Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  Meeting before midnight sounded romantic. In reality, it was bloody cold. Men straggled in a couple at a time. They got sticks easily concealable down a trouser leg—not the sort of weapon Skarnu would have wanted to take to war, but one with which he could walk through the streets of the town.

  “They’re not coming by ley-line caravan?” he asked the painter.

  “Not from what I heard,” the local answered. “I don’t know whether they got blazed down someplace where there aren’t any ley lines or Mezentio’s men didn’t feel like laying on a caravan, but they’re not. Just a carriage. If they’re coming up through town, they’ll get in by Duchess Maza Road, up from the southeast.”

  Having come into Ventspils from the southwest, Skarnu knew nothing of Duchess Maza Road. He tagged along with the other Valmierans who hadn’t given up on their kingdom. He wondered what they would do if they ran into an Algarvian patrol, but they didn’t. With the war in Unkerlant sucking men west, fewer Algarvians were left to watch the streets.

  “Keep an eye out for Valmieran constables, too,” the painter warned. “Too many of them are in bed with the redheads.” That made Skarnu think of Krasta again, but he shook his head. Too many Valmierans of all sorts were in bed with the redheads.

  They spied only one pair of constables on the way to the road into town from the southeast, and ducked out of sight before the constables saw them. Then it was on to Duchess Maza Road, into ambush positions behind tree trunks and fences, and wait.

  Skarnu wondered how they would know the right carriage, but they had no trouble. Four Algarvian horsemen guarded it, two in front, two behind. But, by the way they rode, they thought they were there to make a fine procession, nothing more. Because they weren’t looking for danger, it found them.

  “Now!” the painter said in a low, savage voice. His double handful of followers blazed the redheads off their horses and the driver off his carriage. The Algarvians managed only startled squawks before they went down. The next group of redheads who came through Ventspils with captives would doubtless be more alert, but that did these men no good at all.

  Skarnu ran toward the carriage. He paused a moment to finish an Algarvian who still writhed on the cobbles, then seized a horse’s head to keep the beast from bolting. Another man blazed off the stout padlock that held the carriage door closed. As it fell with a clank, he spoke in Lagoan.

  The door opened. A couple of men jumped down from the carriage. “Away!” the painter said urgently. The men of the underground scattered. One of them led off the rescued dragonfliers. The rest headed back to their homes. Skarnu moved slowly through the dark streets of Ventspils, not wanting to get lost. Another lick against Algarve, he thought, and wondered what the next one would be.

  What was left of Plegmund’s battered Brigade welcomed two new regiments hurried down from Forthweg with all the charm veterans usually showed new fish. Now a veteran himself, Sidroc jeered along with his comrades: “Does your mother know you’re here?” he asked a recruit obviously several years older than he was. “Does your mother know they’re going to bury you here?”

  He howled laughter. So did his comrades. They were all a little, or more than a little, drunk, having liberated several jars of spirits from a village the Unkerlanters had abandoned in haste. Had the Unkerlanters abandoned it in something less than haste, they would have taken their popskull with them.

  Sergeant Werferth said, “Nobody told him that when he comes down here, the buggers on the other side blaze back.”

  That set the survivors of overrun Presseck into fresh gales of laughter. The recruits stared at them as if they’d gone mad. Maybe we have, Sidroc thought. He didn’t much care, one way or the other. He swigged from his canteen. More raw spirits ran hot down his throat.

  Those spirits gave him most of the warmth he felt. The tents of Plegmund’s Brigade sat on the vast plains of southern Unkerlant, out in the middle of nowhere, so the frigid wind could get a running start before it blew through them. He said, “One thing—the Algarvians with us are every bit as cold as we are.”

  “Serves ’em right,” Ceorl said.

  “Together, we and the Algarvians will drive Swemmel’s barbarians back into the trackless west,” the recruit said stiffly.

  Together, Sidroc, Werferth, and Ceorl howled laughter. “We’ll try and stay alive,” Sidroc said. “And we’ll try and kill some Unkerlanters, because that’ll help us stay alive.”

