Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

He imagined an Unkerlanter dragon flying over the woods outside the village, dropping eggs on them to flush out the recalcitrants less than eager to fight in King Swemmel’s army. Impressers would do that sort of thing in a heartbeat—assuming they had hearts, which struck Garivald as unlikely.

Several lines casting scorn on impressers, inspectors, and everyone from Cottbus sprang into his mind, all unbidden. The whole village would laugh if he started singing such a song: the whole village except Waddo and the guards who kept the captives in the gaol cell from escaping. Garivald did not think they would be the least bit amused.

Reluctantly, he pushed his thoughts away from that sort of song. He could make it, aye. He could do any number of things he would be better off not doing. Life in Zossen was sometimes hard. That didn’t mean he had to go looking for ways to make it harder.

Behind him, he heard shouts of surprise. Those were the guards. Waddo must have given them the news. Garivald shook his head. He wouldn’t have shared gossip of any sort with the guards. It wasn’t as if they were villagers. Garivald shook his head again. Waddo had no sense of proportion.

“This is Patras,” Captain Galafrone said as the ley-line caravan sighed to a stop. “From here on, boys, we don’t ride any more. From here on, we march.” He looked as if he relished the prospect. Tealdo, who was something less than half his captain’s age, didn’t.

Neither did Tealdo’s friend Trasone. “I’ve already done enough marching to last me, thank you kindly,” he whispered.

“It’s not like we won’t be doing more anyhow soon enough,” Tealdo said. Like any soldier worth his pay, he was always ready to complain.

“What?” Trasone raised a gingery eyebrow. “You don’t figure us being here will scare King Swemmel out of gobbling up Yanina, the way he was going to do? I figure one look at you would be enough to make every Unkerlanter in the world run off screaming for his mother.”

“Come on, let’s go,” Galafrone said. “We want to impress Colonel Ombruno, right?” He pretended not to hear the jeers that rang through the car, continuing, “And some of the Yaninan women are supposed to be pretty cursed good-looking, too. I don’t know about you boys, but I don’t want ’em laughing at me on account of I can’t remember which is my left foot and which is my right when I’m marching.”

That put matters in a different light. Tealdo checked to make sure his tunic was perfectly straight and every pleat in his kilt knife-sharp. Trasone combed his mustache, not wanting a single hair out of place. Even Sergeant Panfilo set his hat on his head at a jauntier angle, and Tealdo would have sworn that only a blind woman, or one severely short of cash, could take the least interest in Panfilo.

“Get moving, you lousy lugs,” Panfilo rumbled as he surged to his feet. “Let’s show these foreign doxies what real men look like.”

A raw breeze blew through the streets of Patras. Tealdo was glad of the long, thick wool socks he wore, and would have been gladder had they been thicker and longer. Not far from the platform on which he was debarking, a Yaninan band played a vaguely familiar tune. After a while, he recognized it as the Algarvian royal hymn. “I’ve never heard it with bagpipes before,” he murmured to Trasone.

“I hope I never do again,” his friend whispered back.

Yaninans lined the route along which the Algarvian soldiers marched. Some of them held up signs in badly spelled, ungrammatical Algarvian. One said, WELL COME LIBERATATORS! Another proclaimed, DEETH FOR UNKERLANT! More signs and placards were in Yaninan, whose very characters were strange to Tealdo. For all he knew, they might have been advertising sausage or patent medicine or wishing that he and his countrymen might come down with a social disease.

But the Yaninans cheered too lustily to let him believe that. Set against Algarvians, they were short and wiry. The men favored mustaches that were thick and bushy rather than waxed to spiked perfection, as was the Algarvian ideal. Some of the older women had fairly respectable mustaches, too, which was much less common in Tealdo’s homeland.

He paid more attention to the young women. Like the men, they mostly had olive complexions and dark hair and eyes. Their features were sharply carved: wide foreheads; strong cheekbones and noses; narrow, pointed chins. They painted their lips red as blood.

“I’ve seen worse,” he said to Trasone, in a tone another man might have used to judge horseflesh.

“Oh, aye,” Trasone agreed. “And if we go into Unkerlant, you’ll see worse again. Think of Forthwegian women, only more so.”

Tealdo thought about it. He didn’t like what he was thinking. “Best argument for peace I’ve heard yet,” he said.

Trasone snickered, which brought Sergeant Panfilo’s wrath down on his head. “Silence in the ranks, curse you!” Panfilo growled.

Along with the rest of the brigade, Colonel Ombruno’s regiment assembled in front of King Tsavellas’s palace, a sprawling edifice whose onion domes painted in swirling patterns and bright colors loudly proclaimed what a foreign land this was. Algarvian banners—red, white, and green—flew alongside those of Yanina, which were simply red on white.

Another band struck up something vaguely resembling a tune. Tealdo supposed it was the Yaninan royal hymn, for a man in a domed crown and robes of scarlet and ermine ascended to a rostrum while the locals lining the edge of the plaza chorused, “Tsavellas! Tsavellas!”

King Tsavellas raised a hand. Had King Mezentio used such a gesture, he would have got silence. Tsavellas got more noise: Yaninans were anything but an orderly folk. The king waited. Slowly, very slowly, quiet came. Into it, Tsavellas spoke in accented but understandable Algarvian: “I welcome you brave men from the east, who will help shield my small kingdom from the madness of my other neighbor.” Then he said something—probably the same thing—in Yaninan. His subjects cheered. He waved to them and stepped down.

An Algarvian took his place. “That’s probably our minister here,” Tealdo said to Trasone, who nodded. Sure enough, the Algarvian spoke first not to the soldiers from his kingdom but to the assembled people of Patras in what sounded like fluent Yaninan. They cheered him with as much enthusiasm as they’d given their own sovereign.

Then he looked out over the ranks of Algarvian soldiers. “You are here for a reason, men,” he told them. “King Tsavellas invited you, begged King Mezentio to allow you, to enter Yanina to prove to King Swemmel of Unkerlant that we are determined to defend the small against the large. Just as the Kaunian kingdoms oppressed us when we were weak, so Unkerlant sought to oppress Yanina. But we are not weak now, and we shall not let our neighbors be molested. Men of Algarve, do I speak the truth?”

“Aye!” the Algarvian soldiers shouted. Some of them waved their hats. Some scaled their hats through the air. Tealdo waved his. However tempted he might have been to throw it, he refrained. Sergeant Panfilo’s comments would surely have been colorful, but might also have been imperfectly appreciative.

Two flagbearers went up on the rostrum. One held an Algarvian banner, the other a Yaninan. The flags blew in the breeze side by side.

“About-turn!” Colonel Ombruno called to his regiment. Along with his comrades, Tealdo spun on his heel. The regiment led the brigade out of the square. After one wrong turn—fortunately, out of sight of King Tsavellas and the Algarvian minister—they made their way to the barracks where they would spend the night.

Surrounding the barracks like toadstools were tents full of Yaninan soldiers. “Uh-oh,” Tealdo said. “I don’t much like that. We’re stealing their beds. They won’t love us for it.”