Darkness Descending

by Harry Turtledove

  “I can’t bring him back,” Skarnu said once the sobs had ebbed to sniffles. The Algarvians had blazed Gedominu, as they’d blazed a good many other Valmieran hostages, to punish resistance against their occupying army. “I wish I could, but I can’t.”

  That was true, even if it meant Merkela would not be giving herself to him now. It might not have meant anything of the sort; what had smoldered between them might have caught fire even with Gedominu still limping around his farm. “He was a brave man.” That was also true. Skarnu would have said it even were it not, to honor the dead.

  “Aye, he was.” Merkela’s head came up. From grief, she swung quickly to rage. Tears still streaked her cheeks, but her eyes glittered with fury. “He was brave, and the redheads blazed him down like a dog. Powers above spurn them. Powers below eat them through all eternity.” Her voice held an incantatory quality, as if she truly had the power to make her curses bite deep. “They will pay. How they will pay.”

  “Aye.” Skarnu kept stroking her, gentling her, as if she were an unbroken unicorn. “They will pay. They are paying. You’re helping to make them pay.”

  Merkela nodded. The thought might have come from her own mind, not Skarnu’s. While Gedominu lived, she’d been content to wait at home and let him carry on the clandestine war against the redheads. After they executed him, she’d gone out on every raid Skarnu and his sergeant, Raunu, and the handful of stubborn local farmers and villagers had put on. Skarnu’s greatest fear was not that she would be unable to hold her own but that she would get herself killed from foolish eagerness to throw herself at the foe. It hadn’t happened yet. In time, he hoped, she would get her common sense back.

  “And you, Skarnu, you are a brave man,” she exclaimed, suddenly seeming to remember he was there even though she’d been lying mostly on top of him, her naked, sweaty flesh pressed tightly against his. “When they took him, you tried to go in his place.”

  Skarnu shrugged. She’d been watching them. He could think of no other reason why he’d offered himself to the Algarvians instead of Gedominu. Had they taken him, had they blazed him, would Merkela now be mourning him, naked in this bed with her old lame husband? Skarnu shrugged and shivered, both at the same time. No one could know such a thing--and just as well, too.

  He reached for her, to hold away what might have been. She was reaching for him, too, perhaps to hold away what had been. Only noblewomen in Valmiera were said to know what she knew and used to get him ready quickly. He’d learned before that what people said and what was so often had no connection to each other. Soon, she arched her hips to receive him. “Hurry,” she whispered, there in the darkness.

  When her pleasure came this time, she groaned as if it were pain. A moment later, Skarnu groaned, too, and spent himself. Merkela wept again, but only for a little while. Her breathing grew deep and slow. She drifted off to sleep without bothering to put on the loose tunic and trousers she wore at night.

  Getting into his own clothes was a matter of a moment for Skarnu. Merkela let him share her bed when they joined on it, but she would not let him sleep with her in the literal meaning of the words. He slipped down the stairs and out of the farmhouse, closing the door behind him. He’d grown very used to sleeping on straw in the barn. A mattress, by now, would probably feel too soft to be comfortable.

  “Hello, sir,” Raunu said quietly. Straw rustled under the veteran--Raunu had fought in the Six Years’ War--as he sat up.

  “Oh, hello, Sergeant,” Skarnu said in dull embarrassment. Raunu had kept him afloat when, thanks to his being a marquis, he’d taken command of a company in Valmiera’s failed war against Algarve. They’d stayed together after the formal fighting ended, too. Now, since he hadn’t been here, Raunu could hardly help knowing where he had been and what he’d been doing. “I didn’t mean to wake you.

  “You didn’t,” Raunu answered. “I was wakeful anyhow.” He didn’t say anything else for a little while after that. Skarnu could see his face but not make out its expression; the inside of the barn was darker even than Merkela’s bedchamber had been. At last, Raunu resumed: “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, sir?”

  “Sure?” Skarnu shook his head. “No, of course not. Only fools are sure they know what they’re doing, and they’re commonly wrong.”

