Darkness Descending (24 page)

“Algarvian tactics,” Leudast remarked.

Sergeant Magnulf nodded. “The redheads had a long time to figure out how to put all the puzzle pieces together. We’re having to learn on the fly, and I think we’re doing a lot better than we were just after they hit us.”

“Aye,” Leudast said. “Nothing comes cheap for them these days.” But trying to hold back the Algarvians didn’t come cheap, either. As one who’d started fighting them in central Forthweg and was still fighting them here deep inside Unkerlant, Leudast understood that better than most.

“Forward!” Magnulf shouted, echoing Captain Hawart, and Leudast shouted, too, echoing his sergeant. And forward the Unkerlanter footsoldiers went, on the heels of their behemoths. In a way, such willingness to keep on counterattacking was surprising, considering how often such blows either came to nothing or were frittered away; Leudast remembered the fight for Pfreimd only too well. In another way, though ... A lot of the men who’d retaken Pfreimd only to have to yield it up again were by now dead or wounded. The fresh-faced young soldiers who’d replaced them didn’t realize how easily their superiors could throw their lives away for no good reason.

They’ll find out,
Leudast thought.
The ones who live will find out.
The ones who died would find out, too, but the knowledge would do them no good. After another couple of strides, he wondered how much good it would do the ones who lived.

He pounded along, hunched forward at the waist to make himself as small a target as he could. Men who’d seen some fighting imitated him, and also imitated him in zigzagging frequently so as not to let any Algarvian footsoldiers grow too sure where they’d be in the next moment. Troopers newly pulled from their villages stood straight up and ran straight ahead. The ones who lived would soon learn better, and that lesson would actually do them some good.

Bursting eggs from the behemoths’ tossers tore up the wheatfield ahead. The Algarvians were supposed to have come that far, though no one on the Unkerlanter side seemed sure of exactly where they were. That struck Leudast as inefficient. Quite a few things about the way his side was fighting the war struck him as inefficient. But mentioning them struck him as efficient only in the sense that it would be an efficient way to get himself into trouble.

Sure as sure, a behemoth-rider threw up his arms and slid out of his seat to lie crumpled and still among stalks of wheat now going from green to gold. Leudast hadn’t seen whence the beam came. But a couple of Unkerlanters cried out “There!” and pointed to a spot in the field not far ahead of him.

A moment later, a beam blazed past his head, so close he could feel the heat on his cheek. He threw himself flat and scrambled forward through the grain. The rich smells of fertile soil and ripening wheat reminded him the harvest would be coming soon. Were he back in his village, were this a time of peace, he would follow the horse-drawn reaper, gathering up the grain it cut down. Now he wanted to cut down that Algarvian soldier who’d come so close to reaping him.

As he moved toward the spot where he thought the redhead hid, he tried to work out what the Algarvian would be doing. If he was a new man himself, he’d probably be running. But a veteran might well sit tight, knowing he was unlikely to escape and intent on doing all the damage he could before being hunted down and killed. The way this fellow had coolly blazed down the behemoth-rider argued that he knew what he was about.

Never had it crossed Leudast’s mind that the redhead might come hunting him. But the stalks of wheat parted in front of him, and there was the Algarvian, waxed mustachios all awry. He shouted something in his language and swung the business end of his stick toward Leudast.

He was smart and dangerous and very fast. But so was Leudast, and Leudast blazed first. A neat hole appeared in the redhead’s face, just below his right eye. The beam boiled his brains inside his skull; most of the back of his head blew out. He was dead before he crashed to the ground like a dropped sack of barley.

“Powers above,” Leudast muttered. Cautiously, he got to his feet and looked around to find out what had happened in the bigger fight while he and the Algarvian carried on their own private war. The Unkerlanter behemoths and his comrades were still going forward. He too hurried ahead.

Algarvian dragons fell out of the sky on the behemoths. But a couple of those dragons smashed to earth; the Unkerlanters manning the heavy sticks some of the behemoths carried were not caught napping. And Unkerlanter dragons, their scales painted the rock-gray of Leudast’s tunic, attacked the beasts gaudy in Algarve’s red, green, and white. The redheads hurt the troop of behemoths, but could not wreck it.

Here and there, little fires smoldered in the wheat. Had the wind been stronger, they would have grown and spread. A couple of them, one around the burning body of a dragon, were trying to spread anyhow. Leudast skirted them and ran on. He’d seen far worse things than fields afire.

