Rulers of the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

“Nobody’s driving us out of this salient,” Vatran said. “Nobody. And just because you’re talking about what they have done, what’s that got to do with what they’re going to do? Not a fornicating thing, says I.”

  Rathar slapped him on the shoulder, not so much for being right as for trying to raise both their spirits. But if the Algarvians had gone forward by great leaps in the two earlier summers of their war against Unkerlant, what was to keep them from going forward by great leaps in this third summer of the war?

  Unkerlanter soldiers, that’s what, he thought. Unkerlanter behemoths, Unkerlanter dragons, Unkerlanter cavalry. We’ve learned a lot from these redheaded whoresons the past two years. Now we’ll find out if we’ve got our lessons right.

  If they hadn’t learned, they would have gone under. He knew no stronger incentive than that. They might still go under, if King Mezentio’s men did break through what Unkerlant had built here to hold them back. But the Algarvians would know they’d been in a fight. They already knew they’d been in a fight, a harder fight than they’d had anywhere in the east of Derlavai.

  Vatran had been thinking with him. “Invade our kingdom, will they? We’ll teach them what we think of people who do things like that, powers below eat me if we don’t.”

  “If we don’t, the powers below will eat both of us,” Rathar said, and Vatran nodded. They trudged through rubble-strewn streets—or perhaps across what had been yards from which most of the rubble had been blown—back toward the battered bank building where Rather had made his headquarters. A lot of eggs had fallen on Durrwangen since, but the building still stood. Banks had to be strong places; that was one of the reasons Rathar had chosen this one.

  No sentries stood outside to snap to attention and salute as he and General Vatran came up. King Swemmel would have had sentries out there; Swemmel insisted on show. Maybe because his sovereign did, Rathar didn’t. Also, of course, sentries outside the building would have been likely to get killed when the Algarvians tossed in some more of their endless eggs. Rathar had sent uncounted tens of thousands of soldiers to their deaths, but he wasn’t deliberately wasteful. He hoped the war never made him so hard or simply so indifferent as that.

  A horned lark hopped out of his way, then leaped into the air to catch a fly. The golden-bellied lark was svelte, even plump. It probably had a great brood of svelte, even plump, nestlings somewhere amid the ruins. With so much dead but unburied flesh in Durrwangen, there were a great many flies to catch.

  Inside the headquarters building, a sentry did salute the marshal and his general. Rathar nodded to the youngster. Then he spoke to Vatran: “Let’s go look at the map.” He wondered how many times he’d said that. Whenever he was worried, undoubtedly. He’d been worried a lot.

  Vatran walked over to the map table with him. Algarvianheld bulges overlapped Durrwangen to either side. “They’re good, curse them,” Vatran said. “Who would’ve thought they had that counterattack in’em?”

  “We didn’t, that’s certain.” Rathar ruefully shook his head. “And we’ve paid for it. And we’re liable to pay more.” He pointed to the map. “Are these the best sites we could have picked for the centers?”

  “Archmage Addanz thinks so.” Vatran scowled. “Are you ready to argue with him? He’d likely turn you into a frog.” He chuckled, but the laughter sounded strained. “War would be easier without magecraft.”

  “Maybe it would.” Rathar shrugged. “But I’ll argue with Addanz if I have to. I’ve asked him to come up to Durrwangen; he should be here soon. I’ll argue with anyone and do anything I have to to win this war.”

  “I don’t like arguing with mages,” Vatran said. “Too many things they can do to you if you rub’em the wrong way.”

  “A soldier can generally slay a mage faster than a mage can get rid of a soldier,” Rathar said serenely. “And magecraft, even the simple stuff, isn’t easy. If it were, we’d have mages running the world. And we don’t.”

  “And a good thing, too, says I,” Vatran exclaimed.

  “Excuse me, lord Marshal.” The sentry came back to the map table. “Sorry to bother you, but the archmage is here.”

  “Good,” Rathar said. Vatran looked as if he thought it was anything but. The marshal continued, “Send him right on back here. We’ve got things to talk about, he and I.” The sentry saluted and hurried up to the entrance. He didn’t just send the archmage back: he brought him. Rathar nodded approval. He rarely found fault with a man who exceeded his orders.

