Through the Darkness d-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “I figured that,” Garivald said.

  “I figured you did,” the leader of the band of irregulars answered. “But I don’t know if the firstman’s wife is sleeping with the redheads, or whether swine fever’s gone through, or if the harvest is good-haven’t heard anything like that. Too far away.”

  “If the Algarvians are sleeping with Herka, they’re a lot more desperate than anybody thought they were,” Garivald said, and Munderic laughed. Garivald started to walk off, then turned back. “What about the fight at that Sulingen place?”

  “Still going on.” Now Munderic spoke with great assurance. “By the powers above, the redheads stuck their dicks in the sausage machine there, and now they can’t get ‘em out. Breaks my heart, that it does.”

  “Mine, too.” Now Garivald did walk away.

  Munderic’s voice pursued him: “We’re going after that ley line tonight, remember. Got to keep the Algarvians from moving things through.”

  “I hadn’t forgotten.” Garivald paused to look back over his shoulder. “That’ll get harder when the snow does start sticking, and it won’t be long. Cursed Algarvians will be able to follow our tracks a lot easier.”

  “We lived through last winter and kept fighting,” Munderic answered. “We can do it again, I expect. Maybe Sadoc will figure out a way to hide our tracks.”

  Garivald rolled his eyes. “Maybe Sadoc will figure out a way to get us all killed, not just some of us. The longer it is since he’s tried to work wizardry, the better the mage you misremember him to be.”

  “When you work better, you can pick nits,” Munderic said angrily. “Till then, he’s the only excuse for a mage we’ve got.”

  “You said it, I didn’t. But I’ll say this: from everything I’ve seen, no mage-craft is better than bad magecraft.” Garivald kept on walking this time, and paid no attention to whatever Munderic shouted after him.

  He walked right out of the clearing where most of the irregulars squatted or lounged. Just beyond it, he almost fell when his feet slipped in wet, rotting leaves. He had to grab for a tree trunk to keep from landing on his backside.

  From behind another tree, he heard a snicker. Obilot stepped out. She’d been on sentry-go; she had a stick in her hand. “I’ve seen that done better,” she said. “You looked as clumsy as a redhead there.”

  Having just quarreled with Munderic, Garivald found himself in a sour mood. Instead of laughing at himself, as he usually would have, he growled, “And if you’d put your foot where I did, you’d look even clumsier.”

  Obilot glared at him. “I got out here without slipping and sliding like an otter going down a bank.”

  Garivald glared back. He bowed low, almost as if he were an Algarvian and not a poorly shaved Unkerlanter peasant in a dirty tunic and muddy felt boots a couple of sizes too big. “I’m so sorry, milady. We can’t all be as beautiful and graceful as you.”

  Obilot went white. When she started to swing the business end of her stick toward him, he realized that was killing rage. She realized it a moment later, and lowered the stick before Garivald had to decide whether to try to jump her or to dive behind the tree he’d grabbed.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying,” she whispered, very likely more to herself than to him. She took a deep breath, and got back a little color. When she spoke again, she did aim her words at him: “Be thankful you don’t know what you’re talking about. Be thankful you don’t know where I’ve heard things like that before.”

  She never had said much to him about what had driven her into the irregulars. “Something to do with one of Mezentio’s men,” he guessed.

  Her nod was jerky. “Aye. Something.” Her voice made the cutting wind seem a warm breeze out of the north. “Something.” She gestured with the stick again, this time in a peremptory way. “Go on. Leave me in peace. Peace!” She laughed. Garivald all but fled.

  Compared to facing Obilot, going out and trying to sabotage an Algarvian-held ley line seemed safe and easy to Garivald. Or it would have, had she not been one of the irregulars coming along on the raid. Garivald stayed as far away from her as he could.

  He also wanted to stay away from Sadoc. Since the would-be mage and Obilot wouldn’t stay close to each other, Garivald had to balance repulsions as best he could.

  Munderic was blind to all that. He had other things to worry about. “Careful with the eggs,” he kept telling the irregulars who carried them. “If you’re not careful, we’ll all end up very unhappy.”

