Out of the Darkness d-6

by Harry Turtledove

  “He was fighting down in the Duchy of Grelz last I heard from him,” Saffa said. “A couple of months ago, letters stopped coming.”

  “That doesn’t sound so good,” Bembo said, and then, belatedly remembering himself, “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I. He was sweet.” For a moment, Saffa managed the nasty grin that had always provoked Bembo-one way or another. She added, “Unlike some people I could name.”

  “Thank you, sweetheart. I love you, too,” Bembo said. “If I could get up, I’d give you a swat on that round fanny of yours. Did you come see me just so you could try and drive me crazy?”

  She shook her head. Coppery curls flew back and forth. “I came to see you because this stinking war has taken a bite out of both of us.”

  If the baby’s father were still around, I wouldn‘t want anything to do with you. Bembo translated that without effort. But it didn’t mean she was wrong. “This stinking war has taken a bite out of the whole stinking world.” He hesitated. “When I’m back on my feet, I’ll call on you, all right?”

  “All right,” Saffa said. “I’ll tell you right now, though, I still may decide I’d sooner slap your face. Just so we understand each other.”

  Bembo snorted. “Some understanding.” But he was nodding. Saffa without vinegar wasn’t Saffa. “Take care of yourself. Stay safe.”

  “You, too,” she said, and then she was gone, leaving Bembo half wondering if he’d dreamt her whole visit.

  An egg flew in from the east and hit a house in the village Garivald’s company had just taken away from the Algarvians. Chunks of the house flew out in all directions. A spinning board knocked down an Unkerlanter soldier standing only a couple of feet from Garivald. He started to get up, then clapped a hand to the small of his back and let out a yip of pain. The house fell in on itself and started to burn.

  A Forthwegian couple in the middle of the street started howling. Garivald presumed it was their house. He couldn’t make out much of what they were saying. To a Grelzer like him, this east-Forthwegian dialect made even less sense than the variety of the language people around Eoforwic spoke. Not only were the sounds a little different, a lot of the words sounded nothing at all like their Unkerlanter equivalents. He wondered if they were borrowed from Algarvian.

  Another egg flew in. This one burst farther away. The crash that followed said somebody’s home would never be the same. Shrieks rose immediately thereafter. Somebody’s life would never be the same.

  My life will never be the same, either, Garivald thought. Powers below eat the Algarvians. It’s their fault, curse them. I’d sooner be back in Zossen, drinking my way through the winter and waiting for spring. Neither Zossen nor the family he’d had there existed any more. He turned to Lieutenant Andelot. “Sir, we ought to get rid of that miserable egg-tosser.”

  “I know, Sergeant Fariulf,” Andelot answered. “But we’ve come so far so fast, we can’t sweep up everything as neatly as we want to. On the scale of the war as a whole, that tosser doesn’t mean much.”

  “No, sir,” Garivald agreed. “But it’s liable to take some nasty bites out of us.” He thought for a moment. “I could probably sneak my squad through the redheads’ lines and take it out. Things are all topsy-turvy-they won’t have had the time to get proper trenches dug or anything like that.”

  What am I saying? he wondered. Go after an egg-tosser behind the enemy’s line? Have I lost all of my mind, or do I really want to kill myself?

  Andelot also studied him with a certain curiosity. “We don’t see volunteers as often as we’d like,” he remarked. “Aye, go on, Sergeant. Choose the men you’d like to have with you. I think you can do it, too.” He pointed southeastward. “Most of the redheads in these parts are falling back on that town called Gromheort. They’ll stand siege there, unless I miss my guess, and getting them out won’t come easy or cheap.” With a shrug, he went on, “Nothing but Algarve beyond, though. As I say, pick your men, Sergeant. Let’s get on with it.”

  The men Garivald did pick looked imperfectly enamored of him. He understood that; he was giving them the chance to get killed. But he had an argument they couldn’t top: “I’m going along with you. If I can do it, you can cursed well do it with me.”

  Behind his back, somebody said, “You’re too ugly for me to want to do it with you, Sergeant.” Garivald laughed along with the rest of the soldiers who heard. He couldn’t help himself. But he didn’t stop picking men.

