Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  “I didn’t come here to put you in a penalty battalion,” Rathar answered mildly. Officers who disgraced themselves sometimes got the chance for redemption by fighting as ordinary soldiers. Penalty battalions went in where the fighting was hottest. Men who lived got their rank back. Most didn’t.

  “Well, then, let’s talk about how we’re going to hold on to what we can down here,” Vatran said.

  That was a good, sensible suggestion. Before Rathar could take him up on it, eggs crashed down around the schoolhouse Vatran was using for a headquarters. Rathar threw himself flat. So did Vatran and all the junior officers in the chamber. Most of the glass in the windows had already been shattered. What was left flew through the air in glittering, deadly arcs. A spearlike shard stuck in the floorboards a few inches from Rathar’s nose.

  “Never a dull moment,” Vatran said when the eggs stopped falling. “Where were we?”

  “Trying to stay alive,” Rathar answered, getting to his feet. “Trying to keep our armies alive, too.”

  “If you know a magic to manage it, I hope you’ll tell me,” Vatran answered. “The Algarvians have more skill than we do; the only thing we can do to stop ’em is put more bodies in their way. We’re doing that, as best we can.”

  “We have to do it better,” the marshal said. “Down here now, it’s the way things were in front of Cottbus last fall; we haven’t got a lot of room to fall back. If we do, we lose things we can’t afford to lose.”

  “I know that,” Vatran said. “I need more of everything—dragons, behemoths, men, crystals, you name it.”

  “And you’ll have what you need—or as much of it as we can get to you, anyhow,” Rathar told him. “Moving things down from the north isn’t easy these days, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I’ll bet you did.” By the look Vatran gave Rathar, he would have been just as well pleased if the marshal hadn’t been able to come down from Cottbus.

  In a way, Rathar sympathized with that. No general worth his salt should have been eager to have a superior looking over his shoulder. Had the fight in the south been going well, Rathar would have stayed up in the capital, even if that meant enduring King Swemmel. But, with the Algarvians bulling forward, Vatran could hardly expect to have everything exactly as he wanted.

  Rathar asked the question that had to be asked: “Will we hold Durrwangen?”

  “I hope so,” General Vatran answered. Then his broad shoulders moved up and down in a shrug that held none of the jauntiness an Algarvian would have given it. “I don’t know, Marshal. To tell the truth, I just don’t know. The cursed redheads have been moving awful fast. And . . .” He hesitated before going on, “And the soldiers aren’t as happy as they might be, either.”

  “No?” Rathar’s ears pricked up. “You’d better tell me more about that, and you’d better not waste any time doing it, either.”

  “It’s about what you’d expect,” the general said. “They’ve been licked too many times, and some of ’em don’t see how anything different’s going to happen when they bump up against the Algarvians again.”

  “That’s not good,” Rathar said in what he thought a commendable understatement. “I haven’t seen anything about it in your written reports.”

  “No, and you won’t, either,” Vatran told him. “D’you think I’m daft, to put it in writing where his Majesty could see it? My head would go up on a pike five minutes later—unless he decided to boil me alive instead.” He spread his hands—broad peasant hands, much like Rathar’s. “You hold my life, lord Marshal. If you want it, you can take it. But you need to know the truth.”

  “For which I thank you.” Rathar again wondered whether he wanted Vatran dead. Probably not: who could have done better here in the south? No one he could think of, save perhaps himself. “Don’t the men remember what we did to the Algarvians last winter?”

  “No doubt some of ’em do,” Vatran answered. “But it’s not winter now, and it won’t be for a while, even down here. And in summer, when their dragons can fly and their behemoths can run, nobody’s beaten Mezentio’s men yet.”

  “We’ve made them earn it,” Rathar said. “If we can keep on making them earn it, sooner or later they’ll run out of men.”

  “Aye,” Vatran said, “either that or we’ll run out of land we can afford to lose. If we don’t hold Sulingen and the Mamming Hills, can we keep on with the war?”

  People had asked that about Cottbus the summer before. Unkerlant hadn’t had to find out the answer, for the capital had held. Rathar hoped his kingdom wouldn’t have to find out the answer this time, either. He had no guarantee, though, and neither did Unkerlant.