  Where the eggs had come from, Garivald didn’t know. They appeared in the camp every so often, almost as if they were magicked into being. They had plenty of magic inside them; Garivald knew that. The characters on their cases weren’t in Unkerlanter. He couldn’t read, but he could recognize the characters of his own language. If these weren’t Unkerlanter, they had to be Algarvian. Had Munderic stolen them out from under the redheads’ noses? Or had the Algarvians given them to puppet King Raniero’s Grelzer troops, with a Grelzer soldier friendlier than he seemed passing them on to the irregulars?

  Asking Munderic struck Garivald as more trouble than it was worth. He and the leader of the band had dickered too often to make him think he would get a straight answer. He slogged along down the muddy path under the ever barer branches of the trees.

  And then, quite suddenly, the irregulars weren’t under the shelter of the trees any more, but tramping up the path through an overgrown meadow that hadn’t been grazed for at least a year. Munderic waved the men with the eggs- and a good many others with them-off the path and into the grass. “Have a care, lads,” he said. “The redheads have gone to burying eggs in the roadway again.”

  That made several more irregulars skitter off the track. Then Obilot spoke up, her voice a clear bell in the darkness: “Sometimes they bury eggs alongside the roads, too, to get the clever buggers who know enough to get off onto the safe ground-only it isn’t.”

  Sadoc said, “I’ll douse out any eggs; see if I don’t.” Carrying a forked stick, he strode boldly down the middle of the road, as if daring an Algarvian egg to burst under him.

  “If he doesn’t douse out an egg, we’ll see it, all right,” Garivald murmured to another irregular nearby. The fellow chuckled, though it was funny only in a grisly way. Garivald didn’t think Sadoc could find the sun at noon, with or without a dowsing rod, but he held his tongue. If Sadoc proved him right, everyone would know about it.

  He tramped along under the dark, moonless sky. Nights grew ever longer. That gave the irregulars an advantage they lacked in summertime: they could travel farther under cover of darkness at this season of the year. If he were back in Zossen now, he would be wondering if he had enough jars of spirits to keep him drunk through most of the winter. Unless this winter were very different from any that had gone before, he would have enough, too.

  But this winter was different, and Zossen a long way away. Instead of the redheads who’d garrisoned his village, Garivald had to worry about whatever Grelzer troops were guarding the ley line for their Algarvian masters.

  He wondered how hard the men who served King Raniero would fight. They weren’t Algarvians, which was doubtless all to the good. But they wouldn’t have only the weapons they could steal or scrounge. The Algarvians would want to make sure they could fight, whether they would or not.

  Munderic spoke in a low but urgent voice: “We’re getting near the ley line. Keep your eyes skinned, every cursed one of you. We want to slide past the Grelzer traitors; we don’t want to get into a fight with them. If we can plant our eggs and then sneak back to the woods, we’ve done what we came for.”

  Somebody said, “We’ll have to kill those whoresons sooner or later. Might as well start now.”

  “If we have to, we will,” Munderic answered. “But hurting the Algarvians is more important now. That’s what we aim for first.”

  With more than a little reluctance, Garivald admitted to himself that Munderic was right. He paused and peered ahead through the night.
In the name of efficiency, King Swemmel had ordered shrubbery planted to either side of a lot of ley lines in Unkerlant, to keep people and animals from blundering unawares into the path of a caravan. How much labor that had taken hadn’t been measured against men or beasts saved. Garivald wondered why not, but not for long. Because Swemmel gave the order, that’s why. He still feared the king more than he loved him. But he feared-and hated-the Algarvians still more.

  “Halt!” someone called from the darkness ahead, in accents much like his own. “Who goes there!”

  Garivald went down onto his belly. He couldn’t see the man who had challenged, and he didn’t want the fellow seeing him, either. For all he knew, the Grelzer carried a crystal and was calling reinforcements. But Sadoc’s voice rang out, harsh and proud: “Free men of Unkerlant, that’s who!”

