Rulers of the Darkness d-4

by Harry Turtledove

  "You blame us for the debacle of Unkerlant's arms?" the king said. "How dare you? We did not send the armies out to defeat. You did."

  "Aye, so I did," Rathar agreed. "I sent them out according to your plan, at your order, and against my better judgment- the Algarvians were not so weak as you supposed, and they have proved it. If you put sour milk, rancid butter, and moldy flour into a cake, it will not be fit to eat. If you joggle an officer's elbow when he tries to fight an army, the fighting it gives you will not be what you had in mind, either."

  Swemmel's eyes opened very wide. He wasn't used to frank speech from those who served him, not least because of the horrible things that often happened after someone was rash enough to speak his mind. In most of the things that went on at court, whether Swemmel heard the truth or a pleasing lie mattered little in the grand scheme of things. But in matters military, that wasn't so. Bad advice and bad decisions in the war against Algarve could- and nearly had- cost him his kingdom.

  For years, then, Rathar had used frankness as a weapon and a shield. He knew the weapon might burst in his hand one day, and wondered if this would be that day. Vatran would handle things reasonably well if he got the sack. There were some other promising officers. He hoped Swemmel would grant him the quick mercy of the axe and not be so angry as to boil him alive.

  It had got very quiet inside the vault. Everyone was staring at the small image of the king. Rathar realized, more slowly than he should have, that King Swemmel might not be satisfied with his head alone. He might destroy everyone at the headquarters. Who was there to tell him he could not, he should not? No one at all.

  Next to Swemmel's wrath, the eggs bursting all around were indeed small tubers. Swemmel could, if he chose, wreck his realm in a moment of fury. The Algarvians couldn't come close to that, no matter how hard they tried.

  Rathar couldn't help feeling fear. He stolidly refused to show it: in that, too, he differed from most of the king's courtiers. After a long, long pause, Swemmel said, "We suppose you will tell us now that, if we give you your head, you will reverse all this at the snap of a finger and swear by the powers above to preserve Durrwangen against the building Algarvian attack?"

  "No, your Majesty," Rathar said at once. "I'll fight for this town. I'll fight hard. But we stretched ourselves too thin, and Mezentio's men are the ones on the move right now. They can't just break into Durrwangen, but they may be able to flank us out of it."

  "Curse them," Swemmel snarled. "Curse them all. We live for the day we can hurl their sovereign into the soup pot."

  At least he wasn't talking about hurling Rathar into the soup pot. The marshal said, "They may retake Durrwangen. Or, as I told you, we may yet hold them out of it till spring comes, and the spring thaw with it. But even if they do take it, your Majesty, they can't possibly hope to do anything more till summer."

  "So you say." But the king didn't call Rathar a liar. Swemmel had called Rathar a great many things, but never that. Maybe a reputation for frankness was worth something after all. After muttering something about traitors Rathar was probably lucky not to hear, King Swemmel went on, "Hold Durrwangen if you can. We shall give you the wherewithal to do it, so far as that may be in our power."

  "What I can do, I will," Rather promised. Swemmel's image winked out. The crystal flared, then went dark. Rather sighed. He'd survived again.

  ***

  "Sir?" Leudast came up to Lieutenant Recared as his company commander sat hunched in front of a little fire, toasting a gobbet of unicorn meat over the flames.

  "Eh?" Recared turned. His face and voice were still very young, but he moved like an old man these days. Leudast could hardly blame his superior; he felt like an old man himself these days. The lieutenant let out a weary sigh. "What is it, Sergeant?"

  "Sir, I was just wondering," Leudast answered. "Have you got any notion of where in blazes we are? We've done so much marching and countermarching, hopping onto this ley-line caravan car and off of that one- I wouldn't be sure I'd brought my arsehole along if it weren't attached, if you know what I mean."

  That got him a wan smile from Lieutenant Recared, who said, "I wouldn't put it quite that way, but I do know what you mean, aye. And I can even tell you where we are- more or less. We're somewhere south and a little west of Durrwangen. Does it make you happy to know that?"

