Through the Darkness d-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Corporal Kun said, “And where would we be if this weren’t another winter? Up among the stars with the other spirits of the dead, that’s where.”

  Taking a sergeant’s privilege, Istvan said, “Oh, shut up.” Kun sent him a wounded look; he didn’t usually take such privileges with a man beside whom he’d fought for years. Istvan refused to let that stare bother him. He knew what he’d meant. Since Kun didn’t, he set it out in large characters: “Another winter here. Another winter away from my home valley, away from my clansfolk. I haven’t even had leave in most of a year.”

  He held his hands out to the little fire around which he and his men sat, trying to get some warmth back into them. Then he looked down at his palms. The scar from the wound Captain Tivadar had given him remained fresh, easy to see, despite calluses and dirt. He didn’t say anything about it; not all the soldiers crouched around the fire had eaten goat’s flesh with him.

  If he came home to the little village of Kunhegyes on leave, his family wouldn’t know what the scar meant. They would welcome him into their bosom with glad cries and open arms, as they had the last time he’d got away from the war for a little while. They would have no idea he was, at best, only marginally purified from the uncleanness into which he’d fallen. If he didn’t tell them, they would never learn. He could live out his life in the valley with no one the wiser.

  He looked at the scar again. Whether his kinsfolk knew or not, he would know. He could imagine the knowledge eating away at him, day by day, month by month, year by year. He could imagine himself screaming out the truth one day, just because he couldn’t stand to hold it in any more. What he knew counted for more than what anyone else knew.

  Szonyi spat into the flames. His saliva sizzled for a moment and then was gone. He said, “We’re a warrior race. We’re here because we’re a warrior race. Sooner or later, we’ll win because we’re a warrior race. We’re too stubborn to quit, by the stars.”

  “Aye,” Istvan said. In a way, that was the other side of the coin to his own thoughts. Gyongyosians did what they did because of what was inside of them, not because of any outside force.

  And then Kun spat, too, in utter contempt. “Oh, aye, that’s why we’ll be marching into Cottbus week after next,” he said.

  “There aren’t enough of us here,” Istvan protested.

  “More of us than there are Unkerlanters,” the onetime mage’s apprentice said.

  “Well, but…” Istvan’s wave encompassed the forest, or as much of it as remained visible through the drifting, swirling snow. “I’d call this place the arsehole of the world, but you need to know where your arsehole is once or twice a day. Nobody’s needed to know where these woods are since the stars made them.”

  “We wouldn’t have come as far as we have if we weren’t a warrior race,” Szonyi said stubbornly. “Some of us still believe in things, we do. Next thing you know, some of us will say we’ve stopped believing in the stars.” He stared a challenge back at Kun.

  But Istvan took him up on it: “No, nobody is going to say anything like that. I didn’t mean anything like that, and Kun didn’t mean anything like that, either.” If Kun did mean something like that, Istvan didn’t want to hear about it, and he didn’t want anybody else to hear about it. He went on, “Even a warrior can have enough of war for a while.”

  “I suppose so.” Szonyi’s voice was grudging.

  “If you don’t see that that’s true, you’re a bigger twit than anyone gives you credit for,” Kun said. “We’d be fighting among ourselves all the time if it weren’t.”

  “Enough,” Istvan said, and used his own rank to make sure it was enough. Still, as far as he was concerned, Kun proved he came from a warrior race by the way he stood up to Szonyi. The hulking common soldier made two of the corporal, but Kun didn’t back away from him.

  Off in the distance, a couple of eggs burst. Everyone’s head came up. “Are those ours or theirs?” somebody asked.

  “We’ll find out,” Kun said, “probably the hard way.”

  Istvan wanted to contradict him, but found he couldn’t. He did say, “Those are more likely to be theirs than ours. The Unkerlanters have an easier time bringing egg-tossers into the forest across the flatlands than we do hauling them over the cursed mountains.” That made it harder for the Gyongyosians to show their full mettle as a warrior race, too, though Istvan didn’t suppose Kun would ever admit as much.

  More eggs burst, these closer to the fire. Istvan grimaced, then shoveled snow over the flames. Nobody said anything. The soldiers all looked to their sticks. Some of them took positions behind trees, from which they’d be able to blaze eastward if the Unkerlanters really did have an attack laid on.