  Raunu grunted. Skarnu needed a moment to realize that was intended for laughter. Raunu said, “All right, sir, fair enough. If she’d chosen to look at me, I don’t suppose I’d have looked away either.”

  “Ah.” Skarnu didn’t want to talk about it. He pulled off his boots. He’d also got used to sleeping in tunic and trousers, to keep the straw from poking him so badly. His yawn might have been a bit theatrical, but he thought it would serve.

  Here on the farm, though, sergeant and captain, commoner and noble, were far closer to equals than they had been in the tightly structured world of the army. Raunu did not back off. He said, “Did you know, sir, that Gedominu knew she’d started looking your way before the redheads hauled him off and blazed him?”

  That had to be answered. “No, I didn’t know,” Skarnu said slowly. “Nothing happened between us before then.” It was true. How long it would have kept on being true, he didn’t know. He’d started looking Merkela’s way, too. He’d started looking her way from the moment he met her.

  He wondered if she mourned Gedominu so extravagantly because she felt guilty about having turned her eye elsewhere before the Algarvians seized her husband. He doubted he would ever know. He could hardly come right out and ask.

  Raunu’s thoughts had traveled along their own ley line. “Aye, he knew,” the sergeant said. “It was always one thing after another, he said to me once--that was how he looked at the world. He was sure Algarve would go after Unkerlant next.

  With Forthweg and Sibiu and us and the Jelgavans down, Unkerlant was the next duck in a row.”

  Skarnu didn’t care about Gedominu’s theories. He yawned again, louder and more stagily than before, and lay down in the straw, which rustled as it compressed under his weight. He felt around till he found his blanket, then wrapped it around himself.

  “I hope everything turns out all right, sir, that’s all,” Raunu said, apparently resigned to the idea that he wouldn’t get many more answers from his superior.

  But Skarnu gave him one more after all: “Everything’s turned out fine so far, hasn’t it, Sergeant? Our armies will be in Trapani next week at the latest, and Gedominu should have a fine harvest come fall. Or have you heard something different?”

  “Well, I walked into that, didn’t I? I only wish we were in the Algarvians’ capital and not the other way round.” Raunu lay down, too; the straw rustled once more. The sergeant sighed and said, “I’ll see you in the morning, sir.”

  “Aye.” Now that Skarnu was off his feet, his yawn had nothing forced about it. He fell asleep almost as fast as Merkela had, up in her room.

  In the morning, he drew up a bucket of water from the well and splashed it over his face and hands. Raunu used some, too. Then they went into the farmhouse. Merkela fed them fried eggs and bread and butter and beer: all from the farm, nothing bought in town but the salt that went on the eggs.

  Thus fortified, they went out to tend the crops and the cattle and sheep, leaving Merkela behind to bake and wash clothes and weed the vegetable garden and feed the chickens. She and Gedominu had got a good enough living from the farm. Skarnu marveled at that. He and Raunu together had trouble doing as much as Gedominu had managed by himself.

  “Ah, but there’s a difference, sir,” Raunu said when Skarnu grumbled about it, which he did every now and then. “The old man had a lifetime to learn what he was doing. We’ve had not quite a year.”

  “Aye, I suppose so.” Skarnu glanced over toward the veteran. Raunu had had a lifetime to learn how to be a soldier . . . and then Skarnu, with a good deal less than not quite a year’s experience, had been set over him. I ought to count myself lucky he didn’t betray me to the Algarvians, the way so m
any Jelgavan soldiers did with their officers, he thought. Raunu might have been better off had he decided to turn traitor.

  Skarnu was weeding--somewhat more expertly than he had the year before, if not with Gedominu’s effortless skill--when a couple of Algarvians came riding along the path that ran by the fields. They dismounted not far away. One of them nailed a broadsheet to an oak tree. The other one kept him covered, which meant that, for most of the time he was busy, the fellow pointed his stick not quite straight at Skarnu. Once the broadsheet was in place, the Algarvians swung back up onto their unicorns and rode away.

  Only after they were out of sight did Skarnu amble over to see what the broadsheet said. In rather stilted Valmieran, it offered a reward for information leading to the capture of soldiers who had gone into hiding rather than surrendering, and a double reward for information leading to the capture of officers.

