Jaws of Darkness (81 page)

Just as he was about to jump out of his hole and fall back, what seemed like all the eggs in the world descended on the Algarvians. The Unkerlanters had moved a lot of egg-tossers into the bridgehead. A crystallomancer must have reached the men who served them, and the efficient way they responded would have warmed King Swemmel’s heart—assuming anything could.

Whatever such efficiency would have done to Swemmel’s heart, it wreaked havoc on the Algarvians. Their onslaught petered out, smashed under a blizzard of bursts of sorcerous energy. The ground shook under Garivald’s feet—not as it would have when one side or the other started sacrificing, but simply because so many eggs were coming down close to him.

“Take that, you whoresons!” Lieutenant Andelot screamed at the redheads. He was only a youngster himself. This probably seemed like a great lark to him.

“We ought to go after the stinking buggers,” somebody said.

But, youngster or not, Andelot knew how to follow orders. “No,” he said. “For the time being, we’re just supposed to hold this bridgehead.”

“When do we break out, sir?” the soldier asked.

“When the generals tell us to,” Andelot answered. Garivald found himself nodding. Sure enough, that was how things worked.

Once driven off, the Algarvians didn’t resume their attack. From what the handful of surviving old-timers Garivald had talked with said, that was a change from the earlier days of the war. Mezentio’s men didn’t have the reserves of strength they’d once enjoyed. As far as he was concerned, they were quite bad enough as they were.

Andelot came over to him. “What’s up, sir?” he asked cautiously. He didn’t like drawing official attention to himself.

“Don’t worry, Fariulf—you’re not in trouble,” Andelot said, which did nothing to keep Garivald from worrying. “I just wanted to say you did a good job of handling that fellow who wasn’t blazing at the redheads.”

“Oh,” Garivald said. “Thank you, sir.”

“I think you’ve got the makings of a good soldier—a fine soldier, even,” Andelot said. “Would you like to move up in the army? You might be an officer by the time the war ends. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”

Garivald wanted to become an officer about as much as he wanted an extra head. “Sir, I don’t have my letters,” he said, thinking that would dispose of that.

“I’ll teach you, if you like,” Andelot offered.

“Would you?” Garivald stared. “Nobody ever said anything like that to me before, sir. My village didn’t even have a school. The firstman there could read, and maybe a few other people, but not that many. I’d give a lot, sir, to be able to read and write.” /
could write down my songs. I could make them better. I could make them last forever.

“It would be my pleasure,” Andelot said. “The more men who do know how to read and write, the more efficient a kingdom Unkerlant becomes. Wouldn’t you say that’s so, Corporal?”

“Aye, sir,” Garivald replied. New thoughts crowded in on the heels of his first excitement.
If I do write my songs down, I have to be careful. If the inspectors find them, they’ll know who I really am. And if they know who I really am, I’m in a lot of trouble.

He didn’t show what he was thinking. Showing your thoughts could and often did prove deadly dangerous in Unkerlant. He did his best to look interested and attentive when Andelot pulled a scrap of paper, a pen, and a bottle of ink from his belt pouch. He wrote something on the paper in big letters. “Here’s your name—Fariulf.”

“Fariulf,” Garivald repeated dutifully, wondering what his real name looked like. He didn’t ask. If he ever got the hang of this writing business, he’d figure it out for himself.

“That’s right.” Andelot smiled and nodded. “It’s not hard, really—all the characters always have the same sound, so you just have to remember which sound each character makes. See? You have an ‘f sound at each end of your name.”

“Those both say ‘f ?” Garivald asked. Andelot nodded. Garivald scratched his head. “Why don’t they look the same, then?”

“Ah,” Lieutenant Andelot said. “You use
this
form—the royal form, people call it—for the first one because it’s the first letter of a name. You’d do the same thing if it were the first letter of a sentence. The rest of the time, you use small letters.”

“Why?” Garivald asked.

Andelot started to answer, then stopped, chuckled, and shrugged. He looked very young in that moment. “I don’t know why, Corporal. It’s just how we do things. It’s how we’ve always done them, so far as I know.”

“Oh.” Garivald shrugged, too. Rules didn’t have to make sense to be rules. Anyone who’d lived under King Swemmel understood that perfectly well. “All right, you make the one kind of mark for—what did you say, sir?”

“For the first letter of a name or the first letter of a sentence,” Andelot repeated patiently.

