Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  That turned out to be a mistake. These fellows came at Munderic’s men as fiercely as if their hair were red, not dark. They kept right on shouting Raniero’s name, too. And they cursed King Swemmel as vilely as Garivald had ever cursed the Algarvians.

  Garivald expected Munderic would try to break away. His target had been Kluftern, not a platoon of Grelzers. But the irregular leader shouted, “Kill the traitors!” and ordered his men forward with as little hesitation as Marshal Rathar might have shown.

  Forward Garivald went, wishing Munderic had shown more sense. Fighting these fellows was different from fighting Algarvians. The soldiers who followed Raniero looked like the irregulars, sounded like them, and wore clothes much like theirs, too—one snow smock couldn’t differ much from another. And, with snowflakes blowing every which way, nobody got a clear look at anybody more than a couple of paces away anyhow.

  Munderic rapidly proved Marshal Rathar had nothing to worry about from his generalship. The only thing he had going for him—the thing that had held his band of irregulars together—was his enthusiasm. In this fight, it got in the way. He sent men running now here, now there, till Garivald wasn’t sure where he was supposed to be and who, if anyone, was supposed to be there with him.

  Had a competent soldier—say, a veteran Algarvian captain—been leading King Raniero’s troopers, they would have made short work of the irregulars. But the big fight, the fight against the real Unkerlanter army, sucked competent soldiers toward the front. Whoever was in charge of the Grelzers had no more idea of how to handle his men than did Munderic.

  What resulted wasn’t so much a battle, even a small one, as a series of skirmishes, men fighting first in this place, then in that one, as they happened to collide. Garivald flopped down in the snow behind some bushes. He blazed at a couple of men he was pretty sure were Grelzer soldiers. Neither of them fell; either the snow, which blew more thickly by the minute, was attenuating his beam or he wasn’t so handy with a stick as he might have been.

  A couple of minutes later, somebody else skidded down behind the same bushes. “Stinking whoresons!” he growled, and blazed at the same men Garivald had tried to knock over. “Hate those stinking traitors, serving the false king.”

  “Aye.” Garivald blazed again, though by then he could hardly see his targets. He cursed. “Might as well throw rocks at ’em, for all the good our sticks are doing us.”

  “It’s a stinking war, that’s the truth,” the other fellow said. Like a lot of the irregulars, he had a length of wool wrapped around the lower part of his face to keep his nose and mouth from freezing. Bits of vapor came out through it; more had formed icicles in front of where his lips were bound to be.

  “Wish I were back in my own village, getting drunk,” Garivald said. “I miss my wife, I miss my brats, I miss my firstman . . . well, maybe not.”

  The other fighter laughed. “I know just what you mean. Firstman in the place I grew up chewed nails for fun—that’s what everybody said, anyhow.”

  “Mine’s just a sneak and a spy. He’d suck up to inspectors and then take it out on everybody else.” No, Garivald didn’t miss Waddo, not a bit.

  “They’re like that, all right,” the other fellow said. “Ought to hang every cursed one of them, give a man a little room to live.” They spent the next few minutes maligning firstmen. Neither of them did any more blazing. They had no targets worth blazing at, not with the blizzard closing the walls of the world around them.

  Then a couple of shapes did appear through the snow. Both men behind the bush raised their sticks. But one of the newcomers could only have been big, shambling Sadoc. “Take it easy,” Garivald said. “They’re ours.”

  “Suits me,” his companion replied, and lowered his stick again.

  Maybe Sadoc heard them. Maybe the bumbling mage did have enough skill to sense them there. He started to raise his own stick. “Swemmel!” Garivald called, not wanting a fellow irregular to blaze him. “Swemmel and Unkerlant!”

  The words were almost the last ones that ever passed his lips. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the fighter with whom he’d been chatting and cursing roll away to bring his stick to bear on him. Without conscious thought, Garivald leaped after him and knocked the stick out of his hands. It flew off into the snow.

  “Grelz!” his erstwhile companion yelled, kicking out at Garivald and catching his stick with a boot heel. It also flew away. Garivald didn’t dare scramble for it—the man who’d chosen the Algarvian puppet might get the other one first. Instead, Garivald grappled with the fellow who, till the war began, had been a peasant just like him.

