Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  Whichever was true, she couldn’t even think about trying the spell before Ealstan got home. Even if she’d had all it would need, she wouldn’t be able to see the change if she did it before then, neither on herself nor in a mirror. And if she turned herself into a crone, she wouldn’t want to go out on the streets, either.

  When Ealstan gave his coded knock, Vanai threw the door open and let him in. “Ethelhelm and his band are back in town,” he said after he’d hugged her and kissed her. “He’s got more stories to tell than you can shake a stick at.”

  “That’s nice.” Normally, Vanai would have been bubbling with eagerness to hear news of the outside world. Now, hoping to see some of it for herself, she cared much less. “Listen, Ealstan, to what I want to do . . . .”

  Listen Ealstan did. He had patience. And, as she went on, his own enthusiasm built. “That would be wonderful, sweetheart,” he said. “Do you really think you can do it?”

  “I don’t know,” Vanai admitted. “But, by the powers above, I hope so. I’m so sick of being stuck here, you can’t imagine.”

  She waited to hear whether Ealstan would claim he could imagine it, even if he didn’t feel it himself. To her relief, he only nodded and asked, “What will you need for the spell?”

  Vanai had been pondering that herself. You Too Can Be a Mage didn’t go into a lot of detail. “Yellow yarn,” she answered. “Black yarn—dark brown would be even better. Vinegar. Honey. A lot of luck.”

  Ealstan laughed. “I can bring you back everything but the luck.”

  “We’ve got honey and vinegar,” Vanai answered. “All you have to buy is the yarn. And you’ve already brought me luck.”

  “Have I?” His tone went bleak. “Is this luck, being trapped in this little flat day after day?”

  “For a Kaunian in Forthweg, this is luck,” Vanai said. “I came this close”—she snapped her fingers—“to getting sent west, remember. I’m lucky to be alive, and I know it.” Maybe you should be content with that, part of her said. Maybe you shouldn’t want any more. But she did. She couldn’t help it.

  And because she couldn’t, the next day seemed to crawl past. The walls of the flat felt as if they were closing in on her. When Ealstan came home after what seemed like forever, she threw the door open and snatched from his hand the little paper-wrapped parcels he was carrying. He laughed at her. “Nice to know you’re glad to see me.”

  “Oh, I am,” she said, and he laughed again. She tore the parcels open. One held pale yellow yarn, a pretty good match for the color of her own hair. The skein of yarn in the other package was dark brown. She nodded to Ealstan. “These are perfect.”

  “Hope so,” he said. “Will the spell wait till after supper? I’m starved.” He gave his belly a theatrical pat.

  Even though Vanai didn’t want to wait any more, she did. And then, at last, there wasn’t anything left to wait for. She got the honey and the vinegar. She got lengths of each color yarn. And she got You Too Can Be a Mage. After studying the spell it gave as carefully as if she were a first-rank theoretical sorcerer essaying some conjuration that had never been tried before, she nodded. “I’m ready.”

  “Good,” Ealstan said. “You don’t mind if I watch?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “Just don’t jog my elbow.”

  Ealstan didn’t say a word. He pulled up a chair and waited to see what would happen next. Vanai began to chant. She felt strange incanting in Forthwegian rather than classical Kaunian, though the tongue in which a spell was cast had nothing to do with how effective it was. A lot of history had proved that.

  As she chanted, she dipped the yellow yarn first into the vinegar, then into the honey. She laid it on top of the length of dark brown yarn. She frowned a little while she was doing that. The phrasing for the spell there seemed particularly murky, as if the translator, whoever he was, had had trouble following the Kaunian original. She hurried on. A last word of command and the spell was done.

  “You don’t look any different,” Ealstan remarked.

  He’d stayed quiet all the time Vanai was working. She’d almost forgotten he was there. Now, sweat streaming down her face from the effort she’d just put forth, she looked up—and froze in horrified dismay. No wonder she didn’t look any different. The spell hadn’t worked on her; it had worked on Ealstan. He made a very handsome Kaunian, but that wasn’t what she’d had in mind.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. He couldn’t see the effects on himself, any more than Vanai would have been able to on herself.

