Harry Turtledove: Darkness Descending

“It is, and Mezentio is a far more sensible sovereign on his worst day than Swemmel on his best,” Hajjaj said, which made the colonel laugh. But the Zuwayzi foreign minister continued, “If the war goes on as it has been going, would you not say our frontier is liable to march with Algarve’s before long?”

“Hmm.” Now the corners of Muhassin’s mouth turned down. “Something to that, I shouldn’t wonder. The Algarvians are moving west at a powerful clip, aren’t they? Still and all, they’ll make better neighbors than Unkerlanters ever did. Aye, they wear clothes, but they have some notion of honor.”

Hajjaj chuckled under his breath. It wasn’t that Muhassin was wrong. It was just that what the Zuwayzin and the Algarvians had in common was a long tradition of fighting their neighbors when those neighbors were weak and fighting among themselves when their neighbors were strong. It wasn’t that the Unkerlanters didn’t fight; they did. Zuwayza would not have been free but for the Unkerlanters’ Twinkings War, when both Swemmel and his brother, Kyot, claimed to be the elder, and so deserving of the throne. But Unkerlanters did not fight for the sport of it, as both Zuwayzin and Algarvians were wont to do.

“Come on, your Excellency,” Muhassin said. “The encampment is over that rise there.” He pointed and then booted his camel back into motion. The beast’s complaints at having to work once more sounded as if it had been given over to the king of Jelgava’s torturers. Hajjaj also got his camel going again. It too sounded martyred. He had little sympathy for it. Though descended from nomads, he greatly preferred ley-line caravans to obstreperous animals.

But the Zuwayzin had done their best to sabotage the ley lines as the Unkerlanters drove northward. King Swemmel’s sorcerers had repaired some of the lines, only to sabotage them in turn when the Zuwayzin began pushing south once more. These days, naked black mages worked to undo what Swemmel’s wizards had done. Nobody could sabotage a camel; the powers above had already taken care of that. However revolting the beasts were, though, Hajjaj would rather have gone by camel’s back than by shank’s mare.

At the encampment, a comfortable tent and a great flagon of date wine awaited him. He drank it down almost in one long draught. In Algarve, he’d learned to appreciate fine vintages. Next to them, this stuff was cloying, sticky-sweet. He didn’t care. He always drank it without complaint whenever it was served to him in Zuwayza, as it often was. It put him in mind of clan gatherings when he was a child. Visiting Algarvians might turn up their noses at the stuff, but he was no visiting Algarvian. To him, it was a taste of home.

Colonel Muhassin’s superior, General Ikhshid, greeted Hajjaj after he had begun to refresh himself. The general gave him more date wine, and tea fragrant with mint, and little cakes almost as good as he could have had in the royal palace. Hajjaj enjoyed the leisurely rituals of hospitality for the same reason he enjoyed the date wine: lifelong familiarity.

Ikhshid was not far from Hajjaj’s age, and quite a bit paunchier, but seemed vigorous enough. “We drive them, your Excellency,” he said when small talk was at last set aside. “We drive them. The Algarvians drive them. Down in the south, even the Yaninans drive them, which I would not have reckoned possible. Swemmel heads up a beaten kingdom, and I am not the least bit sorry.”

“Few in Zuwayza would sorrow to see Unkerlant beaten,” Hajjaj said, and then, meditatively, “I would like our allies better if they ruled less harshly the lands they have conquered. Of course, I would like the Unkerlanters better if they were less harsh, too.”

“When you have to choose between whoresons, you choose the ones who’ll give you more of what you want,” Ikhshid said, a comment close in spirit to Muhassin’s.

“That is indeed what we have done,” Hajjaj said. He looked toward the east, the direction from which the Algarvians were advancing. Then he looked toward the south, the direction in which the Unkerlanters were retreating. He sighed, “The most we can hope for is that we have made the right choice.”

When the ley-line caravan in which Fernao was traveling reached the border between Lagoas and Kuusamo, it glided to a halt. Kuusaman customs agents swarmed aboard to inspect all the passengers and all their belongings. “What’s this in aid of?” Fernao asked when his turn came, which did not take long.

“A precaution,” the flat-faced little inspector answered, which was more polite than None of your cursed business but no more informative. “Please open all your bags.” That, too, was more polite than a barked order, but left the Lagoan sorcerer no more room to disobey. When the Kuusaman customs agent came upon the letter of introduction from Grandmaster Pinhiero to Siuntio, he stiffened.

“Something wrong?” Fernao asked with an inward groan; he’d hoped the letter would save him trouble, not cause it.

“I don’t know,” the Kuusaman answered. He raised his voice: “Over here, Louhikko! I’ve got a mage.”

Louhikko proved to be a mage himself: probably, if Fernao was any judge, of the second rank. The spells he used to examine Fernao’s baggage, though, had been devised by sorcerers more potent than he. He spoke to the inspector in their own language, then nodded to Fernao and left.

“He says you have nothing untoward,” the customs agent told Fernao. He sounded reluctant to admit it and demanded, “Why do you come to see one of our mages? Answer at once; don’t pause to make up lies.”

Fernao stared at him. “Is this Kuusamo or Unkerlant?” he asked, not altogether in jest: such sharp questions were most unlike the usually easygoing Kuusamans. “I’ve come to consult with your illustrious mage on matters of professional interest to both of us.”

“There is a war on,” the Kuusaman snapped.

“True, but Kuusamo and Lagoas are not enemies,” Fernao said.

“Neither are we allies,” the customs agent said, which was also true. He glowered at Fernao, who made a point of staying in his seat: a lot of Kuusamans did not care to be reminded that they ran half a head shorter than Lagoans. Muttering something in his own language under his breath, the Kuusaman went on to search the belongings of the woman in the seat behind Fernao.

The inspection held up the caravan for three hours. One luckless fellow in Fernao’s car got thrown off. The Kuusamans paid no attention to his howls of protest. Only after they got him out of the car and onto the ground did one of them say, “Be thankful we didn’t take you on to Yliharma. You’d like that a lot less, believe me.” The ousted man shut up with a snap.

At last, the ley-line caravan got moving again. It glided across the snow-covered landscape. The forests and hills and fields of Kuusamo were very little different from those of Lagoas. Nor should they have been, not when the kingdom and the land of the Seven Princes shared the same island. The towns in which the caravan stopped might for the most part have been Lagoan towns as readily as Kuusaman. For the past hundred years and more, public buildings and places of business had looked much alike in the two realms.

But when the caravan slid past villages and most of all when it slid past farms, Fernao was conscious of no longer traveling through his own kingdom. Even the haystacks were different. The Kuusamans topped theirs with cloths they sometimes embroidered, so the stacks looked like old, stooped grannies with scarves on their heads.

And the farmhouses, or some of them, struck Fernao as odd. Before the soldiers and settlers of the Kaunian Empire crossed the Strait of Valmiera, the Kuusamans had been nomads, herders. They’d learned farming fast, but to this day, more than fifteen hundred years later, some of their buildings, though made from wood and stone, were still in the shape of the tents in which they had once dwelt.