Through the Darkness d-3

by Harry Turtledove

  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 footsoldiers 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.”

  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.”

  “What kind of message?” Trasone asked.

  “A call on them to surrender,” the Unkerlanter answered. “If they yield now, they and all of you will be well fed, well housed, generally well treated. So Marshal Rathar swears, by the powers above. But if you go on with this senseless, useless fight, he cannot answer for what will happen to you.”

  “Well, I can’t answer for my generals,” Trasone replied. He stood up in his trench and waved the Unkerlanter forward. “Come ahead, pass through. I’ll take you to them-or I’ll take you to somebody who’ll take you to them, anyhow.” He didn’t suppose there’d be any fighting till the generals made up their minds. If nothing else, that bought a little more time.

  “And what did the Algarvian generals say, Captain Friam?” Marshal Rathar asked when the young officer who’d gone into Sulingen with his surrender demand came into his presence once more.

  “Lord Marshal, they rejected your call out of hand,” Friam answered. “They were full of oily politeness-you know how Algarvians are-but they said no, and they didn’t say anything else.”

  “They’re out of their fornicating minds!” General Vatran burst out. “They’re crazy if they think they can hold us back very long. And they’re worse than crazy if they think they can lick us.”

  “My guess is, they don’t think either of those things,” Rathar said. “But they know how many men we’ll have to use to slam the lid onto their coffin and nail it down tight. If they give up, we can take all those men and throw them at the Algarvians farther north, the ones who aren’t surrounded.”

  Vatran rumbled something deep in his chest. After a moment, he nodded. “Aye, that makes a deal of sense, however much I wish it didn’t. They’re good soldiers, curse them. They’d be a lot less trouble if they weren’t.”

  “That’s all too true.” Rathar gave his attention back to Captain Friam. “Take a chair, young fellow. Don’t stand there stiff as a poker.” He raised his voice. “Ysolt! Bring the captain some tea, and pour some brandy in it.”

  “Aye, lord Marshal.” Ysolt had a real hearth to work with now. After the attack that cut the Algarvians in Sulingen off from their comrades, Rathar had moved out of the cave overlooking the Wolter and into a village halfway between the encircled city and the Unkerlanter attacks farther north. This surely had been the firstman’s house. The cook gave the captain his tea, and an alarmingly predatory smile to go with it.

  After Friam had gulped down the steaming contents of the mug, Rathar asked him, “What did you see? How did things look, there inside Sulingen?”

  “Well, as to the city itself, lord Marshal, there’s no city left, not to speak of,” Friam answered. “It’s all rubble and wreckage, far as the eye can see.”

  Rathar nodded. He’d already known as much. “What about the Algarvians?” he said. “What sort of shape are they in?”

  “They’re worn,” Friam said. “They’re scruffy and they’re hungry and their peckers are drooping on account of they didn’t break through to the north.”

  “They never had a chance to break through to the north,” Rathar declared. That was the public face he put on the fighting that had followed the redheads’ desperate push. It was, in fact, likely true. But, considering what the Algarvians had had with which to attack, they’d come appallingly close to success. Vatran hadn’t been wrong-no indeed. Mezentio’s men made good soldiers.

  “What happens if we hit ‘em a good lick?” Vatran asked Friam. “Will they fold up and make things easy for us?”

  “Sir, I don’t think so,” the young captain replied. “We all know how Algarvians are-when they’re down, they don’t show it much. But I think they’ve still got fight in ‘em. And the field works they’ve built in Sulingen. . they’re formidable people.”

  Even trapped, even driven back into their den after daring to stick their noses outside, Mezentio’s men still exerted a malign influence on the Unkerlanters who fought them. Rathar knew too well they exerted a malign influence on him. Because they were so good, they made their enemies believe they were even better. “Have they got any behemoths left?” he asked.

  “I saw some,” Friam replied. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they led me past ‘em so I would see. And I saw dragons flying in more supplies and flying out wounded men.”

  “We haven’t been able to cut them off,” Rathar said discontentedly. “But I think we will soon-we’ve finally got egg-tossers up to where they can bear on all the parts of Sulingen they hold. They won’t land many dragons once they see the beasts going up in bursts of sorcerous energy as soon as they touch.”

  “How long can they go on fighting without supplies?” Vatran asked.

  Rathar’s smile was even more predatory than Ysolt’s had been. “That’s what we’re going to find out,” he said, and Vatran and Friam smiled in a way that echoed his. He slapped Friam on the back. “You did very well, Captain. If they won’t yield, they won’t. And if they don’t, we’ll just have to make them. You’re dismissed. Go on, get some rest. We’ve got more fighting ahead of us.”

