Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  The irregulars left the cover of the pines and oaks and birches not long after sunset. The band numbered perhaps fifty all together, of whom half a dozen or so were women. That was one more thing Garivald hadn’t known—hadn’t imagined—before Munderic and his comrades rescued him from Mezentio’s men.

  One of the women fell into stride beside him. Her name was Obilot. “I wish we were raiding tonight, not just bringing back sheep and rye and oats,” she said. The Algarvians had smashed her village on their way west; she thought she was the only one from it left alive. Now she wanted to go out and raid every night. So did all the women in the band. They hated the Algarvians worse than their male counterparts did.

  “We’ve got to eat, too,” Garivald said. Like a lot of people who’d gone hungry, he wanted to make sure he didn’t have to.

  “You’re soft,” Obilot said. She sounded soft herself; her voice was high and thin. The top of her head barely came up to Garivald’s chin. She looked more delicate and girlish than Annore. But a scar seamed her left arm from elbow to wrist. She bore the mark with pride—she’d cut the throat of the Algarvian who’d given it to her.

  A hideous screech drifted down from high overhead. Garivald looked up, but couldn’t spy the dragon. He wondered if eggs would start dropping on the irregulars. But somebody said, “They’re flying west.” He relaxed. If the beasts were on their way to the big fight, they wouldn’t worry about a band of raiders deep inside territory Algarve was already supposed to have conquered.

  Garivald sniffed. “I smell smoke,” he said. “That will be the village we’re going to, won’t it?”

  “Aye,” Munderic answered. “You’d better pay attention to your nose. At night, it’ll let you know you’re coming up on people before your eyes will.”

  “I’ve noticed,” Garivald answered. He’d usually taken stinks for granted back in Zossen; when he was among them all the time, he hardly noticed them. Only when he’d been out working in fields upwind from the village had he had its odors of smoke and manure and seldom-washed humanity forced upon his consciousness.

  Beside him, Obilot spoke suddenly: “That’s too much smoke for a little place like Gartz. And the dogs should be barking, but they aren’t.”

  Munderic grunted. “You’re right, curse it.” His call was soft but urgent: “Spread out. Go slow. We’re liable to be walking into something.”

  Obilot caught Garivald in the flank with an elbow. “Get off the path. We’ll go through the fields. And be ready to turn around and run like a rabbit with a ferret on its tail if the redheads have an ambush laid on.”

  Heart pounding in his chest, Garivald obeyed her. Most of the irregulars were bypassed soldiers; they knew what to do at times like these. The ones who hadn’t been in King Swemmel’s army had more practice fighting the Algarvians than Garivald did. Before joining this band, the worst fights he’d known were a couple of drunken brawls with fellow villagers. This was different. He might die here, and he knew it.

  Peering ahead through the darkness, Garivald saw jagged outlines instead of the smooth, pale surfaces of thatched roofs. “They’ve burnt the place,” he burst out.

  “That they have.” Beside him, Obilot’s voice went cold as a blizzard. When she continued, it was more to herself than to Garivald: “You never get used to it.” She started cursing the Algarvians with loathing all the more bitter because it was helpless to change whatever lay ahead.

  Gratz hadn’t been much of a village; Munderic had been right about that. Now, Garivald discovered, it wasn’t a village at all any more. Every house had been burned. Bodies lay everywhere: men, women, children, animals. They didn’t stink yet. “This must have happened today,” Munderic said harshly.

  “This is what the Algarvians did to a village near Zossen when it rose against them—this or something like it,” Garivald said.

  “Gartz wouldn’t have risen,” the leader of the irregulars answered. “Gartz was supposed to stay nice and quiet, so it could go right on giving us what we needed. We didn’t raid here, any more than we do close to our other villages. Only a fool fouls his own nest.”

  “Someone betrayed them,” Obilot said, sounding even more wintry than before. “Someone who lives—lived—here, or maybe someone in a traitor village who figured out what Gartz was doing.”

  Garivald started to say something, but held his tongue—he’d just stepped out into the village square. The Algarvians had built a gibbet there. Three bodies hung on it, two men and a woman, their heads canted at unnatural angles. Each corpse had a placard fastened to it: a lighter square in the night. He turned away, fighting sickness. He’d seen such things before, when the redheads hanged irregulars they’d caught outside of Zossen.

