Rulers of the Darkness d-4

by Harry Turtledove

  "It is." Vanai gave him a quick kiss. He did try to understand in his head. Maybe he even succeeded there. But how could he understand in his belly what being cooped up inside that flat for most of a year had been like? How could he understand the fear she'd felt every time somebody walked along the hall past the door? A pause, a knock, could have meant the end for her. It hadn't happened, but it could have. She'd know that in her belly.

  Her husband's thoughts were traveling a different ley line. "There in the park, that was where you got your Forthwegian name," Ealstan said. "It was the first one that popped into my head when we ran into Ethelhelm and his friends."

  "Thelberge." Vanai tasted it, then shrugged. "It took me by surprise then. I'm used to it by now, or pretty much so, anyway. Everybody who calls me anything calls me Thelberge these days- except you, every once in a while."

  "I like you as Vanai," he said seriously. "I always have, you know." Despite the chilly drizzle, that warmed her. Ealstan shifted his basket to the hand that also held the umbrella so he could put his free arm around her. He went on, "You've had a better year than Ethelhelm did, and that's the truth."

  "I know." Her shiver had nothing to do with the weather, either. "I wonder what's become of him since he ran away from everything. He had nerve, there in the street in Eoforwic when his spell wore off. He started singing and playing and bluffed his way through."

  "If he'd had more nerve earlier, it might not have come to that." Ealstan had never had much bend to him. As far as he was concerned, things were right or they were wrong, and that was that. "But he wanted to stay rich even though the Algarvians were running the kingdom, and he ended up paying the price."

  "You can't blame him too much," Vanai said. "Most people just want to get along as best they can. He did better than almost anybody else with Kaunian blood in Forthweg… for a while, anyhow."

  "Aye. For a while." Ealstan sounded grim.

  Part of that, Vanai knew, was what he reckoned friendship betrayed. She said, "Maybe we haven't heard the last of him yet."

  "Maybe," Ealstan said. "If he has any sense, though, he'll go on lying low. The Algarvians would be on him like a blaze if he started making waves. And Pybba would know about him, too, if he were trying to give the redheads a hard time. Pybba hasn't heard a thing."

  "Would he tell you if he had?" Vanai asked.

  Before Ealstan answered, he stooped to pick some meadow mushrooms and toss them into his basket. Then he said, "Would he tell me? I don't know. But there would likely be some sign of it in his books, and there isn't. You poke through a fellow's books, you can find all sorts of things if you know how to look."

  "You could, maybe," Vanai said. He spoke with great assurance. His father had trained him well. At nineteen, he was a match for any bookkeeper in Eoforwic.

  And how did your grandfather train you? Vanai asked herself. If there were need for a junior historian of the Kaunian Empire, you might fill the bill. Since the Algarvians have made it illegal to write Kaunian- and a capital offense to be Kaunian- you're not good for much right now.

  She walked on for another couple of paces, then stopped so abruptly that Ealstan kept going on for a bit before realizing she wasn't following. He turned back in surprise. "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing." She'd been feeling flutters in her belly the past few days, maybe even the past week. She'd put them down to gas and a sour stomach; her digestion wasn't all it might have been. But this wasn't gas. She knew what it was, knew what it had to be. "Nothing's wrong. The baby just kicked me."

  Ealstan looked as astonished as he had when she'd first told him she was pregnant. Then he hurried back to her and set his own hand on her belly. Vanai looked around, ready to be embarrassed, but she couldn't see anyone else, which meant no one else could see him do such an intimate thing. He said, "Do you suppose he'll do it again?"

  "How should I know?" Vanai said, startled into laughter. "It's not anything I can make him do."

  "No, I guess not." Ealstan sounded as if that hadn't occurred to him till she pointed it out.

  But then, with his palm still pressed against her tunic, the baby did stir again within her. "There!" she said. "Did you feel that?"

  "Aye." Now wonder filled his face. "What does it feel like to you?"

  Vanai thought about that. "It doesn't feel like anything else," she said at last. "It feels as if somebody tiny is moving around inside me, and he's not very careful where he puts his feet." She laughed and set her hand on top of his. "That really is what's going on."

