Out of the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  Balazs had told one truth, anyhow: the barracks hall where Istvan slept held only a handful of other stubborn underofficers besides himself. He didn’t care much, save that he missed Corporal Kun. Kun must have thought telling a few lies a small enough price for going home to Gyorvar. Istvan hardly blamed him. He knew mulishness was all that kept him here.

  With Kun gone, he was in no mood for company anyhow. Lamps-out came as more than a little relief. Gyorvar’s distant lights came in through the south-facing windows, casting a pale, grayish illumination on the northern wall of the barracks. It was less than moonlight, more than starlight--not enough to disturb Istvan in the least when he fell asleep.

  Having fallen asleep, he promptly began to wish he’d stayed awake. He kept starting up from a series of the ghastliest nightmares he’d ever had the misfortune to suffer. In one of them, Captain Tivadar cut his throat instead of his hand on finding out he’d eaten goat. That was one of the gentler dreams, too. Most of the others were worse, far worse: full of red slaughter. He couldn’t always remember the details when he woke, but his pounding heart and the terrified gasps with which he breathed told him more than he wanted to know.

  And then, some time toward morning, he woke to bright sunlight streaming in through the window. But it wasn’t morning, not yet, and the window didn’t face east. And the light into the barracks might have been as bright as sunlight, but it wasn’t sunlight. It rippled and shifted like waves--or flames.

  With a cry of horror and despair, Istvan sprang to his feet and rushed to the window. He knew what he would see, and he saw it: the same destruction poured down onto Gyorvar as had descended upon Becsehely. He’d been closer to the disaster in the Kuusaman ley-line cruiser than he was now, but he wasn’t so far away as to have any doubt about what was happening.

  Even through the window, even across the miles separating him from the capital of Gyongyos, savage heat beat on his face. For a moment, that was the only thought in his mind. Then he wondered what it was like in Gyorvar itself, and then, sickly, he wished he hadn’t.

  Well, he thought, if that accursed Balazs went into the capital, he isn‘t coming back. May the stars not shine on his spirit.

  He faced that loss with equanimity. But then one of the other men in the hall whispered, “If Ekrekek Arpad’s there, he couldn’t live through . . . that. If his kin are there, they couldn’t, either.”

  That was horror of a different sort. The Ekrekek of Gyongyos was the only man alive who communed with the stars as an equal. That was what made him what he was. If he died, if all his kin died in the same searing instant--who would rule Gyongyos then? Istvan had no idea. He doubted anyone had ever imagined such a nightmare could befall the land.

  “What do we do?” another soldier--or was he another captive?--moaned. “What can we do?”

  The flames pouring out of the sky onto Gyorvar abruptly ceased, though they remained printed on Istvan’s vision when he blinked. Gyorvar without the ekrekek, without the ekrekek’s whole family? Arpad’s house had reigned in Gyongyos since the stars made the world. That was what people said, at any rate.

  And so? Istvan wondered. If Arpad had the brains of a carrot, he would have realized’ Kuusamo was trying to warn us, not trying to bluff us. Now he’s paid for being wrong--along with the stars only know how many people who never did anyone any harm. If there’s any justice, the stars will refuse to shine on his spirit.

  “Other lands just have kings,” Istvan said. “Maybe we can get along with nothing more than a king, too.”

  “But--” Three shocked-sounding men began an automatic protest.

  Istvan cut them off with a sharp chopping motion of his right hand. “We’d better be able to get along with nothing more than a king. How much good did Ekrekek Arpad do us? We lost the war, we lost Gyorvar--stars above, we might as well have had a goat-eating savage on the throne.”

  Two of the soldiers at the window with him backed away, as if afraid he had some deadly, highly contagious disease. The third one, a corporal, said, “You’re right, by the stars.”

  “I wonder what we’ll do now, and who the new Ekrekek or King or whatever he is of Gyongyos will be,” Istvan said, and then, with a shrug, “It probably won’t matter, not to the likes of us.”

  “No,” said the underofficer who’d nodded--his name was Diosgyor. “Only thing that matters to us is whether they let us out.”

  Captain Petofi strode into the barracks hall in time to hear that. “We’ll need to be very lucky to get away,” he said.

