Darkness: Through The Darkness Part 58

After her unfortunate experience with the Forthwegian matrons, Vanai had no interest in learning more about such things. She finished soaping herself in a hurry. Then she grabbed a bucket with a perforated bottom, filled it in a great tub of lukewarm water, and hung it on a hook that came down from the ceiling. She stood under it to rinse the soap off her skin and out of her hair.

Rubbing at her hair after that first bucket went dry, she discovered she still had some suds in it. With a small sigh, she took the bucket off the hook, refilled it, and got back under it once more.

She was still under it when the two Algarvian women, soapy all over, came up and got their own buckets. The Forthwegian women had already gone off to swaddle themselves in towels. One of the Algarvians nodded to Vanai and asked, "Do you speak this language?" in pretty good Kaunian.

"No," Vanai answered, more sharply than she'd intended--were they trying to entrap her? She wouldn't fall for that.

Both redheads shrugged and went back to getting themselves clean. As they filled buckets and stood under them, they talked back and forth in Algarvian. Thanks to her grandfather, Vanai could read it after a fas.h.i.+on, but she didn't speak much and didn't understand much when she heard it spoken. But she did hear the word Kaunians several times, mostly in the mouth of the woman who'd asked her if she spoke the cla.s.sical tongue.

The other one pointed to Vanai and said something more in Algarvian. Vanai thought she knew what it meant: something like, Why expect her to speak it? They're all gone. If she let on she had any idea what they were saying, it would only land her in trouble. She knew that, and kept rinsing her hair. What she wanted to do was scream at the Algarvians, or, better, bash out their brains with a bucket.

Had only one of them been there with her, she might have tried that. She didn't think she could kill two, no matter how enraged she was. Both Algarvian women laughed. Why? Because they thought all the Kaunians in Forthweg were dead and gone? She wouldn't have been surprised. But they were wrong, curse them, wrong. She wanted to scream that, too, wanted to but didn't. She only finished rinsing and went off to get a towel of her own.

She dried quickly, threw the towel into a wickerwork hamper, and handed her claim token back to the woman in charge of bathers' clothes. The women gave back her garments, which she put on as quickly as she could. She didn't want to be there when the Algarvians came out to dress.

But she was; they'd done a faster job of rinsing than she had. Out they came, outwardly conforming to the Forthwegian custom of nudity but in truth flouting it by flaunting their bodies instead of taking no special notice of them in the baths. Even the attendant noticed, and she was as bovine a woman as Vanai had ever seen. She scowled and snapped at the redheads as she pa.s.sed them their tunics and kilts. They only laughed, as if to say nothing a mere Forthwegian did could matter to them.

And the worst of it was... in ordinary times, as far as the t.i.tle could be applied to the war, nothing the Forthwegians did would or could let them rise up in numbers that would make them more than a nuisance to Mezentio's men and women.

In ordinary times. What if times weren't ordinary? What if the Unkerlanters ran the redheads out of Sulingen? What if the Algarvians didn't look so much like winning the war? Would the Forthwegians decide they weren't going to stay quiet under the Algarvian yoke forever? If they did decide that, how much trouble could they cause the redheads?

Vanai didn't know. She hoped she would get the chance to find out. Meanwhile, she'd go right on cursing the Algarvians.

"Another winter," Istvan said. Another self-evident truth, too: what else would this be, with snow filtering down through the trees of the trackless, apparently endless forest of western Unkerlant?

Corporal Kun said, "And where would we be if this weren't another winter? Up among the stars with the other spirits of the dead, that's where."

Taking a sergeant's privilege, Istvan said, "Oh, shut up." Kun sent him a wounded look; he didn't usually take such privileges with a man beside whom he'd fought for years. Istvan refused to let that stare bother him. He knew what he'd meant. Since Kun didn't, he set it out in large characters: "Another winter here. Another winter away from my home valley, away from my clansfolk. I haven't even had leave in most of a year."

He held his hands out to the little fire around which he and his men sat, trying to get some warmth back into them. Then he looked down at his palms. The scar from the wound Captain Tivadar had given him remained fresh, easy to see, despite calluses and dirt. He didn't say anything about it; not all the soldiers crouched around the fire had eaten goat's flesh with him.

If he came home to the little village of Kunhegyes on leave, his family wouldn't know what the scar meant. They would welcome him into their bosom with glad cries and open arms, as they had the last time he'd got away from the war for a little while. They would have no idea he was, at best, only marginally purified from the uncleanness into which he'd fallen. If he didn't tell them, they would never learn. He could live out his life in the valley with no one the wiser.

