Through the Darkness d-3

by Harry Turtledove

  They’d all managed to get out of sight when half a dozen redheaded men in kilts stepped out onto the meadow. They came up to the two Valmierans. “You seeing escaping criminals?” one of them asked.

  Skarnu looked at Raunu. Raunu looked at Skarnu. They both looked back at the Algarvian with the stolid, uncaring gaze of peasants. “Didn’t see nobody,” Skarnu answered. Raunu nodded agreement.

  The Algarvian muttered something in his own language that sounded like a curse. As the Kaunians from Forthweg had done, he and his comrades ran on.

  “They’ll catch a lot of them,” Raunu said out of the corner of his mouth.

  “I suppose so. But they won’t do it right away, and it won’t be easy,” Skarnu answered. “And anyone who speaks even a little of the old language will find out what the Algarvians have been doing to our cousins in Forthweg. If we don’t see a lot more people in this part of the kingdom starting to fight the redheads now, we never will.” Raunu thought that over, nodded, and headed back toward the fields. He had more weeding to do.

  Four

  Every so often, Garivald looked at the little enamelwork plaque-striped red, green, white-set into the butt of his stick. He wondered what had happened to the Algarvian invader who’d once carried it. Nothing good, he hoped.

  Not that many Algarvians patrolled the forests through which Munderic’s band of irregulars prowled. Mezentio’s men kept the roads and ley lines leading west open as best they could, and rarely batded the Unkerlanters who hadn’t given up despite being far behind the line. When the redheads wanted to make life difficult for the irregulars, they sent in their pet soldiers from the toy Kingdom of Grelz.

  “How can we blaze them?” Garivald asked not long after Munderic and his comrades rescued them from the redheads. “They might be our brothers.”

  “Some of them are our brothers, the cursed traitors,” the leader of the fighting band answered. “How can we blaze them? If we don’t, they’ll cursed well blaze us. They aren’t playing games when they come after us. They want us dead; as long as we’re alive and free, it reminds them they live their lives in chains, and they put them on themselves.”

  “I don’t follow that,” Garivald said.

  Munderic spat. “The Algarvians don’t conscript soldiers into the army that sticks its belly in the air for that pimp of a puppet king named Raniero. They don’t dare send out impressers, because most of the men they’d drag in hate Raniero worse than they hate us. Every bugger in that army volunteered to come after us. Now are you ready to blaze ‘em all?”

  “Aye,” Garivald answered, adding. “I hadn’t known that-about the Grelzer soldiers, I mean.”

  “All sorts of things you don’t know, aren’t there?” Munderic rumbled.

  “I find more every day,” Garivald admitted. He’d known just how to live in Zossen. He’d been doing farm work since he was big enough to toddle around after chickens and chivvy them back to his parents’ house. He’d known the people in the village as long as he or they’d been alive, depending on who was older. A tiny world, but one in which he was completely at home. Now he’d been uprooted, thrown into something new, and each day brought fresh surprises.

  “It’ll give you more to sing about,” Munderic said, which was also true.

  “Where do we go next?” Garivald asked.

  “We’ve been gathering supplies from the villages north of the forest,” the leader of the band of holdouts answered, “so we’ll go south for a while. Next one on the list is a little place called Gartz. The redheads don’t even bother putting a garrison there-they just go through now and again.”

  “All right. That sounds easy enough,” Garivald said. Several villages around their forest stronghold kept the irregulars in food and tunics and other things they needed. They avoided a couple of others, whose firstmen favored the Algarvians and the puppet King Raniero of Grelz. Munderic kept threatening to wipe those off the face of the earth, but he and his followers hadn’t done it yet.

  The irregulars left the cover of the pines and oaks and birches not long after sunset. The band numbered perhaps fifty all together, of whom half a dozen or so were women. That was one more thing Garivald hadn’t known- hadn’t imagined-before Munderic and his comrades rescued him from Mezentio’s men.

  One of the women fell into stride beside him. Her name was Obilot. “I wish we were raiding tonight, not just bringing back sheep and rye and oats,” she said. The Algarvians had smashed her village on their way west; she thought she was the only one from it left alive. Now she wanted to go out and raid every night. So did all the women in the band. They hated the Algarvians worse than their male counterparts did.

