Authors: Harry Turtledove
“Ah.” Magnulf thought about that, then nodded. “I see what you’re saying,” he continued, also speaking quietly. “It makes sense, I suppose, but no, from all I’ve heard, the border is quiet.”
“Good.” Leudast started to turn away, but something else occurred to him: “Are we going to jump the Algarvians?”
Just for a moment, Magnulf’s eyes went very wide. Then he caught himself and answered, “No, of course not. What a daft notion.”
He was lying. Leudast was as sure of that as of his own name. He wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He wished the idea had chosen a different time to pop into his head. He could have told himself it was so much moonshine, so much hogwash. Now he knew different. He sighed. The impressers hadn’t asked him if he wanted to join the army. They’d told him what would happen if he didn’t. It had seemed horrifying at the time. Next to what he’d seen since, it didn’t look so bad.
Magnulf flipped him a coin. “Get the squad billeted, then go over to the tavern and buy yourself some ale or some wine or whatever suits you.”
Leudast stared at the silver bit. King Penda’s image stared back at him—it was a Forthwegian coin. Then Leudast stared at Magnulf. The sergeant had never tossed him money before. Maybe Magnulf did it because he was a corporal now, not a common soldier. Maybe, on the other hand, Magnulf did it so he would forget about the question he’d asked.
“Go on, get moving,” Magnulf said. Some sergeantly snap returned to his voice, but only some—or was Leudast letting his imagination run away with him?
He didn’t want to find out the hard way. “Aye, Sergeant,” he said. “Thanks.” He put the silver bit in his own belt pouch, then followed orders. No Unkerlanter who did exactly as his superior told him could go far wrong. King Swemmel’s reign had changed a good many things, but not that. Never that.
As he strode through the village toward the tavern, the Forthwegians sent him resentful stares. His uniform tunic and his clean-shaven face marked him as an Unkerlanter, a foreigner, an occupier. But the Forthwegians didn’t say anything where he could hear them. They’d learned the hard way that Unkerlanters could follow enough of their language to recognize insults.
A couple of soldiers were already inside the tavern when Leudast came through the door. Maybe they weren’t supposed to be there, for they got up in alarm. They weren’t from his company, so he didn’t care what they did. He waved them back to their stools and went up to the tavernkeeper. “Plain spirits,” he said, speaking slowly and distinctly so the Forthwegian couldn’t misunderstand him.
“Aye, plain spirits,” the fellow said, but he moved like a sleepwalker till Leudast set the silver bit Magnulf had given him on the counter. After that, Leudast got his drink very fast.
He sat down and sipped from the glass. The tavernkeeper had given him what he’d asked for, but even plain Forthwegian spirits tasted a little different from those brewed in Unkerlant. The Forthwegians also drank spirits they’d stored inside charred wooden casks, sometimes for years. Leudast had tried those, too—once. One taste was plenty to put him off them forever.
A Forthwegian paused in the doorway, saw three Unkerlanter soldiers inside the tavern, and decided to come back another time. The tavern-keeper sighed and swiped a wet rag over the counter with more force than the job needed.
One of the common soldiers laughed. He said to his friend, “The old boy’s mad he’s lost a customer. He ought to be cursed glad we pay him anything at all.”
“Aye.” His friend laughed, too. “Better than he deserves, you ask me.”
The tavernkeeper polished the counter harder than ever. Just as Unkerlanters could understand some Forthwegian, Forthwegians could follow some Unkerlanter. This old boy probably wished he couldn’t.
Leudast looked down into his glass of spirits. All at once, he knocked it back with a flick of the wrist. The spirits might have been plain, but they weren’t smooth; he felt as if a dragon had breathed fire down his throat. Even so, he got up, bought another glass, and poured it down. He didn’t feel any better after he’d drunk it, nor did he dare have a third; Magnulf hadn’t given him leave to get drunk. But two glasses of spirits weren’t nearly enough to make him feel easy about the prospect of going forward against the Algarvians.
Marshal Rathar was fighting a campaign he could not possibly win: memoranda and reports piled up on his desk faster than he was able to deal with them. He might have had a better chance to catch up had King Swemmel taken a couple of week’s holiday at the spas west of Cottbus or at the royal hunting lodge in the woods to the south.