  Doing his best to look on the bright side of things, he said, “I hear they’re starting to put Yaninans in the line. They wouldn’t do that if they didn’t have to.”

  “That’s so—to a point,” Vatran said. “But they’re no fools. They wouldn’t be so dangerous if they were. They give the boys with the pretty shoes the quiet stretches to hold. That lets them concentrate more of their own men where they have to do real fighting.”

  Before Rathar could reply, more eggs fell on Durrwangen. Again, he and Vatran stretched themselves on the floor. The schoolhouse shook and creaked all around them. Rathar hoped the roof wouldn’t come down on his head.

  Still more eggs fell. The Algarvians couldn’t have moved so many tossers so far forward . . . could they? More likely, dragons with redheads atop them were dropping their loads of death on the Unkerlanter city. And Vatran had already said he lacked the dragons to repel them.

  A runner with more courage than sense rushed into Vatran’s headquarters even while the eggs were falling. “General!” he cried. “General!” By his tone, Rathar knew something had gone badly wrong. Sure enough, the fellow went on, “General, the Algarvians have broken through our lines west of the city. If we can’t stop them, they’ll slide around behind us and cut us off!”

  “What?” Vatran and Rathar said the same thing at the same time in identical tones of horror. Both men cursed. Then Vatran, who know the local situation better, demanded, “What happened to the brigades that were supposed to hold the buggers back?”

  Unhappily, the runner answered, “Uh, some of them, sir, some of them went and skedaddled, fast as they could go.”

  Rathar cursed again. In a low voice, Vatran said, “Now you see what I meant.”

  “I see it,” the marshal said. “I see we’ll have to stop it, too, before the rot gets worse.” He climbed to his feet. The runner stared at him. “How bad a breakthrough is it?” he snapped.

  “Pretty bad, sir,” the messenger replied. “They’ve got behemoths through, and plenty of footsoldiers with ’em. They’re astride—no, they’re past—the ley line leading west out of Durrwangen.”

  That was also Rathar’s most direct route back to Cottbus, not that any route from the embattled south to the capital was direct these days. “Can we drive them back?” he asked both the runner and General Vatran.

  “Sir—uh, lord Marshal—the redheads have pushed a lot of men through,” the runner said. His gaze swung toward Vatran.

  So did Rathar’s. Vatran licked his lips. “I don’t know where we could scrape up the men,” he said at last, most unhappily. “And coming at Durrwangen from out of the west! Who would have thought the Algarvians—who would have thought anybody—could come at Durrwangen from out of the west? We haven’t got the defenses there that we do east of the city.”

  “Probably why the Algarvians chose that direction for their attack,” Rathar said. Vatran gaped at him as if he’d suddenly started declaiming poetry in Gyongyosian. The marshal repeated the question he’d asked before: “Can we hold Durrwangen?”

  “I don’t see how, lord Marshal,” Vatran answered.

  “I don’t, either, but I was hoping you did, since you’ve been on the spot here longer than I have,” Rathar said. “Since we can’t hold the place, we’d better save what we can when we pull out, don’t you think?”<
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  A loud thud outside the schoolhouse—not a bursting egg, but a heavy weight falling from a great height—made Vatran smile savagely. “That’s a dragon blazed out of the sky,” he said, as if one downed Algarvian dragon made up for all disasters. “Aye, we’ll get out and we’ll keep fighting.”

  “And we’d better make sure there are no more skedaddles,” Rathar said. “Whatever we have to do to stop them, we’d best do it.” King Swemmel might have spoken through his mouth. He was ready to be as harsh as Swemmel, to get what he had to have—no, what Unkerlant had to have. Somewhere not far away, another dragon slammed to the ground. Rathar nodded. Once more, the Algarvians were paying a price.

  Along with his men, Leudast squatted in a field of sunflowers. It would have been a dangerous place to have to fight. With the plants nodding taller than a man, the only way to find a foe would be to stumble onto him.

