Darkness: Through The Darkness Part 17

"It had better be." Trasone's tone was dark. "If the Unkerlanters start running behemoths at a bunch of lousy Yaninans with pom-poms on their shoes, you know what'll happen as well as I do."

"They'll run so fast, they'll be back in Patras day after tomorrow," the veteran sergeant replied, and Trasone nodded. Panfilo went on, "Half the time, I think we'd do better if those b.u.g.g.e.rs were on Swemmel's side instead of ours."

"Aye." Trasone trudged on up the road. It was summer, and dry, so a cloud of dust, like thick brown fog, obscured his comrades more than a few yards away. That was better than slogging through mud or snow, but not much. The dead, bloated carca.s.s of a unicorn, feet sticking up in the air, lay by the side of the road. He smelled it before he could see it. Pointing to it, he said, "I thought that was going to be soldiers, not just a beast."

"The stink's a little different," Panfilo said. "Unicorns are . . . sweeter, maybe." His prominent nose wrinkled. "It's not perfume, though, any which way."

"Sure isn't." Trasone pointed ahead. "What's the name of that town there? We just took it away from the Unkerlanters last week, and already I can't remember."

"Place is called Hagenow," Panfilo told him. "Not that I care, as long as the lines in front of the brothels don't stretch around the block, and as long as they've got plenty of popskull in the taverns."

Trasone nodded. Strong spirits and loose women ... he was hard pressed to think of anything else he required from a leave in the rear areas. After a moment, though, he did. "Be nice to go to sleep and not worry about waking up with my throat cut."

"And that's true, too," Panfilo said. "If the dice are hot, I'll win enough silver to make myself armor out of it when I go back."

"In your dreams," Trasone said, and then, remembering proper military etiquette, "In your dreams, Sergeant."

They marched along in silence for a while, two weary, filthy men in a battalion full of soldiers just as weary and just as filthy. From somewhere up ahead, Major Spinello's bright tenor came drifting back on the breeze. Somehow or other, Spinello kept the energy to sing a dirty song. Trasone envied him without wanting to imitate him.

Something else came drifting back on the breeze, too: a stink of unwashed humanity worse than that rising from the soldiers, along with a strong reek of nasty slit trenches. "Phew!" Trasone said, and coughed. "If that's Hagenow, the Unkerlanters are welcome to it. I don't remember that it smelled all that bad when we went through it before."

"Neither do I." Panfilo peered ahead, shading his eyes--not that that did much against the dust. Then he pointed. "Look there, Trasone, in that barley field. That's not Hagenow, not yet. We haven't gone over the little river in front of it. So what in blazes is that? I'd take oath it wasn't here when we headed west over this stretch of road."

"So would I." Trasone narrowed his eyes, also trying to pierce the dust. After a little while, he grunted. "It's not a town--it's a captives' camp."

"Ah, you're right," Panfilo said. The guards and the palisade around the place helped make its nature clear ... or so it seemed. Then a gate opened so more people could go into the camp.

Trasone grunted again. "Those aren't Unkerlanters--they're blonds." His laugh was nasty. "Well, I don't expect they'll be in there stinking up the place all that long. And when they go, I hope our mages give Swemmel's wh.o.r.esons a good kick in the b.a.l.l.s with their life energy."

"That's the truth," Panfilo agreed. "If it weren't for the Kaunians, we wouldn't have a war. That's what everybody says, anyhow, so it's likely right."

"Well, by the time this war's over, there won't be a whole lot of Kaunians left," Trasone said. "Maybe that means the next one'll be a long time coming. Hope so."

Half an hour later, they got into Hagenow. It was more than a village and less than a city, and had taken a beating when the Algarvians managed to drive the Unkerlanters out of it. Not many Unkerlanters were on the streets now. The ones who were flinched away from the Algarvian soldiers. As far as Trasone was concerned, that was how things were supposed to be.

Major Spinello turned to his men. "Listen, you rogues, I expect you to leave bits and pieces of this town still standing so the next gang of soldiers coming in have somewhere to enjoy themselves, too. Past that, have yourselves a time. Me, I aim to screw myself dizzy." And off he went, plainly intent on doing just that.

"He's got it easy," Trasone said, a little jealous. "He won't have to stand in line at an officers' brothel."

"He pulls his weight," Panfilo said. "We've had plenty of worse officers over us, and cursed few better ones. Go on, tell me I'm wrong."

