Through the Darkness d-3

by Harry Turtledove

  He hadn’t come to talk about the military situation or the politics that sprang from it. He’d come to talk about this Lagoan or Kuusaman magecraft, whatever it was. Isn‘t that interesting? Hajjaj thought. If Balastro had some ulterior motive, he was putting a lot of art and effort into keeping it hidden.

  Before Hajjaj could do more than scrawl a note to himself to check with some leading Zuwayzi mages, Qutuz came into his office. His secretary, for once, looked quite humanly astonished. “Well?” Hajjaj said. “Whatever it is, you’d better tell me.”

  “I just had delivered to me a letter from Hadadezer of Ortah, requesting a few minutes of your time this afternoon,” Qutuz replied.

  “That is something out of the ordinary,” Hajjaj agreed. “Of course I will see the Ortaho minister. How else am I to satisfy my own curiosity? Hadadezer has been minister to Zuwayza for twenty years, and I am not sure I have seen him twenty times in all those years. And I can count the times he has sought an audience on the fingers of one hand.”

  “Some kingdoms are lucky in their geography,” Qutuz observed, to which Hajjaj could only nod. Ortah lay between Algarve and Unkerlant, but its mountains and the swamps surrounding them had always made it impossible to invade and overrun. Thanks to them, the Ortahoin had dwelt there undisturbed since before the days of the Kaunian Empire.

  Hadadezer came at precisely the appointed hour. He had a white beard that rode high on his cheeks and white hair that came down low on his forehead. Some folk wondered if the Ortahoin were kin to the Ice People. Ethnography, though, would have to wait. After a polite exchange of greetings, Hajjaj spoke in Algarvian: “How may I serve you, your Excellency?”

  “I would ask a question,” Hadadezer answered in the same language. Hajjaj nodded. The Ortaho said, “My sovereign, King Ahinadab, sees war all around him. With Algarve in retreat, he sees war coming toward him. It is a very great war. We have not got much skill in diplomacy. For long and long, we have had no need of such. Now.. How do we keep the flames of war from setting our homeland ablaze? You are a most able diplomatist. Perhaps you will be able to tell me.”

  “Oh, my dear fellow!” Hajjaj exclaimed. “Oh, my dear, dear fellow! If I knew the answer, I would tell my own king first, and after that would gladly share what I knew with you-and with the whole world. You’ve stayed neutral so far. Perhaps you can keep it up. And if not… if not, your Excellency, be as strong as you can, for strength will let you save more than pity ever would.”

  Hadadezer bowed. “That is good advice. I shall convey it to King Ahinadab.” He paused and sighed. “Do not be offended, but I wish you had something better still to offer.”

  “Offended? Not I, sir,” Hajjaj replied. “I wish I did, too.”

  Leudast had seen the Algarvians running strong, like the floods that sent rivers out of their banks. They’d rolled west across Unkerlant two summers in a row. He’d seen them in stubborn defense, damming up the counterflow of Swemmel’s men the winter before.

  Now, here in Sulingen, he saw them in despair. They had to know they were doomed. A man hardly needed the acumen of Marshal Rathar to see they were trapped. Their comrades farther north had tried to reach them, tried and failed. The redheads in Sulingen had tried to break out, tried and failed. Algarvians dragons had tried to bring them the supplies they needed, tried and failed. No real hope remained for them.

  Yet they fought on. And they still fought as only Algarvians seemed to know how to fight. Every one of Mezentio’s troopers had his own all but invisible hiding place. Every one of them had comrades sited so they could get in a good blaze at anybody who attacked him. When they died, they died very hard.

  But die they did. Leudast stirred a corpse with his foot. The Algarvian, his coppery whiskers all awry, had the look of a scrawny red fox that had been torn by a wolf. “Tough whoresons,” Leudast remarked. The admiration in his voice was grudging, but it was real.

  “Aye, they are.” Young Lieutenant Recared spoke with more wonder than admiration. “When we trained, they said the Algarvians weren’t so much.” He shook his head. “I can’t imagine why they told us that.”

  Probably didn’t want to make you afraid too soon, Leudast thought. But he didn’t say it out loud. Recared had learned fast, and made a pretty good officer now. If he hadn’t learned fast, he would have been dead by now. Even if he had learned fast, he might well have died. The war didn’t always respect such learning. Leudast had seen that too many times.

