“Why not?” Ealstan said. “If Ethelhelm comes knocking, don’t let him in.”
“You don’t need to worry about that,” Vanai said. One of the reasons she approved of money was that it would let her bribe Algarvians at need. She never wanted to have to bribe them about her Kaunianity; that would leave her enslaved to them. But some silver might make them stop asking her questions about the singer. She hoped she wouldn’t have to find out, but she could try it if she had to.
Through the winter, the woods in the west of Unkerlant had been quiet save for the sounds of men and men’s magic. With the coming of spring, birdsongs burst out everywhere. The very air took on a fresh, green smell as the sap rose in untold millions of trees. Even some of the logs in front of the Gyongyosian army’s redoubts sprouted little leafy shoots. But the Gyongyosians stayed on the defensive.
One day, Szonyi came up to Istvan and said, “Sergeant, the stars only know what kind of horrible scheme the Unkerlanters are hatching over there.” He pointed east. “We ought to give ‘em a good prod, knock’em back on their heels.”
Istvan shrugged. “We haven’t got any orders.” He shook his head. “No, I take that back. We have got orders—to sit tight.”
“It’s foolishness,” Szonyi insisted. “It’s worse than foolishness. It’s going to get a lot of us killed.” He waved his arms in disgust.
The motion drew Corporal Kun’s notice. “What’s eating him?” he asked Istvan, as if Szonyi weren’t there.
“He wants to go out and kill things again,” Istvan answered.
“Ah.” Spectacles glinting in a shaft of sunlight, Kun turned to Szonyi. “When was the last time we saw anything that looked like reinforcements?”
“I don’t know,” Szonyi said impatiently. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“If we attack and use up our men and don’t get any new ones, how long will it be before we haven’t got any men left at all?” Kun asked, as if to an idiot child.
“I don’t know that, either,” Szonyi said. “But if we sit here and don’t do anything and let the Unkerlanters build up and roll over us, how long will it be before we haven’t got any men left that way?”
“He has a point,” Istvan said.
“He should wear a hat on it,” Kun said. Istvan laughed at the former mage’s apprentice. Kun hated admitting that Szonyi could score off him.
Lajos, who was on sentry duty, called, “Who comes?” That sent Istvan and Kun and Szonyi and everybody else in the squad grabbing for sticks.
But the answer was immediate: “I—Captain Tivadar.”
“Come ahead, sir!” Lajos said, and the men in the redoubt relaxed.
Tivadar did, sliding down into the trench behind the log barricade. Istvan hurried over to salute him. “What can we do for you today, sir?” he asked.
“Not a thing. Carry on as you were,” his company commander replied. “I just came up to see how things were going.”
“We’re all right, sir,” Istvan said. “Nothing much going on in front of us right now.” Szonyi stirred, but didn’t say anything. Seeing him stir made Istvan remark, “Been a while since we’ve seen any new men up here, sir. We could use some.”
“This whole line could use some,” Tivadar agreed. “Don’t hold your breath till we get them, though, or we’ll have one more casualty to replace.”
“Something’s gone wrong somewhere,” Istvan spoke with the assurance of a man who had seen a great many things go wrong. “Up till not very long ago, we got—well, not everything we needed, but enough to keep us going from day to day. Now … Stars above know I mean no disrespect to Ekrekek Arpad or anybody else, but it’s like people have forgotten we’re here.”
“You’re not far wrong,” Tivadar answered. “Things aren’t going so well out in the islands in the Bothnian Ocean. I’m not giving away any great secrets when I tell you that. The Kuusamans keep biting them off one after another, and we’re putting more and more soldiers into the ones we still hold. We don’t really have enough men to fight that campaign to the fullest and this one to the fullest at the same time.”
“By the stars, a couple of years ago the Kuusamans couldn’t even throw us off Obuda,” Istvan exclaimed. “What have they done since, and why haven’t we done anything about it?”
Kun asked a different but related question: “Kuusamo is fighting us and Algarve, the same as we’re fighting them and Unkerlant. How is it that they can divide up their forces but we can’t?”
