Darkness Descending

by Harry Turtledove

  Other constables patrolled the perimeter of the quarter where Gromheort’s Kaunians had to live, but Bembo and Oraste came near that perimeter as they neared the end of their beat. “Won’t be long,” Oraste said. “I aim to do some serious sleeping once we get in.”

  Yawning, Bembo nodded. Morning twilight was beginning to paint the eastern sky gray and pink. He yawned again. He didn’t like the late-night shift. And then he grew alert once more. “Powers above,” he said softly. “Here comes another Kaunian--a woman, looks like.” Even in twilight, thiat pale gold hair was hard to miss.

  “Aye,” Oraste said, and then, raising his voice: “What are you doing out of your district, sister?”

  As the woman got closer, Bembo saw that her trousers were very tight indeed, her tunic of transparent silk. She was on the skinny side, but worth looking at. In slow, clear Algarvian, she answered, “I am going home. My name is Doldasai. I have leave to be out: I was sent for to screw one of your officers. You may check this. It is true.”

  Oraste and Bembo looked at each other. Unlike almost any other Kaunian, an officer’s whore might be able to make trouble for them if they bothered her. Bembo said, “Well, go on, then.” Doldasai strode past him as if he didn’t exist. He turned to watch her backside, but she wasn’t working now and put nothing extra into her walk. He shrugged and sighed. You couldn’t have everything.

  As soon as the ley-line caravan stopped moving, Sergeant Leudast stood up in the straw of the car in which part of his company had traveled. The car was better suited to hauling livestock than soldiers; by the lingering stench that filled it, it had carried a lot of livestock. But Unkerlant, these days, used anything it could.

  Leudast undogged the door and slid it open. The fresh air that poured into the car made him notice the livestock smell more than he had for a while; he’d got used to it as the caravan came down into the Duchy of Grelz. “Come on, boys-- out we go,” he said. “Now we’re here, and we’ll have work to do.”

  His men held in their enthusiasm, if they’d ever known any. After the botched attack on Lautertal, they had to be wondering again about the orders they were getting. But, wondering or not, they had to obey. So did Leudast. He knew that, too.

  He jumped down out of the car and waved to Captain Hawart, who waved back and came up to him with a grin. “Well, what did you think of Cottbus when we went through it?” Hawart asked.

  “If you hadn’t told me we were going that way, sir, I never would have known it,” Leudast answered. “And in a closed car like that one, I didn’t get a chance to see it at all. As far as I’m concerned, Cottbus smells like cows.”

  “As far as you’re concerned, everything smells like cows right now,” the regimental commander said, and Leudast could hardly disagree. Hawart went on, “But you should have known we’d be going through Cottbus even if I hadn’t told you. It’s the biggest ley-line center in the kingdom; that’s one of the reasons we had to hold onto it no matter what.”

  Hawart was a man not just of wit but also of education. He paid Leudast a compliment by assuming the sergeant shared his background. Leudast knew only too well that he didn’t. Trying to hold his own, he said, “You mean hanging onto Cottbus makes us more efficient.” King Swemmel was wild for efficiency, which meant his subjects had to be, too.

  To Leudast’s relief and pride, Captain Hawart nodded. “That’s right. If we’d lost Cottbus, we’d be going around three sides of a rectangle to get soldiers from the north down here to Grelz.”

  If they’d lost Cottbus, they would have lost the war. Hawart didn’t dwell on that. Neither did Leudast. He said, “Well, we’re here now, and we got here the short way. As long as we are here, we’d better make the redheads sorry about it.”

  “Aye, that’d be efficient, sure enough,” Hawart agreed. He didn’t dare sound anything but serious about King Swemmel’s favorite word, either. He slapped Leudast on the shoulder. “Get ‘em moving. Head ‘em east.” He might have been talking about cattle himself. “As soon as the whole army’s in place, we’ll show the Algarvians what we can do.”

  With shouts and waves and occasional curses, Leudast did get his men moving. The encampment into which Hawart’s regiment went was one of the biggest ones he’d ever seen: rock-gray tents that stretched and clumped for a couple of miles. Here and there, heavy sticks thrust their noses up into the air.

