Darkness Descending

by Harry Turtledove

  Dagulf came to visit in a state of high excitement. “Maybe our own men’U be coming back in a few days,” he said, sipping the mug of spirits Garivaid gave him. That was a thought worthy of getting a man out of his own house--and Dagulf’s wife nagged. He went on, “Maybe they’ll chase these raggedy kilted buggers back to Algarve where they belong.”

  “That’d be good.” Garivaid was halfway to being drunk himself, and would have agreed to almost anything.

  Dagulf had a scar on his cheek. It twisted his smile. “Aye, it would,” he said. “And then we can let people know who played along with the redheads. You know names. So do I. Not as bad here as some places, they say. Some places, lots of people are willing to lick Raniero’s Algarvian arse.”

  But the folk of Zossen did not get the chance to inform on their collaborationist neighbors. No Unkerlanter soldiers fought their way into the village to slaughter the garrison or drive King Mezentio’s men back toward the border. Instead, struggling forward through the snow, half a dozen Algarvian behemoths and a company of footsoldiers camped in Zossen.

  One of their officers, a young lieutenant, spoke Unkerlanter pretty well. At his order, the villagers had to assemble in the central square. “You wish we were gone, don’t you?” he said with an unpleasant smile. “You wish Swemmel’s men were here instead, don’t you? If they do come, how glad will you be to see them after they cut your throats to power their magecraft against us? Eh? Think on it.”

  By the next morning, the Algarvians were gone, heading west to get into the fight. Garivald feared more would be coming, though. “He was lying, wasn’t he?” Annore said. Garivald only shrugged. He remembered the convicts who’d been sacrificed for the sorcerous energy to power Zossen’s crystal. He wished he didn’t, but he did. Who could say what Swemmel would or wouldn’t do to drive the redheads back?

  When Krasta walked through the west wing of her mansion, the wing given over to the Algarvians who helped rule occupied Priekule, she knew at once that things were not as they should have been. On any normal day, the clerks and spies and military constables who labored there would have leered and muttered among themselves as she walked past. They were redheads. Leering at good-looking women was in their blood. The only thing that kept them from reaching out and fondling her as she went by was in their blood. The only thing that kept them from reaching out and fondling her as she went by was her being Lurcanio’s mistress. The count and colonel could punish anyone who go to gay with his hands.

  Today, though, the Algarvians scarcely seemed to notice her, though she was wearing a pair of green velvet trousers cut like a second skin. Mezentio’s men talked in low voices, but not about her. The looks on their faces put her in mind of those the servants had worn after her parents died. They’d had a shock, and they were wondering what would come next.

  When she strode into the anteroom where Captain Mosco worked, she demanded, “Nothing’s gone and happened to your precious king, has it?”

  Colonel Lurcanio’s aide looked up from his paperwork. “To Mezentio?” he said. “No indeed, milady--as far as I know, he’s hale as can be.” But his face had that pinched, pained expression on it, too, and his voice was full of things he wasn’t saying. Setting his pen in the inkwell, he rose from his desk. “I’ll tell the colonel you’re here.” He returned a moment later. “Aye, he’ll see you.”

  Krasta went into Lurcanio’s office. The Algarvian was, as always, courteous as a cat. He got to his feet, bowed over Krasta’s hand, and gallantly raised it to his lips. He handed her into the chair across from his desk. But it all struck Krasta as a performance, and not a very good one at that. “What is the matter with you people today?” she fumed.

  “Have you not heard?” Lurcanio asked. Even his accent seemed thicker than usual, as if he wasn’t trying so hard to shape the sounds that went into Valmieran.

  “If I’d heard--whatever there is to hear--would I be asking you?” Krasta said. “By all the long faces out there, I thought something was wrong with your king. Mosco said that wasn’t it, but he didn’t say what was.”

  “No, Mezentio is hale,” Lurcanio said, echoing his aide. “But, against all expectations, we have been thrown back before Cottbus, which naturally pains us.”

  “Oh,” Krasta said. “Is that all?”

  Lurcanio stared at her from under gingery eyebrows going gray. “You may not think it so much of a much, milady, but there are those who will tell you it is no small thing. Indeed, I fear I am one of them.”