He looked at the scar again. Whether his kinsfolk knew or not, he would know. He could imagine the knowledge eating away at him, day by day, month by month, year by year. He could imagine himself screaming out the truth one day, just because he couldn't stand to hold it in any more. What he knew counted for more than what anyone else knew.

Szonyi spat into the flames. His saliva sizzled for a moment and then was gone. He said, "We're a warrior race. We're here because we're a warrior race. Sooner or later, we'll win because we're a warrior race. We're too stubborn to quit, by the stars."

"Aye," Istvan said. In a way, that was the other side of the coin to his own thoughts. Gyongyosians did what they did because of what was inside of them, not because of any outside force.

And then Kun spat, too, in utter contempt. "Oh, aye, that's why we'll be marching into Cottbus week after next," he said.

"There aren't enough of us here," Istvan protested.

"More of us than there are Unkerlanters," the onetime mage's apprentice said.

"Well, but..." Istvan's wave encompa.s.sed the forest, or as much of it as remained visible through the drifting, swirling snow. "I'd call this place the a.r.s.ehole of the world, but you need to know where your a.r.s.ehole is once or twice a day. n.o.body's needed to know where these woods are since the stars made them."

"We wouldn't have come as far as we have if we weren't a warrior race," Szonyi said stubbornly. "Some of us still believe in things, we do. Next thing you know, some of us will say we've stopped believing in the stars." He stared a challenge back at Kun.

But Istvan took him up on it: "No, n.o.body is going to say anything like that. I didn't mean anything like that, and Kun didn't mean anything like that, either." If Kun did mean something like that, Istvan didn't want to hear about it, and he didn't want anybody else to hear about it. He went on, "Even a warrior can have enough of war for a while."

"I suppose so." Szonyi's voice was grudging.

"If you don't see that that's true, you're a bigger twit than anyone gives you credit for," Kun said. "We'd be fighting among ourselves all the time if it weren't."

"Enough," Istvan said, and used his own rank to make sure it was enough. Still, as far as he was concerned, Kun proved he came from a warrior race by the way he stood up to Szonyi. The hulking common soldier made two of the corporal, but Kun didn't back away from him.

Off in the distance, a couple of eggs burst. Everyone's head came up. "Are those ours or theirs?" somebody asked.

"We'll find out," Kun said, "probably the hard way."

Istvan wanted to contradict him, but found he couldn't. He did say, "Those are more likely to be theirs than ours. The Unkerlanters have an easier time bringing egg-t.o.s.s.e.rs into the forest across the flatlands than we do hauling them over the cursed mountains." That made it harder for the Gyongyosians to show their full mettle as a warrior race, too, though Istvan didn't suppose Kun would ever admit as much.

More eggs burst, these closer to the fire. Istvan grimaced, then shoveled snow over the flames. n.o.body said anything. The soldiers all looked to their sticks. Some of them took positions behind trees, from which they'd be able to blaze eastward if the Unkerlanters really did have an attack laid on.

Along with the thunder of bursting eggs--rather m.u.f.fled by the snow-- came shouts. Istvan couldn't tell what language they were in, but they kept getting closer, too. He found a place behind a spruce of his own. Trouble was heading this way. He didn't know who'd started it, but he doubted whether that mattered.

Out of the snow came the first Unkerlanters, white smocks over their tunics and snowshoes on their feet. Istvan didn't think they knew he and his men were in place waiting for them. From what he'd heard, the Unkerlanters had the edge against the Algarvians in the far east during the winter. That wasn't so here. He and his fellow Gyongyosians knew as much about snow and ice and fighting in them as any Unkerlanter ever born.

He waited till the first Unkerlanter was almost on top of him before he started blazing. That way, he made sure he couldn't miss, and that the blowing snow wouldn't attenuate his beam. The Unkerlanter gave a startled grunt and toppled.

The rest of the men who fought for Swemmel stopped in alarm. One of them pointed west past Istvan, deeper into the woods. They thought the beam had come from that direction. When no more of them fell for a little while, they started moving forward again.

This time, Istvan wasn't the only one who blazed at them. Down they went, one after another, like oxen slaughtered for a n.o.ble's wedding feast. A few of them let out howls of pain as they fell. Most simply died, death taking them by surprise. Istvan had the feeling he'd just disrupted the advance of at least a company.

After a bit, the Unkerlanters decided they wanted no part of the position he and his squad were defending. They fell back. He decided not to stay around and try to hold in place. "Back," he ordered urgently. "Next things they'll do is, they'll hit this place with everything they've got."