  “We’ve got to eat, too,” Garivald said. Like a lot of people who’d gone hungry, he wanted to make sure he didn’t have to.

  “You’re soft,” Obilot said. She sounded soft herself; her voice was high and thin. The top of her head barely came up to Garivald’s chin. She looked more delicate and girlish than Annore. But a scar seamed her left arm from elbow to wrist. She bore the mark with pride-she’d cut the throat of the Algarvian who’d given it to her.

  A hideous screech drifted down from high overhead. Garivald looked up, but couldn’t spy the dragon. He wondered if eggs would start dropping on the irregulars. But somebody said, “They’re flying west.” He relaxed. If the beasts were on their way to the big fight, they wouldn’t worry about a band of raiders deep inside territory Algarve was already supposed to have conquered.

  Garivald sniffed. “I smell smoke,” he said. “That will be the village we’re going to, won’t it?”

  “Aye,” Munderic answered. “You’d better pay attention to your nose. At night, it’ll let you know you’re coming up on people before your eyes will.”

  “I’ve noticed,” Garivald answered. He’d usually taken stinks for granted back in Zossen; when he was among them all the time, he hardly noticed them. Only when he’d been out working in fields upwind from the village had he had its odors of smoke and manure and seldom-washed humanity forced upon his consciousness.

  Beside him, Obilot spoke suddenly: “That’s too much smoke for a little place like Gartz. And the dogs should be barking, but they aren’t.”

  Munderic grunted. “You’re right, curse it.” His call was soft but urgent: “Spread out. Go slow. We’re liable to be walking into something.”

  Obilot caught Garivald in the flank with an elbow. “Get off the path. We’ll go through the fields. And be ready to turn around and run like a rabbit with a ferret on its tail if the redheads have an ambush laid on.”

  Heart pounding in his chest, Garivald obeyed her. Most of the irregulars were bypassed soldiers; they knew what to do at times like these. The ones who hadn’t been in King Swemmel’s army had more practice fighting the Algarvians than Garivald did. Before joining this band, the worst fights he’d known were a couple of drunken brawls with fellow villagers. This was different. He might die here, and he knew it.

  Peering ahead through the darkness, Garivald saw jagged outlines instead of the smooth, pale surfaces of thatched roofs. “They’ve burnt the place,” he burst out.

  “That they have.” Beside him, Obilot’s voice went cold as a blizzard. When she continued, it was more to herself than to Garivald: “You never get used to it.” She started cursing the Algarvians with loathing all the more bitter because it was helpless to change whatever lay ahead.

  Gratz hadn’t been much of a village; Munderic had been right about that. Now, Garivald discovered, it wasn’t a village at all anymore. Every house had been burned. Bodies lay everywhere: men, women, children, animals. They didn’t stink yet. “This must have happened today,” Munderic said harshly.

  “This is what the Algarvians did to a village near Zossen when it rose against them-this or something like it,” Garivald said.

  “Gartz wouldn’t have risen,” the leader of the irregulars answered. “Gartz was supposed to stay nice and quiet, so it could go right on giving us what we needed.
We didn’t raid here, any more than we do close to our other villages. Only a fool fouls his own nest.”

  “Someone betrayed them,” Obilot said, sounding even more wintry than before. “Someone who lives-lived-here, or maybe someone in a traitor village who figured out what Gartz was doing.”

  Garivald started to say something, but held his tongue-he’d just stepped out into the village square. The Algarvians had built a gibbet there. Three bodies hung on it, two men and a woman, their heads canted at unnatural angles. Each corpse had a placard fastened to it: a lighter square in the night. He turned away, fighting sickness. He’d seen such things before, when the redheads hanged irregulars they’d caught outside of Zossen.

  Munderic went over and cut down one of the placards. He couldn’t have read it in the darkness. Garivald couldn’t have read it at all; he’d never learned his letters. After a moment, Munderic let the placard fall to the ground. “I don’t care why the Algarvians say they killed them,” he muttered. “They killed them because they don’t want our peasants remembering whose kingdom it really is.”

  “Vengeance,” Obilot said softly.