  “Don’t waste your time on him,” Werferth said. “He’s a virgin. He’ll find out. And if he lives through it, he’ll be telling the new recruits what they need to know next summer. If he doesn’t—” He shrugged.

  Sidroc’s head ached the next morning. Ache or not, he drew himself to attention to listen to an Algarvian officer harangue the men of the Brigade. “We are part of something larger than ourselves,” the officer declared. “We shall rescue our brave Algarvian comrades down in Sulingen, we and this force King Mezentio’s might has gathered.”

  He let loose with a typically extravagant, typically expansive Algarvian gesture. Sure enough, the tents of Plegmund’s Brigade weren’t the only ones on the plain. Several brigades of Algarvians had been mustered with them, and troop after troop of behemoths. It was a formidable assemblage. Whether it was formidable enough to punch through the cordon the Unkerlanters had drawn around Sulingen, Sidroc didn’t know. He knew it would do all it could.

  “We must do this,” the Algarvian officer said. “We must, and so we can, and so we shall. Where the will is strong, victory follows.”

  Redheads were drawn up getting their marching orders, too. “Mezentio!” they shouted, with as much spirit as if they were going on parade through Trapani to show off for pretty girls.

  Not to be outdone, the Forthwegians who’d taken service with Algarve shouted, “Plegmund!” as loud as they could, doing their best to outyell the men who’d taught them what they knew of war. The Algarvians yelled back, louder than ever. It was a good-natured contest, nothing like the one that lay ahead.

  Snow swirled through the air as Sidroc tramped south. “Loose order!” officers and underofficers called. He knew why: to keep too many of them from getting killed at once if things went wrong. He had a heavy cloak, and a white snow smock over it. He wore a fur hat some Unkerlanter soldier didn’t need any more. The weather was colder than any he’d ever known, but he wouldn’t freeze. He hoped he wouldn’t.

  Freezing soon proved to be that least of his worries. The soldiers set over him had known what they were talking about when they warned their charges to spread out. The relief force had been moving for only a couple of hours when Unkerlanter dragons appeared overhead. They dropped a few eggs, flamed a few soldiers, and flew away. A pinprick—but the force hadn’t been overstrong to begin with. Now it was a little weaker.

  About noon, they neared another of those Unkerlanter peasant villages scattered across the plain. Swemmel’s men held it. Warning shouts of, “Behemoths!” echoed through the army. Sure enough, Sidroc saw them moving inside the village, perhaps milling about in the square. Some of them began lobbing eggs at the advancing Algarvians—and at Plegmund’s Brigade as well.

  Out trotted a force of Algarvian behemoths, whose crews skirmished at long range with the Unkerlanters. Even at a glance, Sidroc could see that the Unkerlanters outnumbered them. King Swemmel’s men saw the same thing. They didn’t come charging out after the Algarvians, as they might have when the war was new—from some of the stories the redheads told, they’d been very stupid in the early days. But they did forget about the footsoldiers. They forgot about everything, in fact, except what the Algarvian commander showed them.

  And they paid for it. The officer in charge of the Algarvians had more than one string for his bow. While the Unkerlanters were busy fighting and seemingly repelling the behemoths in front of them, another force entered the village from behind. The fight that followed was sharp but very short. The relief force kept moving south, on toward Sulingen.

&nbs
p; “We’ve got a smart general,” Sergeant Werferth said. “That’s good. That’s mighty good. He buggered Swemmel’s boys just as pretty as you please.”

  Sidroc snorted, then guffawed when he realized how apt the figure was. “Aye, bugger ’em he did—came right up their backside.”

  But it stopped being easy after that. Sidroc had found in Presseck how dangerous the Unkerlanters could be when they had numbers and power on their side. Now he discovered they didn’t need numbers to be dangerous. They knew what the Algarvians were trying to do, and threw everything they had into stopping them.