“Because, Corporal, their fight with Algarve is only a sham.” Tivadar chose to answer Kun. “They face our allies with ships and dragons, but not with many men. What soldiers they have in the fight, they throw at us. Both our fronts are real.”
“That’s true,” Kun said. “And if the Unkerlanters hit us hard here, we’ll fall down like a stone-block house in an earthquake.”
“Unkerlant’s got two fronts, too,” Istvan said, “and this is the one that’s their sham.”
Tivadar nodded. “That’s about the size of it, Sergeant. We can grab chunks of their land here, but that’s the most we can do. We can’t take Cottbus away from them, and the Algarvians might.”
Cottbus was only a name to Istvan, and not a name that seemed particularly real. Once, when the fight in western Unkerlant was new, Kun had calculated how long the Gyongyosians would need to get to Cottbus at the rate of advance they’d had then. It had been years; Istvan remembered that. How many? Three? Five? He couldn’t recall. One thing seemed certain: if his countrymen weren’t advancing toward Cottbus at all, they’d never get there.
That led to the next interesting question: “Sir, do you think we’ll be able to hold what we’ve already taken from Unkerlant? The way things are now, I mean.”
“Well, we’re still going to try, Sergeant, sure as blazes,” Tivadar replied. “The last time we talked about this, I was pretty sure we could do it. Now … It’ll be harder. I’d be a liar if I said otherwise. It’ll get harder still if we have to pull men out of the woods here so we can send them to fight on the islands. But the Unkerlanters have their troubles, too. We’ll do our best.”
“The stars favor us,” Szonyi said. “With the heavens smiling, how can we lose?”
Tivadar walked over and slapped him on the back. “You’re a good man. With men like you in our army, how can we lose?” Just for a moment, Szonyi held out his left hand, palm up, and looked at the scar on it. Tivadar thumped him on the back again. “You heard what I said, soldier. I meant it.” Szonyi stood straight and looked proud.
Kun said, “How can we lose? That’s why people fight wars—to find out how one side can lose.”
Szonyi started to get angry. Istvan took a deep breath, casting about for the words that would put Kun in his place. But Captain Tivadar just laughed and said, “We need a few city men in the ranks, too. Otherwise, the rest of us would take too much for granted.”
“He can’t take it for granted that his—” Szonyi started.
“Enough!” Now Istvan’s voice cracked sharp as a whip.
“Aye, enough.” Tivadar looked from Kun to Szonyi and back again. His eye fell on Istvan, too, as his gaze passed from one soldiers to the other. “You are brothers, blooded together … in battle.” The slight pause reminded them how they’d been blooded together for a different reason, too. But no one who didn’t know about that other, darker, reason could have guessed it from the company commander’s words. Tivadar continued, “Let no quarrel come between you now.”
Kun nodded at once. City men didn’t cling to feuds the way folk from the mountain valleys did. Szonyi took longer. Tivadar and Istvan both glared at him. At last, reluctantly, his big, shaggy head bobbed up and down, too.
“That’s a strong fellow,” Tivadar said. He turned and started to climb out of the redoubt.
“Sir? One more question?” Istvan asked. Tivadar paused, then nodded. Istvan asked, “Have we got enough mages forward to warn us if Swemmel’s whoresons are going to turn that hor
rible magic loose on us again? You know the one I mean.”
“I know the one you mean,” the company commander agreed grimly. “What I don’t know is the answer to your question. I’m not even sure mages can detect that spell before the Unkerlanters start slaughtering people to power it. We might do better to slide forward to find out if they’re bringing peasants up toward the front.”
“That’s not a bad notion, sir,” Kun said. “I don’t mean just for us. I mean all along the line of these cursed woods.”
“I’m no general. I can’t give an order for the whole line. I can’t even give an order for the whole regiment,” Tivadar said. “But if you boys want to poke men out to the east to see what’s going on, you won’t make me unhappy. And now I will be on my way.” He climbed the sandbagged steps at the rear of the redoubt and hurried off through the forest.
