Harry Turtledove: Darkness Descending

“Nor shall you learn,” Waddo said, “for surely our brave warriors and fliers shall drive back the Algarvians long before they enter Zossen.” He looked toward the east with complete certainty.

“So may it be,” Garivald said from the bottom of his heart.

Unlike so many Zuwayzin, Hajjaj was not fond of the desert for its own sake. He was a city man, most at home in Bishah or in the capitals of the other kingdoms of the continent of Derlavai. And he loathed camels with a loathing both deep and passionate, a loathing based on more experience than he cared to remember. Riding on camelback through the desert, then, should have been nothing but ennui and discomfort.

Instead, he found himself smiling from ear to ear as he rode along. This waste of thornbushes and sand and yellow stone had been seized by Unkerlant more than a year before. Now it was back in Zuwayzi hands, where the Treaty of Blu-denz said it belonged--not that King Swemmel had paid any attention to the treaty when he invaded Zuwayza. That made it worth seeing, worth riding through, even if it was full of scorpions and lizards and bat-eared foxes just like any other stretch of desert.

Hajjaj’s escort, a colonel named Muhassin, pointed to corpses from which vultures and ravens reluctantly flew as the camels ambled past them. “Here, your Excellency, the Unkerlanters made a stand. They fought bravely, but that did not save them.”

“They are brave,” Hajjaj said. “They are mostly ignorant and ruled by a king half a madman, but they are brave.”

Muhassin adjusted his hat, which bore four silver bars--one broad, with three narrow ones beneath it--to show his rank. Zuwayzi officers had trouble making themselves as impressive as did their counterparts in other kingdoms, being limited to their headgear as an area for display: like Hajjaj, Muhassin wore hat and sandals and nothing else covering the brown skin between the one and the others. “They are dead now,” Muhassin said, “dead or fled or captured.”

“It is good,” Hajjaj said, and the colonel nodded. The Zuwayzi foreign minister stroked his neat white beard, then went on, “Do I understand correctly that they were not here in great strength?”

“Aye, your Excellency,” Muhassin replied. “Of course, they are somewhat occupied elsewhere. Otherwise, I have no doubt, we should not have enjoyed such an easy time of it.”

“Powers above be praised that we did catch them unprepared to fight back hard,” Hajjaj said. “Perhaps they did not believe everything Shaddad told them. My own secretary! Powers below eat the traitor! I had a scorpion in my own sandal there, and did not know it. But he did less harm than he might have.”

“Perhaps it did not matter so much whether they believed him or not,” Muhassin said. Hajjaj raised an eyebrow. The broad brim of his hat kept Muhassin from seeing that, but the colonel explained himself anyway: “If you were about to fight Algarve and Zuwayza at the same time, where would you place most of your warriors?”

Hajjaj considered that for a moment, then chuckled wryly. “I don’t suppose King Swemmel crouches under his throne from fear of our parading through the streets of Cottbus on these ugly, mangy, ungainly brutes.” He patted the side of his camel’s neck with what looked something like affection.

Muhassin stroked his camel with what was obviously the genuine article. “Don’t listen to him, Sunbeam,” he crooned. “Everyone knows you’re not mangy.” The camel rewarded that limited endorsement by twisting around and trying to bite his knee. He smacked it in the nose. It let out a noise like a bagpipe being horribly murdered. Hajjaj threw back his head and laughed. Muhassin gave him a wounded look.

A column of glum-looking Unkerlanters came toward them. Naked Zuwayzi soldiers herded the men in rock-gray along. The Zuwayzin were in high spirits, singing and joking about the victories they’d won. They also made comments their captives were lucky they could not understand.

“Stop them for a moment, Colonel, if you’d be so kind,” Hajjaj murmured to Muhassin. The officer called orders. The captives’ guards shouted in broken Unkerlanter. The light-skinned men halted. In Algarvian, Hajjaj asked, “Does anyone speak this language?”

“I do, sir,” an Unkerlanter said, stepping forward.

“Don’t you wish your kingdom would have let mine alone?” Hajjaj asked him.

“I don’t know anything about that, sir,” the captive said, bowing low as he would have to one of his own nobles. “All I know is, they told me to come up here and do my best, and that’s what I tried to do. Only trouble is, it didn’t turn out to be good enough.” He looked warily at Hajjaj. “You won’t eat me, will you, sir?”

“Is that what they tell you Zuwayzin are like?” Hajjaj asked, and the Unkerlanter nodded. Hajjaj sighed sadly. “You don’t look very appetizing, so I think I’ll be able to do without.” He turned to Muhassin. “Did you follow that?”

“Aye, I did,” Muhassin answered in Zuwayzi. “He’s no fool. He speaks Algarvian well--a better accent than I have myself, as a matter of fact. But he doesn’t know anything about us.” He chuckled in grim anticipation. “Well, he’ll have his chance to find out.”

“So he will. There’s always work to be done in the mines.” Hajjaj gestured to the column of captives. “They may go on now.”

Muhassin spoke to the guards. The guards shouted at the captives. The captives shambled forward again. Muhassin turned back to Hajjaj. “And now, your Excellency, shall we go on toward the old frontier, the frontier we are restoring?”

“By all means, Colonel,” the foreign minister said. His camel wasn’t so interested in going on, but he managed to persuade it.

“Here and there, we’re already in position to cross the old frontier,” Muhassin said. As if to underscore his words, a squadron of dragons flew by overhead, going south. Muhassin pointed to them. “We couldn’t have come so far so fast without help from the Algarvians. Unkerlant hasn’t got but a few dragons up here in the north country.”

“Cross the old frontier?” Hajjaj frowned. “Has King Shazli authorized the army to invade Unkerlant itself? I had not heard of any such order.” He wondered if Shazli had given the order but not told him for fear of angering or alarming him. That would have been courteous of the king--courteous, aye, but also, in Hajjaj’s view, deadly dangerous.

To his vast relief, Muhassin shook his head. “No, your Excellency: as yet, we have received no such orders. I merely meant to inform you that we have the ability, should the orders come. A fair number of folk south of the old frontier--and east of it, too--have dark skins.” He ran a dark finger along his own arm.

“That is so,” the foreign minister agreed. “Still, if a small kingdom can take back what rightfully belongs to it, it should count itself lucky, the more so in these days when great kingdoms are so mighty. We would need something of a miracle to come away with more than we had at the beginning.”

“It is with feuds among kingdoms as it is with feuds among clans,” Muhassin replied. “A small clan with strong friends may come out on top of a large one whose neighbors all hate it.”

“What you say is true, but the small clan often ends up becoming the client of the clan that befriended it,” Hajjaj said. “I do not want us to become Algarve’s clients, any more than I wanted us to be Unkerlant’s clients back in the days before the Six Years’ War, when Zuwayza was ruled from Cottbus.”

“No man loves this kingdom more than you, your Excellency, and no one has served her better,” Colonel Muhassin said, by which flowery introduction Hajjaj knew the colonel was about to contradict him. Sure enough, Muhassin went on, “We have had the accursed Unkerlanters on our southern border for centuries. Our frontier does not march with Algarve, and so we have less to fear from King Mezentio than from King Swemmel. Is this not your own view as well?”