Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  She marshaled the people in her life as if she were a general marshaling armies. “That may serve,” Skarnu said, “but it may not, too. Plenty of people in these parts can tell the Algarvians I’ve been living with you.”

  She pondered, but not for long. “I’ll say we quarreled, and I cursed well threw you out.” Then she raised her voice to a furious shout: “You stinking cockhound, if you don’t keep your eyes and your hands where they belong, I’ll make sure you sing soprano for the rest of your days!”

  People stared. Lurcanio was one of those people. His face twisted into an amused smirk. For a moment, Skarnu gaped—drawing Lurcanio’s attention was the last thing he wanted. But, a little slower than he should have, he saw how Merkela was building her alibi, and remembered that, at the moment, Lurcanio couldn’t recognize him. He did his best to get into the spirit of things, yelling, “Oh, shut up, you noisy bitch! I ought to give you a good one—and I will, too, if you don’t keep quiet.”

  “You try it and you’ll be sorrier than you ever have been,” Merkela snarled. She sounded as if she meant it, too; she made a fine actress. And she wasn’t just acting, either. Skarnu wouldn’t have wanted to be the man who laid a hand on her when she didn’t care to be touched.

  They kept on quarreling till they left Pavilosta. As soon as they were alone on the road back to the farm, they started to laugh. Skarnu wasn’t laughing, though, when he went off into the woods with Vatsyunas and Pernavai. He felt a coward for leaving a woman—and especially a woman carrying his child—to face the redheads alone. And the Kaunians from Forthweg were city folk, without much notion of how to take care of themselves in what seemed very wild country to them. Skarnu stayed busy showing them what needed doing. He tried to remember that he hadn’t known, either, till he went into the army.

  He could sneak back to the farm for food; he didn’t have to hunt. About a week later, Merkela said, “They came today. And sure enough, that redhead who swives your sister is a dangerous man. But Raunu and I played the fool and sent him on his way.”

  “Good enough,” Skarnu said. “Better than good enough, in fact. But I won’t come back to stay for a while yet. What do you care to bet they’ll swoop down here again, to see if you were playing tricks?”

  “Aye, that Lurcanio would,” Merkela said at once. “He might even come back three times, curse him. Let him. He won’t catch you. And the fight goes on.”

  Skarnu nodded. As if they were a spell, he repeated the words. “The fight goes on.”

  Istvan studied the scar on his left hand. It still pained him every now and again; Captain Tivadar had cut deep. Istvan didn’t blame his company commander. Tivadar had had to let the sin out of him and out of the men of his squad. Istvan just hoped the cut proved expiation enough.

  Corporal Kun came back through the trees toward him. “No sign of the Unkerlanters ahead, Sergeant,” he said.

  “All right—good. We’ll move forward, then,” Istvan said. Kun nodded. They were oddly formal with each other. All the men who’d eaten goat were like that these days. They had a bond. It wasn’t one any of them would have wanted, but it was there. Feeling it, Istvan understood how and why criminals and perverts sometimes sought out goat’s flesh. It set them apart from the rest of mankind—the rest of Gyongyosian mankind, at any rate. They had to band together, for no one else would have anything to do with them.

  “Sergeant?” Kun asked again in that oddly formal tone.

  “Aye? What is it?” Istvan wanted to harass the bespectacled mage’s apprentice as he had before they shared the contents of that stewpot, but found he couldn’t. He looked down at his scar again.

  Kun saw where Istvan’s eyes went, and he opened his own left hand. He was similarly marked—and, no doubt, similarly scarred on his soul as well. He let out a long, unhappy breath, then said, “Do you suppose the rest of the company knows . . . what happened there, back in that clearing?”

  “Well, nobody’s called me a goat-eater, anyhow,” Istvan answered. “A good thing, too—anybody did call me anything like that, I’d have to try to kill him for my honor’s sake: either that or admit it.”

  “You couldn’t admit it!” Kun exclaimed in horror. “The stars wouldn’t shine on you if you did.”

  “Of course they wouldn’t,” Istvan said. “That’s why I’d have to do what a warrior should do. Maybe people know what happened and they’re keeping quiet because they know what I’d have to do, too. Or maybe they really don’t know. Captain Tivadar was the only one who came up to the clearing, after all, and he wouldn’t blab, not after he cleansed us he wouldn’t.”