But, as Rathar had seen, Swemmel did not take holidays. For one thing, the king did not care to leave the capital, lest a usurper seize the reins of government while he was away. For another, Swemmel had no passions—indeed, so far as Rathar knew, had no interests—save ruling.
The marshal studied a map of what had been Forthweg and was now divided between Unkerlant and Algarve, as it had been before the Six Years’ War. He studied the blue arrows that showed Unkerlanter forces slashing into eastern Forthweg and taking it away from King Mezentio’s men. He noted only one flaw in the plan, which had King Swemmel’s enthusiastic support: it required that the Algarvians not do anything out of the ordinary—
like resisting,
he thought with a snort.
When he looked up from that alarmingly optimistic map, he discovered a young lieutenant from the crystallomancy section standing in the doorway waiting to be noticed. “What is it?” Rathar asked, gruffness covering embarrassment—how long had the poor fellow been gathering dust there while he stayed in his brown study?
“My lord Marshal, his Majesty requires your presence in his audience chamber in an hour’s time,” the lieutenant replied. He touched his right hand to his forehead and bowed in salute, then turned on his heel and hurried away.
Well, that answered that: with a message from King Swemmel, the fellow had not been waiting long. Had Rathar not looked up almost at once, the lieutenant would have interrupted him. Swemmel’s commands took precedence over everything else in Unkerlant.
For the sake of the kingdom, he endured stripping off his marshal’s sword and hanging it in the anteroom to the audience chamber. For the sake of his kingdom, he endured the bodyguards’ intimate attentions. “You should have seen that crazy old Zuwayzi, my lord,” one of the guards said, patting the insides of his thighs. “He took off his clothes so we could search ‘em. Have you ever heard the like?”
“Hajjaj?” Rathar asked, and the bodyguard nodded. The marshal went on, “He’s not crazy—he’s a very clever, very able man. And if you don’t have a little care with your hand there, I may do the same thing the next time the king summons me.”
That scandalized the guards, but not enough to make the search any less thorough. When they were finally satisfied Rathar carried no lethal implements, they suffered him to enter the audience chamber. He went through the prescribed prostrations and acclamations before King Swemmel, then received the king’s permission to rise.
“How may I serve your Majesty?” he asked—always the question with Swemmel. That was what the king was for: to be served.
“In the matter concerning the war to come against Algarve,” Swemmel answered.
Rathar had hoped his sovereign would say that—hoped for it and dreaded it at the same time. With Swemmel, nothing was ever simple. “I am yours to command, your Majesty,” he said.
I
am also going to talk you out of anything excessively foolish,
he thought.
I
am
going to do that, if you give me half a chance. Even if you give me a quarter of a chance, I am going to do it.
He hid such thoughts away. Having them was dangerous. Showing them was fatal. And Swemmel, who stared down at him from his high seat like a bird of prey, had a bloodhound’s nose for them. The king’s genius ran in twisted channels, but ran strong where it did run. Rathar’s stolidity was not the least of the assets that had helped him rise to his present rank.
Swemmel said, “Algarve wars in the east. King Mezentio pays Unkerlant no mind. The best time to strike a redhead is when his back is turned.”
“All you say is true, your Majesty.” For a sentence, Rathar could be fulsome and tell the truth at the same time, and he took full advantage of that. It let him go on, “But recall, I beg, that Algarve also warred in the west when we reclaimed western Forthweg. Then you were scrupulous not to molest Mezentio’s men, and also scrupulous not to go beyond Unkerlant’s boundaries before the Six Years’ War.”
“Mezentio would have been looking for us to strike him then,” King Swemmel replied. “He is a devious man, Mezentio.” Coming from Swemmel, that was no small praise—or perhaps simply a matter of like recognizing like. “But we did not strike. Now we have lulled him. Now he thinks we will not strike. He may even think—we hope he does think—we fear to strike against Algarve.”
Rathar feared to strike against Algarve. He and his aides had spent a lot of time examining the way the Algarvians had pierced the Forthwegian army like a spear piercing flesh. In the privacy of his own mind, he set the redheads’ performance against the way the Unkerlanter army had handled itself facing the Zuwayzin. He found the comparison so alarming, he kept it to himself. Had he admitted his fear, Swemmel would have named a new marshal on the instant.
