266 Harty Turtledove he exclaimed. "All our best generals have been wracking their brains over it for weeks and months, and the results have not been perfectly satisfactory." "I should say they have not," Krasta said. "What we need to do is strike the redheaded barbarians such a blow, they will flee before us as they did in the ancient days. I can't imagine why we haven't done it yet." "Neither can 1, not when you put it so clearly." Erglyu reached into his desk and pulled out several sheets of paper, a pen, and a squat bottle of ink. "If you would but give the kingdom the benefit of your insight, I am certain all Valmiera will soon hail you as its benefactress and savior." He pointed to a table and chair - both of severely plain make - set against a side wall of his office. "Perhaps you would be kind enough to set forth your strategic plan in as detailed a form as you can, that I may share it with my superiors. "I will do that." Krasta took the writing tools and went over to the table. Once there, though, she stared down at the first blank leaf with the same angry despair she'd always known in the women's finishing academy. After gnawing on the end of the pen, she wrote, We need to hit the Algarvians as hard as we can. We need to do it where they do not expect it. She started to add something more, then savagely scratched it out. More pen gnawing followed. She sprang to her feet and slapped the piece of paper on to Captain Erglyu's desk. He glanced down at it, then said, "I am certain King Gaimbu himself will be grateful to you for what you have done here today." "Why can't anyone else in the kingdom think clearly?" Krasta demanded. Without waiting for an answer, she headed out toward her carriage. She noticed she'd got ink on one finger. With a snort of annoy- ance, she rubbed it off. I t to ta d her noy- 10. Leofsig was becorming, if not thrilled about latrine duty, at least resigned to it. It was nasty, smelly work, but no harder than chopping wood or any number of other assignments in the captives' camp. Both his Algarvian captors and his Forthwegian superiors seemed content to make him the token Forthwegian on the largely Kaunian latrine crew. He made the best of it, or tried. His own Kaunian had grown rusty since his escape from school. When he'd first tried speaking it again, the lean blonds had smiled among themselves and, more often than not, replied in Forthwegian. But he'd persisted. He'd never be mistaken for a Kaunian when he opened his mouth, but these days he was even getting a good notion of how to use the optative mood, which had always baffled him even when his masters drilled it into him with a switch. Having his cot next to Gutauskas in the barracks helped in getting the Kaunian captives on the latrine crew to accept him. So did his continued enmity with Merwit. If Merwit called him a Kaunian-lover, he wore what was meant for an insult as a badge of pride. One day, as he was covering over a stinking slit trench, Gutauskas came up to him with a gleam in his blue-gray eyes. "You know, stale piss is a good bleach," the Kaunian said in his own language. Leofsig had not learned the Kaunian word for piss in school; latrine duty was educational in all sorts of ways. Gutauskas went on, "Maybe we should dye your hair blond. Do you think you would look like one of us if we did?" "Oh, indeed - without a doubt," Leofsig answered. He pointed to the stinking slit into which he was shoveling dirt. "And shit" - another word he hadn't picked up in school - "will turn your hair brown. Do you think vou would look like a Forthwegian if I flung you in there?" "It could be," Gutauskas said imperturbably. "We have been known 267 268 Harry Turtledove to call Forthwegians dungheels, just as Forthwegians have their own pleasant names for us." He cocked his head to one side, waiting to see how Leofsig would take that. A With a shrug of his broad shoulders, Leofsig said, "Everyone cans his neighbors names. Why, I would bet even the Unkerlanters aren't too efficient" - he had to drop into Forthwegian for that, being unable to come up with the Kaunian word - "to call their neighbors names." He rolled his eyes to show he intended sarcasm. Gutauskas nodded. "I would bet you are right: you prove it with your own speech, in fact. So tell me, would you sooner dwell in that part of Forthweg occupied by the Algarvian barbarians or the portion occupied by the Unkerlanter barbarians?" "I would sooner no one occupied Forthweg," Leofsig answered. "That was not one of the choices offered," Gutauskas said in the quietly mocking way that so often set Forthwegians' teeth on edge. By then, though, Leofsig had grown used to it. He gave the question serious thought; it was more interesting than what he had been doing. At last, he said, "It is likely easier for your people under the Unkerlanters, for my people under the Algarvians." "Aye, I think you are right," the Kaunian agreed, "for the Algarvians have us to despise, which keeps them from despising you quite so much." He waited while Leofsig threw a couple of shovels' worth of dirt into the slit trench, then went on, "Perhaps around midnight tonight, you will need to make a call of nature, as I shall." "Will IF' Leofsig scratched his head. "I knew you Kaunians were an orderly, regular folk, but I didn't realize you were as regular as all that." Gutauskas said nothing, but kept looking at him with head cocked slightly to one side. Leofslg scratched his own head again. In a romance about the Six Years' War, he would have figured out night away what the Kaunian was trying to tell him. At least he'd figured out Gutauskas was trying to tell him something. He said, "Well, who knows? Maybe I will." Gutauskas still didn't say anything. He went off and started digging a new slit trench. Leofsig went back to covering over the one at which he d been working. He didn't move any faster than he had to. The Algarvians didn't feed him enough to make him want to move very fast - and latrine duty wasn't the sort of work that fired a man's enthusiasm anyhow. At last, as sunset drew near, he stowed his shovel in the rack and lined INTo THE DAPKNEss rs, ance t the was ill. " ing a lic, d ians atrine lined 269 up for the meager supper that made a perfect accompaniment to his meager breakfast and meager dinner. He got a small slab of brown bread and a bowl of cabbage-and-turnip soup with a few small floating bits of salt pork so fatty it might as well have been lard. He also got a small cup of what the Algarvians insisted was beer. By the way it tasted, it might have come straight from the latrine trenches. He drank it anyway. He ate and drank almost anything he even vaguely suspected of containing nourishment. He'd seen men pop their own lice into their mouths. He hadn't fallen that far himself, but he knew he might. AM too often, his belly ached like a rotting tooth. He cherished the hour or so after each meal, when that ache drew back and waited for a while. After supper, the captives formed up in front of their barracks hall for the day's final roll call and count. For a wonder, the Algarvian guards managed to get the same number twice running, which satisfied them. Their leader spoke in bad Forthwegian: "You going in now. You no coming out till morning roll call unless you pissing, you shirting. You try- ing any other come-outings . . ." He drew a finger across his throat. Leofslg wished that finger were the sharp edge of a knife. Along with the rest of the men from his barracks, he went inside. Some of them clumped into little groups to talk. Others diced for money or, more often, for food. A few wrote letters or read the handful they'd been allowed to receive. By far the largest number lay down on their cots to rest or sleep away as much time as their captors allowed them. Merwit glared at Leofsig in the dim lanterrilight. Leofsig glared back. They were both too hungry and tired to do anything more than glare - and neither was eager to go up before the Algarvian authorities. That would mean half rations for sure, and whatever other punishments the redheads chose to add. Such delights made good behavior seem sensible c\~cn to Merwit. The bruiser eventually rolled over and started to snore. Leofsig wanted to go to sleep, too; every fiber of his being cried out for it. If he did doze off, he'd miss whatever Gutauskas had in mind for midnight. if he didn't, lic d I)c a wreck tomorrow. Which had the greater weight? Not nearly sLirc he was doing the night thing, he feigned sleep instead of falling head- long into it. Gutauskas came back to his own cot. He'd been talking in a low voice with the few other Kaunians in the hall, as he usually did before the I 270 Harry Turtledove guards came in and blew out the lanterns. His breathing soon grew slow and regular. Had he fallen asleep? Leofsig watched him out of half-closed eyes that kept wanting te'-slide all the way shut. No strip of moonlight shone on the barracks floor to let Leofsig gauge the hour even roughly; the moon, nearing new, would not rise till a little before the sun did. How, Leofsig wondered resentfully, is Gutauskas supposed to know when it's midnight, anyway? He got angry enough at the Kaunian captive to keep himself a little less sleepy than he might otherwise have been. And at last, at an hour that might have been midnight or might not, Gutauskas rose from his cot and walked toward the barracks door, which was always open - and which, at the moment, let a chilly breeze into the hall. Heart pounding, Leofsig got to his feet and walked out into the Might after Gutauskas. If anyone challenged him, he intended to curse the Kaunian for waking him and making him get up in the middle of the night. But no one did. Yawning, he stumbled toward the latrines. The one advantage of the cold was that the slit trenches did not stink quite so badly - or maybe it simply numbed Leofsig's prominent nose. That dim shape ahead had to be Gutauskas. Leofsig yawned again, wish- ing he were back on his hard cot under his thin blanket: a strange wish, when most of the time he would have given anything to get away from the barracks. Someone - a Forthwegian - came back from the latrine, tugging at his tunic. He grunted at Leofsig as they passed each other in the darkness. f c sever~l men straadlea s' it tren'hes. All, -by their silhouettes, were Kaunians. A couple exchanged soft comments in their own language: "They're here." "Aye. The last of them." Gutauskas set a hand on Leofsig's arm. "Come. Come quickly. Come quietly. Ask no questions, not now. Soon enough, you will know." Naturally, questions flooded into Leofsig's head. When he started to ask the first one, Gutauskas's hand closed tight enough to hurt. Leoffig's mouth stayed closed, too. Gutauskas jerked his chin toward the SME knot of Kaunians ahead. Leofsig followed him over to them without another word. As he came up, one of the Kaunians spoke in quiet Forthweglan: "Aii advantage to digging trenches is that there is digging, and then there is digging-" t his ere age: ome ed to fsig's small ithout INTo THE DARKNESS 271 A light shone in Leofsig's dark, sleepy mind, bright as if an egg had burst in front of his face. Gutauskas said, "Come. It will be noisome. We could not keep everyone from using this trench. But will you set filth on your feet against the chance for freedom?" "By the powers above, no!" Leofsig said in the best classical Kaunian he could muster. "Hmm. As well we do take him, Gutauskas," said the Kaunian who'd spoken a moment before. "Some of them, in truth, can be decent." By them, Leofsig realized, he meant Forthwegians. He himself was the only non-Kaunian here. Gutauskas said, "We can all be caught if we stand around here much longer. " By way of answer, the other Kaunian scrambled down into the stink- ing trench. He yanked at the side - and pulled up a tiny square door covered with dirt and muck. "Go, my friends. Crawl as fast as you may. Crawl on one another's heels. Never stop. There is an opening at the other end. Go to it." One by one, the six or eight men slid down into the trench and into the mouth of the tunnel. Gutauskas gave Leofslg a tiny shove. "Go before me," he murmured. Leofsig got into the slit trench as quietly as he could. The muck at the bottom tried to suck the sandals off his feet. He scram- bled through the doorway. It was barely wide enough for his broad Forthwegian shoulders. Outside, it had been dark. In the tunnel - shored up here and there with boards that caught Leofslg in the head when he raised up too far, but mostly dirt, like a grave - it was black beyond black. The air felt dead. He crawled on, crawled for his life. A tiny thump came from behind him as the last Kaunian let the door fall. With luck, it would be filthy enough to keep the Algarvians from noticing it for a while. Leofslg crawled. Sometimes he touched the feet of the man in front of him. Sometimes Gutauskas bumped his. How far had he come? How far to go? He had no idea. He kept crawling. He aimed to keep crawling till he came out, even if that were in Gyongyos or Lagoas. Blackness and dirt and shoving one knee past the other. ~resh air, live air, ahead. He smelled it, as a hound would. The tunnel vme a little under his shins. A Kaunian pulled him out. The night looked ZY 1 -starved eyes. Gutauskas came up behind him, Eke a ha day to his light 272 Harry Turtledove and then the last man. "Now," Gutauskas said in quiet but businesslike tones, "we all piss." "Why?" Leofsig asked - at last, a question he could put. One of the other Kaunians answered, mirth in his voice: "To put run- ning water between us and the Algarvians' searching sorceries." Hot piss splashed out of them, there near the mouth of the tunnel, hid- den from the captives' camp by a grove of olive trees. Leofsig laughed, silently but with great joy, as he shook himself. He was filthy and stink- ing and liable to be recaptured or blazed on sight, but not one bit of that mattered, not now. Now - for the moment - he was free. Bembo strolled along the streets of Tricarico, swinging his club and doing his best to make people notice him. Like most Algarvian towns, Tricarico was, among other things, a center of display. Even the most outrageously swaggering constable got less notice than he craved. Still, Bembo would rather have been swaggering along the street than marching and countermarching in the park. He didn't care for the weight of the dummy stick on his shoulder, and he especially didn't care for the way that monster of a sergeant screamed at him and at everybody else in the makeshift rnilitia. If any screaming went on, he wanted to give it, not to be on the receiving end. He glanced nervously toward the east. The real army, or such part of it as Algarve could spare on this part of the frontier, was still holding the jelgavans in the foothills of the Bradano Mountains. Bembo couldn't quite figure out how the army was holding them there. The news sheets made it sound like strong sorcery, but no sorcery was that strong. He just hoped the regulars could keep doing it. If they couldn't, he would have to try. He relished that notion not at all. A couple of people started yelling at each other down a side street. At first, Bembo was inclined to keep on walking. People shouting at one another was nothing out of the ordinary in any Algarvian city. But then he thought that, since he'd had a quiet shift, he ought to find out what was going on there. He could bring the story back to the stationhouse, which would keep Sergeant Pesaro from calling him a lazy son of a whore. He turned the comer. A crowd had already started to gather around the quarreling pair. "What's going on here?" Bembo said loudly. Several VC ne .en ~at ise, & a tile INTo THE DARKNESS 273 people in the crowd looked his way, saw what he was, and discovered urgent business elsewhere. He chuckled. He'd expected nothing difterent. One of the people who'd been doing the yelling was a redheaded woman heading hard toward middle age. Her clothes and her wary eyes didn't say whore, not quite, but they did say slattern. Facing her was a rather younger man who wore tunic and kilt and spiky waxed mustaches of unimpeachably Algarvian style. But those mustaches and his hair were pale gold, not red or auburn or chestnut. Uh-oh, Bembo thought. Aloud, he repeated, "What's going on here?" "This stinking Kaunian was trying to rob me," the slatternly woman shouted. I bet lie's a jelgavan spy. He looks like a spy to me." A couple of men behind Bembo growled. The constable's head started to ache, as if he'd poured down too much red wine. The man standing there looking affronted and innocent was undoubtedly of Kaunian blood, asjelgavans were. That might mean anything, or nothing. His ancestors could have been living in Tricarico for centuries before there were any Algarvians within a couple of hundred miles. But even if they had been, that didn't prove anything, either. Some folk of Kaunian blood were per- fectly loyal to King Mezentio. Some still dreamt of the days of the ancient Kaunian Empire. "What have you got to say for yourseIP" Bembo demanded of the blond man. His voice was rough with suspicion, partly because he was a constable, and so was suspicious on general principles, and partly because he'd been reading a lot of the torrid historical romances that had been coming out lately, and so was more suspicious of Kaunians than he had been. "Why would I try to rob her?" the man asked. "Does she look like she's got anything worth having?" He spoke Algarvian with the accent of someone who'd grown up in the northeastern part of the kingdom - the same accent as Bembo's. But a spy would be smooth, the constable thought. The blond man looked the woman up and down, then rolled his eyes, as any Algarvian who found a woman unattractive and wanted her to know it would have done. She screeched at him. Bembo looked her up and down. She didn't have anything he particularly wanted, though he probably wouldn't have said no if she offered it free of charge. Wearily, Bembo hauled out his notebook. "Give me your names," he "Don't get cute with 'em, either. We'll have a mage checking. 274 Harry Turtledove We don't like people who he to the constabulary." The woman called herself Gabn*na. The man said his name was Balozio. "A likely story," Gabrina sneered. "Probably started out as Balozhu." She twisted it from an Algarvian-sounding name to one that sprang from Jelgava or Valmiera. "Your father never knew what your name was," Balozio told her: an insult as Algarvian as the day was long. Gabriina screeched again. Balozio shouted at her. "Shut up!" Bembo yelled, hating them both. He pointed to the woman. "What did he try to rob you oP How did he do it?" "My belt pouch," she answered, sticking out the hip on which she wore it. She remained unalluring to Bembo. "Why, you lying slut!" Balozio shouted. She bit her thumb at the blond man. Turning to Bembo, he went on, "All I was trying to do was pat her on the bum." For a moment, Bembo accepted that. He'd felt up a good many women strolling along the street. But then he stopped thinking like a man and started thinking like a constable. "Now just you wait," he said. "A minute ago, you were telling me this broad didn't have anything you wanted." "Don't you call me a broad, you tun of lard!" Gabriina yelled at him. Bembo brandished his club. '~For that, you can come along to the station, too. We'll sort it out there." Balozio and Gabrina both looked appalled. If one ran one way and one the other, Bembo didn't know what he'd do. Calling on people to help was about as likely to get them to help the fugitives as to help him: he knew his countrymen and how they felt about constables only too well. If they'd felt differently, Algarve wouldn't have needed so many constables. But then the man and woman didn't run. Bembo smacked the club into the palm of his left hand. "Come on," he growled. They came. They came sullenly, but they came. Before one of them could decide to make a break, Bembo spoded another constable and waved him over.- "What's going on?" asked the newcomer, a burly fellow named Oraste. "Curse me if I know," Bembo told him. "He says he was just letting-J, his hand get happy, you know what I mean? She says he tried to steal hei- Pouch." 1. I lie me elp he 1. if des. Rub, hey Itted the tting I her INTo THE DARKNESS I 275 Oraste eyed Gabrina. He rocked his hips forward and back; he must have liked what he saw. Gabrina noticed, too, and let her tongue slide along the edge of her lower lip. When Oraste inspected Balozio, he 1111ght have been looking at a pile of dog turds on the street. "I've never seen a blondie yet who wouldn't steal whenever he got the chance," he declared. Balozio turned pale. Since he was already very fair, he ended up look- ing downright ghostly. "Now see here," he said. "I'm an honest man. I've always been an honest man, and I've always been a loyal man." He was trying to bluster, and not doing a good job of it - he sounded more frightened than arrogant. After a moment, he added, "I can't help the way I look. It's how I was born." Gabrina contrived to brush against Oraste. "I still say he looks like a jelgavan spy," she murmured in tones that shouldn't have been heard outside a bedchamber. Balozio was too upset to notice the byplay. He snarled, "I say you look I-Ike a case of the clap on the hoof " 11 Shut up, Kaunian," Oraste said in a deadly voice. He might have modeled himself after an Algarvian warrior chief in one of those popular historical romances; Bembo thought he read them, too. Oraste looked about to lay into Balozio with his club. "Have a care," Bembo muttered behind his hand. "He might be a rich Kauman." It didn't seem likely, not from the blond man's clothes, but stranger things had happened. Oraste scowled, but desisted. When they went upstairs and into the station, Sergeant Pesaro set down the plum tart he'd been eating; a couple of flaky crumbs clung to the tuft of hair under his lower lip. "What's all this?" he rumbled. Everyone started speaking ... shouting ... screaming at once, with increasingly frantic gesticulations to accompany the increasingly loud talk. Quite suddenly, Balozio ended up on the floor. Bembo didn't see how it happened; he'd been nose to nose with Gabriina, exchanging uncompliments. Like most Algarvians, Pesaro was adept at following several different threads at once. "Enough," he said after watching and listening to the show for a while. "Bembo, you take this lug" - he pointed at Balozio - "down to the recording section. If he's tried stealing before, we'll drop him in a cell and charge him. If he hasn't, I guess he can go. Oraste, you 276 Harry Turtledove handle the wench. Same deal: you find out she tries getting customers in trouble, we jug her. Otherwise, kick her tail back out on the street." Bembo thought Gabrina would start screeching at Pesaro for implying she had customers. But she was shrewder than that: she sent another sm~e of invitation toward Oraste, who looked as if he'd like handling herjust fine. Bembo got the idea her records wouldn't be searched so closely as, in a little while, her person would. Resignedly, Bembo turned to Balozio, who had a bruise on his cheek the constable didn't remember. "Come on, pal, let's find out about you," Bembo said. Balozio seemed to know his way to the recording station, which Bembo found interesting in a man who'd loudly proclaimed his honesty. The constable leered at Saffa. The sketch artist bit the thumb at him, as Gabrina had at Balozio, but then she winked. Was she teasing him to encourage him, or to drive him mad? Probably to drive him mad. A bored-looking clerk took Balozio's name and his thumbpnint. He mumbled a charm. One of the many file drawers in back of him came open. He nodded to Bembo. "There's a thumbpriint in there similar to his, all right." Still bored, he went back and got the file with the thumbprint in it. When he opened it, Bembo recognized one of Saffa's sketches. "Let's see," the clerk said, flipping sheets. "Fine for cheating a courtesan of her fee, petty theft, petty theft again, charged with stealing a pouch, but that wasn't proved." "Of course it wasn't proved," Balozio exclaimed. "I didn't do it." He spread his hands in despairing appeal. "I'm a blond, and they still couldn't convict me. I must have been innocent, night?" "It's close enough," Bembo said to the clerk. "Thanks. We'll pack him away for a while. Getting a Kaunian off the streets sounds good to me. "I don't even speak Kaunian!" Balozio said. The clerk ignored him, except to put his file back in its proper drawer. Bembo took Balozio by the arm. "Come on, pal. Come quiet, and you'Ir just get packed away. If you don't-" Head hanging Imserably, Balozio went with him. Cornelu drank the bitter