Darkness Descending

by Harry Turtledove

  When he stood panting by Merkela again, she kissed him as ferociously as she had when he’d shouted against Simanu in Pavilosta’s market square. “Let’s get out of here,” he said when, after some long and mostly enjoyable time, he broke free. She didn’t argue with him. Neither did any of the other raiders--he’d won his spurs today. But even as he fled, he wondered what the Algarvians would do tomorrow, or the day after that.

  Officially, Leudast remained a corporal. No one had bothered with the paperwork that would have promoted him. Unkerlant had neither time nor energy to spare on paperwork these days. Unkerlant had neither time nor energy to spare for anything save survival, and even survival looked to be too much to hope for.

  Unofficially, Leudast led a couple of squads in the company Sergeant Magnulf just as unofficially commanded. Captain Hawart headed the regiment of which that company was a part. None of them had the rank for his job. They were all still alive and still fighting back against the Algarvians--a less formal qualification, but good enough.

  Cold, wet, filthy, and frightened, Leudast peered east out of the hole in the ground he shared with Magnulf. One thought was uppermost in his mind: “When are they going to do it again?”

  “Curse me if I know,” Magnulf answered wearily. He looked as worn and disheveled as Leudast felt. Spitting into the mud at the bottom of the hole, he went on, “I could fight the redheads. Aye, they kept coming forward, but they paid for every inch of ground they stole from us. But this . . .” He shook his head, a man caught in the grip of horror.

  “This,” Leudast echoed. He shook his head, too. “And what are we doing to fight back? We keep bringing up more men, but so what? The Algarvians murder another raft of poor whoresons who never did ‘em any harm, and they smash right through us again.” He looked over his shoulder, toward the southwest. “If they smash through us two or three times more, they’re in Cottbus, and what do we do then?”

  He only half heard Magnulf s reply; he’d spotted a soldier trudging through the pitted muck toward them. The fellow called, “Captain Hawart’s coming up to the front, and he’s got some big blaze with him.”

  Leudast glanced over at Magnulf, who still outranked him. With an angry gesture, Magnulf said, “Aye, tell ‘em to come ahead. We’ll give ‘em pheasant under glass, just like we’re having, and they can sleep on the same featherbeds we use.”

  With a couple of chunks of stale, moldy bread in his wallet and a grimy blanket for a mattress, Leudast couldn’t help snickering. The soldier shrugged and trotted away. He’d delivered his message. Past that, he didn’t care what happened.

  In a lazy sort of way, the Algarvians started lobbing eggs at the line the Unkerlanters held. A couple landed close enough to the hole in which Leudast and Magnulf sheltered to splash fresh mud onto them. “The captain would come forward in this,” Leudast said, “but any big blaze’d turn up his toes--or else pick ‘em up and run away.” He paused, considered, and corrected himself: “Any big blaze but Marshal Rathar. He was right there in the thick of it up in Zuwayza.”

  “He’s not afraid to mix it,” Magnulf agreed. Now he looked back toward the rear, and a moment later let out a low whistle of surprise. “Turns out you’re wrong. Here comes the captain, and he’s got somebody in a clean tunic with him.”

  Hawart got down into the hole with Leudast and Magnulf without hesitation; he knew it could keep him alive. The fellow with him, a clever-looking man of middle years, got into it with wrinkled lip, as if fearing his tunic wouldn’t stay clean.

  “Sir,” Hawart said to him, “let me present to you Magnulf and Leudast. They’ve been in this fight from the start, and they want to stay in it to the finish. Boys, this is Archmage Addanz, the top wizard in the whole kingdom.”

  “King Swemmel has seen fit to honor me with the highest rank,” Addanz said. “Whether I have the highest skill in all the land may perhaps be a different question.”

  Leudast wasn’t inclined to quibble. “Then you can stop the Algarvians when they hurl their magic at us?” he asked eagerly.

  “That’d be wonderful,” Magnulf exclaimed. “Let us fight the redheads man against man, and we’ll lick ‘em.” The Unkerlanters hadn’t licked King Mezentio’s men even before they started using their blood-soaked magecraft, but they’d fought hard enough to lend Magnulf’s words some weight.

