Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  That made him think of something else. He stuck up his hand. “May I say a word, sir?”

  Recared didn’t look happy at the idea of anyone else talking, but nodded. “Go ahead, Sergeant.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Leudast turned to the waiting soldiers. “Remember, boys, what we’ve got in front of us isn’t Algarvians. We have a big kingdom here, and they’re stretched too thin to hold all the line themselves. It’ll be Yaninans and whatever other odds and sods they can scrape up. I’ve fought those buggers, and I’ve fought the Algarvians, too. Give me Yaninans any day.”

  The soldiers who’d gone against King Tsavellas’ men nodded and began telling their friends what cowards the Yaninans were. Recared slapped Leudast on the shoulder. “That was well said,” he told him. A moment later, the lieutenant turned and looked back over his shoulder. He pointed to a tiny gleam seen for a moment through clouds. “The sun!” he cried.

  Leudast wasn’t sure it really was the sun, but officers higher than Recared must have thought so, too. Egg-tossers began hurling death at the Yaninans huddled in their tents and holes and trenches. Leudast’s eyebrows flew up at the number of eggs bursting on the enemy. Neither his own folk nor the Algarvians had managed to put so many tossers on one narrow stretch of line very often.

  Dragons painted rock-gray flew low overhead. Some had eggs slung beneath their bellies. Others flew unburdened, to protect their comrades and to flame the luckless Yaninans. Leudast took off his fur hat and waved it at the dragonfliers. Every enemy soldier they and the egg-tossers killed or wounded was an enemy who couldn’t kill or wound him.

  Chainmail clattering with every great stride they took, behemoths lumbered forward. Leudast waved his hat at their crews, too. He knew his countrymen had been gathering them, as Lieutenant Recared had said. As with the egg-tossers, he hadn’t known so many had made their way here. But then, he hadn’t been here very long himself.

  Recared proved himself an officer by blowing a long, piercing blast on the whistle he wore round his neck. “Forward!” he shouted.

  “Forward!” Leudast echoed. He had no whistle, but he’d long since got used to doing without. “King Swemmel! Urra!”

  “Urra!” the Unkerlanter soldiers echoed as they swarmed out of their trenches. “Swemmel! Urra!”

  Some men linked arms with their comrades and charged on together, doing their best to keep up with the behemoths. What had been the Yaninan lines were now a smoking, cratered jumble. After the pounding they’d taken, Leudast couldn’t see how anything could remain alive in them.

  But his countrymen started falling—not in enormous numbers, as happened when an attack went wrong, but here and there, now one, now another. Egg-tossers on the behemoths pounded positions where the Yaninans held out in some strength. Footsoldiers overran the rest.

  “Urra!” Leudast roared, and jumped down into a battered trench. He landed on a dead Yaninan, noticing only because he didn’t hit the ground so hard as he thought he would. A moment later, a live Yaninan came out of a hole, his hands high, terror twisting his face. Leudast took what food he had—black bread and moldy sausage—and let him live. “Urra!” he shouted again, and ran on.

  Every so often—almost surely in the places where they had good officers—the Yaninans fought hard. But Tsavellas’ men had next to no behemoths, and few heavy sticks that might penetrate the armor the Unkerlanter beasts wore. Few enemy dragons flew, either.

  Leudast looked around a little past noon and was astonished at how far he’d come. Recared had come all that way, too. “It’s a rout, sir!” Leudast exclaimed. He sounded drunk, but he hadn’t had enough spirits in his water bottle to get him high. This is what victory feels like, he thought dazedly.

  He’d fought Yaninans before. He’d beaten them before. But that had been only a skirmish, and part of the Unkerlanter army’s long retreat to Sulingen. His comrades and he weren’t retreating any more. They were moving forward, and the Yaninans could not stand in their way.

  King Tsavellas’ men fought more bravely now than they had then. They kept trying to hold back the Unkerlanter flood, and they forced pauses—but never for long. Behemoths and dragons and eggs raining down from fast-moving tossers soon overwhelmed them. It was, Leudast thought, the way the Algarvians had won so many victories against his own countrymen. Curse me if our officers haven’t learned something after all.

