Darkness Descending (63 page)

“Aye, Captain.” Leudast didn’t expect the behemoths. The whole course of the war had taught him not to expect them. There were rarely enough to go around; more stretches of line needed the great beasts than could have them. He got his company ready to attack Midlum without them. For once, he was glad he had only a handful of veterans. The new troops would go forward without knowing how unlikely they were ever to get into the village.

And then, in the middle up the chilly night, the behemoths did come up to the front, chainmail clinking below the heavy blankets that helped their shaggy fur keep them warm. Starlight glittered off their long, sharp, iron-shod horns. Thanks to the great snowshoes attached to their feet, they had little trouble making their way over the drifts.

Real hope—a strange feeling—began to rise in Leudast. “We’re going to do this,” he told his men. “We’re going to kick the redheads out of that village, we’re going to chase them across the fields, and we’re going to slaughter them. This is what they bought for coming into Unkerlant and trying to take away our homes. Now they’ll pay full price—every last copper.”

His own home village, not too far from what had been Unkerlant’s border with Forthweg, lay far to the east of where he squatted now. He wondered how his kinsfolk fared under Algarvian occupation. The only thing he could do to help them was hurt Mezentio’s men as much as he could.

In the darkness, his men’s heads bobbed up and down. They listened earnestly. Most of them lacked the experience to know what they were getting into. After the coming day’s fighting, though, they’d be veterans, too—the ones who wouldn’t be corpses strewn across the frozen ground.

Almost on time, Unkerlanter egg-tossers started pounding Midlum. “Get ready, boys,” Leudast said. “It won’t be long now.” He peered across the fields toward the bursts of sorcerous energy ahead. Now the Algarvians would know something was coming their way. With luck, the bursting eggs would keep them from doing too much about it. With luck . . .

They were alert, there in Midlum. Leudast had never known the Algarvians when they weren’t alert. He wished this might be one of those times, but it wasn’t. Eggs began flying back toward his own position. Fortunately, the Algarvians were tossing a little long, so they didn’t hurt too badly the men gathered to attack them.

Whistles blew, all along the Unkerlanter line: officers ordering their men forward. Leudast was doing an officer’s job, but he didn’t have the formal rank, so he didn’t have a whistle, either. A shout had to do: “Let’s go!”

The behemoths went forward, too. They paused outside of Midlum. Some, the ones that mounted egg-tossers on their backs, joined in pounding the village and the Algarvians inside. Others sent beams from their heavy sticks against the houses to the east. Fires began to burn, lighting up the eastern sky as if dawn were coming too soon.

Leudast flopped down behind what he thought was a snow-covered boulder. But boulders didn’t have hair: it was a dead behemoth—a long-dead behemoth, which meant it had probably belonged to the Algarvians. “Blaze and move!” he shouted. “Blaze and move!”

His men knew what they were supposed to do: some were to blaze to make the Algarvians keep their heads down while others advanced into new cover. Then the two groups would reverse roles. But knowing what to do and doing it right the first time you tried it were two different things. Leudast had expected no better than he got.

He wondered if the Algarvians had any behemoths in Midlum. If they did, the beasts needed to come out and fight: the only thing with much hope of stopping one behemoth was another. But no behemoths came forth from the village. Maybe they’d all frozen to death. Leudast hoped so.

When it was his turn, he ran forward, toward the burning village. He pounded passed a young man lying in the snow clutching both hands to his belly. Those hands couldn’t keep the Unkerlanter soldier’s lifeblood from pouring out. Steam rose from the pool it formed. Leudast shook his head and ran on.

He’d fought to hold the Algarvians out of a good many villages. He knew how the job was done. So did they, worse luck, and they proved as stubborn in defense as they ever had on the attack. But they couldn’t simply stay in Midlum and fight it out to the last man there, for the Unkerlanters were not only assailing the strongly held village but also sending men around it to either side to cut it off from other territory the redheads held.

You taught us that trick, you whoresons,
Leudast thought.
How do you like having it pulled on you?

He didn’t know what he would have done in the Algarvian commander’s predicament. The redhead sent some of his men east toward their comrades and used the rest to make a stand. Unkerlanter behemoths lumbered after the Algarvians struggling through the snow. With the eastern sky now going gray with true dawn, the retreating Algarvians made easy targets.

