Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

“I’d be sure you were right, if only I thought the Algarvians had that much upstairs.” Without doing anything more than sitting a little straighter, Smilsu managed to convey the Algarvians’ swaggering pomposity. As he slumped back down, he went on, “And you’d better not say anything like that around anybody you’re not sure of, either, or you’ll be sorry for a long time.”

Vartu came out of Dzirnavu’s tent just then. Talsu and Smilsu both fell silent. Talsu liked the colonel’s servant, and trusted him fairly far, but not far enough to speak treason in front of him.

Mumbling under his breath, Vartu stalked past the two soldiers. A moment later, Talsu heard him yelling at a cook. The cook yelled back. Smilsu’s snicker was amused and sympathetic at the same time. “Poor Vartu,” he said. “He gets it from both sides at once.”

“So do all of us,” Talsu answered, “from our officers and from the Algarvians.”

“Someone put vinegar in your beer this morning, that’s plain,” Smilsu said. “Why don’t you go over there and scream at the cooks, too?”

“Because they’d stick a carving knife in me or hit me over the head with a pot,” Talsu said. “I can’t get away with things like that. I’m not a count, or even servant to a count.”

“Aye, you’re a no-account, all right,” Smilsu said, whereupon Talsu felt like hitting him over the head with a pot.

After their less than magnificent breakfast, the Jelgavan soldiers cautiously advanced. Exhortations from King Donalitu to move faster kept coming forward. Colonel Dzirnavu would read them out whenever they did, and would blame the men for not living up to their sovereign’s requests. Then he and his superiors would order another tiptoeing step ahead, and would seem surprised when King Donalitu found it necessary to exhort the troops again.

The Algarvians did their best to make life unpleasant for their foes, too. The country through which Talsu and his comrades moved was made for defense. One stubborn soldier with a stick who found a good hiding place could hold up a company. There were plenty of good hiding places to find, and plenty of stubborn Algarvians to fill them. Each redhead had to be flanked out and flushed from cover, which made what would have been a slow business slower.

And the Algarvians had taken to burying eggs in the ground, and attaching to them trips lines that would rupture their shells. A soldier who didn’t watch where he put his feet was liable to go up in a great gout of sorcerous fire. That slowed the Jelgavans, too, till dowsers could find the eggs and mark paths past them.

Most of the redheads who lived in the mountain country had fled to lower ground farther west. A few people, though, were obstinate, as Jelgavan mountain folk also had a name for being. Talsu captured an old Algarvian with a bald head, a big white mustache, and knobby knees and hairy calves sticking out from under the hem of his kilt. “Come on, gramps,” he said, and gestured with his stick. “I’m going to take you back to our encampment so they can ask you some questions.”

“A dog should flitter you,” the old man growled in accented Jelgavan.

He added a couple of other choice oaths in Talsu’s language, then fell back on Algarvian. Talsu didn’t know any Algarvian, but he didn’t think the captive was paying him compliments. All he did was gesture with the stick again. Cursing still, the old man got moving.

Back at the camp, a bored-looking lieutenant who spoke Algarvian started questioning Talsu’s captive. The old man kept right on cursing, or so Talsu thought. The lieutenant stopped looking bored and started looking harassed. Talsu hid a smile. He didn’t mind seeing an officer sweat, even if it was because of an Algarvian.

He was about to head off toward the front line again when a trooper from a different company brought in another cursing captive. Talsu stopped and stared. Everyone who heard those curses stopped and stared. The other soldier’s captive (you lucky bastard, Talsu thought) was a good-looking—a very good-looking—woman of about twenty-five. Coppery hair flowed halfway down her back. Her knees were not knobby, nor her calves hairy. Talsu examined them carefully to make sure of those facts.

Her curses even drew from his tent Colonel Dzirnavu, who had been in there alone except, perhaps, for a bottle of what his servant called restorative. By the lurch in his stride, he was quite thoroughly restored. His eyes needed a moment before they lit on the captive. “Well, well,” he said when they finally did. “What have we here?”

“That’s what they call a woman,” a soldier near Talsu muttered. “Haven’t you ever seen one before?” Talsu coughed to keep from laughing out loud.

Dzirnavu advanced on her at a ponderous waddle. He looked her up and down, plainly imagining everything the tunic and kilt concealed. She looked him up and down, too. Her face also showed what she was thinking. Talsu would not have wanted anyone, let alone a good-looking woman, thinking such things about him.

“Where did you find her?” Dzirnavu asked the soldier who had brought her back to camp. “Spying on us, unless I miss my guess.”

“Lord, she was going into a little cottage up ahead.” The trooper pointed. “My thought is, she was trying to take away a few last things before she fled for good.”

The Algarvian woman pointed at Dzirnavu. “Where did you find him?” she asked the soldier who had captured her. Her Jelgavan was accented but fluent. “I would say under a flat rock, but where would you find a flat rock big enough to hide him?”

Like most Jelgavans, Dzirnavu was quite fair. That let Talsu watch the flush mount from his beefy neck to his hairline. “She is a spy,” he snapped. “She must be a spy. Take her to my tent.” A murky light kindled in his bloodshot gray eyes. “I shall attend to her interrogation personally.”

Talsu could think of only one thing that might mean. He knew a moment’s pity for the Algarvian woman, even if he wouldn’t have minded having her himself. Dzirnavu’s “interrogation,” though, was liable to crush her to death—and he wouldn’t learn anything while he was doing it.

After a while, the soldier who’d captured the woman came out of the tent. His face bore a curious mixture of excitement and disgust. “He had me cover her while he tied her to the bed,” he reported, and then, “He made her lie on her belly.”

Along with his comrades, Talsu sadly shook his head. “Waste of a woman, especially one so pretty,” he said. “If that’s what he’s got in mind, he could do it with a boy instead.”

“Officers have all the fun,” the other soldier said, “and they get to pick what kind of fun they have.”

Since Talsu couldn’t argue with that, he started back toward the front line. He hadn’t gone far before the Algarvian woman screamed. It sounded more like outrage than anguish. Whatever it was, it was none of his business. He kept walking.

When he returned to the encampment at suppertime, no one had been into or out of the regimental commander’s tent since he’d left. “You should have heard what he called me when I asked him if he needed anything an hour ago,” Vartu said.

“Is the redhead still screaming in there?” Talsu asked. Dzirnavu’s servant shook his head. Talsu sighed. Maybe she’d seen screaming did her no good. Maybe, too, she was in no shape to scream any more. From what he knew of Dzirnavu, he found that more likely. He stood in line for supper. If Dzirnavu was skipping a meal for the sake of his pleasure, it wouldn’t hurt him a bit. No sound at all came from the tent. Eventually, Talsu rolled himself in his blanket and went to sleep.

Dzirnavu’s tent was still quiet when Talsu woke up the next morning. When Vartu cautiously asked whether the count wanted breakfast, no one answered. Even more cautiously, the servant stuck his head in through the flap. He recoiled, clapping a hand to his mouth. He choked out one word: “Blood!”