  For the moment, the Algarvians were a couple of miles to the north—or so Leudast hoped with all his heart. He leaned forward to listen to what Captain Hawart had to say. The regimental commander spoke in matter-of-fact tones: “The kingdom is in danger, boys. If we don’t stop Mezentio’s whoresons before too long, it won’t matter anymore, because we’re licked.”

  “You wouldn’t be talking like that if we’d hung on to Durrwangen,” somebody said.

  “That’s so, but we didn’t,” Hawart answered. “And some soldiers got blazed because they didn’t fight hard enough, too. Not just ground-pounders, either; there are a couple of dead brigadiers on account of that mess.”

  “We’ve done everything we could.” That voice came from behind Hawart. Leudast didn’t see who’d spoken up there, either. Whoever it was hadn’t stood up and waved, that was for sure. Leudast wouldn’t have, either, not if he’d said something like that.

  The regimental commander whirled, trying to catch the soldier who’d let his mouth run. Captain Hawart couldn’t, which meant he glared at everyone impartially. “Listen to me,” he said. “You’d cursed well better listen to me, or you’ll all be dead men. If the Algarvians don’t kill you, your own comrades will. It’s that bad. It’s that dangerous. We can’t fall back any more.”

  “What’s this about our comrades, sir?” Leudast said. Hawart had ordered him to ask the question.

  With a flourish, Captain Hawart took from his belt pouch a sheet of paper. He waved it about before beginning to read it. Leudast watched the soldiers’ eyes follow the sheet. A lot of the men were peasants who could no more read than they could fly. To them, anything on paper seemed more important, more portentous, simply because it was written down.

  Leudast knew better, at least most of the time. But Hawart had told him what this paper was. Now the officer explained it to the rest of the regiment: “This is an order from King Swemmel. Not from our division headquarters. Not from General Vatran. Not even from Marshal Rathar, powers above praise him. From the king. So you’d better listen, boys, and you’d better listen good.”

  And the troopers he commanded did lean forward so they could hear better. The king’s name made them pay attention. Leudast knew it made him pay attention. He also knew he didn’t want the king or the king’s minions paying attention to him, which they were too likely to do if he disobeyed a royal order even to the slightest degree.

  “Not one step back!” Hawart read in ringing tones. “Iron discipline. Iron discipline won the day for the right in the Twinkings War. Even when things looked blackest, our army held firm against the traitors and rebels who fought for that demon in human shape, Kyot.”

  Kyot, of course, had been Swemmel’s twin brother: an inconvenient twin, who refused to admit he was the younger of them. He’d paid for his claim. The whole kingdom had paid—and paid, and paid. But if Kyot was a demon in human shape and was also Swemmel’s twin, what did that make the present king of Unkerlant?

  Before Leudast could dwell on that for very long, Hawart went on, “The Algarvian invaders shall not be permitted to advance one foot farther onto the precious soil of Unkerlant. Our soldiers are to die in place before yielding any further territory to Mezentio’s butchers and wolves. The enemy must be checked, must be halted, must be driven back. Any soldiers who shirk this task shall face our wrath, which, we assure all who hear these words, shall blaze hotter than anything the redheaded mumblers can possibly inflict on you.”

  Here and there, soldiers looked at one another. Leudast looked up at the sky and the nodding sunflowers. He did not want to have to try to meet anyone else’s eyes. From everything he’d heard, from everything he’d seen, Swemmel was neither lying nor boasting. However much Leudast feared the Algarvians, he feared his own sovereign more.

  “Any soldier who retreats without orders shall be reckoned a traitor against us; and shall be punished as befits treason,” Hawart read. “Any officer who gives the order to retreat without direst need shall be judged likewise. Our inspectors and impressers shall enforce this command by all necessary means.”

  “What does that mean?” Half a dozen soldiers asked the question out loud. Leudast didn’t, but it blazed in his mind, too. After the impressers caught him and made sure he had a rock-gray tunic on his back, he’d thought he was done worrying about them. Was he wrong?

  Evidently he was, for Captain Hawart said, “I’ll tell you what it means, boys. Somewhere back of the army, there’s a thin line of impressers and inspectors. Every one of them has a stick in his hands. You try running away, those buggers’d just as soon blaze you as look at you.”

