Through the Darkness d-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Rual waved to the fellow behind the bar, who wore not only a mustache but also a ridiculous little strip of chin beard, as if he hadn’t been paying attention while he shaved. “Two mugs of ale here,” Rual called, and set a shiny, newly minted silver coin on the table.

  Garivald picked it up and looked at it. “So that’s what King Raniero looks like, is it?” he remarked. “Hadn’t seen him before.” In his opinion, Raniero had a pointy nose. He didn’t think Rual would care about his opinions in such matters.

  “Aye.” Rual waited till the tapman brought him his ale, then raised his mug. “And here’s to Raniero.” Having expected such a toast, Garivald had no trouble drinking to it. Rual added, “Good to have a king in Grelz again.”

  “That’s the truth,” Garivald said, though Swemmel was the only king in Grelz he acknowledged. After a pull at his ale-which was pretty good-he added, “I wish we hadn’t had to have a war to get one, though.” He also wished the king Grelz had got weren’t an Algarvian, one more opinion he kept to himself.

  “No, we should have had one of our own all along,” Rual said. “But I’d sooner be tied to the redheads than to Cottbus.”

  The Algarvians in here were surely listening to him, as he was listening to Garivald. Garivald wondered what they’d think of his wanting a Grelzer king rather than Mezentio’s cousin. “I never worried about things like this before the fighting started,” he said at last. “I just wanted life to go on the way it always had.” He wasn’t even lying.

  Rual gave him another sympathetic look, though the last thing Garivald wanted was his sympathy. “I understand what you’re saying-powers above know I do,” Rual assured him. “But weren’t you sick of inspectors stealing your crops and impressers liable to drag you off into the army if you looked at ‘em sideways or even if you didn’t?”

  “Well, who wasn’t?” Garivald said, making it sound like an admission Rual had dragged out of him. Again, he wasn’t lying. Again, it didn’t matter, which Rual didn’t seem to understand. The Algarvians had done worse in Zossen- and, no doubt, elsewhere in Unkerlant-than Swemmel’s inspectors and impressers. Garivald decided to make his own comment before Rual could ask another question: “This looks like a pretty happy place now, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Oh, it is,” Rual assured him. “Raniero makes a fine king. So long as we don’t trouble anything, he leaves us alone. You could never say that about Swemmel, now could you?”

  “No, indeed.” Garivald laughed a particular kind of laugh, one that suggested a lot of things you could say about King Swemmel. He would have enjoyed saying them, too-to his wife, or to his friend Dagulf back in Zossen. Saying them to Rual would have been blackest treason.

  “Well, there you are,” Rual said, as if certain Garivald agreed with him in every particular.

  “Aye, here I am-at the bottom of my mug of ale.” Garivald set coins- old coins, coins of Unkerlant, not Grelz-on the table and waved to the Unkerlanter with the preposterous mustache and strip of beard behind the counter. When he caught the fellow’s eye, he pointed to his mug and Rual’s. The tapman brought them refills.

  “My thanks,” Rual said. “You’re a man of your word. Too many drifters coming through Pirmasens these days want to grab what they can and then slide out again. This is a nice, quiet place. We want to keep it that way.”

  “Don’t blame you,” Garivald said. “Almost tempts a fellow into wanting to settle down here for good.” He drank some more ale, to get rid of the taste of the lies he was telling.

  “You could do worse, Liaz,” Rual said, and the curse of the war Unkerlant and Algarve were fighting was that he was probably right. “Aye, it’s right peaceful here.” He didn’t mention-maybe he even didn’t consciously notice-the Algarvian soldiers drinking at a table not ten feet away from him. If they’d been back in Algarve where they belonged, he would have come closer to telling the truth.

  Garivald finished his ale. Now came the tricky part: sliding out of Pirmasens under the noses of those Algarvian soldiers, and under Rual’s, too. He got to his feet. “Good to find a friendly face,” he said. “Aren’t many of ‘em left these days.”

  “Where are you heading?” Rual asked.

  “Somewhere that got hurt worse than you seem to,” Garivald answered. “Maybe somewhere I can find a farm nobody’s working and get things going again. That’d keep me too busy to worry about anything else for a while, I expect.”