  Along with the thunder of bursting eggs-rather muffled by the snow- came shouts. Istvan couldn’t tell what language they were in, but they kept getting closer, too. He found a place behind a spruce of his own. Trouble was heading this way. He didn’t know who’d started it, but he doubted whether that mattered.

  Out of the snow came the first Unkerlanters, white smocks over their tunics and snowshoes on their feet. Istvan didn’t think they knew he and his men were in place waiting for them. From what he’d heard, the Unkerlanters had the edge against the Algarvians in the far east during the winter. That wasn’t so here. He and his fellow Gyongyosians knew as much about snow and ice and fighting in them as any Unkerlanter ever born.

  He waited till the first Unkerlanter was almost on top of him before he started blazing. That way, he made sure he couldn’t miss, and that the blowing snow wouldn’t attenuate his beam. The Unkerlanter gave a startled grunt and toppled.

  The rest of the men who fought for Swemmel stopped in alarm. One of them pointed west past Istvan, deeper into the woods. They thought the beam had come from that direction. When no more of them fell for a little while, they started moving forward again.

  This time, Istvan wasn’t the only one who blazed at them. Down they went, one after another, like oxen slaughtered for a noble’s wedding feast. A few of them let out howls of pain as they fell. Most simply died, death taking them by surprise. Istvan had the feeling he’d just disrupted the advance of at least a company.

  After a bit, the Unkerlanters decided they wanted no part of the position he and his squad were defending. They fell back. He decided not to stay around and try to hold in place. “Back,” he ordered urgently. “Next things they’ll do is, they’ll hit this place with everything they’ve got.”

  As he knew winter, so he knew the Unkerlanters. They didn’t withdraw from a position because they’d lost hope of taking it. They withdrew because they wanted to hit it a different, harder, blow. Runners-well, waddlers in this country-were surely going back to their officers with the bad news. Some of those officers would have crystallomancers. Before too long, fury would fall on the fighters who’d presumed to slow Swemmel’s soldiers.

  And so, for now, retreat. It galled Istvan; his instinct, like the Unkerlanters’, was to go forward first. But he didn’t know how many of the foe pressed against him. And so he fell back a quarter of a mile. Having advanced through that stretch of the wood, he knew what was there. Before long, he and his men took a position as strong as the one they’d just left.

  They’d hardly settled in when eggs started falling on the little clearing they’d abandoned. “The sergeant knows what’s what,” Szonyi said cheerfully. If nothing had happened to that clearing, Istvan would have lost respect. As things were, he gained it. Being no less selfish than any other man, he liked this better.

  After a while, silence returned up ahead. “What now, Sergeant?” Kun asked. The question was half serious, half challenging-a demand for Istvan to prove he was as smart as Szonyi said he was.

  “Now we go forward again,” Istvan answered at once: both the warrior’s response and, he was sure, the right tactical choice. “They’ll advance again, and they’ll be sure we’re all dead. Here’s our chance to show ‘em they’re wrong. But we’ve got to move fast.”<
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  Moving fast was easy enough till they got near the clearing they’d left. The eggs had knocked down a good many trees, and the Gyongyosians had to scramble over or around them to get close to their previous position.

  Istvan didn’t mind, or not very much. “Look at all the fine hiding places they’ve handed us, boys,” he said. “Snuggle down, and then we’ll blaze them right out of their boots.”

  “That wouldn’t be bad,” Szonyi said. “Those big felt ones they wear hold the cold out better than anything we issue.” Having seen a fair number of Gyongyosians wearing felt boots whose original owners didn’t need them anymore, Istvan could hardly disagree.

  “Here they come!” Kun snarled. Maybe he’d used his little magic for detecting people moving toward him. Maybe he just had good ears and- thanks to his spectacles-sharp eyes.

  The Unkerlanters came on openly, confidently-they seemed sure their eggs had cleaned up whatever enemies might be waiting for them. Fools, Istvan thought. They had to be new men, men without much experience in battle. Veterans would have taken less for granted. Some fools lived and learned and became veterans. Istvan was determined that these men wouldn’t.

