Out of the Darkness Read online

  “There isn’t anybody like Ilmarinen,” Pekka said with great conviction. “They only minted one of that particular coin.”

  “You’re right there,” Linna said. “He’s even good in bed, would you believe it? I finally told him aye as much to shut him up as for any other reason I can think of. He’d been pestering me for so long--I figured we might as well get it over with, and then I could let him know I wasn’t interested any more. But he fooled me.” She shook her head again, this time in slow wonder. “Once he got started, I never wanted him to stop.”

  Fernao coughed and looked down at his hands. That was more than he’d expected or wanted to hear. Kuusamans--especially their women--were a lot franker about some things than Lagoans. Casting about for some sort of answer, he said, “Ilmarinen would be good at anything he set his mind to.”

  “He probably would,” Pekka agreed.

  Linna didn’t say anything, but the look on her face did argue that Ilmarinen had indeed been good at something. Recalling herself--she needed a moment to do so--she said, “What can I bring you? You never did tell me.”

  “Tea. Hot tea. Lots of hot tea, and a jar of spirits to splash into it,” Fernao said.

  “Same for me,” Pekka added. “And a big bowl of tripe soup to go alongside.” Linna nodded and hurried off toward the kitchens.

  “Tripe soup?” Fernao echoed, wondering whether he’d heard right. But Pekka nodded, so he must have. He gave her an odd look. “Do Kuusamans really eat things like that? I thought you were civilized.”

  “We eat all sorts of strange things,” Pekka answered, a twinkle in her eye. “We just don’t always do it where foreigners can see us. Chicken gizzards. Duck hearts. Reindeer tongue, boiled with carrots and onions. And tripe soup.” She laughed at him. “Turn up your nose all you like, but there aren’t many things better when you’ve had too much to drink the night before.”

  “I’ve had tongue,” Fernao said. “Beef tongue, not reindeer. They sell it smoked and sliced in fancy butcher’s shops in Setubal. It’s not bad, as long as you don’t think about what you’re eating.”

  The twinkle in Pekka’s eye only got more dangerous. “You’ve never had brains scrambled together with eggs and cream, where what you’re eating thinks about you.”

  Fernao’s stomach did a slow lurch, as it had been known to do when waves started pounding a ley-line ship on which he was serving. Only one way to deal with this, he thought. When Linna came back with the tea and the strengthener and a big steaming bowl of soup, he pointed to it and said, “Let me have some of that, too.”

  Pekka’s eyebrows flew up like a couple of startled blackbirds. Linna just nodded. “Good for what ails you,” she said, “though who would’ve thought a Lagoan had wit enough to know it?”

  “Are you sure?” Pekka asked, pausing with a spoonful of soup--and a chunk of something thin and grayish brown in the bowl of the spoon--halfway to her mouth.

  “No,” Fernao answered honestly. “But if it’s nastier than I think, I don’t have to eat it all.” He spooned honey into his tea, and poured in a splash of spirits, too. Hot and sweet and spiked, the brew did make him feel better. He gulped it down.

  Pekka drank fortified tea, too, but concentrated on the soup. Linna brought Fernao’s bowl back almost at once. “Cook did up a big pot of it this morning,” she said, setting it down in front of him. “After what all went on last night, he figured people would need it. I had some myself, back in the kitchen.”

  Looking around the refectory, Fernao saw several Kuusamans with bowls like his in front of them. If it doesn’t hurt them, it probably won’t kill me, either, he thought. Pekka eyed him inscrutably as he picked up his spoon.

  Of all the things he’d expected, actually liking the soup was among the last. “That’s good!” he said, and sounded suspicious even as he spoke: as if he suspected someone of tricking him. But it was. The broth was hot and greasy and salty and full of the flavors of garlic and chopped scallions. And the tripe, while chewy, didn’t taste like much of anything. His headache receded, too. Maybe that was the tea. But, on the other hand, maybe it wasn’t.

  He beamed at Pekka. “Well, if this is barbarism, who needs civilization?” She laughed. Why not? Her bowl was already empty.

  Like all the Forthwegians in Plegmund’s Brigade, Sidroc hated winters in the south. This was the third one he’d been through, and they got no easier with practice. He didn’t think Yanina was quite so cold as southern Unkerlant had been, but it was a lot worse than Gromheort, his home town. There, snow had been a curiosity. It was nothing but an eternal nuisance here.