“He had a good idea there, Sergeant,” Kun said. “If we could get some warning before the Unkerlanters started slaying …” He shuddered. “When they loosed that magic the last time, it was so vile I thought my head would burst like an egg. By the stars, I hoped my head would burst like an egg.”
“All right, we’ll do it,” Istvan said, “though it’d only be luck if Swemmel’s buggers had their victims in our sector. We ought to have scouts pushing forward all along the line. The Unkerlanters do, may the stars go black for them.”
Before he could order anyone to go out and scout around in the woods to the east, an egg burst about fifty yards in front of the redoubt. A moment later, another burst less than half as far away. Before the third egg could land, Istvan was flat on his belly, his face pressed against the black earth. He breathed in a moist lungful of air smelling of mold and old leaves.
That third egg burst behind the redoubt, close enough that the blast of sorcerous energy made the ground shudder beneath Istvan’s prostrate form. A couple of trees crashed in noisy ruin. Earth and twigs rained down on Istvan. He’d been through such pummelings before. Unless an egg burst right on top of the redoubt, he knew he was safe enough.
He was. His squad was. As more eggs burst all around, he exclaimed in dismay: “Captain Tivadar!” He didn’t dare raise his head very far, no matter how dismayed he was.
“He has a good chance,” Kun said, his head not an inch farther from the ground than Istvan’s was. “He’d have gone flat when the first egg flew, and started digging himself a hole before the second one burst. You would. I would. The captain, too. He’s no fool.” From Kun, that was highest praise.
“We ought to go out after him,” Szonyi said. “If it was one of us stuck in a storm like that, he’d go out and bring us back.”
“We don’t even know which way he went,” Istvan said. But that sounded hollow even to him. Szonyi didn’t answer. His silence sounded more reproachful than shouted curses would have.
Cursing on his own, Istvan heaved himself to his feet and left the redoubt. As soon as he was out in the woods, he went down on his belly again; eggs were still bursting all around. “Captain Tivadar!” he shouted, though his voice seemed tiny and lost through those shattering roars of suddenly released sorcerous energy. “Captain Tivadar, sir!”
Even if Tivadar did answer, how was Istvan supposed to hear him? His ears were bruised, overwhelmed, battered. An egg burst nearby, very close. A pine that might have stood for a hundred years swayed, toppled, and crashed down. Had it fallen at a slightly different, an ever so slightly different, angle, it would have crushed the life out of him.
Was that someone’s tawny hair or a bit of dead, yellowed fern? Istvan crawled toward it, then wished he hadn’t. There lay Tivadar, broken like a jointed doll some thoughtless child had stepped on. But dolls didn’t bleed. A bursting egg must have flung him full force into a tree trunk.
At least he can’t have known what hit him, Istvan thought. “Stars above preserve and guide his spirit,” he murmured, and hurried back to the redoubt. He hoped his own end, if it came, when it came, would be as quick.
As winter gave way to spring, so Talsu accommodated himself to life in prison. He hadn’t intended to do any such thing. But, as he’d found in the Jelgavan army, routine had a force of its own. Even when the routine was horrid, as it was here, he got used to it. His belly anticipated almost to the minute the times the guards fed him his nasty, sadly inadequate bowls of gruel. Afterwards, for half an hour, sometimes even for an hour, he felt as nearly content as he could in a small, stinking, vermin-infested cell.
Nearly. His best time in the prison was the exercise period, when, along with other captives from his hall, he got to tramp back and forth in the yard. Even whispers among them could bring the wrath of the guards down on their heads. The gray stone of the prison was as unlovely in the yard as anywhere else. But Talsu saw it by sunlight, a light that grew brighter almost ever day. He saw blue sky. He breathed fresh air. He began to hear birds sing. He wasn’t free. He knew that all too well. But the exercise period let him remember freedom.
And then, like a drowning man sinking beneath the surface of the sea, he would have to go back into the gloom and the reek. Even that came to be part of the routine. He would put a lot of himself away, deaden himself, till the next time he got to go out and see the sun once more.
Whenever routine broke, he dreaded it. He had reason to dread it: routine never broke for anything good. The Jelgavan constabulary captain hadn’t summoned him for several weeks now. Talsu hoped that meant the fellow had given up. He didn’t believe it, though. If the authorities decided he was innocent—or at least harmless—wouldn’t they let him go?