Inside Midlum, though, the enemy kept on fighting hard. A beam zipped past Leudast’s head. He threw himself flat and blazed back. A scream answered him. He grunted in satisfaction, but didn’t rise too soon. Any Algarvians who’d come this far were likely veterans and full of the tricks veterans knew.

Well, Leudast had a few tricks, too. “Surrender!” he shouted in his own language and then in what he thought was Algarvian. Returning to Unkerlanter—he had no choice—he went on, “You can’t get away.”

Maybe some of Mezentio’s men understood Unkerlanter. Maybe they didn’t need to understand it—maybe they could see what was so for themselves. Little by little, the blazing died away. Algarvians started coming out of battered huts and holes in the grounds. They carried no sticks. Their hands were high. Fear filled their faces.

“Powers above,” Leudast whispered in something approaching awe. He’d never seen so many redheads surrender, not all at once. After staring, he rushed forward with the rest of his men to plunder the Algarvians.

As Trasone stumbled south and east through the snow, he thought about what might have been. “Hey, Sergeant!” he called, his breath making a bank of mist around his head. “Did we really see the towers of stinking Swemmel’s stinking palace?”

“Don’t know about you, but I sure as blazes did,” Sergeant Panfilo answered, his voice coming muffled through the wool scarf he’d wrapped around the lower part of his face. “You were there in the market square at Thalfang, same as me. If we could have made it across to the other side ...”

“Aye. If.” Trasone shrugged his broad shoulders; he was almost as thickly built as an Unkerlanter. He was hard to faze, too, or else too stubborn to admit that any trouble could be so very bad. “I’ll tell you something, Sergeant: a lot of good lads went into that cursed square. A lot fewer came out again.”

“That’s the truth.” Panfilo’s big head went up and down, up and down. “Captain Galafrone was maybe the best officer I’ve ever known, and I’ve seen plenty. I’d say as much to the king’s face, even if Galafrone hadn’t a drop of noble blood in him.”

“You ought to say it, on account of it’s true.” Trasone tramped past the stiff carcass of a unicorn that had frozen to death. Its coat was whiter than the snow in which it lay. He jerked a thumb at it. “Somebody ought to butcher that beast. Plenty of good meat on it, if we ever get to a place where we can make a fire and cook it.”

“Aye.” Panfilo liked to eat, but that wasn’t what was on his mind. “I had this company—powers above, I had this whole fornicating battalion—for a few days, but will they make
me
an officer? Not bloody likely, not when my old man made shoes for a living.”

“I don’t know about that, Sergeant,” Trasone said. “The way they’re using up nobles these days, before long there won’t be enough of ‘em to fill all the slots that need filling. Stay alive and you may get your chance yet.”

“Won’t have one if I’m dead, that’s certain.” Panfilo twisted his head this way and that. Trasone knew what he was doing: looking for Unkerlanter behemoths with snowshoes or Unkerlanter footsoldiers wearing them. In this cursed weather, Swemmel’s soldiers were more mobile than the Algarvians they pursued. Trasone kept his eyes open all the time, too.

He didn’t see any foes now, for which he thanked the powers above. When he trudged past the frozen corpse of an Algarvian soldier, he started to laugh.

“What’s funny about him?” Panfilo asked.

“Poor whoresons in the same pose as that unicorn we went by a little while ago,” Trasone answered.

“Heh,” Panfilo said, and then, “Heh, heh.” Trasone shrugged and kept on walking. That was about as much credit as the comment deserved.

From up ahead came the sharp crack of bursting eggs. A moment later, Trasone heard a dragon screaming high in the air. “Got to be an Unkerlanter beast,” he said wearily. “Where are our own dragons, curse the lazy buggers who fly ‘em?”

Panfilo tried to look on the bright side: “They come over now and again. But they’re stretched thin along so much front.”

“The Unkerlanters have dragons to drop eggs on us,” Trasone said resentfully. “The front’s no shorter for them.” He waved before Panfilo could speak. “I know, I know—somewhere along the line, we’re dropping eggs on them, too. But they’re doing it here, curse them, and one of those stinking eggs is liable to come down on my head.”

“They weren’t worrying about us—we’re small fry.” Panfilo pointed ahead, to a burning town. “Unless we’re even more lost than I think we are, that’s Aspang. A ley line runs through it. How are we going to get men and supplies forward if it’s going up in flames around us?”