  He remembered throwing snowballs with his cousins, Ealstan and Leofsig, one day when white did cover the ground up there. He’d been perhaps nine, the same age as Ealstan, with Ealstan’s older brother in his early teens. Sidroc grunted in his frozen hole in the ground. No more playing with them. Ealstan had done his best to break his head, and he himself had broken Leofsig’s-- broken it with a chair. Whoreson gave me one hard time too many, Sidroc thought. Good riddance to him. The whole family’s a pack of filthy Kaunian-lovers.

  Somebody called his name--an Algarvian, by the trill he put in it. “Here, sir!” Sidroc sang out, speaking Algarvian himself. Even now, after more than two years of desperate fighting, there wasn’t a Forthwegian officer in Plegmund’s Brigade--nobody higher than sergeant. The redheads reserved the top slots for themselves.

  Lieutenant Puliano wasn’t an Algarvian noble, though. He was a veteran sergeant who’d finally become an officer for the most basic and desperate reason of all: there weren’t enough nobles left to fill the places that needed filling. All but invisible in a white snow smock, Puliano slithered along the ground till he dropped into the hole next to Sidroc. “I’ve got something for you,” he said. “A present, you might say.”

  “What kind of present?” Sidroc asked suspiciously. Some of the presents officers gave, he didn’t want to get.

  Puliano laughed. “You weren’t born yesterday, were you?” With his gravelly voice and no-nonsense attitude, he sounded like a sergeant. In fact, he put Sidroc in mind of Sergeant Werferth, who’d been his squad leader--and, without the rank, his company commander--till he got blazed outside a Yaninan village.

  That village didn’t exist anymore; Sidroc and his comrades had slaughtered everybody there in revenge for him. Puliano went on, “It’s nothing bad. No extra sentry-go. No volunteering to storm the enemy bridgehead over the Skamandros singlehanded.”

  Sidroc just grunted again. “What is it, then?” He remained suspicious. Officers didn’t go around handing out presents. It felt unnatural.

  But Lieutenant Puliano dug into his belt pouch and gave Sidroc a straight cloth stripe for the shoulder straps of his tunic and two cloth two-stripe chevrons for the tunic sleeve--Forthwegian and Algarvian blazons of rank. Men of Plegmund’s Brigade wore both when they could get them, though the Algarvian insignia were more important. “Congratulations, Corporal Sidroc!” Puliano said, and kissed him on both cheeks.

  Sergeant Werferth never would have done that. ““Well, dip me in dung,” Sidroc said, startled into Forthwegian. He was more polite in Algarvian: “Thank you, sir.”

  “You are welcome,” Puliano said. “And who knows? You may make sergeant yet. You may even make officer yet.”

  That startled Sidroc. In fact, it startled him right out of politeness. “Who, me?” he said. “Not fornicating likely--uh, sir. I am a Forthwegian, in case you had not noticed.”

  “Oh, I noticed. You’re too ugly to make a proper Algarvian.” Puliano spoke without malice, which didn’t necessarily say he meant it for a joke. Before Sidroc could sort that out, the redhead went on, “If they made me into an officer, who knows where they’ll stop?”

  He had something there. The only kingdom that really didn’t care whether its officers were noblemen or not was Unkerlant. Swemmel had got rid of old nobles much faster than he’d created new ones. If the Unkerlanters hadn’t let commoners become o
fficers, they wouldn’t have had any.

  Puliano grinned and pointed west. “Now, Corporal”--Sidroc didn’t care for the way the redhead emphasized his shiny new rank--”we have to see what we can do about that bridgehead on this side of the Skamandros.”

  “What, you and me and nobody else?” Sidroc said. The Unkerlanters had spent lives like water to force their way across the river after being balked for some considerable while. Most of the lives they’d spent forcing the crossing were those of Yaninans. That’ll teach Tsavellas to turn his coat, Sidroc thought savagely.

  “No, lackwit,” Puliano answered. “You and me and everything the fellows in the fancy uniforms can scrape together.” He might have been reading Sidroc’s mind, for he went on, “It’s not the nasty little whoresons in the pompom shoes in the bridgehead any more. I wish it were; we could deal with them.” He spat in fine contempt. “But it’s Unkerlanters in there now, Unkerlanters and as many stinking behemoths as they can cram into the space. And if we wait for them to bust out. . .”