  But, especially after their first lines were breached, most of the Yaninans either ran away or threw down their sticks and threw up their hands. They went into captivity with smiles on their faces—relieved smiles at still being alive or sheepish smiles at being captured in a kingdom that didn’t belong to them.

  “Not my war,” one of them said in oddly accented Unkerlanter as he surrendered to Leudast. “Algarve’s war.” He spat on the dirt. “This for Algarve.”

  “Aye, that for Algarve.” Leudast spat, too. “So what were you doing fighting for the redheads, then?”

  “I no fight, they blaze me,” the Yaninan answered. To Unkerlanter eyes, he was a sorry, scrawny little man, with a mustache too big for his face. He shrugged and shivered. “I fight. Till now.”

  “Go on.” Leudast pointed back toward the east. Lots of scrawny little Yaninans were shambling off into captivity. They held their hands high to keep King Swemmel’s advancing soldiers from blazing them.

  Leudast knew a certain amount of sympathy for the Yaninan. He hadn’t wanted to go into the Unkerlanter army, either. When the impressers grabbed him, though, he’d had no choice. King Swemmel’s servants might not have been so gentle as just to blaze him had he tried to tell them no.

  That night, he and Lieutenant Recared and half a dozen soldiers crowded into an abandoned peasant hut. Recared was jubilant. “We have them on the run, by the powers above,” he said. “They can’t hold us back. Once we broke through this morning, we sealed their fate.”

  “Aye, so far, so good,” Leudast agreed, rubbing his leg. It ached; he hadn’t expected to use it so hard. He wished he could rest it come tomorrow. But he’d be marching just as hard then, and he knew it. He also didn’t want Recared making too much of what the army had accomplished. “You have to remember, these are only Yaninans. It’ll be a lot tougher when we have to deal with the redheads.”

  Most of the men in the hut had seen more action than Recared. Several of them nodded. But Recared said, “Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter. Aye, the Algarvians are tough, but there aren’t enough of them to go around. If we break through these weak sisters, we can cement our positions and make the Algarvians try to bang their way out of Sulingen against us.”

  Leudast didn’t like the prospect of Algarvians trying to bang their way out of anywhere, especially not if they were going to try to do it through a position he was holding. They’d already pulled off too many astounding and appalling things. Why wouldn’t they be able to manage one more?

  But no sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a possible answer occurred to him. Thoughtfully, he said, “There’s already snow on the ground. Mezentio’s men don’t do so well in snow.”

  He didn’t love snow himself. But if he wasn’t better in it than any Algarvian ever born, what good was he? He rolled himself in his blanket, huddled up against the rest of the Unkerlanters in the tumbledown shack, and slept, if not well, then well enough.

  Recared roused the soldiers before sunup. “We go hard today,” he said. “We go as hard tomorrow. Then, with luck, the next day—we win glory for our king. This is the most efficient attack we’ve ever carried out.”

  There Leudast could hardly argue with him. Most of what he ate for breakfast was what he’d stolen from Yaninans. That was efficient, too. He wiped his hands on his tunic, left the hut, and tramped east.

  Till noon, or a little after, everything went as it had the day before. Scattered and stubborn regiments of Yaninans fought hard. Their countrymen went right on giving up by the hundreds, by the thousands. Then the first Algarvian dragons appeared overhead. S
ome of them dropped eggs on the Unkerlanters. Others attacked their footsoldiers and, wherever they could, their behemoths.

  Staring at the burnt carcass of a behemoth roasted in its own chainmail, Leudast cursed. “I knew we weren’t going to have it all our own way,” he told the cloudy sky.

  He waited for Algarvian footsoldiers to stiffen the Yaninans, too. But no redheads came to the rescue of King Tsavellas’ men. And there were more Unkerlanter dragons in the air than those belonging to their enemies. The Algarvian dragonfliers stung the Unkerlanter army in a few places. Without steady soldiers on the ground to back them up, they could do no more than sting.

  Recared had guessed four or five days. He was young. He believed things always went just as planned. That made him overoptimistic. But, just over a week after the Unkerlanters started their push, Leudast saw men coming toward him who did not shy away as the Yaninans did. They were solid, blocky men in long tunics, men who shouted in delight when they saw him.