  "Happy? No, sir." Leudast shook his head. One of the earflaps on his far cap flipped up for a moment; he grabbed it and shoved it back into place. The spring thaw was coming. It hadn't got here yet, and nights remained bitterly cold. "We came through this part of the country a while ago. I didn't ever want to see it again. It was ugly to start with, and it hasn't got better since."

  Recared smiled again, and added a couple of syllables' worth of chuckle. "There are other reasons for not wanting to see it again, too," he said, "as in, if we had the bit between our teeth instead of the Algarvians, they wouldn't have forced us into defensive positions to try to save Durrwangen again." He cut a piece from the chunk of unicorn meat with his knife and popped it into his mouth. "Powers above, that's good! I don't remember the last time I had anything to eat."

  He didn't offer to share, but Leudast wasn't particularly offended- Recared was an officer, after all. And Leudast wasn't particularly hungry, either; he made a better forager than Recared would be if he lived to be a hundred. The very idea of living to a hundred made Leudast snort. He didn't expect to live through the war, and was amazed he'd been wounded only once.

  A few eggs burst, several hundred yards off to the west. "Those are ours, I think," Leudast said. "Anything we can do to make the redheads keep their heads down is fine by me."

  "They have to be almost at the end of their tether," Recared said. "Who would have thought they could counterattack at all, the way we drove them north and east through the winter?" His face set in unhappy lines. "They're a formidable people."

  He spoke with regret and with genuine if grudging respect. There might have been Unkerlanters who didn't respect Algarvian soldiers after seeing them in action. Leudast hadn't met any, though. He suspected that most of his countrymen who couldn't see what was in front of their noses didn't live long enough to spread their opinions very far.

  Felt boots crunched on crusted snow. Leudast whirled, snatching his stick off his back and swinging it in the direction of the sound. "Don't blaze, Sergeant!" an unmistakable Unkerlanter voice called. A trooper- a man of Recared's regiment- came into the small circle of firelight. "I'm looking for the lieutenant."

  Recared raised his head. "I'm here, Sindold. What do you need from me?"

  "Sir, I've got Captain Gundioc with me here," Sindold answered. "He's commanding a regiment that's just come up out of the west through Sulingen. They'll be going into the line alongside of us, and he wants to know what they'll be up against."

  "That's about the size of it," Captain Gundioc agreed, coming forward into the light with Sindold. "I'm new to this business, and so are the soldiers I'm commanding. You've been through the fire; I'll be grateful for anything you can tell me."

  He looked like a man who hadn't yet seen combat. His face- strong and serious, with a jutting chin- was well shaven. He wore a thick, clean cloak over his equally clean uniform tunic. Even his boots had only a couple of mud stains on them, and those looked new. He might have been running a foundry or teaching school only a few days before.

  "I'll be glad to tell you what I know, sir," Recared answered. "And this is Sergeant Leudast, who has a lot more experience than I do. If you don't mind his sitting in, you can learn from him. I have."

  Leudast hid a grin. He knew he'd taught Recared a thing or two; he hadn't been so sure the lieutenant also knew it. Gundioc nodded, saying, "Aye, I'll gladly hear the sergeant. If he's fought and he's alive, he knows things worth knowing."

  He may be raw, but he's no fool, Leudast thought. After coughing a couple of times, he said, "The thing to remember about the redheads, sir, is, they think lefthanded a lot of the time. They'll do things
we'd never imagine, and they'll make them work. They love to feint and to make flank attacks. They'll look like they're going to hit you one place and then drive it home somewhere else- up your arse, usually."

  "All that's true," Recared agreed. "Every word of it. It's also wise not to go right at them. A charge straight for their lines will slaughter the men who make it. Use the ground as best you can. Use feints, too. If it's obvious, they'll wreck it. If it's not, you have a better chance."

  "I understand," Gundioc said. "This all strikes me as good advice. But if I'm ordered to go forward and I have inspectors with sticks standing behind my line to make sure I obey, what am I to do?"

  Blaze those buggers, Leudast thought. But he couldn't say that aloud, not unless he wanted an inspector blazing him. He glanced over to Recared. If the officer had the privileges of his rank, he also had the obligations, which included answering nasty questions like that. Answer he did, saying, "If you are ordered, you must obey. But men who give such orders often don't live very long in the field. The Algarvians seem to kill them quickly."

