Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

The fellow couldn’t have been above seventeen. Unkerlanter soldiers in the field didn’t get to shave very often, but his cheeks remained smooth and beardless even when he was nowhere near a razor. Leudast wanted to laugh in his face. Instead, he just shook his head. “Sonny, I was wounded down in Sulingen. They fixed me up in time to let me fight in the Durrwangen bulge. After those scraps, anything the redheads have done to us here is like a walk in the meadow with a pretty girl.” He thought of Alize, back in the village of Leiferde.

Sergeant Kiun shook his head. “Oh, it’s not so easy asthat, sir,” he said. “More like a walk through the meadow with anugly girl, if you want to know what I think.”

“Who wants to know what you think?” Leudast returned. They grinned at each other. Why not? Between the two of them, they’d captured the Algarvian noble who’d called himself King of Grelz. Just as Leudast wasn’t quite an ordinary lieutenant, so Kiun wasn’t an ordinary sergeant.

The young soldier was unimpressed. “You’re making fun of me!” he said, and his voice broke in the middle of the sentence, going from the baritone he would have as a grown man to the squeaky treble he was just escaping.

“Well, what if we are, Gilan?” Leudast asked. “You said something silly. If you don’t expect people to make fun of you after you say something silly, you’re making a big mistake.”

“But I didn’t know it was silly,” Gilan protested.

“That makes it more silly, not less,” Leudast said. Had he been that naive when King Swemmel’s impressers pulled him into the army? If he had, how in blazes had his sergeants and officers put up with him? He thought of Sergeant Magnulf, who’d died in the first year of the war with Algarve. They’d shared a hole in some village they were trying to defend. Had he looked out of the hole when the egg burst in front of it, he would be dead now and Magnulf might still be alive. It had happened the other way round. He knew neither rhyme nor reason for it.

As if the mere thought of eggs were enough to conjure them up, they started bursting not far from the trench in which he and Kiun and Gilan stood. They weren’t quite close enough to make the soldiers throw themselves flat, but they weren’t much farther off than that. “Powers below eat the redheads,” Kiun said. “I thought they were supposed to be moving everything north to fight our push there.”

“Lots of odds and sods in the men they’re throwing at us,” Leudast said. “Those Forthwegian whoresons are almost as bad as Grelzers-you can’t tell they’re the enemy till too late. And now these blond Kaunian buggers.”

“They fight hard,” Kiun said.

“Aye.” Leudast nodded. “There were a few Kaunians not so far from my village. I grew up pretty close to the border with Forthweg, you know. They’re just… people who don’t look like us. What I don’t get is how come they’ll fight for the Algarvians when the redheads kill ‘em to make their magic.”

“These aren’t Kaunians from Forthweg,” Kiun said. “They’re from way the demon off in the east somewhere. I hardly even know the names of the kingdoms on the other side of the world.”

“They’re Valmierans,” Leudast said. Before Kiun could put in a jab, he held up his hand. “Only reason I know is because Captain Recared told me. He knows all that stuff. But still, they’re blonds, and so are the Kaunians from Forthweg. So why would they help Mezentio’s bastards?”

“Have to take some prisoners, squeeze it out of’em,” Kiun said.

“I suppose so,” Leudast allowed.

Unkerlanter egg-tossers started answering the Algarvians. They still didn’t respond as fast as the redheads, but they were there in numbers in the bridgehead. Nothing the Algarvians or the foreigners fighting for them had done had stopped Unkerlant from bringing egg-tossers and behemoths forward, which was not the least of the reasons they still held the foothold on this side of the Fluss.

Dragons flew by, dragons painted rock-gray. “They’ll drop their loads on the Algarvians’ heads, too,” Leudast said. “Serves the redheads right-this is what they used to do to us all the time.”

Before long, the Algarvian egg-tossers fell silent. “That’s more like it,” Kiun said. “Maybe they’ll learn not to try that anymore.”

“Here’s hoping,” Leudast said. “That’s one lesson I wish they’d learned already, as a matter of fact.” Kiun chuckled and nodded, for all the world as if Leudast were joking. They’d both been in the front lines a long time. If you didn’t joke, you’d go mad sooner or later-unless the redheads killed you, which was rather more likely.

Here, though, the Algarvians really did seem to learn a lesson. Things stayed very quiet for the next couple of days. They were so quiet, in fact, that Leudast almost lost the feeling of being stuck in a bridgehead.

He remarked on that the next time he saw Captain Recared, adding, “If we hit them hard enough to make them stay this quiet, maybe we can break out of this cramped little place and start pushing them back again.”

Recared shook his head. “Not yet, Lieutenant. I’d like to just as much as you would, but not yet. We’ll have to see how things go up in the north before we find out what we can do here. All the spares we have, and all the reserves, are going into that push. If it goes well, then we can try pushing here, too. Or that’s my guess, anyhow-askMarshalRathar if you want a better notion.”

“Oh, of course, sir.” Leudast laughed. Unlike most junior lieutenants, he’d met the marshal, and Rathar might, if reminded, remember who he was. None of that meant he could go asking questions of Rathar. None of it meant Rathar was anywhere within a thousand miles of the River Fluss at the moment, either.

Recared laughed, too, and said, “You’ve got attitude, Leudast.”

“Do I?” Leudast shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that. All I know is, I’m still here, and that makes me luckier than a lot of people.” Poor Magnulf crossed his mind again. He asked, “Howare things going up in the north, sir?”

“Better than we expected. As well as we hoped,” Recared answered. Leudast blinked; he hadn’t really looked for a reply quite so optimistic. The regimental commander went on, “That whole Algarvian army up there is getting smashed to pieces. With any luck at all, wewill be able to start moving here pretty soon-but not just yet.”

“I’m in no hurry, sir, not as long as the redheads and the whoresons who fight for them leave us alone, the way they have lately.” Leudast snapped his fingers. “That reminds me-Kiun and I were talking about the Kaunians who fight on Algarve’s side. Has anybody figured out why they’re daft enough to do it?”

“We’ve caught a few,” Recared said. “We haven’t found any answers that tell us a whole lot. Best guess so far is, they’re about like the buggers in Plegmund’s Brigade: ne’er-do-wells and men down on their luck and a few just looking for a fight and taking one anywhere they can find it.”

Leudast grunted. “Bunch of cursed fools, if anybody wants to know what I think. You’d have to be, wouldn’t you, to fight for somebody who was doing that to your own people?”

“Well, I think so,” Captain Recared said. Then he changed the subject, and then, sooner than Leudast had expected, he left. Leudast scratched his head for a while, wondering if he’d somehow offended the regimental commander. He ran the conversation over in his mind. He couldn’t see how.

And then, as he was drifting toward sleep that night, he did. After all, King Swemmel was killing powers above only knew how many Unkerlanters to fuel the sorcery that thwarted the Algarvians’ murderous magic and helped beat the redheads and their allies out of Unkerlant. Even though he was doing that, Leudast didn’t hesitate to fight for him. Neither did countless other Unkerlanters.