Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  But she couldn’t stand going back up to the flat. Defiantly, she threw open the door and walked down the stone steps to the sidewalk. No cries of “Cursed Kaunian!” rose from any of the people walking up and down the street. No one paid any attention to her at all. Hers had to be the most unnoticed defiance in the history of Forthweg.

  Vanai walked along, staring in wonder at buildings and pigeons and wagons and all the other things she’d had little chance to see close up lately. Seeing people who weren’t Ealstan up close felt strange, too. And seeing Forthwegians who didn’t react to her Kaunianity at all felt stranger than anything. As far as they could tell, she wasn’t a Kaunian.

  Two Algarvian constables came round a corner and headed straight toward her. She wanted to flee. She couldn’t. That would give the game away. She knew it, and made herself keep walking toward them. “Hello, sweetheart!” one of the redheads chirped in accented Forthwegian. Vanai stuck her nose in the air. Both constables laughed. Vanai kept walking. They didn’t bother her any more, as they surely would have bothered a Kaunian woman even before Kaunians were forced into their own tiny districts. And they’d told her she was at least passably pretty as a Forthwegian. She liked that.

  She didn’t stay out long, not on her first foray into Eoforwic. She still wasn’t sure how long she could rely on the spell—and leaving the flat and going through the city threatened to overwhelm her. At first, she felt a pang of regret at returning to confinement, but it didn’t last long. I can go out again, she thought, looking at the words of the spell she’d adapted from the useless version in You Too Can Be a Mage.

  Then she looked at the paper again, this time in a different way. Her eyes went big and round. She’d adapted the spell thinking of herself, no one else. That was selfish, but selfishness had its place, too; without it, she wouldn’t have started trying to fix the spell at all. Since she had . . .

  She found another leaf of paper, and copied the spell onto it. She also wrote out instructions for the passes to make, for using the lengths of yarn, and on what she knew about how long the spell could disguise a Kaunian. When Ealstan got home that evening, she told him what she’d done and what she had in mind doing. He thought it over, then said, “That would be wonderful—if you can find a safe way to do it.”

  “I have one,” Vanai said. I hope I have one. But she wouldn’t let Ealstan hear anything but confidence in her voice.

  He raised an eyebrow even so. Vanai nodded emphatically. “Are you sure?” he asked. She nodded again. He studied her, then nodded himself. “All right. May it do some good, by the powers above.”

  Vanai cast the spell again the next morning and, cloaked in her sorcerous disguise, went to the apothecary’s shop where she’d bought medicines when Ealstan was so sick. The Forthwegian behind the counter had given her what she needed even though she was a Kaunian. Now she handed him the spell and the commentary she’d written and asked, “Can you get this into the Kaunian quarter?”

  “Depends on what it is,” the apothecary answered, and began to read. Halfway through, his head came up sharply and he stared at her. She looked back. He couldn’t have known her face. Did he recognize her voice? He’d heard it only once. He finished reading, then folded the paper in half. “I’ll take care of it,” he promised, in perfect classical Kaunian.

  “Good,” Vanai said, and left. Another pair of Algarvian constables leered at her as she headed back to the flat. Because she looked like a Forthwegian, they did nothing but leer. If a lot of Kaunians suddenly started looking like Forthwegians . . . Vanai walked on, a wide, joyous smile on her face. She didn’t think she could have hurt the redheads more if she’d grabbed a stick and started blazing at them.

  Fourteen

  Leudast crouched in the ruins of the great ironworks near Sulingen’s port on the Wolter. He and his countrymen held only the eastern part of the ironworks now; the Algarvians had finally managed to gain a lodgment inside the building. One forge, one anvil at a time, they were clearing the Unkerlanters from it.

  “What do we do, Sergeant?” one of his troopers called to him.

  “Hang on as long as we can,” Leudast answered. “Make the redheads pay as high a price as we can for getting rid of us.”

  He coughed. The air was full of smoke. It was also full of the twin stenches of burnt and rotting flesh. When he looked up, he could see the sky almost unhindered by roof beams. Eggs dropped by dragons and lobbed from tossers had left only a few bits of ceiling intact. He wondered why they hadn’t fallen in, too.