As he knew winter, so he knew the Unkerlanters. They didn't withdraw from a position because they'd lost hope of taking it. They withdrew because they wanted to hit it a different, harder, blow. Runners--well, waddlers in this country--were surely going back to their officers with the bad news. Some of those officers would have crystallomancers. Before too long, fury would fall on the fighters who'd presumed to slow Swemmel's soldiers.

And so, for now, retreat. It galled Istvan; his instinct, like the Unkerlanters', was to go forward first. But he didn't know how many of the foe pressed against him. And so he fell back a quarter of a mile. Having advanced through that stretch of the wood, he knew what was there. Before long, he and his men took a position as strong as the one they'd just left.

They'd hardly settled in when eggs started falling on the little clearing they'd abandoned. "The sergeant knows what's what," Szonyi said cheerfully. If nothing had happened to that clearing, Istvan would have lost respect. As things were, he gained it. Being no less selfish than any other man, he liked this better.

After a while, silence returned up ahead. "What now, Sergeant?" Kun asked. The question was half serious, half challenging--a demand for Istvan to prove he was as smart as Szonyi said he was.

"Now we go forward again," Istvan answered at once: both the warrior's response and, he was sure, the right tactical choice. "They'll advance again, and they'll be sure we're all dead. Here's our chance to show aem they're wrong. But we've got to move fast."

Moving fast was easy enough till they got near the clearing they'd left. The eggs had knocked down a good many trees, and the Gyongyosians had to scramble over or around them to get close to their previous position.

Istvan didn't mind, or not very much. "Look at all the fine hiding places they've handed us, boys," he said. "Snuggle down, and then we'll blaze them right out of their boots."

"That wouldn't be bad," Szonyi said. "Those big felt ones they wear hold the cold out better than anything we issue." Having seen a fair number of Gyongyosians wearing felt boots whose original owners didn't need them anymore, Istvan could hardly disagree.

"Here they come!" Kun snarled. Maybe he'd used his little magic for detecting people moving toward him. Maybe he just had good ears and-- thanks to his spectacles--sharp eyes.

The Unkerlanters came on openly, confidently--they seemed sure their eggs had cleaned up whatever enemies might be waiting for them. Fools, Istvan thought. They had to be new men, men without much experience in battle. Veterans would have taken less for granted. Some fools lived and learned and became veterans. Istvan was determined that these men wouldn't.

Again, he chose to wait till the Unkerlanters were almost on top of him before he started blazing. Again, his men imitated him. Again, they worked a frightful slaughter on Swemmel's troopers. This time, it was too much for the Unkerlanters to bear. They fled, leaving dead and wounded behind them.

"Boots," Szonyi said happily, and proceeded to strip them off the corpse closest to him and put them on his own feet.

"Those are too big," Istvan said.

"They're supposed to be big," Szonyi insisted. "That way, you can stuff them full of cloth or whatever you've got so they keep your feet warm even better." But whenever he moved, the boots tried to slide off. At last, cursing, he kicked them away and allowed, "Well, maybe they are a little too big."

"Let me try them," Istvan said. "I think my feet are bigger than yours." He sat down on a tree trunk, pulled off his own, Gyongyosian-issue, boots and put on the ones the dead Unkerlanter had worn. They fit him better than they had Szonyi, and they were warmer and more flexible than the ones he'd had on. He walked a few steps. "I'll keep aem."

"Let me see if I can find a pair to fit me," Kun said. He had plenty of Unkerlanter corpses from which to choose; Swemmel's men had paid a heavy price for gaining not an inch of ground. Before long, all the Gyongyosians who wanted felt boots had pairs to suit them. Istvan nodded in no small satisfaction. If you had to fight a war, this was the way to go about it.

Sometimes, things ended as they began. These days, pinned back against the Wolter in the many times ruined wreckage of Sulingen, Trasone had plenty of chances to think about that. He turned to Sergeant Panfilo, who crouched beside him in the remains of what had been an ironworker's hut. "The last time we were here," he said, "we were facing south, not north."

"Aye, so we were," Panfilo answered. "And we were wondering how we were going to pry the stinking Unkerlanters out of those b.l.o.o.d.y big ironworks that're behind us now. Before long, they'll be wondering how to pry us out."

"Only thing I'm wondering right now is where in blazes I'm going to get some food," Trasone said, and Panfilo nodded. Neither of them had eaten for a while. Only a handful of Algarvian dragons made it down to Sulingen these days, and the Algarvian pocket in the city had grown so small, a lot of the supplies they dropped ended up in the enemy's hands.