  He pointed ahead, toward the ruins of what had been a ley-line caravan depot. “A good many of the buggers holed up there,” he remarked. “If we can drive ‘em out of that strongpoint, they’ll have to pull back to right and left, too.”

  Recared nodded. “Making their perimeter shrink is a good thing. But by the powers above, Sergeant-the price we’ll pay!” He wasn’t hardened yet; his face still showed a good deal of what he thought. “The poor men!”

  Leudast nodded. The regiment had taken a beating cutting off the Algarvians in Sulingen, and another one fighting its way into the city. “We’ve got to make them pay, sir. That’s the idea, you know.”

  “Oh, aye.” Recared nodded, but reluctantly. He, too, pointed ahead: carefully, so as not to expose himself to snipers. “Not much cover up ahead there, though. The boys would take a horrible pounding before they could close with the redheads.”

  “Can we get ‘em to toss eggs at the ruins while we move forward?” Leudast asked. “That would make the Algarvians keep their heads down, anyhow.”

  “Let me go back and ask our brigadier,” Recared said. “You’re right, Sergeant-it would be splendid if we could.” He hurried off through the maze of holes and trenches that led to brigade headquarters.

  When he returned, he was grinning from ear to ear. “You got the egg-tossers, sir?” Leudast asked eagerly.

  “No, but I got something about as good,” Recared answered. “A penal battalion just came to the front, and they’ll throw it in right here.”

  “Ah,” Leudast said. “Good enough. Better than good enough, in fact. Those poor buggers aren’t going to be around at the end of the war any which way. Might as well get something out of them while they’re being used up. Then we go in after they’ve taken the edge off the Algarvians?”

  “That’s how I see it,” Recared said. “They’ll start the job, and we’ll finish it.”

  The men from the penal battalion started coming up to the front line a little before sunset. Almost all of them were leaner than the poor starveling Algarvian corpse Leudast had kicked. Some wore rags. Some wore the fine cloaks and greatcoats that went only to high-ranking officers, though none showed rank badges. Some wore what had been fine cloaks and greatcoats now reduced to rags. All of them stared ahead in glum, grim silence. An invisible wall seemed to separate them from the ordinary Algarvian soldiers.

  And that invisible wall wasn’t the only thing separating them from their countrymen. Coming up to the front with them were a couple of sections of well-fed, well-clothed guards. If the men of the penal battalion tried to go back instead of forward when ordered into action, the guards were there to take care of what the enemy would not.

  In a low voice, Recared asked, “Does anybody ever come out of a penal battalion?”

  “I think so,” Leudast said. “Fight well enough long enough and you might even get your old rank back. That’s what they say, anyhow. Of course, if you’re the kind of officer who runs away or does something else to get yourself stuck in a penal battalion, how likely are you to fight that well?” He was only a sergeant. If he ran away, they wouldn’t bother putting him in one of those battalions. They’d just blaze him and get on with the war.

  It started to snow again during the night. Dawn was a dark gray, uncertain thing. The men of the penal battalion passed flasks back and forth. Leudast had drunk some courage before going into action a good many times himself. Over in the ruins of the caravan depot, what did the Algarvians have to drink?

  Whistles shrilled.
The broken officers who made up the penal battalion sprang to their feet and grabbed their sticks. Without a word, without a sound but those of their felt boots dully thudding on snow, they swarmed toward the Algarvian strongpoint. No cries of “Urra!”-no cries of “Swemmel!” either. It was the eeriest attack Leudast had ever seen.

  Perhaps because it went in so silently, it surprised the redheads more than an ordinary assault might have. The men of the penal battalion got a long way toward the caravan depot before they started to fall. Peering out ever so cautiously from behind what had been an ornamental limestone carving, Leudast watched the Unkerlanters who didn’t fall get in among the Algarvians in the wreckage of the depot. Glancing over toward Recared, he asked, “Now, sir?”

  “Not quite yet,” Recared answered. “We’ll let them develop the enemy a little more first, I think.”