  More and more of the irregulars gathered in the square, staring at the bodies swaying every so slightly in the breeze. “Another charge on the bill they’ll pay,” Garivald said. “Another reason they’ll rue the day….” The song built itself, a long, furious call for revenge against the redheads.

  When it was through, the irregulars’ gaze had swung from the bodies to him. Munderic came up and patted him on the shoulder. “This is why the Algarvians wanted to hang you, too,” he said.

  “They were talking about boiling me alive,” Garivald remarked.

  Munderic nodded. “That’s the kind of thing they do.” He pointed to the gibbet. “This is the kind of thing they do. Well, here in Unkerlant they’re finding we’re as fierce as they are. We can war like this, same as them. We can, and we are, and we will, till they all flee.”

  “Aye,” the irregulars said, an angry, ragged chorus.

  “Aye,” Garivald echoed. He turned to Munderic. “I’ll put that last bit into the song. It deserves to be there.”

  “Huh,” Munderic said, playing it down, but Garivald knew he’d pleased the leader of the irregulars. After a moment, Munderic went on, “And now we’d better get out of here. Nothing we can do to help Gartz, and we’re not going to get anything out of the place, either. Just have to hope the Algarvians or their Grelzer dogs don’t do the same to all the villages that feed us.”

  Before Garivald could say what was on his mind, Obilot exclaimed, “We can do one thing for Gartz, even if we don’t do it here and now: we can kill lots of redheads.”

  “Aye.” Another savage growl from the whole band.

  As the irregulars started back toward the sheltering woods, Garivald caught up with Munderic and asked, “What happens if they do wreck all the villages that are friendly to us?”

  “Then we start raiding the ones that aren’t harder than ever,” Munderic answered. “They’ll find out that Mezentio’s men aren’t the only ones who can tear things to pieces.”

  “Our own countrymen. .” Garivald paused a moment in thought. “Aye, if we have to.” Munderic walked on for a couple of paces, then slapped him on the back. In the still night, the noise seemed loud as a bursting egg.

  Along with the rest of the Lagoan army, Fernao tramped west across the almost treeless plains of the land of the Ice People. He couldn’t have said how advance felt different from retreat, but it did. When he remarked on that to Affonso, the other mage looked at him as if he were daft. “I’ll tell you how it’s different,” Affonso said. “It’s better, that’s how.”

  “Well, so it is,” Fernao agreed. “They’ll make soldiers out of us yet if we’re not careful.”

  “I understand soldiers better than I ever did before,” Affonso said. “When the other fellow’s trying to kill you, things that look foolish in peacetime start making more sense all of a sudden.”

  “That’s so.” Fernao nodded. “Their discipline isn’t the same as the sort we have, but it’s there. You can’t get around that.”

  Up from the south came a band of Ice People leading camels. They exchanged halloos with the Lagoan scouts. After a little while, an army quartermaster went out to dicker with them. Before long, Lagoan soldiers took charge of some of the camels. Pointing, Affonso said, “Another advantage of advancing is that we’re better fed. The Ice People don’t ignore us, the way they did when we were going backwards.”

  Fernao shook his head. “We may have more to eat when we’re advancing, but we’re not better fed. The only way we could be better fed would be to go back to Lagoas. And if I ever see a camel in the zoological gardens in Setubal, I’ll spit in his eye before he can do it to me.”

  Affonso laughed, though Fernao hadn’t been joking. The other mage said, “We’ve been here too cursed long, that’s certain. By the powers above, even the women of the Ice People are starting to look good to me.”

  “Oh, my dear fellow-my deepest sympathies,” Fernao exclaimed, and put an arm around Affonso’s shoulder. The women of the Ice People were as hairy as the men, not just on their faces but all over their bodies. Some distress in his voice, Fernao went on, “They’re starting to look good to me, too. But they still haven’t started smelling good to me, so I’m safe a while longer, anyhow.”

  Still, he noticed the rank stink of the Ice People much less than he had when he’d first come to the austral continent. For one thing, he’d grown more used to it. For another, he, like everyone else in the Lagoan expeditionary force, stank much worse than he had back then.