  Leudast believed him. By the way soldiers’ heads bobbed up and down, everybody believed him. Anyone who’d ever dealt with inspectors and impressers could have no possible doubt that they would blaze their own countrymen. But how many of them would get blazed in return while they were doing it?

  No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than he shied away from it, as a unicorn might shy from a buzzing fly. If Unkerlanters began battling Unkerlanters, if the Twinkings War, or even some tiny portion of it, visited the kingdom once again, what would spring from it? Why, Algarvian conquest, and nothing else Leudast could see.

  “So,” Hawart said. “There it is, lads. We don’t go back any more, not if there’s any help for it. We go forward when we can, we die in place when there’s no other choice, and we don’t go back, not unless . . .” He paused and shook his head. “We don’t go back. We can’t afford to, not any more.”

  “You heard the captain,” Leudast growled, as any sergeant might have after an officer gave orders. He’d heard the captain, too, and wished he hadn’t. Swemmel’s orders left no room for misunderstanding.

  Hawart put the paper back into his belt pouch. He had to look up, orienting himself by the sun, before he could point east and north. “That’s where the Algarvians are,” he said. “Let’s go find them and give them a good boot in the arse. They’ve already done it to us too many times.”

  “Aye,” Leudast said. A few other troopers snarled agreement. But most of the men, though they obeyed Hawart readily enough, did so without any great eagerness. They’d seen enough action by now to understand how hard it was to halt the redheads in the open field. Leudast had seen more action than almost any of them. He wondered why he retained enough enthusiasm to want to go forward against the Algarvians. I’m probably too stupid to know better, he thought.

  Sunflower leaves rustled, brushing against his tunic and those of his comrades. Dry, fallen leaves crunched under his boots. The plants bobbed and shook as he pushed his way through them. The sunflowers were taller than a man, but an alert Algarvian with a spyglass could have tracked from afar the marching Unkerlanters by the way the plants moved without a breeze to stir them. Leudast hoped Mezentio’s men weren’t so alert—and also hoped that, even if they were, they had no egg-tossers nearby.

  Coming out from among the sunflowers was almost like breaking the surface after swimming underwater in a pond: Leudast could suddenly see much farther than he had been able to. Ahead lay the village whose peasants
would have harvested the sunflowers. Dragons—perhaps Algarvian but perhaps Unkerlanter, too—had visited destruction on it from the air. Only a few huts still stood. The rest were either blackened ruins or had simply ceased to be.

  People moved amongst the ruins, though. For a moment, Leudast admired the tenacity of his countrymen. Who but Unkerlanter peasants would have tried so hard to go on with their lives even in the midst of war’s devastation?

  Then he stiffened. Unkerlanters would have been more solidly made than these tall, scrawny apparitions. And no matter how tall and scrawny Unkerlanters might have been, they would never, ever, have worn kilts.

  Leudast’s body realized that faster than his mind. He threw himself to the ground. At the same time, someone else shouted, “Algarvians!”

  “Forward!” Captain Hawart called: he was going to obey King Swemmel’s order. Or die trying, Leudast thought. But Hawart didn’t want to do any more dying than he had to, for he added, “Forward by rushes!”

  “My company—even squads forward!” Leudast commanded. He got up and went forward with the even-numbered squads. He’d learned from Hawart not to order anything he wouldn’t do himself. The men in the odd-numbered squads blazed at the Algarvians in the village ahead. As Leudast dove to the ground again, he wondered how many Algarvians the village held and how many more were close enough to join the fight. He’d find out before long.

  He’d done a good job of teaching the raw recruits who flooded into his company’s ranks what needed doing. Even before he screamed the next order, the soldiers from the odd-numbered squads were running past their comrades and toward the Algarvians in the village. He blazed at the redheads. The range was still long for a handheld stick, but beams zipping past them and starting house fires would make Mezentio’s men keep their heads down and interfere with their blazing.

  Captain Hawart’s regiment had worked its way across half the open country between the edge of the sunflower field and the village when eggs began dropping on the Unkerlanter soldiers. Leudast cursed in weary frustration. He’d seen that sort of thing happen too many times before. The Algarvians had too many crystals and used them too well to make them easy foes.