“Thanks. I’ll remember now.” And Garivald thought he would. Not least because he couldn’t read or write, he had a very good memory.

To his surprise, Lieutenant Andelot thrust the pen at him. He recoiled from it, almost as if it were a knife. “Here. Take it,” Andelot said. “Write your own name. Go ahead—you can do it. Just copy what I did.”

When Garivald held the pen as if it were a knife, Andelot showed him a better way. Brow furrowed in concentration, he made marks on the paper, doing his best to imitate what the officer had written. “There,” he said at last. “Does that say … Fariulf?” He nearly made the mistake of using his real name. He might get away with that mistake once. On the other hand, he might not.

“Aye, it does.” Andelot beamed at him, so he must have done it right. The officer started to write again, then stopped and fumbled in his belt pouch till he found a bigger leaf of paper. He wrote a lot of characters on it. “These are the royal form and the regular form of all the letters, in the right order. Do you know the children’s rhyme that helps you remember the order and the way each letter sounds?”

“No, sir,” Garivald said simply.

Andelot sighed. “You really must have lived in the back of beyond.” Garivald shrugged again. He probably had. Andelot taught him the rhyme, which had a catchy little tune. He learned it quickly enough to please the lieutenant. “That’s good,” Andelot said. “That’s very good. Here, let me give you more paper. You can have that pen, too, and here’s a bottle of ink. Go practice shaping the letters and keep saying the rhyme so you know what each one sounds like. In a couple of days, I’ll show you how to read more things, too.”

“Thank you, sir,” Garivald said. He went back to his own hole, his head as full of that children’s rhyme as it had ever been with his own songs. He wrote the alphabet several times, reciting the rhyme as he wielded the pen. Then—first looking around to make sure no one could see him—he wrote
Garivald
as,best he could, being certain to use the royal form of the G.

And then he crumpled up that leaf of paper and threw it in the closest fire. He let out a small sigh of relief as he watched it burn. In Swemmel’s kingdom, no one could be too careful. Fariulf he was, and Fariulf he would have to remain.

Istvan raised an axe and brought it down on a chunk of firewood. The chunk split into two smaller chunks. The Kuusaman guards who watched the woodcutting detail stayed very alert—axes were real weapons. A few feet from Istvan, Kun was chopping away, too.

“Anyone can tell you didn’t grow up cutting wood,” Istvan said.

“I do it well enough.” Kun was touchy about everything. That had got him into trouble with the guards at the captives’ camp a couple of times. It would have been worse trouble if he hadn’t managed to talk his way out of most of it.

“I didn’t say you didn’t,” Istvan answered.

“I’ll say that,” Szonyi told Kun with a grin. “You don’t cut as much wood as the sergeant or I do, not even close.”

“You’re both twice my size,” Kun said—an exaggeration, but not an enormous one: by Gyongyosian standards, he
was
on the scrawny side.

Even so, Istvan shook his head. “We’d still do more, even if we were your size or you were ours. Anybody can see that. You waste motion.”

“If I were an Unkerlanter, you’d complain I wasn’t efficient enough,” Kun said.

“If you were an Unkerlanter, you’d still be a lousy woodcutter,” Szonyi said. “By the stars, you’d be a lousy woodcutter if you were an Algarvian.”

“Algarvians,” Kun said, and chopped away at the wood scattered before him with great spirit if not with great efficiency.

“They’re strange people.” Szonyi paused for a moment to wipe sweat from his face with a tunic sleeve. Like most early autumn days on the island of Obuda, this one was cool and misty, but cutting wood was plenty of work to keep a man warm. “Even the one who speaks our language is strange, and the other three …” He rolled his eyes. “They’re even worse.”

“Makes you wonder why we ever allied with them,” Istvan said, leaning on his axe. “They’re … foreign.”

Kun laughed. “Of course they’re foreign. They’re
foreigners,
by the stars. Did you expect them to be just like us?”

Actually, Istvan
had
expected something like that. The only foreigners with whom he’d had any experience up to now were Unkerlanter and Kuusaman enemies—and trying to kill one another hadn’t proved the best way to strike up an acquaintance—and the natives of Obuda, whom he reckoned contemptible because they bowed down to whoever occupied their island. He said, “I expected them to be more like us than they are, I’ll tell you that.”

“Why?” Kun asked.