  Before they set out from the village, though, a couple of squadrons of dragons painted rock-gray flew over the place out of the west. “Hold up, Fariulf,” Andelot said. “Maybe they’ll do our job for us.”

  “They should have done it already,” Garivald said. Even so, he wasn’t sorry to raise his hand. None of the men he’d chosen tried to talk him out of waiting. He would have been astonished if anyone had.

  That one Algarvian tosser hadn’t had many eggs to fling. The distant thunder of the eggs the Unkerlanter dragons dropped brought smiles to all the men in rock-gray who heard it. “Don’t know whether they’ll flatten that egg-tosser or not,” a soldier said. “Any which way, though, the redheads are catching it.”

  Only silence followed the edge of the thunder. No more eggs came down on the Forthwegian village. Andelot beamed. “That’s pretty efficient,” he said. “Maybe we’ll be able to get a decent night’s sleep here.”

  Not everybody would get a decent night’s sleep. Andelot made sure he had plenty of sentries facing east. Had Garivald been the Algarvian commander, he wouldn’t have tried a night attack. But the redheads were still dedicated counter-punchers. He’d seen that. Given even the slightest opening, they would hit back, and hit back hard.

  Crickets were chirping not far from the campfire by which Garivald sat when Andelot came up to him and asked, “Got a moment, Fariulf?”

  “Aye, sir,” Garivald answered. You couldn’t tell a superior no. He hadn’t needed more than one scorching from a furious sergeant to learn that lesson forever. And, in truth, he hadn’t been doing anything more than marveling at hearing crickets in wintertime. There wouldn’t have been any singing down around Zossen. He scrambled to his feet. “What do you need, sir?”

  “Walk with me,” Andelot said, and headed away from the fires and out into the darkness. Garivald grabbed his stick before following. Everything seemed quiet, but you never could tell. Andelot only nodded. If he’d discovered who Garivald was, he wouldn’t have wanted him armed. So Garivald reasoned, at any rate. His company commander nodded again once they were out of earshot of the rest of the Unkerlanters. “Sergeant, you showed outstanding initiative there when you volunteered to go after the Algarvian egg-tosser. I’m very pleased.”

  “Oh, that.” Garivald had already forgotten about it. “Thank you, sir.”

  “It’s something we need more of,” Andelot said. “It’s something the whole kingdom needs more of. It would make us more efficient. Too many of us are happy doing nothing till someone gives them an order. That’s not so good.”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it, sir,” Garivald said truthfully. If you didn’t have to do something for yourself, and if nobody was making you do it for anyone else, why do it?

  “Mezentio’s men, curse them, have initiative,” Andelot said. “They get themselves going without officers, without sergeants, without anything. They just see what needs doing and do it. That’s one of the things that makes them so much trouble. We should be able to match them.”

  “We’re beating them anyhow,” Garivald said.

  “But we should do better,” Andelot insisted. “The price we’re paying will cripple us for years. And it’s something we should do for our own pride’s sake. How does the song go?” He sang in a soft tenor:

  “ ‘Do anything to beat them back.

  Don’t hold off, don’t go slack.’

  Something like that, anyhow.”

  “Something like that,” Garivald echoed raggedly. He was glad the darkness hid his expression fr
om Andelot. He was sure his jaw had dropped when the officer started to sing. How not, considering that Andelot was singing one of his songs?

  The company commander slapped him on the back. “So, as I say, Sergeant, that’s why I’m so pleased. Anything you can do to encourage the men to show more initiative would also be very good.”

  “Why don’t you just order them to …?” Garivald’s voice trailed away. He felt foolish. “Oh. Can’t very well do that, can you?”

  “No.” Andelot chuckled. “Initiative imposed from above isn’t exactly the genuine article, I’m afraid.” He headed back toward the fires. So did Garivald. One of the nice things about being a sergeant was not having to go out and stand sentry in the middle of the night.

  He woke the next morning before dawn, with Unkerlanter egg-tossers thunderously pounding the Algarvians farther east. Andelot’s whistle shrilled. “Forward!” he shouted. Forward the Unkerlanters went, footsoldiers, behemoths, and dragons overhead all working together most efficiently. Garivald didn’t worry, or even stop to think, that the Algarvians had devised the scheme his countrymen were using. It worked, and worked well. Nothing else mattered to him.