  Ealstan nodded. "Now it does seem you're going to have a baby. It didn't feel quite real before, somehow."

  "It did to me!" Vanai exclaimed. For a moment, she was angry at him for being so dense. She'd gone through four months of sleepiness, of nausea, of tender breasts. She'd gone through four months without the usual monthly reminder that she wasn't pregnant. But all of that, she reminded herself, had been her concern, not Ealstan's. All he could note from firsthand experience was, this past week or so, a very slight bulge in her lower abdomen and, now, a flutter under his hand.

  He must have been thinking along with her there, for he said, "I can't have the baby, you know. All I can do is watch."

  She cocked her head to one side and smiled at him. "Oh, you had a little more to do with it than that." Ealstan coughed and spluttered, as she'd hoped he would. She went on, "The baby isn't going anywhere for months, even if he thinks he is. We'll only be out here hunting mushrooms for a few hours. Can we do that now?"

  "All right." Ealstan looked astonished again. The baby was uppermost- overwhelmingly uppermost- in his thoughts. He had to be amazed it wasn't so overwhelmingly uppermost in hers. But she'd had those months to get used to the idea, while he'd admitted a minute before that it hadn't seemed real to him till now.

  "Come on." She pointed ahead. "Are those oaks there? I think they are. Maybe we'll find some oyster mushrooms growing on their trunks."

  "Maybe we will." Ealstan slipped his arm around her waist- she still had a waist. "We did back there in that grove between Gromheort and Oyngestun." He grinned at her. "We found all sorts of interesting things in that oak grove."

  "I don't know what you're talking about," Vanai said. They both laughed. They'd first met in that grove of oaks. They'd first traded mushrooms there, too. And, a couple of years later, they'd first made love in the shade of those trees. Vanai smiled at Ealstan. "A good thing it wasn't drizzling that one day, or everything that's happened since would have been different."

  "That's so." Ealstan wasn't smiling anymore; he frowned as he worked through the implications of what she'd said. "Strange to think how something you can't control, like the weather, can change your whole life."

  "Tell it to the Algarvians," Vanai said savagely. "In summer, they go forward in Unkerlant. In winter, they go back." Before Ealstan could answer, she made her own commentary to that: "Except this year, powers below eat them, they couldn't go forward in summer. They tried, but they couldn't."

  "No." Ealstan's voice held the same fierce, gloating joy as hers. "Nothing came easy for them this year. And now there's fighting down in Sibiu, too. I don't think that's going so well for the redheads, either, or they'd say more about it in the news sheets."

  "Here's hoping you're right," Vanai said. "The thinner they spread themselves, the better." She stooped and plucked up a couple of horse mushrooms, slightly more flavorful cousins to ordinary meadow mushrooms. As she put them in her basket, she sighed. "I don't think there are as many interesting kinds around Eoforwic as there were back where we came from."

  "I think you're right." Ealstan started to add something else, but broke off and looked at her with an expression she'd come to recognize. Sure enough, he said, "Your sorcery's slipped again."

  Vanai's mouth twisted. "It shouldn't have. I renewed it not long before we walked to the caravan stop."

  "Well, it has," her husband said. "Is it my imagination, or has the spell been fading faster since you got pregnant?"


  "I don't know," Vanai said. "Maybe. It's a good thing nobody's close by, that's all." Now she hurried for the shelter of the oaks- not that they gave much shelter, with most of the leaves off the branches. She took out her two precious lengths of yarn, twirled them together, and made the spell anew. "Is it all right?" she asked.

  "Aye." Ealstan nodded. Now he looked thoughtful. "I wonder why it isn't holding so long these days. Maybe because you've got more life energy in you now, and so the spell has more to cover."

  "It could be. It sounds logical," Vanai said. "But I hope you're wrong. I hope I just didn't cast the spell quite right. I could have lost the disguise on the caravan car, not out here where no one but you saw me." Her shiver, again, had nothing to do with the chilly, nasty weather. "That would have been very bad."

  ***

  "Forward!" Sergeant Leudast shouted. "Aye, forward, by the powers above!" Since the great battles in the Durrwangen bulge, he'd shouted the order to advance again and again. It still tasted sweet as honey, still felt strong as spirits, in his mouth. He might almost have been telling a pretty woman he loved her.