  Munderic went over and cut down one of the placards. He couldn’t have read it in the darkness. Garivald couldn’t have read it at all; he’d never learned his letters. After a moment, Munderic let the placard fall to the ground. “I don’t care why the Algarvians say they killed them,” he muttered. “They killed them because they don’t want our peasants remembering whose kingdom it really is.”

  “Vengeance,” Obilot said softly.

  More and more of the irregulars gathered in the square, staring at the bodies swaying every so slightly in the breeze. “Another charge on the bill they’ll pay,” Garivald said. “Another reason they’ll rue the day. . . .” The song built itself, a long, furious call for revenge against the redheads.

  When it was through, the irregulars’ gaze had swung from the bodies to him. Munderic came up and patted him on the shoulder. “This is why the Algarvians wanted to hang you, too,” he said.

  “They were talking about boiling me alive,” Garivald remarked.

  Munderic nodded. “That’s the kind of thing they do.” He pointed to the gibbet. “This is the kind of thing they do. Well, here in Unkerlant they’re finding we’re as fierce as they are. We can war like this, same as them. We can, and we are, and we will, till they all flee.”

  “Aye,” the irregulars said, an angry, ragged chorus.

  “Aye,” Garivald echoed. He turned to Munderic. “I’ll put that last bit into the song. It deserves to be there.”

  “Huh,” Munderic said, playing it down, but Garivald knew he’d pleased the leader of the irregulars. After a moment, Munderic went on, “And now we’d better get out of here. Nothing we can do to help Gartz, and we’re not going to get anything out of the place, either. Just have to hope the Algarvians or their Grelzer dogs don’t do the same to all the villages that feed us.”

  Before Garivald could say what was on his mind, Obilot exclaimed, “We can do one thing for Gartz, even if we don’t do it here and now: we can kill lots of redheads.”

  “Aye.” Another savage growl from the whole band.

  As the irregulars started back toward the sheltering woods, Garivald caught up with Munderic and asked, “What happens if they do wreck all the villages that are friendly to us?”

  “Then we start raiding the ones that aren’t harder than ever,” Munderic answered. “They’ll find out that Mezentio’s men aren’t the only ones who can tear things to pieces.”

  “Our own countrymen . . .” Garivald paused a moment in thought. “Aye, if we have to.” Munderic walked on for a couple of paces, then slapped him on the back. In the still night, the noise seemed loud as a bursting egg.

  Along with the rest of the Lagoan army, Fernao tramped west across the almost treeless plains of the land of the Ice People. He couldn’t have said how advance felt different from retreat, but it did. When he remarked on that to Affonso, the other mage looked at him as if he were daft. “I’ll tell you how it’s different,” Affonso said. “It’s better, that’s how.”

  “Well, so it is,” Fernao agreed. “They’ll make soldiers out of us yet if we’re not careful.”

  “I understand soldiers better than I ever did before,” Affonso said. “When the other fellow’s trying to kill you, things that look foolish in peacetime start making more sens
e all of a sudden.”

  “That’s so.” Fernao nodded. “Their discipline isn’t the same as the sort we have, but it’s there. You can’t get around that.”

  Up from the south came a band of Ice People leading camels. They exchanged halloos with the Lagoan scouts. After a little while, an army quartermaster went out to dicker with them. Before long, Lagoan soldiers took charge of some of the camels. Pointing, Affonso said, “Another advantage of advancing is that we’re better fed. The Ice People don’t ignore us, the way they did when we were going backwards.”

  Fernao shook his head. “We may have more to eat when we’re advancing, but we’re not better fed. The only way we could be better fed would be to go back to Lagoas. And if I ever see a camel in the zoological gardens in Setubal, I’ll spit in his eye before he can do it to me.”

  Affonso laughed, though Fernao hadn’t been joking. The other mage said, “We’ve been here too cursed long, that’s certain. By the powers above, even the women of the Ice People are starting to look good to me.”