  A beam came out of the night, aimed at the loudmouthed would-be mage. Garivald and his comrades blazed back, trying to hit the Grelzer before he could hit any of them. By the way he was shouting-screaming-he had no crystal to summon aid. A moment later, the screams changed note, from fear to anguish. A moment after that, most abruptly, they cut off.

  From behind the hedge-how had he got there so fast? — Munderic called, “Stinking whoreson’s dead-scratch one traitor. But come on. We’ve got the get these eggs planted fast now. Sadoc, are you hale?”

  “Aye,” Sadoc answered.

  “Get up here, then,” Munderic snapped as irregulars dug a hole in the dirt between the hedgerows marking the ley line’s path. “Say the words over these eggs and we’ll get out of here.”

  “Aye,” Sadoc repeated. Say the words he did, in a rapid singsong. Garivald didn’t think it was in Unkerlanter, but wasn’t sure. With Sadoc saying the words, he wasn’t sure they would work, either. As soon as they were through, he helped his comrades fill in the hole they’d dug. Then they started for the shelter of the woods again. No more Grelzer soldiers came over to see what might have happened or to pursue. That told Garivald more than a little about the quality of the men who served Raniero.

  The irregulars were more than halfway back to the forest when a distant roar from behind them made them burst into cheers. If any villagers heard them, they might have taken their noise for the baying of a wolf pack that had killed. They wouldn’t have been far wrong, either. Even Garivald slapped Sadoc on the back.

  Just outside the woods, an irregular trod on an egg buried in the meadow. That roar was louder, more intimate. His screams were more dreadful than the Grelzer’s, but faded to nothingness almost as fast. Obilot said, “One of us for one of their caravans-fair exchange.” She was right… but Garivald’s shiver had nothing to do with the cold.

  Marshal Rathar and General Vatran had a new headquarters these days; the Algarvians had finally overrun the gully from which they’d directed the fight for Sulingen for so long. This one was also a cave, a cave dug into the side of the bluffs that tumbled down to the Wolter. Runners had to make their way along a narrow, twisting, dangerous path to bring new from the few bits of the city to Unkerlanters still held and to take back orders.

  After one runner did make the journey, Vatran started cursing. Rathar had been studying the map; the general’s fury made him look up from it. “What now?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Vatran growled. “You know Colonel Chariulf?”

  “Of course,” Rathar answered. “He finally put paid to that Algarvian master sniper, and a good thing, too-the whoreson was bleeding us white.”

  “Aye, well, now he’s had his own letter posted, poor bugger,” Vatran told him. “He got caught away from a hole when the Algarvians started tossing eggs, and there’s not enough of him left to bury in a bloody jam tin.”

  This war is bleeding the whole kingdom white, Rathar thought. He’d thought the same thing during the Twinkings War. Men a little older, a little more traveled, than he had surely thought the same thing during the Six Years’ War. And they’d been right, and he’d been right, and he was right again. What would be left of Unkerlant by the time this fight was over?

  He hoped something would be left of Unkerlant by the time this fight was over. His job down here was to help make sure something would be left of his kingdom when the fight was over. If the Algarvians took it all… If that happened, they would make people long for the good old days of King Swemmel, which, to a man who’d lived through those days, was a genuinely frightening thought.

  “Poor Chariulf,” he said. “He was good at what he did.”

  Vatran grunted. “Aye, he was. And that’s more praise than most of us will get after we’re dead and gone.”

  “If you and I don’t get that kind of praise, it’ll mean we lost the war,” Rathar said.

  “Maybe,” Vatran answered. “But maybe not, too. Maybe it’ll just mean Swemmel got sick of us, threw us in the soup pot when it was boiling hard, and then went on and won the war anyhow, with whatever other generals he scrounged up.”

  “Now there’s a cheerful thought,” Rathar said. “I like to think of myself as indispensable.”

  “I like to think of myself the same bloody way,” Vatran replied. “But the way I look at it and the way his Majesty looks at it aren’t necessarily one and the same, however much I wish they were.” He raised his voice: “Ysolt! How about another mug of tea?”

  “I’ll fetch you one, General,” the cook answered from the back of the cave. “Do you want one, too, Marshal Rathar?”