In the trenches less than a furlong away, the Unkerlanters had their p.e.c.k.e.rs up. They knew they were going to overwhelm the Algarvians here as surely as Trasone did. Every so often, they would burst into hoa.r.s.e song. The only thing they didn't do was stick their heads up out of the trenches to jeer at the Algarvians who had come so far ... but not quite far enough. The ones who tried that wouldn't live long enough to celebrate their victory.

Just as Trasone had learned a few words and phrases of Unkerlanter, so some of Swemmel's mean had picked up a little Algarvian. "Surrender!" one of them shouted now. In a moment, the cry resounded up and down the line: "Surrender! Surrender! Surrender!"

Here and there, Algarvian soldiers yelled back. Their answers were uniformly negative and mostly obscene. "What do you suppose they'd do to us if we were stupid enough to give ourselves up?" Panfilo asked.

"I don't much want to find out," Trasone answered. "As long as I have a choice, I'd sooner die quick and clean--if I can, anyhow."

"I'm with you," Panfilo said. "They'd have fun, their mages would have fun...." His s.h.i.+ver had nothing to do with the bitterly cold winter day. "No, I'd sooner make aem earn it."

The Unkerlanters were ready to do just that. As if the Algarvians' refusal to give up angered them, they plastered the front-line trenches with eggs. They had plenty of t.o.s.s.e.rs and plenty of eggs to toss. The Algarvians couldn't reply in kind; they had to h.o.a.rd the few eggs left to them for the moments when those eggs would be most desperately needed.

Huddled in the wreckage of the hut, sorcerous energy searing the air not far from him, deadly fragments of metal and wood and stone hissing every which way, Trasone reckoned the present moment quite desperate enough for all ordinary purposes. And then, just when he thought things could grow no worse, somebody behind him called, "We've got soup in the pot!"

He groaned. No matter how hungry he was, nothing could make him enthusiastic about what pa.s.sed for food among the Algarvians in Sulingen these days. Panfilo made a horrible face, too, and asked, "What's in it?"

"You don't want to know that," Trasone exclaimed.

"About what you'd figure," the soldier at the soup pot answered. "Old bones, a few turnip peelings." That meant it was a good batch. A lot of the time lately, it hadn't had any peelings to thicken it. Sometimes it hadn't had any bones, either, and was only hot water flavored by whatever had stuck to the sides of the pot from the previous batch.

"What kind of bones?" Panfilo persisted. Trasone shook his head. The less he knew about what he poured down his throat, the better. But Panfilo, morbidly or not, was curious: "And how old are they?"

"Whatever we could dig up," came the reply. "And they've been frozen since whatever beasts they belonged to got killed, so what difference does it make? Come back and have some if you want. Otherwise, you can go on starving."

"We go on starving even if we've got the soup, on account of there's nothing real in it," Trasone said. Panfilo nodded; he knew that, too. The trooper went on, "Is it any wonder we sneak out and murder the Unkerlanter pickets for the sake of whatever black bread and sausage they've got on aem?" He sighed. He was on the front line, which meant he was supposed to get a couple of ounces of bread every day. Sometimes he did. More often, he didn't.

Panfilo said, "I'm going back there. The way my belly's gnawing my spine, anything is better than nothing."

"Not with what'll be in that pot," Trasone predicted, but his own belly was growling like one of the wolves that prowled the Unkerlanter plains and forests. Cursing the Unkerlanters and his own officers impartially, he crawled after the sergeant. Eggs continued to burst all around. He was, by now, without fear, or nearly so. If one burst on top of him and finished him off, it wouldn't be finis.h.i.+ng much.

Panfilo was already pouring down a mess tin full of soup when Trasone got back to the hole in the ground that housed the cookfire. The sergeant finished, wiped his mouth on a filthy tunic sleeve, and said, "You're right--it's pretty bad. I'm still glad I got it."

Trasone sniffed the pot. The cook hadn't told all of the truth. Some of the bones in there had had time to start going bad before they froze. Nothing else could have accounted for the faint reek of corruption that reached his nose. But he held out his mess tin, too. If the soup poisoned him, it wouldn't be poisoning much, either.

As Panfilo had, he gulped the stuff down. It tasted nasty, but maybe not quite so nasty as he'd expected. And there were turnip peelings in there; he actually had to chew a couple of times. The cook hadn't been lying after all. The peelings might create some small part of the illusion of fullness. And the soup was hot. That, at least, was real.

When he'd emptied the mess tin, he said, "Powers above, that hit the spot. It sure did. Now where's the sparkling wine and the beautiful broads to go with it?"