  “And I expect you’re right,” Rual said. “Good luck to you.”

  “Thanks.” Garivald took a couple of steps toward the doorway. One of the redheads sitting in the tavern spoke to him in Algarvian. He froze in alarm entirely unfeigned. Turning to Rual, he asked, “What did that mean? I don’t know any of their language.”

  “He told you to count yourself lucky you’re still breathing,” Rual said.

  “Oh, I do,” Garivald answered, feeling the sweat start out under his arms once more. “Every day, I do.” He stood there for a moment, wondering whether the Algarvians were going to try to wring him dry. But the fellow who’d spoken just nodded and waved him away. Trying not to let out a sigh of relief, he went out into the hot sunshine.

  He didn’t just turn around and go back the way he’d come. That would have roused suspicions. Instead, he kept walking east, toward Herborn. Eventually, when he judged it safe, he’d make a wide circle around Pirmasens and double back toward the forests where Munderic, not false King Raniero, was lord and master. For now, he felt like a traveling mountebank who’d stuck his head into a dragon’s mouth and pulled it back unscathed.

  Dragons were stupid beasts, though. Every once in a while, no matter how you trained them, they would bite down.

  Dragons flew south overhead: hundreds of them, maybe even thousands, some high, some low. All were painted in one variant or another of Algarve’s green, red, and white. To Sergeant Leudast’s horrified gaze, they seemed to cover the whole sky.

  “And not a single one of ours to try to flame them down,” he said bitterly.

  “They’ll have a fight on their hands sooner or later,” Captain Hawart said. “They’d better, anyhow, or the game is as good as over.”

  Leudast wondered if the game was as good as over. He’d wondered that before, back last summer when the Algarvians smashed and encircled Unkerlanter armies again and again, then toward the end of fall when Mezentio’s mages first unleashed their slaughter-filled sorceries. When winter came, Unkerlant fought back hard. But now it was summer again, and. . “Cursed redheads have got more lives than a cat,” he grumbled.

  “They’re nasty buggers, no two ways about it,” Hawart agreed. Like every man in his regiment, he looked worn and battered.

  Still another wave of Algarvian dragons passed overhead. “At least they’re not dropping their eggs on us,” Leudast said. “Where do you suppose the whoresons are headed?” Coming out of a peasant village in northern Unkerlant, he knew little about the geography of the south-and, till the fighting started, had cared less.

  “Sulingen.” Captain Hawart spoke with great authority. “Has to be Sulingen on the Wolter. That’s the last city in front of the Mamming Hills, the last city in front of the cinnabar mines, the last place where we can keep them from breaking through.”

  “Sulingen.” Leudast nodded. “Aye, I’ve heard the name. But after a pounding like that, there won’t be one stone in the town left standing on another.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” the regimental commander said, sticking a long stalk of grass in the corner of his mouth so he looked like a peasant from a village in the back of beyond rather than the educated man he was. “Sulingen’s a good-size place, and towns take a deal of knocking down before there’s nothing left of them. Powers above know we’ve seen that.”

  “Well, I won’t say you’re wrong, sir,” Leudast admitted. “Rubble’s as good to fight from as buildings are, too, maybe even better. But still…” He didn’t go on. He and Hawart had been through a lot together, but not so much that
he cared to tag himself with the label of defeatist.

  Hawart understood where his ley line of thought was going. “But still,” he echoed. “You don’t want them to drive you back to your last ditch, because you don’t have anywhere to go if they push you out of it.” The stalk of grass bobbed up and down as he spoke. He tried to sound reassuring: “They haven’t even driven us back into it yet.”

  “No, sir.” Leudast wasn’t about to argue, but he still wanted to say what was in his mind: “You can see it from here, though.”

  Off to the east, Leudast could also see columns of smoke marking the latest Algarvian thrust into Unkerlant. He turned his head and looked west. No new smoke there. Leudast let out a small sigh of relief. The regiment wasn’t about to be cut off and surrounded any time soon, anyhow.

  A starling hopped through the grass, chirping metallically. It pecked at a worm or a grub, then flew away when Leudast shook his fist at it. “Those things are cursed nuisances,” he said. “They’ll eat the fruit right off a tree and the grain right out of the fields.”