  As
the captain saluted and left, one of Rathar’s crystallomancers said, “Lord Marshal, I’ve got a report from the force moving on Durrwangen.”

  By his tone, Rathar knew the report wouldn’t be good. “Tell me,” he said.

  “They brought up behemoths from down this way and smashed up our attacking column pretty well,” the crystallomancer said. “Looks like they’ll be able to hold west of the city.”

  “Oh, a pestilence!” the marshal exclaimed in disgust. General Vatran cursed with a good deal more imagination than that. Rathar said, “I wanted to trap that second army, too, and now those whoresons’ll be able to get out through Durrwangen.”

  “If you’d pulled off the double pocket, you’d have gone down in history forever,” Vatran said.

  “I’m not going to lose any sleep about history,” Rathar said. “If I’d shut both pockets on the redheads, we could have had the war within shouting distance of being won.” King Swemmel had wanted the war won-had insisted on it-a year before. That hadn’t happened; Unkerlant was lucky the war hadn’t been lost this past summer. That Rathar could speak of such possibilities.. meant nothing at all, because his soldiers hadn’t been able to bag the second army as they had the one down in Sulingen.

  Vatran said, “We’ve got some more work to do, sure enough. We’ll grind the army in Sulingen to dust, we’ll run the redheads out of Durrwangen, and we’ll see how far we can chase them before the spring thaw stops everything.”

  “And we’ll see what sort of surprises Mezentio’s boys pull out from under their hats in the meantime,” Rathar said. “Do you really think we can just chase them and have them go?”

  “Too much to hope for, I suppose,” Vatran said. “Next time the Algarvians do just what we want ‘em toll be the first.”

  As if to underscore that, a few eggs fell in and around the village. Rathar wondered if the redheads had somehow learned he was headquartered here, or if Mezentio’s dragonfliers had simply spied soldiers and behemoths in the streets and decided to leave their calling cards. If an egg burst on this house, the hows and whys wouldn’t matter.

  The marshal refused to dwell on that. He studied the map to see what sort of reinforcements he could send to the Unkerlanter army west of Durrwangen. The only men he saw were the ones involved in the attack on Sulingen. He grimaced. The Algarvians there had done right by not surrendering.

  Vatran was making similar calculations. He said, “Even if we pull soldiers out of the south, we’ve got no guarantee that we’ll take Durrwangen. Mezentio’s men’ll hang on to it tooth and toenail, not only for itself but because it’s the key to their road north. Is it worth risking Sulingen for a chance at seizing Durrwangen?”

  “I don’t think we’d risk Sulingen.” But Rathar wasn’t happy as he turned back to the map. “Still and all, if the redheads in there found we had nothing but a little screen up against them, they’d be liable to break out and make trouble all over the landscape.”

  “And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Vatran said. “You just can’t trust Algarvians to sit there and let themselves get massacred.”

  “Heh,” Rathar said, though it wasn’t really funny. Vatran had a point. If the initiative was there to seize, Mezentio’s men would without fail seize it. He wished the Unkerlanters showed as much drive, as much willingness to do things on their own if they saw the chance. He knew of too many times when they’d let the Algarvians outmaneuver them simply because they didn’t think to do any maneuvering of their own.

  Of course, the Algarvians weren’t so burdened with inspectors and impressers. They didn’t need so many people like that. More of them lived in towns, and more of them had their letters. Rathar didn’t know how King Swemmel could run his vast, sprawling, ignorant kingdom without hordes of functionaries to make sure his orders were carried out. Having those functionaries over them, though, meant the peasants didn’t-wouldn’t-do much thinking on their own. They waited for orders instead.

  “If we take the sure thing,” Rathar said slowly, “we clear the Algarvians from a big chunk of the south.” Vatran nodded. Rathar went on, “As long as we make sure they never get to the Mamming Hills, we go a long way toward winning the war.” Vatran nodded again. Rathar continued, “We can’t take any chances about that. We can’t let them get into a position of driving deep into the south again. We’ll take the sure thing, and then we’ll bang heads with them farther north. I hate that, but I don’t see that we can do anything else.”

  “For whatever it’s worth to you, lord Marshal, I think you’re right,” Vatran said. “And after Sulingen goes down, then we can throw everything we’ve got at Durrwangen. And when we do that, I don’t think the Algarvians can hold it.”