wine of exile. He ate the hard bread of the man cast from his home. The metaphor, he knew, was only a metaphor. INTO THE DARKNESS io 277 The bread the Lagoans fed him was no harder than what he'd been used to eating in Sibiu. Now that Lagoas was at war with Algarve, wine had grown hard to come by, but he found nothing wrong with Lagoan ales and lagers, stouts and porters. However well they fed him, though, an exile he remained. The Algarvian banner, green and white and red, flew above Tirgoviste and the other cities of Sibiu. King Burebistu was a captive, seized in his own palace before he could flee. And Costache, Cornelu's wife, was a captive, too. By now, he rmight well have a son or daughter. He did not know. He could not know. He did know Algarvians. They'd be sniffing around Costache like dogs around a bitch in heat. His hands folded into fists as he sat on his hard cot in one of the bar- racks halls the Lagoans had given to the forlorn few soldiers and sailors who'd got out of Sibiu: the only free Sibians left. He cursed the Algarvians who occupied his kingdom. He cursed them twice, for being there and for being clever enough to figure out a way to get there that no one in the island kingdom had foreseen. A Lagoan officer came into the barracks. Cornelu and his fellow exiles looked up from whatever dullnesses occupied them. Cornelu had never been enormously fond of Lagoans. As far as he was concerned, the only reason they'd ever got ahead of Sibiu in trade and war was that they had a larger kingdom. And now that larger kingdom remained free, while Sibiu lay captive and Algarvian soldiers - or so he feared, at any rate - accosted his wife. That gave him another reason to resent Lagoans: they did not understand what he was going through. Oh, they'd taken him in, they'd fed him, they'd housed him, they'd even promised to use his leviathan and him in the fight against Algarve they now - belatedly -joined. But they did not understand. With gloomy Sibian pride, he was sure of it. The officer, who wore the grayish green of the Lagoan navy, came tmk ard Comelu. His strii de was easy, loose, confident: the stride of a man whose own king ruled his kingdom and was likely to keep on ruling it. That stride and the thoughtlessly cheerful smile on his face made Cornelu dislike him on sight. "Good day, Commander, and how are you?" the Lagoan asked in ~\,liat lie no doubt fondly imagined to be Cornelu's language. To Comelul it sounded more like Algarvian, and bad Algarvian at that. 278 Harry Turtledove Blithely oblivious, the fellow went on, "I am Lieutenant Ramalho. I hope you are not busy now?" Slowly, Cornelu got to his feet. He was glad to find himself a c%uple of inches taller than Ramalho. "I do not know," he said. "There are, after all, so many important things for me to do right now." Ramalho laughed a gay laugh, as if Cornelu had been jocular rather than icily sardonic. Maybe the Lagoan gave him the benefit of the doubt, which was a rm*stake. Maybe, too, Ramalho couldn't tell the difference. Still chuckling, the fellow said, "If you are not too busy, will you come with me?" "Why? Where will we go?" Cornelu kept his words slow and simple, as if speaking to an idiot child. Even Lagoans who thought they spoke his language made heavy going of it. As for him, he despised their tongue, with its nasal vowels and sneezy consonants, with its hordes of words pil- laged from Kaunian, Kuusaman, and every other language under the sun. How even people born speaking it figured out what they were going to say was beyond him. "Well, you'll know more about that when we get there, won't you?" Ramalho said, cheerful still. "Come along." He turned away, certain Cornelu would follow - as indeed he did. He and his fellow Sibian exiles were tools in the Lagoans' hands - useful tools, to be employed with some care, but tools nonetheless. ' He blinked against watery sunshine when he went outside. He also winced at the racket; whatever else the naval half of Setubal harbor was, it was a noisy place. Iron and steel clanged against each other. Sailors and stevedores and teamsters and mages shouted in their incomprehensible language. Every now and then, Cornelu caught a word close enough to its Sibian equivalent for him to recognize it. Those few words made him lonelier than ever; it was as if they were exiles, too. "Do we go to the leviathan pens?" Cornelu asked. "I should see Eforiel." He did not want the leviathan to think he'd abandoned her. He counted her a friend - almost the only friend he had here - and did not want to worry her or make her sad. "Not far from them," Ramalho answered. He pointed toward a couple of low, white-painted buildings set a little way back from the pens. "We go there." "And what do we do there?" Cornelu inquired. All Ramalho did was INTo THE DARKNESS as 279 laugh again, as if at anotherjoke. Cornelu gritted his teeth. He wondered if he should have surrendered to the Algarvians. He'd be with Costache now - if Mezentio's men didn't fling him in a captives' camp. He sighed. He'd done this. He had to live with it. Gulls, some with white heads, some with dark, rose in angry, skrawk- ing clouds as he and Ramalho drew near. "Miserable beggars," Ramalho said, his tone halfway between annoyance and affection. "If we fed them, they would love us instead of making such a fuss." Comelu shrugged. The Lagoans fed him. In their offhand way, they tried to be kind to him. He recognized as much. Even so, he could not love them. Ramalho chattered on. If he had any notion what his com- panion was thinking, he gave no sign of it. "Well, here we are," the Lagoan lieutenant said gaily as he led Cornelu up a short wooden staircase and opened the door at the top, standing aside so Comelu could precede him. Cornelu's shoulders went back and then forward in a silent sigh. He wondered how, if Lagoas had men like this, Sibiu had ever come out on the short end of their naval wars in centuries past. When he got a look at the men who stood to greet him, he reluctantly stopped wondering. Here, by all appearances, were Lagoan naval officers who Might have stepped from the pages of a Sibian romance: arrogant, aye, but with solid ability underlying the arrogance. "Commander Comelu," one of them said, and then went on in his own language: "You speak Lagoan?" Comelu understood the question, and could answer "No" in Lagoan one of the few polite expressions out of the handful of words and phrases he'd picked up. "Right." The Lagoan officer spoke good Algarvian, and didn't try to tuni it into Sibian, as Ramalho ineptly kept doing. "We can get along in this tongue, I expect." He waited for Cornelu to nod, then continued, "I aiii Coimnodore Ribeiro; my colleague here is Captain Ebastiao." After handclasps, the commodore suddenly seemed to remember Ramalho was there. "Run along, Lieutenant," he said, and Pamalho disappeared. Ebastiao also handled himself well in Algarvian, saying, "That's a fine leviathan you rode here. You Sibs have always been good at getting the most out of those beasts." "For this I thank you." Cornelu stiffly inclined his head. "And this is 280 Harry Turtledove why I have been summoned here, this matter of leviathans?" He real4ed he was speaking Sibian himself, and started to translate into the language the Lagoan officers had shown they knew. Commodore Ribeiro made a chopping gesture. "Don't bother," he said. "I expect Ebastiao and I can follow your jargon well enough, even if we wouldn't care to try wrapping our tongues around it." He poked the other Lagoan officer in the ribs with an elbow. "Eh, Ebastiao?" "I expect so, sir," Ebastiac, said, nodding. "And if we don't know what the commander is talking about, maybe he doesn't know what he's talk- ing about, either, eh?" He had narrow, slanted eyes; they would have been perfect Kuusaman eyes had they been dark rather than gray. The lid to one of them dipped in an unmistakable wink aimed Cornelu's way. Cornelu didn't know how to respond to that. The Sibian navy enforced almost as much distance between ranks as did those of VaIrmera and jelgava. Cornelu tried to imagine Commodore Delfinu winking at him. He shook his head. Inconceivable. He stood still, waiting to see what the Lagoans would do next. You couldn't tell ahead of time with Lagoans. That was part of what made them dangerous. Ebastiao said, "What we have in mind for you, Commander, is working with our leviathan riders, teaching them some of your tricks - bringing them up to speed generally, you might say - and then commencing patrols out from our sl~ores and as close to Sibiu as proves practicable." "That's right." Ribeiro nodded. "We don't relish the notion of being taken by surprise, as your kingdom was. We shall have leviathans patrolling as far forward as possible, as Ebastiao told you - we shall do our best to equip the riders with crystals, that they may expeditiously report what they see. We shall have the navy moving along the ley lines. We shall also put yachts to see, to peer in between the lines, so to speak." "I doubt you will need them," Cornelu said bitterly. "Some tricks work only once. This one worked on us." "Better to have and not need than to need and not have," Ribeiro' replied. "And we shall have long-distance dowsers out along the coasts - as your kingdom should have done, if I may speak frankly without giving offense.5' "Looking back, you are right," Cornelu said. "But who could have thought ahead of time that even Algarvians would be mad enough to en oves eing thans o our eport s. We tricks ibc1ro oasts - Living Id have ugh to INTo THE ARXNESS try such a stunt? Had it failed-" He scowled. It had not failed. 281 "Let's go back to your place in this," Ebastiao said. Commodore Ribeiro looked at the broad picture. His subordinate dealt with details. In that, the Lagoan navy operated like its Sibian counterpart - no, as its Sibian counterpart had done. Ebastiao went on, "You will train our men up to your standards. You will, as circumstances permit, draft a manual o training techniques so others may use them. And you win - you most assuredly will - patrol and, again as circumstances permit, take the war to the foe in and around Sibian waters. Will that put enough on your plate to keep you hopping?" "Aye," Comelu said hastily. He was indeed a tool to the Lagoans. But, at last thev ere seeinp, he could be a sharn one Ealstan and Sidroc had a day free from school. They and some of their classmates were kicking a ball around in a park not far from Ealstan's home, along with a few boys - some older, some younger - they'd met there. It wasn't really a game - how could it be, with no goals, no nets, no properly marked pitch? They were just running and shouting and having as good a time as they could in occupied Gromheort. It had rained the night before. Mud splashed up from under Ealstan's shoes as he sprinted toward the beat-up old ball. He and his cousin would come home filthy. His mother would shout at them. He knew that, somewhere in the back of his mind, and was vague sorry about it - but not enouah to stov runninL),. Here came Sidroc, too, so intent on the ball that he didn't notice Ealstan. joy burst through Ealstan like the sun bursting out from behind clouds. He lowered his shoulder and knocked his cousin sprawling. Sidroc went rolling through the muck. With a wild shout of triumph, Ealstan booted the ball toward a little grove of carob trees. The pack of boys dashed after it "Curse you, Ealstan!" Sidroc shouted, spitting mud out of his mouth. He scrambled to his feet. "Powers below eat you!" Ealstan called back over his shoulder. "I aot vou fair and sciuare." Three strides later somebodv - he never saw who - ~,ot him fair and square. He was briefly airborne, like a dragon taking wing. Unlike a dra,,oti ukiiig wing, lie didn't stay airborne. He landed on his belly and 282 Harry Turtledove 4 skidded along the muddy ground for a good ten feet. His mother would yell, all right - the front of his tunic, he discovered as he got up, was nothing but brown and green. It had started out grayish blue. He charged after the ball, which had gone its own merry way while he was down. As he ran, he brushed mud from his tunic - and from his arms. He was as grimy as some of the ragged men who stood around watching the boys at their sport. Before the war, Gromheort had been a quietly prosperous town. Oh, it had some derelicts; Ealstan's father said there was no place in the world that didn't have some derelicts, which made sense to Ealstan. Now, though, with so many homes and shops destroyed, with so many foriner soldiers around whom the occupying authorities hadn't bothered for- mally capturing, Gromheort seemed full of men - and some women, too - living as they could, cadging what they could, sleeping where they could. One of them, a scrawny fellow with an unkempt beard who wore a tunic much too small, started to wave when Ealstan ran past. Ealstan saw him only from the corner of his eye. The ragged men often begged for coins. If he happened to have any, he sometimes gave them out. When he did, he thought of Leofsig, who, in the captives' camp, couldn't get even that much help. Today, though, Ealstan had left his belt pouch at home; kicking a ball around was as good a way to lose a pouch as any he could think of offhand. Then the beggar who'd waved called his name. Ealstan stopped dead. Sidroc, who'd been about to hit him from the side, skiddcd past and nearly went down in the mud agaiii. Ealstan didn't even notice his cousin had almost clipped him. He trotted out of the game, staring at the man he'd taken for a derelict. "Leof-" he began. "Don't say it," his brother cautioned. He coughed a couple of times before continuing. "I'm not exactly here on official business, you know." He hadn't been released, then, as Ealstan had guessed. He'd escaped. The pride Ealstan felt for his brother swelled enormously. "How did you Leofsig cut him off again. "Don't ask stupid questions. And speaking of stupid questions-" He pointed with his chin. Sidroc was coming up. "Found your own level?" Ealstan's cousin asked with a hard, sour I i P ie Ike Vt ie 11 ~d- ~id LP. ~ur INTo THE DARKNESS laugh. "Beggars now? It'll probably be Kaunians next." 283 "I should have wrung your neck years ago," Leofsig said evenly. "Are you trying to show me it's not too late?" Sidroc started to get angry. Then, far more slowly than Ealstan had, he recognized Leofsig. "I thought you were in a camp," he blurted. "So did the fornicating redheads," Leofsig said. "And don't talk about Kaunians like that. You drip ignorance. 11 Sidroc rolled his eyes. "You sound like Ealstan. "Do V' Leofslg glanced at his younger brother. "Are you growing up? Maybe you are. Here's hoping, anyhow." "We've got to get you home," Ealstan said. "I didn't want to go straight there - didn't know how risky it was." Leofsig's face took on a look of bleak, cold calculation: the look of the hunted. "The Algarvians haven't been paying you any special attention?" He waited for both Ealstan and Sidroc to shake their heads before going on. "All right, we'll try it. Ealstan, you run ahead. Let them know I'm on the way. Sidroc, you come along with me. Keep me company. It's been a while." Ealstan ran like the wind. He'd never run so hard after a ball, not in all his born days. A couple of Algarvian soldiers gave him fishy looks, but he was young enough to look like someone running for the fun of it, not someone running because he'd just done something nasty to one of their pals. One of the Algarvians shrugged, the other made a mildly disparaging gesture, and they walked on. He kept running. He pounded on the front door to his house. W en his sister unbarred it, alarm filled her face. "Ealstan! You're filthy!" she exclaimed. "And have you gone crazy? Mother and I thought you were a squad of redheads, come to tear the place apart or worse." "They'd better not," Ealstan panted. All at once, how har caught up with him. He pushed past Conberge into the short front hall, closed the door behind him, and barred it again. When his sister began to give him more of a hard time about the way he looked, he said, "Shut up." That made her start to shout; he wasn't supposed to speak to her so. He knew how to make her stop, though: "Leofsig is on the way home. He's coming with Sidroc. He'll be here in about five minutes." Conberge went on for another couple of words before she re that. Then she hugged him, regardless of how grubby he was. "Did the 04 284 Harry Turtledove Algarvians let him go?" she asked. "Why didn't they tell us if they let him go? " "Because they're Algarvians," Ealstan answered. "And because they didn't let him go. But he'll be here any minute, all the same." His sister understood at once what he was saying. "He'll have to hide, won't he?" Without waiting for an answer, she went on, "You'd better tell Mother. She'll know what to do." "Of course she will." Ealstan was just young enough to say that with- out sounding sardonic. "Is she in the kitchen?" Conberge nodded. She stayed by the door, ready to slam it shut the instant Leofsig crossed the threshold. When Ealstan burst into the kitchen, his mother looked up from the garlic cloves she was mincing. Her look was much more ominous than the one the Algarvian soldiers had turned on him. "What happened to you?" Elfryth demanded in tones that said he had no possible answer. He found one anyhow: "Leoffig's right behind me. He's coming with Sidroc." "Powers above!" his mother said softly. Unlike Conberge, she didn't think for an instant that the Algarvians had released Leofsig. In tones sud- denly brisk and practical, she went on, "You had better go tell your father. He's casting accounts for Womer - you know, the linen merchant on the Street of the Green Unicorn. Go tell him right now. No - change your tunic first. Then go. You'll look like a proper human being, so you w't f on righten Womer half to death." "Why do I care about ffightening Womer?" Ealstan rather liked the idea. Elfryth looked at him as if he were five years old and none too bright. "We don't want to draw anyone's notice to us, not now, not for any- thing," she said. "Now go get your father. He'll know which redheads' palms we'll have to grease to stay out of trouble." By the time Ealstan had on a clean tunic, Conberge was embracing Leofsig in the front hall. She even hugged Sidroc, and her dealings with her cousin were edgy at best. Ealstan squeezed past them all and out the door. As he started away, he was glad to hear someone bar it behind him. The Street of the Green Unicorn wasn't far from Count Brorda's bat- tered keep. Most of Ealstan's father's clients came from the upper crust of I t d- ur nt the t. ny- ads' ing ith the hind bar st of INTo THE DARKNESS 285 Gromheort. Hestan was best at what he did; no wonder he dealt with folk who were best at what they did. Worrier's secretary was a big, scarred man who looked as if he hated everything and everybody. But when Ealstan said whose son he was and added, "My mother's been taken ill, sir," the secretary led him back to the large ledgers his father was poring over with the linen merchant. Hestan looked up from the books. "Ealstan!" he said. "What are you doing here?" "Mother's sick, sir," Ealstan said, as he had to Worrier's secretary. "She wants you to come home." What his father's face showed was terror. Ealstan, fortunately, didn't quite recognize it. Hestan sprang to his feet. "Your pardon, sir, I pray you," he said to Womer. "I'll be back as soon as I may." "Go on, go on." Worrier made as if to shove him out the door. "I hope everything turns out well for you." Once they were on the street, Ealstan said, "Mother's not really ill, sir." Hestan seized his arm. He thought he was about to get a very pub- lic thrashing. But, again, he knew the charm to get himself out of it: "My brother's come home." His father let him go as quickly and abruptly as he'd grabbed him. Hestan whistled softly, then ruffled Ealstan's sweaty hair, something he hadn't done since Ealstan was much smaller. "You did well not to say that in Woiner's hearing," he admitted. "How is he?" "Thin. Hungry. Dirty the way you are when you haven't washed for weeks," Ealstan said, and then, "But he's here." "Aye." Hestan's gaze went far away. "And now I have to figure out how he can stay here without hiding under the bed for the rest of his days." He plucked at his beard. "It shouldn't be too hard. Algarvians are fond of cash. The records will have to read that he's been here with us since before Mezentio's men took the city. I know which redhead sergeant handles those lists." Pride filled Ealstan's voice: "Mother said you'd be able to handle it." He was proud of both his parents - of his father for knowing what he knew and of his mother for knowing his father would know it. Hestan set a hand on his shoulder. "If it has to do with money and papers, I can handle it." The hand tightened. "The trick is to use money and papers well enough to keep Algarvian soldiers with sticks from 286 Harry Turtledove .4 coming after us. I can't do anything about redheads with sticks." He sighed. "The way it worked out, no one in Forthweg could do anything about redheads with sticks." Pekka enjoyed the ley-line caravanjourney up to Yliharma, the capital of Kuusamo. She felt a little guilty about saddling Leino with Uto while she was gone, but he'd made craft-related trips before - and Elimaki was next door to lend a hand with the chaos elemental inadequately disguised as a small boy. A steward came into the car with a tray of pickled herring, smoked salmon, and meat-stuffed rolls. On Kuusaman caravans, unlike those of, say, mercenary Lagoas, meals came with the fare. Pekka took a roll and some herring. Another steward followed the first with a tray of drinks. Pekka chose hot ale, though a stove at each end of the car kept it com- fortably warm. Outside, snow blanketed the Vaattojarvi Hills, the low range that ran across most of Kuusamo from east to west. North of those hills, the cli- mate was less rugged. When KaJaam had blizzards, Yliharma had snow- storms. When Kajaam had snowstorms, Yliharma had flumies, or else freezing rain. When Kaj'aam had freezing rain, the rain around Yliharina didn't freeze. When Ka aani had ordinary rain, Yliharma had sunshine.. every once in a while. Some of the trees in the forests north of the Vaattcjarvi Hills were oaks and maples, bare-branched in winter. The rest were the pines and firs and spruces that dorninated the woods farther south. Once, Pekka thought she saw a red fox trotting over the crusted snow, but the caravan swept past before she could be sure. She got into Yliharma around lamplighting time - an hour that varied through the year and that, in winter, came later in the capital than down in KaJaani, though it did not come very late in any part of Kuusamo. Steep-roofed buildings stood black against the sky. Steep roofs were Kuusamo and Unkerlant's contribution to the world's architecture, as surely as columns were the Kaunian contribution and extravagant detail- ing the Algarvian. When the caravan sighed to a stop in the station - which also had a steep roof - Pekka threw on her heavy cloak and a rabbit-fur hat with earflaps. She pulled a pair of carpetbags from the rack above the seats and, INTo THE DARKNESS w- Ise ma aks and ght ept aried own amo. were re, as detail- had a t with ts, and, 287 thus burdened, walked up the aisle to the door near the forward stove. A square stone block not much different from the ones riders had used to mount horses in the days before stirrups helped her dismount from the car now. "Mistress Pekka!" Among the folk waiting on the platform to meet and greet arrivals was a man calling her name. She had expected to be met and greeted. But when she saw who was waving to her, her eyes widened. She hadn't expected this man to do the job himself. "Master Siuntio!" she called. She couldn't wave, not burdened as she was. She couldn't bow, either, which was what she really wanted to do. Siuntio had headed the theoretical-sorcery faculty at the Princely University of Yliharma for more than twenty years. Calling him a first- rank mage was an understatement on the order of calling the heart of the sun warm. Had scholars won prizes like athletes, he would have had a roomful. And he had come to meet her at the station? "Master, you honor me beyond my worth," she said as she came up to him. "Pekka, I'm going to tell you a sorcerous secret: a lot of the really good ones haven't the faintest notion of what they're worth," Siuntio answered. He was a stooped, graying man only a couple of inches taller than Pekka, who was herself short even by Kuusaman standards. He looked like an apothecary on the point of retirement. Looks deceived, as they often