Rulers of the Darkness d-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Werbel listened to the eggs in the distance. With a sigh, he said, "I wonder if they'll get caught up before the war ends."

  Leudast's laugh was loud, raucous, and bitter. "Powers above, what makes you think it'll ever end?"

  ***

  Sidroc was glad Forthwegians had the custom of wearing full beards. For one thing, the thick black hair on his chin and cheeks and upper lip went a little way toward keeping them warm in the savage cold of southern Unkerlant. Coming out of Gromheort in the sunny north, he'd never imagined weather like this. Had anybody told him even a quarter of the truth about it before he knew it for himself, he would have called that fellow a liar to his face. No more.

  For another, the beards the men of Plegmund's Brigade- Forthwegians fighting in the service of their Algarvian occupiers- wore helped distinguish them from their Unkerlanter cousins. Unkerlanters and Forthwegians were both stocky, olive-skinned, hook-nosed, both given to wearing long tunics rather than kilts or trousers. But if Sidroc saw a clean-shaven face, he blazed at it without hesitation.

  At the moment, he saw very little. His regiment- about a company's worth of men, after all the hard fighting they'd been through- was trying to hold the Unkerlanters out of a village called Hohenroda. It lay somewhere not far from the important town of Durrwangen, but whether north, south, east, or west Sidroc couldn't have said to save his life. He'd done too much marching and countermarching to have any exact notion of where he was.

  Eggs crashed down on the village and in front of it. The log walls of the cabin where he was sheltering shook. He turned to Sergeant Werferth. "Those Unkerlanter buggers have every egg-tosser in the world lined up south of here, seems like."

  "Wouldn't surprise me," Werferth answered. If anything ever did faze him, he didn't let on. He'd served in the Forthwegian army till the Algarvians destroyed it. Sidroc had been only fifteen when the Derlavaian War began three and a half years before. Werferth spat on the rammed-earth floor. "So what?"

  That was too much calm for Sidroc to handle. "They're liable to kill us, that's what!" he burst out. Every once in a while, his voice still broke like a boy's. He hated that, but couldn't help it.

  "They won't kill all of us, and the ones who're left'll make 'em pay a good price for this place," Werferth said. He'd signed up for Plegmund's Brigade as soon as the recruiting broadsheets started going up on walls and fences. As far as Sidroc could tell, Werferth didn't care for whom he fought. He might have served the Unkerlanters as readily as the Algarvians. He just liked to fight.

  More eggs burst. A fragment of the metal casings that held their sorcerous energy in check till suddenly and violently released slammed into the wall. Timbers creaked. Straw from the thatched roof fell down into Sidroc's hair. He peered out through a tiny slit of a window. "I wish we could see better," he grumbled.

  "They don't build houses with south-facing doors in these parts," Werferth said. "A lot of 'em haven't got any south-facing windows at all, not even these little pissy ones. They know where the bad weather comes from."

  Sidroc had noticed there weren't any south-facing doors, but he hadn't thought about why. Questions like that didn't interest him. He wasn't stupid, but he didn't use his brains unless he had to. Hitting somebody or blazing somebody struck him as easier.

  Werferth went to the other little window. He barked out several sharp curses. "Here they come," he said, and rested his stick on the window frame, the business end pointing out toward the Unkerlanters.

  Mouth dry, Sidroc did the same. He'd seen Unkerlanter charges before- not too many, or he wouldn't have remained among those present. Now he had to try to fight off another one.

  It was, he had to admit, an awe-inspiring sight. King Swemmel's soldiers formed up in the frozen fields south of Hohenroda, out beyond the range of the defenders' sticks: row on row of them, all in fur hats and white smocks. Sidroc could hear them howling like demons even though they were a long way off. "Do they really feed 'em spirits before they send 'em out to attack?" he asked Werferth.

  "Oh, aye," the sergeant answered. "Makes 'em mean, I shouldn't wonder. Though I wouldn't mind a nip myself right now."

  Then in the distance, whistles shrilled. The ice that ran up Sidroc's back had nothing to do with the ghastly weather. He knew what was coming next. And it came. The Unkerlanters linked arms, row on row of them. The officers' whistles squealed once more. The Unkerlanters charged.

