Darkness Descending

by Harry Turtledove

  Trasone shook his head, which made the earflaps of his own looted fur cap flop up and down. “You won’t sneak that by me so easy. Now that it’s snowing, the ground’s frozen up, and our behemoths can get going again.”

  As if to prove his point, a couple of the big beasts trotted past the footsoldiers. The behemoths were draped in stolen blankets, too. Their riders had covered them in preference to covering themselves. If the behemoths froze to death, their crewmen turned into footsoldiers, and not very useful footsoldiers at that. One of the men waved a mittened hand to Tealdo and Trasone. Tealdo waved back. He wore mittens, too, which kept the fellow on the behemoth from seeing the gesture he shaped.

  He went back to the argument with Trasone: “The footing’s better for the Unkerlanter behemoths, too, you know.”

  “Ahh, that doesn’t help them so much,” Trasone said with a scornful wave. “The Unkerlanters mostly don’t know what to do with behemoths even when the ground is all right. A good thing, too, or we’d both likely be dead by now.”

  Tealdo thought about rising to that to that even though he knew it was true. But he saw a couple of men standing by a series of low rises in the snow. He needed a moment to realize the men were mages; they looked as draggled as everyone else in the Algarvian army these days. “What’s toward?” he called to them.

  “See for yourself,” one of them answered, though the wind almost blew his words away from Tealdo. Curious, Tealdo ambled over. The mage kicked at one of the ridges in the snow. It turned out to be the body of an Unkerlanter: not a soldier, but a peasant woman. Her throat had been cut. The mage said, “This is how they fight back against us--with their folk as victims.”

  “Me, I’d sooner kill Kaunians than Algarvians--I’ll say that,” Tealdo remarked. “But if we’re doing it and now they’re doing it, too, wouldn’t it be better if both sides stopped, since it’s pretty much evened out?”

  “If one side stopped and not the other, that could mean--would mean--disaster,” the mage said. “Sometimes climbing onto a wolf is easier than climbing off again.”

  “Maybe somebody should have thought of that before we went and got into this lousy war with Unkerlant in the first place,” Tealdo said. “This is a cursed big wolf, and I ought to know. I’ve walked every miserable inch of the way from the Yaninan border to here.”

  “It is the inches you have yet to walk that truly matter,” the mage said. “What could be more important than taking Cottbus?”

  Staying alive, Tealdo thought. He kept that to himself, judging he’d already pushed the mage about as far as he could. He started marching once more, trotting a little to catch up to Trasone. Snow kept swirling down. The stuff was very pretty to watch, but Tealdo wouldn’t have been sorry never to see it again.

  By the time evening came, he had to lift up his foot at every step, which made him slow and awkward despite the hard ground under his feet. Captain Galafrone chose a grove of firs as a halting place. Tealdo had hoped for a village, but this would do; the trees grew close enough together to make a good windbreak. He sat down on the leeward side of one of the first. “This isn’t as easy as they thought it would be back home,” he said.

  Captain Galafrone looked like an old man now. He’d given everything his kingdom asked of him and more, but he had very little left to give. Wearily, he said, “Can somebody get a fire going before we all freeze to death?” With the fir trees breaking the force of the wind and keeping off a good bit of the snow, Tealdo used his stick to start a small blaze. It wasn’t really enough to keep the soldiers warm, but it did make them feel a little better.

  Somebody said, “After we take Cottbus and drive King Swemmel off into the wilderness, this will seem worthwhile.”

  “My arse,” Trasone exclaimed. “This’ll be fornicating dreadful if we look back on it a hundred years from now. And half of Unkerlant’s a fornicating wilderness. What do you call this where we’re at right now, a fornicating playground?”

  “We still have to take Cottbus,” Galafrone said, rallying a little at the sight of the flames. “I’d like to see Swemmel try and fight a war without the place.”

  “Maybe, just maybe,” Tealdo said in speculative tones, “we could spend some time out of the line, let some other people take it on the chin for a while.”

  “Can’t let our mates down,” Galafrone said reproachfully.

  “No, I suppose not,” Tealdo agreed, and his comrades nodded. He went on, “Not letting my mates down is about the only reason I see for going forward anymore. I don’t care one pile of behemoth dung for the greater glory of Algarve, I’ll tell you that.” The rest of the redheaded soldiers nodded again.