  With a curse, she flung You Too Can Be a Mage across the room. The translator hadn’t known what he was doing—and he’d landed her and Ealstan in a dreadful fix. How was Ealstan supposed to go out if he looked like a blond? Her heart in her shoes, Vanai told him what had happened.

  “Well, that’s not so good,” he said, easier-going than she could have been. “Try it again—the exact same spell, I mean—except this time put brown on yellow. With a little luck, that’ll get us back where we started.”

  She envied him his calm. Forthwegians were supposed to have terrible tempers, to fly off the handle at any excuse or none. Here, though, she was furious while Ealstan took things in stride. And he’d come up with what sounded like a good idea. She went over and picked up You Too Can Be a Mage. The cover was bent. She wished she could bend the author, too.

  Ealstan, still looking like a Kaunian, came over and gave her a kiss. It almost felt as if she were being unfaithful to the real him. But part of her also wished he could stay a Kaunian . . . except when he had to go outside. “You too can be a mage,” he said, “provided you have more going for you than this fool book.”

  “I’ll try the spell again,” Vanai said. “Then I’ll throw the book away.”

  “Keep it,” Ealstan said. “Read it. Enjoy it. Just don’t use it.”

  Grimly, Vanai set about the spell once more, with the reversal Ealstan had suggested. She wanted to correct the Forthwegian text where she knew it had gone awry, but she didn’t. And when she called out the word of command, Ealstan went back to looking like himself.

  “Did it work?” he asked—he couldn’t tell.

  “Aye.” Vanai heard the relief in her own voice. “You won’t have to go through what I go through for looking like this.”

  “I like the way you look,” Ealstan said. “And I wouldn’t mind looking like a Kaunian, except that I can do a better job of keeping you safe if I don’t.”

  That was no doubt true. Vanai hated it, but couldn’t argue it. She slammed the cover of You Too Can Be a Mage shut. She never intended to open it again.

  Splashing through muck toward yet more trees ahead, Sergeant Istvan said, “I never thought the stars looked down on such a forest.” The big Gyongyosian plucked on his curly, tawny beard; as far as he could tell, the forest in which he was fighting went on forever.

  Corporal Kun said, “Sooner or later, it has to stop. When it does, there’s the rest of Unkerlant ahead.” Kun’s beard grew in lank clumps; he was lean and would have been clever-looking even without spectacles. He’d been a mage’s apprentice before going into the Gyongyosian army, and seldom let anyone forget it.

  “I know,” Istvan answered morosely. “I wonder if any of us’ll be left alive to see it.” He had no great desire to see the rest of Unkerlant. As far as he was concerned, the Unkerlanters were welcome to their kingdom. He wanted nothing to do with it. The mountains that were the borderland between Gyongyos and Unkerlant had been bad. This endless forest, in its own way, was worse. He wouldn’t have bet that whatever lay beyond it made for much of an improvement. But he did want to live to find out.

  More men with tawny yellow hair and beards who wore leggings like Istvan’s waved his squad and him forward. “All safe enough,” one of them said. “We’ve cleared the Unkerlanters out of the stretch ahead.”

  Istvan didn’t laugh at his countrymen, but keeping quiet wasn’t easy. Brash Kun did speak up: “Nobody knows whether those goat-eaters
are cleared out till after they blaze half a dozen men in the back. Some of them will be lurking there, you mark my words.”

  “You have no faith,” said one of the warriors beckoning the squad onward.

  “We have plenty of faith,” Istvan said before Kun could answer. “We have faith there will be some Unkerlanters all our patrols haven’t swept up. There always are.” He didn’t waste any more time with the guides, but tramped east past them, ever deeper into the woods.

  Behind their spectacles, Kun’s eyes were puzzled. “You don’t usually stick up for me like that, Sergeant,” he said.

  “I’ll take you over those know-it-alls any day,” Istvan answered. “They haven’t done any real fighting, or they wouldn’t talk like a pack of idiots. Besides, you’re mine. If anybody rakes you over the coals, it’s me. Let them tend to their own. That’s fair. That’s right.”