  Sidroc made a very unhappy noise. He’d seen too often what happened when the Unkerlanters burst from their bridgeheads. He didn’t want to be on the receiving end of that again. But he asked, “Have we got any real chance of flinging them back across the river?”

  Puliano’s shrug was as theatrical as his scornful spitting. To a Forthwegian’s eyes, Algarvians overacted all the time. “We have to try,” he said. “If we don’t try, we just sit here waiting for them to futter us. If we try, who knows what might happen?”

  He had a point. Most of the time, the Unkerlanters were as stubborn in defense as any general could want. Every so often, though, especially when they got hit at a time or from a direction they didn’t expect, they would panic, and then the men attacking them got victories on the cheap.

  “We have enough behemoths of our own to throw at them?” Sidroc persisted. “We have enough Kaunians to kill to put some kick in our attack?”

  “Behemoths?” Puliano gave another shrug, melodramatic and cynical at the same time. “We haven’t had enough behemoths since the battles in the Durrwangen bulge. This won’t be any different from any other fight the past year and a half. Blonds . . . Powers above, we’re even short on blonds.” But his battered features didn’t seem unduly disheartened. “Of course, since Tsavellas isn’t on our side any more, we don’t have to worry about what happens to these stinking Yaninans. Their life energy works as well as anybody else’s.”

  “Heh,” Sidroc said. “I would sooner kill Kaunians. I never did like Kaunians. We are better off without them. But nobody will miss these Yaninan bastards, either.”

  “Just so,” Puliano agreed. “Kaunians are the great enemies of Algarve, of real Derlavaian civilization, always and forever. But, as you say, the Yaninans betrayed us. They’ll pay for it. Indeed they will.” He clapped Sidroc on the back one more time, then went off to spread the news elsewhere.

  Sidroc waited in his hole, wondering if the Unkerlanters would spend some more Yaninans, or even some of their own men, in a spoiling attack to disrupt whatever the Algarvians had in mind. It didn’t happen before his relief came to take his place. “Hullo, Sudaku,” he said. “Everything is pretty quiet there for now. It won’t last, though, not if the lieutenant has the straight goods.”

  “We have to take out the bridgehead,” Sudaku answered seriously. “If we do not, the Unkerlanters will come forth and take us out.”

  They both spoke Algarvian. It was the only tongue they shared. Sudaku was no Forthwegian. He and a good many others like him had attached themselves to Plegmund’s Brigade in the grim fighting during the breakout from the Mandelsloh pocket in the eastern Duchy of Grelz. No one had bothered to detach them since; the Algarvians had more important things to worry about. By now, some of the men from the Phalanx of Valmiera could curse fluently in Forthwegian.

  And, by now, Sidroc had stopped worrying about the obvious fact that Sudaku and his countrymen were tall and blond and blue-eyed--were, in fact, every bit as Kaunian as the blonds from Forthweg whom Mezentio’s men massacred whenever they needed to. He did sometimes wonder why the Valmierans fought for Algarve. The reasons they’d given didn’t seem good enough to him-- but then, his own probably looked flimsy to them, too. All he really worried about was whether he could count on them in a tight place. He’d seen, again and again, that he could.

  Sudaku asked, “Do we hear right? Are you promoted?”

  “Oh. That.” Thinking about assailing the Unkerlanter bridgehead, Sidroc had almost forgotten about his new rank. “Aye, it’s true.”

  “Good for you,” the Valmieran said. Sidroc shrugged. He didn’t know whether it was good or not, not really. Then Sudaku smiled a sly smile and added, “Now you will be able to tell Ceorl what to do.”

  “Ah,” Sidroc said, and smiled. He hadn’t thought of that. He and the ruffian had been giving each other a hard time for a couple of years. Now, at last, he had the upper hand. Of course, if he rode Ceorl too hard, he was liable to end up dead in the attack on the bridgehead regardless of whether the Unkerlanters blazed him. Neither the Phalanx of Valmiera nor Plegmund’s Brigade worried overmuch about keeping hard cases from their ranks.

  When Sidroc got back to his squad--his squad indeed, now--Ceorl greeted him with, “Well, here’s a fine outfit ruined.”

  “Plegmund’s Brigade’s been in trouble ever since it took you in,” Sidroc retorted. But he went on, “We may be ruined, if we really do have to try and smash the Unkerlanter bridgehead. It won’t be easy. That job never is.”