  “They might as well be Algarvians,” Hawart said. Leudast laughed, though it was at best a bitter joke.

  A runner trotted up, shouting for an officer. When Hawart admitted he was one, the other Unkerlanter said, “Sir, you’re ordered east with as many men as you command, to try and hold back the Algarvians.”

  Captain Hawart sighed. Leudast knew how he felt. Simply lying in the grass for a little while, without eggs bursting close by or beams sizzling past overhead, was sweet. It couldn’t last; Leudast knew that all too well. But he wished it would have lasted a little longer.

  “Aye, we’ll come, of course,” Hawart said, and started shouting for his men to get to their feet and get moving. The runner saluted and hurried off, likely to haul some more weary footsoldiers into the fight. Hawart sighed again. “We’ll see if we go out again once we’re done, too.”

  “Won’t have so many dragons dropping eggs on us, anyhow,” Leudast said as he heaved himself upright. “They’re all off pounding that Sulingen place.”

  “Well, so they are,” Hawart said. “Maybe we’ll be able to catch Mezentio’s men in flank, too. From where the smoke’s rising, their spearpoint’s gone past us. With a little luck, we’ll chop it off.”

  “Here’s hoping.” Leudast wasn’t sure he believed the Unkerlanters could do that; they’d had as little luck down here in the south this fighting season as they’d had all along the front the summer before. But it was worth trying.

  He wondered how many miles he’d marched since the war against Algarve started. Hundreds, he knew-most of them heading west. He was moving east now, toward Algarve. Back during the winter, that had mattered a great deal. Now. . He supposed it still did, but what mattered even more was that he could be blazed just as dead heading this way as the other.

  “Open order!” he called to the men he led. “Stay spread out. You don’t want them to be able to get too many of you all at once.”

  The veterans in his company already knew that, and were doing it. But he didn’t have a lot of veterans left, and every fight claimed more. Most of his men were not long off farms or city streets. They were brave enough, but a lot of them would get killed or maimed before they figured out what they should be doing. Only luck had kept Leudast from going that way, and he knew it.

  A good-size counterattack against the western flank of the Algarvian drive looked to be building. Behemoths trotted forward along with Unkerlanter footsoldiers. More behemoths hauled egg-tossers too heavy to fit on their backs. Teams of horses and mules urged on by sweating, cursing teamsters and hostlers hauled even more.

  Leudast looked up into the sky, hoping to spot dragons painted in rock-gray. When he didn’t, he grunted and kept marching. He knew he couldn’t have everything. The support the footsoldiers were getting on the ground was already more than he’d expected.

  Eggs started bursting in front of the regiment sooner than he’d hoped, though not really sooner than he’d thought they would. As usual, the Algarvians were alert. They could be beaten, but seldom surprised. Some soldier on the flank with a crystal had seen something he didn’t like, talked to the redheads’ egg-tossers, and then, no doubt, ducked back down into the tall grass.

  “Come on,” Leudast said. “They’re trying to scare us off. Are we going to let them?” He was scared every time he went into a fight. He hoped his men didn’t know it. He knew too well he did.

  As he’d hoped, Mezentio’s soldiers didn’t have that many egg-tossers here on their flank. Most of them would be down at the head of the attack, at what Captain Hawart called the spearpoint. Leudast would have put them there, too, if he’d wanted to break through deeper into Unkerlant. But now he and his comrades were trying to break through, and he thought they might do it.

  Then, just after he’d tramped through the fields around a ruined, abandoned peasant village, somebody blazed at him. The beam missed, but charred a line through the rye that struggled against encroaching weeds. Leudast threw himself down on his belly. The smell of damp dirt in his nostrils brought back his own days in a peasant village.

  “Advance by squads!” he shouted to his men. Again, the veterans already knew what to do. He heard them shouting instructions to the new men. Would the raw recruits understand? They’d better, Leudast thought, if they want to have the chance to get any more lessons. Soldiers said you’d last a while if you lived through your first fight. If you didn’t, you surely wouldn’t.

