Darkness: Through The Darkness Part 9

Trasone tramped through the wheat fields surrounding a medium-sized town--no one had bothered telling him its name--somewhere in southern Unkerlant. A few of King Swemmel's soldiers blazed at the advancing Algarvians from hastily dug holes.

As Trasone got down on his belly to crawl forward, Major Spinello cried out, "Behemoths!" Spinello sounded gleeful, so Trasone guessed they were Algarvian behemoths. The battalion commander wouldn't have been so cheerful had the great beasts belonged to Unkerlant.

Sure enough, eggs from the t.o.s.s.e.rs the behemoths carried on their backs began bursting on the Unkerlanter soldiers ahead. Before long, the Unkerlanters stopped blazing. Trasone didn't raise his head right away. Swemmel's men were sneaky wh.o.r.esons. They might well have been waiting for unwary Algarvians to show themselves so they could pick them off.

But Spinello yelled, "Come on--they're finished!" Trasone raised up far enough to see the battalion commander striding briskly toward the town. Muttering, Trasone got to his feet, too. Spinello was brave, all right, but he was also liable to get himself killed, and some of his men with him.

Not this time, though. Spinello and his soldiers went forward, and so did the behemoths. They came out of the wheat fields and onto the road leading into the town. Refugees fleeing the Algarvians already clogged the road. Seeing more Algarvians coming up behind them, they began to scatter.

Dragons swooped down on them just then, dropping eggs that flung bodies aside like broken dolls. And then they flew on to drop more eggs on the town ahead. The behemoths charged through the Unkerlanter fugitives who were still fleeing down the road. For once in this war, the behemoths' iron-shod horns found targets. The soldiers on the beasts whooped and cheered as they ran down one peasant after another.

"That's how things go," Sergeant Panfilo said cheerfully. "You get in the way, you get flattened--and you deserve it, too."

"Oh, aye, no doubt about that," Trasone agreed. He was a big, broad-shouldered young man, almost as burly as an Unkerlanter. "We've flattened a lot of the b.u.g.g.e.rs, too." He looked ahead. More plains, more fields, more forests, more towns, more villages--seemingly forever. "But we've still got a deal of flattening to finish, we do."

"Too right," Panfilo said. "Too b.l.o.o.d.y right. Well, we're gaining again." He pointed ahead. "Look. The dragons have gone and set the town afire."

"Aye," Trasone said. "I hope they cook a regiment's worth in there, but I don't suppose they will. The Unkerlanters aren't standing up to us the way they did last summer. I think we've got aem on the run."

"They aren't battling they way they did, that's sure enough," Panfilo agreed. "Maybe the fight's finally leaking out of aem--or maybe they're falling back toward wherever they're going to make a stand."

"Now there's a cheery thought," Trasone said. "Here's hoping the Unkerlanters don't have it. Wouldn't you like things to be easy for once?"

"Oh, that I would," Panfilo answered. "But you've been doing this a long time by now. How often are things easy?"

"Valmiera was easy," Trasone said.

"That makes once," the sergeant told him. Trasone nodded. They both let out noises that might have been grunts or might have been laughs, then got back to the serious business of marching again.

Not all the Unkerlanter soldiers had run off toward the west. Some egg-t.o.s.s.e.rs the dragons hadn't wrecked started lobbing eggs at the advancing Algarvians. Somebody not too far from Trasone went down with a scream. Trasone shivered as he tramped past the wounded man. It could have been him as easily as not, and he knew as much.

When the leading squads of his battalion started into the town to fight it out with King Swemmel's men, Major Spinello threw a fit. "No, no, no!" he howled, and made as if to tear his fiery hair or rip out his waxed mustachios. "Stupid b.u.g.g.e.rs, pox-brained cretins, what do you think you're doing? Go around, flank them out. Let the poor trudging wh.o.r.esons who come after us dig the pus out of the pocket. Our job is to keep moving. We never let them get set up to slug it out with us. We go around. Have you got that? Have you? Powers below eat you, you'd better."

"All right, we'll b.l.o.o.d.y well go around," Panfilo said, and swung his arm to lead his squad south of Unkerlant. Spinello was also screeching at the behemoths on this part of the field, and got them not to go straight into the town, either. They tossed a few eggs into it as they skirted it to north and south.

