying the cord with one hank of dark brown yarn and one of yellow. Now I’m cutting it. Now…” He held up the baby. She started to cry, and quickly went from purple to pink.

“Give her to me,” Vanai said. “Give me Saxburh.” That was the girl’s name-the Forthwegian girl’s name-they’d picked. Vanai also thought of her as Silelai-her own mother’s name. If things in Forthweg ever improved for Kaunians, perhaps the baby could use that name, too.

Ealstan handed her to her mother as if he had in his hands an egg that might burst at any moment. Saxburh had a little hair, incredibly fine. What there was of it was dark. Her eyes were dark blue, but that meant nothing: all babies’ eyes were that color at first. Whether her skin would prove fair or swarthy, whether she’d be lean like a Kaunian or blocky like a Forthwegian- who could say? Too soon for such guesses.

“Here,” Vanai said, and set the baby on her breast. Saxburh knew what to do; she began sucking right away. That made Vanai’s womb contract painfully. She let out a hiss and began to realize how worn she was. She felt as if she’d been run over by a wagon full of logs.

And then Ealstan had the nerve to say, “Move a little.” But when, after a groan, she did, he swept off the fouled bedclothes and gave her a pair of drawers and a cloth pad of the sort she wore when her courses came. She set Saxburh down for a moment so she could put them on. The baby’s high, thin wail made Vanai pick her up again in a hurry.

As Saxburh went back to nursing, Vanai asked Ealstan, “Could you get me something to eat, please? I feel like I haven’t had anything in years.”

“Of course.” He hurried away and came back with bread and sausage and olives and cheese and two big mugs full of wine. As Vanai fell to like a famished wolf, he raised his mug high. “To our baby!”

“To our baby!” Vanai echoed with her mouth full. After she swallowed, she took a long pull at her own mug. She wanted to bathe. She wanted to sleep for a year. For the time being, she was content to lie there with Saxburh and try to rest.

Major Scoufas looked up from his mug of ale at Colonel Sabrino. “Well, your Excellency, now I know you are truly in bad odor at King Mezentio’s court,” the Yaninan dragonflier said.

Sabrino’s mug held spirits, not ale. He hadn’t got very far down it, though, not yet. “I told you that the day my wing got here,” he replied. “Why do you say you know it now?”

“Because if your superiors cared for you at all, they would have sent you north to try to stem the Unkerlanter tide there,” Scoufas replied. “But no- they have left you here to keep us Yaninans company. And I happen to know they are sending everything they can possibly spare to the north.”

That called for a long pull at the mug of spirits. Sabrino wished he could have contradicted Scoufas. Unfortunately, the Yaninan was right. Sabrino said all he could say: “I am a soldier. I can only go where my orders take me. I can only do what my superiors tell me.”

“I understand that, and the answer does you honor,” Major Scoufas said. “But is it not true that something very like a catastrophe is taking shape for Algarve in the north?” He spoke with a certain avid interest. If Algarve went down to defeat against Unkerlant, Sabrino didn’t see how Yanina could avoid also going down to defeat. That didn’t stop some Yaninans from enjoying Algarve’s misfortune. Having tasted defeat so often themselves, they enjoyed seeing the once-invincible Algarvians learn what the dish tasted like.

“Disaster?” Sabrino shrugged. “I don’t think it’s so bad as that, Major. Sooner or later-probably sooner-Swemmel’s men will run out of soldiers, and we’ll mend the front, the way we’ve done here in the Duchy of Grelz.”

He realized, too late, he should have called it the Kingdom of Grelz. Scoufas raised a dark, elegantly arched eyebrow to show he realized the same thing. Using the Unkerlanter name for the region showed how much ground the Algarvians had lost in the past year.

And he realized he was liable to be talking through his hat when he claimed things would soon get better in the north. The Algarvian army defending that long and vital stretch of front seemed simply to have disappeared. Algarvian reports from the north grew more tight-lipped day by day. Swemmel’s men, by contrast, declared victory after victory and claimed the recapture of town after town. If those claims were lies, the Algarvians might have done a better job of denying them.

Scoufas said, “If you were truly a lucky man, Colonel, or a well-favored one, you might have been sent off to Jelgava and escaped from Unkerlant altogether.”

That held some truth, too, but rather less. Not many Algarvian formations were leaving Unkerlant to fight in the east. Mezentio didn’t have enough men in Unkerlant to hold back Swemmel’s soldiers as things were. The east would just have to take care of itself.

And if it doesn‘t? Sabrino wondered. If it can’t? He finished the spirits at a gulp. Then we‘re in even more trouble than we were before.

He eyed Major Scoufas. “You may not like Algarvians all that well, but I suggest you remember one thing: before the Unkerlanters get into Algarve- if we’re so unlucky as to have that happen-they have to go through Yanina.”

Like most Yaninans, Scoufas had an expressive face. The emotion he expressed wasn’t delight, nor anything close to it. Sabrino smiled. Maybe Scoufas thought he was allowed to snipe at Algarvians but they couldn’t say anything about his kingdom. That wasn’t how things worked, no matter what he thought.

Before either wing commander made the occasion more unpleasant, a Yaninan crystallomancer burst into the peasant hut where they were drinking and spoke rapidly in his own language. Yaninan always put Sabrino in mind of wine pouring out of a jug, glug glug glug. But he didn’t speak it, and had to ask, “What’s he saying?”

“The Unkerlanters seem to be stirring down here after all,” Scoufas replied. “They’re trying to cross the Trusetal River and set up a bridgehead on the east side.”

“Can’t have that.” Sabrino sprang to his feet. “If they get a company over today, it’ll be a brigade tomorrow, complete with behemoths.”

Scoufas dipped his head in the Yaninan equivalent of a nod. “Aye, that is so,” he said. “We may not love each other, but there is nothing like a common foe to point out where our interests lie.”

“True enough,” Sabrino said. “Shall we go pay a call on the common foe and try to make him extinct rather than common?”

“Extinct?” Scoufas frowned; he needed a moment to understand the wordplay, which robbed Sabrino of half his pleasure in it. But then the Yaninan smiled. “Oh, I see. Aye, indeed it would be well if the Unkerlanters were extinct.” They both hurried out of the hut, shouting for their men.

The Yaninan dragon handler with the big black mustache had taken it upon himself to minister to Sabrino’s dragon. He was as good as any Algarvian could have been. His name was Tsaldaris. He had no breeding to speak of; had he come from a notable family, he would have been flying dragons, not handling them. He spoke Algarvian after a fashion: enough to talk about dragons, at least. As Sabrino mounted the screeching, bad-tempered beast, Tsaldaris said, “Careful. Cinnabar-pfuifHe made a disgusted noise and held thumb and forefinger close together to show he’d had little to give the dragon.