  Lieutenant Puliano hadn’t been joking. Sidroc wished it were otherwise. He didn’t get so much as the chance to sew his new insignia of rank to his tunic before he and the men with him got ordered forward. Some behemoths came with them. The beasts wore snowshoes to help them get over and through the drifts: an Unkerlanter notion that had dreadfully embarrassed the Algarvians the first winter of the war, and that Mezentio’s men had since stolen. Seeing behemoths with Algarvians aboard them raised Sidroc’s spirits. It proved the redheads were serious about this attack.

  They also brought up egg-tossers to pound the Unkerlanter positions on the east side of the Skamandros. The pounding didn’t last long. All too soon, officers’ whistles shrilled. “Forward!” Puliano shouted, along with his fellow commanders. To his credit, he went forward, too. Algarvian officers led from the front, one reason Mezentio’s men needed so many replacements.

  Sidroc ran past a few dead and dying Unkerlanters whose blood stained the snow. For a heady moment, he thought the attack might have surprised Swemmel’s soldiers. Then they struck back. Dragons--some of them painted Yaninan red and white--streaked over from the west side of the river. The Algarvians didn’t have nearly enough beasts in the air to hold them off. Despite the Algarvian behemoths stiffening the attack, far more Unkerlanter animals trudged forward to oppose them. As always, the Unkerlanters turned a bridgehead into a spiky hedgehog as fast as they could.

  This time, they didn’t wait for the Algarvians to start killing Kaunians or Yaninans before striking back in kind. The ground shuddered beneath Sidroc’s feet. Violet flames shot up from it. Men shrieked. Behemoths bellowed in mortal agony. And, when the Algarvian mages did resort to their own murderous magic, it was to defend against what Swemmel’s sorcerers were doing, not to aid in the attack.

  Crouching behind a great gray stone, Sidroc called out to Puliano: “We cannot do this.”

  “We have to,” the Algarvian lieutenant answered. “If we don’t, they’ll futter us later.”

  “If we do, they will futter us now,” Sidroc retorted.

  He hoped Puliano would tell him he was full of nonsense, but the redheaded veteran only grimaced. Another attack did go in. The Unkerlanters held it off and beat it back. After that, sullenly, the Algarvians--and the Forthwegians and Valmierans and Grelzers and the handful of Yaninans who couldn’t stomach serving Swemmel--drew back. Sidroc knew what that meant. It meant trouble; Puliano was dead rig
ht. And it means we aren’t strong enough to stop the trouble, he thought. He shrugged a broad-shouldered shrug. He’d been in a lot of trouble in this war. What was once more?

  In all his life, Garivald had never gone through--had, in fact, never imagined-- a winter without snow. He came from a little village called Zossen, down in the Duchy of Grelz. Blizzards there were so much a fact of life that every peasant hut had its doorway facing north or northeast, away from the direction from which the bad weather was likeliest to come. Even in his time as an irregular in the woods west of Herborn, the Grelzer capital, he’d known no different winters. Zossen, these days, no longer existed. The Algarvians had made a stand there when Unkerlanter armies fought their way back into Grelz, and nothing was left of the village or of the family Garivald had had there. And Swemmel’s impressers, a few months later, had efficiently dragged him into the army, even though he and Obilot, the woman with whom he’d taken up while in the irregulars, were working an abandoned farm well away from any other village.

  An Algarvian egg burst, not too far from Garivald’s hole in the ground in the Unkerlanter bridgehead south of Eoforwic. No snow here: just rain through the fall and into the winter. People had told Garivald it would be like that, but he hadn’t believed it till he saw it himself.

  Another egg burst. He saw the flash as all the sorcerous energy trapped inside the egg was released at once, and the fountain of mud and dirt that rose. The redheads had tried several times to drive the Unkerlanters back across the Twegen River, tried and failed. They hadn’t mounted any full-scale attacks against this bridgehead lately, but they didn’t let the Unkerlanters rest easy here, either.

  From the rear, somebody called, “Sergeant Fariulf!”

  “I’m here,” Garivald answered. Swemmel’s impressers hadn’t been perfectly efficient when they swept him into their net. They’d got him into the army, but they didn’t know who they had. As Fariulf, he’d just been one peasant recruit among many. As Garivald the leader of an irregular band, the composer of patriotic songs, he was a target. He’d led men, he’d influenced men, without taking orders directly from King Swemmel. That made him dangerous, at least in Swemmel’s eyes.