  Galafrone said, “Anybody who went through the Six Years’ War knows what glory’s worth--not even a pile of shit, like you said. But we lost that war, and all our neighbors made us pay. If we don’t want to pay again, we’d better win this one.

  “Oh, aye,” Tealdo said. “I remember how glad they were when we marched into the Duchy of Bari. That started us getting our own back.” He shook his head in slow, chilly wonder. “Two years ago now, two years and more. A lot’s happened since.”

  “I wonder how glad the folk of Bari are now that we marched in then,” Trasone said. “Now they get the joys of fighting in Unkerlant, too. That wasn’t the first thing on their minds back then, I bet.”

  “First thing on their minds then was screwing us till we couldn’t see straight.” Fond reminiscence filled Sergeant Panfilo’s voice. “I like the way they thought.”

  Captain Galafrone climbed to his feet. “Like Tealdo says, that was awhile ago now. Us, we’ve still got a war to fight. Come on, let’s go do it.”

  As soon as the Algarvians came out of the shelter of the wood, Unkerlanters started blazing at them from behind snow-covered bushes. Tealdo threw himself down on his belly in the snow. A beam made steam hiss up from the white powder a couple of feet away from him. When he blazed back, more steam rose from the cover King Swemmel’s men were using.

  He thought the troopers under Galafrone’s command outnumbered their Unkerlanter foes. Galafrone evidently thought the same thing, for he sent out flanking parties to left and right to make the Unkerlanters give ground or risk being blazed from three sides at once. A couple of his men fell, but more gained the positions to which they’d been running.

  And then a pair of Algarvian behemoths came up from the southeast. The ground was hard now, but so much snow had fallen that they had to plant their feet with care. One of them bore a heavy stick on its back. That beam had no trouble punching through either the snow still falling or the snow on the bushes that had helped shield the enemy soldiers. One Unkerlanter after another fell.

  The other behemoth carried an egg-tosser. When bursts of sorcerous energy sent snow and frozen dirt flying, the Unkerlanters decided they’d had enough and fled for the next patch of woods. More eggs pursued them. So did beams from the Algarvians’ sticks.

  “Obliged!” Tealdo shouted back toward the behemoths and their crews. One of the soldiers on the behemoth with a heavy stick waved his fur hat in reply.

  “I’d be even more obliged if they’d got here sooner,” Trasone said as he and his comrades rose to go after the Unkerlanters.

  “So would I, but they can’t be having an easy time there,” Tealdo said. “Look how much trouble it is for them to move in deep snow.”

  “This is Unkerlant. This is winter, or near enough as makes no difference,” Trasone said. “The snow’s not going to up and disappear, not for a cursed long time it’s not. How much good are the behemoths going to be till then?”

  “Not as much as we’d like, odds are,” Tealdo replied. “But the Unkerlanters won’t have it any easier than we do.”

  “I want them to have it harder than we do, curse ‘em up one side and down the other,” Trasone said. “I want to lick the whoresons out of Cottbus, I want to help make sure they can’t give us any trouble for a long time afterwards, and then, by the powers above, I want to g
o home. A lot of places in Algarve, it hardly snows at all.”

  “I know--I’m from one of them,” Tealdo said wistfully. “Come on. Before we lick them out of Cottbus, we’ve got to lick them out of those woods there.”

  Before the Algarvians went in after the Unkerlanters, the behemoth with the egg-tosser flung death in among the trees. But it was tossing blind, without any visible targets. King Swemmel’s men still showed plenty of fight when the troopers who followed Galafrone came to close quarters with them. Some of the fighting in the shadow of the pines and birches was with knives and with sticks swung club-fashion; men came on enemies too close to let them swing up their sticks and blaze.

  A few Unkerlanters surrendered. More, though, fought till they were killed or retreated northwest, to take yet another stab somewhere else at holding the Algarvians away from Cottbus. When Galafrone’s men emerged to continue the pursuit, Unkerlanter egg-tossers made them dive for cover.

  “I enjoy this so much, don’t you?” Trasone said, lifting his mouth an inch or so off the snow to speak.

  “Aye, of course,” Tealdo answered. “But we’re still moving ahead, powers above be praised. We’ll get there yet.”