  Up he came, running heavily toward a boulder a hundred feet ahead. He dove behind it as if one step ahead of the inspectors, lay panting for a moment, then peered1 around the chunk of granite. The enemy was blazing from an apple orchard that, like the fields around the abandoned village, had seen better years. Leudast spotted a man in there who wasn’t wearing Unkerlanter rock-gray. He brought his stick to his shoulder and thrust his forefinger into the beaming hole. The foeman toppled. Leudast let out a growl of triumph.

  Two more rushes brought him into the grove. As he crouched behind a tree trunk, he made sure the knife on his belt was loose in its sheath. He knew from bitter experience that Algarvians didn’t go backwards without leaving a lot of dead, theirs and those of their enemies, as monuments to where they’d been.

  “Urra!” he yelled as he ran forward again. “Swemmel! Urra!” His countrymen echoed him. He waited for the answering cries of “Mezentio!” and “Algarve!” to give him some idea of how many redheads he faced.

  Those cries didn’t come. Instead, the enemy soldiers yelled a name he hardly knew-”Tsavellas!”-and other things in a language he’d never heard before. In brief glimpses, he saw that their uniforms were a darker tan than those of the Algarvians, and they wore tight leggings, not kilts.

  Realization smote. “They’re Yaninans!” he called to his men. From everything he’d heard, the Algarvians’ allies didn’t have the stomach for the fight that Mezentio’s men brought to it. Maybe that was so, maybe it wasn’t. It might be worth finding out. “Yaninans!” he yelled as loud as he could, and then a couple of phrases of Algarvian he’d learned: “Surrender! Hands high!”

  For a moment, the enemy’s shouts and blazing went on as they had before. Then silence fell. And then, from behind trees and bushes and rocks, skinny little men with big black mustaches began emerging. When the first ones weren’t blazed down out of hand, more and more came forth. Leudast told off troopers of his own to take charge of them and get them to the rear.

  One of those troopers looked at him in something approaching awe. “Powers above, Sergeant, we’ve just bagged twice as many men as we’ve got.”

  “I know.” Leudast was astonished, too. “It’s not so easy against the Algarvians, is it? Go on, get ‘em out of here.” He raised his voice and addressed the rest of his men: “They’ve given us a chance. We’re going into that hole fast and hard, like it belongs to some easy wench. Now come on!”

  “Urra!” shouted the Unkerlanters, the new men loudest among them
: they thought it would be this easy all the time. Leudast didn’t try to tell them anything different. Pretty soon, they’d run into Algarvians and find out for themselves. Meanwhile, they-and he-would go forward as fast and as far as they could. Maybe, if they got lucky enough, they’d cut off the spearhead after all.

  Among the books Ealstan had brought home to help keep Vanai amused in the flat she dared not leave was an old atlas. It was, in fact, a very old atlas, dating back to the days before the Six Years’ War. As far as that atlas was concerned, Forthweg didn’t exist; the east belonged to a swollen Algarve, while the west was an Unkerlanter grand duchy centered on Eoforwic here.

  Vanai’s chuckle had a bitter edge. Algarve was a great deal more swollen these days than it had been when the atlas was printed. And the news sheets kept announcing new Algarvian victories every day. Down in the south of Unkerlant, their spearheads reached toward the Narrow Sea.

  She looked back from the atlas to the news sheet. In fierce fighting, she read, the town of Andlau fell to Algarve and her allies. An enemy counterblow against the flank of the attacking column was turned back with heavy loss.

  Andlau, she saw, was well beyond Durrwangen, three quarters of the way from where the fighting had begun in spring to Sulingen. Sure enough, Mezentio’s men seemed to be moving as fast as they had the summer before.

  “But they can’t,” Vanai said out loud, defiantly using her Kaunian birth-speech. “They can’t. What will be left of the world if they do?”

  What would be left of the world for her if the Algarvians won their war was nothing. But they kept right on rolling forward all the same. The news sheet went on, in the boasting Algarvian style even though it was written in Forthwegian, Algarvian dragons hammered Sulingen on the Wolter, dropping eggs by the thousand and leaving the city, an ungainly sprawl stretched along the northern bank of the river, burning in many places. Casualties are certain to be very heavy, but King Swemmel continues his useless, senseless resistance.