  “Why?” Istvan said in dismay. “We were right. Everything we told them was true--and everything we warned them about came true.”

  Petofi nodded. “All the more reason for locking us up and losing the key, wouldn’t you say, Sergeant? Few offenses more dangerous than proving right when your superiors say you must be wrong. Of course”--he grimaced--”most of our superiors, or the ones immediately concerned with us, are dead.”

  “Uh--of course.” Istvan’s stomach lurched. He hadn’t even tried to think about how many people might have died in Gyorvar. Thinking about the ekrekek and his kinsfolk was bad enough. Add in all the ordinary men and women and children ... “By the stars, sir, this wasn’t war. This was murder!”

  “You’re half right,” Petofl said. “In a way, looked at from the Kuusaman point of view, this was murder. But the slanteyes did their best not to commit it. They could have loosed this magic on Gyorvar as soon as they found it. Instead, they let us watch when they threw Becsehely on the pyre. They let us watch and take back word of what we’d seen. Arpad wouldn’t hear it, though.” He sighed. “Wouldn’t you say he helped kill himself, and all of Gyorvar with himself?”

  Slowly, Istvan nodded. Corporal Diosgyor said, “Can we still go on fighting the war now?”

  “By the stars, I hope not!” Istvan and Captain Petofi exclaimed at the same time. It was impossible to say which of them sounded more horrified. And then Istvan let out a different cry of horror and despair.

  “What’s wrong?” This time, Petofi and Diosgyor spoke together.

  “My comrade, Corporal Kun,” Istvan said. “He gave the Eyes and Ears what they wanted . . . and he lives--lived--in Gyorvar. We fought together on Obuda, in the forests of Unkerlant, and on Becsehely. He was the cleverest man I ever knew.” He would never have praised Kun so where the ex-mage’s apprentice could hear him. Now, though, Kun would never hear anything again. “If either of us died, I thought I’d surely be the one.”

  “May the stars shine on his spirit forevermore,” Petofi said. “If he was in Gyorvar, that is the most any man can hope for.”

  “I know,” Istvan said heavily. He was a warrior from a warrior race. Tears were for women, or so he’d heard from boyhood. He’d never come so close to shedding them as he did now, not since he’d grown out of childish things. “He was ... a brother to me, a brother in arms.”

  “Many of us have lost brothers,” Petofi said. “With Gyorvar gone, Gyongyos has had its heart torn from it. And what can we do? I have no answers.”

  Istvan had no answers, either. No one left alive did. He was sure of that. And the answers Ekrekek Arpad and the other dead had come up with were wrong. He’d been sure of that even before fire enfolded Gyorvar in its dreadful embrace. Now the whole world knew it was true.

  Leudast knew he’d passed through the enormous forests of western Unkerlant on his way to fight the Gongs in the Elsung Mountains. He hadn’t imagined how huge they really were. Back in those distant days, that halfhearted border war and Gyongyos’ skirmishes with Kuusamo among the islands of the Bothnian Ocean had been the only flareups in an otherwise peaceful world. The rest of Derlavai had gone through six years of darkness--and the Gongs were still fighting Unkerlant here in the uttermost west and the slanteyes in the Bothnian Ocean.

  “Let’s see how much longer the whoresons last,” Leudast muttered under his breath. If it turned out to be much longer, he would own himself surprised. Even as he muttered, Unker
lanter egg-tossers pounded the Gyongyosian positions near the western edge of the woods. He didn’t quite know how his countrymen had managed it, but they’d moved a lot of egg-tossers through the trees till they bore on the lines the Gongs still held.

  Hardly any Gyongyosian egg-tossers answered back. The Algarvians had fought hard for as long as they could. Whenever King Swemmel’s men started flinging eggs at them, they’d responded sharply. That remained true up to the day they surrendered. They’d gone down, but they’d gone down swinging.

  The Gyongyosians, by contrast, hardly seemed to believe what was hitting them. Things had been quiet here in the distant west for the past couple of years. Unkerlant had thrown as much as possible into the fight against Algarve, while the Gongs had taken their men farther west still to fight the Kuusamans in a watery sort of war Leudast didn’t pretend to understand.