  Pointing to one of them, Leudast said, “Almost makes me hope the cursed Algarvians do send some dragons over. Those little toys will blaze them right out of the sky.”

  “So they will--if the weather stays clear so their crews can see where to aim, and so clouds don’t make the beams spread too much to do any good,” Captain Hawart told him. “Don’t go wishing for any more trouble than you’ve got, Leudast. You’ll generally have plenty.”

  Leudast knew good advice when he heard it. He saluted. “Aye, sir.” After he made sure the soldiers in his charge were settled, he paced here and there through the encampment, trying to figure out what sort of orders the regiment would get when it went into action.

  He returned to his company’s tents certain of but one thing: whatever was coming would be big. The encampment held not only footsoldiers beyond counting but also units of horse and unicorn cavalry--Leudast liked the bugling cries unicorns let out--and a good many behemoths, though he would have liked to see even more of the great beasts. There was also a large dragon farm.

  “Oh, aye, Sergeant, we’re as ready as can be for the stinking Algarvians,” one of his troopers said. “What we get to find out next is how ready the redheads are for us.”

  Leudast wished he hadn’t put it like that. The Algarvians were rarely anything but ready. They could be beaten--Leudast knew that now, where he hadn’t been so sure the summer before--but they always put up every ounce of fight they had. Anybody who thought that would be different this time had to be drunk, either on spirits or, perhaps more dangerous, on hope.

  Two days later, Hawart’s regiment, along with a great many others, was ordered to the front. Leudast had got used to marching through land over which the Algarvians and Unkerlanters had already fought. This was another such battered landscape, one that looked as if a couple of petulant giants had vented their wrath on it: not so far wrong, if you looked at things the right way.

  “All the egg-tossers!” said one of Leudast’s troopers, a big-nosed kid named Alboin. “We’re going to be dropping plenty on the redheads, we are.”

  “Aye,” Leudast agreed. “We’ll hit ‘em a good first lick, that’s for sure.” What would happen after the first lick was anything but sure, as he knew too well. Egg-tossers had trouble keeping up with the rest of the army when that army was moving fast. He’d seen as much. He’d also seen that Unkerlanter egg-tossers had more trouble keeping up than their Algarvian counterparts.

  Alboin had seen no such thing. He was one of the reinforcements who’d joined the company during the winter. By now, he’d had enough action to be well on the way toward making a veteran, but it had all been since the Unkerlanter counterattack began. “We’ll lick ‘em,” he said, sounding absurdly confident.

  “Aye, I think we will,” Leudast said, more from policy than from conviction. From conviction, he went on, “Remember how they handled us at Lautertal. They can do worse than that. I’m not saying they will, but they can.”

  “Sure, Sergeant.” But Alboin sounded as if he was talking from policy, too. He hadn’t seen the Algarvians at their best, when the footing was good and they had the chance to maneuver.

  Leudast said, “Listen to me. If the redheads weren’t tough, nasty buggers, would we be fighting them in the middle of the Duchy of Grelz?”

  Maybe that got through, maybe it didn’t. Either which way, Alboin shut up and kept marching. That suited Leudast well enough.

  Here and there up at the front, the Algarvians lobbed eggs at the Unkerlanters’ positions. Leudast was glad when soldiers waved his company into the shallow trenches from which they would soon att
ack. The earthworks shielded his men and him from bursting eggs. Then, once in the trenches, he wasn’t so glad any more. If the redheads started slaughtering Kaunians and making magic, the holes grubbed in the ground could turn into death traps.

  He wondered if King Swemmel’s mages would start slaughtering Unkerlanter peasants or old women or whomever it was they killed. On the one hand, he wanted magecraft to help the army move forward--and, more urgently, to help him stay alive. On the other, he couldn’t help but think about the price his kingdom was paying to try to beat back the Algarvians.

  Captain Hawart came along the line. “The attack goes in tomorrow morning before sunrise,” he said, and walked on to keep spreading the word.

  Leudast spread it, too. His troopers talked among themselves in low voices.

  They were ready. They were more than ready--they were eager. Leudast wondered how many of them would be eager after the attack, even if it succeeded. Not many, if his own experience was any guide.