  One look at Addanz’s face told Leudast his first wild hope was indeed too wild. “You can’t do it,” he said. He didn’t mean it to sound like an accusation, but that was how it came out.

  “I cannot do it, not yet,” the archmage said. “I do not know if I will ever be able to do such a thing. What I can do, what I hope to do now, is to drop an egg on them of the same sort as they have been dropping on us.”

  “What do you--?” Leudast broke off. He didn’t need to have Addanz draw him a picture. Like anyone else who’d grown up in an Unkerlanter peasant village, he knew how hard life could be. He asked only one question: “Will it work?”

  Sergeant Magnulf, who’d grown up close to the Duchy of Grelz--now again the Kingdom of Grelz under Mezentio’s cousin--found another one: “Can you do that and not have the people rise up against King Swemmel and for the Algarvians?” People who knew Grelzers well always thought in terms of uprisings.

  “I can do it,” Addanz answered. “My mages and I, under the orders of the king, have already begun to do it. The Algarvians will make far harsher masters than King Swemmel, so of course the people will follow him.”

  That meant he didn’t know, and no one else did, either. Another egg burst near the hole, splattering the soldiers and the mage with more mud. Unkerlanter egg-tossers, slow as usual, began throwing sorcerous energy back at the Algarvians. “About time,” Leudast growled. “Sometimes I think we’ve forgotten about fighting back since the redheads started doing this to us.” That wasn’t fair, and he knew it, but he didn’t much care about being fair. He’d come too close to dying too many times to care about being fair.

  Addanz clucked reproachfully. Leudast remembered he had King Swemmel’s car. If he chose to remember a name, if he chose to mention that name to the king ... if he chose to do that, Leudast would regret saying what he thought.

  Perhaps the archmage of Unkerlant was about to reprove him. If he was, he never got the chance. He stiffened, his mouth hanging open. Then he groaned, as if a beam had burnt its way through his body. “They die,” he croaked in a voice that suggested he might be dying himself. “Oh, they die.”

  “Mezentio’s men at their butchery again?” Captain Hawart demanded.

  Addanz managed to nod. “Aye,” he gasped. “And we have not gathered enough men behind our line to try to block them altogether.” He gasped again, as if he’d run a long way. “Didn’t. . . expect them to smite again so soon.”

  Leudast knew what that had to mean, but didn’t want to dwell on it. He didn’t have time to dwell on it, either. He spoke urgently: “We’d better get out of this hole. When the Algarvians start their spells, places like this have a way of closing up all of a sudden.”

  “He’s right,” Magnulf said. He, Leudast, and Hawart started to scramble out. So did Addanz, but his effort was feeble and plainly hopeless. With a curse, Leudast jumped back into the mud at the bottom of the hole and heaved the archmage up to Magnulf and Hawart. Then he got out again himself.

  “My thanks,” Addanz said. He looked as if he’d just gone through a four-day battle. “You have no notion of what it is like for a mage to feel the trapped death throes of so many at once. How the Algarvian sorcerers do what they do without blazing out their minds is beyond me. Their hearts are surely colder than winter in Grelz.”

  However the Algarvian mages did what they did, they chose that moment to loose their latest sorcerous onslaught. The ground shuddered beneath Leudast like the body of a man shackled to the whipping post when the lash bites. He imagined he heard it groan like a man under the lash, too.

  Flames sprang upward all around, as if fire mountains were
erupting all over the field. Here and there, men caught in those flames screamed--but not for long. With a wet, sucking noise, the lips of the hole in the ground by Leudast’s feet pulled together. They would have been pulled together had they been down in the hole, too.

  “You were right to get us out of there,” Hawart said. “I hope we didn’t have too many men trapped this time.”

  Addanz groaned once more, as he had a couple of minutes before. “Are they doing it again, sir mage?” Sergeant Magnulf asked. Leudast understood the alarm in his voice. The Algarvians had never struck two such sorcerous hammer blows back to back. Going through one was bad enough. Could flesh and blood--to say nothing of earth and stone--stand two?

  But the archmage of Unkerlant shook his head. Speech, just then, seemed beyond him. His head was turned back toward the west, toward land Unkerlant still held, not toward the east and the Algarvians. “Oh, by the powers above,” Leudast whispered.