Trasone said, "I think he's a pretty good officer. As long as we keep moving, we can lick these Unkerlanter wh.o.r.esons right out of their boots. Only time they match us is when mud and rain or snow make us slow down."

"Maybe so," Panfilo allowed: no small concession from a veteran sergeant toward a green officer. He promptly qualified it by adding, "If he tells one more dirty story about that Kaunian b.i.t.c.h back in Forthweg, though, I'll hit him over the head with my stick and make him shut up."

"Oh, good," Trasone said. "I'm not the only one who's sick of them, then." Somehow, finding that out made the march seem easier.

The Unkerlanters must have been hoping the Algarvians would come into the town and fight for it street by street. When they saw Mezentio's men weren't about to, they began pulling out themselves: men in rock-gray tunics dog-trotting in loose order, with horses hauling egg-t.o.s.s.e.rs and carts full of eggs.

They wouldn't have held the town against the Algarvian troopers following the ones pushing the front forward. Out in the open, they didn't last long against those front-line troops. The Algarvians on the behemoths showered eggs down on them with impunity. As soon as one of those eggs touched off a supply dump for the Unkerlanter egg-t.o.s.s.e.rs, King Swemmel's men began to realize they were in a hopeless position. At first by ones and twos and then in larger numbers, they threw down their sticks and came toward the Algarvians with hands held high. Along with his comrades, Trasone patted them down, stole whatever money they had and whatever trinkets he fancied, and sent them off toward the rear. "Into the captives' camps they go, and good riddance, too," he said.

"We may be seeing some of them again one day," Panfilo said.

"Huh?" Trasone shook his head. "Not likely."

"Aye, it is," Panfilo said. "Haven't you heard?" He waited for Trasone to shake his head again, then went on, "They go through the camps and let out some of the Unkerlanters who say they'll fight for Raniero of Grelz--which means, for us."

Trasone stared. "Now that's a daft notion if ever there was one. If they were trying to kill us a little bit ago, why should we trust aem with sticks in their hands again?"

"Ahh, it's not the worst gamble in the world," Panfilo said. "Put it this way: if you were an Unkerlanter and got the chance to give King Swemmel a good kick in the b.a.l.l.s, wouldn't you grab it with both hands?"

"I might," Trasone said slowly, "but then again, I might not, too. I haven't noticed that the wh.o.r.esons are what you'd call shy about fighting for their king, no matter whether he's crazy or not."

"It's not like they've got a lot of choice, not after Swemmel's impressers get their hands on aem." Sergeant Panfilo's shoulders moved up and down in a melodramatic, ever so Algarvian shrug. "And it's not like I can do anything about it any which way. I'm just telling you what I've heard."

"Pretty s.h.i.tty way to go about things, anybody wants to know what I think," Trasone said.

Panfilo laughed at him. "Don't be dumber than you can help. n.o.body cares a sour fart for what a common footslogger thinks--or a sergeant, either, come to that. Now Spinello--Spinello they'll listen to. He's got himself a fancy pedigree, he does. But I bet he doesn't care one way or the other what happens to Unkerlanter captives."

"He's not interested in laying them, so why should he care?" Trasone returned, and got a laugh from the sergeant.

Neither one of them was laughing a few minutes later, when a flight of Unkerlanter dragons streaked toward them out of the trackless west. Because the Unkerlanters painted their beasts rock-gray, and because they came in low and fast, Trasone and his comrades didn't see them till they were almost on top of the Algarvians. A tongue of flame reached out for him as a dragon breathed fire.

Trasone threw himself flat. The flame fell short. He felt an instant's intense heat and did not breathe. Then the dragon raced by. The wind of its pa.s.sage blew dust and grit into Trasone's face.

He rolled from his belly to his back so he could blaze at the Unkerlanter dragons. He knew how slim his chances of hurting one were, but blazed anyhow. Stranger things had happened in this war. As far as he was concerned, that the Unkerlanters were still fighting was one of those stranger things.

A dragon flamed an Algarvian behemoth. The soldiers riding the behemoth died at once, without even the chance to scream. Partly shielded by its armor, the beast took longer to perish. Bellowing in agony, flames dripping from it and starting fires in the gra.s.s, it galloped heavily till at last it fell over and lay kicking. Even then, it bawled on and on.

"There's supper," Trasone said, pointing. "Roasted in its own pan."