  As so many had before him, Sidroc grew to hate and dread the cheer, “Urra!” Single Unkerlanters would pop up out of the snow shouting it and blaze down a man—or two, or three, or four—before they died themselves. Companies would fight like grim death in villages, bellowing defiance till the last man was slain. And regiment after regiment would charge across the plain at the relief force, sometimes with their arms linked, all the soldiers roaring, “Urra!”

  Nor would those regiments charge alone, unsupported. The Unkerlanters threw behemoths and dragons and egg-tossers into the fight with the same air they threw men into it. Aye, they seemed to say, you’ll smash these up, but we’ve got plenty more.

  And the Algarvians did not have plenty more. Sidroc needed only a day or two to see that. Relief forces came in by dribs and drabs, when they came in at all. If the army couldn’t relieve the men in Sulingen with what it had now, it couldn’t relieve them.

  “When are they going to break out toward us?” Sidroc asked, six days into the move south. By then, he’d taken to wrapping the lower part of his face in wool rags, so that only his eyes showed. He’d thought he knew how cold Unkerlant could get. Every new day proved him wrong.

  “I don’t know what they’re doing down there,” Sergeant Werferth told him. “I don’t give a dragon turd what they’re doing, either. It’s too soon to worry. Whatever they’ve got in mind, right now it doesn’t change my job one fornicating bit.”

  Sidroc started to bristle. Ceorl would have, because Ceorl was the sort who bristled at anything. But Sidroc realized Werferth was just giving good advice. Worrying about what he couldn’t help wouldn’t, couldn’t, change things.

  At dawn the next morning, the Unkerlanters attacked the relief force before it could get moving. By the time Swemmel’s men sullenly withdrew, the sun was halfway across the sky. The Unkerlanters left hundreds of bodies lying in the snow, but they’d robbed the relief force of men and of time, and it could recover neither.

  Despite the troops Swemmel and his generals kept throwing at them, the soldiers and behemoths of the relieving force managed to keep moving south. They crossed the Presseck, from whose banks the men of Plegmund’s Brigade had been so rudely expelled not long before. And they also forced their way over the Neddemin, the next river to the south, in a sharp battle with the Unkerlanters trying to keep them from gaining the fords.

  “What’s the river after this one?” Sidroc asked that night as he toasted a gobbet of horsemeat on a stick. He’d never imagined eating horse up in Forthweg. Compared to going hungry, it was tasty as could be.

  “That’s the Britz,” Werferth answered. “If we make it over the Britz, the fellows in Sulingen should be able to fight their way out to meet us.” He’d come far enough, he was willing to look ahead a bit.

  “They’d better be able to fight their way out to meet us,” Sidroc said. “Curse me if I know how we’ve made it this far. I don’t know how much further we can go.”

  “Other question is, how far can they come?” Werferth asked. “What have their behemoths and horses and unicorns been eating down there? Mostly nothing, or I miss my guess. Odds are the men haven’t had much more, either.”

  Sidroc took a bite of horseflesh. Juice running down his chin, he said, “It’s not like we’ve got a lot.” The sergeant nodded, but they both knew the men down in Sulingen had less.

  On toward the Britz they went. The Unkerlanters attacked again and again, from south and east and west. Swemmel’s cavalry forces nipped in to raid the supply wagons that kept the relieving force fed and supplied with eggs and with sorcerous charges for their sticks. In spite of everything, the Algarvians and the men of Plegmund’s Brigade kept pushing south.

  And then, about a day and a half before they would have reached the Britz, most of their behemoths left the army and headed north. “Have they gone out of their fornicating minds?” Sidroc shouted. “The Unkerlanters still have their behemoths, curse them. How are we supposed to lick ’em without ours?”

  No one had an answer for him till later in the day. Then Werferth, who as a sergeant heard things, said, “Swemmel’s whoresons are mounting a big push on Durrwangen, north of here. If they take the place, then they’ve got us in the bag along with the boys down in Sulingen. Can’t have that. It doesn’t work.”

  “Getting over the Britz isn’t going to work, either, not without those behemoths,” Sidroc said.

  “We’ve got to try,” Werferth answered. Sidroc grimaced and nodded. Deserting and going north on his own was sure death. Advancing with his comrades was only deadly dangerous. Knowing the odds, the men of the relieving force went on.