More eggs began falling among his comrades, these not dropped from dragons but hurled by Algarvian egg-tossers behind the line. Leudast threw himself into a hole one of them had made in bursting. A moment later, after another burst close by, Sergeant Magnulf jumped into the same hole—and onto Leudast, who said, “Oof!”

“Sorry,” Magnulf said, though he didn’t sound very sorry. Leudast wasn’t unduly put out; Magnulf worried about saving his own neck first and everything else afterwards, as any sensible soldier would have. The sergeant went on, “Stinking redheads hit back faster than you wish they would, don’t they?”

“Aye,” Leudast said. “I wish I could say you were wrong.” He tried to look on the bright side: “We’re getting better at that ourselves, too. Our dragons gave them more than they wanted a little while ago.”

“I know, but they do it all the stinking time,” Magnulf said. “The whoresons have more crystals than we do, and they keep on talking into them.”

Shouts from ahead warned that the Algarvians were doing more than talking into their crystals. Leudast and Magnulf scrambled up to the edge of their hole and looked east. Behemoths and soldiers and eggs had flattened enough of the wheat to let them see troopers in tan kilts and tunics running toward them in loose order.

Leudast laughed out loud. “They didn’t do enough talking this time. Look, Sergeant—they didn’t bring any behemoths with ‘em, and we’ve still got some of ours.”

Magnulf’s eyes glowed. “Ha! They’ll pay for that.” Gloating anticipation filled his voice.

Pay for it the Algarvians did. The Unkerlanter behemoths’ heavy sticks blazed them down at a range from which the redheads could not hurt the beasts or their riders. Eggs from other behemoths’ tossers burst among the Algarvians, tossing some aside like broken dolls and making most of the rest go to earth to keep from suffering a like fate.

“Forward!” Captain Hawart called. Leudast heaved himself out of the hole and made for the Algarvians. So did Sergeant Magnulf. Almost without noticing they were doing it, they spread apart from each other, making themselves into less inviting targets for the enemy.

But the Algarvians were as quick to correct their own mistakes as they were to punish the Unkerlanters’. Reinforcements came to the rescue of the men the Unkerlanter attack had been on the edge of crushing, and those reinforcements included behemoths with redheads aboard. One thing Leudast had seen before was that Algarvian behemoth-riders went after their Unkerlanter counterparts the instant they spied them. So it was in this fight, too, and, with fewer behemoths backing them, King Swemmel’s footsoldiers faltered.

Shouting King Mezentio’s name, the Algarvians came on again, hot to retake the stretch of ground the Unkerlanters had wrested from them. But a flight of dragons painted rock-gray swooped down on them, dropping eggs on their behemoths and flaming their footsoldiers. Leudast shouted himself hoarse, or rather hoarser, for the smoke in the air had left his throat raw now for quite a while.

When he looked back over his shoulder, he was surprised to see the sun dipping toward the western horizon. The fighting had gone on all day, and he’d hardly noticed. Now he felt how worn and hungry and thirsty he was.

Unkerlanter reinforcements came up during the night. So did a little food. Leudast had more than a little food on him; he knew supplies were liable to be erratic. During the night, the wind shifted, as it had a way of doing as summer swung toward fall. It blew from out of the south, a cool breeze with a warning of rain in it.

Sure enough, at dawn gray clouds covered most of the sky. Eyeing them, Sergeant Magnulf said, “It’ll already be raining, I expect, down in the village I come from. Nothing wrong with that, you ask me.”

“No,” Leudast said. “Nothing wrong with that at all. Let’s see how the redheads like slogging through the mud. If the powers above are giving us an early winter, maybe they’ll give us a nasty winter, too.” He stared up at one of the few patches of blue sky he could see, hoping the powers were listening to him.

Along with a dozen of his comrades, Tealdo sheltered in a half-wrecked barn somewhere in southern Unkerlant. It was raining almost as hard inside the barn as it was outside. Tealdo and Trasone held a cloak above Captain Galafrone to keep water from dripping down onto the map the company commander was examining to try to figure out just where they were.

“Curse me if I know why I’m bothering,” Galafrone growled. “This miserable thing lies more often than it tells the truth.”