  Or we can blame it on the Algarvians, anyhow, Leudast thought. He didn't know exactly how many Unkerlanter officers had met with unfortunate accidents from the men they were supposed to be leading. Not enough, probably. One reason the Unkerlanters had suffered such gruesome casualties was that their officers weren't trained so well as their counterparts in Mezentio's service. Another was that, with plenty of men to spend, the Unkerlanters put out fires by throwing bodies on them till they smothered.

  Did Gundioc understand what Recared had just told him? If he didn't, maybe he was the sort of officer who'd meet with an accident one fine day. But he did. His eyes narrowed. The lines running down from his nose to his mouth deepened and darkened and filled with shadow. "I… see," he said slowly. "That sounds… unofficial."

  "I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about, sir," Recared answered.

  "Which is probably just as well." Gundioc got to his feet. "Thank you for your time. You've given me a thing or two to think about." He trudged across the snow toward his own regiment.

  Leudast went up to his company, not far behind the fighting front. His nose guided him to a pot sizzling above a little fire. A cook ladled bits of turnip and parsnip and chunks of meat into his mess tin. He didn't ask what the meat was. Had he found out, he might have decided he didn't want to eat it, and he was too hungry to take the chance.

  "What are the redheads doing?" he asked- the first question anyone with any sense asked on getting near the Algarvians.

  "Nothing much, Sergeant, doesn't look like," one of his troopers answered. "Real quiet-like over there."

  Suspicion flowered in Leudast. "That's not good," he said. "They're up to something. But what? Will it land on our heads, or will it come down on somebody else?"

  "Here's hoping it's somebody else," the soldier said.

  "Oh, aye, here's hoping." Leudast's voice was dry. "But hope doesn't milk the cow. We'll send extra pickets forward. If the redheads have got something nasty under their kilts, they'll have to work hard to bring it off."

  Even with extra men out in front of the main line, he had trouble going to sleep. He didn't like having raw troops to his left. Their commander seemed smart enough, but how good were his men? What would they do if the Algarvians tested them? He dozed off dreaming about it.

  When he woke, he thought he was still in the dream: a soldier shook him awake, shouting, "Sergeant, everything's gone south on the left!"

  "What do you mean?" Leudast demanded. Somebody had been saying much the same thing to him in his nightmare.

  "The redheads hit that new regiment and broke through, Sergeant," the soldier answered, alarm in his voice. "Now they're trying to swing over and attack us from the flank."

  "Aye, that sounds like them." After two sentences, Leudast was fully awake. He started shouting orders: "First squad, third squad, fall back and form a front to the left. Runner! I need a runner!" For a wonder, he got one. "Go back to brigade headquarters and tell them we're under attack from the left."

  "Aye, Sergeant!" The runner dashed off.

  A couple of squads of Leudast's company weren't the only Unkerlanters trying to stem the Algarvian breakthrough. Recared's other company commanders also used some of their men as a firewall against the redheads. Like him, they were all sergeants who'd seen a lot of fighting; they knew what having Mezentio's men on their flank meant, and how much danger it put them in.

  The trouble was, telling who was who in the dark wasn't easy. Some of the men running toward the line Leudast and his comrades desperately tried to form were Unkerlanters from Gundioc's shattered regiment, fleeing the Algarvian onslaught. Others were authentic redheads. They didn't yell "Mezentio!" as they came forward, not now- silence helped them sow confusion.

  "If it moves, blaze it!" Leudast shouted to his men. "We'll sort it out later, but we can't let the Algarvians get in among us." That was all the more true- and urgent- because the men he'd pulled out to face left didn't have enough holes in which to hide, and the ones they did have weren't deep enough. If it meant some of his countrymen got blazed, it did, that was all. And how are you different from the officers you warned Gundioc about? Leudast wondered. He had no answer, except that he wanted to stay alive.

  Someone blazed at him out of the night. The beam hissed as it boiled snow into steam a few feet to his right. He blazed back, and was rewarded with a cry of pain: more to the point, a cry of pain whose words he didn't understand but whose language was undeniably Algarvian. He didn't have to feel personally guilty, not yet.