  “No,” Addanz croaked--he could talk after all. “By the powers below. Murder piled on murder, and where shall it end?” Tears trickled through the dirt on his face: he was dirty by now, almost as dirty as the soldiers around him.

  Captain Hawart spoke as gently as he could: “We’re only doing it because the redheads did it first. We’re doing it to try to defend ourselves. If Mezentio hadn’t done it, we would never have taken it up.”

  All that was surely true. None of it seemed to console the archmage. He swayed back and forth, back and forth, as if mourning something he would never see again--a cleaner time, perhaps.

  Leudast started to reach out, to set a hand on his shoulder. But he stopped with the motion stillborn. Sooner than it had under any of the Algarvians’ earlier sorcerous onslaughts, the ground steadied beneath him. The flames shrank. Most of them, though not all, vanished. “I think, sir mage, your comrades back there did us a good turn.”

  Only then did he think of the peasants--he supposed they were peasants--who must have perished in the Unkerlanter countermagic. He didn’t suppose they thought Addanz’s sorcerous comrades had done them a good turn.

  “Here come the redheads,” Magnulf said. Algarvian behemoths lumbered toward the battered Unkerlanter line. Footsoldiers trotted along to help protect them and to take advantage of the holes they tore. Horse and unicorn cavalry, swift but vulnerable, trailed after them. If the holes were big enough, the cavalry would tear through, too, and spread chaos in the Unkerlanter rear.

  “Do you know, I think we may just give them a nasty surprise,” Captain Hawart said. “This time, maybe they think they’ve kicked us harder than they really have.”

  Leudast wasn’t thinking about that. He was scurrying toward the nearest hole he could find. Over his shoulder, he called, “Get the archmage out of here. This isn’t his kind of fight.”

  It was Leudast s kind of fight. He started blazing at the advancing Algarvians. He wasn’t the only one, either--far from it. The redheads started dropping. Even without their magic’s working as well as they would have liked, they kept coming, though. Leudast had fought them for too long to think they were cowards. He wished they had been. Unkerlant would have suffered far less.

  “Fall back!” Captain Hawart shouted, as he’d had to shout so many times. Unwillingly, Leudast obeyed lest the Algarvians get behind him. As clashes went these days, the Unkerlanters had done well. By the time nightfall brought fighting to an end, Leudast and his comrades had lost only about a mile of ground.

  Every once in a while, a handful of Unkerlanter dragons would appear over Bishah, drop a few eggs, and then flee back toward the south. They did little damage. Hajjaj judged they didn’t come intending to do much damage, but rather to remind the Zuwayzin that King Swemmel hadn’t forgotten about them even if he was involved in bigger fights elsewhere.

  After the third or fourth visit, the Zuwayzi foreign minister noticed something else: most of the eggs the Unkerlanters dropped fell near the Algarvian ministry. He remarked on that to Balastro when King Mezentio’s minister to Zuwayza held a reception: “I think you are trying to gather all the diplomats in the city here together to be wiped out at one stroke. Are you sure you’re not in King Swemmel’s pay rather than that of your own sovereign?”

  Marquis Balastro threw back his head and laughed uproariously. “Ah, your Excellency, you do both me and the Unkerlanter dragonfliers’ aim too much credit,” he said. Lamplight glittered off his badges of nobility and rank, and also off the silver threads that ran through his tunic. Far from being naked, as he’d come to Hajjaj s hillside estate, tonight he displayed full Algarvian plumage. That was literally true: in his hatband glowed three bright feathers from some bird or another out of tropical Siaulia.

  Hajjaj minded clothes tonight less than usual. With the sun almost as low in the north as it ever went, the weather was cool by Zuwayzi standards, mild by those of Algarve. He didn’t feel as if his own tunic and kilt--not nearly so splendid as Balastro’s--were trying to smother him.

  “Some date wine, your Excellency?” Balastro asked. “We have what the dealer assured me was an excellent vintage--if that’s the word one uses for date wines--though I hope you will forgive me for admitting I have not sampled it myself.”

  “I may forgive you eventually, but not soon.” Hajjaj smiled, and the Algarvian minister to Zuwayza laughed again. Balastro was a charming fellow: good-natured, clever, cultured. Hajjaj eyed him, wondering how he could be all he was and yet. .. But that would wait. It would have to wait.