  They reached the river. They couldn’t cross. The Unkerlanters had too many men in front of it, too many egg-tossers on the southern bank. And they had behemoths left to throw into the fight, behemoths the relieving force could no longer withstand. The Algarvians and the men of Plegmund’s Brigade fell back from the Britz, retreating across the frozen plains of Unkerlant.

  A blizzard howled through the woods where Munderic’s band of irregulars took shelter from their foes. As far as Garivald was concerned, the tent pitched above a hole in the ground was no substitute for the warm hut in which he’d passed previous winters with his wife and children and livestock. He didn’t have enough spirits to stay drunk through the winter as he normally would have, either.

  And he couldn’t even stay in his inadequate shelter and feed the fire a few twigs at a time. As far as Munderic was concerned, blizzards were the ideal time for the irregulars to be out and doing. “Most of the time, we leave tracks in the snow,” the commander declared. “Not now, by the powers above—the wind will blow them away as fast as we make ’em.”

  “Of course it will,” Garivald said. “And it’ll blow us away just as fast.” Perhaps fortunately for him, the wind also blew his words away, so no one but him heard them.

  When Munderic gave orders, it was either obey or raise a mutiny against him. Garivald didn’t want to do that. He didn’t much want to go tramping through the snow, either, but nobody asked what he thought about it. The only people who’d ever asked what he thought of anything were his wife and a few close friends, and they were all far away in Zossen.

  Munderic led almost the whole band out against the village of Kluftern, which had a small Algarvian garrison and which also sat close to a ley line. “If we can wipe out the redheads there, we can sabotage that line in a dozen different places—take our time and do it properly,” Munderic said. “That’ll keep Mezentio’s mages scratching like they’re covered with lice.”

  He was right; if they could bring it off, that would happen. But Garivald turned to the man closest to him and asked, “How often do these things turn out just the way they’re planned? Next time will be the first, as far as I can see.”

  The man next to him turned out to be a woman; Obilot answered, “At least he isn’t counting on magecraft this time around.”

  “That’s something,” Garivald agreed. The two of them were on wary speaking terms again. Obilot hated the Algarvians too much to stay furious at anyone else who also hated them. As for Garivald, he wasn’t by nature a particularly quarrelsome man. He’d kept speaking softly, not making things worse than they were already, till Obilot’s temper softened.

  Once the irregulars left the shelter of the woods, the wind tore at them harder than ever. Algarvians out in such weather might well have
frozen. Every one of the Unkerlanters, though, had been through worse. They trudged along, grumbling but not particularly put out.

  “We’ll catch the redheads all cozied up to the fire,” somebody said. “Then we’ll make ’em pay for being soft.”

  That brought a rumble of agreement from everyone who heard it. Garivald rumbled agreement, too, but he didn’t really feel it. Had the Algarvians truly been soft, they never would have overrun the Duchy of Grelz or penetrated Unkerlant to Sulingen and to the outskirts of Cottbus.

  Snow swirled around Garivald and blew into his face. He cursed wearily and kept walking. He hoped Munderic was keeping track of the direction in which Kluftern lay. He couldn’t have found it himself on a bet.

  “Snow bleeding the redheads white,” he muttered under his breath, feeling for the lines of a song. “Brave man putting thieves to flight.” He played with metrical feet while his own feet, even in felt boots, got colder.

  Confused shouts from up ahead broke into his thoughts. He cursed again, this time in real anger. There went the song, and most of it would be gone for good. Then he stopped worrying about the song, for one of those shouts was a shriek of agony. If that wasn’t a man who’d just been blazed, he’d never heard one.

  Then he heard other shouts. They were battle cries: “Raniero!” “The Kingdom of Grelz!”

  He peered ahead through the snow. The last set of Grelzer troops the irregulars ran into hadn’t proved to be worth much. Some Grelzer soldiers passed information on to Munderic’s band. From all that, he’d assumed none of the men who fought for King Mezentio’s cousin would be worth anything.