  His runner, or another one from the regiment, must have got through. Eggs started falling where the Algarvians had broken the line. A fresh regiment of Unkerlanter soldiers- all of them shouting, "Urra!" and "Swemmel!" -rushed up to push the redheads back. A couple of troops of behemoths came forward with the reinforcements. Sullenly, the Algarvians withdrew.

  After the sun came up, Leudast saw Captain Gundioc's body. He sprawled in the snow with some of his own men and some redheads. Leudast sighed. Gundioc might well have made a good officer with some seasoning. He'd never get it now.

  Seven

  Wind whipped past Colonel Sabrino's face as his dragon dove on a ley-line caravan coming up into Durrwangen from the south. He didn't know whether the caravan was carrying Unkerlanter soldiers or horses and unicorns or simply sacks of barley and dried peas. He didn't much care, either. Whatever it was carrying would help King Swemmel's men inside Durrwangen- if it got there.

  As the dragon stooped like a striking falcon, the caravan swelled from a worm on the ground to a toy to its real size with astonishing speed. "Mezentio!" Sabrino shouted, loosing the eggs slung under his mount's belly. Then he whacked the dragon with his goad to make it pull up. If he hadn't, the stupid thing might have flown itself straight into the ground.

  Without the weight of the eggs, it gained height more readily. Behind it, twin flashes of light marked bursts of sorcerous energy. Sabrino looked back over his shoulder. He whooped with glee. He'd knocked the caravan right off the ley line. Whatever it was carrying wouldn't get to Durrwangen any time soon. Flames leaped up from a shattered caravan car. Sabrino whooped again. Some of what that caravan was carrying wouldn't get to Durrwangen at all.

  Captain Domiziano's image appeared in the crystal Sabrino carried. "Nicely struck, Colonel!" he cried.

  Sabrino bowed in his harness. "I thank you." He looked around. "Now let's see what else we can do to make King Swemmel's boys love us."

  No immediately obvious answer sprang to mind. A nice pillar of smoke was rising from the wrecked ley-line caravan now. More smoke, much more, rose from Durrwangen itself. Algarvian egg-tossers and dragons had been pounding the city ever since the late-winter counterattacks pushed this far south. Sabrino hoped his countrymen would be able to break into Durrwangen before the spring thaw glued everything in place for a month or a month and a half. If they didn't, the Unkerlanters would have all tha
t time to fortify the town, and then it would be twice as expensive to take… if it could be done at all.

  That wasn't anything about which he could do much. He couldn't even drop any more eggs till he flew back to the dragon farm and loaded up again.

  "Sir!" That was Domiziano again, his voice cracking with excitement like a youth's. "Look over to the west, sir. A column of behemoths, and curse me if they aren't stuck in a snowdrift."

  After looking, Sabrino said, "You have sharp eyes, Captain. I didn't spot those buggers at all. Well, since you did see them, would you like to give your squadron the honor of the first pass against them?"

  "My honor, sir, and my pleasure," Domiziano replied. Not all the rank-and-file dragonfliers had crystals; he used hand signals to point them toward the new target. Off they flew, the rest of Sabrino's battered wing trailing them to ward against Unkerlanter dragons and to finish whatever behemoths they might miss.

  Sabrino sang a tune that had been popular on the stage in Trapani the year before the Derlavaian War broke out. It was called "Just Routine," and sung by one longtime lover to another. Smashing up columns of Unkerlanter behemoths was just routine for him these days. He'd been doing it ever since Algarve and Unkerlant first collided, more than a year and a half ago now.

  Great wingbeats quickly ate up the distance to the behemoths. Sabrino laughed aloud, saying, "So your snowshoes didn't help you this time, eh?" The first winter here in the trackless west had been a nightmare, with the Unkerlanters able to move through snow that stymied Algarvian men and behemoths. Those odds were more even now: experience was a harsh schoolmaster, but an undeniably effective one.

  The snow down there didn't seem all that deep. Sabrino had seen drifts that looked like young mountain ranges, drifts into which you could drop a palace, let alone a behemoth. Of course, gauging the ground from above was always risky business. Maybe snow filled a gully, and the behemoths had discovered it the hard way. Still, although they'd halted, they didn't seem to be in any enormous distress.