Trasone pointed to a line printed in red. “Sir, isn’t that the highway?” “That’s what the
map
says,” Galafrone answered. “I saw Unkerlanter roads during the Six Years’ War, but I thought they might have got better since. They were supposed to have got better since. But the stinking ‘highway’ is just another dirt track. Huzzah for Swemmel’s efficiency.”

“Mud track now,” Trasone said. His legs, like everyone else’s, were mud to the knees and beyond.

Tealdo said, “Maybe Swemmel’s efficient after all. Hard for us to go very far very fast if we bog down every step we take.”

Galafrone gave him a sour look. “If that’s a joke, it’s not funny.”

“I didn’t mean it for a joke, sir,” Tealdo said. “I meant it for the truth.”

“They have as much trouble in this slop as we do,” Trasone said.

“What if they do?” Tealdo answered. “They’re not trying to go forward right now, or not so much. They’re only trying to hold us back.”

That produced a gloomy silence. At last, Captain Galafrone said, “We’ve got ‘em by the ears and we’ve got ‘em by the tail. Can’t very well let go now, can we?” He bent closer to the map, then swore. “I’ll be cursed if I don’t need spectacles to read the fornicating letters when they’re printed that fornicating small. Where in blazes is the town called Tannroda?”

Trasone and Tealdo both peered at the map—rather awkwardly, since they had to keep holding the cloak over it. Tealdo spotted the place first. He pointed with his free hand. “There, sir.”

“Ah.” Galafrone’s grunt held more weariness than satisfaction. “My thanks. Northwest, is it? Well, that makes a deal of sense—it’s in the direction of Cottbus. Once we take his capital away from him, King Swemmel won’t be so much of a much.” He folded up the map and put it back in his belt pouch. “Come on, boys. We’ve got to get moving. The Unkerlanters won’t wait for us.”

“Maybe they’ve all drowned in the mud,” Trasone said.

“Don’t I wish.” Galafrone grunted again. For the first time since the veteran had taken command of the company, Tealdo thought he saw his years telling on him. Galafrone made himself rally. “It’s too much to hope for, and you know it as well as I do. If we don’t shift ‘em, they won’t get shifted.”

“Maybe the Yaninans can do the job,” Tealdo said slyly as Galafrone started toward the open barn door.

The captain stopped and gave him a baleful look. “I wouldn’t pay you a counterfeit copper for a whole army of those chicken thieves. They think we’re supposed to do the fighting while they steal anything that isn’t spiked down. Only thing they’re good for is holding down quiet stretches of the line—and they’re not much good for that, either. Come on. We’ve wasted too much time here.”

Out they went. The rain was still coming down hard; Tealdo felt as if he’d been slapped in the face with a wet towel. More bedraggled Algarvians emerged from the farmhouse, which had taken an even worse beating than the barn. Still others were resting in haystacks and under trees. Like Tealdo, they all squelched forward toward Tannroda and, somewhere beyond it, Cottbus.

Every step was an effort. Tealdo, like most of the company, stayed on what was called the highway for lack of a suitably malodorous word. Others insisted moving through the fields to either side was easier. It probably didn’t make much difference, one way or the other. Mud was mud.

They slogged past a ley-line caravan whose forwardmost several cars no longer floated above the ground but lay on it, canted at drunken angles. The Algarvian soldiers who’d been riding in those cars now stood around in the mud—except for the ones who lay in it, hurt when the caravan went awry.

“Poor dears,” Tealdo said. “They’ll get wet.”

Trasone’s laughter had a nasty edge. “They look like new men—probably never saw an Unkerlanter in all their born days. They’ve been drinking wine and pinching pretty girls back in Algarve while we’ve had to go out and work for a living. Whoresons might as well find out what it’s like over here.” He spat into the muck. The drumming rain drowned his spittle.

They hadn’t gone much farther before the reason the caravan had come to grief became obvious. Three or four Algarvian mages stood around and in a large hole in the ground that was rapidly turning into a pond. A colonel shouted at them: “Hurry up and fix the damage to this ley line, powers below eat you all! I have men to move, and how am I supposed to move them with the line broken?” He stamped his booted foot, which only made it sink into the soggy ground.

“Try walking,” Tealdo called, confident the rain would cloak him. And, sure enough, the colonel whirled in his direction, but couldn’t pick him out from among the other vague, dripping shapes.