  He folded one of them into a bear hug. “By the powers above, we’ve got the redheads in a sack!” he shouted, and tears of joy streamed down his grimy, unshaven cheeks.

  “Step it up, there!” Sergeant Werferth shouted. “It’s not a game, you lugs. We don’t get to start over. Move, curse you all!”

  Sidroc did some cursing of his own. He was cold and tired and hungry. He wanted to hole up somewhere with a bottle of brandy and a roast goose.. He hadn’t fully realized when he joined Plegmund’s Brigade that there was no such thing as time off. When the underofficers and officers set over him told him to do something, he had to do it. He’d already seen the sorts of things that happened to men who didn’t do as they were told. He wasn’t interested in having any of those things happen to him.

  He scratched. He itched, too. He itched everywhere. When he complained about it, the trooper nearest him, the ruffian named Ceorl, started to laugh. “You’re a lousy whoreson, just like the rest of us.”

  He meant it literally. Sidroc needed a moment to realize that. When he did, he started cursing all over again. He’d grown up in a prosperous household in Gromheort. Lice were for filthy people, for poor people, not for the likes of him.

  But he was filthy. He could hardly help being filthy. When he slept indoors at all, he slept in huts that had belonged to filthy Unkerlanter peasants. If they had lice—and they likely did—how could he help getting them? For that matter, he was poor. Nobody got rich on the pay in Plegmund’s Brigade.

  “Come on!” Werferth shouted again, with profane embellishment. “Swemmel’s bastards went and gave Algarve a boot in the nuts, and now it’s up to us to pay ’em back. And we’ll do it, too, right?”

  “I’m going to pay somebody back for making me slog through this miserable, freezing country,” Sidroc growled.

  Ceorl laughed again, even less pleasantly than before. “You think it’s cold now, wait a couple months. Your joint’ll freeze off when you whip it out to take a leak.”

  “Powers below eat you, too.” But Sidroc made sure he spoke lightly. Ceorl was not a man to curse in earnest unless you intended to back up the words with fists or knife or stick.

  An Algarvian captain swaggered along, looking altogether superior to the Forthwegians around him. Sidroc didn’t think he was lousy; no lice would have dared crawl through that perfectly combed coppery hair. But even the officer looked worried. As Werferth had said, the Unkerlanters had hit Algarve where it hurt.

  “Up to us to save their bacon, boys,” the sergeant said. “But it’s our bacon, too. That army in Sulingen goes up in flames, we burn with it.”

  Where nothing else had, that got Sidroc’s attention. He didn’t want to die anywhere. He especially didn’t want to die here in the chilly wastes of southern Unkerlant. “I see how Swemmel’s men got to be such whoresons,” he said to Ceorl. “If I lived in this miserable place, I’d be mean, too.”

  The ruffian laughed, the smoke from his breath puffing out as he did. “I’m from Forthweg, by the powers above, and I’m the meanest whoreson around. Anybody who says different, I’ll deal with him.”

  “Shut up, Ceorl,” Werferth said. “You want to be a mean son of a whore, take it out on the Unkerlanters, not on my ears.”

  Ceorl scowled at him. But Werferth was not only a tough customer himself, he was also a sergeant. If Ceorl tangled with him, he didn’t tangle with him alone, but also with the entire structure of Plegmund’s Brigade—and ultimately with the Algarvian army, to which the brigade was attached.

  “Keep your eyes open. Ears, too,” Werferth added. “We’re liable to run into irregulars—and we’re liable to run into real Unkerlanter soldiers, to boot. Since they came swarming out at us, powers above only know where they’re all at right now.”

  Sidroc’s head swiveled now to one side, now to the other. All he saw were snow-covered fields. By the way his sergeant and the Algarvian officers had warned the brigade, those fields might hold thousands of bloodthirsty Unkerlanters in white smocks, every one of them ready to spring to his feet and charge with a roar of “Urra!”

  They might. Sidroc didn’t believe it, not for a minute. The fields were just fields, the bare-branched woods farther away just woods. He didn’t see any Unkerlanters anywhere. Nobody rose up out of the fields with fierce shouts of “Urra!”—or with any other shouts, for that matter. The countryside, having been fought over, was as empty and dead as it looked.