  Tactically, that made good sense. It was hard on the penal battalion, though. Leudast considered, then shrugged. The battalion was there to be expended. It existed for no other real reason; officers restored to their posts were lucky accidents, nothing more.

  They waited. The Algarvians in the ruins of the caravan depot put up a ferocious fight. Leudast had expected nothing less. The Algarvians always fought hard. Here they had even less choice than usual. Those ruins were a linchpin for their line in the northern part of Sulingen. If Mezentio’s men lost them, they would have to pull back on a broad front, and they couldn’t afford that.

  Leudast pointed. “Do you see, sir? There, by the wreckage of the tower. That’s one of their strongpoints. The attack’s bogged down in front of it.”

  “You’re right, Sergeant,” Recared agreed. “If it weren’t for the penal battalion, we would have found that out the hard way.”

  The penal battalion was finding out the hard way. But Leudast understood what Recared meant. Someone always got it in the neck. If you were an Unkerlanter, you knew that. Better somebody else than you. One of these days, your turn would come, no matter what you did.

  “Now that we know where they’re strongest, we ought to take another blaze at getting some egg-tossers to give ‘em what for,” Leudast said.

  “That’s what the penal battalion’s supposed to do,” Recared said, but then he relented. “You’ve got a point. I’ll send a runner back. We’ll see what we can manage.”

  Before long, eggs did start falling on that Algarvian concentration. Unkerlant had plenty of egg-tossers around Sulingen. King Swemmel’s men still didn’t maneuver them as smartly as the redheads, but this wasn’t a war of quick movement, not here it wasn’t. All they had to do was pound at the Algarvians, and pound they did.

  After a while, Recared said, “I think we’re about ready now.” There was a little doubt in his mind, as if he was asking Leudast’s opinion. Leudast nodded. He thought they were ready, too. Recared get to his feet and blew a long, ear-splitting blast on his whistle. “Forward, lads!” he shouted, though he was more nearly a lad than most of his soldiers. “Forward for King Swemmel! Urra!” He was brave. Leudast had already seen that. He charged toward the caravan depot at the head of his regiment.

  “Urra!” Leudast yelled as he too broke from cover. “King Swemmel! Urra!”

  A few eggs burst among the Unkerlanters as they surged forward, but only a few. The Algarvians didn’t have many tossers left, and didn’t have many eggs left to fling from them, either. They’d also buried eggs in front of their position. The penal battalion had discovered that, the hard way. So did a couple of luckless men from Recared’s regiment. Dowsers could have found paths past the buried eggs, but dowsers, like trained men of all sort, were in short supply in Unkerlant. King Swemmel had plenty of footsoldiers, though.

  Leudast dashed past dead men from the penal battalion, then flung himself down behind a pile of bricks. Up ahead, the Algarvians were still shouting Mezentio’s name: they had spunk and to spare. But there weren’t enough of them, and they didn’t have enough of anything but spunk. One by one, their battle cries fell silent. A beam struck snow off to Leudast’s left, raising a puff of steam. He scrambled to the right and then, bent low at the waist, forward again.

  A man from the penal battalion and an Algarvian thrashed on the ground in a death struggle: two fierce, skinny, miserable creatures, both intent on living, neither with much of anything left to live for. Which one had suffered worse in this war? Leudast wouldn’t have wanted to guess. He knew which one was on his side, though. As soon as he got the chance, he blazed the Algarvian.

  “Thank you, friend,” the Unkerlanter from the penal battalion said in educated accents that belied his pinched, half-starved face and his fiercely glittering eyes. He cut the dead redhead’s belt pouch open with his knife, exclaimed in triumph, and stuffed the little chunk of sausage he found there into his mouth. Only after he’d gulped it down did he seem to remember Leudast again. “You have no idea how good that is.”

  Leudast started to say he’d been hungry, but something in the other man’s expression warned he’d get only scornful laughter if he did. He contented himself with, “Let’s go get some more of those buggers, then.” A moment later, he did something smarter: he gave the soldier from the penal battalion some of the black bread he had in his own belt pouch. He felt ashamed that he hadn’t thought of it right away.

  The other Unkerlanter made it disappear faster than a man should have been able to. Then he warned, “Don’t let an inspector see you do anything like that. You could end up in my outfit, easy as you please.”