  A few minutes later, off to one side, someone let out a shriek. “He’s been blazed!” someone else shouted. Gyongyosian troopers scurried this way and that, trying to flush out the Unkerlanter sniper. They had no luck.

  “No, none of King Swemmel’s men in these parts,” Istvan said. “No chance of that at all.”

  “Goat shit,” Kun said. They both laughed, though it wasn’t really funny. Snipers and holdouts took a constant toll on the Gyongyosians trying to force their way through the vast pine forests of western Unkerlant. Endless ferns and tree trunks to hide behind; endless branches on which to perch; endless foliage with which to conceal . . . no, rooting out the enemy was next to impossible. Kun looked now this way, now that. He knew, as the guides had not, that where there was one sniper, there were likely to be more.

  Somewhere up ahead, eggs were bursting. Istvan wondered who was tossing them at whom. With the breeze blowing from out of the east, bringing the sound toward his ears, he had trouble being sure. He hoped those eggs were landing on the Unkerlanters’ heads.

  “Come on! Come on!” That was Captain Tivadar’s voice. Istvan relaxed a little; if he’d found his company commander, he’d brought the squad somewhere close to where it was supposed to be. Tivadar caught sight of him and waved. “The party’s up ahead.”

  “Aye.” Istvan turned to his men. “Come on, you lugs. Back into the line we go.”

  “Not enough time pulled back, and we didn’t pull back far enough, either,” Szonyi said. Istvan remembered when he’d been new to the game. He wasn’t any more. He picked the same thing to complain about as Istvan would have, or, for that matter, as a fellow who’d been in the army since before Istvan was born would have.

  “They can’t very well give us a proper leave, not when it’s a week’s march back to the nearest ley line that could take us anywhere worth going,” Istvan told him. Istvan had been a sergeant long enough by now to know how to squelch grumblers, too.

  “Then they cursed well ought to bring some whores forward,” Szonyi said. Since Istvan thought that was a good idea, too, he didn’t argue any more.

  Captain Tivadar fell into step beside him. “Swemmel’s boys are up to something,” he said. “Nobody knows what yet, but they haven’t been standing and fighting the past couple of days the way they would before.”

  “Maybe they finally know they’ve been licked.” Istvan threw up a hand. Tivadar sputtered raucous laughter all the same. Istvan went on, “No, I didn’t mean it. They’re tough, no doubt about it.”

  “And they’ve got more lines in these woods than a thief has on his back after he takes his forty lashes,” Tivadar added. “No, if they don’t fight now, it’s because they’re plotting something nasty for later.”

  “Aye, you’re likely right, sir,” Istvan agreed with a sigh.

  More eggs burst, closer now. Istvan looked around for the nearest hole in which he could hide, something he did as automatically as he breathed, and because he wanted to keep breathing. That also made him take more notice of the forest through which he was marching. Tivadar noticed him noticing; the captain didn’t miss much. “You see what I mean?”

  “Aye,” Istvan said again, nodding. “If they’d fought the way they usually do, the woods here would be beaten flat. Instead, most of the trees are still standing.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” the company commander agreed. “When they’ve always done one thing and they all of a sudden change to another, anybody with any sense starts wondering why.”

  An egg burst close enough to send branches crashing down only a few strides away. “They haven’t quite given up yet,” Istvan remarked dryly.

  Tivadar chuckled. “No, it doesn’t seem that way, does it? But it’s not the same kind of fight as it has been, and I don’t trust it.”

  The breeze from out of the east blew smoke into Istvan’s face. He coughed a couple of times. A moment later, he smelled something else: the sickly-sweet reek of corruption. Sure enough, a few paces farther on he strode past a bloated corpse in a rock-gray tunic. He jerked a thumb toward it. “Good to see we got one of those sons of goats, anyhow.”

  “Oh, we’ve hurt them,” Tivadar said. “But what they’ve done to us . . .”

  “The whole cursed country is too big and too far from everything to make it easy to fight over,” Istvan said. “We can’t get at it, and the Unkerlanters can’t get very many men into it, either. But as long as they can keep us from getting into country that really is worth something, they’re ahead of the game.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Captain Tivadar agreed. The breeze out of the east picked up, and tried to lift his service cap off his head. He tugged it down over his curly hair. “Sooner or later, we will break out. Then, by the stars, we’ll make them pay. Till then . . .” He grimaced. “Till then, the debt just keeps getting bigger.”

