Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

Maybe the Valmieran Kaunians felt the same way. If they do, they‘re wrong, Leudast thought, and dozed off.

After black bread and sausage the next morning, he led Kiun’s squad out on a patrol through the woods. He could have stayed back in camp and let the sergeant take charge of the patrol himself; a lot of officers would have. But he’d been on plenty of patrols himself. If he went on this one, he thought-he hoped-he gave everyone a little better chance of coming back in one piece.

A jay screamed. A woodpecker drummed on the trunk of a birch. A flock of waxwings flew from one wild plum tree to another. No one who’d ever heard them could mistake their soft, metalliczreel zreel for the call of any other bird. “All seems pretty quiet,” Kiun said. “No sign the redheads are trying to sneak in and make trouble.”

“You sound disappointed,” Leudast said.

“Not me.” Kiun shook his head. “Surprised, maybe, but not disappointed. I haven’t seen the Algarvians back on their heels like this for a long time.” He shook his head again. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Algarvians back on their heels like this. Doesn’t seem natural, you know what I mean?”

“I think so.” Leudast nodded. “They’re not doing anything themselves. They’re waiting for us to do something. They never used to do that. We used to wait for them, especially in the summertime. It’s not the same fight it was a couple of years ago.”A good thing, too, he thought. If the Algarvians were still kicking us around like that, we’d have long since lost the war.

Kiun started to answer, then silently toppled, his stick falling from hands that would no longer hold it. He didn’t even twitch; he was dead before he hit the ground. A patch of leaves near his feet started smoldering.

“Sniper!” Leudast called, and dove for cover. “Sniper up a tree!” he added-the trajectory of the beam that had slain Kiun proved as much.

If the whoreson stayed quiet, how were they supposed to find him? He’d got Kiun through the head. Kiun had been aboutthere, and the patch of plants on the ground that had caught fire was aboutthere, so the enemy had to be over inthat direction. “There!” Leudast pointed northeast. “One of those trees there. Work carefully, boys-he’ll be looking for us.”

The Unkerlanters slid from tree to bush to rock, trying to show themselves as little as possible. And the sniper evidently knew what he was about, for he sat tight in whatever tree he’d chosen for himself. If the Unkerlanters didn’t spot him, he was free to get away, free to wait for the next unlucky soldier to come within range of his stick. But then a trooper shouted, “There he is!” and pointed to a big, leafy oak-a tree so big and leafy, the mere sight of it had made Leudast suspicious.

Once seen, the sniper didn’t last long. He wounded one more man-not badly-before tumbling, dead, out of the tree. He was a trouser-wearing Kaunian with an Algarvian banner sewn to the sleeve of his tunic. Leudast kicked the body. “One more down,” he said, and the patrol moved on.

Colonel Spinello stumbled south and east, trying to pick his way through a marsh east of Sommerda. He was weary and filthy and unshaven. He hoped he wouldn’t meet any Unkerlanter soldiers, for he wasn’t at all sure whether his stick held enough sorcerous energy to blaze. At that, he reckoned himself better off than most of the soldiers in the regiment he’d commanded. He remained alive and able to go on retreating. Most of them were either dead or captive.

He missed a step and went into muck up to his knees. Before he could sink any deeper, Jadwigai, who remained on firm ground, grabbed him and helped him get back to decent footing himself.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” he said, and gave her a kiss. She was every bit as worn and dirty as he, but still contrived to look good to him. It wasn’t just that she didn’t grow whiskers to add to a raffish appearance. She’d been so pretty starting out, grime and exhaustion only gave her beauty more sharply sculpted edges.

“You’re welcome.” She pointed toward a clump of man-high bushes a couple of hundred yards ahead. “If we can get there, we’ll have a pretty good hiding place for the night.”

“Aye, I think you’re right.” Spinello’s bones creaked when he started moving, but move he did. Unkerlanters were bound to be prowling in this swamp. If they caught up with him, he’d never make it out the other side to reconnect himself to the Algarvian army. He wondered if any Algarvian army remained in northern Unkerlant to be reconnected to. He couldn’t prove it, not at the moment, not by the way Mezentio’s forces had collapsed under the hammer blow the Unkerlanters dealt them.

He went into muddy water again before reaching the bushes. This time, he pulled himself out without help from Jadwigai. The water was also stagnant and smelly. The last time he’d risked a fire, he’d used a lighted twig to get a leech off his leg. Mosquitoes hovered in buzzing, thrumming clouds.

As he and Jadwigai had hoped, the bushes marked slightly higher ground. He stretched out, almost ready to fall asleep right there where he lay. Jadwigai sat down beside him. Maybe she was still full of luck-he was still breathing, after all. Or maybe he’d broken the regiment’s luck, and the whole northern army’s as well, when he first brought her to his bed.

“Or maybe that’s nonsense,” he muttered.

“What?” Jadwigai asked.

“Nothing,” he told her. “Or I think it’s nothing, anyway.” He rolled onto his side and leaned on one elbow, studying her. “Ask you something?”

“Go ahead,” she said.

“Why are you still here with me? You might do better to let the Unkerlanters catch up with you. Especially…” Spinello’s voice trailed away. Especially since we’re killing Kaunians, and they’re not didn’t strike him as the most politic thing to say, no matter how true it was. He sometimes wondered why she hadn’t cut his throat while he lay sleeping. Asking her that didn’t seem politic, either. Last thing I need is to put ideas in her head if she hasn‘t got ‘em already.

Jadwigai shook her head. “I’d just be a body to them, I think. They don’t care about Kaunians. We always made jokes about them in my village-it wasn’t that far from the border with Unkerlant.”

She might well have been right. Both sides here in the west fought the war without restraint. Algarvian soldiers did as they pleased with Unkerlanter women in villages they’d overrun. The Unkerlanters sometimes killed Algarvians they captured in lingering, painful ways and left their bodies where their comrades could find them.

“Besides,” Jadwigai went on, “I know you’ll keep me safe when we find the rest of the army.”

“I’ll do my best.” Spinello wondered how good that best would be. A colonel normally would have no trouble getting whatever he wanted for his mistress. But times weren’t normal, and most mistresses weren’t Kaunians. More urgent worries reared their head at the moment. “What have we got left to eat?”

“Bread. Hard and stale, but bread,” Jadwigai answered. “And spirits. If we mix the spirits with swamp water, we can drink the swamp water, too.” She was right again. Spinello shuddered all the same. The swamp water tasted as nasty as it smelled, and that remained true regardless of whether it would give him a flux of the bowels.

The bread wasn’t just hard; it could have done duty for a brick. Spinello and Jadwigai shared. “If I had bad teeth, I’d starve,” he said.

Before Jadwigai could answer, eggs burst off in the distance. “What’s happening to the army?” she asked. “Have you got any idea?”

“In detail? No,” Spinello said. “In general? Aye. They threw more at us than we could stand up against, and they broke us. I was afraid they were going to do that, but they’ve done more than I thought they could. They used columns of behemoths to smash through our lines, then turned in so they’d either surround us or make us fall back… and they did it over and over and over. I didn’t know they had that many behemoths-or dragons, either. I don’t think anybody in Algarve knew what all Swemmel had before this fight started.”