  He understood perfectly well the task lying ahead of him. Seizing his shiny bronze officer’s whistle, he blew till the shrill note made his ears ring. “Forward!” he shouted. “Now we take the land away from them!”

  Forward his company went--one company among hundreds, more likely thousands. Forward went behemoths, down game tracks and sometimes down no tracks at all. Overhead, dragons dropped more eggs on the Gongs skulking in the forest and swooped low to incinerate whatever they found in clearings. No brightly painted Gyongyosian beasts rose to challenge them. They had the sky to themselves.

  The terrain here was as rugged as any in which Leudast had fought on the other side of his kingdom. The woods west of Herborn weren’t a patch on these. They could have been swallowed up as if they never were, in fact. Leudast and his men had to pick their way forward past great tree trunks scattered and tumbled like so many jackstraws.

  But the country in which they were fighting did more to hold them back than did the Gyongyosians. Here and there, a few tawny, shaggy-bearded men in leggings did keep blazing at them, but they overran those pockets of resistance like men beating boys. “Nothing’s going to slow us down now!” Leudast shouted exultantly. “It’s not like it was when we were fighting the fornicating Algarvians-- it’ll be easy!”

  Powers above, am I really saying things like that? he wondered. But he was. Even at the end of the war against the redheads, they’d been dangerous whenever they managed to scrape together enough men and beasts and eggs to make a stand or to counterattack, and they’d always looked for chances to hit back. The Gongs, by contrast, seemed stunned at the attack rolling over them.

  For the first couple of days of that attack, Leudast knew it reminded him of something he’d been through before, but couldn’t put his finger on what. Then, encamped for the night in a clearing, he snapped his fingers in sudden realization. “What is it, sir?” one of his men asked.

  He still had trouble getting used to being called sir. But that wasn’t the reason he answered, “Oh, nothing important.” All at once, he understood why the Gongs were acting as they were. The Unkerlanter army had behaved exactly the same way when the Algarvians swarmed over the border more than four years earlier. They’d been hit by a force not just stronger than they were but also almost beyond their comprehension. Gyongyos had never expected a blow like this.

  Unkerlant, thanks to its vast spaces and dreadful winters, had managed to ride out the Algarvian storm. Leudast didn’t think the Gongs would be able to do the same. They didn’t have so much land to yield, and they did have another war to worry about: the fight on the Bothnian Ocean came closer to the offshore Balaton Islands, closer to Gyorvar itself, every day.

  And so, while the Unkerlanters swarmed forward, a lot of Gyongyosian soldiers simply threw up their hands, threw down their sticks, and went off into captivity. Some of them looked relieved, some looked resigned. One, who spoke a little Unkerlanter, asked, “What you do, move here so fast?”

  He got no answer. The guards leading him and his countrymen back toward the camps that would house them kept them moving. Even if someone had sat him down and explained exactly what the Unkerlanters were doing, he might not have understood it. Leudast wouldn’t have understood exactly what the redheads were doing just after they started doing it. All he would have known--all he had known at the time--was that something dreadful had happened to his countrymen.

  Less than a week after the great attack began, the Unkerlanters burst out of the vast forest and into the more open country that led to the foothills of the Elsung Mountains. Behind them, Leudast knew, pockets of Gongs still held out. So what? he thought. Pockets of Unkerlanters had still held out as the Algarvians swarmed west, too. The redheads had mopped them up at their leisure.

  Peering ahead at the mountains, Leudast wondered how close he was to where he’d been when the Derlavaian War--what everybody but Unkerlant reckoned the Derlavaian War--broke out. He shrugged. He couldn’t tell. One set of peaks looked much like another to a man raised on the broad plains of northeastern Unkerlant.

  He was settling his company for the night when Captain Dagaric called him and the other company commanders together. Dagaric took them out onto the meadow, well away from the common soldiers’ campfires. “What’s gone wrong, sir?” Leudast asked. Obviously, something had, or Dagaric wouldn’t have acted as he was doing.