did. He reached out. "Here, give me one of those bags." Pekka did, the lighter one. She would have felt less strange, less con- strained, with one of the Seven Princes carrying her carpetbag. They hadn't earned their rank; they'd just been born into it. Siuntio came honestly by every speck of the acclaim he'd gained through the years. He seemed an ordinary enough man on the platform, though, using her bag to fend off other people and, once or twice, to help clear a path through them. He cursed when someone trod on his toes, and got cursed when he trod on someone else's. Pekka would have reckoned getting her toes stepped on by the greatest theoretical sorcerer of his generation a privilege, but not everybody shared her knowledge or her point of view. "Here we are," he said when they reached his carriage. "I'll take you over to the Principality. We've got you booked there. I hope that's all right?" He cocked his head to one side and gave her an anxious look. "I - think so," Pekka said faintly. When kings and their ministers visited Yliharma, they stayed at the Principality. Kuusamo did not have 288 Harry Turtledove another hostel to compare to it; every third romance set a banquet scene there - and a spicy scene in one of the famous bedchambers. "Well, fine, then." Sluntio put the bag he was carrying into the car- nage, then took the other one from Pekka and set it alongside. He handed her up on to the seat, unhitched the horse, went around to the other side of the carriage, took up the reins, and began to drive. He could readily have afforded a coachman, but didn't bother. As the carriage started to roll, he said, "You won't be the only one at the Principality, you know, Several others have come in from the provinces. It should be an interesting gathering in the Ahvenanmaa Room tomorrow midmorn- ing, don't you think?" "Should it?" Pekka plucked up her courage and said, "Master Siuntio, I'm not precisely sure why I was asked up to Yliharma." "Is that a fact?" Sluntio chuckled, as if she'd said something funny. Had most people done that, she would have got angry. Siuntio she granted the benefit of the doubt. He went on, "It has to do with the business Prince joroinen asked you not to put in the journals any more. From the bits and pieces you have published, you may be closer to the bottom of things than any of us." "That?" Pekka gaped. "I've been doing that for my own amusement, nothing more. I don't know if it will ever have any use." "As a matter of fact, neither do I," Sluntio said. "But it may, Mistress Pekka; it may. You have seen deeper into it than most, as I told you, Others, though, may have had a wider vision." Before Pekka could say anything to that, Siuntio pulled back on the reins and the horse stopped. "Here we are. You see, it wasn't far. Go right on in. Shall I carry that bag for you?" "Please don't bother. I can manage." Pekka jumped down and took both carpetbags. Sluntio beamed. "I'll see you at midmorning, then. The Ahvenanmaa Room, remember." He clucked to the horse and flicked the reins. The carriage rattled off, leaving narrow wheel tracks in the slush on the street. Still dazed, Pekka went into the Principality. By the way the staff fawned on her, she might have been Swernmel of Unkerlant, with the power and the will to take their heads if they displeased her in the slight- est. The chambers to which they led her could not have displeased Swemmel or anyone else; they were about the size of her house, and ever INTo THE DAB-KNESS 289 so much more luxuriously appointed. She ordered mutton and kale and pi f arsnipritters from the menu by the enormous bed. The supper came up by dumbwaiter with almost magical speed. It was almost magically good, too. Andthe bed, besides being enormous, was almost magically soft. When Pekka lay down on it, she knew a moment's regret that Leino couldn't have come along to enjoy it with her and help her enjoy it more. But it was only a moment's regret. Though she'd dozed a little on the journey up from KaJaam, travel remained wearing. She yawned once, twice, and then slept soundly till morning. Her suite had an attached steam room and cold plunge. She was still toweling her hair dry when she sent down a breakfast order. The fat smoked herrings and mashed turnips came up almost before she could adblink. By the time she'd got outside them and some hot tea, she felt ready e to go looking for the Ahvenanmaa Room. eWhen she got down to the lobby, she almost bumped into Sluntio. He dwas talking with another theoretical sorcerer, a man of her own gsgeneration named Piilis. After the greetings, Plilis said, "Everyone who's anyone in our business is here today. I just left Master Alkio and Mistress nt, Raahe in the hostel's cafe." "Master Ilmarinen will be here, too," Sluntio said, "or I'll know the Css reason why. And that should be the lot of us." Pekka felt like a herring - not like a smoked one, but like a live one sw'lmniing in the company of a pod of leviathans. For some unfathomable topped.reason, ffiey seemed to think her a leviathan, too. Piilis pointed and said, that bag 11( Kaahe and Alkio. They must know where our room is." n When Pekka and the other theoretical sorcerers walked into the room, nd took they found Ilinarinen already there. He had close to Sluntio's years, and stood second only to Sluntio in reputation - first, if you listened to him. nanmaaPaahe and Alkio were both comfortably middle-aged; Raahe, Pekka ins, The thought, would have been a beauty in her younger days. e street."Let us begin," Siuntio said, and then, "Before the Kaumans came, we the staffof Kuusamo were here. Before the Lagoans came . . . The age-old ritual with thesoothed Pekka, as it always did. When it was over, Sluntio went on, "All c slight-of us, in one way or another, have been seeking a unity below the Two spleased Laws." 'PO'_ and ever Everyone nodded. Gruffly, Ilmarinen said, "Aye, we've been seeking 290 Harry Turtledove ing we it, all right. And we find we're all liable to end up wishi hadn't. " Siuntio inclined his head in grave agreement. Raahe said, "But if someone else finds it, we shall all wish we had sought harder." Sluntio also inclined his head to her. So did Ilmarinen, but his agreement seemed sour, not grave. "All of you, I think, know more of this than I do," Pekka said. "My approach has been purely theoretical, with no thought to consequences." "Which is, I daresay, why you have made such progress," Sluntio said. Ilmarinen snorted. "Who could have dreamt such innocence survived in this day and age?" he said. Pillis's laugh was small and dry. Alkio turned to Pekka. "Consider, Mistress," he said. "The more we've learned of how the world works, the more effective our sorcery has become. If One is the foundation of the Two, will we not be able to attempt things never imagined before?" "I suppose that may be so," Pekka said. "I had not thought much about it, but I suppose it may be so." "If we can handle sorcerous energies at a level below the Two," Ilmarinen said roughly, "don't you think we'll be able to make the biggest eggs look like glowworms alongside lightning bolts? I do, curse it, and I wish I didn't." Pekka had not thought along those lines at all. She wished no one else had, either. But 11marinen was right. She saw that at once. Understanding the laws of sorcery did give control over them. And the theoretical sorcerer had been right before that, too. Pekka said, "I hope none of the kingdoms fighting the Derlavalan War is working on this." "So do we all, my dear," Sluntio said slowly. "We hope Gyongyos is not working on it, either. We hope - but we do not know. That some- thing is absent from the journals does not Prove no one is examining it. And, before the war began, there were hints in the literature from Lagoas, from Algarve, and from Gyongyos. How seriously the sorcerers in those lands are following where those hints lead - again, we do not know." His smile was sweet and sad. "I wish we did." "They must not get ahead of us!" Pekka exclaimed. "That is why we are met here today," Alkio said. "That is why we will go on meeting. That is why we will go on working, and sharing with one another what we know - eventually sharing it with more is Ig re INTo THE DAPLKNESS 291 mages, I suppose, as we progress, if we progress. But, for now, we are racing blindly. Lagoas and the others may be ahead of us, or they may not have started at all. We just have to keep running." Heads bobbed up and down around the table in the posh Ahvenanmaa Room. Pekka's agreement was no less emphatic than anyone else's. Talsu and his regiment were back to slogging. He'd enjoyed Colonel Adomu's brief tenure as regimental commander. The dashing young marquis had gained more ground during that brief tenure than the late Colonel Dzirnavu had managed in a much longer time. But Adomu's dash had cost him, too; he was as dead as Dzirnavu. Colonel Balozhu, the count who'd replaced Adomu, was not actively vile, as Dzirnavu had been. But he wasn't aggressive, either, as Adomu had been. So far as Talsu could tell, Balozhu wasn't much of anything. He would have made a perfect clerk, keeping track of boots and belts, tunics and trousers. As a regimental corrimander, he was hardly there at all. " We are ordered to advance two miles today," he would say at morn- ing parade. I am sure all of you will do your duty to King Donalitu and to the kingdom." He didn't sound sure. What he sounded was bored. And then he would return to his tent, and it would be up to the captains and sergeants to see to it that the regiment gained the required two imiles. And sometimes it would, and sometimes it wouldn't. The Algarvians had officers telling them what to do, too. One evening, with both of them leaning back against tree trunks and gnawing on bread and smoked beef, Talsu said to Smilsu, "You ever get the feeling that the cursed redheads' officers don't give them as much trouble as ours give us?" Smilsu looked around to see who else might be listening. Talsu had already done that, and hadn't seen anyone. Maybe Smilsu thought he did, or maybe he felt cautious, for he answered, "I haven't seen Colonel BiloAu giving us any trouble. Powers above, you hardly know he's iround." "Powers above is right. That's trouble all by itself, isn't it?" Talsu burst out. Maybe the beer he was drinking with his supper had gone to his head. "He's supposed to be leading us against the enemy, not pretending he's invisible." I 292 Harry Turtledove "Colonel Adomu led us against the enemy," Smilsu said, still either cautious or contrary. "Are you going to complain about him, too?" "Not a bit of it," Talsu answered. "I wish we had more officers like him. I think the Algarvians do have more officers like him." Snulsu took a pull at his own beer. "Well, maybe they do. Vartu would say so, anyhow." He chuckled. "Of course, Vartu was Colonel Dzimavu's body servant, so he's not in the mood to be fair. But no mat- ter what the redheads have, pal, we're still the ones doing the advancing." "So we are, but we ought to be doing more of it," Talsu said. "You can see the Algarvians don't have anything more than skeleton forces facing us. We should be in front of Tricarico by now." He shook his head. "That's not right - we should be in Tnicanico by now, and past it, too." "I'm so sorry, General Grand Duke Talsu, sir, my lord," Smilsu said with a snort. "I didn't know King Donalitu had set you in command of the fight against Algarve." "Oh, shut up." Talsu's voice was as sour as the beer he was drinking. "Maybe I will go looking for Vartu. You're no cursed good, not when it comes to making sense you're not." He started to get to his feet. "Sit tight, sit tight," Smilsu said. "One thing you've got to know is that the redheads have some men who are really good with a stick lurk- ing around here somewhere, waiting to see if they can put a beam through a fellow's ear. You want to give them a clean blaze at you~" "No, but I don't want to hang around with a fool, either. It Might be catching." Despite his harsh words, Talsu didn't get up. And Sm-ilsu didn't get angry. He spat out a piece of gristle, then said, "And what if you're right? What are we supposed to do then? There's nothing we can do. If the Algarvians don't get us, the dungeons back of the line will. We're stuck in the middle. All we can do is hope we win in spite of ourselves." "We can hope the Algarvians kill all our nobles," Talsu said savagely. "Then we'd be better off." "We've been round that barn before - and-you want to be careful with what you say, and you want to be careful who you say it to." Smilsu kept his own voice very low indeed. "Otherwise, you won't be better off, no matter what happens to the rest of us. Do you hear what I'm telling you, my fricnd"" INTo THE DARKNESS ck of in in agely. I with kept ff, no YOU, 293 I hear you." Talsu remained furious at the world in ge hidebound Jelgavan nobility in particular. Because Smilsu kept his mouth shut, the Jelgavan nobi their revenge. The world was another matter. Not ten cold, nasty rain started falling. A couple of weeks earlier I a little higher in the foothills and it would have been sno Talsu had to make a wet, miserable bed, he didn't loathe t as he might have. Like dust and smoke, it cut down the beams were effective. He hoped all those clever Alga came down with chest fever from staying out in the ba wouldn't grieve a bit. The Algarvians, unfortunately, found other ways to t than with sneaky stick men struggling not to sneeze. They eggs in the direction of the Jelgavan encampment. The exactly where King Donalitu's men were resting, but notion - fair enough to get Talsu and the other Jelgavan their blankets and digging holes in the rocky, muddy soil. He cursed with every shovelful of dirt he flung aside. heads," he muttered. "Won't even let a man get a decent ni egg burst close by. The flash illuminated the camp for a mo ning bolt would have done. The suddenly released energy earth and stones and flung them about. A good-sized rock I a foot or two from Talsu's head. He cursed again and dug Every so often through the long night, someone won was wounded. The redheads weren't tossing eggs in eno - this wasn't anything like the enormous cataclysms of 'War, where battlefields became scorched, cratered waste eggs the Algarvians tossed did serve their purpose: the Jelgavans and kept the rest from getting the sleep they need coniniandcd the Algarvian forces, he would have pinned go nien tossliw thcni. At last, sullenly, the darkness lifted, though rain kept pot had put out all the cookfires during the night. Talsu breakf soggy porridge, on cold, greasy - almost slimy - sausage, an even insistent rain had trouble making any more watery t wis. He enjoyed it about as much as he'd enjoyed trying t wet hole he'd du.- for himself I OA , T Harry Turtledove Colonel Dzirnavu would have thrown a tantrum because the rain interfered with cooking his fancy breakfast. Colonel Adomu would have eaten what his men did and then led them in an attack on the egg-tossers that had harassed them in the night. Talsu didn't know what Colonel Balozhu ate. Balozhu did appear at an hour earlier than Dzirnavu would have stirred abroad. He carried an umbrella and looked more like a schoolmaster than a noble who commanded a regiment. "No point trying to move forward in this," Balozhu said after peering in all directions. "You couldn't hope to blaze a man till you got close enough to hit him over the head with your stick. We'll keep scouts out ahead of us, maybe send forward a patrol, but as for the rest, I think we'll sit tight till this finally decides to blow over. Talsu couldn't argue with any of that, not even to himself - had he proposed to argue with the colonel and count, jumping off a cliff would have put him out of his rnisery faster and less messily. But, as he squelched off to stand against a tree, he remained vaguely dissatisfied. Maybe I'm tired, he thought, unbuttoning his fly. No doubt he was tired. Was he tired enough for his wits to be wandering? If he was, how could he tell? He put the question to Smilsu when relieving his friend on sentry-go: "Isn't the idea behind this war to stamp the cursed redheads into the dirt? " "You've got that look in your eye' again - or maybe it's the rain." Smilsu thought for a little while, then shrugged. "You really want to advance in this stuffi" "It might catch the Algarvians by surprise," Talsu said. He added what he thought the final convincer. "Colonel Adomu would have done it. 11 Unconvinced, Smilsu said, "Aye, and look what it got him, too. Dead men don't have a whole lot of fun." "We advanced more under Adomu than under Dzirnavu and Balozhu put together," Talsu said. Smilsu sent him a quizzical look. "You're the one who wants the nobles dead, right? So why are you so cursed eager to fight their fight for em?" Talsu hadn't looked at it that way. It was his turn to stop and think. At last, he said, "Just because I can't stand the nobles doesn't mean I love the Algarvians. No good Kaunian should do that." "Tell it to Dzirnavu - but he got his, didn't he?" Smilsu chuckled, INTo THE DARKNESS 295 then sobered. "The redheads don't love us, either, not even a little they don't." "Cursed robbers, cursed thieves, cursed bandits - as if what they love should matter to us." Talsu grimaced. If Algarvians and what they loved and didn't love hadn't mattered to jelgava, he wouldn't have been out here in the foothills of the Bratanu Mountains with chilly rain dripping down the back of his neck. Snulsu put it a slightly different way: "If one of those whoresons points his stick your way and blazes you down, it'll matter a lot that he doesn't love you." "Aye, aye, aye." Talsu waved, yielding the point. "I still wish we were giving the redheads a good kick in the balls." Smilsu started to say some- thing; Talsu shook his head to show he wasn't finished. "If we don't, sooner or later they'll give us one, and you can take that to the bank and turn it into goldpieces." "They're busy," Smilsu said. "They've got the Sibs and Forthwegians to hold down, they're in a sea fight with Lagoas, and the Valnuierans are trying to smash through their lines down south. With all that in their mess kit, they aren't going to be bothering us any time soon." "There - you've gone and proved my point," Talsu said. "If they can't bother us, what better time to bother them?" "Ahh, you bother me, so I'm going back to camp." Off Smilsu went, dripping. Talsu stood in the warm glow surrounding any man who has won an argument. Then he wondered, faded. good did it do me? The glow 11. When Vanal heard the knock on the door, her first thought was that it meant trouble. She'd grown quite good at telling Kaumans from Forthwegians simply by the way they knocked. Kaumans did it as softly as they could to make themselves heard inside, almost as if they we apologizing for causing a disturbance. The Forthwegians of Oyngestun came less often to the house she shared with her grandfather. When they did, they forthrightly announced themselves. This knock - it came again as Vanal hurried toward the door - did not seem to fall into either the apologetic or the forthright school. What it said was, Open up or suffer the consequences, or, perhaps, Open up and suffer the consequences anyway. "What is that dreadful racket?" Bri'vibas called from his study. "Vanai, do something about it, if you please." "Aye, my grandfather," Vanai said. Bri'vibas sensed something out of the ordinary, too, which worried her. He paid as little heed as he could to such mundanities as knocks on the door. No ancient Kaunian author Vanal knew and no modern journal of things anciently Kaunian men- tioned them; thus, they rMight as well not have existed for him. She opened the door, telling herself she was imagining things and a Forthwegian tradesman would be standing there irritably wondering what took her so long. But the man standing there was no Forthwegian. He was tall and lanky, with a red chin beard and mustaches waxed to needle points. On his head, cocked at ajaunty angle, sat a broad-bri'mined hat with a bright pheasant feather sticking up from the band. He wore a short tunic above a pleated kilt, and boots and knee socks. He was, in short, an Algarvian, as Vanal had feared from the first. She thought about slamming the door in his face, but didn't have the 296 INTo THE DAP-KNESS 297 nerve. Besides, she doubted that would do any good. Trying to keep a quaver from her voice, she asked, "What - what do you want?" He surprised her by sweeping off his hat and bowing almost double, then astonished her by replying in Kaunian rather than the Forthwegian she'd used: "Is this the home of the famous scholar Brivibas?" Was it a trap? If it was, what could she do about it? The occupiers had to know where Bri'vibas lived. They didn't need to waste time on polite- ness, either. Had they wanted her grandfather for dark reasons of their own, they could have broken down the door and sent soldiers storming in. Despite the obvious truth in all that, she couldn't bring herself to say anything more than, "Who wishes to learn?" She kept on speaking Forthwegian. The Algarvian bowed again. "I have the honor to be Major Spinello. Will you do me the courtesy of announcing me to your - grandfather, is that correct? I wish to seek his wisdom in matters having to do with antiquities in this area." He kept using Kaunian. He spoke it very well, and even used participles correctly. Only his trilled 'Y's declared his native language. Vaiiai gave up. "Please step into the front hall," she said in her own tongue. "I will tell him you wish to see him." Spinello rewarded her with another bow. "You are very kind, and very lovely as well." That made her retreat faster than the Forthwegian army cver had. The redhead did keep his hands to himself, but she didn't let him get close enough to do anything else. Brivibas looked up in some annoyance when she poked her head into the study. "Whoever that was at the door, I hope you sent him away with a flea in his ear," he said. "Drafting an article in Forthwegian is quite dif- ficult enough without distractions." "M~ grandfather" - Vanai took a deep breath, and also took a cer amount of pleasure in dropping an egg on Brivibas's head - "my gra father, an Algarvian major named Spinello would speak with concerning antiquities around Oyngestun." Brivibas opened his mouth, then closed it again. He tried once m "An - Algarvian major?" Each word seemed to require a separate eff "What am I to do?" he muttered, apparently to himself But the ans t~) t1ut, c~'cii for ~i scholar, was only too obvious. He rose from his ch 1 had better see hini, hadn't IF' 298 Harry Turtledove He followed Vanal back to the hall that led to the street door. Spinello was examining a terra-cotta relief of a cobbler at work hanging there. After bowing to Brivibas and yet again to Vanal, he said, "This is a splendid copy. I've seen the original in the museum at Trapani." That he should recognize such an obscure piece and recall where the original was displayed flabbergasted Vanal. Her grandfather said only, "A shame it was carried away from its original site." Spinello wagged a finger at him, like an actor playing an Algarvian on the stage. "The original site for this one was in Unkerlant, if I recall," he said in his excellent Kaunian. "The local barbarians probably would have smashed it when they were drunk." "Hinin," Brivibas said. Vanal watched him weighing one dislike against another. At last, brusquely, he nodded. "It could be so. And now, if you will, tell me why a major of the occupying army seeks me out." Spinello bowed again. Watching him made Vanal dizzy. He said, "I am a major, true: I serve my king, and serve him loyally. But I am also an antiquarian and, being an antiquarian, I seek to learn at the feet of the great scholar whose home, I discover, is in the otherwise unin~pressive village where I find myself stationed." Vanal thought he laid it on with a trowel. She looked for her grand- father to send him away, probably with his ears ninging. But Brivibas proved no more immune to flattery than most men. After coughing a couple of times, he said, "In my own small way, I do what I can." "You are too modest!" Spinello cried. However well he spoke Kaunian, he did so with Algarvian theatricality. "Your studies on late imperial pottery in the Western Kaunian Empire? First-rank! Better than first-rank!" He kissed his fingertips. "And the monograph on the bronze coinage of the usurper Melbardis? Again, a work scholars will use a hun- dred years from now. Could I ignore the opportunity to seek wisdom froin such a inai)?" "Ahem!" Bn*vibas ran a finger inside the neck of his tunic, as if it had suddenly become too tight for comfort. He turned pink. Vanal