Panfilo lay sprawled in the dirt a few feet away. "If this were last winter, roast behemoth would be supper--and we'd be cursed glad to have it, too."

"Don't I know it," Trasone answered. "What? Did you think I was kidding? There's not a man with a frozen-meat medal"--the decoration given for surviving the first winter's savage fighting in Unkerlant--"who'll do much kidding about behemoth meat, except the ones who ate mule or unicorn instead."

"Or the ones who didn't eat anything," Sergeant Panfilo said.

"They're mostly dead by now." Trasone got to his feet. "Well, we'd better keep going and hope those b.u.g.g.e.rs don't come back. Our dragonfliers are better than the Unkerlanters' any day, but they can't be everywhere at once."

Now Panfilo was the one to say, "Don't I know it." He went on, "When we started this cursed fight, did you have any notion how stinking big Unkerlant was?"

"Not me," Trasone answered at once. "Powers below eat me if I don't now, though. I've walked every foot of it--and a lot of those feet going forwards and then backwards and then forwards again." And he hadn't walked enough of Unkerlant, either. He hadn't marched into Cottbus, and neither had any other Algarvian.

It still might happen. He knew that. Despite Unkerlanter dragons, King Mezentio's army was rolling forward again here in the south. Take away Unkerlant's breadbasket, take away the cinnabar that helped her dragons flame . . . Trasone nodded. Let's see Swemmel fight a war once we have all this stuff, he thought.

"Come on!" Major Spinello shouted. "We're not going to win this cursed war sitting on our a.r.s.es. Get moving! Get moving!" Trasone glanced toward Sergeant Panfilo. Panfilo waved the squad forward. On they went, into the vastness of Unkerlant.

Marshal Rathar scowled at the map in his office. With his heavy Unkerlanter features, he had a face made for scowling. He ran a hand through his iron-gray hair. "Curse the Algarvians," he growled. "They've got the bit between their teeth again." He glared at his adjutant, as if it were Major Merovec's fault.

"They didn't do quite what we expected, no, sir," Merovec agreed.

That we was courteous on Merovec's part. Rathar had thought the Algarvians would strike hard for Cottbus again once the spring thaw ended and the ground firmed up. Had he been commanding King Mezentio's troopers, that was what he would have done. He'd strengthened the center against the a.s.sault he'd expected. But Mezentio's generals looked to have moved more of their men into the south, and had forced one breakthrough after another there.

"We're not going to be able to stop them down there, not for a while," Rathar said. Merovec could do nothing but nod. The advances the Algarvians had already made ensured that they would make more. They'd seized enough ley lines to make bringing reinforcements down from the north much harder. And Unkerlant didn't have enough soldiers west of the Duchy of Grelz to stop the redheads, or even to slow them down very much.

Merovec said, "If we'd known they were building up for their own campaign south of Aspang..."

"Aye. If," Rathar said unhappily. King Swemmel had insisted that the Unkerlanters strike the first blow in the south, as soon as the land down there got hard enough to let soldiers and behemoths move. And so they had, but then the Algarvians struck, too, and struck harder.

And now the army the Unkerlanters had built up to batter their way back into Grelz was shattered. It had held the finest regiments Swemmel and Rathar could gather. Some of them had managed to break out of the pocket the Algarvians formed south of Aspang. Some--but not enough. Soldiers who might have been strong in defending the south were now dead or captive.

Rathar got up from his desk and paced back and forth across his office. Merovec had to step smartly to get out of the way. The marshal hardly noticed he'd almost trampled his aide. He strode over toward the map. "What are they after?" he rumbled, down deep in his chest.

Merovec started to answer, but then realized Rathar hadn't aimed the question at him. Indeed, as his pacing proved, Rathar had forgotten Merovec was there. He might have asked the question of himself or of the powers above; his adjutant's views didn't matter to him.

Rathar had a gift for visualizing real terrain when he looked at a map. It was a gift rarer than he wished it were; he knew too many officers who saw half an inch of blank paper between where they were and where they wanted to be and a.s.sumed getting from the one point to the other would be easy. They didn't quite ignore swamps and forests and rivers in the way, but they didn't take them seriously, either. The marshal of Unkerlant did.