  Cries echoed through the forest as Istvan’s squad neared the front. He had trouble sorting out Gyongyosians and Unkerlanters. No matter which kingdom wounded men came from, their moans and screams sounded very much alike. Telling how far away the racket came from wasn’t easy, either. Istvan kept expecting attackers to burst out of the bushes at any moment, only to realize a heartbeat later that the noises he’d heard came from a long way off.

  “They’ve stopped tossing eggs,” Tivadar said. He frowned and plucked a hair from his beard. “I wonder why. They’ve got more egg-tossers than we do: they don’t have to manhandle them over the mountains to get them here.”

  “Only the stars know why Unkerlanters do things.” But Istvan frowned, too. “When they don’t do what they usually do, you wonder what they’re up to, like you said.”

  “You’d better, too, if you want to keep the stars shining on you,” the company commander answered. He started to say something else, but coughed a couple of times instead. “Smoke’s getting thick.”

  “Aye, it is.” Istvan’s eyes stung and watered. He pointed east. “It’s coming from that way, too. Maybe Swemmel’s men are burning themselves up, and that’s why they aren’t using their egg-tossers.” He laughed, then coughed himself. “Too much to hope for.”

  “No doubt it is,” Tivadar said, “but we have to—”

  Before he could tell Istvan what the Gyongyosians had to do, a couple of his countrymen burst out of the woods ahead. Istvan almost blazed them for Unkerlanters. But Swemmel’s men didn’t wear leggings or bushy yellow beards, and they didn’t yell, “Fire!” at the top of their lungs in his language, either.

  While Istvan was gaping, Captain Tivadar rapped out, “Where? How bad?”

  “Bad,” the men said in the same breath. One of them added, “The accursed goat-eaters have fired the whole forest against us.” And then, without waiting for any more questions, they both dashed off toward the west.

  Istvan and Tivadar stared at each other. While they were staring, the breeze—no, more than a breeze now, a freshening wind—blew thick smoke into their faces. They both coughed, and both looked as if they wished they hadn’t. Istvan heard other shouts of, “Fire!” He also heard more Gyongyosian soldiers plunging through
the woods, fleeing the flames.

  And then he heard the fire itself, crackling with insane glee. A moment later, he saw it through the branches and brambles ahead: a wall of flames, licking up tree after tree and advancing on him as fast as a man could walk. He turned to Tivadar. “What do we do, sir?”

  “We—” The company commander bit back whatever he’d been about to say and answered, “We fall back. What else can we do? It’ll cook us if we stay.” He shook his fist at the fire, and at the Unkerlanters behind it. “May the stars never shine on them! Who would have thought to use fire as a weapon of war?”

  Whoever had thought of it had had a good idea. Istvan didn’t need to order his squad away from the flames; he had to work to keep them from fleeing like so many panicked horses. He had to work to keep panic from sinking its teeth into him, too. The fire was frightening in a way war wasn’t. It wasn’t trying to kill him; it was just doing what it did, and the only thing he could do about it was run.

  Run he did, hoping he could go faster than the flames. Behind him—ever closer behind him, it seemed—trees turned into torches. Smoke got thicker and thicker, till he could hardly breathe, could hardly tell in which direction he should run. Away from the flames—that was all he knew.

  At last, when he was beginning to wonder how much farther he could run, he plunged into the bog from which he’d emerged earlier that day. He slogged into the mud, rejoicing at what he’d cursed then. Now the fire had trouble following. He shook his fist at it, as Tivadar had shaken his fist at the Unkerlanters who’d started it. When the flames died down, he and his comrades would go forward again. And what would King Swemmel’s men have waiting for them then?

  For the first time in a very long while, the Marchioness Krasta made the acquaintance of someone who not only could outshout her but paid no attention to her desires whatever. Her maidservant Bauska’s bastard by the Algarvian Captain Mosco, a girl the mother had named Malya, howled as loud as she wanted whenever she wanted.