  He sprawled behind a forge. Chunks of chain mail still lay on the anvil nearby. The Unkerlanter smith had kept working as long as he could. Dark stains on the floor argued that he’d kept working too long for his own good.

  Ever so cautiously, Leudast peered westward over the top of the forge. He didn’t see anything moving in the eyeblink of time before he ducked back down again. The Algarvians were every bit as careful hereabouts as were his own countrymen. Fighting in a place like this, even the most wary soldiers died in droves. The ones who weren’t wary died even faster.

  “Leudast!” someone called from behind him.

  “Aye, Captain Hawart?” Leudast didn’t turn his head. Watching what was in front and to either side of him mattered. If he looked to the rear, bad things were liable to happen before he could look back.

  “I’m coming up,” Hawart said. Leudast blazed a couple of times, almost at random, to let the officer scramble up beside him in back of the solid brickwork of the forge.

  “What now, sir?” Leudast asked. Once again, the regiment Hawart was commanding had shrunk to a company’s worth of men, while Leudast’s nominal company was only a little bigger than the usual squad. They’d been brought up to strength since falling back into Sulingen—been brought up to strength and then seen that strength melt away like snowdrifts when the warm north winds started to blow.

  “We’re going to let them have this building, Sergeant,” Hawart answered. “Holding on to even a piece of it is just costing us too dear.”

  “But what about the piers, sir?” Leudast asked in no small alarm. “How are we going to get more men up into Sulingen? If we lose the ironworks here, we can’t hold the piers, and if we can’t hold the piers. . . .” He shuddered. “If we hadn’t been able to bring in those three brigades a few nights ago, we would have lost the city by now.”

  Hawart nodded. “I know all that, believe me I do. By now, we’ve lost most of the men in those brigades instead. A lot of them went in here, and you know what’s happened to this place. And the rest, or most of the rest, went into the granary, and the Algarvians hold it, or what’s left of it. Those brigades probably saved Sulingen, but they wrecked themselves doing it.”

  “Wrecked plenty of Algarvians, too, by the powers above,” Leudast said savagely. Captain Hawart nodded again. Leudast repeated the question the officer hadn’t answered before: “If we give up the ironworks, if we’ve lost the granary, if we lose the piers, too—how do we bring in reinforcements?”

  “They’ve run up more piers farther east, in the districts we do control,” Hawart said. “We’ll have to hang on to those. But we can’t hold these any more. Some prices are too high to pay.”

  As if to underscore that, the Algarvians started tossing eggs into the ironworks from the west. Leudast and Hawart huddled side by side. Fragments of the eggs shells hissed through the air with malignant whines. So did bricks and boards and chunks of iron hurled by the blasts of sorcerous energy. Here and there, wounded Unkerlanters shrieked. Here and there, wounded Algarvians shrieked, too. The fighting was at quarters too close for either side to toss eggs without hurting some of its own soldiers. That didn’t stop the redheads, and it didn’t stop the Unkerlanters, either.

  Even while the eggs were still falling, Leudast and Hawart looked around opposite ends of the forge. Sure enough, the Algarvians were moving forward, taking their chances on being hurt by their own side while the Unkerlanters had to keep their heads down. The
redheads were brave. Leudast had seen as much, many times. They were also clever. He’d seen that, too. This time, they were too clever for their own good. He blazed down three of them, one after another.

  “Got you, you son of a whore!” Hawart exclaimed, which argued his luck was also good. Leudast blazed again. An Algarvian screamed. Leudast nodded, well pleased with himself.

  But his pleasure evaporated when Hawart started shouting orders for the withdrawal from the ironworks. The Unkerlanters knew how to conduct retreats. We’d better, Leudast thought bitterly. We’ve had enough practice. They did it by odd and even numbers, the same way they conducted advances. Half stayed behind and blazed while the rest slipped away to new positions. Then the first group fell back past the second while the second covered then withdrawal. The redheads could move forward only slowly and cautiously.

  “We’re clear,” Leudast said when he left the ruins of the iron manufactory and came out into the ruins of the rest of Sulingen. He stayed in the open not an instant longer than he had to, but dove into the first hole in the ground he saw.