  “Oh, my dear fellow—my deepest sympathies,” Fernao exclaimed, and put an arm around Affonso’s shoulder. The women of the Ice People were as hairy as the men, not just on their faces but all over their bodies. Some distress in his voice, Fernao went on, “They’re starting to look good to me, too. But they still haven’t started smelling good to me, so I’m safe a while longer, anyhow.”

  Still, he noticed the rank stink of the Ice People much less than he had when he’d first come to the austral continent. For one thing, he’d grown more used to it. For another, he, like everyone else in the Lagoan expeditionary force, stank much worse than he had back then.

  High overhead, a dragon let out a shriek of fury. Fernao looked up to see if he could spot it, but not with the alarm bordering on panic he’d known a few weeks before. Sure enough, it was a Kuusaman beast, and hard to note against the sky. Up until the dragon transports came, shrieks in the air would have burst from the throats of enemy dragons, and would have meant eggs raining down in short order.

  No more. Now Lagoan dragons painted red and gold and Kuusaman beasts painted sky blue and sea green took the fight to the Algarvians and Yaninans. Fernao enjoyed picturing in his mind enemy soldiers frantically digging for their lives as sorcerous energy seared them and hurled fragments of lichen-covered stones in all directions. Better them than me, he thought. Aye, better them than me.

  Up ahead of the marching footsoldiers, a behemoth paused to tear at the grass and stunted, foot-tall birches that covered the plain. Fernao pointed to it. “I wonder if we can keep all the beasts fed when winter comes again.” he said. “For that matter, I wonder if we can keep all of us fed when winter comes again.”

  Affonso shuddered. “I never dreamt we might have to spend a second winter down here—but then, this isn’t a dream; it’s a nightmare. Do you remember when this campaign was supposed to be quick and clean and easy?”

  “Did you ever hear of a campaign that wasn’t supposed to be quick and clean and easy?” Fernao asked, and then answered his own question: “The trouble is, the whoresons on the other side keep coming up with ideas of their own.”

  “Who ever heard of a Yaninan with any idea except running away?” Affonso asked. Fernao laughed. So did his comrade, but not for long. With a grimace, Affonso continued, “But there are more Algarvians down here than there used to be. And they do have other ideas.”

  “Mostly nasty ones,” Fernao agreed. Thinking of the sorceries Mezentio’s men had started using in Unkerlant, he kicked at the grass and the mossy dirt. “Almost all of them nasty ones in this war.”

  Behind its screen of scouts on camels and a few unicorns, behind its behemoths, the army slogged on toward a long, low rise. Somewhere on the other side of that rise, the Yaninans and Algarvians waited. It was somewhere not far away, too: Fernao exclaimed as dragons painted in red and white and green streaked out of the west, driving a handful of Kuusaman and Lagoan beasts before them.

  Nor did the Algarvians content themselves with that. Their dragons threw themselves at those flying above the Lagoan army. Whenever the Algarvians did anything, they did it with all their might. Fernao watched dragons wheel and twist and flame in the sky—and watched some of them fall out of the sky, too, broken and burning.

  Then a unicorn out ahead of the army toppled to the ground, pinning its rider beneath it. A great gout of steam rose from its body: it had been blazed by a heavy stick. Fernao’s gaze went to the top of the rise. Coming over it were behemoths that didn’t belong to the Lagoan army. Lagoan beasts tramped forward to meet them. Both sides began tossing eggs.

  “They’ve got more behemoths than I thought they did,” Affonso said in worried tones.

  “Aye.” Fernao was worried, too. “If they’ve been reinforced . . .” His voice trailed off. If the Algarvians had brought more behemoths to the austral continent, they’d surely brought more men down here, too.

  Footsoldiers swarmed over the ridge behind and between the enemy behemoths. Affonso cursed. “Yaninans haven’t come forward like that in all the days of the world,” he said bitterly.

  “I won’t tell you you’re wrong, however much I wish I could,” Fernao replied. “King Swemmel ought to thank us. Every one of those whoresons we slay is one the Unkerlanters won’t have to worry about.”

  “I’m more worried about the Algarvians who’re liable to slay us,” Affonso answered. Fernao didn’t see how he could fault his friend’s thinking there.