  He stood rocking back and forth on his heels, the picture of rustic indifference. Then, with a shrug more convincing than his yawns had been the night before, he went back to work. Maybe someone in the countryside knew what he and Raunu were and felt like turning a profit on his knowledge. Whether that was so or not mattered little at the moment; Skarnu couldn’t do anything about it. He could do the work. If he didn’t, no one would.

  When he and Raunu came in for their midday meal--big bowls of bean soup, with more beer to wash them down--he mentioned the broadsheet. Raunu shrugged. “Figures the redheads would try it sooner or later,” he said. “But not many people like ‘em well enough to talk with ‘em even for money.”

  “Someone will,” Merkela said. “Someone will want silver, or will remember an old quarrel with Gedominu or with me. There are always people like that.” She tossed her head to show what she thought of them, a gesture even Skarnu’s sister Krasta might have envied. Skarnu wondered how many of the people who’d had quarrels with Gedominu were jealous of him for taking such a woman to wife.

  He chuckled. He hadn’t imagined farmers might have feuds as serious and as foolish as those of the nobility. “Can you think of anyone in particular?” he asked Merkela. “Maybe someone needs to have an unfortunate accident.”

  Her eyes flashed. Skarnu would not have wanted that wolfish smile aimed at him. “Or even a fortunate one,” she said.

  Captain Hawart said, “Gather round, men.” Corporal Leudast and the other Unker-lanter survivors from his regiment obeyed. They might have filled out three full-strength companies. Hawart was the senior officer still alive. Colonel Roflanz hadn’t lived through the counterattack he’d stupidly ordered against the Algarvian invaders.

  Lieudast marveled that he himself was still breathing. The regiment had been encircled twice during the grinding retreat through Forthweg. Once, the men had slipped through the Algarvian lines a few at a time under cover of night. The other time, they’d had to fight their way clear--which was one reason so few of them gathered to listen to Captain Hawart.

  He pointed back toward the village in eastern Unkerlant through which they’d retreated the day before. The Algarvians held the place now, or what was left of it: a breeze from out of the east blew stale, sour smoke into Leudast’s nostrils. “Men, we have to retake Pfreimd,” Hawart said, “Once we do it, we can form a line along the western bank of the stream that runs by the other side of the town and have some chance of really stopping the redheads.”

  That stream was hardly more than a creek. Leudast hadn’t bothered looking for a ford before wading across it, and the water hadn’t come above his waist. He didn’t think it would prove much of an obstacle to the Algarvians. As a matter of fact, it hadn’t proved much of an obstacle to the Algarvians.

  “We’ll have reinforcements coming in behind us,” Hawart promised. “They’ll give us the men we need to make a proper stand on the river line.” It wasn’t a river. Not even in flood could it be a river. But the regimental commander had met Leudast’s most urgent concern.

  In any case, Hawart gave the orders. Leudast’s job was to obey them and see that the men in his squad did the same. He glanced over to Sergeant Magnulf. Magnulf shrugged, ever so slightly. He had to obey orders, too. After a moment, Leudast also shrugged. Going straight at the Algarvians was only slightly more perilous than falling back before them.

  “Let’s get moving,” Hawart said. “Advance in open order. Use whatever cover you can find. If you can manage it, Unkerlant needs you alive. But Unkerlant needs dead Algarvians even more. Come on.”

  “Open order,” Magnulf repeated. “Spread it out as wide as you can. We want to get into the village, we want to clear out the Algarvians, and we want to keep on advancing to the line of the stream. And Leudast here,” he added, pointing toward the corporal, “wants to keep the redheads as far away from his home village as he can.”

  “Aye, that’s so,” Leudast agreed. He turned his head to look westward. His village couldn’t have been more than twenty or thirty miles west of the battle line, though he was rather south of it, too. “Too many villages lost already.”

  “Well, let’s take one back,” Magnulf said.

  Leudast did his best to force fear to one side. He couldn’t keep from feeling it. As long as he kept from showing it, though, he could hold his head up among his comrades. Maybe they felt it, too. He hadn’t asked. Nobody’d asked him either.