  Again, he chose to wait till the Unkerlanters were almost on top of him before he started blazing. Again, his men imitated him. Again, they worked a frightful slaughter on Swemmel’s troopers. This time, it was too much for the Unkerlanters to bear. They fled, leaving dead and wounded behind them.

  “Boots,” Szonyi said happily, and proceeded to strip them off the corpse closest to him and put them on his own feet.

  “Those are too big,” Istvan said.

  “They’re supposed to be big,” Szonyi insisted. “That way, you can stuff them full of cloth or whatever you’ve got so they keep your feet warm even better.” But whenever he moved, the boots tried to slide off. At last, cursing, he kicked them away and allowed, “Well, maybe they are a little too big.”

  “Let me try them,” Istvan said. “I think my feet are bigger than yours.” He sat down on a tree trunk, pulled off his own, Gyongyosian-issue, boots and put on the ones the dead Unkerlanter had worn. They fit him better than they had Szonyi, and they were warmer and more flexible than the ones he’d had on. He walked a few steps. “I’ll keep ‘em.”

  “Let me see if I can find a pair to fit me,” Kun said. He had plenty of Unkerlanter corpses from which to choose; Swemmel’s men had paid a heavy price for gaining not an inch of ground. Before long, all the Gyongyosians who wanted felt boots had pairs to suit them. Istvan nodded in no small satisfaction. If you had to fight a war, this was the way to go about it.

  Sometimes, things ended as they began. These days, pinned back against the Wolter in the many times ruined wreckage of Sulingen, Trasone had plenty of chances to think about that. He turned to Sergeant Panfilo, who crouched beside him in the remains of what had been an ironworker’s hut. “The last time we were here,” he said, “we were facing south, not north.”

  “Aye, so we were,” Panfilo answered. “And we were wondering how we were going to pry the stinking Unkerlanters out of those bloody big ironworks that’re behind us now. Before long, they’ll be wondering how to pry us out.”

  “Only thing I’m wondering right now is where in blazes I’m going to get some food,” Trasone said, and Panfilo nodded. Neither of them had eaten for a while. Only a handful of Algarvian dragons made it down to Sulingen these days, and the Algarvian pocket in the city had grown so small, a lot of the supplies they dropped ended up in the enemy’s hands.

  In the trenches less than a furlong away, the Unkerlanters had their peckers up. They knew they were going to overwhelm the Algarvians here as surely as Trasone did. Every so often, they would burst into hoarse song. The only thing they didn’t do was stick their heads up out of the trenches to jeer at the Algarvians who had come so far … but not quite far enough. The ones who tried that wouldn’t live long enough to celebrate their victory.

  Just as Trasone had learned a few words and phrases of Unkerlanter, so some of Swemmel’s mean had picked up a little Algarvian. “Surrender!” one of them shouted now. In a moment, the cry resounded up and down the line: “Surrender! Surrender! Surrender!”

  Here and there, Algarvian soldiers yelled back. Their answers were uniformly negative and mostly obscene. “What do you suppose they’d do to us if we were stupid enough to give ourselves up?” Panfilo asked.

  “I don’t much want to find out,” Trasone answered. “As long as I have a choice, I’d sooner die quick and clean-if I can, anyhow.”

  “I’m with you,” Panfilo said. “They’d have fun, their mages would have fun….” His shiver had nothing to do with the bitterly cold winter day. “No, I’d sooner make ‘em earn it.”

  The Unkerlanters were ready to do just that. As if the Algarvians’ refusal to give up angered them, they plastered the front-line trenches with eggs. They had plenty of tossers and plenty of eggs to toss. The Algarvians couldn’t reply in kind; they had to hoard the few eggs left to them for the moments when those eggs would be most desperately needed.

  Huddled in the wreckage of the hut, sorcerous energy searing the air not far from him, deadly fragments of metal and wood and stone hissing every which way, Trasone reckoned the present moment quite desperate enough for all ordinary purposes. And then, just when he thought things could grow no worse, somebody behind him called, “We’ve got soup in the pot!”

  He groaned. No matter how hungry he was, nothing could make him enthusiastic about what passed for food among the Algarvians in Sulingen these days. Panfilo made a horrible face, too, and asked, “What’s in it?”