  Slowly, Kun nodded. “I keep telling myself the same thing. But the other thing I keep telling myself is, that sort of business doesn’t stay a secret. Somehow, it doesn’t.”

  Istvan nodded, too. The same fear filled him. Having done what he’d done was bad enough. Having others—people who hadn’t done it, who weren’t linked to one another by that strange bond—know would be far, far worse.

  Meanwhile, along with worrying about the state of his sins, he also had to worry about staying alive. Every time he scurried from pine to birch to clump of ferns, he took his life in his hands. Kun hadn’t seen any Unkerlanters in this stretch of the endless forest, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  A flick of motion caught his eye. He swung his stick toward it and blazed without conscious thought. Had it been an Unkerlanter, the fellow would have died. As things were, a red squirrel toppled off a branch and lay feebly kicking among the pine needles. After a minute or so, it stopped moving.

  “Nice blazing,” Kun said. “Ought to bring it along and throw it in the pot when we stop. Nothing wrong with squirrel.”

  “No,” Istvan said. He didn’t know whether Kun meant that the meat tasted good or that the animal was ritually clean. He didn’t want to ask; that would have involved comparisons with animals that weren’t ritually clean.

  As he stopped to pick up the squirrel, he realized he could have blazed a countryman as readily as a foe. If, in some dreadful accident or in the heat of battle, Captain Tivadar went down and did not rise again, who but for Istvan and his equally guilty squadmates would know on what accursed meat they’d supped?

  Horrified, he violently shook his head. That was the curse speaking inside him. Tivadar had cleansed when he might have condemned, and Istvan wanted to repay him for that with death? Some part of the goat’s meat had to be working inside him, corrupting him.

  “No,” he said aloud.

  “No what, Sergeant?” Kun asked. Istvan didn’t answer. A moment later, an Unkerlanter’s beam burned a hole in a tree trunk behind him, and almost burned off part of his beard, too. Throwing himself flat and rolling toward another tree felt more like a relief than anything else. Compared to what had been going through his mind, worries about his own death or mutilation seemed simple and clean.

  “Urra!” the Unkerlanters shouted. “Swemmel! Urra!” Either they had an accomplished mage with them, to make a few men sound like a host, or they outnumbered the Gyongyosians approaching them.

  Again, Istvan saw something move. This time, a human howl of pain rewarded his blaze. His own men were shouting, too, trying to sound like more than they were. He yelled along with the rest of them: “Arpad! Arpad!” He didn’t know how much good crying out his sovereign’s name would do, but it couldn’t hurt.

  And then, as if the stars chose to grant a favor he hadn’t even asked for, eggs began falling on the Unkerlanters. Moving egg-tossers forward along the miserable tracks through these miserable woods wasn’t easy; Istvan hadn’t known the Gyongyosians had any close by. For once, the surprise he got was pleasant.

  The Unkerlanters didn’t think so. How they howled when bursts of sorcerous energy knocked down trees and sent men flying—but not for long. Some of them kept on yelling Swemmel’s name, but they didn’t sound nearly so fierce as they had before.

  “Come on! Let’s make them pay!” That was Captain Tivadar. Istvan
hadn’t known the company commander was so close by, either. The horrid thought that had sprung up like a toadstool from the rot at the bottom of his mind returned once more. He shook his head again, and asked the stars to hold that idea away from the minds of his squadmates.

  Going forward seemed easier. As long as he was fighting, he wouldn’t have to think. That suited him fine. “Ekrekek Arpad!” he cried.

  No one asked whether he’d liked the goat he ate, not while the Gyongyosians were advancing. By what seemed another special miracle, the egg-tossers lengthened their range so their eggs didn’t burst on men from their own side. That didn’t happen all the time, either, as Istvan remembered too well from the fighting on Obuda.

  He snorted as he ran past a dead Unkerlanter. You could lift that island out of the Bothnian Ocean and throw it down anywhere in this vast forest, and it would vanish without a trace. He wished the stars would lift it from the ocean and throw it down somewhere near here, with luck someplace where it would crush a good many of Swemmel’s soldiers.