  Artificers had laid bridges over the river that ran near Gromheort-nobody had bothered telling Garivald its name. Andelot clapped his hands when he thudded across one of those bridges. “Nothing between us and Algarve now but a few miles of flat land!” he shouted.

  Garivald whooped. That there might be some large number of redheads with sticks between him and their kingdom was true, but hardly seemed to matter. If King Swemmel’s men had surged forward from the Twegen and Eoforwic to here in a few short weeks, another surge would surely take them onto Algarvian soil.

  Garivald whooped again when he saw Unkerlanter behemoths on this side of the rivet. Footsoldiers were a lot safer when they had plenty of the big beasts along for company.

  But then one of those behemoths crumpled as if it had charged headlong into a boulder. A couple of the crewmen riding it were thrown clear; its fall crushed the rest. “Heavy stick!” someone close to the beast yelled. “Blazed right through its armor!”

  Maybe that was just an enemy emplacement nearby. Or maybe. . An alarmed shout rose: “Enemy behemoths!”

  Even before the first egg from the Algarvian beasts’ tossers burst, Garivald was digging himself a hole in the muddy ground. A footsoldier without a hole was like a turtle without a shell: naked, vulnerable, and ever so likely to be crushed.

  Another Unkerlanter behemoth went down, this one from a well-aimed egg. The Algarvians knew what they were doing. They generally did, worse luck. Had there been more of them. . Garivald didn’t care to think about that. Beams from ordinary, hand-held sticks announced that Algarvian footsoldiers were in the neighborhood, too.

  “Crystallomancer!” Andelot bellowed. “Powers below eat you, where’s a crystallomancer?” No one answered. He cursed, loudly and foully. “The fornicating Algarvians would have a crystallomancer handy.”

  Before he could embroider on that theme, Unkerlanter dragons dove on the enemy behemoths. Crystallomancer or not, someone back on the other side of the river knew what was going on. Under the cover of their aerial umbrella, the men in rock-gray moved forward again. Garivald ran past a couple of corpses in kilts, and past a redhead down and moaning. He blazed the Algarvian to make sure the fellow wouldn’t get up again, then ran on.

  But Mezentio’s men hadn’t given up. A crash from behind Garivald made him whirl. There was the bridge on which he’d crossed, smashed by an egg. A moment later, another one went up. A tall column of water rose into the air. “They’re using those stinking sorcerously guided eggs again,” somebody exclaimed.

  “They did this to us back by the Twegen, too, and we managed fine then,” Garivald said. But that bridgehead had been well established. This one was brand new. Could it stand against enemy counterattack? He’d find out.

  Vanai hadn’t known peace, hadn’t known the absence of fear, since Algarvian footsoldiers and behemoths swept into, swept past, Oyngestun. Now Eoforwic was calm and quiet under the rule of King Beornwulf and the more obvious and emphatic rule of the Unkerlanters who propped him on his throne. She could go out without sorcerous disguise if she wanted to. Some Kaunians did. She hadn’t had the nerve to try it herself, not after having had her nose rubbed in how little so many Forthwegians loved the blonds who lived among them.

  But lack of love was one thing. The desire to kill her on sight was something else again. For the first time in more than four years, she didn’t have to worry about that. Life could have been idyllic … if the Unkerlanters hadn’t hijacked Ealstan into their army.

  Fear for her husband swirled around her and choked her like nasty smoke. “It’s not fair,” she told Saxburh. The baby looked up at her out of big round eyes-eyes that, by now, were almost as dark as Ealstan’s. Saxburh smiled enormously, showing a new front tooth. Now that it had come in, she was happy. She had no other worries. Vanai wished she could say the same herself.

  “Not fair,” she whispered fiercely. Saxburh laughed. Vanai didn’t.

  In a way-in a couple of ways, actually-this was worse than worrying about her grandfather when Major Spinello set out to work him to death. She’d agonized over Brivibas more from a sense of family duty than out of real affection. And she’d been able to do something to keep her grandfather safe, even if letting Spinello into her bed had been a nightmare of its own.