  “You don’t want to know that,” Trasone exclaimed.

  “About what you’d figure,” the soldier at the soup pot answered. “Old bones, a few turnip peelings.” That meant it was a good batch. A lot of the time lately, it hadn’t had any peelings to thicken it. Sometimes it hadn’t had any bones, either, and was only hot water flavored by whatever had stuck to the sides of the pot from the previous batch.

  “What kind of bones?” Panfilo persisted. Trasone shook his head. The less he knew about what he poured down his throat, the better. But Panfilo, morbidly or not, was curious: “And how old are they?”

  “Whatever we could dig up,” came the reply. “And they’ve been frozen since whatever beasts they belonged to got killed, so what difference does it make? Come back and have some if you want. Otherwise, you can go on starving.”

  “We go on starving even if we’ve got the soup, on account of there’s nothing real in it,” Trasone said. Panfilo nodded; he knew that, too. The trooper went on, “Is it any wonder we sneak out and murder the Unkerlanter pickets for the sake of whatever black bread and sausage they’ve got on ‘em?” He sighed. He was on the front line, which meant he was supposed to get a couple of ounces of bread every day. Sometimes he did. More often, he didn’t.

  Panfilo said, “I’m going back there. The way my belly’s gnawing my spine, anything is better than nothing.”

  “Not with what’ll be in that pot,” Trasone predicted, but his own belly was growling like one of the wolves that prowled the Unkerlanter plains and forests. Cursing the Unkerlanters and his own officers impartially, he crawled after the sergeant. Eggs continued to burst all around. He was, by now, without fear, or nearly so. If one burst on top of him and finished him off, it wouldn’t be finishing much.

  Panfilo was already pouring down a mess tin full of soup when Trasone got back to the hole in the ground that housed the cookfire. The sergeant finished, wiped his mouth on a filthy tunic sleeve, and said, “You’re right-it’s pretty bad. I’m still glad I got it.”

  Trasone sniffed the pot. The cook hadn’t told all of the truth. Some of the bones in there had had time to start going bad before they froze. Nothing else could have accounted for the faint reek of corruption that reached his nose. But he held out his mess tin, too. If the soup poisoned him, it wouldn’t be poisoning much, either.

  As Panfilo had, he
gulped the stuff down. It tasted nasty, but maybe not quite so nasty as he’d expected. And there were turnip peelings in there; he actually had to chew a couple of times. The cook hadn’t been lying after all. The peelings might create some small part of the illusion of fullness. And the soup was hot. That, at least, was real.

  When he’d emptied the mess tin, he said, “Powers above, that hit the spot. It sure did. Now where’s the sparkling wine and the beautiful broads to go with it?”

  “No such thing as beautiful Unkerlanter broads,” the cook said, and Trasone and Panfilo both nodded. That was an article of faith among Algarvian soldiers in the west. It hadn’t kept Trasone from visiting the brothels his superiors set up in Unkerlant, though he’d usually picked Kaunian women when there were any. No brothels in Sulingen. No women at all in Sulingen, unless a few Unkerlanters still survived in hidden cellars.

  “Back to our position,” Panfilo said. Trasone nodded. It was no more dangerous there than here.

  They hadn’t been back in the ruined hut for long before the barrage of eggs, already heavy, got worse. Through-perhaps around-the bursts, Trasone heard Unkerlanter officers’ whistles shrilling. “They’re coming!” he shouted, and his was far from the only cry going up along the Algarvian line.

  And the Unkerlanters were coming, scampering through the wreckage of what had been a quiet riverside city, diving into holes and behind clumps of rubble and then coming out blazing. Some ran bent at the waist, others straight up and down. Trasone blazed at the men who tried to make themselves smaller targets. They were the ones likely to be veterans, the ones likely to be more dangerous if they got in among the Algarvians.

  Swemmel’s soldiers tried one of these assaults every few days. Sometimes Mezentio’s men threw them back with heavy losses. Sometimes they got in among the Algarvians and bit off another chunk of Sulingen. At first, Trasone thought this would be another time when the Unkerlanters spent lives and came away with nothing to show for it. They fell in large numbers; every advance they made came over the bodies of their slain. They spent lives the way he spent his money when he got leave.