"Can't do it," Trasone admitted. He pointed to the queue in front of the closest brothel for ordinary troopers. It wasn't quite so long as Panfilo had feared, but it wasn't what anybody would call short. "Can't get my ashes hauled right away, either. Might as well pour down some spirits first."

An Algarvian soldier served as tapman in a tavern that had surely belonged to an Unkerlanter before Mezentio's army swept into and then past Hagenow.

Trasone wondered what had happened to the Unkerlanter, but not for long. "What have you got?" he demanded when he elbowed his way up to the bar.

"Ale or spirits," the fellow answered. "Wasn't much wine in town, and the officers have it all."

"Let me have a slug of spirits, then," Trasone told him, "and some ale to chase it." The tapman gave him what he asked for. He knocked back the spirits, then put out the fire in his gullet with the ale. Before other thirsty troopers could shove him away from the bar, he got a refill.

He thought about drinking till he couldn't stand up any more. He thought about getting into a dice game, too. Three or four were going on in the tavern. But he had other things on his mind. He looked around for Panfilo, but didn't see him--maybe the sergeant had other things on his mind, too.

Panfilo wasn't in the line Trasone chose. It snaked forward. With a few drinks in him, he didn't mind it's not moving faster. When a drunken soldier started cursing how slowly it moved, two military constables hustled him away. Trasone was glad he hadn't complained.

After what seemed a very long time, he got inside the brothel. In the downstairs parlor sat six or eight weary-looking women in wide-sleeved long tunics of red or green or yellow silk: almost the uniform of wh.o.r.es down in Forthweg or Unkerlant. About half the women were Unkerlanters, the others Kaunians. Blonds didn't live in this part of Unkerlant; the Algarvian authorities must have shipped them in for their soldiers' pleasure. They'd likely get shipped off to a captives' camp when they wore out, too. Trasone thought most Forthwegian women dumpy and plain. He pointed to a Kaunian. She nodded, slowly rose from her chair, and led him upstairs.

In a little room up there, she pulled off her tunic and lay down naked on the pallet. Trasone quickly got out of his own clothes and lay down beside her. When he began to caress her, she said, "Don't bother. Just get it over with." She spoke good Algarvian.

"All right," he said, and did. She lay still under him. Her eyes were open, but she looked up through him, looked up through the ceiling, to somewhere a million miles away. He had to close his own eyes, because the empty expression on her face put him off his stroke. He didn't think she'd last much longer. When he grunted and spent himself, the wh.o.r.e pushed at him so she could get up and put her tunic back on.

Trasone went back across the street to the tavern and did some more drinking. After a while, he got back into the line for the wh.o.r.ehouse. This time, he chose a Forthwegian woman. She proved a little livelier; he didn't feel as if he were coupling with a corpse.

The leave pa.s.sed that way. He had a dreadful hangover when Major Spinello collected the battalion and started everyone toward the front again. Sergeant Panfilo kept bragging about the havoc he'd wreaked in the brothels of Hagenow. Trasone didn't mind the boasts; he'd heard their like before. But he kept wishing Panfilo wouldn't talk so loud.

They were marching west past the labor camp when Trasone said, "Look--they're taking out a bunch of blonds."

"What are they going to do with aem?" Panfilo asked. "And how do you know they aren't getting away on their own?"

"They'd be running harder if they were getting away, and they wouldn't have soldiers standing watch over aem." Trasone's pounding head made him testy. He pointed again. "And look there--those aren't just soldiers. They're mages. They've got to be. n.o.body in uniform who isn't a mage stumbles around like that."

Panfilo chuckled. "Well, I won't say you're wrong. And if those are mages ..." His voice dropped. "If those are mages, I think I know what they're going to do with the Kaunians. So this is how it goes."

"Aye, this is how it goes," Trasone agreed. He'd felt the strong lash of Algarvian sorcery pa.s.sing over him to fall on the Unkerlanters. And he'd been on the receiving end as the Unkerlanters ma.s.sacred their own people to build a sorcery to strike back at the Algarvians. But he'd never seen how such mage-craft was made. Now he would, unless his squad marched past before the slaughter began.

They didn't. The Algarvian soldiers in the field lined the Kaunians up in neat rows. Then, at a shouted order Trasone clearly heard, they raised their sticks and started blazing. The blonds who didn't fall at once tried to run now. That did them no good. The soldiers kept on blazing, and the Kaunians had no place to flee. After a few minutes, they all lay dead or dying.