No matter how the Unkerlanters’ performance against Zuwayza dismayed Rathar, though, he could turn it to his own purposes. “Your Majesty, do you recall the chief difficulty your forces had in the campaign in the north?” he asked.
“Aye,” Swemmel growled: “that we could not even smash through the ragtag and bobtail the black men threw against us. Camels!” He screwed up his face till he looked remarkably like a camel himself. “We assure you, Marshal, your reports on the subject of camels grew most tedious.”
“For this, I can only beg your Majesty’s pardon.” Rathar took a deep breath. “The Zuwayzin did indeed fight harder and do more with the camels than we had expected. But that was not our chief difficulty in facing them.”
King Swemmel leaned forward once more, trying to put Rathar in fear—and succeeding, though Rathar hoped the king did not realize that. “If you say bad generalship was the flaw, Marshal, you condemn yourself out of your own mouth,” Swemmel warned.
“Our generals, but for Droctulf, did as well as they could have done,” Rathar said. Droctulf was no longer a general; Rathar thought Droctulf was no longer among the living. The marshal refused to let irrelevancies distract him. He took another deep breath. “Our chief difficulty, your Majesty, was that we struck too soon.”
“Say on,” Swemmel told him, in the tones of a jurist listening to a man already obviously guilty further condemning himself.
“We struck too soon, before all the regiments called for in the plan against Zuwayza were in place,” Rathar said. He did not point out that that had been at Swemmel’s express command. “We struck before we were fully ready, and paid the price. If we strike too soon against Algarve, we shall pay a larger price.”
“You need not fear that,” Swemmel said. “We know the redheads are tougher than the Zuwayzin. You have our leave to collect such soldiery as you need, provided you attack when we give the order. There, do you see? We endeavor to be flexible.”
The clenched fist in Rathar’s gut eased a little. Swemmel was, for Swemmel, in a reasonable mood. That emboldened the marshal to say what needed saying: “Your Majesty, this is but half the loaf. Here is the other half: that I would hesitate to attack Algarve even with all our forces assembled.
Now
I would hesitate.”
Swemmel stabbed a forefinger out at him. “Did you leave your ballocks behind, up there in the Zuwayzi desert?”
“No.” Standing still and speaking calmly were harder than facing the Zuwayzin in the front line, as he’d done. “For consider: now Algarve fights on the defensive everywhere in the east, against Jelgava and Valmiera both. If we strike the redheads, they will have men to spare, with whom to strike back. But spring is here, or near enough. Soon the Algarvians will strike at their foes. For that, they will have to throw all the men they can spare into the fight. All will be as it was during the Six Years’ War, army locked with army, neither side able to go forward or back. Then, your Majesty,
then
we strike, and strike hard.”
He waited. He could not judge which way King Swemmel would go. Swemmel was a law of his own. The king would decide what he decided, and Rathar would obey, or, if not Rathar, someone else.
“Ahh,” Swemmel said: more an exhalation than a real word. Whatever it was, though, Rathar knew he’d won his case. Swemmel’s dark eyes glowed; had they been green like an Algarvian’s, he would have looked a happy cat. “That is indeed subtle, Marshal.” By the way he said it, he could have offered no higher praise.
Rathar inclined his head. “I serve your Majesty. I serve the kingdom.”
And now I will go on serving a while longer.
“Of course you do.” Swemmel spoke as if no doubt were possible. Everyone in Unkerlant served him … and he destroyed without warning or mercy any servant who, in his sole judgment, had ambitions beyond serving him. For now, though, his suspicions were a banked fire. He took the bait Rathar dangled before him. “Aye, aye, and aye. Let them murder each other by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, as they did for six years straight. This time, the Algarvians shall not slaughter the men of Unkerlant in the same way, as they did during our father’s reign.”
“Even so, your Majesty.” Rathar hid relief as carefully as he had hidden worry.
“But you must be ready,” King Swemmel warned him. “When the moment comes, when the hosts of Algarve bog down in the east of their kingdom or in western Valmiera or Jelgava—wherever they strike first—you must be prepared to smash through whatever garrisons they have left behind in Forthweg. We shall give the order, and you shall obey it.”
“As you say, your Majesty, so shall it be,” Rathar said. If Swemmel picked a time he judged wrong, he would try to talk the king out of it. If he was lucky, as he had been today, he might even succeed.