  Well before sunrise, the Unkerlanter egg-tossers started pounding at the Algarvian positions farther east. Leudast hoped they did lots of damage, because they were surely alerting King Mezentio’s men to the coming assault. And the Algarvians responded, flinging eggs of their own at the Unkerlanters. But, as best Leudast could judge, his side had the better of the exchange. He huddled in his blanket and tried to sleep.

  As black night gave way to gray twilight, the ground shook beneath him. He leaped up, ready to scramble out of the trench for his life if the shaking got worse. It didn’t. Peering over the lip of the trench, he saw purplish flames spurting up from the ground he and his comrades would have to cross. These were Unkerlanter mages plying their trade, not Algarvians. Leudast muttered under his breath, hoping the sacrifice from his countrymen would help the army win victory.

  Whistles shrilled, all along the line. Still not officially an officer, Leudast couldn’t add another strident note. Instead, he shouted, “Come on, you buggers! They wanted to quarrel with us, and now they’re going to pay the price.”

  “Urra!” his troopers roared as they burst from the sheltering trenches. “Urra! King Swemmel! Swemmel! Urra!”

  Yelling himself, Leudast ran forward, too, one tiny drop in a rock-gray wave. However many of their own they’d killed to make the magic against Mezentio’s men, the Unkerlanter mages hadn’t got rid of all Algarvian resistance. Eggs fell among the advancing Unkerlanter troopers, making holes in their lines that reserves had to fill. Redheaded soldiers blazed down Unkerlanters, too.

  But, try as they would, they couldn’t stop or even seriously slow King Swemmel’s men. Here and there along the shattered line, an Algarvian trooper would throw up his hands and try to surrender. Sometimes, the redheads managed to do it. Rather more often, they got blazed down.

  “Forward!” Leudast shouted to his men, echoing Captain Hawart, who was doing his best to be everywhere at once for his regiment.

  Unkerlanter magic had done dreadful things to the Algarvian trenches, so dreadful that Leudast and his countrymen had trouble pushing across the shattered ground. Flames still sullenly flickered every few feet. Resistance from the redheads stayed light.

  “This is almost too easy,” Leudast called to Hawart the next time he saw him.

  “I like it,” said Alboin, who chanced to be close by.

  But Hawart looked worried. “Aye, it is,” he said. “I haven’t seen enough dead Algarvians to satisfy me, nor anything close. Where are they, curse them?”

  “Buried when their trenches all caved in?” Leudast suggested.

  “I hope so,” the officer answered. “If they aren’t, we’re going to run into them pretty soon, and they won’t be glad to see us.”

  “Powers below eat them, we weren’t glad to see them, either,” Leudast said. He ran and scrambled on, wondering how deeply the Algarvians had fortified their positions: there seemed to be no end to trenches and foxholes and barricades.

  And then, as Hawart had worried about, the Algarvians started popping up out of holes beyond the reach of the Unkerlanters’ magecraft. After that, nothing was easy anymore.

  Along with the rest of his company, Trasone stood at stiff attention in front of the barracks in Aspang. Major Spinello strode down the line with a box of medals. He paused in front of each man to pin one onto him, kiss him on the cheek, and murmur a few words before moving on.

  When he got to Trasone, he said, “For making it through this cursed winter,” and presented the decoration. After the ritual kiss that accompanied it, he pinned an identical decoration on Clovisio.

  At last, everybody had his medal. Spinello strutted away. Trasone looked down at the decoration. It was stamped with a map of eastern Unkerlant and two words: WINTER WAR. He tapped Sergeant Panfilo on the shoulder. “Isn’t that grand? We’ve all got frozen-meat medals to call our own.”

  Panfilo laughed, but not for long. “There’re a lot of dead men only thawing out now,” he said. “If you want to trade places with one of’em, I doubt he’d complain.”

  “I like being alive just fine, thanks, Sergeant,” Trasone said. “But twenty years from now I’m going to look at this cursed chunk of polished brass, and my feet’ll start to freeze, and I’ll taste behemoth that’s starting to go bad. Once I get home, that’s the stuff I want to forget, not remember.”

  “Now you do, aye,” Panfilo agreed. “But how many times have you listened to veterans of the Six Years’ War going on and on about everything they went through?”