“Because we’re on the same side, of course,” Istvan answered. Szonyi nodded vigorous agreement.

“We’re on the same side as the naked black Zuwayzin, too,” Kun said. “Do you think they’ll be just like us?”

Istvan had trouble believing there really were people with black skins who ran around with no clothes on all the time. It sounded like one of the stories big boys told their little brothers so those little brothers would look like fools when they repeated them to their parents. He said, “I’ve never seen a Zuwayzi, and neither have you. And we weren’t talking about them. We were talking about Algarvians.”

“Aye, but you were saying that foreigners shouldn’t—” Kun began.

“No to talk!” a guard shouted in bad Gyongyosian. “To work! To chop!”

With something close to relief, Istvan went back to cutting wood. Kun had a way of twisting things till they seemed upside down and inside out. The former mage’s apprentice got back to work, too, but he didn’t stop talking.
He never does,
Istvan thought, which wasn’t quite fair. Kun continued, “Foreigners shouldn’t be different from us if we’re going to ally with them? I think that’s a silly notion.”

“No to talk!” the Kuusaman guard yelled again. This time, Kun did shut up—for a while.

After what seemed like forever, the wood-chopping detail finished its work. The Kuusamans carefully counted the axes before sending the captives back to their barracks. Istvan didn’t know how anyone could hope to sneak an axe away, but the guards took no chances.

In the barracks, Captain Frigyes and Borsos the dowser and the Algarvian who spoke Gyongyosian—his name was Norandino, which struck Istvan as a thoroughly barbarous appellation—had their heads together. Istvan didn’t like that. Both Frigyes and, from what he’d been able to see, Algarvians in general were much too fond of blood sacrifice and the sorcerous power that sprang from it to suit him.

By the way Frigyes looked up in alarm, he and Borsos and Norandino had been plotting something. Whether it had to do with cutting some large number of Gyongyosian throats here, Istvan didn’t know. He hoped he wouldn’t ever have to find out.

Norandino said something in questioning tones, too low for Istvan to make out the words. Frigyes answered a little more loudly: “Oh, aye, they’re reliable enough. Nothing to worry about with them.”

Istvan knew he should have felt reassured, complimented, even flattered. What he felt instead was something a man not from a self-styled warrior race would unquestionably have called fear. He had too good a notion of what sort of bloody thoughts went through his company commander’s mind.

Szonyi and the rest of the woodcutters went to their cots and relaxed without the slightest worry—all save Kun, who caught Istvan’s eye. Kun didn’t say anything. He hardly changed expression. But Istvan knew they were thinking the same thing, and that it appalled them both.

Norandino’s laugh rang out. It filled the barracks hall. How could anyone who talked of slaughter sound so cheerful about it? Istvan didn’t know, but the redhead certainly seemed to manage. And it wasn’t a laugh of anticipation of someone else’s trouble, as might have come from a Gyongyosian. By the sound of it, Norandino knew his own neck might be on the line. He not only knew, he thought that was part of the joke.

Or maybe I’m imagining things,
Istvan thought as he lay down on his own cot. He stared up at the boards of the ceiling and tried to make himself believe it. He couldn’t. Why would Frigyes and a mage of sorts and an Algarvian talk together, if not for purposes of sorcery and sacrifice?

Reliable. Captain Frigyes thinks I’m reliable. Am I?
That he could even ask himself the question left him startled.
If I thought he could really do something to win the war for Gyongyos, I might not feel the same. But he can’t hurt anything but Obuda, and the fighting’s moved a long way from here.

Which meant… Istvan knew what it meant. He knew, but he shied away from following the thought where it had to lead. He glanced over toward Kun, who sprawled a couple of cots away. Kun was looking in his direction, too. Istvan jerked his eyes away, as if he’d caught the other man doing something disgusting. But he hadn’t. The disgust was all in his own mind, with much of it aimed at himself.

Kun didn’t shy away from logic. Kun would know the choice perfectly well—would know it and know what to make of it. Either you let your throat be cut—or, if you were lucky, your friends’ throats—or you let the Kuusamans know what was brewing. Istvan saw no middle ground.

He’d talked about such matters. Talking about them, he discovered, was one thing. Actually nerving himself to speak to a guard? That was something else again.
If I do it, I can never go back. If I do it, I can probably never set eyes on another Gyongyosian as long as I live.