  Addanz was a well-groomed man of middle years, perhaps a little younger than Rathar. Few old men served King Swemmel; Vatran was an exception. A lot of leaders of the generation ahead of Rathar’s had chosen the wrong side in the Twinkings War. Most of the others had managed to displease the king in the intervening years—or he’d killed them anyway, to make others thoughtful or simply on a whim. Swemmel did as he chose. That was what being King of Unkerlant meant, as long as a king lived. Swemmel had lived a surprisingly long time.

  “I greet you, lord Marshal.” Addanz’s voice was rich and smooth, like strong tea with milk. Rathar was a long way from sure he was the best mage in Unkerlant. What he was, without a doubt, was the prominent mage with the fewest enemies.

  “Hello, Archmage.” Set beside Addanz, Rathar felt himself to be all harsh stone and rough edges. The archmage was a courtier; Rathar wasn’t, or was as little as he could get away with. But regardless of what he wasn’t, he cursed well was a soldier, and he’d summoned Addanz on soldiers’ business. His index finger stabbed down at the map. “This center here, the western one—are you sure it’s where you want it? If they break through past this line of low hills, they may overrun it.”

  “The closer, the stronger—so we have shown,” Addanz answered. “With soldiers and magecraft to defend it, it should serve well enough. Besides, given how soon Mezentio’s minions may strike at us, have we got the time to move it and set it up again farther from the front?”

  Rathar gnawed his lower lip. “Mm—you’re likely right. If I thought we had more time, I’d still have you move it a bit. You’re liable to take a pounding from dragons, too, you know.”

  “That would be so even if we did move it,” Addanz answered. Rathar gnawed his lip some more. The archmage went on, “And we have masked it as best we can, both with magecraft and with such tricks as soldiers use.” He didn’t sound patronizing; he seemed to make a point of not sounding patronizing. That only made Rathar feel twice as patronized.

  He shook his head. Addanz had won this round. “All right. I’ll never complain about anyone who wants to get close to the enemy. I just don’t want the enemy getting too close to you too fast.”

  “I rely on your valiant men and officers to keep such a calamity from happening,” Addanz said. I’ll blame them to Swemmel if it does. He didn’t say that, but he might have.

  “Your mages know exactly what they have to do?” Rathar persisted.

  “Aye.” Addanz nodded. A year and a half before, the notion had so rocked him, he couldn’t even think of it for himself. How Swemmel had laughed! Nothing rocked Swemmel, not if it meant holding on to his throne. And now Addanz took it for granted, too. The war against Algarve had coarsened him, as it had everybody else. That was what war did.

  Distant thunder rumbled, off to the south. But there should have been no thunder, not on a fine, warm early summer day. Eggs. Thousands of eggs, bursting at once. Rathar looked to Vatran. Vatran was already looking to him. “It’s begun,” the marshal said. Vatran nodded. Rathar went on, “Now we’ll know. One way or the other, we’ll know.”

  “What?” Addanz needed a moment to recognize the sound. When the archmage did, he blanched a little. “How shall I go back to the center now?”

  “Carefully,” Rathar answered, and threw back his head and laughed. Addanz looked most offended. Rathar hardly cared. At last, after longer than he’d expected, the waiting was over.

  Even Sergeant Werferth, who had been a soldier for a long time, first in For
thweg’s army and then in Plegmund’s Brigade, was impressed. “Look at ‘em, boys, he said.”Just look at’em. You ever see so fornicating many behemoths in one place in all your born days?”

  Sirdoc wrinkled his nose. “Smell ‘em, boys,” he said, doing his best to imitate his sergeant. “Just smell’em. You ever smell so fornicating many behemoths in one place in all your born days?”

  Everybody in the squad laughed—even Ceorl, who was about as eager to fight Sidroc as the Unkerlanters; even Werferth, who seldom took kindly to being lampooned. They all had to laugh. Sidroc’s joke held altogether too much truth. Algarve had indeed assembled a great host of behemoths to hurl against the western flank of the Unkerlanter salient around Durrwangen. And those behemoths did indeed stink. They’d been moving up toward the front for days now, and the air was thick with the rotten-grass reek of their droppings.

  It was also thick with flies, which buzzed around the behemoths and their droppings, and which weren’t too proud to visit the waiting men and their latrines as well. Like the other soldiers in Plegmund’s Brigade, like the Algarvians with them, Sidroc slapped all the time.