  Shouts-Unkerlanter shouts-rose in triumph. “We’ve broken them!” Leudast exclaimed.

  “Aye, so we have.” The man from the penal battalion sounded pleased, but far from overjoyed. “It only means they’ll kill me somewhere else.” With a nod to Leudast, he ran forward, looking for the place.

  Cornelu lay asleep in the Sibian exiles’ barracks next to the harbor in Setubal. The woman he was dreaming about was the most exciting he’d ever imagined; he was sure of it. One moment, she had Costache’s face; the next, Janira’s. He was about to do what he most wanted to do when Algarvian eggs began bursting not far away.

  He tried to incorporate those roars into his dream, but had no luck. His eyes came open. He sat up on his cot. The rest of the men from the Sibian navy who’d escaped when the Algarvians overran their island kingdom were likewise sitting up and cursing. “What good does this do them?” somebody said. “They can’t send over enough dragons to make it likely they’ll do Lagoas any real harm.”

  “It ruins our sleep,” Cornelu said. As far as he was concerned, that was crime enough at the moment.

  “It gives them something to print in their news sheets, too,” somebody else added. “Something besides Sulingen, I mean.”

  “My guess is, they stopped printing much about Sulingen a while ago,” Cornelu said. “They don’t like to let bad news out.”

  “Poor dears,” the other Sibian said. “Powers above grant them blank news sheets for years to come, then.”

  Several Sibians laughed, Cornelu among them. Before Cornelu could say anything more-he would cheerfully go on casting scorn on the Algarvians as long as his body held breath-an egg burst all too close to the barracks. Windows blew in, shards of glass hissing through the air like hundreds of flying knives of all sizes. One sliced the left sleeve of Cornelu’s tunic-and, he realized a moment later, sliced his arm as well. He cursed.

  His comrades were cursing, too. Some, those hurt worse than he, were shrieking. He opened and closed his left fist. When he discovered he could do that, he tore a strip from his blanket and bound up his bleeding arm. Then he set about helping his more badly wounded countrymen.

  Another egg burst almost on top of the spot where the first one had landed. Hardly any more glass flew; the first egg had taken out most of what was in the windows. But the barracks building itself groaned and shuddered like an old tree in a strong wind. “We’d better get out!” Cornelu shouted. “I don’t know if it’s going to stay up.”

  No o
ne argued with him. More than one man shouted, “Aye!” in various tones of agreement and alarm. Cornelu and another officer grabbed a bleeding comrade and half dragged, half carried him out of the barracks. The other officer set to work bandaging the bleeding man. Cornelu ran back into the building to get someone else out.

  He had some light by which to see; the Algarvian eggs raining down on Setubal had started fires here and there. He grabbed a man who lay groaning by his cot and dragged him toward the door.

  Beams from heavy sticks shot up into the night, seeking the enemy dragons overhead. Cornelu cursed again, this time at how little good they were doing. Mezentio hadn’t sent so many dragons south across the Strait of Valmiera for a long time. Eggs kept falling, some farther away, some closer. Cornelu looked up into the night sky and shook his fist at the foes he could not see. As if in answer, an egg landed on the barracks he’d left only a minute or so before.

  The burst of sorcerous energy knocked him off his feet-knocked him head over heels, in fact. A brick shattered on the cobbles inches from his face, spraying chips into his eyes. He rubbed at them till his vision cleared. But he hardly needed to see to know he would never sleep in that barracks hall again. He could feel the heat of flames on his back. The building was burning, burning. As the fire grew, he dragged the wounded man farther from the wreckage.

  Lagoans ran this way and that, intent on their own concerns: the barracks was far from the only building afire along the waterfront. Some of Cornelu’s comrades who’d learned more Lagoan in exile than he called out to the locals. After a while, the Lagoans deigned to notice them. Parties of stretcher bearers came and took the men with the worst hurts off to the surgeons and mages who might help them. That done, though, the Lagoans left the exiles alone once more.

  “If the barracks weren’t burning down, we’d be freezing, and would they care?” a Sibian demanded indignantly. “Not even a little, they wouldn’t. They toss us at the Algarvians like so many eggs, and it doesn’t matter to them if we burst.”