Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

He saw no reason why Jelgava should not already have done it again, in fact. All of Algarve’s neighbors hated her. All of them that mattered were at “war against her. They were many. She was one, and beset from east and west and south. Why, then, were his countrymen not yet out of the mountains and racing to join hands with the Forthwegians? He scratched at his almost invisibly pale mustache, which he wore close-trimmed, not in any wild Algarvian style. It was a puzzlement.

A delicious smell distracted him. Turning his head, he saw Colonel Dzirnavu’s servant carrying a covered silver tray toward the regimental commander’s tent. “Ha, Vartu, what have you got there?” he asked.

“His lordship’s breakfast—what else?” the servant answered.

Talsu made an exasperated noise. “I didn’t think it was the chamber pot,” he said. “What I meant was, what will the illustrious count enjoy for his breakfast?”

“Not much, if I’m any judge,” Vartu said, rolling his eyes. “But if you mean, What is he having for breakfast?— I’ve got fresh-baked blueberry tarts here, and poached eggs and bacon on toasted bread with butter sauce poured over them, and some nice ripe cheese, and a muskmelon from by the seashore. And in the pot—not a chamber pot, mind you—is tea flavored with bergamot leaves.”

“Stop!” Talsu held up a hand. “You’re breaking my heart.” His belly rumbled. “You’re breaking my stomach, too,” he added.

“See what you miss because the blood in your veins isn’t blue enough?” Vartu said. “Red blood’s good enough to spill for our dear Jelgava, so it is, but it won’t get you a breakfast like this at the front, no indeed. And now I’ve got to get moving. If the hot stuff gets cold or the cold stuff warms up, the other thing his lordship will bite off is my head.”

Neither soldier had spoken loudly; the colonel’s tent lay only fifteen or twenty feet away. Vartu ducked inside. “Curse you, what took you so long?” Dzirnavu shouted. “Are you trying to starve me to death?”

“I humbly crave pardon, your lordship,” Vartu answered, abject as a servant had to be in the face of a noble’s wrath. Talsu jammed his own face against the brownish green sleeve of his uniform tunic so no one would hear him giggle. Dzirnavu was as round as a kickball. He looked as if he’d take years without food to starve to death.

With the regimental commander’s breakfast attended to, the cooks could get around to feeding the rest of the soldiers. Talsu lined up with the other men in tunics and trousers of the same horse-dung color as his. When he finally got up to the kettles, he held out a tin plate and a wooden cup. One bored-looking cook plopped a ladleful of barley mush and a length of grayish sausage on the plate. Another poured sour beer into the cup.

“My favorites,” Talsu said: “dead man’s cock and what he pissed through it.”

“Listen to the funny man,” said one of the cooks, who’d probably heard the stale joke two or three times already. “Get out of here, funny man, before you end up wearing this pot.”

“Your sweetheart’s the one who knows about dead man’s cock,” the other cook put in.

“Your wife, you mean.” Laughing, Talsu sat down on a rock, took the knife from his belt, and cut off a bite-sized chunk of sausage. It was greasy, and would have been flavorless except that it was heading toward stale. Along with the porridge, it filled his belly. That was the most he would say for it. He wondered if Colonel Dzirnavu had ever tasted what his men ate. He doubted it. If Dzirnavu tasted sausage like that, the Algarvians in Tricarico would hear him screaming.

Presently, the regimental commander deigned to emerge from the tent. With green-brown tunic and trousers stretched tight to cover his globular frame, with bejeweled medallions of nobility glittering on his chest, with rank badges shining from his shoulder straps, he resembled nothing so much as a heroic coconut. “My men!” he said, and the sagging flesh under his chin wobbled. “My men, you have not advanced far enough or fast enough to satisfy our most magnificent sovereign, his Radiant Splendor, King Donalitu V. Press ahead more bravely henceforward, that he may be more pleased with you.”

One of Talsu’s friends, a tall, skinny chap named Smilsu, murmured, “You don’t suppose it’s ever crossed the king’s mind that one of the reasons we haven’t gone farther and faster is that we’ve got Colonel Dzirnavu commanding, do you?”

“He’s Count Dzirnavu, too, so what can you do?” Talsu answered. “The only thing that would happen if we moved fast against the Algarvians is that we’d leave him behind.” He paused for a moment. “Might be the best thing that could happen to the regiment.”

Smilsu snickered, hard enough to draw a glare from a sergeant. Talsu loathed sergeants and pitied them at the same time. They made themselves as hateful as possible to the men of their own estate under them, knowing all the while that the officers above them despised them for their low birth, and that, however heroically they might serve, they could not hope to become officers themselves.

Colonel Dzirnavu, perhaps exhausted at having addressed his soldiers, retreated behind canvas once more. Smilsu said, “You notice the king is displeased with us, not even with us and the colonel?”

“So it goes,” Talsu said resignedly. “When we win the war, though, he’ll be pleased with the colonel and then, if he happens to recollect, with us, too.”

From inside the tent, Dzirnavu let out a bellow. Vartu hurried in to see what his master required. Then he hurried out again. When he returned, he was carrying a small, square bottle of dark green glass.

“What have you got there?” Talsu asked. He knew the answer, but wanted to see what Dzirnavu’s servant would say.

Sure enough, Vartu had a word for it: “Restorative.”

Talsu laughed. “Make sure he’s good and restored, then. If he’s back here snoring while the rest of us fight the Algarvians up ahead, we’ll all be better off.”

“No, no, no.” Smilsu shook his head. “Just restore him enough to get him fighting mad, Vartu. I want to see him go charging between the rocks, straight at the Algarvians. They’ll run like rabbits—like little fluffy bunnies they’ll run. They won’t have figured we’d be able to bring a behemoth through the mountains.”

Vartu snickered. He almost dropped the dark green bottle, and had to make a desperate lunge for it. Fortunately for him, he caught it. Unfortunately for him, Colonel Dzirnavu chose that moment to bellow again: “Confound it, Vartu, you worthless turd, what are you doing out there, fiddling with yourself?”

“If you were fiddling with yourself, you’d be having more- fun than you are now,” Talsu told the servant. With a sigh, Vartu went off to deliver the therapeutic dose to his master.

“If he liked the illustrious count better, we couldn’t talk to him the way we do,” Smilsu said.

“If he liked the illustrious count better, we’d probably like the illustrious count better, too, and we wouldn’t have to talk to him the way we do,” Talsu said.

His friend chewed on that, then slowly nodded. “Some nobles do make good officers,” Smilsu admitted. “If they didn’t, we never would have won the Six Years’ War, I don’t suppose.”

“I don’t know about that,” Talsu said. “I don’t know about that at all. The Algarvians have noble officers, too.”

“Heh.” Smilsu shook a fist at Talsu. “Now look what you’ve gone and done, you lousy traitor.”

“What are you talking about?” Talsu demanded.

“You’ve made me feel sorry for the stinking enemy, that’s what.” Smilsu paused, as if considering. “Not too sorry to blaze away at him and put him out of his misery, I guess. Maybe I won’t have to report you after all.”