  Most of his countrymen did the same thing. One trooper, though, crumpled and fell to the ground, stick slipping from hands that could hold it no more. There was a neat hole in the side of his head, just above and in front of his left ear.

  “Cursed sniper!” cried one of the Unkerlanters hiding in the wreckage of what had been a block of ironworkers’ cottages. “That whoreson hides like a viper, and he’s got eyes like an eagle. He’s picked off a couple of dozen of us, maybe more, the past few weeks.”

  “Bugger him,” Leudast said. “Bugger him with a straight razor.” No matter how fiercely he spoke, though, he made sure he didn’t expose any part of his person to the Algarvian sniper.

  “We ought to bring in a sniper of our own and get rid of him,” Captain Hawart said.

  “I hate snipers, theirs and ours, too,” Leudast said. “They aren’t going to change the way the battle goes. All they’re good for is blazing some poor fool who’s squatting somewhere taking a dump. Powers below eat the lot of them.”

  “Powers below eat the Algarvians,” Hawart answered. “Can you see the granary without getting killed doing it?”

  “I think so.” Leudast wriggled around in his hole. Sure enough, he could make out the top of the tall, strong brick building—and the Algarvian banner lazily flapping above it. Leudast cursed. Before long, those red, green, and white stripes would be flying above the ruins of the ironworks, too.

  He trained his stick on the battered manufactory, ready to punish the first of Mezentio’s men who pursued the retreating Unkerlanters. But the Algarvians proved too battlewise for that. Instead of charging straight into the meat grinder, they used their egg-tossers again, to make the Unkerlanters stay down. And their footsoldiers came at the Unkerlanter defenders not straight out of the manufactory but in a pincer movement from north and south of it.

  Some of the redheads yelled “Mezentio!” and “Algarve!” Others cried, “Sibiu!” Leudast had seen that the enemy soldier soldiers who raised that shout were uncommonly ferocious. If they got in among his comrades, bad things happened. He turned to blaze at them—and never saw the Algarvian who blazed him.

  The beam went straight through his left calf. He did what he’d seen and heard so many other soldiers do—he screamed in pain and clutched at himself, everything else forgotten. A moment later, one of his comrades blazed the redhead, who also screamed. Leudast heard him, but only distantly. His hurt filled the world.

  He tried to put weight on the wounded leg, and found he couldn’t. When he looked down, he saw two neat holes in his calf, each about as thick as his middle finger. Some stick wounds were self-cauterizing. Not this one: blood ran down his leg from each hole and began to pool in his boot. He fumbled for the length of bandage he carried in a pouch on his belt. His fingers didn’t want to obey him. He found he did better when he didn’t look at his leg. Even after so much horror on so many battlefields, the sight of his own blood left him queasy.

  Somebody shouted, “The sergeant’s been blazed!”

  “Can you move, Sergeant?” somebody else asked.

  “I can crawl,” Leudast answered. He gulped. That white bandage was turning red fast. And binding up the wound didn’t make the pain go away. If anything, he hurt worse than ever. He tasted blood in his mouth, too; he must have bitten down on the inside of his lip or cheek without even noticing.

  “Here, Sergeant. I’ll get you away.” That was Aldrian, stooping beside him. “Can you get your arm over my shoulder?” Leudast wasn’t sure he could. When he tried, he managed. “Go on one leg if you can, Sergeant,” the youngster told him. Leudast tried. He wasn’t sure whether his awkward hops did more good than harm, but Aldrian didn’t complain, so he kept hopping.

  They hadn’t got more than a couple of furlongs from the actual fighting line before a grim-faced inspector popped out of a hole in the ground and aimed his stick at both of them. “Show blood,” he said curtly. He looked ready, even eager, to blaze. If neither of them could show a wound, he’d kill them both for cowards.

  But Leudast used his free hand to point to the bloody bandage on his leg. With a grudging nod, the inspector gestured with his stick, waving the two soldiers on. Eggs fell around them moments later. Aldrian tried to hold Leudast up as they both dove for cover, but Leudast banged his calf anyhow. Fresh fire ran through it. He howled like a lovesick hound. He could no more have kept himself from howling than he could have kept his heart from beating.

