Jaws of Darkness by Harry Turtledove Page B

it wasn’t because he’d run out of words in Kuusaman.
    “Only that what?” Pekka asked sharply. Fernao didn’t answer. He looked down at his plate, then glanced back up to her. Despite her golden skin, she’d flushed. “Never mind,” she said, and rose, and hurried away.
    It’s only that, if I dawdle, I can sit here and be with you. He would have said that, or something like it. She had to understand it even if he hadn’t said it. And it had to be on her mind, too, or she would have joked about it.
    Fernao sighed. He finished breakfast, then got to his feet and reached for his cane. He couldn’t hurry away, not after a bursting egg almost killed him and did ruin his leg down in the land of the Ice People. And he and Pekka had to go on working side by side as if they felt nothing toward each other but professional respect. He sighed again. It wasn’t easy, and got harder all the time.
     
     

Three

     
     
     
    B ack before the war, Garivald had visited Tolk only a handful of times, though the market town lay less than a day’s walk from Zossen, his home village. After King Swemmel’s armies drove the Algarvians out of the western portion of the Duchy of Grelz, he’d left the band of irregulars he’d led before Unkerlanter regulars and inspectors could reward him for his fight against the redheads by making something unfortunate happen to him.
    And so he’d gone back to Zossen, only to find the war there before him. The village, his wife, his son, his little daughter … all gone as if they’d never been. He’d trudged on to Tolk, farther west still, not least because he had no idea what else to do.
    Tolk survived. The Algarvians and their Grelzer puppets hadn’t made a stand there, as they must have at Zossen. Buildings were smashed. Only burnt-out rubble remained of a few whole blocks. But Tolk survived.
    Sitting by the fire in a tavern there, Garivald turned to Obilot and said, “Powers above only know what we would have done if this place was gone, too.”
    Like him, she had a thick earthenware mug of spirits in front of her. She shrugged as she took a swallow from it. “Gone somewhere else, that’s all. What difference does it make where we are? We haven’t got anything left but each other.”
    Garivald still didn’t know exactly what the Algarvians had done to her, and to whatever family she’d had, to make her flee to the irregulars. She’d fought Mezentio’s men longer and harder than he had; she’d been in the band when Munderic, who’d led it before Garivald, rescued him before the redheads could take him to Herborn and boil him alive for making patriotic songs.
    He said, “We might have starved before we got anywhere else.” Late winter was the hard time, the empty time, of the year in peasant villages in Grelz, as it doubtless was in peasant villages all over Unkerlant.
    Obilot shook her head. She had to bring up a hand to brush dark curls back from her face. She wasn’t pretty, not in any conventional sense of the word: she was too thin, too fierce looking, for anything approaching beauty. But the energy that crackled through her made every other woman Garivald had known, including Annore who’d borne him two children, pallid in comparison. She said, “Two desperate characters with sticks in their hands don’t starve.”
    “Well, maybe not,” Garivald said, and drank from his own mug of spirits. In most winters, he’d have stayed drunk much of the time from harvest till planting. How else to while away the long winter with so much time in it and so little to fill that time? As an irregular, he’d found other ways. As a refugee, he was finding other ways still. But, when he put the mug down again, he said, “I don’t feel like a desperate character.”
    “No?” Obilot’s laugh held little mirth. “What else are you? What else is anybody in Grelz?” She lowered her voice: “What will you be if the inspectors catch up with you?”
    “Dead,” Garivald answered, and