  But all the love she had in the world that she didn’t give to Saxburh was aimed at Ealstan. She knew he was going into dreadful danger; the Unkerlanters had beaten back Mezentio’s men more by throwing bodies at them than through clever strategy. And one of the bodies was his-the only body she’d ever cared about in that particular way.

  If bedding an Unkerlanter officer could have brought Ealstan back to Eoforwic, she would have done it in a heartbeat, and worried about everything else afterwards. But she knew better. The Unkerlanters didn’t care what happened to one conscripted Forthwegian. And, for all their talk about efficiency, she wouldn’t have bet they could even find him once he went into the enormous man-hungry monster that was their army.

  So she had to live her life from day to day as best she could. Fortunately, Ealstan had managed to save up a good deal of silver. She didn’t have to rush about looking for work-and who here, who anywhere, would take care of Saxburh even if she found it? One more worry, though a smaller one, to keep her awake at night. The silver, as she knew too well, wouldn’t last forever, and what would she do when it ran out?

  What she did after yet another night where she got less sleep than she wished she would have was take Saxburh, plop her into the little harness she’d made so she could carry the baby and keep both hands free, and go down to the market square to get enough barley and onions and olive oil and cheese and cheap wine to keep eating a while longer.

  The market square was a more cheerful place than it had been for a long time. People went about their business without constantly looking around to see where they would hide if eggs started falling or if dragons suddenly appeared overhead. The Algarvians had struck at Eoforwic from the air a few times after losing the city, but not lately-and their closest dragon farms had to be far away by now.

  New broadsheets sprouted like mushrooms on fences and walls. One showed a big, clean-shaven man labeled unkerlant and a smaller, bearded fellow called forthweg advancing side by side against a mangy-looking dog with the face of King Mezentio. They both carried upraised clubs. The legend under the drawing said, NO MORE BITES.

  Another had a drawing of King Beornwulf with the Forthwegian crown on his head but wearing a uniform tunic of a cut somewhere between those of Forthweg and Unkerlant. He had a stern expression on his face and a stick in his right hand, A KING WHO FIGHTS FOR HIS PEOPLE, this legend read.

  Vanai wondered what sort of king he would end up making and how much freedom from the Unkerlanters he’d be able to get. She suspected-indeed, she was all but certain-she and Forth
weg as a whole would find out. If King Penda didn’t live out his life in exile, if he tried coming back to his native land, he wasn’t likely to live long.

  More food was in the market square and prices were lower than they had been for a couple of years. Vanai praised the powers above for that, especially since everything had been so dear during the doomed Forthwegian uprising against the redheads. She even bought a bit of sausage for a treat, and didn’t ask what went into it. Saxburh fell asleep.

  Over in one corner of the square, a band thumped away. They had a bowl in front of them, and every now and then some passerby would toss in a couple of coppers or even a small silver coin. Forthwegian-style music didn’t appeal to Vanai; the Kaunians in Forthweg had their own tunes, much more rhythmically complex and, to her ear, much more interesting.

  But the novelty of hearing any music in the market square drew her to listen for a while. Out here, in her sorcerous disguise, she wasn’t just Vanai: she was also Thelberge. She thought of the Forthwegian appearance she wore almost as if it were another person. And Thelberge, she thought, would have liked these musicians. The drummer, who also sang, was particularly good.

  He was so good, in fact, that she gave him a sharp look. Ethelhelm, the prominent musician for whom Ealstan had cast accounts for a while, had also been a drummer and singer. But she’d seen Ethelhelm play. He had Kaunian blood in him. Half? A quarter? She wasn’t sure, but enough to make him tall and rangy and give him a long face. Enough to get him in trouble with the Algarvians, too. This fellow looked like any other Forthwegian in his late twenties or early thirties.

  She couldn’t applaud when the song ended, not with her hands full. Several people did, though. Coins clinked in the bowl. “Thank you kindly, folks,” the drummer said; it was plainly his band. “Remember, the more you give us, the better we play.” His grin showed a broken front tooth. He got a laugh, and a few more coppers to go with it. The band swung into a new tune.