This spring, at least, the Algarvians hadn't attacked all along the front, as they had a year earlier. Mezentio's men lacked the strength for that. But they'd sapped Unkerlant, too. The question was whether King Swemmel's soldiers-- King Swemmel's kingdom--could still stand up against the blow the redheads were still able to launch.

"Cinnabar," Rathar muttered. Down in the Mamming Hills were the mines from which Unkerlant drew most of its supply of the vital mineral. Algarve was always short on cinnabar, which had to account for the redheads' growing adventure in the land of the Ice People. Maybe the mines scattered through the barren hills in the far south of Unkerlant were reason enough for Mezentio to launch the kind of attack he had. It made more sense than anything else Rathar had stumbled across.

"Cinnabar, sir?"

When Major Merovec did finally speak, he reminded the marshal of his existence. "Aye, cinnabar," Rathar said. "It's obvious." It hadn't been, not till he pondered the map in just the right way, but it was now. "We have it, they need it, and they're going to try to take it away from us."

Merovec came over and looked at the map, too. "I don't see it, sir," he said with a frown. "They've got too much too far north to be striking down at the Mamming Hills."

"Wouldn't you?" Rathar retorted. "That's the screen, to keep us from coming down and hitting them in the flank. If they gave me the chance, that's just what I'd do, too, by the powers above. I may try it anyhow, but they're making things harder for me. They're good at what they do. I wish they weren't."

"But--the Mamming Hills, lord Marshal?" Merovec still sounded anything but convinced. "They're a long way from where Mezentio's men are now."

"They're a long way from anything," Rathar said, which was true enough. "Not even a lot of Unkerlanters down in those parts except for the miners. The hunters and herders in the hills look more like Kuusamans than anything else."

"Pack of thieves and robbers," Major Merovec muttered.

"Oh, aye." Like any Unkerlanter, Rather looked down his beaky nose at the alien folk who lived on the edges of his kingdom. After a few moments' thought, he added, "I hope they stay loyal. They'd better stay loyal."

There his adjutant rea.s.sured him: "If they don't, it'll be the worst and the last mistake they ever make."

Rathar nodded at that. Anyone who failed to take King Swemmel's views on vengeance seriously was a fool. A generation of Unkerlanters had come to take that for granted. Even the hillmen had learned to fear the king's name. If they went over to the Algarvians, they would be sorry. The other question was, how sorry would they make Unkerlant?

"Get paper and pen, Major," Rathar said. "I want to draft an appreciation of the situation for his Majesty." The sooner Swemmel got Rathar's views on what was going on, the less inclined he would be to listen to anyone else or to get strange notions of his own ... or so the marshal hoped.

Merovec dutifully took dictation. When Rathar finished, his adjutant rolled the sheets into a cylinder and tied a ribbon around them. Rathar used sealing wax and his signet to confirm that he had dictated the memorial. Merovec took it off to pa.s.s to Swemmel's civilian servitors.

These days, Rathar did not go home much. His son was at the front in the north, toward Zuwayza. His wife had got used to living without him. He'd had a cot set up in a little room to one side of his office. Legend had it that, during the Six Years' War, General Lothar had entertained his mistress in the little room--but then, Lothar had been half Algarvian himself, and all sorts of stories stuck to him.

Someone shook Rathar awake in the middle of the night. "His Majesty requires your presence at once," a palace servitor declared.

"I'm coming," Rathar said around a yawn. Whatever Swemmel required, he got. Had Rathar asked something like, Won't it keep till morning?--had he been so foolish, Unkerlant would have had a new marshal by sunup. Were Rathar lucky, he would have been ordered to the front as a common soldier. More likely, his head would have gone up on a spear to encourage his successor.

Since he'd been sleeping in his tunic, the marshal had only to pull on his boots, grab his ceremonial sword, and run his fingers through his hair to be ready. He followed the servitor through the royal palace--quiet now, with most courtiers and soldiers asleep--to Swemmel's private audience chamber.

The guards there were wide awake. Rathar would have been astonished to find anything else. After they'd searched him, after he'd set the sword on a wall bracket, the men let him enter Swemmel's presence. He prostrated himself in front of his sovereign and went through the rituals of abas.e.m.e.nt till Swemmel decided he could rise.

And when he had risen, the king fixed him with the glare that turned the bones of every underling in Unkerlant--which is to say, every other Unkerlanter--to jelly. "You have proved wrong again, Marshal," Swemmel said. "How shall we keep you at the head of our armies when you keep being wrong" The last word was nearly a scream.