  High overhead, a dragon let out a shriek of fury. Fernao looked up to see if he could spot it, but not with the alarm bordering on panic he’d known a few weeks before. Sure enough, it was a Kuusaman beast, and hard to note against the sky. Up until the dragon transports came, shrieks in the air would have burst from the throats of enemy dragons, and would have meant eggs raining down in short order.

  No more. Now Lagoan dragons painted red and gold and Kuusaman beasts painted sky blue and sea green took the fight to the Algarvians and Yaninans. Fernao enjoyed picturing in his mind enemy soldiers frantically digging for their lives as sorcerous energy seared them and hurled fragments of lichen-covered stones in all directions. Better them than me, he thought. Aye, better them than me.

  Up ahead of the marching footsoldiers, a behemoth paused to tear at the grass and stunted, foot-tall birches that covered the plain. Fernao pointed to it. “I wonder if we can keep all the beasts fed when winter comes again.” he said. “For that matter, I wonder if we can keep all of us fed when winter comes again.”

  Affonso shuddered. “I never dreamt we might have to spend a second winter down here-but then, this isn’t a dream; it’s a nightmare. Do you remember when this campaign was supposed to be quick and clean and easy?”

  “Did you ever hear of a campaign that wasn’t supposed to be quick and clean and easy?” Fernao asked, and then answered his own question: “The trouble is, the whoresons on the other side keep coming up with ideas of their own.”

  “Who ever heard of a Yaninan with any idea except running away?” Affonso asked. Fernao laughed. So did his comrade, but not for long. With a grimace, Affonso continued, “But there are more Algarvians down here than there used to be. And they do have other ideas.”

  “Mostly nasty ones,” Fernao agreed. Thinking of the sorceries Mezentio’s men had started using in Unkerlant, he kicked at the grass and the mossy dirt. “Almost all of them nasty ones in this war.”

  Behind its screen of scouts on camels and a few unicorns, behind its behemoths, the army slogged on toward a long, low rise. Somewhere on the other side of that rise, the Yaninans and Algarvians waited. It was somewhere not far away, too: Fernao exclaimed as dragons painted in red and white and green streaked out of the west, driving a handful of Kuusaman and Lagoan beasts before them.

  Nor did the Algarvians content themselve
s with that. Their dragons threw themselves at those flying above the Lagoan army. Whenever the Algarvians did anything, they did it with all their might. Fernao watched dragons wheel and twist and flame in the sky-and watched some of them fall out of the sky, too, broken and burning.

  Then a unicorn out ahead of the army toppled to the ground, pinning its rider beneath it. A great gout of steam rose from its body: it had been blazed by a heavy stick. Fernao’s gaze went to the top of the rise. Coming over it were behemoths that didn’t belong to the Lagoan army. Lagoan beasts tramped forward to meet them. Both sides began tossing eggs.

  “They’ve got more behemoths than I thought they did,” Affonso said in worried tones.

  “Aye.” Fernao was worried, too. “If they’ve been reinforced …” His voice trailed off. If the Algarvians had brought more behemoths to the austral continent, they’d surely brought more men down here, too.

  Footsoldiers swarmed over the ridge behind and between the enemy behemoths. Affonso cursed. “Yaninans haven’t come forward like that in all the days of the world,” he said bitterly.

  “I won’t tell you you’re wrong, however much I wish I could,” Fernao replied. “King Swemmel ought to thank us. Every one of those whoresons we slay is one the Unkerlanters won’t have to worry about.”

  “I’m more worried about the Algarvians who’re liable to slay us,” Affonso answered. Fernao didn’t see how he could fault his friend’s thinking there.

  He peered nervously toward the south. If the Algarvians had brought in enough behemoths to confront the Lagoan army, had they brought in enough to outflank King Vitor’s men, too? But no cries of alarm rose there, and he saw no great shapes pounding across the plain to cut off the Lagoans. With more than a little relief, he turned his attention back to the battle ahead.

  With more relief still, he saw that the Lagoan behemoths were holding their own against the Algarvian animals. There weren’t so many of the Algarvian behemoths as he’d thought at first frightened glance, even if there were plenty to have routed the Lagoan scouts. Indeed, the Lagoan behemoths were starting to push the Algarvians back.