  But the men holed up in the village ahead didn't love him or his comrades. The ragged banners flapping in the chilly breeze there were green and gold- the colors of what the Algarvians called the Kingdom of Grelz. As far as Leudast was concerned, that kingdom didn't exist. The Grelzers blazing at his company from those battered huts had a different opinion.

  "Death to the traitors!" Captain Recared yelled. Somewhere in the long fight between Durrwangen and west-central Grelz, a promotion had finally caught up with him. Leudast couldn't remember where. It didn't matter to him. Promotion or no, Recared kept doing the same job. Leudast kept doing the same job, too, and nobody would ever promote him to lieutenant's rank. He was sure of that. He had neither the bloodlines nor the pull to become an officer. "Death to the traitors!" Recared cried again, from behind a pale-barked birch tree.

  Leudast crawled over toward Recared. Somebody in the village saw the motion and blazed at him. The ground was wet: steam puffed up where the beam bit, a few feet in front of his head. He froze. In southern Unkerlant, with winter coming on fast, that could easily be a literal as well as a metaphorical statement. After shivering for half a minute, he dashed forward again, and found shelter behind another tree trunk. The Grelzer blazed at him again, and missed again.

  "Death to those who follow the false king!" Captain Recared roared.

  "Sir," Leudast said, and then, when Recared didn't notice him right away, "Sir!"

  "Eh?" That second time, he'd spoken loud enough to make Recared jump. The young regimental commander turned his head. "Oh, it's you, Sergeant. What do you want?"

  "Sir, if you don't mind, don't shout about death so much," Leudast answered. "It just makes the cursed Grelzers fight harder, if you know what I mean. Sometimes they'll surrender, if you give 'em the chance."

  Recared chewed on that: visibly, for Leudast watched his jaw muscles work. At last, he said, "But they deserve death."

  "Aye, most of 'em do." Leudast didn't want to argue with his superior; he just wanted him to shut up. "But if you tell 'em ahead of time that they'll get it, then they've got no reason not to fight as hard as they can to keep from falling into our hands. Do you see what I'm saying?"

  The winter before, Recared wouldn't have. Now, reluctantly, he nodded, though he said, "I still have to make our men want to fight."

  "Haven't you noticed how it is, sir?" Leudast asked. "Advancing makes a big difference there." Unkerlanter egg-tossers began pelting the enemy-held village. Leudast grinned wider at each burst. "And so does efficiency. They see we really can lick the whoresons on the other side."

  "Of course we can," Recared exclaimed, as if the first two desperate summers of the war against Algarve had never happened. He knew how to take advantage of the egg-tossers, though. He raised his voice to a shout again: "They've got to keep their heads down, boys, so we can take 'em. Forward! King Swemmel and victory!"

  "Swemmel and victory!" Leudast echoed, also at the top of his lungs. Nothing wrong with that war cry, nothing at all. A lot of Unkerlant- and a good big stretch of the Duchy of Grelz here- had been recaptured behind it.

  Recared ran forward- he was brave enough and to spare. Leudast followed him. So did everybody within earshot, and then the rest of the Unkerlanter soldiers who saw their comrades moving. "Urra!" they shouted, and, "Swemmel and victory!"

  Shouts rose from inside the village: "Raniero!" and "Swemmel the murderer!" Advancing Unkerlanters went down. Some howled out cries that held no words, only pain. Others lay very still. These Grelzers weren't about to surrender regardless of what the Unkerlanters yelled.

  They'd buried eggs in the mud in front of their village, too. An Unkerlanter soldier trod on one. He shrieked briefly as the released energies consumed him. Leudast cursed. His own countrymen had stalled Algarvian attacks in the Durrwangen salient with belt after belt of hidden eggs. Having the stratagem turned against them seemed anything but fair.

  Then Recared pointed south of the village and said the happiest words any Unkerlanter footsoldier could use: "Behemoths! Our behemoths, by the powers above!"