  “But why?” Krasta asked in genuine perplexity. “By the powers above, Lurcanio, it’s on the other side of the world.” Few things outside Priekule, and next to none outside Valmiera, carried much weight with her.

  Lurcanio perplexed her by rising and giving her another bow. “Ah, milady, I almost envy you: you are invincibly provincial,” he said. By his tone, it was a compliment, even if Krasta didn’t quite understand it.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” she said with a sniff, “King Swemmel is welcome to Cottbus. A nasty place for a nasty man.”

  “He is a nasty man. It is a nasty place,” Lurcanio agreed with a sniff of his own. “But Unkerlant has a great many nasty places, and none of them so strong or so strongly held as Cottbus. It should have fallen. That it did not fall will mean . . . complications in the war ahead.”

  To Krasta, tomorrow was a mystery, a week hence the far side of the moon. “You will beat the Unkerlanters,” she said. “After all, if you beat us, you can beat anyone.”

  For a moment, what looked uncommonly like a smirk lit Lurcanio’s face. It vanished before Krasta could be sure she’d seen it. He said, “Actually, the Unkerlanter army has given us a rather better fight than Valmiera’s did.”

  “I can’t imagine how that could be,” Krasta said.

  “I know you can’t. I almost envy you that, too,” Lurcanio said; he might have been speaking Gyongyosian for all the sense he made to her. “But whether you can imagine it or not, the thing is there, and we have to see what comes of it.”

  Krasta tossed her head. “I know what will come of it. No one will be having any parties worth going to until you people decide you can be happy again, and powers above only know how long that will take.” Before Lurcanio could answer, she spun on her heel and stalked out of his office.

  She swung her hips more than usual when she headed back toward the part of the mansion that still belonged to her. Even so, hardly any of the Algarvians looked up from their work as she went by. That only made her unhappier. If no one was watching her, she hardly felt she was alive.

  “Bauska!” she shouted when she got back into her own section of the mansion. “Curse it, you lazy slut, where are you hiding?”

  “Coming, milady,” the maidservant said, hurrying down the stairway and up to her. She was very pale and gulped as if hoping her stomach would stay quiet. As far as Krasta was concerned, she’d been next to useless since Captain Mosco put a loaf in her oven. Gulping again, she said, “How may I serve you?”

  “Fetch me my wolfskin jacket,” Krasta said, enjoying the prospect of sending Bauska back upstairs. “I am going to go for a walk on the grounds here.”

  “You are, milady?” Bauska sounded astonished. Walking the grounds was not Krasta’s usual idea of amusement. The only good Krasta usually saw in having wide grounds, as a matter of fact, was in keeping neighbors at a nice, respectful distance. But she was feeling contrary today, all the more so after than unsatisfactory conversation with Lurcanio.

  And so she snapped, “I certainly am. Now get moving.” With a sigh, Bauska trudged up the stairs to get the jacket. She gave it to Krasta and gave her a reproachful look with it. That was wasted; Krasta never noticed it.

  Fastening the wooden toggles on the wolfskin jacket, Krasta went outside. She exclaimed as the cold bit at her cheeks and nose, but neither of the Algarvian sentries at the front door stirred an inch. She cursed their indifference under her breath.

  The skins in the jacket came from Un
kerlant; few wolves survived farther east in Derlavai. Krasta patted the soft gray sleeve. At the moment, she quite enjoyed wearing something from Swemmel’s kingdom. She wished she could throw that in Lurcanio’s face, but knew she didn’t dare. He got quite stuffy where what he saw as Algarve’s honor was concerned.

  Snow crunched under her shoes. It was a couple of days old; soot from the countless coal and wood fires in Priekule had already streaked it with gray. Everything was cold and quiet, so quiet she could hear the scream of a dragon high overhead. The Algarvians kept a couple of them in the air above Priekule all the time, to give warning of Lagoan raiders. The Lagoans didn’t fly north very often. Krasta sniffed. She scorned Valmiera’s former allies even more than she did its conquerors. The Algarvians, at least, had proved their strength.

  She walked on, getting chillier with every step in spite of the wolfskin jacket. The Algarvians had to be mad to want to fight a war in Unkerlant in the wintertime. They should have settled down where they were and waited till spring. Next time I meet a general at some feast or other, maybe I’ll tell him so, Krasta thought. Some people just can’t see what’s in front of them.