And the mages got to work. Trasone could hear their chants rising and falling, too, but couldn't understand a word of them. After a moment, he realized why: they weren't incanting in Algarvian, but in cla.s.sical Kaunian. He started to laugh. If that didn't serve the blonds right, what did?

He felt the power the mages were raising. The soldiers had killed hundreds of Kaunians. How much life energy was that? He couldn't measure it--he was no wizard. But it was enough and more than enough to make his hair stand on end under his broad-brimmed hat even though he was getting only the tiniest fringe of it as it built.

Then it flashed away. He could tell the very instant the mages launched it at King Swemmel's men. The feel of the air changed, as it did just after a thunderclap. All that energy would come down on the Unkerlanters' heads. He turned to Sergeant Panfilo. "Better them than us," he said. "Powers above, a lot better them than us." The sergeant didn't argue with him.

As always, Marshal Rathar was glad to get out of Cottbus. Away from the capital, he was his own man. When he gave an order, everyone leaped to obey. It was almost like being king. Almost. But he'd seen the kind of obedience King Swemmel commanded. He didn't have that. He didn't want it, either.

What he did have was a hard time making his way into the south, where the worst of the fighting was. The Algarvians, having punched through the Unkerlanter defenses, now stood astride most of the direct routes from Cottbus to the south. To get where he was going, Rathar had to travel along three sides of a rectangle, taking a long detour west to use ley lines still in Unkerlanter hands.

When he got to Durrw.a.n.gen, he wondered if he'd come too late. Algarvian eggs were bursting just outside the city, and some inside it as well. "We have to hold here as long as we can," he told General Vatran. "This is one of the gateways to the Mamming Hills and the cinnabar in them. We can't just give it up to the redheads."

"I know how to read a map, too," Vatran grunted. "If we don't hold aem here, there's nowhere else good to try and stop aem this side of Sulingen. But the wh.o.r.esons have the bit between their teeth again, the way they did last summer. How in blazes are we supposed to make aem quit?"

"Keep fighting them," Rathar answered. "Or would you sooner let them have all the cinnabar they need?"

Would you sooner lie down and give up? was what he really meant. He studied Vatran. He'd urged Swemmel to keep the officer in charge down here. Now he was wondering if he'd made a mistake. Vatran's attack south of Aspang had failed. There were reasons it had failed; neither Vatran nor any other Unkerlanter had realized the Algarvians were concentrating so many men in the south. But Vatran hadn't covered himself with glory since, either. The question was, could anyone else have done better?

Vatran understood that question behind the question. He glared up at Rathar, who stood a couple of inches taller. Vatran's nose was sharp and curved as a sickle blade; had it been one in truth, he might have used it to cut the marshal down. "If you don't care for the job I'm doing," he ground out, "give me a stick, take the stars off my collar, and send me out against the Algarvians as a common soldier."

"I didn't come here to put you in a penalty battalion," Rathar answered mildly. Officers who disgraced themselves sometimes got the chance for redemption by fighting as ordinary soldiers. Penalty battalions went in where the fighting was hottest. Men who lived got their rank back. Most didn't.

"Well, then, let's talk about how we're going to hold on to what we can down here," Vatran said.

That was a good, sensible suggestion. Before Rathar could take him up on it, eggs crashed down around the schoolhouse Vatran was using for a headquarters. Rathar threw himself fiat. So did Vatran and all the junior officers in the chamber. Most of the gla.s.s in the windows had already been shattered. What was left flew through the air in glittering, deadly arcs. A spearlike shard stuck in the floorboards a few inches from Rathar's nose.

"Never a dull moment," Vatran said when the eggs stopped falling. "Where were we?"

"Trying to stay alive," Rathar answered, getting to his feet. "Trying to keep our armies alive, too."

"If you know a magic to manage it, I hope you'll tell me," Vatran answered. "The Algarvians have more skill than we do; the only thing we can do to stop aem is put more bodies in their way. We're doing that, as best we can."

"We have to do it better," the marshal said. "Down here now, it's the way things were in front of Cottbus last fall; we haven't got a lot of room to fall back. If we do, we lose things we can't afford to lose."

"I know that," Vatran said. "I need more of everything--dragons, behemoths, men, crystals, you name it."

