Rulers of the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  That made Tantris’ eyes glow. “Aye, that’s what we’ll do,” he said. “That’s what we’re for.”

  “How many of them are mustering at Pirmasens?” Garivald asked.

  “I don’t know exactly,” Obilot replied. “A couple of regiments, anyhow. Algarvians and Grelzers both.”

  He stared. “Powers above!” he exclaimed. “What can we do against a couple of regiments of real soldiers? They’d squash us like bugs.”

  But Obilot shook her head. “We can’t fight them, no. But there are only two bridges over the streams south of Pirmasens. If we can knock those into the water, the redheads and the traitors can’t get where they’re going.”

  “That’s right.” Sadoc nodded. The peasant who made such a disastrous mage went on, “I’m from those parts. They’d have to spend a while building bridges if we take out the ones that are standing.”

  Tantris nodded, too. Tantris, in fact, all but licked his chops. “If this isn’t the sort of thing a band of irregulars can do, what is?” he asked Garivald. He still didn’t try giving orders, though. Maybe he’d really learned.

  “We can try it, aye,” Garivald said. “A good thing you managed to get us a few eggs—they’ll help.” Tantris actually had been worth something there. Back in the days when Munderic led the band, he’d had connections among disaffected Grelzer soldiers that got eggs for the irregulars. Garivald hadn’t been able to match that. But Tantris, being a regular, had sources of supply farther west, and they’d come through.

  Sadoc said, “I want to get out there and fight. I want to make the Algarvians and the traitors pay. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

  It wasn’t any such thing. Once upon a time—not very long before—he’d wanted to slay Garivald with sorcery. All he’d managed to do was kill Tantris’ comrade instead. He was far more dangerous to the foe with a stick in his hand than with a spell. Maybe he’d really learned, too.

  Garivald scratched his chin. “If we’re going to wreck the bridges, we’ll have to move by night. We can’t let anybody catch us hauling eggs by daylight. Anyone sees us doing that, we’re dead men.”

  Tantris stirred but didn’t speak. Garivald could guess what he was thinking: that wrecking the bridges counted for more than losing a few irregulars. That was probably how real soldiers had to think. If not thinking that way meant Garivald wasn’t a real soldier, he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. And he saw the rest of the band nodding their heads in agreement with him. They wanted to make the Algarvians and their puppets suffer. They didn’t want to do any dying themselves.

  Some of them would, no matter what they wanted. Garivald was pretty sure of that, even as he got the irregulars moving a little past midnight. He hoped they weren’t dwelling on it. But if they wrecked those bridges south of Pirmasens, the enemy would have a good idea of where they were—and would stand between them and the shelter of the woods. Getting back wouldn’t be so easy.

  Getting to the bridges was another matter. Nights were long now, long and cold and dark: plenty of time for marching, plenty of darkness for concealment. Clouds overhead threatened snow. Garivald hoped they would hold off. That’d be just what we need, he thought: a bunch of tracks saying, Here we are—come blaze us!

  They carried four eggs, two for each bridge, with each egg yoked between two men with carrying poles and rope. Every so often, new pairs would take them; they weren’t light, and Garivald didn’t want anyone exhausted. He also sent out scouts well ahead of the main body of irregulars: here of all times, he couldn’t afford to be surprised.

  Tantris came up to him and remarked, “I’ve seen real officers who didn’t arrange their men half so well.”

  “Have you?” Garivald said, and the regular nodded. Garivald let out a thoughtful grunt. “No wonder the Algarvians drove us so hard during the first days of the war, then.”

  “You may make fine songs, but your mouth will be the death of you one day,” Tantris said. Garivald didn’t answer. He just kept trudging along. When the time came to take one egg’s carrying poles on his shoulders for a while, he did it without hesitation. A real officer probably wouldn’t have, but he wasn’t one, so he didn’t care.

  He sent a runner up to the scouts with orders to swing wide around Pirmasens. The glow from the campfires there was plenty to warn him away from the place. The runner came back with word that the scouts had already swung wide on their own. Garivald wondered if regular soldiers would have. He didn’t ask Tantris.

  When they got to the first bridge, they planted an egg at each end. The second bridge lay a few hundred yards upstream. When they got there, Sadoc murmured, “I feel a power point. All I have to do is say the word, and—”

  “No!” Garivald hissed frantically. To his vast relief, Tantris said the same thing in the same tone of voice. Sadoc muttered something else, but the louder mutter of the rain-swollen river swept it away.

  Tantris went off by himself into the darkness. The eggs were his; he knew the spell that would make them burst, and he jealously guarded the knowledge. Garivald made out only one word from him—“Now!”—and then four nearly simultaneous roars shattered the night and shattered the bridges. Chunks of wood rained down on the irregulars. Someone let out a yowl of pain. Nobody would cross the river by either of those ways for a good long while.

  But then, even before Garivald could order the irregulars back toward the woods, challenges rang out and beams began to flicker in the night. The Grelzers had had patrols on the move—he’d just been lucky enough to miss them. Now … Now there were a lot of shouts of “Raniero!” and a lot of men rushing down from Pirmasens to join the hunt for the bridgewreckers. Garivald’s mouth went dry. Some Grelzer soldiers would sooner surrender than fight. Some were very good men indeed. My luck to run into that kind again, he thought. And they can pin us against the river. We can’t use those stinking bridges, either.

  The Grelzers plainly intended to do just that. Garivald had no idea how to stop them. If Tantris did, he kept it as secret as the bursting spell. Another thought ran through Garivald’s mind. We’re going to die here. We’re all going to die here. A beam zipped past him. For a moment, the air smelled of thunderstorms.

  No sooner had that crossed his mind than lightning smote the Grelzers, not once but again and again. Each crash of cloven air dwarfed the roars that had come from the bursting eggs. No snow. No rain. Only bolt after bolt of lightning, peal after peal of thunder.

  Through those peals, Garivald heard someone laughing like a man possessed. Sadoc, he realized. Awe—or perhaps the aftereffects of lightning—made the hair prickle up on his arms and at the nape of his neck. He’s found himself at last. And then, as the Grelzer soldiers fled howling in fear, Well, for sure he picked the right time.

  As the ley-line caravan glided to a stop on the eastern outskirts of Eoforwic, Vanai squeezed Ealstan’s hand in excitement. “Oh, I can hardly wait!” she exclaimed.

  He was grinning, too. They both got to their feet and descended from the caravan car. They both popped open umbrellas; it was drizzling. The misty rain hid all but the nearest houses. There weren’t so many, anyhow; the city faded away into meadows and orchards and farmland—exactly the sort of landscape Vanai wanted now.

  Along with her umbrella, she clutched a wickerwork basket. Ealstan had one just like it. Vanai jumped in the air from sheer high spirits. “Mushrooms!” she squealed, as if it were a magic word. And so, for her, it was.

  “Aye.” Ealstan nodded. They walked away from the caravan stop. Their shoes got muddy. Neither of them cared. They both had on old pairs. They weren’t the only ones who’d got off at this stop, either. Half a carload of eager Forthwegians scattered to pursue their kingdom’s favorite fall sport.

  “You don’t know what this means to me,” Vanai said once the other mushroom hunters were out of earshot.

  “Maybe a little,” Ealstan said. “I remember how excited you were after you found the sorcery last year, just to be able to go to a park and look
for mushrooms there. This has to be even better.”

  “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.