  "Urra!" they bellowed, a deep, rhythmic shout, as snow flew up from their felt boots. "Urra! Urra! Swemmel! Urra! Urra!" If they couldn't overrun Hohenroda- if they couldn't overrun the whole cursed world- they didn't know it.

  No doubt because they were drunk, they started blazing long before they got close enough to be in any serious danger of hitting something. Puffs of steam in the snow in front of them showed that some of the men from Plegmund's Brigade had started blazing, too. "Fools!" Werferth growled. "Bloody stupid fornicating fools! We can't afford to waste charges like that. We haven't got any Kaunians around to kill to give us the sorcerous energy we need to get more."

  They didn't even have any Unkerlanters to kill for the same purpose. The local peasants had long since fled Hohenroda. The men of Plegmund's Brigade were on their own here.

  Or so Sidroc thought, till eggs started bursting among the onrushing Unkerlanters. He whooped with glee- and with surprise. Plegmund's Brigade was made up of footsoldiers; it had to rely on the Algarvians for support. "I didn't know there were egg-tossers back of town," Sidroc said to Werferth.

  "Neither did I," Werferth said. "If you think our lords and masters tell us everything they're up to, you're daft. And if you think those eggs'll get rid of all those Unkerlanters, you're even dafter, by the powers above."

  Sidroc knew that too well. As the eggs burst in their midst, some of Swemmel's men flew through the air, to lie broken and bleeding in the snow. Others, as far as he could tell, simply ceased to be. But the Unkerlanters who still lived, who could still move forward, came on. They kept shouting with no change in rhythm he could hear.

  Then they were close enough to make targets even Werferth couldn't criticize. Sidroc thrust his right forefinger out through a hole in his mitten; his stick required the touch of real flesh to blaze. He stuck his finger into the opening at the rear of the stick and blazed at an Unkerlanter a few hundred yards away. The man went down, but Sidroc had no way to be sure his beam had hit him. He blazed again, and then cursed, for he must have missed his new target.

  The Unkerlanters were blazing, too, as they had been for some little while. A beam smote the peasant hut only a foot or so above Sidroc's head. The sharp, tangy stink of charred pine made his nostrils twitch. In drier weather, a beam like that might have fired the hut. Not so much risk of that now, nor of the fire's spreading if it did take hold.

  "Mow 'em down!" Werferth said cheerfully. Down the Unkerlanters went, too, in great swaths, almost as if they were being scythed at harvest time. Sidroc had long since seen Swemmel's soldiers cared little about losses. If they got a victory, they didn't count the cost.

  "They're going to break in!" he said, an exclamation of dismay. They might pay a regiment's worth of men to shift the company's worth of Forthwegians in Hohenroda, but that wouldn't make the detachment from Plegmund's Brigade any less wrecked. It wouldn't make Sidroc any less dead.

  "We have three lines of retreat prepared," Werferth said. "We'll use all of them." He sounded calm, unconcerned, ready for anything that might happen, and ready to make the Unkerlanters pay the highest possible price for this miserable little place. In the abstract, Sidroc admired that. When fear rose up inside him like a black, choking cloud, he knew he couldn't hope to match it.

  And then, instead of swarming in among the huts of Hohenroda and rooting out the defenders with beams and with knives and with sticks swung clubwise and with knees in the crotch and thumbs gouging out eyes, the Unkerlanters had to stop short of the village. More eggs fell among Swemmel's men, these from the northeast. Heavy sticks sear
ed down half a dozen men at a time. Algarvian behemoths, fighting as they had in the old days before sticks and eggs were so much of a much, got in among the Unkerlanters and trampled them and gored them with iron-encased horns.

  And the Unkerlanters broke. They hadn't expected to run into behemoths around Hohenroda. When they fought according to their plans, they were the stubbornest soldiers in the world. When taken by surprise, they sometimes panicked.

  Sidroc was heartily glad this proved one of those times. "Run, you buggers, run!" he shouted, and blazed a fleeing Unkerlanter in the back. Relief made him sound giddy. He didn't care. He felt giddy.

  "They've got snowshoes," Werferth said. "The Algarvian behemoths, I mean. They didn't last winter, you know. The Algarvians hadn't figured they'd have to fight in the snow. It cost 'em."