  Like everybody else, he also did his best to be careful where he put his feet. He knew all about stepping in horse turds. Who didn’t, by smelly experience? But a horse turd dirtied the bottom of a shoe, and maybe a bit of the upper. Behemoths were a lot bigger than horses. Their droppings were in proportion. Those who didn’t notice them in the weeds and rank grassland and unattended fields had enormous reason to regret it.

  An Algarvian senior lieutenant named Ercole had replaced the late Captain Zerbino as company commander. Sidroc wondered how Ercole had got to be senior to anybody; he doubted the redhead had as many years as his own eighteen. Ercole’s mustache, far from the splendid waxed spikes his countrymen adored, was hardly more than copper fuzz. But he sounded calm and confident as he said, “Once the eggs stop falling, we go in alongside the behemoths. We protect them, they protect us. We all go forward together. The cry is, ‘Mezentio and victory!’”

  He waited expectantly. “Mezentio and victory!” shouted the Forthwegians of Plegmund’s Brigade. The Brigade might have been named after their own great king, but it served Algarve’s.

  Were any Unkerlanters close enough to hear? Sidroc didn’t suppose it mattered. They’d soon hear a lot of that cry. With the help of the powers above, it would be the last cry a lot of them heard.

  Algarvian egg-tossers began to fling then. Sidroc whooped at the great roar of bursts to the east of him. And it went on and on, seemingly without end. “There won’t be anything left alive by the time they’re through!” He had to shout even to hear himself through the din.

  “Oh, yes, there will.” Sergeant Werferth was shouting, too. His shout held grim certainty: “There always is, curse it.”

  As if to prove him right on the spot, Unkerlanter egg-tossers. began hurling sorcerous energy back at the Algarvians. There didn’t seem to be so many of them, and they flung fewer eggs, but they hadn’t gone away, either. Sidroc wished they would have. He crouched in a hole scraped in the ground and hoped for the best Not a lot of Unkerlanter eggs were falling close by. He approved of that, and hoped it would go on.

  Algarvian dragons flew by overhead at what would have been treetop height had any trees grown close by. They had eggs slung under their bellies to add to those the tossers were flinging. Not long after they struck Swemmel’s men, fewer eggs flew back toward the Algarvian army of which Plegmund’s Brigade was a part.

  The pounding from the Algarvian side kept on. “They’ve put everything they’ve got into this, haven’t they?” Sidroc shouted.

  This time, Ceorl answered him: “Aye, they have. Including us.”

  Sidroc grunted. He wished Ceorl wouldn’t have put it quite like that. He also wished he could have found some way to disagree with the ruffian.

  At last, after what seemed like forever but was probably a couple of hours, the Algarvian egg-tossers stopped as abruptly as they’d begun. All up and down the line, officers’ whistles shrilled. They didn’t seem so much of a much, not to Sidroc’s battered ears. But they were enough to send men and behemoths trotting forward against the foe.

  Lieutenant Ercole blew his whistle as lustily as anyone else. “Forward!” he shouted. “Mezentio and victory!”

  “Mezentio and victory!” Sidroc shouted as he scrambled out of his hole. He kept shouting it as he went forward, too. So did the rest of the Forthwegians in Plegmund’s Brigade. They wore tunics. They had dark hair and proud hooked noses. Even though they wore beards, they didn’t want excitable Algarvians—and what other kind were there?—taking them for Unkerlanters and blazing them by mistake.

  If anything or anyone had stayed alive in the tormented landscape ahead, Sidroc had trouble understanding how. After a good part of a year in action, he reckoned himself a connoisseur of ruined terrain, and this churned, smoking, cratered ground was as bad as any he’d ever seen.

  And then, off to his right, a new crater opened. A flash of sorcerous energy and a brief shriek marked the passage of an Algarvian soldier. Someone shouted an altogether unnecessary warning: “They’ve buried eggs in the ground!”

  All at once, Sidroc wanted to tippytoe forward. Then, a little farther away, an egg burst under a behemoth. That one blast of sorcerous energy touched off all the eggs the behemoth was carrying. Its crew had no chance. Sidroc wondered if any pieces would come down, or if the men were altogether destroyed.