  After a journey that seemed endless but was surely less than a mile, they came to one of the gullies than ran down toward the Wolter. Fresh troops were coming up out of the gully and heading for the battle line. Other men—physicians’ orderlies—took charge of Leudast from Aldrian.

  “How bad is it?” one of them asked him.

  He glared at the fellow. “I died last week,” he snapped.

  That startled a laugh out of the orderly, who gave the wound a quick examination and delivered his verdict: “They can patch you up. We’ll get you down to the river, then sneak you over tonight, I expect. You’ll be back at it.” Had the orderly judged Leudast wouldn’t be back at it soon, he got the feeling they would have cut his throat so they wouldn’t have to bother with him.

  As things were, they got him through the gully, moving against the stream of men coming up from the river. Algarvian dragons dropped eggs on the gully while they were in it. Most burst to either side, but a couple gave the redheads gruesome successes. Overhanging cliffs hid the spot where the orderlies laid Leudast from Algarvian attention. He had plenty of wounded soldiers for company.

  “You’ll go over tonight,” one of the orderlies repeated. Somewhat to his own surprise, he did. As the boat carried him south across the Wolter, he realized it was the first time since the war with Algarve began that he’d been taken away from the fighting, not toward it. That was almost worth getting wounded for. Almost—the pain in his leg said nothing could really be worth it.

  Traku gave Talsu a severe look. “Hold still, curse it,” the tailor told his son. “If you were a wee bit smaller—just a wee bit, mind you—I’d box your ears but good. How can I measure you for your wedding suit if you keep fidgeting like you’ve got a flock of fleas in your drawers?”

  “I’m sorry,” Talsu answered, more or less sincerely. “Weren’t you nervous before you married Mother?”

  “Oh, maybe a little,” Traku said. “Aye, maybe just a little. I expect that’s why your grandfather said he’d box my ears for me if I didn’t hold still.”

  Talsu’s eyes went to the bolt of dark blue velvet that lay on the counter. “Seems a shame to put so much effort and so much money into an outfit I won’t wear much,” he said.

  “Powers above, I hope you don’t want to be the kind of fellow who puts on a wedding suit five or six times over the course of his life, and each one with a different girl,” Traku said. “Some of our nobles are like that—reach out and grab for anyt
hing that looks good to them. Algarvians are like that, too, except most of the time they don’t even bother getting married, from what I’ve heard.”

  “By their own faithlessness they condemn themselves,” Talsu said, one of the classical Kaunian sentences he’d studied the week before. His father raised an inquiring eyebrow. He translated the sentence into modern Jelgavan.

  “Sounds fancier in the old language, I will say,” Traku observed. “I think that’s what the old language is mostly good for—sounding fancy, I mean.” He turned brisk again. “You’ll wear your outer tunic unbuttoned, of course. And you’ll want a fine pleated shirtfront, right?”

  “You’ll work yourself ragged, Father,” Talsu protested; Traku had refused to let him help prepare his wedding outfit in any way.

  And Traku shook his head now. “No, I won’t. I’ll use the spells that Algarvian military mage gave us. That’ll cut the work in half, maybe more, all by itself. That fellow might have been a redheaded son of a whore, but he knew what he was talking about. Can’t argue that.”

  “I wish we could,” said Talsu, who wanted as little to do with the occupiers of Skrunda as he could arrange. He changed the subject: “Do you know what Gailisa will be wearing?”

  “Haven’t the faintest idea,” her father answered at once. “I didn’t get her business, because you’d’ve found out before the day was done if I did. Whatever it turns out to be, I expect it’ll be pretty, on account of your sweetheart’ll be in it.”

  “It’d be prettier if you made it,” Talsu said. “Everybody knows you’re the best in Skrunda.” Even the Algarvians knew that much, but Talsu wanted to think about the occupiers as little as he could, too.

  His father said, “I thank you kindly, that I do. But Gailisa will look just fine, and you know it.” Traku turned his head so he could glance up the stairs. He evidently decided neither Ausra nor Laitsina was within earshot, for he lowered his voice and added, “Besides, you know what a bride’s proper outfit on her wedding day is.”