"And you'll have what you need--or as much of it as we can get to you, anyhow," Rathar told him. "Moving things down from the north isn't easy these days, in case you hadn't noticed."

"I'll bet you did." By the look Vatran gave Rathar, he would have been just as well pleased if the marshal hadn't been able to come down from Cottbus.

In a way, Rathar sympathized with that. No general worth his salt should have been eager to have a superior looking over his shoulder. Had the fight in the south been going well, Rathar would have stayed up in the capital, even if that meant enduring King Swemmel. But, with the Algarvians bulling forward, Vatran could hardly expect to have everything exactly as he wanted.

Rathar asked the question that had to be asked: "Will we hold Durrw.a.n.gen?"

"I hope so," General Vatran answered. Then his broad shoulders moved up and down in a shrug that held none of the jauntiness an Algarvian would have given it. "I don't know, Marshal. To tell the truth, I just don't know. The cursed redheads have been moving awful fast. And..." He hesitated before going on, "And the soldiers aren't as happy as they might be, either."

"No?" Rathar's ears p.r.i.c.ked up. "You'd better tell me more about that, and you'd better not waste any time doing it, either."

"It's about what you'd expect," the general said. "They've been licked too many times, and some of aem don't see how anything different's going to happen when they b.u.mp up against the Algarvians again."

"That's not good," Rathar said in what he thought a commendable understatement. "I haven't seen anything about it in your written reports."

"No, and you won't, either," Vatran told him. "D'you think I'm daft, to put it in writing where his Majesty could see it? My head would go up on a pike five minutes later--unless he decided to boil me alive instead." He spread his hands--broad peasant hands, much like Rathar's. "You hold my life, lord Marshal. If you want it, you can take it. But you need to know the truth."

"For which I thank you." Rathar again wondered whether he wanted Vatran dead. Probably not: who could have done better here in the south? No one he could think of, save perhaps himself. "Don't the men remember what we did to the Algarvians last winter?"

"No doubt some of aem do," Vatran answered. "But it's not winter now, and it won't be for a while, even down here. And in summer, when their dragons can fly and their behemoths can run, n.o.body's beaten Mezentio's men yet."

"We've made them earn it," Rathar said. "If we can keep on making them earn it, sooner or later they'll run out of men."

"Aye," Vatran said, "either that or we'll run out of land we can afford to lose. If we don't hold Sulingen and the Mamming Hills, can we keep on with the war?"

People had asked that about Cottbus the summer before. Unkerlant hadn't had to find out the answer, for the capital had held. Rathar hoped his kingdom wouldn't have to find out the answer this time, either. He had no guarantee, though, and neither did Unkerlant.

Doing his best to look on the bright side of things, he said, "I hear they're starting to put Yaninans in the line. They wouldn't do that if they didn't have to."

"That's so--to a point," Vatran said. "But they're no fools. They wouldn't be so dangerous if they were. They give the boys with the pretty shoes the quiet stretches to hold. That lets them concentrate more of their own men where they have to do real fighting."

Before Rathar could reply, more eggs fell on Durrw.a.n.gen. Again, he and Vatran stretched themselves on the floor. The schoolhouse shook and creaked all around them. Rathar hoped the roof wouldn't come down on his head.

Still more eggs fell. The Algarvians couldn't have moved so many t.o.s.s.e.rs so far forward ... could they? More likely, dragons with redheads atop them were dropping their loads of death on the Unkerlanter city. And Vatran had already said he lacked the dragons to repel them.

A runner with more courage than sense rushed into Vatran's headquarters even while the eggs were falling. "General!" he cried. "General!" By his tone, Rathar knew something had gone badly wrong. Sure enough, the fellow went on, "General, the Algarvians have broken through our lines west of the city. If we can't stop them, they'll slide around behind us and cut us off!"

"What?" Vatran and Rathar said the same thing at the same time in identical tones of horror. Both men cursed. Then Vatran, who know the local situation better, demanded, "What happened to the brigades that were supposed to hold the b.u.g.g.e.rs back?"

Unhappily, the runner answered, "Uh, some of them, sir, some of them went and skedaddled, fast as they could go."

Rathar cursed again. In a low voice, Vatran said, "Now you see what I meant."

"I see it," the marshal said. "I see we'll have to stop it, too, before the rot gets worse." He climbed to his feet. The runner stared at him. "How bad a breakthrough is it?" he snapped.