  “Forward!” Tivadar shouted. “We’ve punched a hole in their line. If the stars shine bright, we can unravel them like a cheap pair of leggings.”

  “You heard the captain!” As a sergeant, one of the things Istvan had to do was back up his superior’s orders. “Keep moving, you lazy lugs! No time to stop and rest now. We’ve got to keep pushing the Unkerlanters.”

  Earlier in the campaign, he would surely have called the men of his squad a pack of useless goat-eaters or some similar sergeant’s endearment. Not now. They wouldn’t have taken it the right way. He wouldn’t have felt right saying it, either.

  Szonyi emerged from behind the trunk of a stout spruce a few yards away from Istvan. “We really are driving them this time, aren’t we, Sergeant?” he said.

  “Aye, for now,” Istvan answered. “We’d better enjoy it while it lasts, on account of it probably won’t.”

  Szonyi nodded and ran on, his stick ready to blaze, his eyes moving back and forth, back and forth, to make sure he didn’t run past any Unkerlanter who might still be alive. Istvan nodded to himself. Szonyi was about as good a common soldier as he’d ever seen—surely a better warrior than he’d been when he was a common soldier himself.

  And, for once, the Unkerlanters didn’t look to have three or four separate lines waiting for the Gyongyosians. With every step Istvan moved forward, his confidence grew. Aye, Swemmel’s men had put up a good fight for a long time, but could they really hope to withstand a warrior race forever? It didn’t seem likely.

  Ever more Gyongyosian troopers flooded into the gap Istvan’s squad had forced. For three days, he and his countrymen had everything their own way. He thought they moved farther in those three days than they had in the whole month before. The Unkerlanters who did keep fighting began to grow desperate. Some of them began to lose hope. Instead of fighting on after their positions were overrun, they began throwing down their sticks and surrendering.

  Istvan wanted to go forward day and night “I wonder where this accursed forest ends,” he said to Kun as they paused—only for a moment—to stand in front of a tree. “I wonder what’s on the other side of it. Maybe we’ll find out.”

  Instead of laughing at him, Kun nodded. “Maybe we will,” the mage’s apprentice said slowly. “Maybe the stars will show us.”

  “War out in the open again,” Istvan said dreamily. “We’d truly trample the Unkerlanters then.”

  He was setting his leggings to rights when Kun cried out in—alarm? It sounded more like terror. Istvan was about to ask what was wrong when the ground began to shake under his feet. Not far away, someone shouted, “Earthquake!”

  “No!” Kun screamed. “Worse!”

  As far as Istvan was concerned, hardly anything could be worse than a big earthquake. The valley were he’d grown up had known a couple of them, and till he’d been in combat he hadn’t dreamt anything could be more terrifying.”

  Kun screamed again: “Vileness! Filth! They defile themselves! They defile the world!”

  For a moment, Istvan didn’t know what his comrade was talking about. Then livid purple flames shot from the ground only a few feet in front of him. Some of the trees the temblor had shaken down caught fire. Some Gyongyosians caught fire, too. “Magecraft!” Istvan cried.

  “Foul magecraft!” Kun shouted back. “They slay their own to power it. Thank the kindly stars you can’t sense what that felt like. I wish my head would fall off.” He looked like a man with a ghastly hangover.

  By the time the ground stopped shaking and breaking apart, by the time the flames stopped spurting and the fires they started stopped spreading, the spearpoint of the Gyongyosian advance had been blunted. The Unkerlanters got enough breathing space to bring more soldiers forward . . . and the fight went back to being hard again. Glad he’d lived through the sorcerous onslaught, Istvan resigned himself to more time in the forest.

  One of Trasone’s comrades pointed south. “Look,” he said. “You can see the Wolter from here. We can’t be more than half a mile away.”

  “I think you’re lying through your teeth, is what I think,” Trasone said. “Here, give me that stinking thing.”

  The other Algarvian trooper handed him the contraption he’d made from a board and a couple of pieces of a broken mirror. Trasone stuck the top of the contraption above the lip of the trench in which he huddled. By looking at the lower mirror, Trasone could use the upper one to show him what lay ahead. Without a doubt, he would have been blazed if he’d poked up his head to look.