  Werferth didn't just like fighting, he liked going into detail about fighting. Sidroc didn't think that way. He'd joined Plegmund's Brigade mostly because he hadn't been able to get along with anybody back in Gromheort. A lot of the men in the Brigade were similar misfits. Some of them were out-and-out robbers and bandits. He'd led a sheltered life till the war. Things were different now.

  Some of the behemoth crews waved to the defenders of Hohenroda, urging them out in pursuit of King Swemmel's men. Sidroc had no intention of pursuing anybody unless his own officers gave the order. He muttered under his breath when shouts rang out from inside the village: "Forward! South!"

  Those shouts were in Algarvian. Algarvian officers commanded Plegmund's Brigade, and all orders came in their tongue. In a way, that made sense: the Brigade had to fight alongside Algarvian units and work smoothly with them. In another way, though, it was a reminder of who were the puppets and who the puppeteers.

  "Let's go," Werferth said. He would never be anything more than a sergeant. Of course, had Forthweg's independent army survived, he would never have been anything more than a sergeant, either, for he had not a drop of noble blood.

  Sidroc winced and cursed as the icy wind tore at him when he left the shelter of the peasant's hut. But he and his comrades were grinning at one another as they formed up and advanced toward the behemoths and toward the tumbled Unkerlanter corpses in the snow.

  The Algarvian behemoth crews weren't grinning. "Who are these whoresons?" one of them shouted to a recognizably Algarvian lieutenant among the Forthwegians. "They look like a pack of Unkerlanters."

  "We're from Plegmund's Brigade," the lieutenant answered. Sidroc followed Algarvian fairly well. He'd learned some in school, mostly beaten in with a switch, and more since joining the Brigade, which had ways of training harsher yet.

  "Plegmund's Brigade!" the redhead on the behemoth burst out. "Plegmund's bloody Brigade? Powers above, we thought we were rescuing real Algarvians."

  "Love you too, prickface." That was a trooper named Ceorl, like Sidroc in the squad Werferth led. He always had been and always would be more a ruffian than a soldier. Here, though, Sidroc completely agreed with him.

  ***

  Major Spinello eyed the approaching Algarvian physician with all the warmth of a crippled elk eyeing a wolf. The physician either didn't notice or was used to such glances from recuperating soldiers. "Good morning," he said cheerfully. "How are we today?"

  "I haven't the faintest idea about you, good my sir," Spinello replied- like a lot of Algarvians, he was given to extravagant flights of verbiage. "As for myself, I've never been better in all my born days. When do you propose to turn me loose so I can get back into the fight against the cursed Unkerlanters?"

  He'd been saying the same thing for weeks. At first, the healing mages had ignored him. Then he'd been turned over to mere physicians… who'd also ignored him. This one said, "Well, we shall see what we shall see." He pressed a hearing tube against the right side of Spinello's chest. "If you'd be so kind as to cough for me…?"

  After taking a deep breath, Spinello coughed. He also had the Algarvian fondness for overacting; with the energy he put into his coughs, he might have been at death's door from consumption. "There, you quack," he said when he let the racking spasm end. "Does that satisfy you?"

  Perhaps fortunately for him, the physician was harder to offend than most of his countrymen. Instead of getting angry- or instead of continuing the conversation through seconds, as some might have done- the fellow just asked, "Did that hurt?"

  "No. Not a bit." Spinello lied without hesitation. He'd taken a sniper's beam in the chest- powers above, a sniper's beam right through the chest- down in Sulingen. He had the feeling he'd hurt for years to come, if not for the rest of his life. That being so, he could- he had to- deal with the pain.

  "I was listening to you," the physician said. "So that you know, I don't believe you, not a word of it."

  "So that you know, sirrah, I don't care what you believe." Spinello hopped down from the infirmary bed on which he'd been sitting and glared at the physician. He had to look up his nose, not down it, for the doctor overtopped him by several inches: he was a bantam rooster of a man, but strong for his size and very quick. He also had a powerful will; under his gaze, the physician gave back a pace before checking himself. Voice soft and menacing, Spinello demanded, "Will you write me out the certificate that warrants me fit to return to duty?"