  “Whoreson!” The word came from both their mouths at the same time. They punched and kneed and gouged and kicked at each other. The Grelzer soldier was smaller than Garivald, but lithe and quick. He gave at least as good as he got; had Garivald not twisted aside as the last instant, the fellow would have thumbed out his eye as neatly as if he were scraping the meat from a freshwater mussel.

  “Hold it right there, the both of you, or we’ll blaze your balls off!” That shout froze Garivald and his foe. Ever so cautiously, Garivald turned his head. Standing over them were Sadoc and another irregular.

  Garivald pushed himself away from the fighter who’d chosen the path opposite his. “He’s one of Ran—” he began, but the fellow wasted no time showing what he was. Fast as a striking serpent, he grabbed for one of the sticks in the snow.

  He might have been fast as a serpent, but he wasn’t, he couldn’t be, faster than two beams. At that range, the blowing snow didn’t weaken them enough to matter. One caught him in the chest, the other in the head. He thrashed and died, still reaching for the stick a couple of feet away. His blood stained the white with red.

  He was still thrashing when Sadoc kicked him. “Filthy bugger!” the makeshift mage said. “If we’d taken him captive, we’d’ve made him pay proper. We could’ve stretched him out for a day or two, easy.”

  “I’m just glad he’s dead,” Garivald said. “I don’t care how it happened.” Little by little, his thudding heart slowed toward normal. “I thought he was one of us—and he thought I was one of them.” He touched his face with a mittened hand. The mitten came away wet with blood. “He could fight. All these fellows could fight—can fight. They hate Swemmel as much as we hate the redheads.” He kicked at the snow. He hadn’t really believed that was true. Now he saw he’d been wrong.

  Sadoc pointed in the direction of the main fighting. “We’ve given this here pack of bastards all they wanted, anyhow.”

  Sure enough, the men loyal to Raniero sullenly withdrew from the fields. But, after Munderic found what losses the irregulars had taken, he ordered them back toward the woods, too. “We aren’t going to do anything at Kluftern, not beat up like we are,” he said. “We’ll have to wait till the Grelzers and the Algarvians chase some more men into our camp. And they will. Powers above know they will.”

  Garivald thought he was bound to be right. But the river ran both ways, if Swemmel and the thought of staying under the rule of Unkerlant roused such passion in the breasts of at least some who fought for Raniero. The river ran both ways. . . . He saw the beginning of a song there, but deliberately chose not to shape it. He’d already decided which way he was going.

  In the ruins of Sulingen, Trasone and Sergeant Panfilo lined up in front of a steaming kettle. “You know what?” Trasone said as the queue snaked forward.

  “Tell me,” Panfilo urged. Both Algarvians, by now, sported full bushy beards, their mustaches and side whiskers and chin strips all but lost in the rest of the coppery growth. They had almost no hot water with which to help stay trim. Moreover, the beards went some way toward keeping their cheeks and chins warm.

  “I’m bloody jealous of Major Spinello, that’s what,” Trasone said.

  “For all you know, he’s dead,” Panfilo said.

  “So what?” Trasone said. “I’d still be jealous of him.”

  Panfilo considered that, then slowly
nodded. “Something to it,” he admitted. “This isn’t where I’d come on holiday, I’ll tell you.” Not even the snow could make the wreckage of Sulingen look anything but hideous. And the Algarvian soldiers who’d trudged all the way to the banks of the Wolter were hardly more lovely than the ruins they’d helped create. Filthy, unshaven, scrawny, hungrier by the day, dressed in clothes half their own and half scrounged from Unkerlanter corpses, they would have cause apoplexy had they paraded through the streets of Trapani.

  All they had left, all that hadn’t changed, was their spirit. When Trasone got to the kettle, a cook slapped a chunk—not a very big chunk—of boiled meat onto his mess tin. “What is it?” he asked suspiciously, and poked it with his knife. He eyed the cook. “It’s too tender to be your sister.”

  “I’d say it was jackass, but here you are in front of me,” the cook retorted.

  Trasone collected a slab of bread—a very small slab—from another cook and sat down on the stone steps of a house that wasn’t there any more. As Panfilo came over and sat beside him, he took a bite of the meat. When he did, he made a horrible face. “Maybe it is jackass,” he said to Panfilo. “Or else horse or behemoth. What do you think?”