"No such thing as beautiful Unkerlanter broads," the cook said, and Trasone and Panfilo both nodded. That was an article of faith among Algarvian soldiers in the west. It hadn't kept Trasone from visiting the brothels his superiors set up in Unkerlant, though he'd usually picked Kaunian women when there were any. No brothels in Sulingen. No women at all in Sulingen, unless a few Unkerlanters still survived in hidden cellars.

"Back to our position," Panfilo said. Trasone nodded. It was no more dangerous there than here.

They hadn't been back in the ruined hut for long before the barrage of eggs, already heavy, got worse. Through--perhaps around--the bursts, Trasone heard Unkerlanter officers' whistles shrilling. "They're coming!" he shouted, and his was far from the only cry going up along the Algarvian line.

And the Unkerlanters were coming, scampering through the wreckage of what had been a quiet riverside city, diving into holes and behind clumps of rubble and then coming out blazing. Some ran bent at the waist, others straight up and down. Trasone blazed at the men who tried to make themselves smaller targets. They were the ones likely to be veterans, the ones likely to be more dangerous if they got in among the Algarvians.

Swemmel's soldiers tried one of these a.s.saults every few days. Sometimes Mezentio's men threw them back with heavy losses. Sometimes they got in among the Algarvians and bit off another chunk of Sulingen. At first, Trasone thought this would be another time when the Unkerlanters spent lives and came away with nothing to show for it. They fell in large numbers; every advance they made came over the bodies of their slain. They spent lives the way he spent his money when he got leave.

He didn't think he'd get much more leave. And he realized things weren't going so well as he thought when Algarvian egg-t.o.s.s.e.rs went into action over to his right. Unless things went badly, his countrymen h.o.a.rded the eggs they had left.

They might as well have h.o.a.rded them, for the Unkerlanters broke into the Algarvian trenches despite the pallid answer to their own almost ceaseless barrage. "Urra!" they shouted. "Swemmel!" Now that the fighting was hot again, they stopped asking if the Algarvians wanted to surrender.

"We have to hold them!" Sergeant Panfilo shouted to as many of the men in his squad as might still be alive. "We have to hold them right here. If they break past us and make it to the Wolter, they cut the army in half."

"Besides," Trasone added in a low voice, "we haven't got anywhere to run to anyway."

"The ironworks," Panfilo said, but his heart wasn't in it. A lot of Algarvian soldiers were already holed up there, as they were in the ruins of the ma.s.sive granary not far away. But even if the front-line soldiers ran back there, how likely were they to make it before the Algarvians rolled over them? Not very, and Trasone and Panfilo both knew as much.

Turning, Trasone blazed at an Unkerlanter coming at him from the east-- sure enough, Swemmel's men had cracked the Algarvian line. The man went down, whether blazed or only diving for cover Trasone didn't know. The Unkerlanter didn't blaze back, so maybe Trasone had nailed him. In a brief stretch of quiet, he asked Panfilo, "Remember Tealdo?"

"Aye, poor b.u.g.g.e.r," the sergeant answered. "He's dead a year now--more than that, I suppose. Why'd you think of him all of a sudden?"

"He was in sight of Cottbus when he went down. That's how close he came. That's how close we came," Trasone added, for no Algarvian had got more than a glimpse of the towers of the capital of Unkerlant. "Here, anyway, we got all the way into Sulingen."

"Aye, we got all the way in," Panfilo said. "We got all the way in, but we aren't coming out again."

Before Trasone could say anything, several squadrons of Unkerlanter dragons flew low over the embattled Algarvians, dropping more eggs on them and burning soldiers with flames all the stronger because they were fueled with quicksilver from the Mamming Hills--quicksilver that had brought the Algarvians to Sulingen, and that Algarve would never use now. Swemmel's men were getting better at putting the pieces of their attacks together. They weren't as good as the Algarvians, but they didn't have to be. They had more margin for error.

A cleverly concealed heavy stick blazed a couple of dragons out of the sky. The Algarvians still had a few fangs left. In the long run, though, what did it matter? It might make the battle last a little longer. It wouldn't change who won.

"Behemoths!" Panfilo shouted. The yell held no terror, not any more. The Algarvians left alive in Sulingen were beyond that. It was just a warning. Trasone wondered why Panfilo bothered. n.o.body could do much about behemoths, not here, not now.

The great armored beasts lumbered forward. Unkerlanter footsoldiers trotted among them. The behemoths' crews started tossing eggs at the spots where resistance stayed strong.

One flew straight toward Trasone. He watched it rise. He watched it fall. He dove for cover, knowing there was no cover and he was too slow anyhow. The egg burst. A few minutes later, the Unkerlanter behemoths tramped past and over what had been a strongpoint and slogged on toward the Wolter.

end.