  “Well, I’ll be a son of a whore,” he said softly. “You’re right, Folvo. There it is—or the bluffs on this side of it, anyhow. We get there, we get over to the other side, and we can put this lousy war in our belt pouch.”

  “Aye—if we get there,” Folvo answered. “What’s ahead doesn’t look like a whole lot of fun, though.”

  And that, worse luck, was nothing but the truth. A couple of enormous buildings lay between the leading Algarvians in Sulingen and the river. One was a granary. It had been built of massive bricks and blocks of stone to hold vermin at bay, but that also made it a powerful fortress. The other was larger still, though of somewhat less sturdy construction: far and away the biggest iron manufactory in Sulingen. Sometimes the Unkerlanters would bring behemoths across the Wolter into the city, load them with armor and weapons, and throw them straight into the fight. Some of the behemoths lay dead not far from the manufactory. Others, unfortunately for Mezentio’s soldiers, got farther and did worse.

  A flight of dragons painted in bright Algarvian colors swooped down on the ironworks, dropping eggs as they dove. The eggs burst on and around the building. Some more of the roof came down. Trasone didn’t get excited about that, as he might have a couple of weeks earlier. He knew all too well that the Unkerlanters, those whom the bursts didn’t slay, went right on working in the ruins.

  And they kept fighting back, too. They had a lot of heavy sticks crowded into the parts of Sulingen they still held—beams stabbed into the sky after the dragons. Those beams might have done more harm than they did if the smoke that rose from countless fires hadn’t spread and weakened them. As things were, one of the dragons staggered in the air. It didn’t plummet, as Trasone had seen so many plummet, but it couldn’t go on with its flightmates, either. It did manage to come to earth in Algarvian-held territory. Trasone hoped the dragonflier wasn’t badly hurt. He had to be better off than Algarvian dragonfliers who fell into Unkerlanter hands.

  Then Trasone stopped worrying about dragonfliers. The Unkerlanters had dragons, too, flying north from farms on the far side of the Wolter. They seldom fought the Algarvians in the air; most of them lacked the skill for that. But, as Mezentio’s men pounded their positions, they returned the disfavor.

  Eggs fell around Trasone. He rolled himself into a ball in the trench, as if he were a pillbug. But he didn’t even have an armored exterior to present to the world. All he could do was make himself small and hope. A sha
rd of something bit into his little finger. He yelped and pulled out a sliver of glass—Folvo’s improvised periscope was no more.

  Trasone braced himself for the shouts of “Urra!” that were bound to follow the rock-gray dragons. He’d long since lost track of how many Unkerlanter counterattacks he and his friends had beaten back. Too many of his friends were wounded or dead because of them, though—he knew that.

  Beneath him, the ground shook slightly. He cursed and braced himself again, this time to withstand sorcery—whether from his own side or the Unkerlanters he couldn’t yet guess. But it wasn’t the onset of magecraft: instead, it was four or five Algarvian behemoths lumbering up to the battle line. “Huzzah!” Trasone shouted. He waved his hat—though not very high. He didn’t want to get blazed while celebrating, after all.

  “Here they come!” That was Sergeant Panfilo’s shout. Trasone couldn’t see his sergeant, which was all to the good. He hoped the Unkerlanters couldn’t see Panfilo, either.

  He peered up out of his own hole, peered up and whooped with glee. “They waited too stinking long this time,” he said, and settled down and started to blaze.

  He would never have made a general. The officers set over him had decided he wouldn’t even make a good corporal. He’d long since stopped worrying about not getting promoted. All he wanted to do was stay alive and make sure a good many Unkerlanters didn’t. But he was no fool. When it came to measuring a narrow little battlefield, he could do the job as well as any nobleman with fancy rank badges.

  Here came Swemmel’s soldiers, picking their way through the rubble toward the trenches the Algarvians held. They were shouting “Urra!”—and their king’s name, too. As always, they were game. Trasone wondered how many of them were drunk. He knew their officers served up raw spirits before sending the men to the attack. Assailing a position like the one he and his comrades held, he would have wanted to be drunk, too.

  An Unkerlanter fell, and another. Trasone had no idea whether his beam was the one that had knocked either of them over. A lot of Algarvian troopers had popped up from their shelters at the same time as he had from his.