  He said, “I just got word from the regimental crystallomancer--Gyorvar’s been destroyed. Gone. Vanished. Off the map. Disappeared.” He snapped his fingers to show how thoroughly wrecked the capital of Gyongyos was.

  “Well, that’s good, isn’t it, sir?” another lieutenant asked. “If we smashed the place up, that’ll hurt the Gongs, won’t it?”

  “Oh, the Gongs are hurting, all right,” Dagaric said. “Ekrekek Arpad’s dead, and so is everybody in his clan, as far as anyone can tell. The whoresons who’re left are all running around like chickens after the axe.”

  “Then what’s wrong, sir?” the other junior officer repeated. “If we got rid of Gyorvar, of Arpad--”

  “That’s what’s wrong,” Dagaric broke in. “We didn’t do it. We didn’t have anything to do with it. The Kuusamans smashed Gyorvar, with some newfangled sorcery they came up with.”

  “Powers below eat them,” Leudast said softly. He remembered how lucky he’d been to come through alive after the Algarvians started murdering Kaunians the first autumn of their war with Unkerlant. The only answer his kingdom had found was killing its own people--a solution, he thought, no one but Swemmel would have imagined.

  Another company commander, a sergeant, asked, “Can we match this magic?”

  Dagaric shook his head. “No. The slanteyes know how to do it, and we don’t.”

  “That’s not good.” Leudast thought he was the first to speak, but three or four company commanders said the same thing at more or less the same time.

  “Of course it’s not,” Dagaric said. “Those whoresons ’ll hold it over our head like a club, you see if they don’t. But that hasn’t got anything to do with our job here. Our job here is kicking the stuffing out of the Gongs, and it’s more important than ever that we do it up good and proper.”

  “How come, sir?” somebody asked.

  The regimental commander made an exasperated noise. “The more we grab now, the better off we’ll be. For now, we’re still officially friends with Kuusamo. How long will that last, though? Anybody’s guess. So we grab with both hands while the grabbing’s good.”

  “Makes sense,” Leudast said. “And the Gyongyosians were falling to pieces against us even before this happened. Now that it has, they ought to turn to mush.”

  “I hope they do,” Dagaric said. “Other chance is that they might decide to make us pay as much as they can from here on out because everything’s lost. I hope they don’t try to do that, but we’ve got to be alert for it. I want you to let your men know it could happen. Don’t tell them about Gyorvar, not yet. I haven’t got any orders on how we’re supposed to present that to them.”

  Leudast felt foolish warning his troopers the Gongs might turn desperate without telling them why
. Nobody asked questions, though; curiosity was not encouraged in the Unkerlanter army. He did say, “We’ll know better when we see how things go in the morning.”

  Lying there wrapped in a blanket, listening to eggs burst not so far away-- but almost all of them off to the west, falling amongst the Gyongyosians--he realized that might not be so. Dagaric had ordered him to keep the news of the destruction of Gyorvar from his men. Would officers on the other side also keep it from the shaggy soldiers they led? He wouldn’t have been surprised.

  “Forward!” he shouted when first light came. Forward the men went. The Gongs continued to crumble. Their disintegration was so quick and thorough, in fact, that Leudast couldn’t tell whether they knew some dreadful sorcery had claimed their capital. Unkerlant had been hammering their armies before the news came, and went right on hammering them now.

  Three days later, Dagaric’s regiment was well up into the foothills of the Elsung Mountains. Looking east, back in the direction from which he’d come, Leudast saw nothing but a sea of dark green, a sea that stretched out to the horizon and far beyond. Ahead towered the mountain peaks. Even in the summertime, they remained shrouded in snow and mist. He didn’t look forward to climbing higher in them. He’d done that once, all those years before, and found mountain warfare harder work for fewer rewards than any other kind he’d met since.

  No help for it, though, he thought, and ordered the men forward once more. But then, as the sun set ahead of him, a Gyongyosian with a white flag came out from behind a lichen-covered boulder. He waited to be recognized for what he was, then called out in musically accented Unkerlanter: “It is over. You and the slanteyes have beaten us. We can fight no more. We admit it, and we surrender.”

  “By the powers above,” Leudast whispered. “I lived through it.” Those four words seemed to say everything that needed saying.