  He trotted forward through fields of growing wheat that might never be harvested. He wished he were dressed in green, not rock-gray. How far forward had the Algarvians moved their outposts during the night? One way to find out was to get blazed by a redhead. Somebody was liable to find out that way. He hoped he wouldn’t be the one.

  Eggs started falling on the advancing troops. The Algarvians were demons for making their egg-tossers keep up with the rest of the army. Here, though, they were tossing a little long, so they did less harm than they might have.

  Before they could correct their aim, flashes of sorcerous energy came from inside Pfreimd. Leudast let out a glad, startled whoop, then turned it into words: “We’ve got egg-tossers of our own in the fight.” He shook his fist in the direction of the village. “How do you Algarvians like it, curse you?”

  He didn’t think the Algarvians liked it at all. Dishing it out was always easier than taking it. The eggs the Unkerlanters flung at the redheads must have put a couple of their tossers out of action, for the rain of eggs down onto the advancing Unkerlanter regiment slowed.

  Leudast waved men forward as he himself ran on. Maybe Captain Hawart hadn’t been trying to get what was left of the regiment killed after all. Familiar-looking thatch-roofed houses--some amazingly intact, others nothing but charred ruins--swelled in Leudast’s sight as he drew near them.

  “Unkerlant!” he yelled. “King Swemmel! Urra! Urra!”

  More Unkerlanter eggs fell on Pfreimd. They would make the Algarvians holed up in the village keep their heads down. With a little luck, that creek on the other side of Pfreimd would become the front line once more. A barricade of Algarvian corpses might keep the defenders safe.

  Troopers started blazing at the nearest houses, houses in which the redheads might be lurking. Where beams struck it, thatching began to smolder. So did some of the timbers. Before long, those houses would catch fire. The Algarvians would have to come forth or roast.

  In the meanwhile, though, they fought. Beams began cutting down the Unkerlanters advancing on the village. A near miss charred a line through the grass by Leudast’s feet. He threw himself down behind a rock that wasn’t really big enough to shield him and blazed back.

  After a moment to gather himself, he was up and running again. Then he was in among the houses of the village, and discovered that the Algarvians hadn’t merely taken cover in them. The redheads had also dug trenches and foxholes by the houses and in the village square. They resisted with everything they had, too, and seemed not in the least inclined to give up Pfreimd.

  Well, if they won’t, we’ll have to take it away from them, Leudast thought. He blazed at a redhead in
a hole. The fellow reeled back, clutching at himself.

  “Surrender!” an Unkerlanter officer shouted in Algarvian. That was a word Leudast had learned.

  “Mezentio!” was the only answer the officer got. The Algarvians intended to fight it out in the village. Captain Hawart had said reinforcements were coming to help the regiment he commanded these days. Leudast wondered if the redheads expected help from their friends, too.

  If they did, best to finish them now, before that help arrived. “Follow me!” Leudast shouted to his comrades and leaped down into the trenches. To his vast relief, the Unkerlanters he led did follow. Had they hung back, he wouldn’t have lasted long.

  As things were, he’d never found himself in such a vicious little fight. The Algarvians might have been used to overwhelming all the foes in their path, but they did not shy away from combat with the odds against them. Nor did they hang back from fighting at close quarters. Some of the work Leudast did was with his stick used as a club and with his knife: warfare as it had been in the days of the Kaunian Empire, and even before.

  The last few Algarvians threw down their sticks and surrendered. They looked as frightened as Leudast would have had he been trying to yield to them. “They aren’t nine feet tall and covered with spines after all,” he said to Magnulf.

  “No, so they’re not,” Magnulf agreed. He was tying a rag around his arm. Blood soaked through the wool; one of the Algarvians had had a knife, too. “Not too bad,” he told Leudast. “Should heal well enough--and that cursed redhead isn’t going to stick anybody else, believe you me he won’t.”

  “Good,” Leudast said. He thought he’d come through without a scratch till he discovered a cut on one leg. He had no idea when he’d got it. In the heat of battle, he hadn’t noticed it till now.