  Panfilo ate a little himself. After some thought, he said, “Whatever it is, it’s been dead for a while.”

  “Like that’s a surprise,” Trasone said with a snort. “Only meat we get these days, near enough, is from our own beasts the Unkerlanters kill—or from the ones that just fall over dead because they haven’t got anything to eat, either. It’d all be a lot gamier than it is if this lousy place weren’t cold enough to do duty for a rest crate.”

  After another bite, Panfilo said, “I’m pretty sure it’s not dragon, anyhow. If I had a choice between starving and eating dragon, I’m buggered if I’d know which one to pick.”

  Having choked down dead dragon the winter before, Trasone nodded. “You eat too much of that stuff, the quicksilver’ll poison you, or that’s what they say. I don’t know how you’d eat that much, though.” He paused. His mess tin was empty. He’d disposed of the bread in two bites, too. With a sigh, he said, “When we were hungry enough, though, it didn’t seem that bad, you know?”

  “Oh, it seemed bad.” Panfilo had finished his meager meal, too. “But you’re right, I guess: hungry was worse.” He took a handful of snow and scrubbed at his mess tin. “We’re liable to be that hungry again pretty soon. If we don’t break out of here, we’re going to be that hungry again.”

  “Afraid you’re right.” Trasone raised an eyebrow at the sergeant. “We get hungry like that again, I will be jealous of Spinello even if he’s dead.”

  Before Panfilo could answer, shouts came from the north: “Dragons! Our dragons!”

  Trasone and Panfilo both scrambled to their feet and trotted toward the dragon farm in what had been the city square. These days, it was the only part of Sulingen that Unkerlanter egg-tossers couldn’t reach. When the city was first cut off, dragons had come fairly close to bringing in enough supplies to keep the Algarvian army there fighting as well as it ever had. These days, though, the dragons had to fly a lot farther than they had then. Worse, the Unkerlanters knew the routes they had to use, and often lay in wait for them. Every day, it seemed, fewer ran the gauntlet.

  “Life’s bloody wonderful, you know?” Trasone remarked as the dragons began spiraling down toward the battered square.

  “How’s that?” Panfilo asked.

  “If they fly in charges for our sticks and eggs for the tossers, we’ll starve, but we’ll be able to keep fighting while we do it,” Trasone answered. “If they fly in food, we’ll have enough to eat—well, almost—but Swemmel’s whoresons’ll ride roughshod over us. And if they bring in some of each, we’ll sink a couple of inches at a time, the way we’ve been doing.”

  “What I wish they’d fly in is enough Kaunians to make a magic that’d fry the Unkerlanters’ toes off,” Panfilo said. “But it doesn’t look like they can do that, either.”

  It didn’t look as if the Algarvians outside of Sulingen could do enough of anything to stave off defeat here. Trasone resolutely didn’t think about that. Along with the rest of the Algarvian soldiers in the square, he unloaded crates of food and other crates full of eggs and charges, loaded them onto sledges, and hauled them away. Soldiers were draft animals in Sulingen these days, for most of the real draft animals were dead.

  Most of the dragons that flew north out of the square bore only their fliers. Some carried wounded men slung beneath them as the crates of supplies had been. Trasone sighed as he watched one of them get off the ground. “Just about worth taking a beam in the brisket,” he remarked.

  In thoughtful tones, Panfilo replied, “These days, they’ve got mages checking the wounded. If you blaze yourself, you don’t go.”

  “That’s fair,” Trasone said at once, and then, hotly, “And futter you, too, Sergeant, if you think I’d do that to myself.”

  “I don’t.” Panfilo chuckled. “And you can’t get out by being court-martialed for cursing a superior, either.”

  Unkerlanter dragons visited the square as the last of the Algarvian beasts were leaving. Heavy sticks around the farm blazed down a couple of the rock-gray dragons. Others attacked the Algarvian dragons in the air. Still others dropped eggs on the square. Huddled in a hole, Trasone said, “If they were as efficient as they like to brag on being, they would have hit us while our dragons were still on the ground here.”