couldn't remember the last time he'd flushed. He coughed again, then said, "Perhaps we should discuss this in the parlor, rather than standing here in the hall. My granddaughter, would you be good enough to pour wine for the major and me - and for yourself, of course, if you would care for some?" I ~ a INTo THE DARKNESS 299 "Aye, my grandfather," Vanal said tonelessly. She was glad to escape to the kitchen, even though the goblet of wine the Algarvian major would drink meant one goblet fewer that she and Brivibas could share. When she went back to the parlor, Spinello was knowledgeably prais- ing the ornaments in the chamber. He took his goblet and beamed at Vanal. "And here is the finest ornament of them all!" he said, lifting the wine cup in salute to her. on She was glad she hadn't taken any wine. She had nothing that made he her linger in the parlor. As soon as she gave her grandfather his goblet, ave she could - and did - leave. Her ears felt on fire. i She stayed in the kitchen, soaking peas and beans and chopping an ~ike onion for the meager stew that would be supper. She didn't have enough 6w, of anything. Since the war ended, she'd given up on the idea of having enough of anything. That she and Brivibas weren't starving she reckoned no small accomplishment. an Her grandfather's voice and Spinello's drifted across the courtyard to the her. She could not make out much of what they said, but tone was a dif- sive ferent matter. Spinello sounded animated. Spinello, though, was an Algarvian - how else would he sound? She hadn't heard her grandfather so lively in ... She tried to recall if she'd ever heard him so lively. She ,ibas had trouble being sure. ig a After what seemed like forever, Brivibas escorted Spinello out to the street once more. Then her grandfather came to the kitchen. His eyes )oke were wide with wonder. "A civilized Algarvian!" he said. "Who would late have imagined such a thing?" than "Who would have imagined such a thing?" Vanal echoed coldly. Mize Brivibds had the grace to look flustered, but said, "Well, he was, how 11111- ever strange you may find that. He discoursed most learnedly on a great dorn many aspects of classical Kaunian history and literature. He is, as it happens, particularly interested in the history of sorcery, and sought my -tyad assistance in pinpointing for him some of the power points the ancient Adn' t Kaunians utilized in this area. You will perceive at once how closely this marches with my own researches." bere in "My grandfather, he is an Algarvian." Vanal set the peas and beans and Fine for oiilojis over the fire to start cooking. !arc for "Mv granddaughter, he is a scholar." Brivibas coughed on a note dif- fc , rci)t from the one he'd used when Spinello praised him; no doubt he 300 Harry Turtledove was remembering the unkind things he'd said about non-Kaunian scholars in the past. "He has shown himself to be really quite an excellent scholar. I have a great deal to teach him." Vanal busied herself with sup- per. After a while, Brivibas gave up justifying himself and went away. He came back to eat, but the meal passed in gloomy silence. That, however, did not solve the problem of Major Spinello. The Algarvian returned a couple of days later. He did not come emptylianded, either: he carried a bottle of wine, another bottle full of salted olives, and greasy paper enclosing a couple of pounds of ham cut so thin, each slice was almost transparent. "I know times are not easy for you," he said. "I hope I can in some small way be of assistance." He laughed. "Call it my tuition fee." The food was very welcome. Neither Brivibas nor Vanal said how welcome it was. Spinello likely knew. He never showed up without some sort of present after that: dried fruit, a couple of dressed squab, fine olive oil, sugar. Vanal's belly grew quieter than it had been in a long time. Her spirit ... She did not go out on to the streets of Oyngestun that,often. When she did, though, she discovered she had more to fear from her own folk than from the Algarvian soldiers. Small boys threw mud at her. Kaunian youths her own age spat on her shadow. Blond girls turned their backs on her. Adults simply pretended she did not exist. In the night, someone painted ALGARVIANS'WHOR-E on the front of the house she shared with Bri'vibas. She found a bucket of whitewash and covered over the big red letters the best she could. Her grandfather clucked sadly. "Disgraceful," he said. "That our own folk should not understand the call of scholarship . . ." He shook his head. If the villagers harassed him, too, he'd never spoken a word of it. "They understand that they're hungry and we're not," Vanal said. "They understand we have an Algarvian visitor every few days and they don't." "Shall we throw the food away?" Brivibas asked, more than usually tart. Vanai bit her lip, for she had no good answer to that. I And so Major Spinello kept visiting. The rest of the Kaunians of Oyngestun - and some of the Forgiathwens, too - kept ostracizing Vanai and Brivibas. Brivibas cared more for antiquities than for his neighbors' opinions. Vanai tried to match his detachment, but found it hard. When the weather was fine, as it was more often as winter waned, INTo THE DARKNESS me ime. hen folk unian backs front cwash ther d not illagers "They n't. usually nians of c, Vanai ighbors' r v,,aned, 301 Brivibas led Spinello out of Oyngestun to show him some of the ancient sites nearby. Vanai stayed home as often as she could, but she couldn't always. Sometimes Spinello asked her to come along. He always chatted gaily when she did. Sometimes Brivibas did a little digging at one site or another, and used her as a beast of burden. Once, east of Oyngestun, he held up a Kaunian potsherd as if he'd invented it rather than pulling it from between the roots of a weed. Spinello applauded. Vanai sighed, wishing she were elsewhere. She'd seen too many sherds to let one more impress her. Bushes rustled. Vanai turned to look. Neither Brivibas nor Spinello, lost in antiquarian ecstasies, noticed. Through burgeoning new leaves, Vanal saw a Forthwegian peering out at her - and at the others. After a moment, she recognized Ealstan. He'd already recognized her ... and Spinello. He pursed his lips, shook his head, and slipped away. Vanal burst into tears. Her grandfather and the Algarvian major were most perplexed. Leudast wore one thin black stripe on each sleeve of his rock-gray tunic. He had his reward for living through the desert war against Zuwayza: promotion to corporal. That was the reward the Unkerlanter military authorities thought they'd conferred on him, at any rate. In his own view, being transferred back to occupation duty in west- ern Forthweg counted for far more. He'd seen enough naked shouting black men to last him the rest of his days. If he missed the chance to see some naked black women - well, that was a privation he'd have to endure. Discussing such matters with Sergeant Magnulf, he said, "The bumt- skinned wenches are probably ugly, anyway." Magnulf nodded. "Wouldn't surprise me a bit. Besides, far as I'm con- cemed, any woman who'd sooner spit in my eye than smile at me is ugly, and I don't care whether she'd naked or not." "That's so, I expect," Leudast said after a little thought. "More effi- clent to go after the ones who do smile." "Of course it is." Magnulf had no doubts. Why should he? He was a sergeant. "And if you have to lay out a little cash to make 'em smile, so what? What else were you going to spend it on?" He changed the sub- ject: "Go see that the men have gathered plenty of firewood." 302 Harry Turtledove "Aye, Sergeant." One of the things Leudast liked about being a cor- poral was that it freed him from duties like gathering wood and hauling water. He'd never seen such a pack of lazy bastards as the common soldiers to whom he delivered Magnulf s order, either. "Come on, you shirkers," he growled. "Shake a leg, or you'll eat your supper raw." Had he been so useless when he was Just a common soldier? He looked back across the immense distance of a few weeks - looked back and started to laugh. No wonder the underofficers in charge of him had spent so much time screaming. The next morning, Colonel Roflanz, the regimental commander, assembled the entire regiment, something he hadn't done since they came back to Forthweg. In addition to a colonel's three stars grouped in a tn- angle on his shoulder, Roflanz also wore the silver belt of an earl. He was a good-sized man; a lot of silver had gone into that belt. He said, "Enough of rest, men. Enough of relaxation. A little is effi- cient. Too much, and the rot begins. We start exercises today. We need to be ready. We always need to be ready. Anything can happen. I Whatever happens, we will be ready. Leudast wondered if he talked that way because he was stupid or because he was convinced his men were stupid. Then he wondered if both those things might not be true at once. It probably didn't matter, anyhow. A stupid commander would get a lot of his men killed. A com- mander who thought his men were stupid wouldn't care how many of The exercise was against cavalry, but the horses had been tricked ou with gray blankets. "For this drill, you are to make believe those animal "Shall we make believe we're dragons?" somebody asked - somebod) well back of the first rank, who had sense enough to disguise his voice. "Silence!" Magnulf shouted, and Leudast surprised himself by echoin~ the sergeant. The horsemen advanced at a lazy trot. Magnulf glowered'a his squad. "Here come the behemoths. What are you going to do abou Had they been real behemoths, Leudast's thoughts would have gon( back and forth between Run like blazes and Die on the spot. Because it wa on an exercise he could look on thin in a more detached wav. "We'c a SO the No me ~der, ame tri- was effi- iced pen. d or -d if xter, om- ly of [ out Xnals L)ody ice. loing ed at ~bout gone t was We'd inotintains that marked the far western frontier. INTo THE DARKNESS 303 better scatter," he said, "so they can't take out all of us with one egg or one long blaze from a heavy stick." Magnulf beamed at him, not something he was used to from a sergeant. "Maybe we should have promoted you a while ago," Magnulf said. "Scattering is the efficient thing to do, all right. And then what?" Leudast knew the answer to that, too, but he'd already spoken up once. Somebody else deserved a chance. A trooper named Trudulf said, "Then we try and blaze the bastards up on the behemoths." Each horse was carrying only one rider. All the horses looked as if they'd fall over dead if asked to carry more than one rider. Even so, it was the right answer, for real behemoths bore sizable crews. "Good," Magnulf said. "Now we'd better do it, before they trample us into the dust." The soldiers dove into the bushes. The riders on the horses made as if to bombard them. Leudast and his comrades pretended they were picking off the riders. Every so often, someone would pretend to be slain and thrash about or dramatically fall off a horse. It was not a very realistic exercise. Even so, Leudast wondered why Colonel Roflanz's superiors had ordered this particular drill now. All Leudast wanted to do was go on peacefully occupying Forthweg. He didn't think the Forthwegians were going to come after him with thundering herds of behemoths. What Forthweg had had along those lines, she'd thrown at Algarve - and then got thrown back. After picking himself up and brushing dry grass off the front of his tunic, Leudast peered east. Unkerlanter occupation of Forthweg stopped not far east of Eoforwic, which had been the capital. The redheads held the rest of the kingdom. Leudast's father and one of his grandfathers had fought the Algarvians during the Six Years' War. If a quarter of the stories they'd told were true, only a madman would look forward to facing the armies of Algarve. Leudast looked from east to west, toward Cottbus. Some of the things people whispered about King Swernmel . . . Who could guess if those things were true? Leudast hoped they weren't, for Unkerlant's sake. But Zuwayza hadn't had many behemoths - the black men, curse them, had gone in for camels instead. The Gongs might have had herds of the great beasts - truth about Gyongyos was as hard to come by as truth about King %veininel - but couldn't use many of them against Unkerlant not in the 304 Harry Turtledove Which left ... Algarve. "Hey, Sergeant!" Leudast called. Magnul looked a question his way; he didn't want to ask what was in his mind so everyone could hear. He almost whispered it, in fact, when the veteran came over: "Are King Mezentio's men going to jump us?" Magnulf also glanced around to see who might be listening. When he'd satisfied himself no one was too close, he answered, "Not that I've heard. How come? Do you know something I don't?" "I don't know anything," Leudast said. A spark glowed in Magnulfs eyes, but he didn't make the obvious joke. Leudast went on, "If we're not worried about Algarve, though, why drill against behemoths?" "Ali." Magnulf thought about that, then nodded. "I see what you're saying," he continued, also speaking quietly. "It makes sense, I suppose, but no, from all I've heard, the border is quiet." "Good." Leudast started to turn away, but something else occurred to him: "Are we going to jump the Algarvians?" just for a moment, Magnulf s eyes went very wide. Then he caught himself and answered, "No, of course not. What a daft notion." He was lying. Leudast was as sure of that as of his own name. He wished he'd kept his mouth shut. He wished the idea had chosen a dif- ferent time to pop into his head. He could have told himself it was so much moonshine, so much hogwash. Now he knew different. He sighed. The impressers hadn't asked him if he wanted to join the anny. They'd told him what would happen if he didn't. It had seemed horrify- ing at the time. Next to what he'd seen since, it didn't look so bad. Magnulf flipped him a coin. "Get the squad billeted, then go over to the tavern and buy yourself some ale or some wine or whatever suits you. Leudast stared at the silver bit. King Penda's image stared back at him - it was a Forthwegian coin. Then Leudast stared at Magnulf The sergeant had never tossed him money before. Maybe Magnulf did it because he was a corporal now, not a common soldier. Maybe, on the other hand, Magnulf did it so he would forget about the question he'd asked. "Go on, get moving," Magnulf said. Some sergeantly snap returned to his voice, but only some - or was Leudast letting his imagination run away with him? He didn't want to find out the hard way. "Aye, Sergeant," he said. 'Thanks." He put the silver bit in his own belt pouch, then followed INTo THE DARKNESS so an en 9ve to ght He dif- as so . He rmy. rrify- er to suits t him rgeant e was hand, ned to on run e said. llowed orders. No Unkerlanter who did exactly as 305 his superior told him could go far wrong. King Swernmel's reign had changed a good many things, but not that. Never that. As he strode through the village toward the tavern, the Forthwegians sent him resentful stares. His uniform tunic and his clean-shaven face marked him as an Unkerlanter, a foreigner, an occupier. But the Forthwegians didn't say anything where he could hear them. They'd learned the hard way that Unkerlanters could follow enough of their language to recognize insults. A couple of soldiers were already inside the tavern when Leudast came through the door. Maybe they weren't supposed to be there, for they got up in alarm. They weren't from his company, so he didn't care what they did. He waved them back to their stools and went up to the taverrikeeper. "Plain spinits," he said, speaking slowly and distinctly so the Forthwegian couldn't misunderstand him. "Aye, plain spirits," the fellow said, but he moved like a sleepwalker till Leudast set the silver bit Magnulf had given him on the counter. After that, Leudast got his drink very fast. He sat down and sipped from the glass. The taverrikeeper had given him what he'd asked for, but even plain Forthwegian spirits tasted a little different from those brewed in Unkerlant. The Forthwegians also drank spirits they'd stored inside charred wooden casks, sometimes for years Leudast had tried those, too - once. One taste was plenty to put him off them forever. A Forthwegian paused in the doorway, saw three Unkerlanter soldiers inside the tavem, and decided to come back another time. The tavern- keeper sighed and swiped a wet rag over the counter with more force than the job needed. One of the common soldiers laughed. He said to his friend, "The old boy's mad he's lost a customer. He ought to be cursed glad we pay him anything at all." A" His f ye. 1 riend laughed, too. "Better than he deserves, you ask me." The tavernkeeper polished the counter harder than ever. just as Unkerlanters could understand some Forthwegian, Forthwegians could follow some Unkerlanter. This old boy probably wished he couldn't. Leudast looked down into his glass of spirits. All at once, he knocked it back with a flick of the wrist. The si)ln*ts mialit have been Dlain but 'I 306 Harry Turtledove they weren't smooth; he felt as if a dragon had breathed fire down his throat. Even so, he got up, bought another glass, and poured it down. He didn't feel any better after he'd drunk it, nor did he dare have a third; Magnulf hadn't given him leave to get drunk. But two glasses of spirits weren't nearly enough to make him feel easy about the prospect of going forward against the Algarvians. Marshal Rathar was fighting a campaign he could not possibly win: memoranda and reports piled up on his desk faster than he was able to deal with them. He might have had a better chance to catch up had King Swemmel taken a couple of week's holiday at the spas west of Cottbus or at the royal hunting lodge in the woods to the south. But, as Rathar had seen, Swernmel did not take holidays. For one thing, the king did not care to leave the capital, lest a usurper seize the reins of government while he was away. For another, Swemmel had no passions - indeed, so far as Rathar knew, had no interests - save ruling. The marshal studied a map of what had been Forthweg and was now divided between Unkerlant and Algarve, as it had been before the Six Years' War. He studied the blue arrows that showed Unkerlanter forces slashing into eastern Forthweg and taking it away from King Mezentio's men. He noted only one flaw in the plan, which had King Swernmel's enthusiastic support: it required that the Algarvians not do anything out of the ordinary - like resisting, he thought with a snort. When he looked up from that alarmingly optimistic map, he dis- covered a young lieutenant from the crystallomancy section standing in the doorway waiting to be noticed. "What is it?" Rathar asked, gruffness covering embarrassment - how long had the poor fellow been gathering dust there while he stayed in his brown study? "My lord Marshal, his Majesty requires your presence in his audience chamber in an hour's time," the lieutenant replied. He touched his tight hand to his forehead and bowed in salute, then turned on his heel and hurried away. Well, that answered that: with a message from King Swernmel, the fel- low had not been waiting long. Had Rathar not looked up almost at once, the lieutenant would have interrupted him. Swernmel's commands took precedence over everything else in Unkerlant. For the sake of the kingdom, he endured stripping off his marshal's INTo THE DARKNESS ing in: ng s or one the no ering hal's 307 sword and hanging it in the anteroom to the audience chamber. For the sake of his kingdom, he endured the bodyguards' intimate attentions. "YOU should have seen that crazy old Zuwayzi, my lord," one of the guards said, patting the insides of his thighs. "He took off his clothes so we could search 'em. Have you ever heard the like?" "H~jjaj?" Rathar asked, and the bodyguard nodded. The marshal went on, "He's not crazy - he's a very clever, very able man. And if you don't have a little care with your hand there, I may do the same thing the next time the king summons me. That scandalized the guards, but not enough to make the search any less thorough. When they were finally satisfied Rathar carried no lethal implements, they suffered him to enter the audience chamber. He went through the prescribed prostrations and acclarnations before King Swernmel, then received the king's permission to rise. "How may I serve your Majesty?" he asked - always the question with Swernmel. That was what the king was for: to be served. "In the matter concerning the war to come against Algarve," Swernmel answered. Rathar had hoped his sovereign would say that - hoped for it and dreaded it at the same time. With Swernmel, nothing was ever simple. "I am yours to command, your Majesty," he said. I am also going to talk you out Of anything excessively foolish, he thought. I am going to do that , if you give me ha!f a chance. Even if you give me a quarter Of a chance, I am going to do it. He hid such thoughts away. Having them was dangerous. Showing them was fatal. And Swernmel, who stared down at him from his high seat like a bird of prey, had a bloodhound's nose for them. The king's genius ran in twisted channels, but ran strong where it did run. Rathar's stolidity was not the least of the assets that had helped him rise to his present rank. Swerm-nel said, "Algarve wars in the east. King Mezentio pays Unkerlant no mind. The best time to strike a redhead is when his back is turned. " "All you say is true, your Majesty." For a sentence, Rathar could be fulsome and tell the truth at the same time, and he took full advantage of that. It let him go on, "But recall, I beg, that Algarve also warred in the west when we reclaimed western Forthweg. Then you were scrupulous 308 Harry Turtledove not to molest Mezentio's men, and also scrupulous not to go beyond Unkerlant's boundaries before the Six Years' War." "Mezentio would have been looking for us to strike him then," King Swemmel replied. "He is a devious man, Mezentio." Coming from Swernmel, that was no small praise - or perhaps simply a matter of like recognizing like. "But we did not strike. Now we have lulled him. Now he thinks we will not strike. He may even think - we hope he does think - we fear to strike against Algarve." Rathar feared to strike against Algarve. He and his aides had spent a lot of time examining the way the Algarvians had pierced the Forthwegiall army like a spear piercing flesh. In the privacy of his own mind, he set the redheads' performance against the way the Unkerlanter army had handled itself facing the Zuwayzin. He found the comparison so alarm- ing, he kept it to himself Had he admitted his fear, Swernmel would have named a new marshal on the instant. No matter how the Unkerlanters' performance against Zuwayza dis- mayed Rathar, though, he could turn it to his own purposes. "Your Majesty, do you recall the chief difficulty your forces had in the campaign in the north?" he asked. 