"Pretty bad, sir," the messenger replied. "They've got behemoths through, and plenty of footsoldiers with aem. They're astride--no, they're past--the ley line leading west out of Durrw.a.n.gen."

That was also Rathar's most direct route back to Cottbus, not that any route from the embattled south to the capital was direct these days. "Can we drive them back?" he asked both the runner and General Vatran.

"Sir--uh, lord Marshal--the redheads have pushed a lot of men through," the runner said. His gaze swung toward Vatran.

So did Rathar's. Vatran licked his lips. "I don't know where we could sc.r.a.pe up the men," he said at last, most unhappily. "And coming at Durrwan-gen from out of the west! Who would have thought the Algarvians--who would have thought anybody--could come at Durrw.a.n.gen from out of the west? We haven't got the defenses there that we do east of the city."

"Probably why the Algarvians chose that direction for their attack," Rathar said. Vatran gaped at him as if he'd suddenly started declaiming poetry in Gyongyosian. The marshal repeated the question he'd asked before: "Can we hold Durrw.a.n.gen?"

"I don't see how, lord Marshal," Vatran answered.

"I don't, either, but I was hoping you did, since you've been on the spot here longer than I have," Rathar said. "Since we can't hold the place, we'd better save what we can when we pull out, don't you think?"

A loud thud outside the schoolhouse--not a bursting egg, but a heavy weight falling from a great height--made Vatran smile savagely. "That's a dragon blazed out of the sky," he said, as if one downed Algarvian dragon made up for all disasters. "Aye, we'll get out and we'll keep fighting."

"And we'd better make sure there are no more skedaddles," Rathar said. "Whatever we have to do to stop them, we'd best do it." King Swemmel might have spoken through his mouth. He was ready to be as harsh as Swemmel, to get what he had to have--no, what Unkerlant had to have. Somewhere not far away, another dragon slammed to the ground. Rathar nodded. Once more, the Algarvians were paying a price.

Along with his men, Leudast squatted in a field of sunflowers. It would have been a dangerous place to have to fight. With the plants nodding taller than a man, the only way to find a foe would be to stumble onto him.

For the moment, the Algarvians were a couple of miles to the north--or so Leudast hoped with all his heart. He leaned forward to listen to what Captain Hawart had to say. The regimental commander spoke in matter-of-fact tones: "The kingdom is in danger, boys. If we don't stop Mezentio's wh.o.r.esons before too long, it won't matter anymore, because we're licked."

"You wouldn't be talking like that if we'd hung on to Durrw.a.n.gen," somebody said.

"That's so, but we didn't," Hawart answered. "And some soldiers got blazed because they didn't fight hard enough, too. Not just ground-pounders, either; there are a couple of dead brigadiers on account of that mess."

"We've done everything we could." That voice came from behind Hawart. Leudast didn't see who'd spoken up there, either. Whoever it was hadn't stood up and waved, that was for sure. Leudast wouldn't have, either, not if he'd said something like that.

The regimental commander whirled, trying to catch the soldier who'd let his mouth run. Captain Hawart couldn't, which meant he glared at everyone impartially. "Listen to me," he said. "You'd cursed well better listen to me, or you'll all be dead men. If the Algarvians don't kill you, your own comrades will. It's that bad. It's that dangerous. We can't fall back any more."

"What's this about our comrades, sir?" Leudast said. Hawart had ordered him to ask the question.

With a flourish, Captain Hawart took from his belt pouch a sheet of paper. He waved it about before beginning to read it. Leudast watched the soldiers' eyes follow the sheet. A lot of the men were peasants who could no more read than they could fly. To them, anything on paper seemed more important, more portentous, simply because it was written down.

Leudast knew better, at least most of the time. But Hawart had told him what this paper was. Now the officer explained it to the rest of the regiment: "This is an order from King Swemmel. Not from our division headquarters. Not from General Vatran. Not even from Marshal Rathar, powers above praise him. From the king. So you'd better listen, boys, and you'd better listen good."

And the troopers he commanded did lean forward so they could hear better. The king's name made them pay attention. Leudast knew it made him pay attention. He also knew he didn't want the king or the king's minions paying attention to him, which they were too likely to do if he disobeyed a royal order even to the slightest degree.

"Not one step back!" Hawart read in ringing tones. "Iron discipline. Iron discipline won the day for the right in the Twinkings War. Even when things looked blackest, our army held firm against the traitors and rebels who fought for that demon in human shape, Kyot."