  Trasone grunted. That had the unpleasant feel of probability to it. “Good,” he said. “My old man always bored me. Now I’ll have an excuse to bore my kids, if I ever have any.” He glanced west, in the direction of the Unkerlanters who still tossed eggs at Aspang. They wanted to make sure he wouldn’t. So far, they’d had no luck.

  When he woke up before dawn the next morning, he thought they’d smuggled more egg-tossers up close enough to strike at Aspang. But the rumbling roar, he discovered, came from the south, not from the west, and, while there were a great many bursts, none seemed close to the city.

  “What’s going on?” he asked around a yawn as he got up from his cot. “Are the Unkerlanters kicking up their heels, or have we got something laid on down south?”

  “Nobody told me anything about an attack down south,” Sergeant Panfilo said, “not yet, anyhow. I know we’re shifting men down there, but we aren’t set to move this soon.”

  “It’s the Unkerlanters, then,” Trasone said. “If they can’t get us out of Aspang from the front, they’re going to try and do it from the back. Fits the buggers, doesn’t it?”

  Panfilo laughed. “So it does. Now we have to find out if they get anywhere. If they don’t, we can sit tight here. But if they do, we’re liable to have to go out and work for a living again.”

  “Oh, aye, this is a rest cure, this is.” Trasone snorted. “Come to beautiful Aspang for your health. The garden spot of southern Unkerlant, only eight months of winter a year. Don’t fancy the weather? Wait a bit. It’ll get worse.”

  “If you got any worse, they’d fling you in the bloody guardhouse,” Panfilo said. “Too cursed early to be carrying on like that.”

  All the rest of the day, Trasone kept an ear on the racket from the south. It didn’t fade; if anything, it got louder. He drew his own conclusions. Quietly and without any fuss, he made sure his kit was ready to sling onto his back at a moment’s notice. He wasn’t the only veteran doing the same thing, either.

  Major Spinello burst into the barracks the next morning. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” he shouted, full of energy as usual. “Swemmel’s boys are getting rowdy, and it’s up to us to show ‘em that’s our job.”

  He screamed at the men who weren’t ready to move on the instant, and cursed the ones who were because they hadn’t made sure their comrades were, too. That meant all the other officers and sergeants started screaming, too. If they’d wanted the battalion ready to move at a moment’s notice, they could have
started screaming earlier. For one thing, they weren’t screaming at him, because he was ready. For another, he’d heard a lot of screaming in his time. It didn’t faze him.

  Under the lash of Spinello’s tongue, the soldiers in the battalion tramped to the ley-line caravan depot and filed aboard cars that looked to have had better lifetimes. “We’re going down to hit the Unkerlanters in the flank,” Spinello said as they boarded. “Swemmel’s boys are as nervous about their flanks as so many virgins, and we’re going to screw ‘em.”

  As they glided south out of Aspang, they passed the wreckage of several caravans lying by the side of the ley line. “Cursed Unkerlanters are a pack of nervous virgins,” Trasone remarked, and got a laugh. If the Unkerlanters had managed to plant one more egg along the ley line, he and his comrades wouldn’t have the chance to do much in the way of seduction.

  But the ley-line caravan stopped where its operator wanted it to, not at the whim of some Unkerlanter irregulars. Trasone and his fellow troopers tumbled out. Again, Major Spinello was shouting, “Let’s go! What are you waiting for? We have to move, curse it.”

  Maybe the major had been talking by crystal while on the caravan because he seemed to know just where he was going. After Spinello led the battalion out of a stretch of woods, Trasone exclaimed in delight: “Behemoths!”

  “Our behemoths,” Clovisio said. “Where did they come from?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Trasone said. “They’re here, and the ground is nice and solid, so they can move. And when we’ve got behemoths than can do what they’re supposed to do, the Unkerlanters had better watch out.”

  As if to underscore that, the behemoths trotted forward. Spinello shouted, “Come on, you lazy buggers, give ‘em a hand. You know what to do.” Not that many months off garrison duty, he didn’t have any experience of what to do himself. But he was right, not only in his tactics, but in being sure the veterans he commanded knew what to do. They hurried along with and behind the behemoths, ready both to protect them and to swarm through any holes they punched in the enemy’s lines.