11 Aye," Swernmel growled: 11 that we could not even smash through the ragtag and bobtail the black men threw against us. Camels!" He screwed up his face tin he looked remarkably like a camel himself "We assure you, Marshal, your reports on the subject of camels grew most tedious." "For this, I can only beg your Majesty's pardon." Rathar took a deep breath. "The Zuwayzin did indeed fight harder and do more with the camels than we had expected. But that was not our chief difficulty in facing them." King Swernmel leaned forward once more, trying to put Rathar in fear - and succeeding, though Rathar hoped the king did not realize that. "If you say bad generalship was the flaw, Marshal, you condemn yourself out of your own mouth," Swernmel warned. "Our generals, but for Droctulf, did as well as they could have done," Rathar said. Droctulf was no longer a general; Rathar thought Droctulf was no longer among the living. The marshal refused to let irrelevancies distract him. He took another deep breath. "Our chief difficulty, your Majesty, was that we struck too soon INTo THE DARKNESS 309 ond "Say on," Swernmel told him, in the tones of ajurist listening to a man already obviously guilty further condemning himself "We struck too soon, before all the regiments called for in the plan against Zuwayza were in place," Rathar said. He did not point out that like that had been at Swernmel's express command. "We struck before we 43~N -- were fully ready, and paid the price. If we strike too soon against Algarve, we shall pay a larger price." "You need not fear that," Swernmel said. "We know the redheads are nt a lot tougher than the Zuwayzin. -Y ouhave our leave to collect such solffiery wegian as you need, provided you attack when we give the order. There, do you I he set see? We endeavor to be flexible." ny had The clenched fist in Rathar's gut eased a little. Swernmel was, for alarm- Swemmel, in a reasonable mood. That emboldened the marshal to say Id have what needed saying: "Your Majesty, this is but half the loaf Here is the za dis- "Your rapaign through Is! " He If. "We W most k a deep ith the culty in r in fear that. "If rself out e done," Droctulf evancies ty, your other half that I would hesitate to attack Algarve even with all our forces assembled. Now I would hesitate." Swernmel stabbed a forefinger out at him. "Did you leave your ballocks behind, up there in the Zuwayzi desert?" "No." Standing still and speaking calmly were harder than facing the Zuwayzin in the front line, as he'd done. "For consider: now Algarve fights on the defensive everywhere in the east, against jelgava and Valmiera both. If we strike the redheads, they will have men to spare, with whom to strike back. But spring is here, or near enough. Soon the Algarvians will strike at their foes. For that, they will have to throw all the men they can spare into the fight. All win be as it was during the Six Years' War, army locked with army, neither side able to go forward or back. Then, your Majesty, then we strike, and strike hard." He waited. He could not judge which way King Swernmel would go. Swernmel was a law of his own. The king would decide what he decided, and Rathar would obey, or, if not Rathar, someone else. "Ahh," Swernmel said: more an exhalation than a real word. Whatever it was, though, Rathar knew he'd won his case. Swernmel's dark eyes glowed; had they been green like an Algarvian's, he would have looked a happy cat. "That is indeed subtle, Marshal." By the way he said it, he could have offered no higher praise. Rathar inclined his head. "I serve your Majesty. I serve the kingdom." And now I will go on serving a while longer. 310 Harry Turtledove "Of course you do." Swernmel spoke as if no doubt were possible. Everyone in Unkerlant served him ... and he destroyed without warn- ing or mercy any servant who, in his sole judgment, had ambitions beyond serving him. For now, though, his suspicions were a banked fire. He took the bait Rathar dangled before him. "Aye, aye, and aye. Let them murder each other by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, as they did for six years straight. This time, the Algarvians shall not slaughter the men of Unkerlant in the same way, as they did during our father's reign." "Even so, your Majesty." Rathar hid relief as carefully as he had hidden worry. "But you must be ready," King Swernmel warned him. "When the moment comes, when the hosts of Algarve bog down in the east of their kingdom or in western Valmiera orJelgava - wherever they strike first - you must be prepared to smash through whatever garrisons they have left behind in Forthweg. We shall give the order, and you shall obey it. 11 "As you say, your Majesty, so shall it be," Rathar said. If Swernmel picked a time he judged wrong, he would try to talk the king out of it. If he was lucky, as he had been today, he might even succeed. Something new seemed to occur.to Swemmel. "In your plans for attacking Algarve, Marshal, you will assuredly have one wherein our armies strike through Yanina as well as through Forthweg." "Aye, your Majesty. More than one, in fact." Rathar told the truth there without hesitation, even if he did not fully grasp why that mattered to the king. "Make your dispositions according to whichever of those plans you reckon best, then," Swernmel said. For once, he condescended to explain: "Thus we shall punish King Tsavellas for letting Penda Slip through his fingers instead of yielding him up to us, as we demanded." "I serve your Majesty," Rathar repeated. That struck him as a weak reason for choosing one course over another, but such choices lay in Swemmel's hands, not his. And Yanina would likely be an enemy in any war against Algarve. Musingly, Rathar went on, "I do wonder where Penda is. King Mezentio has not got him - Tsavellas didn't Yield him up to Algarve, either, as I might have guessed." "Penda is not here. We ordered his person surrendered, and it was INTo THE DARKNESS 31 ns re. 9 t was not." King Swernmel folded his arms across his chest. "Tsavellas shall pay for his disobedience." Rathar had already got Swernmel to be reasonable once. Having won the larger battle, he yielded the smaller one, lest his victory come undone. "Aye, your Majesty," he said. Istvan and Borsos the dowser walked through the dirt streets of Sorong. An Obudan man wearing a sort of kilt of woven straw, a Gyongyosian army tunic, and a big straw hat was spreading fresh thatch- ing over the roof beams of a wooden house. Borsos watched in fascination. "It's like coming to another world, isn't it?" he murmured. "Aye, so it is," Istvan answered with a chuckle. "I expect you grew up in a solid stone house, same as I did - slates on the roof and everything?" "Well, of course," Borsos said. "By the stars, in Gyongyos a man needs a house he can fight from. You never know when you'll be at feud with the clan in the next valley, or when a feud will break out in your own clan. A house like that" - he pointed - "wouldn't be much more than kindling for a bonfire." Istvan chuckled. "That's the truth, sir, the truth and to spare. This whole place has gone up in smoke a couple of times since we and the accursed Kuusamans started swapping Obuda back and forth. Wooden houses with thatched roofs don't stand up to beams and eggs any too well." Borsos clicked his tongue between his teeth. "They wouldn't, no indeed. But the Obudans didn't know about beams and eggs before ley- line ships started going through the Bothman Ocean." He looked wistful, an expression so rarely seen on a Gyongyosian's face that Istvan needed a moment to recognize it. "It must have been a quiet, peaceful sort of life." "Begging your pardon, sir, but not likely," Istvan said. "They went right after each other with spears and bows and with these funny almost- swords they made by edging flat clubs with volcanic glass. I've seen those things. You could cursed near cut a man in half with one of 'em. " The dowser gave him a sour look. "You've just ruined one of my illu- sions, you know." "Sorry, sir," Istvan said: the common soldier's last bastion. "Would you sooner have illusions, or would you sooner have what's so?" 312 Harry Turtledove "Always an interesting question." Now Borsos studied him in a speculative way. "I take it you've never been in love?" "Sir?" Istvan stared in blank incomprehension. "Never mind," Borsos said. "If you don't know what I'm talking about, all the explaining in the world won't tell you." A couple of Obudans coming down the street nodded to Istvan and Borsos. They wore straw hats like that of the fellow repairing his roof. The man of the couple had on a tunic of coarse local wool over trousers from a Kuusaman uniform. The trousers left several inches of shin show- ing above the Obudan's sandals; his people were taller than Kuusamans. The woman's tunic matched his. Below it, she wore a brightly striped skirt that stopped at about the same place his trousers did. As she and her companion drew near, they both held out their hands and spoke in Gyongyosian: "Money?" Istvan made a face at them. "Go nuilk a goat," he growled: anything but a compliment in his language. Borsos had a captain's pay to spend, not a common soldier's. He hadn't been on Obuda nearly so long as Istvan had, either. Pulling a couple of small silver coins out of his pocket, he gave one to each of them, saying, "Here. Take this, and then be off." They showered loud praises on the dowser in Obudan, in broken Gyongyosian, and even in scraps of Kuusaman that proved they'd begged during the previous occupation, too. As they went on their way, they kept acclaiming him at the top of their lungs. He looked as pleased with himself as if he'd tossed a scrawny stray dog a bone with a lot of meat on it. "Well, now you've gone and done it, sit." Istvan rolled his eyes. No doubt Borsos was a fine dowser, but didn't he have any sense? Istvan shook his head. Borsos had just proved he didn't. And, sure enough, those loud praises from the Obudans to whom the captain had given money brought what seemed like half the people of Sorong out of their houses, all of them - men, women, and children - with hands outstretched. "Money?" they all criied. If they knew one word of Gyongyosian, that was it. Istvan fumed. The man and woman hadn't praised Borsos just to make him feel good. They'd done it to let their cousins and friends and neighbors know there was a Gyongyosian around from whom they could hope to get something. in a alking n and roof users how- ans. triped hands thing hadn't ple of aying, roken egged I they d with eat on es. No Istvan in the ple of dren - e word hadn't t their around INTo THE DARKNESS 313 Borsos doled out a few more coins, which Istvan thought was only compounding his foolishness. Then, far later than he should have, he too figured out what was going on. Instead of smiling, he began to frown, and then to scowl. Instead of saying, "Here," he began to say, "Go away," and then, in short order, "Go bugger a billy goat!" The swarm of Obudans dispersed much more slowly than they'd gathered. The ones who hadn't got any money - the majority of them - went off disappointed and angry. They showered Borsos with abuse in Obudan, Gyongyosian, and Kuusaman, just as the first couple had show- ered him with praise. "A goat's horn up your arse!" a skinny little girl screeched at the dowser, and then, wisely, disappeared around a corner. "By the stars!" Borsos said when he and Istvan were at last free of the crowd. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. "It'll be a long time before I do that again." "Aye, sir," Istvan said stolidly. "They don't much mind if you tell all of 'em to jump off a cliff. They're like beggars back home that way - they're used to no, and they hear it a lot more than aye. But if you give to some of them, they think you have to give to everybody." Borsos still looked shaken. "Beggars back home are broken men, mostly, them and women too old and raddled to get by selling their bodies any more. Some of these folk were merchants and artisans and their kin: people able to live on their own well enough. Why should they shame themselves for silver when they already earn plenty?" Istvan shrugged. "Who knows why foreigners do what they do? They're only foreigners. I'll tell you this, though, sir: the next Obudan I meet with a proper warrior's pride, or even anything close to it, will be the first." "Aye, I've seen that myself, though never like today," the dowser said. He looked thoughtful. "And why should they have a warrior's pride? Set against us, set even against the Kuusamans, they aren't proper warriors. They can't stand against sticks and eggs and wardragons, not with spears and bows and clubs edged with volcanic glass. No wonder they're blind to shame." "Well, isn't that interesting?" Istvan murmured, more to himself than to Borsos. just when he'd reckoned his superior a perfect fool, the dowser came out with an idea he'd been thinking about for days. And Borsos went on, "It's like that over big stretches of the world. 314 Harry Turtledove The folk of Derlaval - aye, and the Lagoans and the accursed Kuusamans, too - know too much magic for anyone else to withstand them. Too much of the mechanic arts, too, though those count for less. There was a tribe on an island in the Great Northern Sea where, a couple of life- times ago, all the men slew themselves because the Jelgavans - I think it was the Jelgavans - trounced them every time they fought. They saw they couldn't win, and couldn't bear to lose any more." "That, at least was bravely done," Istvan said. "The Obudans fawn and cringe instead." "Nothing is ever simple," the dowser said. "The Obudans are still here to fawn and cringe. When those other islanders slew themselves, they slew their tribe as well. Other men took their women. Other men took their land. Other men took their goods. Their name is dead. It will never live again." "It lives," Istvan insisted. "It lives even in the memory of their foes. If it didn't, sir, how would you have heard of it?" "I am a scholar of sorts," Borsos answered. "I make it my business to learn of such strange things. The Jelgavans; wrote down what these tribes- men did, and someone found it interesting enough to translate into our language so people like me could read of it. I doubt that the descendants of these men, if any still live, have the slightest notion of what they did. Are you answered?" "Sir, I am answered," Istvan said. "If my great-great-grandchildren forget the deeds of Gyongyos in this war, why do we bother fighting it?" "Even so, Borsos said. He looked around. "Now that we've finally shaken free of that accursed swarm of beggars, where is this shop you were speaking oP" "We go round this corner here, sir, and it's about halfway down the lane toward the woods." After rounding the corner, Istvan pointed. "That little building there, with the moldy green paint." Borsos nodded. "I see it." He hurried on ahead of Istvan, opened the door, and then paused on the threshold, waiting for Istvan to join him. When Istvan stayed outside in the street, the dowser raised an eyebrow. "Come on in with me." "It's all right, sir," Istvan said. "You get what you came for. I'll wait here. " INTo THE DARKNESS to Is- ren ing ally you the ted. ~ the ~irn. row. wait 315 "Short of silver?" Borsos asked. "Don't worry about that. You've been a lot of help to me since I got shipped out here. I'll spring for one, if you like. " Istvan bowed. "Very kind of you, sir," he said, and meant it - no regular officer, not even a sergeant, would have made such a generous offer. "But you go ahead. I haven't got anybody to send one to. And besides" - he coughed - "in the valley I come from, people would go on and on about newfangled city ways even if I did." Borsos shrugged. "Fewer clan feuds get started this way. I don't know why the folk in the backwoods valleys can't see as much if even the Obudans can." Istvan only shrugged. So did the dowser, who said, "All right, have it as you'd have it." He went into the shop. A little old woman hobbling by asked Istvan for money. He stared through her as if she didn't exist. She limped on down the narrow path. She wasn't angry. No one else had succeeded where she'd failed. Presently, Borsos came out with what looked like a long, thick sausage covered in smooth, supple leather. "I got a good price," he said happily. "I'll send it to my wife on the next supply ship. Better Gergely should use it and think of me than go looking for some other man and cause all kinds of trouble, eh?" "Whatever pleases you, sir," Istvan answered. Borsos started to laugh. So did Istvan, when he realized what he'd said. The toy wasn't for Borsos's pleasure, after all - only for his peace of mind. Rain came down in sheets. Garivald supposed he should have been glad it wasn't snow. Annore was certainly glad. Now that the freezing weather had gone at last, she'd driven the livestock out of the house. With the beasts gone, she had less work than she'd had before. Garivald wished he could say the same. He'd be plowing and planting as soon as the thaw let him. Except for the harvest, spring was the busiest unic of ycar for him. And, before long, the roads would dry enough for inspectors to make their way along them. He looked forward to that as much as lie would have to the arrival of any other locusts. He pulled on his worn leather knee boots. "Where are you going?" Annore asked sharply. "Out to throw some garbage to the hogs," he answered. "The sooner they put on fat, the sooner we can slaughter them. And besides" - he 314 Harry Turtledove The folk of Derlavai - aye, and the Lagoans and the accursed Kuusamans, too - know too much magic for anyone else to withstand them. Too much of the mechanic arts, too, though those count for less. There was a tribe on an island in the Great Northern Sea where, a couple of life- times ago, all the men slew themselves because the jelgavans - I think it was the jelgavans - trounced them every time they fought. They saw they couldn't win, and couldn't bear to lose any more." "That, at least was bravely done," Istvan said. "The Obudans fawn and cringe instead." "Nothing is ever simple," the dowser said. "The Obudans are still here to fawn and cringe. When those other islanders slew themselves, they slew their tribe as well. Other men took their women. Other men took their land. Other men took their goods. Their name is dead. It will never live again." "It lives," Istvan insisted. "It lives even in the memory of their foes. If it didn't, sir, how would you have heard of it?" "I am a scholar of sorts," Borsos answered. "I make it my business to learn of such strange things. The jelgavans wrote down what these tribes- men did, and someone found it interesting enough to translate into our language so people like me could read of it. I doubt that the descendants of these men, if any still live, have the slightest notion of what they did. Are you answered?" "Sir, I am answered," Istvan said. "If my great-great-grandchildren forget the deeds of Gyongyos in this war, why do we bother fighting it?" "Even so," Borsos said. He looked around. "Now that we've finally shaken free of that accursed swarin of beggars, where is this shop you were speaking off' "We go round this corner here, sir, and it's about halfivay down the lane toward the woods." After rounding the corner, Istvan pointed. "That little building there, with the moldy green paint." Borsos nodded. "I see it." He hurried on ahead of Istvan, opened the door, and then paused on the threshold, waiting for Istvan to Joni him. When Istvan stayed outside in the street, the dowser raised an eyebrow. "Come on in with me." "It's all right, sir," Istvan said. "You get what you came for. I'll wait here." INTo THE DARKNEss if es- ren ing the ted. the him. row. wait 315 "Short of silver?" Borsos asked. "Don't worry about that. You've been a lot of help to me since I got shipped out here. I'll spring for one, if you like. " Istvan bowed. "Very kind of you, sir," he said, and meant it - no regular officer, not even a sergeant, would have made such a generous offer. "But you go ahead. I haven't got anybody to send one to. And besides" - he coughed - "in the valley I come from, people would go on and on about newfangled city ways even if I did." Borsos shrugged. "Fewer clan feuds get started this way. I don't know why the folk in the backwoods valleys can't see as much if even the Obudans can." Istvan only shrugged. So did the dowser, who said, "All right, have it as you'd have it." He went into the shop. A little old woman hobbling by asked Istvan for money. He stared through her as if she didn't exist. She limped on down the narrow path. She wasn't angry. No one else had succeeded where she'd failed. Presently, Borsos came out with what looked like a long, thick sausage covered in smooth, supple leather. I got a good price," he said happily. "I'll send it to my wife on the next supply ship. Better Gergely should use it and think of me than go looking for some other man and cause all kinds of trouble, eh?" "Whatever pleases you, sir," Istvan answered. Borsos started to laugh. So did Istvan, when he realized what he'd said. The toy wasn't for Borsos's pleasure, after all - only for his peace of mind. Rain came down in sheets. Garivald supposed he should have been glad it wasn't snow. Annore was certainly glad. Now that the freezing weather had gone at last, she'd driven the livestock out of the house. With the beasts gone, she had less work than she'd had before. Garivald wished he could say the same. He'd be plowing and planting as soon as the thaw let him. Except for the harvest, spring was the busiest time of year for him. And, before long, the roads would dry enough for inspectors to make their way along them. He looked forward to that as much as he would have to the arrival of any other locusts. He pulled on his worn leather knee boots. "Where are you going?" Annore asked sharply. "Out to throw some garbage to the hogs," he answered. "The sooner they put on fat, the sooner we can slaughter them. And besides" - he 316 Harry Turtledove knew his wife well - "won't you be just as well pleased to have me out from underfoot for a while?" "That depends," Annore said. "When you get drunk here, you mostly just go to sleep. When you get drunk in the tavern, you get into brawls, and then you come home with rips in your tunic or with bloodstains on it.,, "Did I say anything about going to the tavern?" Ganivald demanded. "I said I was going to slop the hogs. That's all I said." Annore didn't answer, not with words. But the look she gave him was eloquent. His ears heated. His wife knew him well, too. Getting out, then, felt like escaping. He squelched through the mud toward the hogs and flung them a bucketful of parsnip peelings and other such delicacies. The hogs weren't fussy. He could have thrown them soggy thatching, and they probably would have enjoyed that, too. He set the wooden bucket by the door to his house, thought about going back inside, and then decided not to. Out here, all he had to worry about were rain and mud: such small things, when set against his wife's edged tongue. He wasn't the only man out of doors despite the nasty weather, either. "As long as I'm out here," he muttered, "I may as well wander around a bit and say hello. Efficiency." He laughed. In a village like Zossen, to which inspectors came but seldom, Unkerlanters could laugh at King Swemmel's favorite word - provided no one knew they were doing it. Rain beat down on his hat and his wool cape. The mud did its best to pull the boots night off his feet. It was thick and gluey, even deeper than in the fall. Each step took effort. He wondered if it would come up over his boot tops. That happened every so often, but usually later in the thaw. When the first person Garivald spied through the curtain of rain was Waddo the firstman, he wished he'd gone indoors after all. Waddo saw him, too, which meant Ganivald either had to ignore him, which was rude, or go over and talk with him, which he didn't want to do. Whether he wanted to or not, he went. Waddo had a long memory for slights. "Good day to you, Garivald," the firstman said, his voice almost as slick and greasy as if he were speaking to an inspector. "And to you," Ganivald answered. He had less trouble sounding cheerful than he'd thought he would. The closer he got to Waddo, the more easily he could see how hard a time the firstman had making his INTo THE DARKNESS e out ostly rawls, ins on nded. in was e mud other them about worry wife's either. ound a ssen, to at King ing it. best to er than up over e thaw. am was ddo saw ich was hether ights. most as ounding ddo, the king his 317 way through the mud. After breaking his ankle, Waddo still walked with the help of a cane. Here in the spring thaw, the cane didn't help much. Instead of letting the firstman gain purchase, it sank deep into the mud. "May the coming year be bountiful for you and yours," Waddo, said. "May the harvest be abundant." May you shut up and leave me at peace, Ganivald thought. Aloud, he replied, "May all these things prove true for you as well." He was not even wishing falsely, or not altogether falsely. Anything that went wrong with Waddo's harvest - a blight, locusts, rain at the wrong time - was only too likely to go wrong with everyone's harvest, including his own. Waddo inclined his head, which made water run off the front of his hat instead of the back for a moment. "You have always been a well- spoken man, Ganivald," he said. Only because you don't know what I say behind your back. But Garivald had always been careful to whom he said such things. Some of the people in the village were as much Waddo's inspectors as the men in rock-gray were King Swernmel's. Evidently, Garivald had been careful enough, for no one had betrayed him. "I thank you," he told the firstman, doing his best to match Waddo for hypocrisy. It worked; under the wide brim of his hat, Waddo beamed. "Aye," he said, "it's thanks to folk like you that Zossen will be going places." "Eh?" Gari'vald looked politely interested to conceal the stab of alarm he felt. He liked the village where and as it was just fine. But the firstman repeated, "Going places." His eyelid rose and fell in an unmistakable wink. "We may - we just may, mind you - have a way to bring a crystal into Zossen after all. And if we bring a crystal into the village, we bring the whole world into the village." Under his cloak, he threw his arms wide with excitement, as