  What was in front of her were more snow-covered grounds and bare-branched trees. In the summer, the trees screened Priekule from her sight. For the most part, that suited her fine; the city had altogether too many commoners in it for her to want to look at it very much.

  Now, though, the spires of the royal palace and the taller, paler shaft of the Kaunian Column of Victory were plainly visible. Inside the palace, King Gainibu drowned his humiliation in spirits. Krasta didn’t care to dwell on Gainibu. A king, as far as she was concerned, shouldn’t be a sot.

  That left the Column of Victory to draw her eye. There it stood, as it had since the days of the Kaunian Empire, proud and fair and beautifully carved . . . and Algarvian soldiers patrolled the park whose centerpiece it was, and all of Priekule, and all of the Kaunian kingdom of Valmiera.

  Sudden unexpected tears stung her eyes. Her eyelashes started to freeze together. Angrily, she knuckled them. Foolishness, she thought. She was getting by. She was doing better than getting by. With an Algarvian protector, the hardships that had hold of the kingdom hardly touched her.

  She nodded. She was looking at things the right way. The redheads had won the war, and nothing that happened in far-off Unkerlant could have anything to do with that. She was certain she was right there. Why, then, did the tears keep trying to come back?

  Before she could find an answer--or, more likely, stop looking for one--a couple of Algarvians mounted on unicorns came trotting up the road from Priekule. One of the unicorns still bore some splotches of the dun-colored paint that had made it harder to spot during the fighting. The other was the white to which even clean snow could only aspire.

  Both riders slowed to leer at Krasta. Most times, she would have withered them with a glance colder than .the weather. Now, oddly, she welcomed their attention. She welcomed any attention. The smile she gave them was just this side of an invitation to a lewd act in the snow.

  “Well, hello, sweetheart!” one of them said in accented Valmieran. “Whose girl you being? You being anybody’s girl?”

  “My companion is Colonel Lurcanio,” Krasta answered before she thought. That would kill the unicorn riders’ interest in her, and she didn’t want it killed.

  But it was. Both redheads grimaced. The one who’d spoken gave her a formal salute, as if she rather than Lurcanio were his superior officer. “Meaning no offense,” he said, and spurred his unicorn toward the mansion. The other cavalryman followed close behind.

  Krasta stooped and scooped up a snowball and threw it after them. It fell short. They had no idea she’d flung it. The snow stung her hands. She rubbed them on the fur of her jacket, opening and closing them to get the blood flowing and make them less icy.

  The two Algarvians tied their unicorns in front of the mansion and went inside. They don’t even know it’s my house, Krasta thought. Oh, they might suspect, because Colonel Lurcanio’s woman wouldn’t be anyone ordinary, but they didn’t know. They would have leered at Bauska, too.

  “And I’ve come out of the war better than most,” Krasta murmured. “Powers above!” She looked over toward the Kaunian Column of Victory once more. The triumphs it celebrated were vanished now. The emperor who’d won them was only a name in history books, history books she hadn’t read. Pretty soon, the Algarvians would write the history books, and then no one would ever hear his name again.

  She headed back toward the mansion. Even after she went inside, she was a long time feeling warm.

  Ice was forming in Count Sabrino’s waxed mustachios. Snow lay on the plains of Unkerlant far below. The Algarvian colonel’s dragon had carried him into air colder still.

  He reached up with his right hand to knock the ice away. He used the goad in his left to whack the side of the dragon’s long neck, swinging its course more nearly southwest. The dragon let out an immense, furious hiss. Stupid like all its kind, it wanted to do what it wanted to do, not to follow its dragonflier’s commands.

  Sabrino whacked it again, harder this time. “Obey, curse you!” he shouted, though the freezing wind blew his words away. The dragon didn’t hiss this time; it screamed. He wondered if it would twist its head back and try to flame him off it. That was a dragon’s ultimate sin. He waited, ready to whack it on the sensitive end of its nose if it so forgot its training.