  “No, thanks,” he said; he had some sour ale in front of him as he examined the map, and that would do well enough.

  “Can I get you anything else, then, lord Marshal?” she asked, her voice an inviting croon. If Rathar’s ears didn’t turn as red as the embers of the fire that kept the cave a little warmer than freezing, he would have been astonished. He’d bedded her a couple of times since that first one, or rather, she’d bedded him. He’d discovered he had an easier time resisting the Algarvian army than his own hefty cook.

  Vatran chuckled under his breath; he would have had to be a moron not to know what Ysolt’s tone meant. “Don’t worry about it, lord Marshal,” he said in a stage whisper. “Keeps the juices flowing, or that’s what they say.” He chuckled again. “Never a dull moment there, either, even if she’s no beauty.”

  “No,” Rathar said, admitting what he could hardly deny. He’d wondered whether Vatran had slept with Ysolt-or perhaps the better way to phrase it was whether she’d slept with Vatran. Now he knew.

  “You didn’t answer me, Marshal,” she said reprovingly as she brought General Vatran a steaming mug of tea and a little pitcher of milk beside it on the tray. “Can I get you anything else?”

  “No, that’s all right,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  “Well, I thought so,” she answered, with a girlish giggle that didn’t fit her bulk. Then she had mercy on the marshal and turned back to General Vatran. “It’s goat’s milk, General. I’m sorry. It’s all I could get.”

  “Doesn’t bother me,” Vatran said as Ysolt went back to her cooking. “Cursed sight better than no milk at all, even if the bloody Gyongyosians would shit their drawers about it.” He poured some into the tea, then nodded. “Cursed sight better than no milk at all.”

  “The Zuwayzin drink their tea without milk,” Rathar remarked. “They pour in the honey instead.”

  “That’s not my problem-and if I took off my clothes in this weather, it’d freeze right off,” Vatran answered. “I can’t use it as often as I did when I was your age, but I’ve still got a blaze left in the stick every now and again.”

  “Good for you,” Rathar said. Like him, Vatran also had a wife somewhere far away from the fighting. Considering what Rathar was doing, he hardly found himself in a position to criticize the general. His attention went back to the map. “They aren’t getting over the Wolter now, by the powers above.”

  Carrying his mug, Vatran came to stand by him and study the situation, too. “That’s the truth, unless they scramble down the bank to the river a
nd hop from one ice floe to the next.”

  “We’ve got plenty on the other side to stop ‘em if they try it.” Rathar took another pull at his ale. “And they’re still in play here in the city, so they won’t.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “The ice doesn’t make it any easier for us to get reinforcements and supplies up here, but I’m cursed if I know what to do about it.”

  “It’ll all freeze solid before too long,” Vatran answered. “It’s already doing that farther south. And that’ll solve the problem-if it’s still a problem then.”

  “Aye. If.” Rathar made a discontented noise, down deep in his throat. “Even if they can’t break into the Mamming Hills, powers below eat the Algarvians for pushing as far south as they have. Do you know what a demon of a time we’ve had moving things from hither to yon?” He traced what he meant with the blunt, dirty, callused forefinger of his right hand.

  “I wouldn’t be worth bloody much if I didn’t know it, would I?” Vatran said. “Haven’t I been screaming at the crystallomancers and at every dunder-headed officer they’ve managed to raise for as long as you have? Haven’t I been screaming even louder than you have? Do you think there’s one officer between here and Cottbus who doesn’t want to wear my guts for garters?”

  “I can think of one,” Rathar said. Vatran gave him an indignant look. But then the marshal jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “That’s me. You’ve been a workhorse, and I thank you for it.”

  “Considering that you could have sacked me after Durrwangen went down the drain, I’m the one who ought to thank you, and I do,” Vatran answered. “But do you know what it is?” Rathar shook his head, waiting to see what the older man would say. Vatran went on, “We’re too cursed stubborn to quit-you, me, the king, the whole kingdom. When the redheads kicked Valmiera and Jelgava in the balls, the blonds just folded up and died. We’ve done a lot of dying-we’ve done way too bloody much dying-but we never did fold up. And we could have.”