if to say that would assuredly be a good thing. Ganivald was anything but assured. It hadn't been so long before that he and Annore had concluded Zossen was better off without a crystal. He saw no reason to change his mind. Being an Unkerlanter peasant like most Unkerlanter peasants, he seldom saw reason to change his mind. "How?" he asked, giving no sign of what he thought. "We have no power points close by. No ley line runs anywhere near us. As far as magic goes - well, magic might as well be gone, as far as we're concerned.,' "Aye, and isn't it a pity?" Waddo said. "So much we could do if more 318 Harry Turtledove sorcery worked around these parts. And it may. Before too long, it really may. "How?" Gari'vald asked again. "You can't squeeze water out of a stone - there's no water to squeeze. You can't get magic out of a land with no power points, either." "I don't know just how it's done," Waddo answered. "I'm no mage. But if it is done, wouldn't it be fine? We'd know what happened all over the world, and wouldn't have to wait till some trader came to Zossen with the news." "That might not be so bad," Ganivald said; coming right out and telling the firstman he hated the idea struck him as foolish. But he did give some hint of his own notions: "Of course, it's still news here when- ever it gets to us." "But that's not good enough!" Waddo exclaimed. "When traders and neighbors come to Zossen, I want us to be able to give them the news. I don't want to always be begging for it, the way old Faileuba has to beg for bread because her husband and her daughter are dead and her other daughter ran away with that tinker." "Doesn't matter to me one way or the other," Garivald said. It mat- tered very much to him, but his hopes were opposite Waddo's. With a shrug that flung drops of water from the shoulders of his cloak, he went on, It's not like we're Cottbus, or anything of the sort." "But wouldn't it be fine if we were?" the firstman said. "Zossen - the Cottbus of the south! Doesn't that have a fine sound to it?" Garivald took a couple of shuffling steps to keep from sinking into the mud. He shrugged again, in lieu of roaring at Waddo that he didn't want his home village to be anything like Cottbus. That one crystal, even if it could be made to function here, wouldn't turn Zossen into a copy of the capital of Unkerlant occurred to him no more than it did to the firstman. Waddo also shifted position. He almost fell while he was doing so. Had he gone down into the muck, Garivald would have been tempted to hold him there till he stopped struggling. If Waddo drowned, Zossen would stay as it had always been. To Garivald's disappointment, the firstman caught himself "We'll see what we see, that's all," Waddo said. "Nothing's sure yet." He might have been firstman, but remained a peasant under the petty rank. "Aye, nothing's ever sure," Garivald agreed. So would everyone else in Ise in INTo THE DAR-KNESS 319 the village. So would everyone else through vast stretches of Unkerlant. "Well, then," Waddo said, as if everything were all settled. He said it so convincingly, Garivald believed for a moment everything was all settled and started to go on his way. The firstman wasn't firstman for nothing. But then Garivald turned back. "This is the third time I've asked you, and you haven't told me yet: how would we make a crystal work here without a power point or a ley line anywhere close by?" Waddo looked unhappy. Garivald thought that was because he had no answer, because the whole scheme lived in his head and nowhere else. But he discovered he was wrong, for Waddo said, "Power points and ley lines aren't the only ways to get sorcerous energy, you know. There is another source it would be more efficient to use here in Zossen." "Oh, aye, I'll bet it would," Garivald said with a laugh. "Wen, when you line people up to sacrifice 'em to make your precious crystal, you can start with my mother-in-law." He laughed again. All things considered, he got on pretty well with Annore's mother, her chief virtue being that she stayed out of his hair. Then he watched Waddo's expression change. His own expression changed, too, to one of horror. He'd thought he was joking. He'd been sure he was joking. just how badly did the firstman want a crystal here? What would he do - what would King Swemmel's inspectors, and maybe King Swemmel's soldiers, too, help him do - to get a crystal here? "Powers above,"Ganivald whispered, thinking he ought to drown Waddo in the mud right this instant. e Waddo's arms fluttered under the cloak, as if he was making brushing away motions. "No, no, no," he said. "No, no, no. We would never it sacrifice anyone from Zossen. to power the crystal. That would upset e people" - which would do for an understatement till a bigger one came along - "and be inefficient. But there are plenty of criminals in the king d doni, especially in the cities, where people haven't got any morals at all. Id Who'd miss them if they had their throats cut? And they'd be doing Id something useful, wouldn't they? That's efficiency." an "Aye so it is," Garivald said grudgingly. He didn't mind the idea d. of unpleasant strangers getting their throats slit - no doubt they had it Qmmng. "e did wish it would be for a better cause than bringing a cursed crystal to the village. Waddo said "No\\- do you see why I didn't want to come right out , l~ I 320 Harry Turtledove and talk about sacrifices and such? Everybody in the village would want to get rid of everybody else, or else be sure everybody else wanted to get rid of him. Things won't settle down till folks see it's only bad eggs from far away who get what they deserve." "I suppose so," Garivald said. He knew whom people in Zossen would want to sacrifice. He was standing here talking with the fellow people in Zossen would want to sacrifice. He almost said as much, to see the look on Waddo's face. But the firstman would remember a crack like that. If something chanced to go wrong with the crystal - Ganivald didn't know how he could arrange that, but figured it was worth a try - he didn't want Waddo thinking of him first. Come to that, he didn't want Waddo think- ing of him at all. Tealdo approved of Captain Galafrone, the late Captain Larbino's replacement as company commander. Galafrone was a thick-shoulderd veteran of the Six Years' War, his hair, mustaches, and side whiskers more gray than auburn. He was also a rarity in the Algarvian army - in those of Valmiera or jelgava, he would have been an impossibility - an officer risen from the ranks. "This one's for revenge, boys," he said as Tealdo and his comrades stood in the forwardmost trenches and waited for the trumpets to signal them into action. "The cursed Kaunians stole our land when I was a lad your age, near enough. Now we get to pay the stinking whoremasters back. It's that simple." He couldn't have timed things better had he been a first-rank mage. No sooner had he finished speaking than eggs started falling on the Valmieran positions in front of Tealdo's company. Egg-tossers behind the line flung some of them. More fell from beneath the bellies of the swarms of dragons Tealdo could make out against the lightening sky. Here and there along the line, Valmieran egg-tossers tried to answer, but the dragons, or so Tealdo had heard, were concentrating on them. In that duel, the Algarvians had the better of it. Trumpets rang out. The notes were harsh- and blaring, not the smooth tones of the royal hymn. "Follow me!" Captain Galafrone shouted. He was the first one out of the trench. If he'd done the same thing during the battles of the Six Years' War, Tealdo wondered why he remained among the living. INTo THE DARKNESS se er des rial lad ters wer, . In age. the the arms ooth . He g the mong 321 "Follow me!" Sergeant Panfilo echoed. "For King Mezentio!" "Mezentio!" Tealdo cried, and awkwardly climbed the sandbag steps so he could expose his precious body to the Valmierans' beams and eggs. He wished he'd stayed on occupation duty in Sibiu instead of getting shipped back to southeastern Algarve to Join in the assault against Valmiera. The powers that be back in Trapani had decided otherwise, though, and here he was. "If Mezentio wants to lick the Valmierans so much, let him come fight them!" Trasone shouted. But he, like Tealdo, dashed toward the trenches the blond robbers had dug on Algarvian soil. One or two men went down as beams smote them, but only one or two. The egg-tossers and dragons had done their work well. Behemoths advanced with the Algarvian infantry, to bring more egg-tossers and heavy sticks to the edge of the fighting. Other behemoths hauled supplies and bridging gear forward. Tealdo sprang down into the forwardmost Valrmieran trench. A couple of blond men in trousers threw down their sticks and threw up their hands. "No fight!" one of them said in bad Algarvian. "Send the captives back!" Captain Galafrone shouted, somewhere not far down the line. "Don't waste time going through their pockets, just send'em on back. We've got plenty of plunder waiting ahead of us, ]ads - we won't go without. But the faster we move now, the sooner we kick the Kaunians out of our kingdom. For-ward!" P,ather reluctantly, Tealdo didn't take the time to rob the Valmierans. No doubt Galafrone was right, in a strictly military sense. Still, Tealdo resented the certainty that the trousered Kaunians' money and trinkets would end up in the hands of behind-the-lines types who'd done nothing to earn them. But with Galafrone already running on, Tealdo didn't see how he could do anything less. His comrades followed the veteran captain, too. The Valmierans fought back, but not so hard as he'd expected. The pelt- ing they'd taken from egg-tossers and dragons seemed to have left a lot of them stunned. Others threw down their sticks the moment they first spied Algarvian soldiers. "Our stinking nobles led us into a losing war," a blond man said bit- terly as he werit off into captivity. His Algarvian was already pretty good. He'd get the chance to improve it further in a camp. 322 Harry Turtledove Then Tealdo dove behind a pile of rubble as some Valmierans in a little stone keep showed themselves far from ready to quit. Their beams scorched the tender spring grass. Tealdo tried to sneak one of his own beams through their blazing slits. By the way they went on fighting, he knew he wasn't having much luck. Galafrone and his crystallomancer sprawled in back of similarly makeshift shelter a few yards away. The company commander looked at a map, then yelled something - Tealdo couldn't make out what - to the man with the crystal. The fellow spoke urgently into his sorcerous apparatus; again, Tealdo caught tone without words. Hardly more than a minute later, a couple of dragons with eggs under their bellies dove on the Valmleran strongpoint. Watching, Tealdo won- dered if their fliers intended to take them straight into it. But they released the eggs at little more than treetop height, from which they had no chance of missing. The ground shook under Tealdo as the eggs burst. The Valmierans in that small stone fortress suddenly stopped blazing. Galafrone jumped to his feet. "Come on, let's get moving!" he shouted. "Those bastards won't bother us any more." He was right about that. Tealdo trotted past the ruins of the stone keep. The sharp stink of new-burst eggs still lingered; it always put him in mind of thunderstorms. Other odors lingered with it: burnt meat and the iron smell of blood. Out ahead of the advancing footsoldiers, he spied a large band of behemoths. Like the dragons, they and their crews were busy smashing up the places from which the Valmierans fought hardest. By the time Tealdo and his comrades got to those places, they rarely needed to do more than mop up. By the time that first day ended, Tealdo was more worn than he'd ever been in his life. He and his comrades had also come farther than he'd imagined they could. And, somehow, the field kitchens had kept up with them. The stew a cook with a dragon tattoo on his forearm ladled into his tin bowl wasn't anything over which a gourmet back in Trapani would have gone into ecstasies, but it was a-lot better than anything he and his pals could have come up with by themselves. Galaftone are like a wolf He looked dazed, and not from the hard marching and fighting he'd done. "I can't believe how fast we've moved," he said with his mouth full. He'd said that before, too. "We INTo THE DARKNESS 323 never advanced so fast in the Six Years' War, not even in the last push toward Priekule. Powers above, we've already taken back half of what the blondies stole from us up till now." Around a yawn, Trasone said, "They don't seem so hot to fight now that we're pounding on them instead of them pounding on us." Tealdo nodded. "I thought the same thing. One of them said he blamed their nobles for the war." "I hope they all think that way," Galafrone exclaimed. "They fought like mad bastards the last time, you bet your arse they did. If their hearts aren't in it now, all the better for us." The discussion around the fire would have gone on longer had the warriors not been so tired. Tealdo rolled himself into his blanket and slept like a dead man. He felt like a dead man when Sergeant Parifilo shook him awake before sunrise the next morning, too. Panfilo looked disgust- ingly fit and well rested. "Come on," he said. "You're not much, but if you're what we've got to hit the Valmierans another lick, you'll have to do." "If I'm not much, why don't you leave me here and go on without me?" But Tealdo was already climbing to his feet. He smelled bread baking in the field kitchen's oven. He thought he smelled victory in the air, too. And then, after washing down the bread with a few gulps of rough red wine, he tramped east again. Again, the behemoths had already done a lot of his work for him. Again, Algarvian dragons dove on the soldiers of Kaunian blood who kept on fighting after the behemoths had passed. A few eggs usually proved plenty to silence them. Hardly any Valmieran dragons attacked Mezentio's men. And, again, most Valmierans seemed not to have their hearts in the fight. They surrendered far more readily than the Sibians had. "We took the Sibs by surprise, but they fought hard while they could," Tealdo said to Trasone after they sent another group of captives toward the rear. "These whoresons were supposed to be ready and wait- ing for us." 11 Are you complaining?" his friend asked. "Now that you mention it, no," Tealdo answered. Both soldiers laughed. They strode down the road leading east. ne im an 0 ever he'd with into apani jj~, he e hard we've realdo did his best to stay close to Captain Galafrone and the 324 Harry Turtledove crystallomancer. That wasn't easy; the veteran kept setting a blistering pace Tealdo had trouble matching. But he wanted to be among the first to learn if anything interesting happened: in that, he was a typical Algarvian. And, toward midafternoon, his curiosity and persistence paid off. The crystallomancer listened to his sorcerous apparatus, then spoke to Galafrone. After hearing him out, Galafrone whooped. "What's up, sir?" Tealdo asked. Maybe the captain would tell him, maybe he wouldn't. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Galafrone wasn'tjust willing to talk. Had Tealdo not asked, the captain would have grabbed him and shouted the news: "The marquisate of Rivaroli has risen in revolt behind the Valmieran lines! Let's see those cursed Kaumans move men or supplies through there now!" "Powers above," Tealdo said. Then he whooped, too. "That's what Valmiera gets for taking a marquisate full of good Algarvians away from us after the Six Years' War." "That's just what Valmiera gets," Galaftone agreed. "And we're the fellows to give it to King Gainibu and his worthless nobles in their gilded trousers." Tealdo suspected Galafrone was imperfectly enamored of his own kingdom's nobility. Galafrone couldn't say that, so he took out his anger on the nobles next door. He wasn't the only one, either. Tealdo said, "Talking with the blondies we've nabbed who speak a little Algarvian, a lot of them don't want to fight for their nobles, either." Galaftone nodded and turned to the crystallomancer. "Send that on to Colonel Ombruno, and to the army headquarters, too. They'll probably have heard it already, but send it on the off chance they haven't. Maybe it'll help us find a way to make more Kaunians quit without fighting." "Aye, Captain," the crystallomancer said. As soon as the message went out, Galafrone waved his men forward again. By the end of the day, the company was inside the Marquisate of Rivaroll. Tealdo had no trouble telling when they crossed the border. All' at once, Valrmieran replaced Algarvian on every roadside sign - the retreating enemy had knocked down some of those, but not all - and in the first village through which the company passed. The people in the village remained Algarvian, even if their names were spelled Valrmieran- style. Tealdo wondered what his own name would look like if he'd INTo THE DARKNESS 325 grown up here. Something like Tealtu, he supposed. Most of the villagers greeted the Algarvian soldiers with wine and cakes and cheers. The women greeted them with hugs and kisses. The women might have greeted them with more, too, as they had when Tealdo helped reclaim the Duchy of Bari for Algarve, but Galafrone shouted, "Keep in line and keep moving, curse you all! The way this campaign Is shaping up, you'll have plenty of chances to dip your wicks before long. The harder we press the Kaunians now, the sooner it'll be." Tealdo saw a man and woman staring out through a shop window. They weren't Algarvians, not with hair yellow as butter. A good many Valniierans had moved into the Marquisate since the Treaty of Tortus. Tcaldo wondered what they were thinking as they watched the Algarvian soldiers tramp past. "Nothing good," he muttered, "or I miss my guess." "Keep moving!" Galafrone yelled again. Entering open country, his troopers spread out into a skirmish line. Maybe the Valn-ilerans would be able to make a stand somewhere ahead. They hadn't done it yet, though. I to bly ~be ent of All the I -1 I 12. Skarnu felt like a man trying to fight back after getting hit in the head with a club. From everything the young captain could see, the whole Valmieran army rmight have been a man trying to fight back after getting hit in the head with a club. He couldn't see past his own tiny circle of the war, of course, but nothing inside it looked good. His men had been coming up from rest and recuperation behind the line when the Algarvian blow fell. Had they gone into the line, no doubt they - or however many of them stayed alive - would be in an Algarvian captives' camp now. As things were, they'd been caught up in the head- long Valmieran retreat, fighting when they had to, traveling a lot by night so they could slip between the redheads' scouts. The Algarvians; didn't always have great numbers. Wherever they were, though they had great strength. After a while, footsoldiers despaired of fighting behemoths, of having dragons plummet out of the sky to drop eggs on them. Sergeant Raunu came up to Skarnu with a grim look on his face. "Sir, another three must have slipped away, on account of they sure as blazes aren't here." Pulling a map from his breast pocket, Skarnu spoke in musing tones: "I wonder where exactly here is." He had some idea somewhere between their line of farthest advance and the border between Valmiera and Algarve - but couldn't pin it down within filve miles, let alone to dot on the map. All he and his men had done stumble backwards again and again. "Sooner or later, we'll find a village," Raunu said. "Then know." The veteran hesitated. At last, he went on, "By what I've hef sir, desertion's a lot heavier in the other companies in the regimentthaii it is with us." "Heard from whom?" Skarnu demanded. As far as he could tell. 326 INTo THE DARKNESS company might have fallen off the edge of the world to his superiors. He hadn't had orders for a couple of days. "People I run into in the woods," Raunu said with a shrug. h i rated again. "Our men know you've been in there with 'em, sir. That Pine the -r-n't so likel to take off on their own or iust sit on a stum and wait for the redheads to mck 'em up." "People in the woods, eh?" Skarnu said. His sergeant shrugged again and nodded. He said nothing more. Skarnu had learned to gauge when not to 1)ush Raunu. This looked to be one of those times. He asked a dif- ferent uestion instead: "Is it re-A- as bad as that?" an d- ea - orcier five e was we 11 heard, t than ell, Ills "Aye, sit, it is," Raunu answered stolidly. "The companies, the regi- ments where the noble officers haven't pulled their weight, they're falling to pieces, sir." He hesitated even longer than he had in either of his earlier pauses, then added, "A lot of companies, a lot of regiments, in that boat "Curse the soldiers for not defending the kingdom!" Skarnu burst out. Raunu stood mute. Skarnu thought for a while before making an addi- tion of his own: "And curse the officers who didn't give them a better reason to defend the kingdom " "Ali," Raunu murmured - or was it just an exhalation a little louder than usual? "Sir, you don't mind my saying so, it's because you're the kind of cantain who'd come out with the first thing and the second both that so many men have stuck by you." "Much good it's done them." Skarnu's voice was bitter. Then he sighed. "We can only do what we can do. Let s get moving. "Aye, sir," Raunu said. "It could be worse, sir. At least we re moving through countryside that's pretty much empty - except for Algarvian soldiers, of course. Down in Rivaroll, we've got enemy soldiers and the locals hunting us. Aye." Skarnu sighed once more. "And curse King Mezentio for stir- rin uv rebellion aaainst us down there. Only voes to show a veneration isn't time enouah to make Al2arvians chansze their strives." He set off through the forest, walking as softly as he could. He knew Al garvian behemoths had already got ahead of his company. He knew ,1, ,d 'caded footsoldiers couldn't be far behind. He kept scouts out ahead and to all sides of his main bocl- of men None of them renorted anything untoward. He still wished he had eyes in the back of his head. 328 Harry Turtledove After about an hour, a man at the van came back and reported that the woods ended and, past some untended fields and vineyards, a village lay ahead. "Any sign of soldiers in it?" Skamu asked. "Redheads, you mean?" the scout asked, and Skamu nodded. The soldier said, "No, sir, but I did see a couple of men in trousers on the street." "Did you?" Skamu made up his mind. "All right. We'll go forward and scoop them up. People can sort things out later. Right now, I want all the bodies I can get my hands on." "Aye, that's sensible, sir," Raunu said. Skamu would have gone on without the sergeant's approval, but was glad to have it. The company cautiously moved out of the woods and toward the vil- lage. Skarmi supposed they were advancing on it, but could you advance during a retreat? That was a fine point of warfare with which he remained unacquainted. Sure enough, trousered troopers did tramp along the village streets. One of them shouted when he spied the soldiers approaching in open order. In a twinkling, the men in the village took cover. "Be ready for anything," Skarmi called to his own men. "They may be Algarvians in our clothes, trying to lure us into a trap." Inside the village, the soldiers seemed to have the same fear about Skamu's company. They needed a good deal of wary calling back and forth before they decided they were all Valmierans. "Powers above be praised you're here," said a young lieutenant who came out to greet Skarnu. Skarnu took out his map. "Where is here?" he asked. "This miserable place is called Stomarella, sir," the lieutenant answered. When Skamu found it, he whistled softly; the Algarvians had driven him even farther east than he'd thought. The lieutenant went o "Now we have some sort of a decent guard force for Duke Marstalu." "What?" Skarnu stared. "The army commander? Here?" "Aye, sir." The lieutenant nodded. "We were falling back from the first Algarvian onslaught when their dragonfliers hit our column. I don't think they knew his Grace the Duke was part of it. We were just Valmierans on a road, and so they dropped eggs on us. They killed Grace's unicorn. He broke his leg when the animal fell on him: we got him to the first shelter we could." INTo THE DARKNESS 329 "Is he still in command?" Skarnu asked. "As much as anyone is," the lieutenant said wearily, which summed up the plight of the army as well as anything. "We didn't think the red- heads could do to us what they did to