One morning, not long after what passed for his breakfast, the door to his cell came open at an unaccustomed time. “What is it?” Talsu demanded, alarm in his an voice. Any change in routine meant something that could—that was about to—go wrong.
“Shut up,” the lead guard said. “Stand up.” Talsu sprang off his cot to his feet. He said not another word. The guards punished without mercy anything that smacked of disobedience or insubordination. “Come along,” the man at their head commanded, and Talsu came.
To his relief, he discovered he was not going down the corridors that led to the constabulary captain’s lair. Instead, he was installed in another cell, even smaller and darker than the one from which he’d been taken. Light from the corridor leaked in only through a couple of tiny peepholes.
The guards stayed in there with him, which convinced him this change wasn’t permanent. Their leader said, “All right, boys—gag him.” With rough efficiency, the other guards did. Talsu wanted to struggle, but the sticks they aimed at him persuaded him not to. He wanted to protest, too, but the gag kept him from doing that.
“Here,” said one of the men who’d bound the leather-and-cloth contraption over his mouth. “Now you get to look out.” The guards shoved him up to one of the peepholes.
Doing his best to be contrary, Talsu closed his eyes tight. Whatever they wanted him to see, he would do his best not to see it. Then he felt the business end of a stick pressed against the back of his head. “If you make even the smallest sound now, I will blaze you,” the lead guard whispered. “And that will not be the worst thing that happens—not even close to the worst. I almost hope you do sing out.”
They were playing games with him. Talsu knew they were playing games with him. But that didn’t mean he could keep from opening his eyes. What was so important that he had to see it but also had to keep silent about it?
There was the corridor, as uninteresting as the stretch of hallway in front of his own cell. What sort of foolish game were the gaolers making him join? A guard walked along the hall, into and out of Talsu’s limited field of vision. Even if he’d looked full at Talsu, all he could have seen of him through the peephole were a couple of staring eyes. But he walked past the closed door as if it didn’t exist.
“Not a word,” the lead guard whispered again. Talsu nodded, but only a little. He kept his eyes to the peephole, he surely did. The guards had him going. Aye, he knew it,
but he couldn’t do anything about it.
Here came another guard, this one as indifferent to the door to Talsu’s new cell as the first fellow had been. Behind him walked a woman. She wasn’t a prisoner—her person and clothes were clean. At first, that was all Talsu noticed. Then he recognized his wife. He started to scream, “Gailisa!” in spite of the guard’s warning. But he almost blessed the gag, which reminded him he must not make a sound.
Another guard followed Gailisa, but Talsu hardly saw him. His eyes were only on his wife, and he couldn’t have seen her for more than two heartbeats, three at the outside. Then she was gone. The corridor was just a corridor again.
“You see?” the lead guard said with complacency that was almost obscene. “We have her, too. It won’t get any better for you, and oh, how easy it can get worse.”
He didn’t bother ordering his henchmen to ungag Talsu before they took him back to his own cell. If any other captives were looking out and saw a gagged man marched down a corridor, what would that do except make them more likely to submit to escape a similar fate?
After they took Talsu back, after they released him from the gag, they let him stew in his own juice for a couple of days. Only then did they haul him out again and bring him before the constabulary captain who served King Mainardo as ready as he had served King Donalitu.
“Talsu son of Traku.” The captain sounded reproachful. “Do you see what your stubbornness has got you? We had no choice but to bring in your wife for interrogation, too. And what she told us … I wouldn’t say it looks good. No, by the powers above, I wouldn’t say that at all.”
I don’t believe you, Talsu started to say. But he bit that back almost in the same way he’d bitten back Gailisa’s name there in the cell with the peephole. Anything he said gave them a greater hold on him. He stood there and waited.
“Aye, she’s turned on you,” the constabulary captain said. “And she’s given us enough denunciations to keep us busy for quite a while, that she has.” He eyed Talsu. “What have you got to say about that?”
Rulers of the Darkness Page 31