Stolid as usual, Rathar answered, "If you know an officer who will serve the kingdom better than I have, your Majesty, set him in my place."

For a dreadful moment, he thought Swemmel would do it. But then the king made a disparaging gesture. "Everyone else is a worse fool than you," Swemmel said. "Why else do the Algarvians keep winning victories? We are sick to death of being served by fools."

Swemmel had put to death a great many men who were anything but fools, in the Twinkings War against his brother Kyot when neither of them would admit to being the younger and in its aftermath and then all through his reign, whenever he suspected an able, ambitious fellow was able and ambitious enough to look toward the throne. Pointing that out struck Rathar as useless. He said, "Your Majesty, we have to deal with what is. The Algarvians are driving again, down in the south."

"Aye." Swemmel glared again, eyes dark burning coals in his long, pale face. "I have here your appreciation. More retreats. I want a general who fights, not one who runs away."

"And I intend to fight, your Majesty--when the time and the ground suit me," Rathar said. "If we fight when and where the Algarvians want us to, do we help ourselves or do we help them? Remember, we've got ourselves into our worst trouble by striking at them too soon."

He took his life in his hands with that last sentence. Swemmel had always been the one who'd urged premature attack. No other courtiers would have dared remind the king of that. Rathar dared. One day, he supposed, King Swemmel would take his head for lese majesty. Meanwhile, if Swemmel heard the truth once in a while, the kingdom stood a better chance of coming through the crisis.

"We must save the cinnabar mines in the Mamming Hills," the king said. "We agree with you in this. Without them, our dragons would be greatly weakened."

When he said we, did he mean himself or Unkerlant? Did he even separate the two? Rathar didn't know; fathoming Swemmel's mind was hazardous at the best of times, which this wasn't. Pulling his own mind back to the matter at hand, he said, "So they would. And, did the Algarvians have it, their dragon force would be strengthened to the same degree."

"They must not have it, then. They shall not have it. They shall not!" Swemmel's eyes rolled in his head. His voice rose to a shrill shout once more. "We shall slaughter them! We shall bury them! Unkerlant shall be Algarve's graveyard!"

Rathar waited till his sovereign regained some semblance of calm. Then, cautiously, the marshal asked, "Having read the appreciation, your Majesty, do you recall my mention of the town called Sulingen, on the northern bank of the Wolter?"

"What if we do?" Swemmel answered, which might have meant he didn't recall and might have meant he simply didn't care. The latter, it proved: "Sulingen is too near the Mamming Hills to suit us."

"If we can stop the Algarvians before then, so much the better," Rathar agreed. "But if they break through at Sulingen, then how can we stop them at all?"

Swemmel grunted. "It had better not come to that." He shook his head. "Sulingen. Too close. Too close. But they can't pa.s.s it. They mustn't pa.s.s it." Rathar didn't know if he'd won his point or not. He hadn't lost it in the first instant, anyhow. With Swemmel, that was something of a victory in itself.

Three.

Leofsig toweled water from his beard and used a hand to slick his damp hair back from his forehead. In summer, he used Gromheort's public baths more often after a day of road building than he had when tlie weather was cool. The baths weren't heated so well as they had been before the war, but that mattered less when he would have got sweaty even without a hard day's labor.

He grimaced as he re-donned his old, filthy, stinking tunic. No help for it, though. He had only a few tunics, and no prospect of getting more till the war ended, if it ever did. The Algarvians took almost all the wool and linen Forthweg made. Only people with the best of connections sported new clothes these days.

When Leofsig left the baths, he looked around warily lest he spy Felgilde. He'd seen the girl he'd jilted only once since backing away from their engagement, and that had been coming out of the baths. He didn't want to see her again. To his relief, he didn't see her now. That improved his mood as he headed home.

He turned the last corner and started down his street. He hadn't taken more than a couple of steps before he stopped in surprise: he'd almost run into a Kaunian. "Are you mad?" he exclaimed. "Get back to your own district before a redheaded constable spots you."

The blond--actually, his hair was more silver than gold--touched a scabby scar on the side of his head. When he spoke, he used his own tongue rather than Forthwegian: "I have already made the acquaintance of those barbarians, thank you."

"Then you do not want to make it again," Leofsig answered, also in Kaunian.