Forthweg last fall. We may have been wrong." We may have been wrong. Such a bloodless sentence, to leave so much blood in its wake. Skamu said, "Algarve didn't beat us during the Six Years' War. I expect we'll manage to halt the redheads again." "I hope we do," the lieutenant said. The difference between hope and expect spoke volumes. Skarnu did his best not to read them. He turned to Raunu. "Sergeant, have the men form a perimeter around this village. We'll want to be able to defend it and, if need be, to move out toward the east." He would not say retreat. "Aye, sir," Raunu said, and began giving orders. "If you will come with me, sir, I know Duke Marstalu will be glad to have your report," the lieutenant said. Skarmi knew nothing of the sort, but accompanied the other officer into Stomarella. Close up, the village showed its abandonment. Only shards of glass remained in the windows. Leaves dnifted against walls and fenceposts. Flowers and grass grew in rank, untencled exuberance. The lieutenant led Skarnu to the biggest, fanciest house in Stornarella. Skarnu had expected nothing less. He hadn't thought having his expectations confirmed would leave him so sad. When the lieutenant took Skarnu inside, Marstalu was lying on a sofa, a splint on his leg, giving a crystallomancer orders to relay: "Tell them to hold out as long as they can, curse it, and to counterattack if they see even the slightest chance. We must try to establish some kind of order at the front." He looked up. "Ah, Marquis Skarnu! So good to see you again." For a moment, he might have been in his drawing room at KJaipeda rather than a filthy village parlor with trash and leaves on the floor and pictures all askew on the wall. Then the illusion shattered. Marstalu himself almost seemed to shatter. He'd always reminded Skarnu of a kindly grandfather. Now he reminded hini of a kindly grandfather whose wife of many years had just died: Marstalu was suddenly a little old man cast adnift in a world he neither understood nor desired. "Command me, your Grace!" Skarnu said, trying to put some spirit I !ts. en for out and ~ be reet nant had t on, ri the doil't just -d Ills 7e got 330 Hany Turtledove back into the man who commanded not merely him but the entire Valmieran army struggling to resist the assault from Algarve. It was no good. He could see it was no good before Marstalu spoke. "Your words prove you noble," the duke said with a sad, sweet smile. "But what good is nobility in these times? The commoners shun it, as do most even of our so-called nobles. We are beaten, Skarmi, beaten. All that remains is to learn how badly we are beaten." "Surely we can yet rally," Skarnu said. "Perhaps we can rally in the south - back of the Soretto," Marstalu said. "Defending true Valmierans may put the heart back in our soldiers. We do have to form a line here in the center. How and where we can do that, I am not so sure. In the north, I admit, things are rather better. The thick forests and rough country along the border there will leave the Algarvians with their work cut out for them." "Then we ought to fall back to the Soretto in the south and use the men we save to help strengthen the center here," Skarnu said. "What do you think I've been trying to do?" Marstalu showed temper for the first time. "But powers above, it's not been easy. The cursed folk of Rivaroli have raised a guerrilla against our soldiers there, and the Algarvian behemoth brigades smash through everything we can move against them, throwing us into disarray far behind what should be the line. "Have we no behemoths of our own, your Grace?" Skarnu asked. In the retreat, he'd seen a handful of dead Valmieran beasts, but none in action. "Aye, distributed along the line to support our foot," the Duke of Klaipeda answered. "That is the way sensible men have employed them as long as they have been utilized in warfare." Skarnu was about to point out that the Algarvian way seemed to work better and therefore seemed more sensible when shouts came from the street. The young lieutenant dashed outside. When he came back a moment later, smiles wreathed his face. "Your Grace," he cried, "they have a carriage to take you to the rear." "Oh, very good." Marstalu pointed to his splinted leg, then to Skarnu. "My lord Marquis, will you be so kind as to help my aide get me to the said carriage?" With one of the duke's arms draped over each of them, Skarnu and the lieutenant did haul him to the carriage and heave him aboard. The e of enl karnu. to the and the d. The INTo THE DAPKNESS 331 lieutenant stuck his head into the carriage, spoke briefly with Marstalu, and then turned to Skarnu. "You and your company are to continue your stalwart defense, as before." "Aye," Skarnu said in a hollow voice. The lieutenant mounted a um'- corn. The carriage began to roll. Marstalu's followers rode off with it. They left Skarnu and his men behind, to salvage what they could. Count Sabriino peered down at the ground from atop his dragon. Thick woods hid some of the roughness of the terrain, but could not con- ceal it all. For generations, generals on both sides had been convinced these uplands on the northern part of the border between Algarve and VaIrm'era were too rugged for any large operations. King Mezentio's men aimed to prove those generations of generals mistaken. Had Sabrino swung his dragon so he could look more to the west, he would have seen the great columns of men and behemoths stretching back into Algarve. He didn't bother; he knew they were there. His task, and that of his wing, was twofold: to keep Valmieran dragonfliers from spying on them as they deployed and to support them when they come out into the open country east of the uplands. He had not seen many enemy dragons. Maybe the Valmierans were using all they had in the south, against the Algarvian assault and against the rebellious men of the Marquisate of Rivaroll. Maybe they didn't have enough to cover all their frontier with Algarve. Maybe both those things were true. Sabrino hoped they were. If they were, Valmiera would soon get a nasty surprise. "In fact," Sabrino breathed, "I think the cursed Kaunians may be get- ting a nasty surprise just about now." He patted the side of his dragon's scaly neck, a gesture of affection altogether out of keeping with his usual annoyance at tli6 beast he rode. Down below, the wooded uplands gradually gave way to the flatter farming country of most of western Valmiera. And now he spied emerg- ing from the woods the heads of the columns whose tails stretched back into Algarve. Behemoths trotted across newly planted fields, marking fresh patlis easilv visible from the air. Sabrmo whooped. "The blonds will know they've been diddled, all riglit"' The behemoth crews started tossing eggs into the first villages they 332 Harry Turtledove reached and blazing at the buildings in them with the heavy sticks the great animals carried. Wooden houses and shops burst into flames. Smoke rose in thick clouds. Sabrino nodded approval. The Valimerans rmight not think Mezentio's men able to mount a major assault through the rough country lying between the two kingdoms, but they would have garrisons hereabouts. And so they did. A behemoth went down, crushing some of the men who rode it. The rest perished when a Valmieran beam blazed through the metal-and-magic shell of an egg it carried. When that egg went up, it touched off the sorcerous energy stored in the others and in the heavy stick. The resulting blast of light made Sabrino close his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, only a crater in the nuiddle of the field showed where the behemoth and its crew had been. But most of the others, and the mounted footsoldiers accompanying them, kept right on going for-ward. The dragoons entered the village. Before long, they came out the other side, rejoining the behemoths that had skirted the built-up area. The men who had held their horses brought them up so they could quickly move forward again. First tiny obstacles overcome, the advance rolled ahead like the oncoming tide. Also like the tide, it left rubbish in its wake and pushed more along ahead of it. Not all the dots down there on the ground moved with military discipline and precision. Some were peasants and townsfolk, flee- ing before King Mezentio's soldiers as the ancient Kaunians must have fled before the fierce Algarvian invaders of another day - and as Algarvians had assuredly fled when Valmieran troops pushed into eastern Algarve. Sabrino was tempted to order his wing to swoop down on the Valmieran refugees, to rake them with dragonfire. A less experienced officer would have done it, and would have been raked over the coals for it afterwards. Sabrino knew the Valimerans would finally be discovering they'd worried more about one attack when another was more impor- tant. They'd be rushing all the men and behemoths and dragons they could to the north, to try to stanch the breach. He didn't want those dragons attacking his fliers with the advantage of altitude. In any case, other, lower-flying, Algarvian dragons began dropping eggs on the roads and on the Valmierans clogging them. Sa4rino nodded to himself He'd been wise to resist temptation. The commanders were prepared for everything. jW_ in ~h P, VY a he ng ge. hat ght Cles Ong vith lee- fICCA had the nced is for rring ipor- they those pping Ddded INTo THE ARKNESS 333 The first Valmleran dragons came win ng their way out of the south- east less than half an hour later. Sabrino nodded again. Some Valmieran soldier in one of those little towns had had a crystal with him, and warned his comrades before he either died or ran awav. The blonds had I responded pretty quickly. But they'd sent a boy to do a man's job. They couldn't have put more than a squadron of dragons in the air: more a reconnaissance force than one in any shape to fight hard. Sabriino laughed for joy as he signaled his wing to the attack. Even his dragon's hiss seemed to have a gloating antic- ipation to it. He knew that was a product of his own imagInation; dragons barelv had the brains to know thev were alive at the moment, and couldn't possibly anticipate. When the Valmierans realized how many Algarvian dragons they faced, some of them flew back the way they had come. The others soon wished they had. Sabrino and his men blazed some of the enemy fliers ofl their dragons' necks. Other Valmierans perished in the dragon-to-dragon fights that always broke out in spite of everything fliers could do. A couple of his own men perished, too, which made him curse. Later that afternoon, the Algarvians on the ground bumped into the first defenders who weren't taken aback to find them there. The blonds held out in a small town and refused to Yield. Sabrino laughed to watch the behemoths and mounted infantry simply go around the Valn-lieran strongpoint. if the enemy chose to come out from the town and fight, fine. If not, the strongpoint would soon wither on the vine. The Valinieran defenders, and the townsfolk with them, would get hungry in short order. If everything had gone according to plan, ground troops would be lay- ing out a dragon farm on this side of the uplands, so the wing wouldn't have to fly all the way back to Algarve to land. Soon, he would have to find out if everything had gone as planned. His dragon was soaring more now, fl ping less; it would be hard pressed to hold off a rested Valmieran beast He began to fly in an expanding spiral, still alert for enemy wardragons but also peerin', down to see if he could spy the promised dragon farm. When he did, he brought the dragon down to the ground. Handlers chained it to a stake. The rest of the fliers in his wing followed him down. "We'll need so e beasts in the air " Sabrino caidxxrnrr~rflxr t~ nn~ n 334 Harry Turtledove the handlers. "Some of my fliers should have mounts fresh enough to go back up." He wondered if he was telling the truth; his dragon was almost worn enough to be docile, a striking measure of its exhaustion. "Don't worry about it, sir." The fellow in leather protective gear pointed to the sky. Sure enough, more Algarvian dragons were flying up out of the west to take the place of the worn wing. The handler grinned. "So far, everything's goingjust like it's supposed to." "Isn't it, though?" Sabrino murmured. In the Six Years' War, nothing had gone as it was supposed to, either for Algarve or for her foes. They'd kept banging heads like a couple of rams till one side finally yielded. But the Algarvian army had had its own way in Forthweg, and everything here in Valmiera seemed to be working as the generals had drawn it on the map. Sabrino wondered how long that would last. He wondered how long it could last. For as long as it lasted, he - and Algarve - would enjoy it. Another handler pushed up a cart full of chunks of meat thickly coated in red-orange powder: ground cinnabar, to give the dragons the quick- silver they needed. Along with the meat, the handler also set out a couple of lumps of yellow brimstone. Sabrino's dragon stretched out its long, scaly neck and began to eat. The flier nodded; he'd expected nothing less. A dragon that wouldn't eat wasn't merely exhausted; it was at death's door. Sabrino fed himself, too. Supplies for the men had come forward along with those for their mounts, which proved everything was going accord- ing to plan. Gulping rough red wine and gnawing on a roll stuffed with ham and melon, Sabrino said, "I don't think the yellow-hairs know what's hit 'em yet." "Here's hoping you're right, sir." Captain Domiziano lifted his tin cup to turn the words into a toast. "We've got 'em bending way for- wards down south. Now we come around behind 'em and give it to 'em straight up the arse." "You're a vulgarian, Domiziano," Sabriino said, "nothing but a cursed vulgarian. "Why, thank you, sir," the squadron leader said. He and his wing commander laughed together. While they sdt on enemy soil drinking wine, life looked monstrous good. It looked even better the next morning. Dragons were blessed - some INTo THE DAR-KNESS 335 would say cursed, for it made them more difficult to handle - with enor- mous powers of recuperation. When Sabrino climbed aboard his mount in predawn twilight, the beast was as stupid and bad-tempered and ready to fight anything that moved - except possibly him - as ever. He took his wing of dragonfliers into the heavens before sunup. They flew southeast, in the direction from which day would break. Sabriino scanned the brightening sky ahead. Enemy dragons would be silhouetted against the glow, and easy to see from a long distance. But he spied none. Fighting on the ground had not waited for the sun to come up, either. Flashes from bursting eggs showed where the battle line lay. Sabrino whistled; the wind of his passage blew the sound away. King Mezentio's men had moved miles since the evening before. And the Algarvians were still moving forward. Here and there, the behemoths and the fast-moving mounted infantry accompanying them found obstacles: Valmieran fortresses (although not many, for they'd penetrated well beyond the border), garrisoned villages, stubborn com- panies or occasionally even regiments of VaIrmierans. As they'd done the day before, as they'd learned to do in the Forthwegian campaign, they flowed around as many obstacles as they could. Where they had to fight, the behemoths did the bulk of the work. They would stand off from the opposition and use their egg-tossers and heavy sticks to fight at ranges from which the Valmierans, who mostly had weapons individual soldiers could carry, had trouble replying. Every so often, the Valmierans would keep on fighting in spite of everything the Algarvian warriors on the ground could do. Then the crystallomancers sent out the call for help from above. Dragons would dive out of the sky and drop heavier eggs on the enemy. Few indeed were the drucs when the dragons had to drop eggs twice on the same target. Algarvian dragons also swooped on Valmieran egg-tossers that hurled sorcerous energies at King Mezentio's men. There were more of those as the day wore along, as the Kaunian kingdom slowly - too slowly - awoke to peril in the north. But the Algarvian advance rolled on, roughly parilleling the course of the middle reaches of the Soretto before that river bent from southeast to northeast but in any case well to the east of it: a spearthrust aimed straight at Valmiera's heart. Watching it from above, helping to drive off the Valmieran dragons that tn'ed to check it, Sabrino grew sure on the second day of what he'd le s tin for I ern ursed nking some Ong rd ith ow 336 Hany Turtledove believed on the first. "They can't stop us," he told his dragon, and the beast did not argue with him. Tealdo looked east across the Soretto River, into land that had belonged to the Kingdom of Valmiera since time out of mind. On the far bank, Algarvian dragons dropped eggs on the enemy. Tealdo felt like cheering each flash of released sorcerous energy and each cloud of dust that rose from it. Sergeant Panfilo had other things on his nuind. "Curse the trousered swine for sending all the bridges into the river," he growled. "If they hadn't done that, we'd be halfway to Priekule by now." "More than halfway," Tealdo said. "We went through Rivaroli like a dose of castor oil. The yellow-heads still don't know what landed on em. Captain Galafrone was trotting by, as usual more energetic than troopers half his age. Hearing Panfilo and Tealdo, he stopped, threw back his head, and laughed. "Powers above, boys, we only got to the river a couple of hours ago. We'll be over it by this time tomorrow. Then we drive for Priekule." He paused, listening to what he'd just said. "We really are moving, aren't we? Things weren't like this during the Six Years' War, believe you me they weren't." "I only hope those bastards coming down from the north don't beat us to King Gainibu's palace," Tealdo said. Galafrone laughed again. "Those bastards coming down from the orth are your fellow soldiers, you know. And they couldn't be doing what they're doing if we hadn't drawn the Valmierans' notice away from "Doesn't seem fair, sir," Sergeant Panfilo said. "We're doing as much work - maybe even harder fighting - and they'll get all the glory. No, He sounded like a little boy with a case of the sulks. Tealdo under- stood that. He felt much the same way, and chimed in, "That's right. What's the point of fighting if you can't swagger and boast after-wards? Those fellows will be able to, while we're nothing but afterthoughts." "Well, anyone who listened to you would guess you're an Algarvian, all night," Galafrone said. "Here's the way I see it, though: if MTe lick the Kaunians there's plenty of glory for the whole cursed kingdom. When DrL ~an Lck we Ne six )eat the )ilig r~ rom tuch No, Xlhen INTo THE DARKNESS 337 we lost the last war, back when I was your age, there was plenty of shame to go around, I'll tell you that. But if you get to put on a Conquest Of Valmiera ribbon, none of the pretty girls will care whether you fought in the northern army or the southern one." Panfilo pointed back toward the west. "Here come the rafts, looks like." Sure enough, soldiers aboard a couple of horse-drawn wagons started throwing what looked like large leather pancakes down on to the ground. They also threw down some pumps. Galafrone set his men to inflating the rafts. "No paddles," Tealdo observed. "Do they expect us to get across by twiddling our fingers in the river?" "Use your head, not your mouth," Panfilo suggested. Tealdo sent him an injured look. Panfilo ignored it. Never in the history of the world had a sergeant proved sensitive to an injured look. About an hour later, a fellow wearing the insignia of a captain, a badge of the lesser nobility, and a mage's badge came up, looked over the soldiers at work, and shook his head. "This won't do," he said in fussy tones. "No, this won't do at all. You'll have to move upstream about a mile, and take these rafts with you." "Why?" Galafrone growled. He might have gained captain's rank himself, but still thought like the common soldier he'd been for so many years. "What in blazes is wrong with where we're at?" The mage sniffed at his grammar, and then again when he noted that Galafrone, though also an officer, sported no badge of nobility of any sort. But his answer was not only civil but also informative: "Because, my dear fellow, that's where the nearest ley line across the Soretto lies." "Ah," Galaftone said, and light also dawned inside Tealdo. Galaftone went on, "No wonder they didn't issue us any paddles." He raised his voice: "Come on, boys, time to pack up and move. We have to get to the right doorway before we can pay the Valmierans a call." Now that he understood the reason for the mage's order, he complied without the least fuss. The Valinierans knew that ley line crossed from the Marquisate of Rivaroll into their kingdom proper. They'd flung eggs across the Soretto to keep the Algarvians from concentrating near it till Algarvian dragons put,their tossers out of action. More dragons kept working over the 338 Harry Turtledove eastern bank of the river to make sure the Valmierans; didn't cause any more trouble. Colonel Ombruno's whole regiment and a couple of others were assembling near the ley line. So were a couple of companies of heavily armored behemoths. Tealdo smiled when he saw them. The big, ugly beasts pulled their weight and then some. He'd seen how they spread terror and confusion among the Valmierans. He favored fighting foes who were already afraid. He waited with his comrades till darkness fell. A couple of Valmieran dragons got through the Algarvian squadrons in the air, but the eggs they dropped for the most part fell wide of the gathering force of Mezentio's men. And, as soon as they had dropped them, the Valmieran dragonfliers fled back to the east as fast as their mounts could carry them. "Now we take the war to the enemy," Colonel Ombruno declared magniloquently. "Now we avenge their invasion of our soil, now we avenge their robberies after the Six Years' War, now we avenge the wicked plots by which they won that war. For King Mezentio!" Tealdo shouted "Mezentio!" with the rest. So did his friend Trasone, who stood close by, but Trasone raised an eyebrow while he was shout- ing. Tealdo felt like raising an eyebrow, too. He cared more about living through the next few days than about the king of Algarve. He suspected most Algarvian soldiers felt the same way. Most Valmieran soldiers prob- ably cared more about living through the next few days than about King Gainibu, too. With any luck at all, a lot of the trousered Kaunians were going to be disappointed. "Take to your rafts," Galaftone ordered the men of his company. "We want to hit the yellow-haired whoresons as hard as we can, drive 'em back from the river so we can set up proper bridges - meaning no dis- respect to the mage here, of course." "Of course," that worthy said in a voice like ice. He got into the leather raft with the company commander. After that, Tealdo didn't s(!e him again for a while. He sat in his own raft, doing his best not to wonder what the Valmierans had waiting for him on the other side of the Soretto. All too soon, he'd find out. The rest of the soldiers in Sergeant Panfilo's squad - most veterans of the conquest of-Sibiu, a couple of new men replacing casualties - also sat hunched and quiet. INTo THE DARKNESS ng be We lem dis- the It see or to de of ers in u-1. a quiet. 