  And that suited him. Like most soldiers, he was no more anxious to fight than he had to be. He’d enjoyed terrorizing peasant villages back in the Duchy—no, the Kingdom—of Grelz. That was about his speed. He would have been perfectly happy to go right on doing it. But the Unkerlanters had pissed in the stewpot of the Algarvian campaign, and so here he was, soldiering for real.

  “Dragons!” someone exclaimed in alarm, pointing south.

  Sidroc stared that way in no small alarm himself, but only for an instant. The next thing he did was look around for a hole into which he might dive. He wasn’t thrilled with real soldiering, but he’d learned what mattered.

  “They’re ours,” Werferth said in some relief.

  Ceorl challenged him: “How do you know?” He might not want to brawl with the sergeant, but he didn’t mind giving him a hard time.

  But Werferth had an answer for him: “Because they’re turning away from us instead of dropping eggs on our heads.”

  Thin and faint in the distance, several eggs burst, one after another. Sidroc laughed. “No, they’re dropping ’em on the Unkerlanters instead. Those bastards deserve it. I hope they all get smashed to bits.”

  “They won’t.” Sergeant Werferth spoke with gloomy certainty. “And it’ll be up to the likes of us to stop the ones who’re left. You can count on that, too.” Now he pointed south. “Wherever those eggs are bursting, that’s where Swemmel’s men are at. If we can hear the eggs, they aren’t that far away. You want to go home to mother in one piece, stay awake.”

  Going home to mother was not a choice Sidroc had. An Algarvian egg had taken care of that, back when the redheads overran Gromheort. And here he was, doing his best to get the Algarvians out of the soup. He shook his head as he trudged along. He’d watched Mezentio’s men ever since they entered his kingdom. They were strong. They had style. They’d smashed Forthweg into the dust. By joining them, didn’t he make himself strong and stylish?

  What he’d made himself so far was cold and nervous. He trudged up to the top of a low rise and got the chance to do some pointing himself. “Isn’t that a village up ahead, here on this side of the stream?”

  “That is a village.” An Algarvian officer behind him had heard his question, and chose to answer it. He spoke his own language, expecting Sidroc to understand. “The name of the village is Presseck. The stream is also the Presseck. There is a bridge over the Presseck in the village. We will occupy the village. We will hold the bridge. We will keep the Unkerlanters from crossing it.”

  “Aye, sir,” Sidroc said. The redheads liked polite so
ldiers. They had plenty of ways to make you sorry if you weren’t polite, too. Sidroc had learned that back in his first training camp, outside of Eoforwic.

  A few Unkerlanter peasants—old men and boys—came out of their huts to gape at the troopers from Plegmund’s Brigade. Their women stayed in hiding, or maybe they’d run away. Presseck looked to be as miserable a place as any other Unkerlanter village Sidroc had seen. The Presseck, however, was more nearly a river than a stream, and the bridge that spanned it a solid stone structure.

  Sergeant Werferth pointed to that bridge. “You see why we may have to hold this place, boys. The Unkerlanters could put behemoths over it easy as you please, and we wouldn’t have a whole lot of fun if they did.”

  Along with his comrades—except for the two squads the Algarvian officers ordered across to the south side of the Presseck—Sidroc ransacked the village. The women had fled. There wasn’t much food in Presseck, either. By the time the soldiers finished, there was less.

  Mist rose from the stream as the sun set and day cooled toward evening. It spread through the village, turning the shacks into vague ghosts of themselves. “Stay alert,” Werferth told his squad. “Anybody the Unkerlanters kill, he’ll answer to me.” The troopers had to work that one through before they chuckled or snorted.

  Sidroc drew sentry duty just before dawn. He paced the narrow, filthy streets of Presseck, wishing he could see farther through the fog. Once he almost blazed one of his own countrymen who’d taken on too much in the way of spirits and was looking for a place to heave.

  It got lighter, little by little, without clearing much. Sidroc was beginning to think about breakfast and maybe even a little sleep when, from the south, he heard heavy footfalls and the jingle of chainmail. “Behemoths!” he exclaimed, and ran toward the bridge. He couldn’t see a thing, though.