  But, screaming again, it took the course he wanted. He looked back over his shoulder to make sure the wing he commanded was following. Sure enough, thirty-seven dragons painted in stripes of green, white, and red--the Algarvian colors--matched his change of course. His mouth twisted; like any man of his kingdom, he showed what he thought. His wing should have numbered sixty-four. But fighting had been desperately heavy these past few weeks--men and dragons were dying faster than replacements could reach the front.

  A burning peasant village sent smoke high into the air, almost as high as Sabrino flew. He eyed the column of smoke in mild surprise; he’d thought most of the Unkerlanter villages hereabouts had gone up in flames during the Algarvian advance on Cottbus. Now, down there on the ground, the Unkerlanters, at home in winter, were the ones moving forward.

  No sooner had that thought crossed Sabrino’s mind than he spied a group of Unkerlanter behemoths tramping east. They skirted the village, which might still have Algarvian defenders holed up in it. Over the drifts came the great beasts--literally. Some bright Unkerlanter had had the idea of fitting them with outsized snowshoes. Those let them cope with deep snow far better than Algarvian behemoths could. Sabrino grimaced--what an embarrassment, to be outthought by Unkerlanters!

  When it came to cold-weather fighting, King Swemmel’s men had out-thought the Algarvians several different ways. Sabrino was nearly sure Unkerlanter footsoldiers accompanied those behemoths. He couldn’t see them, though, not from this height. The Unkerlanters wore white smocks over the rest of their clothes, and were nearly invisible in the snow. That sort of need hadn’t occurred to Sabrino’s countrymen. With thick wool tunics and stockings, with heavy felt boots, with fur hats and fur-lined capes, the Unkerlanters had an easier time staying warm than the Algarvians, too.

  The dragons flew over another village, this one wrecked in the earlier fighting. Lumps in the snow around it might have been dead behemoths. Sabrino flew too high to spot snow-covered human corpses. In any case, they were too common to attract much notice.

  There ahead lay the shattered town of Lehesten, north and slightly east of Cottbus. Algarvian troops had briefly held it, just as they’d fought their way into Thalfang south of the Unkerlanter capital. Sabrino had heard they’d spied the spires of King Swemmel’s palace from Thalfang. He didn’t know whether that was true. If it was, they hadn’t seen them for long. Fierce Unkerlanter counterattacks had shoved the Algarvians out of Thalfang, and out of Lehesten, too.

  Now the Unkerlanters were pouring footsoldiers and behemoths and
even horse and unicorn cavalry through Lehesten, using the town as a marshaling point for their counterattack. Sabrino whooped to spot a column of behemoths hauling heavy egg-tossers toward the fighting front. Even with snowshoes on the behemoths’ feet, even with skids under the egg-tossers, that column wasn’t going anywhere fast.

  Activating the crystal attached to his harness took only a muttered word of command. The faces of his three surviving squadron leaders, tiny but perfect, appeared in the crystal. “We are going to tear up that column,” Sabrino told them.

  “Aye, Colonel!” Captain Domiziano exclaimed.

  “Aye, Colonel,” Captain Orosio agreed. “Let’s hurt the whoresons.” He was perhaps five years older than Domiziano in the flesh, thirty years older in the spirit.

  Sabrino spoke to the newest squadron leader, Captain Olindro: “Your men and dragons will fly top cover for us. If the Unkerlanters come against us, you’ll hold them off till we can get some height and join you.” You’ll do that, or you’ll die trying, Sabrino thought. Olindro’s predecessor had.

  As Domiziano and Orosio had before him, Olindro said, “Aye, Colonel.” If he thought about his predecessor’s fate, he didn’t let on. A good soldier couldn’t let his fears and worries show, though Sabrino had never known a fighting man without them.

  “Let’s go!” he shouted, and whacked his dragon again, this time in the command to dive. For once, the dragon obeyed with alacrity. Even its tiny brain had come to associate diving with fighting, and it liked fighting better than feeding, perhaps even better than mating. Domiziano and Orosio’s squadrons followed Sabrino down. The icy wind thrummed in his face. Had he not worn goggles, it would have blinded him.

  Behemoths and egg-tossers swelled from specks to toys to real things in what seemed no time at all. Sabrino led the dragons against the column from the rear, hoping to put off for as long as he could the moment when the Unkerlanters realized they were under attack.