  He peered nervously toward the south. If the Algarvians had brought in enough behemoths to confront the Lagoan army, had they brought in enough to outflank King Vitor’s men, too? But no cries of alarm rose there, and he saw no great shapes pounding across the plain to cut off the Lagoans. With more than a little relief, he turned his attention back to the battle ahead.

  With more relief still, he saw that the Lagoan behemoths were holding their own against the Algarvian animals. There weren’t so many of the Algarvian behemoths as he’d thought at first frightened glance, even if there were plenty to have routed the Lagoan scouts. Indeed, the Lagoan behemoths were starting to push the Algarvians back.

  “Vitor!” A great shout rose from the Lagoan ranks. “King Vitor and victory!” The soldiers surged forward. Fernao and Affonso went with them. The Algarvians began falling back faster now. Maybe they’d been running a monster bluff. Sometimes they paid a price for their arrogance.

  “Every so often, this business is easier than you think it would be,” Fernao said to Affonso.

  “Aye.” The second-rank mage nodded. “Remember how we were worried about the Yaninans the first time they tried to hit us? We didn’t know then they’d run every chance they got.”

  “I’m not sorry they did.” Fernao slogged up the rise. The Lagoan footsoldiers, most of them younger than he and Affonso, moved faster than the mages. They hurried to catch up with their behemoths, which were just reaching the crest of the rise and disappearing as they went down the other side. Panting a little, or more than a little, Fernao went on, “Nice of the Algarvians to do the same.”

  “So it is,” Affonso agreed. He was breathing hard, too. “You wouldn’t expect it of them, the way you would of the Yaninans.”

  “No. You wouldn’t.” Fernao peered thoughtfully toward the top of the rise. “I wonder if they’ve got something in mind.”

  Hardly had the words left his mouth before several behemoths came back over the top of the rise, heading east toward the Lagoan force. “What’s this?” Affonso said, skidding to a halt.

  “Nothing good,” Fernao replied. A moment later, he exclaimed, too—in dismay. “Those are our animals. But where are the rest of them?”

  “What have Mezentio’s whoresons gone and done?” Affonso asked. Fernao couldn’t answer him, not this time. Whatever they’d done, though, it had worked. Their behemoths thundered after the Lagoan beasts that were advancing no more. This time, the Lagoan behemoths couldn’t halt their charge.

 
A third of the way up that long slope, Fernao took out his short-handled shovel and began digging himself a hole. He couldn’t dig so deep as he would have liked; he soon found that the soil, as in so many places on the austral continent, was frozen solid the year around only a couple of feet below the surface. But any kind of scrape in the soil was better than none. He heaped up the dirt in front of the scrape and then half jumped, half lay in it. Cold started seeping into his body.

  Soldiers were going to earth, too, and so was Affonso. And none too soon, for the Algarvian behemoths started plastering them with eggs again. Some of those behemoths bore heavy sticks instead of egg-tossers. As a beam from one of them could bring a unicorn crashing to the ground, so it could also blaze straight through two or three men before becoming too attenuated to be deadly any more.

  A few at a time, King Vitor’s men began falling back from the rise to the flat ground below. As they retreated, Fernao found out what had gone wrong beyond the crest of the rise, on the side he hadn’t been able to see.

  “Who’d have thought those buggers would have hauled those really heavy sticks all this way?” one disgruntled trooper said to another.

  “Well, they did, curse ’em,” the second Lagoan trooper answered. “You get a stick that’s heavy enough, and not even a behemoth’s armor will stand up to it.”

  The two footsoldiers tramped past before Fernao could hear any more, but he’d heard enough and to spare. Turning to Affonso, he said, “They outfoxed us.”

  “It doesn’t do to trust the Algarvians,” Affonso said mournfully. He leaned up on an elbow to peer out over the top of the dirt he’d piled up in front of his own miserable excuse for a hole in the ground. With a grunt, he added, “They’re going to overrun us if we stay here much longer.”

  “And they’ll have an easier time killing us if we get up and run,” Fernao said. But Affonso was right. If he didn’t want to be captured or slain in place, he’d have to run. And run he did, abandoning the rise far more quickly than he’d gone up it. Having won their victory, the Algarvians didn’t pursue hard. That was some consolation for Fernao, but not much. He knew too well that Mezentio’s men could come after the Lagoan army any time they chose.