  And he couldn’t tippytoe despite the buried eggs, another of which blew up a soldier not too far from him. However many eggs the tossers had rained down on the ground ahead, they hadn’t got rid of all the Unkerlanters. Sidroc hadn’t really expected they would, but he had hoped. No such luck. Swemmel’s men popped up out of holes and started blazing at the soldiers struggling through the belt of buried eggs. Going fast meant you might miss whatever signs there were on the ground to warn you an egg lay concealed beneath it. Going slow meant the Unkerlanters had a better chance to blaze you.

  Shouting, “Mezentio and victory!” at the top of his lungs, Sidroc dashed ahead. He might get through to unblighted ground. If he stayed where he was, he would get blazed. Lieutenant Ercole was shouting and waving all his men on, so Sidroc supposed he’d done the right thing.

  When the crews of the Algarvian behemoths saw targets, they lobbed eggs at them or blazed at them with heavy sticks. Fewer beams tore at the advancing soldiers. Men ahead of Sidroc were battling Unkerlanters in their holes. He saw a man in a rock-gray tunic show his head and shoulders as he looked for a target. That was enough—too much, in fact. Sidroc blazed the Unkerlanter down.

  “Keep moving!” Ercole screamed. “You’ve got to keep moving. This is how we beat them—with speed and movement!” By all the news sheets Sidroc had read back in Gromheort before joining Plegmund’s Brigade, by all the training he’d had, by all the fighting he’d seen, the company commander was right.

  But it wouldn’t be easy, not here it wouldn’t. The Unkerlanters had known they were coming—had probably known for a long time. They’d fortified this ground as best they could. It didn’t look like much, but obstacles—tree trunks, ditches, mud—made the going slower than it would have been otherwise. Those obstacles also channeled the advancing men and behemoths in certain directions—right into more waiting Unkerlanters.

  As soon as the Algarvians and the men of Plegmund’s Brigade got in among the first belt of Unkerlanter defenders, others farther back began blazing at them from long range. More obstacles slowed their efforts to get at the Unkerlanters who now revealed themselves. Men on both sides fell as if winnowed. Algarvian behemoths went down, too, here and there, though few Unkerlanter behemoths were yet in the fight.

  At last, around noon, Mezentio’s men cleared that first stubborn belt of defenders. Ercole was almost beside himself. “We aren’t keeping up with the plan!” he cried. “We’re falling behind!”

  “Sir, we’ve done everything we could,”
Sergeant Werferth said. “We’re still here. We’re still moving.”

  “Not fast enough.” Ercole stuck his whistle in his mouth and blew a long, piercing blast. “Onward!”

  For a furlong or so, the going was easy. Sidroc’s spirits began to rise. Then he heard the sharp, flat roar of an egg bursting under another Algarvian soldier. He realized why no Unkerlanters infested this stretch of ground—they’d sown it with more eggs to slow up his advancing comrades.

  What had been woods ahead had taken a demon of a beating, but still offered some shelter: enough that the Unkerlanter behemoths emerging from it were an unwelcome surprise. “Powers above!” Sidroc exclaimed in dismay. “Look at how many of the whoresons there are!”

  The behemoths started tossing eggs at Plegmund’s Brigade and at the Algarvian footsoldiers to either side of the Forthwegians. Sidroc jumped into a hole in the ground. He had plenty from which to choose. So did Ceorl, but he jumped down in with Sidroc anyhow. Sidroc wondered whether he wouldn’t be safer facing the Unkerlanter behemoths.

  “Hard work today,” Ceorl remarked, as if he’d been hauling sacks of grain or chopping wood.

  “Aye,” Sidroc agreed. An egg burst close by, shaking the ground and showering them with clods of dirt.

  “But we’ll do it,” Ceorl went on. “We go east, the redheads on the other side come west, and we meet in the middle. Be a whole great fornicating kettle full of dead Unkerlanters by the time we’re through, too.” He sounded as if he enjoyed the idea.

  “A lot of us dead, too,” Sidroc said. “A lot of us dead already.”

  Ceorl shrugged. “Can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” He brought out the cliché as if he were the first one ever to use it. Maybe he thought he was.

  An officer’s whistle squealed. “Onward!” That was Lieutenant Ercole, who’d had the sense to jump in a hole. Now, sooner than he might have been, he was out again. The Algarvians hadn’t given Plegmund’s Brigade any officers who weren’t recklessly brave—that Sidroc had to admit. “Come on!” Ercole shouted again. “We won’t win anything if we stay here all day!”