  Even with snowshoes spreading their weight, even with the way made easier with brush and logs spread in front of them, the great beasts made slower, rougher going in the mud than they had on the hard ground of summer. But they moved forward faster than men could, and they and their armored crewmen were much harder to kill than ordinary footsoldiers.

  Leudast said, "Let's go with them and bypass this place. Once we get behind it, it won't be worth anything to the Grelzers anymore."

  Recared frowned. "We ought to go straight at the enemy. He's right there in front of us."

  "And we're right here in front of him, where he's got the best blaze at us," Leudast answered. "When the Algarvians were driving us, they'd go around the places that fought hard and let them wither on the vine. They'd advance where we were weak, and we couldn't be strong everywhere."

  "That's so," Recared said thoughtfully. He hadn't been there to go through most of that, but he knew about it. A great many of the soldiers who had gone through it were dead; Leudast knew how lucky he was to be among the exceptions. To his relief, Recared nodded again, blew his whistle, and shouted for his men to swing south of the village and go with the behemoths. "The men who come after us, the ones who aren't good enough to fight in the first rank, can mop up these traitors," he declared.

  As Leudast hurried toward the behemoths, he wondered if the Grelzers would sally to try to stop them. But the men who followed King Mezentio's cousin stayed under cover; they knew they'd get slaughtered out in the open. Leudast expected them to get slaughtered anyway, but now it would take longer and cost more.

  The Unkerlanters pressed on for another couple of miles before a well-aimed beam from a heavy stick left one of their behemoths kicking its way toward death in the mud. Another beam, not so well aimed, threw up a great gout of nasty-smelling steam between a couple of other behemoths. All the crews frantically pointed ahead. When Leudast saw Algarvian behemoths at the edge of some woods, he threw himself flat in the muck. The redheads didn't seem to have so many behemoths left these days, but they used the ones they did have with as much deadly panache as ever.

  Still, two and a half years of war had taught King Swemmel's soldiers several painful but important lessons. Their behemoths didn't charge straight at the Algarvian beasts. Some of them traded beams and sticks with the Algarvians from a distance. That let the others sidle around to the flank. Leudast had watched this dance of death before. He knew what the right counter would be: having more behemoths waiting to engage the Unkerlanters trying the flanking move. The Algarvians didn't have them. That meant they could either withdraw or die where they stood.

  They chose to withdraw. Someplace else, someplace where they found odds that looked better, they would challenge the Unkerlanters again. In the meanwhile… "Forward!" Leudast shouted, scrambl
ing up out of the mud. He wasn't that much filthier than the men around him, and his voice lent him authority.

  Not long before nightfall, his squad and a couple of others fought their way into a village neither the Grelzers nor the Algarvians defended very hard. Captain Recared strode for the firstman's house, to make his headquarters there. He found the place empty, the door standing open. "Where's the firstman?" he asked a dumpy woman looking out the window of the hut next door.

  She jerked a thumb toward the east. "He done run off," she answered, her Grelzer accent thick as syrup in Leudast's ears. "He were in bed with the Algarvians, he were." She sniffed. "His daughter were in bed with anything that walked on two legs and weren't quite dead. Little slut."

  Recared nodded and went inside. Leudast nodded, too- wearily. He heard that story, or one just like it, in every village the Unkerlanters recaptured. All those villages had the same look: a lot of houses abandoned because the peasants had fled east to stay under Algarvian protection, hardly any men fit for soldiers showing themselves on the street.

  The first few times he'd heard peasants tell tales of woe, he'd been sympathetic. Now… Now sympathy came harder. A lot of these people had run away rather than returning to King Swemmel's rule. From what Leudast had seen, a lot of the ones who'd stayed behind had done so only because they hadn't found the chance to flee.

  No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a scuffle broke out in a house not far away: curses and thumps and a shout of pain. "Think we ought to do anything about that, Sergeant?" one of his men asked.

  Leudast shrugged and then shook his head. "I think it'll sort itself out without us. When it does…"

  He proved a good prophet. A couple of minutes later, three middle-aged men half led, half dragged one of their contemporaries up before him. "Ascovind here, he done sucked up to the Algarvians and to the miserable little tinpot king they made," one of the captors said. "He ought to get what's coming to him."