339 Whatever they were thinking, they kept it to themselves. Tealdo heard the waves in the Soretto begin to slap at the sides of some other leather raft. Then his own began to move, pulled straight across the river by the energy the mage was drawing from the ley line. He wondered what would happen if some VaIniieran, alert or Just lucky, blazed the mage in the middle of the stream. That was something he would sooner not discover for himself He looked across the river, toward the side the Valmierans still held. Flashes showed where Algarvian dragons were dropping eggs on the enemy. "Paste 'em," Tealdo mut- tered under his breath. "Paste 'em hard." Other, smaller flashes showed that not all the Valrmierans were slain or cowering in their holes. A beam from a stick struck the water not far from Tealdo's raft. It raised a hiss and a brief cloud of steam. Shouts from the eastern bank of the Soretto and more beams stabbing out announced the arrival of the first Algarvians. If the Valmierans could respond quickly, they'd give Tealdo's comrades a thin time of it. But the one thing the Valmierans hadn't yet shown they could do was respond quickly. Gravel grated under the leather raft. It stopped so hard, it almost pitched Tealdo out on his face. "Come on!" Panfilo screamed. "Get moving, curse you! You want to sit around and wait for the Valmierans to blaze you for the pot?" Tealdo's boots splashed in shallow water. Then he was pounding through gravel-strewn mud, and then up on dry land. "Mezentio!" he shouted, not so much to demonstrate his love for his sovereign as to keep any other Algarvians from blazing him in the dark. Speed and confusion had worked in the assault on Sibiu. They'd worked thus far in the fight against Valmiera. "Mezentio!" he shouted again. He didn't want them working against him, especially when he might have to pav with his neck. He fell in the crater a bursting egg had dug, and then into a trench he hadn't seen in the dark. Picking himself up, he realized he could break his neck as well as paying with it any other way. A couple of dead Valmierans lay in the bottom of the trench. Had any live enemy soldiers been there with him, he would have stretched out cold and dead himself But the Kaunians who hadn't perished had fled. "Mezentio!" Tealdo shouted once more, and stumbled forward. Before long, he heard thunderous footsteps behind him. A behemoth 11 340 Harry Turtledove pounded past, heading east, and then another and another. He cried out the king of Algarve's name again and again. The behemoth crews, not wanting their own men to blaze them in the night, were also yelling, "Mezentio!" When dawn came, Tealdo found himself picking his way along the side of a gravel road. Valmierans, some of them soldiers but more civil- ians, had been retreating down it when Algarvian dragons hit them. The results weren't pretty: dead Valmierans, dead horses and unicorns that had been drawing carts, the carts themselves and all sorts of other worldly goods scattered and burned and wrecked. Not all the Valmierans who'd been assailed on the road were dead yet, nor all the beasts of burden, either. Tealdo paused to give a moaning old woman who plainly wouldn't last much longer a swig of wine from his water bottle. She had trouble swallowing, but at last managed to choke some down. What she said in her own language sounded like thanks. He wondered if she knew he was an Algarvian soldier or took him for a fel- low Kaunian. "Keep moving!" someone called in Algarvian from behind him. "We've got to keep moving! If we push them now, maybe we can break them." Tealdo shoved the cork back into his water bottle. His knees clicked as he rose from a squat. When he spied dragons flying west a moment later, he threw himself flat again. But the Vahmeran dragons paid him no attention. They were streaking toward the Soretto, toward the river crossing the Algarvians had forced. If they could drop some eggs on the ley line, they could put it out of action for a while and trap the Algarvians on this side of the river. "Keep moving!" someone else yelled - Captain Galafrone this time. "They won't stop us. They can't stop us. Nothing Valrmiera can do Win stop us now." Tealdo slogged east. He hoped his company commander was right. Sabrino was working harder these days than he had when the Algarvian army broke through into northern Valimera the week before. King Gainibu's men had finally figured out that, if they didn't halt the Algarvian thrust before it reached the Strait of Valmiera, it woulcrcut off their large force still in eastern Algarve and western Vahmi era - and would INTo THE DARKNESS ad im. reak cked ent no river n the rvianS time. 0 will ander en the before. halt the cut off d would 341 also keep more help from Lagoas from reaching the mainland of Derlavai. But the Lagoans, curse them, had already put dragons and behemoths and footsoldiers into southern Valmiera. Lagoan dragonfliers carried a reputation earned in the Six Years' War. From everything Sabnino had seen, they still lived up to it, too. They were certainly better in the air than their Valimeran counterparts, far better than the Forthwegians Sabrino had fought as last summer passed into autumn. At the moment, Sabrino was wondering whether the Lagoan he was fighting was better in the air than he was. The fellow put his red-and- gold-painted dragon through maneuvers that should have tied it in knots. He kept trying to get on Sabrino's tail at a range close enough to let his dragon flame Sabrino's out of the sky. He kept coming close to doing it, too. He also had a way of leaning far over his dragon's neck to make him- self as small a target as he could. Sabnino wouldn't have cared to lean over that far himself, not with so much empty, empty air between him and the ground. He wondered whether the islander had more balls than brains, or whether the Lagoans had come up with a new kind of harness that made falling off harder. However that was, the enemy dragonflier made a nasty foe. Sabriino felt his own dragon begin to fade beneath him. The beasts co uld put forth their greatest effort only in short spurts - although the dragon the Lagoan flew seemed tireless. Sabrino blazed at the enemy again, and missed again, too. He cursed, then threw his dragon into a twisting dive to evade the Lagoan. As he leveled off, the islander still pursuing him, one of the fliers from his wing dove at the Lagoan. The enemy had to break off his attack on Sabrino to defend himself Algarvian cloctnine stressed always keeping an eve on what was happening in back of you. Faster than the Lagoan must have imagined he could, Sabrino resumed the attack himself His dragon roared to see the one painted in red and gold straight ahead of it. Behind Sabrino, the dragon's powerful wings beat hard. Closer and closer it drew to the Lagoan's mount, which was part of a smaller force than the Algarvian count's. The embattled Lagoan could not fight two at once. Sabrinc, tapped the side of his dragon's neck. Flame burst from its mouth, enveloping the flank and night wing of the Lagoan dragon. "That's my beauty!" Sabriino cried. For the moment, he didn't despise 342 Harry Turtledove dragons at all. His, surely, was the best of the breed ever hatched. The Lagoan flew a fine dragon, too. Even as it shrieked, horribly burned, even as it began to tumble out of the sky, it twisted its long, lim- ber neck and sent a blast of flame back at Sabrino and his mount. He felt the heat against his cheek, but the fire fell short. Shrieking still, the Lagoan dragon fell, Sabrino looked around for more foes. Seeing none close by, he waved to the Algarvian flier who'd fatally distracted his opponent. The dragon- flier blew him a kiss, as if to say it was all part of the game. Down plummeted the Lagoan dragon. Sabriino tried to mark Just where it fell. If he got the chance, he wanted to look at the harness the enemy had used. If it turned out to be better than the ones he and his comrades had on their dragons, the saddlers' guild needed to know about it, and quickly. There on the ground, Algarvian behemoths continued their push through VaIrmiera, southeast toward the sea. As they had throughout the campaign thus far, they did meet resistance here and there. The Vahmerans were brave enough, even if some of their soldiers had no love for the noble officers who led them. And so were the Lagoan battalions fighting alongside them. But the onslaught of dragons, behemoths, and the dragons who kept right up with the behemoths had thrown the enemy into disarray, so that his units fought individually, not supporting one another so well as they might have done. Against the Algarvians, whose warriors and beasts on the ground and in the air worked together like the fingers on a single hand, that was a recipe for disaster. A few enemy behemoths came out of a stand of trees. Sabriino could tell at a glance they were Vahnieran: King Gainibu's men loaded them down with so much armor, it made them slow, so much armor that they couldn't carry as many crewmen or weapons as their Algarvian counterparts. And there were only a few of them. The Valmierans had parceled them out all along the line, while the Algarvians grouped their behemoths into. large bands. No one had been sure which was the better way of using them. "Now people know," Sabrino gloated. The fight on the ground didn't last long. The Algarvians knocked a couple of Valmieran behemoths kicking with well-tossed eggs, and blazed down another despite the thick coat of mail it wore. After tlTat, a Valmieran crew on a behemoth that hadn't been hurt threw up their Dve ,ons and the -.ting ians, ~ther tell own jjdn~t . And )ut all i large 111. ckcd a ,s, and that, a P dicil' INTo THE DARKNESS 343 hands and surrendered. The last couple of Valmieran behemoths fled back into the woods, pursued by the Algarvians. One Algarvian behe- moth was down, too, but Sabrino could see the men who'd ridden it moving around on the ground. They'd come off lucky. Sabrino flew on to the south. Beyond the front, Valmieran refugees clogged the roads. They fled the advancing Algarvians as if the Kaunian Empire were falling all over again. In their flight, they helped insure that Valmiera would fall, for soldiers could not use the roads they fined edge to edge. Here and there, Algarvian dragons had dropped eggs on them or swooned low to flame them. The havoc the dragons had wreaked only made travel tougher That would hurt Gainibu's soldiers. All the same, Sabrino was glad his wing hadn't been assigned to attacking civilians on the roads. War was a filthy enough business anyhow. Had he been ordered to drop eggs on - -A children and old men he would have done it. He had no doubt of that. But it would have left a bad taste in his mouth. At a makeshift dragon farm near a small Valmieran town that evening, Sabnno assembled his squadron leaders and asked, "If you were King Gainibu what would you do now?" "Hop on a ley-line cruiser and scoot over to Lagoas while I still have the chance " Cantain Orosio said. He'd inherited a squadron when its I coinmander got badly burned. "If Gainibu doesn't, we'll nab him." "You're like night about that," Sabrino said, "but it isn't quite what I ineant. If the Valmierans and Lagoans are going to stop us before we get to the sea, how do they do it?" "They'd have to strike back across our front lines from east and west at once," Captain Domiziano said: "with some of the force they sent into Algarve, and with whatever they can scrape up to the north and east. If they can open up a corridor and pull out most of their striking force, they t. h-1.4 - -- -fPn'ekule the wqv thev did durina the Six Years' U1611 I War." "That would be very bad," Orosio said "A\T, it would." Sabrino nodded. "Domiziano, I agree with you - that is their best hope. I don't think they can do it, though. Have you seen - have you seen anywhere - the kind of force they'd need to crack us off to the east? I haven't.. They sent most of their best troops to the border against us, and they're under attack along the border, too. They I 344 Harry Turtledove won't be able to pull much without asking for disaster there." "They're under attack behind the border, too," Orosio said. "The foll of Rivaroll still remember whose kingdom they rightly belong to." "So they do," Sabrino said, "and the Kaunians are paying the price fo greed. Well, our job is to make sure it's a big price." "There's the truth, sir," Domiziano said. "We've waited a long timt to have our revenge on them. Now that it looks like we finally do they'll be paying plenty, they will." His eyes shone with anticipation. Algarvians savored vengeance almost as much as Gyongyosians did, and took It - or so Colonel Sabrino was convinced, at any rate - with far more panache. "Oh, indeed," Sabrino said now. "We have to make sure they can't get back up on their hind legs and hit us again for a long time to come. They tried to do that to us a generation ago, but they couldn't quite bring it off. We win, though; King Mezentio won't make the mistake of being too mild." Out at the edge of the dragon farm, a sentry called a challenge. A woman answered in Vahnieran. Orosio started to laugh. The sentry asked, "What did she say, sit? I don't speak a word of their bloody language!" "You must be a handsome fellow," Orosio answered, chuckling still. "If it means the same in Valrnieran as it does in classical Kaunian, shejust asked if you wanted to marry her," "She's not too bad, sir, but no thanks all the same," the sentry said. 'i Sabrino also laughed. "That verb has changed meaning since the days of the Kaunian Empire," he said. "What she really asked was whether you wanted to screw her." "Oh," the sentry said, suddenly thoughtful. "It's the best offer I've had tonight, anyway." "You're on duty, soldier," Sabrino said. With women involved ' his countrymen often needed reminding of such things. Sabrino went CA "You'd have to pay to get what you want, and she's liable to give you something you don't want along with it." The woman let out an indignant screech; evidently she understood, Algarvian even if she didn't speak it. "She's gone," the sentrysaid, his-, voice mournful. "Just as well," Sabriino called to him. By the sentry's sniff, he had a INTo THE DARKNESS 345 different opinion. Well, even if he did, he couldn It do anything about it . tonight. When Sabn'no took his dragon into the air the next morning, he dis- covered that the Valmierans were trying to do what Domiziano had pre- dicted: they mounted a fierce attack from the west against the Algarvian behemoths and dragoons blocking their line of retreat. They'd loaded eggs on to every dragon that could carry them, too, to drop on the Algarvians. he just said. he days hether I've had ived, his went on, give you riderstood said, his he had a But egg-carrying dragons were slow because of the extra weight they bore, slow and awkward in the air. Sabriino's wing of wardragons flamed many of them out of the sky and blazed many of the fliers who controlled them. Only a few got through to add their weight to that of the attack on the ground. That ground attack came only from the west. Sabrino grinned when he saw how little the Valmierans to the east of the Algarvians could do. If his countrymen could contain the Valmieran effort to break out now, they would swallow the rest of the Kaunian kingdom at their leisure. Contain it the Algarvians did, over another couple of days of hard fighting. Reinforcements came up along the roads and by ley-line cara- ,jan. The retreating Valmierans had disrupted the ley-line network here -aa6 there, but only here and there: an effort of a piece with the way they'd fought niost of the war. King Mezentio's men had little trouble working around the gaps. By the end of the third day, it was plain the Valmierans would not, could not, break out. When Sabrino brought his dragon to the ground that evening, everv part of him but his smile was exhausted. "Bn*ng me wine!" he shouted to the first dragon handler who came up to him. "Wine, and quicklv! We have them! They are ours!" "They've beaten us," Skarnu said dully. He leaned back against the trunk of a chestnut tree. He was so worn, he couldn't have sat up straight without the tree behind him. "We're trapped between two blazes, and We call't let out." j,", "They move so cursedfast," Sergeant Raunu said. Though many years older than the Valmieran marquis who commanded him, he seemed kesher - not that that was saying much. "They're always there a day before you think they can be, and they always have twice as many men 346 Harry Turtledove there as you expect. It wasn't like this during the Six Years' War." He said that before during this disastrous campaign, any number of times. "More of our men are running off now, orjust throwing down the sticks and surrendering to the first redhead they see," Skarnu said. Raunu nodded. "Aye, they see there's not much hope, sir. After while, you start asking why you should get killed when it won't do th kingdom any good. At that, we still have more men in the line an ready to fight than most companies. Powers above, we've got mor men in the line and ready to fight than a lot of regiments. Some of th officers had given up, too, and the men know it." "And some of the commoners don't want to fight for the nobility any how," Skarnu added. "Sir, I wouldn't have said that," Raunu replied. "But, since you hav gone and said it, I'm cursed if I can tell you you're wrong.' "Would they rather serve the Algarvians?" Skarnu knew his voice wa bitter, but he couldn't help it. "If they think the redheads will treat the any better than their own rulers do, they'll be disappointed." Raunu said nothing. He'd been a sergeant since the Six Years' War He would never rise above sergeant's rank in King Gainibu's army, no if he stayed in till he was a hundred years old. He might possibly have ha a view different from Skamu's, but that didn't occur to the you marquis till much later. For the moment, his own immediate problem had more weight. "W can't break out, not as an army we can't," he said, and Raunu nodde again. Skarnu went on, "Since we can't break out, we're going to have to surrender or else get pounded to pieces right where we are." "Aye, sit, I'd say that's so," Raunu responded. "But there aren't Algarvians everywhere, especially to the east of us," Skamu continued, as much to himself as to the veteran sergeant. "There are plenty of them where they really need to be, but their line has thin spots, too." "That's so," Ratinu said. "Wasn't like that in the last war, either. Then everything on both sides was sewn up right. But the Algarvians can move so much force so fast, they don't have to be strong everywhere at once - just where it counts, like you say." "Which means that , if we slide through a few men at a time, we ought to have a decent chance of getting past them and into country they don't INTo THE AP-KNESS r a he ,nd re he ~ave was act-1-1 QVar. not had oung "we xWed , have )f 11s, There 3,,,, thin -rheil I iliove once - e ought hold," Skamu said. "Then we can go on fighting them." 347 "Worth a try, I suppose," Raunu said. "We can't do much more here; that's plain. Maybe, just maybe, they'll be able to put something together farther east. If the redheads spot us, they spot us, that's all. In that case, we either die fighting or we spend the rest of the war in a captives' camp." Neither of those alternatives held any appeal for Skarnu. But they were the only ones he faced if he stayed here. If he kept moving, he had at least some chance of staying free and giving Algarve more trouble "Assemble the company, or what you can find of it," he told Raunu. "I'll nut the choices to the men, too. I can't order anyone to come along with us, because I don't think our chances are very good." "Better with you, sit, than with some other officers I can think of, and a lot of 'em carrvinLy hiaher rank than vours." Raunu answered. "I'll round u the men Perhaps half the number of soldiers who'd been with the company when the Algarvians launched their counterattack came together to listen to Skarnu. Not all of them had started the campaign with his company; some, cut adrift from their own units, hadjointed his because even during the worst of the retreat he'd kept giving orders that made sense. Now lie set forth what he planned to do, finishing, "However you choose, this is farewell. I won't be with you any more. I don't think we move even by squads. It'll be every man for himself, or every couple of men, if you choose to go, Powers above grant that you come through safe to land where King Gainibu still rules. Raunu added, "Night's coming soon. Probably the best time to move because the redheads will have the most trouble spotting us." "Aye, that makes serise," Skarnu agreed. He turned to the men he'd been leading. "You'll leave in separate groups, half an hour or so apart. Keep in loose order, as I said. If you head northeast, you'll cut across the land the mcil-cls lnve abbed at a right- angle that'll be the shortest wa Good luck " -What about vou, sir?" one of the soldiers asked "Oh, I'm going to try it, never fear," Skarnu answered. "But I'll wait till the last squad's out before I leave." "You hear that, you lugs?" Sergeant Raunu growled. "Let's give cheer for the capnin. If we had more officers like him, if we had more 348 Harry Turtledove The cheer warmed Skarnu. That Raunu had proposed it warmed hi even more; the veteran hadn't had to do anything like that. As twilight deepened, Skarmi sent soldiers out, group by group. last, only a dozen or so men remained. Some of them didn't bother ge ting up when he formed a new group. "Might as well stay here," trooper said. "War's as good as over, looks like to me. Skarnu didn't bother arguing. He just said, "Everyone who cares t follow me." Four or five men did. The rest sprawled on the ground a waited for Algarvians to come along and scoop them up. He hadn't gone far when a man stepped out from behind a tre "Decided I'd come along with you, sir, but I figured you'd raise a fuss I stayed back there," Raunu said. "So I did it this way." "You're insubordinate," Skarnu said, and the veteran sergeant nodde Skarmi laughed. "Curse me for a liar if I say I'm not glad to see you. Let get moving. The night won't last forever." They stuck to the woods whenever they could, but the woods didn last forever, either. When they had to travel open country, they sprea out even wider than before and kept to the fields, avoiding roads eve when they led in the right direction. That quickly proved wis Algarvians on foot or on unicorns - which saw far better at night tha horses - patrolled the roads in large numbers. "I'd like to blaze some of them," Skarnu said as a patrol passed wit out spotting him or his comrades. "It would bring all the whoreso down on us, though. They carry a lot of crystals, curse them. We shoul do the same; it would help us move faster." If he got through to the other side, he'd have some things to say abo that. One thing at a time, he thought. For now, worry about getting thro Every so often, he had to cross roads running perpendicular to his direc tion. He and the other Valmierans would dash across, getting to cover a fast as they could. Unlike the fields, which were mostly undamaged, many of the roa and roadsides showed the marks of war: ditches, egg craters, dead me and animals lying bloated and stinking under the starlight. The Algarvi had stormed along roads in their attack from out of the badlands. not? Roads let them move faster than they could cross-country. Sk countrymen had fought them on and along the roads, too, fought and been beaten. INTo THE DARKNESS ian th- ons, Uld through. is cAireC- cover as the roads ead me" garvians ds. Why Skarnu's ught them 349 More by the lingering stench of war than anything else, Skarmi realized he was still in Algarvian-held country when dawn began to pain the sky ahead of him with pink. He and Raunu and a couple of other men still with them lay up for the day in the thickest patch of woods they could find. They shared the biscuits and hard cheese and chunks of blood sausage they had. Skarnu took the first watch. Midway through the morning, he shook one of the soldiers awake and lay down himself. Next thing he knew, his dream of an earthquake turned into Raunu's hand on his shoulder. "Sun's down, sir," the veteran reported. "Time to get moving again." "Aye." Yawning, Skamu wearily climbed to his feet. "If you hadn' got me up there, I could have slept another day around, I think." Raunu's chuckle was dry. "Couldn't we all, sir? But we'd better not.' They went on as they had the night before. Once, they had to dive o to their bellies when a ley-line caravan full of Algarvian soldiers sped past heading southeast. "They shouldn't be able to do that," Skarmi sal angrily after the caravan had passed. "We should have done a better jo of wrecking the grid." "We should have done a betterjob of a lot of things, sir," Raunu said and Skamu could hardly have disagreed with him. "How wide a sickle slice have they cut through us, sir?" one of th troopers asked, as the sickly-sweet smell of meat dead too long and th dangerous reality of Algarvian patrols went on and on and on. "Too wide," Skamu answered: a truth as obvious as Raunu's. hfter another hour or so, he spotted yet one more patrol, this one, unusually, in a field rather than going down a road. He needed a moment to realize these soldiers wore trousers, not kilts. When he did, his heart kapt within him. Without coming out from behind the bush that con- cealed him, he called softly: "King Gainibu! " The Noidlers started. "Who goes there?" one of them rapped out - in Valmitran. Skarnu's own language was sweet in his ears. He gave his name, adding, "My men and I have come across the Algarvian lines from the iontier force." "You're lucky, then, because cursed few have made it," the soldier answered. Bleakly, he added, "Cursed few have tried, come to that. Show yourselves, so we know you aren't redhead raiders."