Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

Also quietly, Talsu answered, “That’s when they start teaching a new dowser how to do the job.” His friend nodded.

Had the Algarvians been present in large numbers, sergeants would have needed to start teaching a lot of new Jelgavan soldiers how to do the job. But the redheads could not take advantage of the way they had stalled their opponents. Before long, the dowser stopped finding eggs to mark. The company started moving faster again. The dowser went along in case the men ran into—literally and metaphorically—another troublesome belt of land.

But they didn’t, and soon began blazing into the pear orchard from the side. The Algarvians had been protecting themselves behind trees against an attack from the front. And, as soon as Colonel Adomu realized his flanking force finally was doing what he’d intended it to do, in went that attack from the front.

That made the Algarvians stop paying so much attention to Talsu and his friends. Vartu let out a whoop, then howled, “Now we’ve got ’em!”

Talsu hoped Colonel Dzirnavu’s former servant was right. If he was wrong, a lot of Jelgavans would end up dead, Talsu all too probably among them. He howled, too, as much to hold fear at bay as for any other reason.

Then he and the rest of the Jelgavans got in among the pear trees themselves, flushing out the Algarvians like so many partridges. Some of the redheads, their positions overrun, threw down their sticks and threw up their hands in token of surrender. They were no more anxious to die than their Jelgavan counterparts.

Smilsu cursed. “My beam’s run dry!” he shouted angrily. A moment later, nothing happened when Talsu thrust his finger into the touch-hole of his own stick. Like Smilsu, he’d used up all the power in it while reaching the pear orchard. Now, when he needed it most, he did not have it.

“Where’s that cursed dowser?” he called. “He can give us a hand. We haven’t sent all the captives to the rear yet, have we?”

“No,” Vartu said from behind him. “We’ve still got a few of them left with us.” He raised his voice to a furious bellow, a good imitation of that of the late, unlamented (at least by Talsu) Colonel Dzirnavu: “Stake ’em out! Tie ’em down! Let’s get some good out of ’em, anyway, the filthy redheads.”

Some of the Algarvian captives understood Jelgavan, either because they came from near the border or because they’d studied classical Kaunian in school and could get the drift of the daughter language. They howled fearful protests. The Jelgavans ignored those, flinging a couple of redheaded soldiers down on to their backs and tying their arms and legs to stakes and tree trunks.

“You’d do the same to us if your sticks were running low,” a Jelgavan soldier said, not without some sympathy. “You know it cursed well, too.”

“Where’s that dowser?” Talsu called again. The fellow shambled up just then, still looking very much like an unmade bed. Seeing the spread-eagled Algarvians, he nodded. He was no first-rank mage, but he didn’t need to be, not for the sorcery the Jelgavan soldiers had in mind.

“Set your dead sticks on them,” he said, and Talsu and the others who could not blaze obeyed. The dowser drew a knife from his belt and stooped beside the nearer Algarvian captive. He yanked up the Algarvian’s chin by the coppery whiskers that grew there, then cut his throat as if butchering a hog. Blood fountained forth. The dowser chanted in classical Kaunian. When he was through—and when the Algarvian soldier he’d sacrificed had quit writhing—some of the Jelgavans snatched up their sticks from the dead man’s chest.

Talsu’s stick lay on the second Algarvian. The dowser sacrificed him, too. Such rough magic in the field wasted a good deal of the captives’ life energy. Talsu cared not at all. What mattered to him was that enough of the energy had flowed into his stick to recharge it fully. As soon as the dowser nodded, he grabbed the stick and hurried forward to do more fighting. It blazed just as it should have.

Before long, the two-pronged Jelgavan attack drove the Algarvians from the pear orchard. But, just as victory became assured, a cry rose from the men who’d made the assault on the front of the orchard: “The colonel’s down! The stinking redheads blazed Colonel Adomu!”

“Powers above!” Talsu groaned. “What sort of overbred fool will they foist on us now?” He didn’t know. He couldn’t know, not yet. He was afraid of finding out.

Brivibas gave Vanai a severe look, as he’d been doing for the past couple of weeks. “My granddaughter, I must tell you yet again that you were too forward, much too forward, with that barbarian boy you met in the woods.”

Vanai rolled her eyes. Brivibas had trained her to dutiful obedience, but his carping was wearing thin. No: by now, his carping had worn thin. “All we did was swap a few mushrooms, my grandfather. We were polite while we did it, aye. You have taught me to be polite to everyone, have you not?”

“And would he have stayed polite to you, had I not happened to come up when I did?” Brivibas demanded.

“I think so,” Vanai answered with a toss of her head. “He seemed perfectly well behaved—better than some of the Kaunian boys here on Oyngestun.”

That distracted her grandfather, as she’d hoped it would. “What?” he said, his eyes going wide. “What have they done to you? What have they tried to do to you?” He looked furious. Was he, could he possibly have been, remembering some of the things he’d tried to do to girls before he met Vanai’s grandmother? That was hard to imagine. Even harder was imagining him doing things like that with her grandmother.

“They’ve tried more than that Ealstan ever did,” she said. “They couldn’t have tried less, because he didn’t try anything at all. He spent a lot of time talking about his brother, who’s an Algarvian captive.”

“I do pity even a Forthwegian in Algarvian hands,” Brivibas said. By his tone, he pitied Kaunians in Algarvian hands far more. But, again, he found himself distracted, this time by a historical parallel: “The Algarvians have always been harsh on their captives. Recall how, under their chieftain Ziliante, they so cruelly sacked and ravaged the city of Adutiskis.” He spoke as if the sack had happened the week before rather than in the waning days of the Kaunian Empire.

“Well, then!” Vanai tossed her head again. “You see, you don’t need to worry about Ealstan after all.”

She’d made a mistake. She knew it as soon as the words were out of her mouth. And, sure enough, Brivibas pounced on it: “I would worry far less had you forgotten the young barbarian’s name.”

Had he stopped nagging her about Ealstan, she probably would have forgotten the Forthwegian’s name in short order. As things were, he looked more attractive every time her grandfather made a rude comment about him. If such a thing had happened to Brivibas during his long-ago youth, it had fallen from his memory in the years since.

“He was very nice,” Vanai said. Even handsome, in the dark, blocky Forthwegian way, she thought. Having made one mistake, she did not compound it by letting her grandfather learn of that thought.

He did not need to learn of it to keep on carping. After a while, Vanai got tired of listening to him and went out to the courtyard around which the house was built. She didn’t stay as long as she’d thought she would. For one thing, a raw breeze made her shiver. The sun ducked in and out from behind gray, nasty-looking clouds. And the courtyard, no longer bright with flowers as it had been through spring and summer, seemed a far less pleasant refuge than it would have been then. The alabaster bowl into which the fountain splashed was a genuine Kaunian antiquity, but it too failed to delight her. Her lip curled. Living with her grandfather was living with an antiquity. She needed no more examples.