  For now, the Zuwayzi foreign minister ambled over to the bar. The Algarvian servitor behind it bowed and asked, “What may I get you, sir?” in fairly good Zuwayzi. That made him likelier to be a spy than a tapman by trade, but these days Hajjaj assumed everyone a spy till proved otherwise. Painful experience with his secretary had taught him that was safest.

  Balastro was eyeing him, to see what he’d choose. As much to humor the redhead as to please his own palate, he did ask for date wine. When the servitor poured it from the jar, Hajjaj’s eyes widened. “Pressed from the golden dates of Shamiyah!” he exclaimed, and the Algarvian nodded. Hajjaj bowed partly to him, partly to the wine. “You do me great honor indeed, and great harm to King Mezentio’s purse.”

  He sipped the lovely, tawny stuff. Almost, he went over to grab Balastro by the scruff of the neck and force him to taste the wine himself. In the end, he refrained. Balastro would say all the right things, but he would not mean them. No man who came to dates after grapes could appreciate them as they deserved to be appreciated. Hajjaj could, and did.

  Sipping, he eyed the gathering. It was not what it would have been in times of peace. Ansovald, the Unkerlanter minister, had been sent south over the border once more when war between his kingdom and Zuwayza resumed. The ministries of Forthweg and Sibiu and Valmiera and Jelgava stood empty, untenanted. Zuwayza was not formally at war with either Lagoas or Kuusamo, but Algarve was, and Balastro could hardly have been expected to invite his king’s foes.

  That left delegations from Algarve, from Yanina, from Gyongyos, from small, neutral Ortah (which no doubt thanked the powers above for the mountains and swamps that let her stay neutral), and, of course, from Zuwayza: Hajjaj was far from the only dark-skinned person making the best of clothes tonight.

  The Yaninan minister to Zuwayza was a plump, bald little man named Iskakis. He had the hairiest ears of any man Hajjaj had ever seen. On his arm was his wife, who couldn’t have had more than half his years, and whose elegant, sculpted features bore an expression of permanent discontent. Hajjaj knew--he wasn’t sure whether she did, too--Iskakis had a taste for boys. For a man with that taste to be married to such a woman seemed a sad waste, but Hajjaj could do nothing about it.

  Iskakis was telling a Gyongyosian almost twice his size about the triumphs Yaninan soldiers were running up in Unkerlant. Neither he nor the big, yellow-bearded man spoke Algarvian perfectly. Being from the other side of broad Derlavai, the Gyongyosian might not know most of the triumphs Iskakis was describing were
as imaginary as the Yaninan’s command of the perfect tense. The Yaninan minister did not brag of his kingdom’s might to Algarvians.

  Horthy, the Gyongyosian minister to Zuwayza, made his way over to Hajjaj. He was a big man, too, his beard streaked with gray. “You do not seem joyful, your Excellency,” he said in classical Kaunian, the only tongue he and Hajjaj had in common.

  Hearing Kaunian spoke inside the Algarvian ministry and using it himself made Hajjaj s mouth twist. Again, he put that aside, answering, “I have been to too many of these gatherings to let one more overwhelm me. The wine is very good.”

  “Ah. Is it so? I understand that. I have not seen so many as you, sir--I honor your years--but I too have seen enough.” Horthy pointed to the goblet. “And you say you esteem that wine?”

  “I do.” Hajjaj’s smile held an edge of self-mockery. “But it is made from a fruit of my country”--to his annoyance, he couldn’t come up with the classical Kaunian word for dates--”rather than grapes, and is not to everyone’s taste.”

  “I shall try it,” the Gyongyosian minister declared, as if Hajjaj had questioned his manhood. He marched over to the bar and returned with a goblet of Shamiyah wine. Raising it to his lips, he said, “May the stars grant you health and many more years.” He sipped, paused thoughtfully, and sipped again. After another pause, he delivered his verdict: “I would not care to drink it and nothing else, but it goes well enough as a change from the usual.”

  “Most Zuwayzin say the same of grape wine,” Hajjaj said. “As for myself, your Excellency, I agree with you.”

  “Marquis Balastro is a good host: he lays in something to please all of us.” Horthy leaned forward, toward Hajjaj, and lowered his voice. “Now if only he had laid in victory, too.”