  Nine

  Halfway along the road from Gromheort to the village of Hwinca, the paving gave out. Bembo discovered that the hard way, by going into the mud almost up to his boot tops. Cursing, the Algarvian constable slogged through the soggy patch and up onto drier--if no more paved--ground.

  “Don’t blaze my ears on account of it,” advised Oraste, whose boots were also befouled. “Take it out on the Kaunians when we finally get to this miserable place.”

  “I will, by the powers above,” Bembo growled. “If it weren’t for them, I’d be sitting back in the barracks, all warm and cozy.” He was always ready to feel sorry for himself. “As a matter of fact, if it weren’t for those miserable buggers, we wouldn’t have a war, and I’d be back in Tricarico, happy as a clam at the beach, and not stuck here in stinking Forthweg.”

  Sergeant Pesaro looked over at him. “Remember, while you’re cursing the Kaunians, odds are they’re cursing us, too. I don’t expect they’ll be as easy to round up here as they were in that Oyngestun place--too many stories going around about what happens after they go west.”

  “They deserve it,” Oraste said. “Bembo’s right, Sergeant--weren’t for them, we wouldn’t have a war.”

  Bembo wondered if Oraste was feeling well. The dour constable hardly ever agreed with him. Bembo also wondered if the Kaunians really deserved it. Most of the time, he tried not to wonder about that. It did no good. He’d been ordered to gather them together and send them off to the west. He couldn’t do anything about what happened to them afterwards. “What point, then, to puzzling over who deserved what?

  The constables tramped through a hamlet of half a dozen houses. An old woman on her knees in an herb garden looked up as they went. Her nose was like a sickle blade. Her chin almost met it. Her face was a tight-woven net of wrinkles. Her smile . . . Her smile chilled Bembo’s heart. He’d seen some raddled old procuresses in his day, but none who could match the ancient, exultant evil this Forthwegian crone showed.

  “No blonds here,” she called in bad Algarvian made worse by her being almost toothless. “Blonds there.” She pointed north, up the road toward Hwinca.

  “Aye, granny, we know,” Pesaro answered. With a chortle and a nasty smirk, the peasant woman went back to her weeding.

  Oraste chuckled. “She loves Kaunians, too, just as much as we do.”

  “I noticed,” Bembo said dryly. “A lot of Forthwegians do, don’t they?”

  “Keep moving, there,” Pesaro said. He was puffing and sweating himself; he’d done more marching since coming to Forthweg than in all the years since he’d made sergeant and comfortably ensconced himself behind the station-house desk back in Tricarico. But he kept on putting one big foot in front of the other, steady as a stream, inevitable as an avalanche. As for Bembo, he wanted a breather. Pesaro didn’t give him one.

  It was most of an hour later when Oraste pointed ahead and said, “There. That must be the place. Miserable-looking little dump, isn’t it? How many are we supposed to take out of it, Sergeant?”

  “Twenty.” Pesaro grunted. “Hardly looks like it’s got twenty people in it, does it, let alone twenty Kaunians? But if we don’t bring back twenty, we get blamed.” He kicked a clod of dirt. “Life’s not fair.”

  “Sergeant?” That was a youngish constable named Almonio. Bembo looked at him in some surprise; he hardly ever said anything.

  “What is it?” Pesaro sounded surprised, too.

  “Sergeant...” Now that he had spoken, Almonio looked as if he wished he hadn’t. He marched along for several paces before going on, “When we get into this Hwinca place, Sergeant, may I have your leave not to help round up these Kaunians?”

  “What’s this?” Sergeant Pesaro studied him as if he were a double rainbow or a golden unicorn or some other astonishing freak of nature. Pesaro’s beefy face clouded. “You telling me you haven’t got the stomach for it?”

  Miserably, Almonio nodded. “Aye, I think that’s what it is. I know what’s going to happen to the whoresons once we take ‘em, and I don’t much want to be a part of it.”

  Bembo’s eyes got wider and wider as he listened. “Powers above,” he whispered to Oraste, “the sergeant’ll tear him limb from limb.”

  “Aye, so he will.” Oraste sounded as if he was looking forward to it.

  Pesaro, though, seemed more curious than furious. “Suppose we’re rounding up the blonds and they try and fight us? What are you going to do then, Almonio? You going to stand there and let the Kaunians kill your comrades?”