  To his surprise, the physician said, "Aye." He reached into the folder he'd set on the bed and pulled out a printed form. "In fact, I have filled it out, all but the signature." He plucked a pen and a sealed bottle of ink from the breast pocket of his tunic, inked the pen, and scrawled something that might have been his name or might equally have been an obscenity in demotic Gyongyosian. Then he handed Spinello the completed form. "This will permit you to return to duty, Major. It doesn't warrant you as fit, because you aren't fit. But the kingdom needs you, and you're unlikely to fall over dead at the first harsh breeze. Powers above keep you safe." He bowed.

  And Spinello bowed in return, more deeply than the physician had. That was an extraordinary courtesy; as a count, he surely outranked the other man, who was bound to be only a commoner. But the physician had given him what he wanted most in all the world. He bowed again. "I am in your debt, sir."

  With a sigh, the physician said, "Why a man should be so eager to rush headlong into danger has always been beyond me."

  "You said it yourself: Algarve needs me," Spinello replied. "Now tell me at once: is it true the last of our brave lads have had to yield themselves in Sulingen?"

  "It's true," the physician said grimly. "The crystallomancers can't reach anyone there, and the Unkerlanters are shouting themselves hoarse at the victory. Not a word about the price we made them pay."

  Spinello cursed. The Algarvians had fought their way into Sulingen the summer before- fought their way into it and never fought their way out again. South beyond the Wolter River lay the Mamming Hills, full of the cinnabar that made dragonfire burn so hot and fierce. Take Sulingen, storm over the Wolter, seize the mines in the hills- it had all seemed so straightforward.

  It would have been, too, had the Unkerlanters not fought like demons for every street, for every manufactory, for every floor of every block of flats. And now, even though Swemmel's men had, as the physician said, surely paid a great price, an Algarvian army was gone, gone as if it had never been.

  "I hope they send me west again in a tearing hurry," Spinello said, and the physician rolled his eyes. Spinello pointed to the closet at the far end of the room. "I'm sick of these cursed hospital whites. Is my uniform in there?"

  "If you mean the one in which you came here, Major, no," the physician replied. "That one, as I hope you will understand, is somewhat the worse for wear. But a major's uniform does await you, aye. One moment." He went over to the closet, set a hand on the latch, and murmured softly. "There. Now it will open to your touch. We couldn't very well have had you escaping before you were even close to healed."

  "I suppose not," Spinello admitted. They'd known him, all right. He walked over to the closet and tried the latch. It did open. It hadn't
before; he'd tried a good many times. With a squeak of dry hinges, the door opened, too. There on hooks hung a tunic and kilt of severe military cut. The tunic, he saw to his pride, had on it a wound ribbon. He was entitled to that ribbon, and he would wear it. He got out of the baggy infirmary clothes and put on the uniform. It was baggy, too, baggy enough to make him angry. "Couldn't they have found a tailor who wasn't drunk?" he snapped.

  "It is cut to your measure, Major," the physician answered. "Your former measure, I should say. You've lost a good deal of flesh since you were wounded."

  "This much?" Spinello didn't want to believe it. But he couldn't very well call the physician a liar, either.

  Also hanging in the closet was a broad-brimmed hat with a bright feather from some bird from tropical Siaulia sticking up from the leather hatband. Spinello clapped it on. His head hadn't shrunk, anyhow. That was a relief.

  The physician said, "I have a mirror in my belt pouch, if you'd like to see yourself. We don't keep many in infirmaries. They might dismay patients like you, and they might do worse than dismay others, the ones unlucky enough to receive head wounds."

  "Ah." Contemplating that was enough to make Spinello decide he hadn't come out so bad after all. In unwontedly quiet tones, he said, "Aye, sir, if you'd be so kind."

  "Of course, Major." The physician took it out and held it up.

  Spinello whistled softly. He had lost flesh; his cheekbones were promontories just under the skin, and the line of his jaw sharper than it had been since he left his teens- an era more than a dozen years behind him now. But his green eyes still gleamed, and the attendants who'd trimmed his coppery mustache and little chin beard and side whiskers had done a respectable job. He tilted the hat to a jauntier angle and said, "How ever will the girls keep their legs closed when they see me walking down the street?"