  “If they were as efficient as they like to brag on being, they would have killed the lot of us a long time ago,” Panfilo said, and Trasone could hardly argue with him.

  A few days later, he and Trasone, along with most of the soldiers who’d been holding the line in the east against the Unkerlanters they’d never quite managed to drive from Sulingen, trudged north toward the outskirts of the city: the great belt of rubble they’d created that now sheltered them against the worst the Unkerlanters could do.

  “You think we can break out?” Trasone asked Panfilo: one professional talking to another, figuring the odds.

  “Sixty, eighty miles, maybe more than that for all I know? Against all the Unkerlanters in the world, and most of the behemoths? Won’t be easy.” Panfilo gave a professional answer. Still, he added, “If we’re going to try, we’d better try now. We probably should have tried two weeks ago, or longer than that. But I’ll tell you something: we’ve got a better chance now than we would in another couple of weeks. And if we don’t break out, it’s only a matter of time.”

  That was professional commentary, too. Trasone thought it over. After a few paces, he kicked at the snow. Panfilo nodded as if he’d answered in words.

  All the Algarvians—and the Sibians and Yaninans trapped in Sulingen with them—looked as ragged as Trasone did. He was surprised to see they’d managed to muster a couple of troops of behemoths; he hadn’t thought so many were left alive in the ruined city on the Wolter. An officer not far away was haranguing his men: “Every one of you lousy buggers is a stinking, nasty son of a whore. You ever want to get between your mistresses’ legs again, you’re going to have to fight like it. Just remember, these fornicators who fight for Swemmel are standing between you and all the pussy in Algarve.”

  The soldiers cheered. Trasone joined in. The officer swept off his hat and bowed. He knew how to get his countrymen ready to fight, all right.

  Egg-tossers sent their cargoes of death flying toward the Unkerlanters entrenched out beyond the northern edge of the city. Chainmail clanking on them, the behemoths lumbered forward to batter a way through the enemy’s lines. And foot-soldiers went forward with them, to protect them from Unkerlanter soldiers.

  Going forward in the open seemed wonderful to Trasone after so long scuttling among the ruins like a rat. And, for the first few hours, the Algarvians did nothing but go forward, smashing through one Unkerlanter line after another. “They didn’t think we had it in us,” Trasone exclaimed. “They don’t know what we’re made of.”
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br />   But the Unkerlanters, though they buckled, did not break. They fought fiercely even when taken by surprise, and soon began throwing swarms of behemoths at the Algarvians. Panfilo had been exaggerating when he said they had most of the behemoths in the world around Sulingen, but not, it seemed, by much. The Algarvian crews were better trained than their Unkerlanter counterparts, but that mattered only so much. Swemmel’s men could afford to lose three, four, five behemoths for every one they slew and still come out ahead in the game.

  Despite everything, the Algarvians kept making progress to the north through most of the second day of the attack. By that afternoon, they were down to a bare handful of behemoths. The Unkerlanters still had plenty. And dragons painted rock-gray appeared overhead in large numbers. They dropped eggs on the Algarvians and swooped low to flame soldiers caught out in the open.

  “I don’t know how we’re going to go any further tomorrow,” Trasone told Panfilo.

  “Got to try,” the sergeant answered.

  Try they did the next morning, a convulsive, desperate attack that carried them another couple of miles farther north. And then, try as they would, they could advance no more. When the Unkerlanters counterattacked, behemoths leading the way, the Algarvians fell back before them. They retreated faster than they’d advanced. By the time the sun rose yet again, they—or those of them who still lived—were back among the ruins of Sulingen. The Unkerlanters had fought for those ruins street by street; now Mezentio’s men would have to do the same.

  Having beaten the Algarvians into the city once more, Swemmel’s men showed no great eagerness for a final struggle among the ruins. Trasone understood that; it would have cost them more men than even Swemmel might feel comfortable paying. They gave the Algarvians three days of near quiet to rebuild their defenses as best they could.

  On the fourth morning—a freezing cold one—Trasone stood sentry at the northern outskirts of the city when he spied a lone Unkerlanter coming toward him. The fellow wasn’t a solitary madman or an infiltrator; he carried a white- and green-striped flag of truce. “Parley!” he shouted in Algarvian. “I come from Marshal Rathar with a message for your commanders.”