For an Algarvian, Trasone was a stolid man. Still, his shrug would have been extravagant for someone from any other kingdom. He said, “Who knows? Odds are, we won’t. Powers below have been eating at our supply system ever since the snow started coming down.”

When the battered company got into Aspang, Trasone discovered he would have made a good prophet. Several of the eggs the Unkerlanter dragons dropped had landed squarely on the ley-line caravan depot. It was burning merrily. So was a caravan that had stopped there. And so were mountains of supplies that had just come off the caravan and hadn’t yet been loaded onto wagons for the trip to the front—not that wagons had an easy time moving through the snow, either.

His stomach didn’t care about troubles with wagons. But it growled like a starving wolf—an all too apt figure—to see food burning. The bursting eggs had knocked one car off the ley line and down to the ground on its side. It was, for the moment, safe from the flames. A crowd of Algarvian soldiers had gathered around it.

Trasone hurried toward the caravan car. “That’s got to be something to eat,” he called over his shoulder to his comrades. “I’m going to get some, and you’d better do the same.” He waited for Sergeant Panfilo to curse and bully him back into the line. Instead, without a word, the sergeant followed him. More than anything else Trasone had seen, that told of the troubles the Algarvian army had known since winter came to Unkerlant.

One of the soldiers already at the caravan car looked up with a laugh. “More starving rats, eh? Well, come on and get your share.”

“What’s to get?” Trasone asked.

By way of reply, the other soldier tossed him a square block of orange stuff that had to weigh a couple of pounds. Automatically, Trasone caught it. “Cheese!” said the fellow who’d thrown it. “If you’re going to be a rat, you may as well be a fat rat, eh?”

“Aye.” Trasone broke a corner off the block and stuffed the cheese into his mouth. With it still full, he went on, “Toss me a couple more of those, pal, will you? It’s not the greatest stuff in the world, but it’ll keep a man going for a while.”

“Help yourself—stuff your pack full,” the other Algarvian said. “If we don’t haul it away with us, it’s not going anywhere.” Trasone took him up on that. So did Sergeant Panfilo. They both ate as they loaded up, too. Trasone guessed a lot of the soldiers at the caravan car had been garrisoning Aspang. They didn’t have the abraded look of men who’d been fighting and marching and fighting again for much too long.

Eggs began bursting once more, this time west of Aspang. Trasone looked up, but saw no dragons. That meant the Unkerlanters had brought their egg-tossers almost far enough forward to start hitting the town. Trasone cursed under his breath. He’d hoped the rear guard would have done a better job of holding back King Swemmel’s men than that.

“To me!” shouted the officer who’d taken over the battalion, or what was left of it, after Sergeant Panfilo brought it out of Thalfang. “Come on—we have to hold this place. Can’t let the Unkerlanters have it, come what may.”

Trasone was more than willing to ignore the dapper little nobleman, but Panfilo, after stuffing a last brick of cheese into his pack, turned away from the caravan car. “Come on,” he told Trasone. “Major Spinello’s not so bad, as officers go.”

“Not
so
bad,” Trasone agreed grudgingly. “But I’d got used to being commanded by commoners—first Galafrone, then you. Nobles just aren’t the same after that. Harder to take ‘em seriously, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh, aye,” Panfilo said. “Don’t worry, though. I’m still commanding you. Now get moving.”

Get moving Trasone did. Major Spinello was still flitting every which way at once and talking like a man possessed: “Come on, my dears. If the Unkerlanters are going to pay us a call, we must be ready to receive them in the style they deserve. After all, we wouldn’t want to disappoint them, now would we?”

He sounded like a bad caricature of every noble officer Trasone had ever known. Even the dour veteran couldn’t help snickering. Up till very recently, Spinello hadn’t been a combat soldier; he kept going on and on about the Forthwegian village whose garrison he’d headed till the war here in the west yanked him out of it. Not all of his orders made the best sense in the world. But Trasone had already seen that he was recklessly brave. As long as he listened to Panfilo and others who actually knew what they were doing, he’d shape pretty well.

What needed doing here was obvious, and Major Spinello saw it. He posted his battalion in among the ruins at the western edge of Aspang. “Find yourselves some good holes,” he urged the soldiers. “Make sure they’re as tight and as deep as a Kaunian trollop’s twat.” He sighed. “Ah, the one I was laying before duty called me here.” He sighed again and kissed his fingertips.