  “Of course not, Sergeant,” Almonio answered. “I just don’t want to have to. drag them out of their houses, that’s all. It’s a filthy business.”

  “War is a filthy business,” Pesaro said, but he still didn’t sound angry. He rubbed his chins as he thought. At last, he pointed toward the reluctant constable. “All right, Almonio, here’s what you’ll do for today: you’ll stand guard while the rest of us winkle out the Kaunians. If they give any trouble--if they even look like they might give any trouble--you start blazing. Have you got that?”

  “Aye, Sergeant.” Almonio stopped marching for a moment so he could bow. “I thank you, Sergeant.”

  “Don’t thank me too much,” Pesaro answered. “And, by the powers above, keep your cursed mouth shut, or we’re both in hot water.” He shook his head. “Warm water would feel good right now, but not that hot.”

  Well, well--isn’t that interesting? Bembo thought. I’ve got a hold on Pesaro, if I ever want one. He lifted off his hat so he could scratch his head. The way things were, he couldn’t see wanting one. He’d spent years getting used to Pesaro--and getting Pesaro used to him. Any other sergeant was too likely to be harder on him. He laughed a sour laugh. Wasn’t that the way of the world?--come up with something that looked good and then decide you couldn’t use it.

  Into Hwinca marched the constabulary squad. The village was smaller and dingier than Oyngestun; it didn’t lie on a ley line, and so seemed more a product of a distant time than Oyngestun had. And Oyngestun, as far as Bembo was concerned, hadn’t been anything to write home about, either.

  He didn’t write home very often, anyhow. He’d quarreled endlessly with his father before going out on his own; they still had little to do with each other. His sister had quarreled with the old man, too. But Lanfusa’s escape had been to marry a furrier who was now on his way to being rich. She didn’t like being reminded her brother was only a constable. If he sent a letter to Safta, she might write back. She was likelier to fall over dead from shock, though.

  A few Forthwegians nodded to the constables. One of them grinned and winked and clapped his hands, almost as if he were an Algarvian. The leer on his face made Bembo remember that what he was doing in Forthweg probably ought not to go down in writing to anyone.

  �
��Kaunians, come forth!” Pesaro shouted in a great voice when he got to Hwinca’s village square. Evodio turned his words from Algarvian into classical Kaunian. That was the tongue the blonds hereabouts still spoke, or near enough as to make no difference.

  No matter what language the order came in, the Kaunians ignored it. Bembo turned to Oraste. “There--you see? They’ve got a notion of what’s going to happen to them. They won’t come out all by themselves, not anymore. We’re going to have to go in after ‘em. It’ll be a lot of extra work from now on.”

  Oraste hefted his stick. “Liable to be dangerous work, too. If they figure they’re going to get shipped west anyhow, who’s to say they won’t decide they’ve got nothing to lose and try and take some of us with ‘em?”

  “Aye.” That had occurred to Bembo, too. He wished it hadn’t.

  Pesaro shouted again. His voice echoed off the houses and shops facing the square. Again, Evodio translated his words into classical Kaunian. Again, none of the yellow-haired men and women in Hwinca came forth. “Well, we’ll have to do it the hard way,” Pesaro said. His chuckle had a nasty edge. “You know what, though? I don’t think it’ll be too hard.” He beckoned to the Forthwegian who’d applauded the constables’ arrival. “Come here, pal. Aye, you. You speak Algarvian?”

  With a show of regret, the villager shook his head. Pesaro looked exasperated. Neither he nor any of his men spoke any Forthwegian past what little they’d picked up since coming from Tricarico. Evodio said, “I’ll bet he speaks Kaunian, Sergeant.”

  “Find out,” Pesaro said. Sure enough, intelligence lit on the Forthwegian’s face. Pesaro nodded. “Good. Tell him we’ll pay him--doesn’t have to be anything much or I’m a Yaninan--if he’ll show us which houses the Kaunians live in.”

  That fellow turned out not to be the only villager who spoke Kaunian; three or four others clamored for a share of the reward, too. Bembo and Oraste followed one of them to a house that didn’t look any different from those to either side of it. The Forthwegian pointed at the door, as dramatically as if he were a hunting dog pointing at a woodcock.