  “No, not in the wintertime,” Rathar agreed. “They’re better at that game than they were last year, but they’re not good enough.”

  “I wonder when we’ll be able to go forward in summer.” Vatran sounded wistful. “Hardly seems fair, the things the Algarvians do to us when the weather’s good.”

  “It isn’t fair,” Rathar said. “But we’re getting better, too. They still have more skill than we do, but we’re gaining. And we’re throwing more men into the fight than they can. We’re throwing more of everything into the fight than they can. Sooner or later, that’s bound to pay off.”

  “Sooner or later,” Vatran echoed gloomily. But then he brightened. “I think you’re right. Their big hope was to knock us out of the fight that first summer. When they didn’t do it, they found themselves with a problem on their hands.” He pointed at Rathar. “How does it feel to be a problem, lord Marshal?”

  “A lot better than not being a problem would.” Rathar eyed the map once more. Now that he’d made up his mind, he wasted no time on half measures. In that, he was much like his sovereign. “If we’re going to take out Sulingen, let’s throw everything we have at it. The sooner the redheads yield-”

  “Or the sooner they die,” Vatran broke in.

  “Aye. Or the sooner they die. The sooner they stop fighting down there, anyhow, the sooner we can shift men to the north again.” Rathar drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “And they know it, too, curse them. Otherwise, they would have surrendered. They won’t get terms that good again.”

  “They don’t deserve ‘em,” Vatran said. “And I’m amazed the king didn’t pitch a fit when you offered them.”

  “Truth to tell, I didn’t ask him,” Rathar said, which made Vatran’s bushy white eyebrows fly upward. “But if they had surrendered, he’d have gone along. That would have gone a long way toward winning the war, too, and winning the war is what he wants.”

  “One of the things he wants,” Vatran said. “The other thing is, he wants to grind Mezentio’s pointy nose in the dirt. You’d better not try to take that away from him.”

  “I wasn’t,” Rathar said, but he did wonder if Swemmel would see things the same way.

  Nineteen

  These days, Bembo had a hard time swaggering through the streets of Gromheort. Even Oraste, as stolid and unflinching as any Algarvian ever born-he might almost have been an Unkerlanter, as far as temper went-had trouble swaggering through the streets of the occupied Forthwegian town. Too many walls had a single word scrawled on them: SULINGEN.

  “It’s still ours,” Bembo said stubbornly. “As long as it’s still ours, these stinking Forthwegians have no business mocking us, and they ought to know it.” He kicked at the slates of the sidewalk. He didn’t even convince himself, let alone Oraste, let alone the Forthwegians.

  Oraste said, “We’re going to lose it. We couldn’t push soldiers down there, and the ones who were down there couldn’t get out.” He spat. “It’s not an easy war.”

  That was a sizable understatement. Bembo said, “I wonder what they’ll do when they run out of Kaunians here in Forthweg.”

  “Good question.” Oraste shrugged. “Probably start hauling ‘em out of Jelgava and Valmiera. Plenty of the blond buggers in those places.” His chuckle was nasty. “
And they can’t get away with magicking their looks or dyeing their hair black there, either. Nothing but blonds in the far east.”

  “Well, that’s so.” Bembo tried swinging his truncheon, but even that couldn’t give him the panache he wanted. “But who’ll get ‘em on the caravan cars and send ‘em west? Do we have enough men in the east to do the job?”

  Oraste spat again. “We can have the constables-the blond constables, I mean-do it for us. Why not? They’d be glad to, I bet-and glad nobody was shipping them off instead of the whoresons they’re catching.”

  “You think even a Kaunian would stoop so low?” Bembo asked.

  “Kaunians are Kaunians.” Oraste sounded very sure-but then, Oraste always sounded very sure about everything. “Their hair may be blond, but their hearts are black.”

  “For that matter, their hair may be black, too, at least in Gromheort,” Bembo said. “I’d like to get my hands on the bastard who thought of that. Wouldn’t he squeal when I was done with him! What we need are mages to nail the ones using those spells.”

  “Army needs ‘em more than we do,” Oraste said. “Army gets what it needs. We get what’s left-if there’s anything left. Usually we just get hind tit.”

  Somebody behind the two Algarvian constables shouted, “Sulingen!” Bembo and Oraste both whirled. Bembo raised his truncheon as if to break a head. Oraste grabbed for his stick. Both gestures were useless. The Forthwegians they saw were all just walking along the street. No way to tell which one of them had shouted. And they were all smiling, enjoying the occupiers’ discomfiture.