Darkness Descending Read online

  He threw himself off the track and behind a log. Somewhere behind him, a comrade was screaming. Off to the other side of the path, the Unkerlanters were shouting: hoarse cries of “Urra! Urra!” and King Swemmel’s name repeated again and again. More beams hissed through the air above Tealdo’s head, giving it the smell it had just after lightning struck.

  From behind a nearby bush, Trasone called, “I’m sure glad we cleared the whoresons out of these woods. They must have been standing on each other’s shoulders in here before we came through and did it.”

  “Oh, aye.” Tealdo hunkered down lower behind his log as the shouting on the other side of the path got louder. “And now they’re going to try and throw us out again.”

  Still shouting “Urra!” Unkerlanters swarmed across the path. Tealdo blazed one down, but then had to scramble back frantically to keep from being cut off and surrounded. All at once, he understood how the Forthwegians and Sibians and Valmierans and Jelgavans--aye, and the Unkerlanters, too--must have felt when King Mezentio’s armies struck them. He would sooner have done without the lesson.

  Mezentio and the Algarvian generals had outplanned their foes as well as beaten them on the battlefield. The Unkerlanters here in this stretch of wood showed no such inspired generalship. All they had were numbers and ferocity. Tealdo tripped over a root and fell headlong. Those were liable to be enough.

  “Rally by squads!” Captain Galafrone shouted, somewhere not too far away.

  “To me! To me!” That was Sergeant Panfilo. Never had his raucous voice seemed so welcome to Tealdo.

  As Tealdo made his way toward Panfilo, Galafrone shouted again, this time for his crystallomancer. Tealdo’s lips skinned back from his teeth. One way or another, the Unkerlanters were going to catch it.

  He only hoped he didn’t catch it first. Along with Trasone, he found Sergeant Panfilo. They all had to keep falling back, though, ever deeper among the trees. Tealdo began to wonder if they would run into still more Unkerlanters there. He would hear cries of “Urra!” and “Swemmel!” in his nightmares as long as he lived. He hoped he lived long enough to have nightmares.

  He cheered when eggs started falling among the Unkerlanters who’d broken the Algarvian grip on the path. He cheered again when shouts of “Mezentio!” rang out from the east, and yet again when the Unkerlanters started yelling in dismay rather than in fury.

  As Algarvian reinforcements struck the Unkerlanters, the pressure on Galafrone’s company eased. “Powers above be praised for crystallomancers,” Panfilo said, wiping sweat from his face.

  “Aye.” Tealdo and Trasone spoke together. Trasone went on, “Say whatever you want about these cursed Unkerlanters, but going up against them isn’t like fighting the Jelgavans or the Valmierans. We’ll lick ‘em, aye, but they don’t know they’re licked yet, if you know what I mean.”

  “That’s the truth.” Tealdo turned around, still nervous lest some Unkerlanters come at him from behind. “Uh-oh.” He caught a glimpse of light brown kilt behind a bush. By the way the Algarvian soldier lay, Tealdo knew the fellow had to be dead. He looked around, but all his companions--all the men who’d rallied to Sergeant Panfilo--were still standing. He took a few steps forward, then stopped in his tracks.

  Panfilo and Trasone followed him. Trasone gulped. “Powers above,” Panfilo said softly.

  The Algarvians, half a dozen of them, looked to have been dead for a couple of days. Maybe they’d been caught in the earlier Unkerlanter counterattack in the woods. The guard on the path had had the right of it. They hadn’t been blazed. They hadn’t had their throats cut. They’d been gruesomely and systematically mutilated. Most of them had their kilts hiked up. What the Unkerlanters had done down there ...

  In a sick voice, Trasone said, “We haven’t fought a war like this for a long time.”

  “Well, we are now,” Tealdo said grimly. “I don’t think I want to be taken alive, doesn’t look like. If I can’t find some way to kill myself, I’d sooner have a friend do it than go through . . . that.” One by one, the other Algarvians nodded.

  Waddo strode out into the middle of Zossen’s village square. Garivald, watching from the edge of the square, found the stocky village firstman’s walk curious: half the limping swagger he usually used, half a nervous, almost slinking step, as if “Waddo also feared the pride he so often displayed.

  Garivald, for once, felt a certain sympathy for the firstman. Waddo had been reporting the iniquities of the Algarvians, all of them lovingly detailed on the crystal that had recently come to the Unkerlanter village. Like everyone else in Zossen, Garivald had expected the next bombastic announcement would be of the Unkerlanter invasion of Algarvian-occupied Forthweg, and probably of Yanina as well. Instead, a few days before, the crystal announced that the Algarvians had without warning attacked Unkerlanter forces engaged in no warlike activity. A palace spokesman had declared that the Algarvians would be beaten. He had not said how.

  Since then, silence.

  Silence till now, silence that let fear build, especially among the older villagers who remembered how the Algarvians had hammered Unkerlant during the Six Years’ War thirty years before. Gossip and rumor filled Zossen--and doubtless filled every other peasant village throughout the vast length and breadth of Unkerlant. Garivald had taken part, cautiously, with people he trusted. “If things were going well,” he’d said to Dagulf, “Cottbus would be shouting its head off. It’s not. That means things can’t be going well.”

  “Makes sense to me,” scar-faced Dagulf had said: also cautiously, looking over his shoulder to make sure no one, not even his wife, could overhear.

  Now Waddo stood in the center of the square, waiting to be noticed. He struck a pose that guaranteed he would be noticed. “My friends,” he said in a loud voice. A couple of people looked his way, but only a couple; he didn’t have a lot of friends in the village. Then he spoke again, even louder: “People of Zossen, I have an important announcement. In one hour’s time, I shall bring our precious crystal from my home to the square here, so that you may listen to an address by our famous, glorious, and illustrious sovereign. His Majesty King Swemmel will speak to you on the state of our war against the barbarous savages of Algarve.”

  Off he went, trying to look important. He had a right to look important: through his crystal, the king would speak to the village. Garivald had never imagined such a thing. If he got close enough to the crystal, he might actually see King Swemmel, though the king would not see him.

  That was exciting. But, try as Waddo would to walk with the best swagger he could with his bad leg, that nasty, slinking hint of fear stayed in his step. It had nothing to do with the limp, either. Garivald didn’t like it. If Waddo was afraid, he probably had good reason to be afraid. Garivald wondered what the firstman had heard on the crystal and then kept to himself.

  Whatever it was, Garivald couldn’t do anything about it. He hurried back to his own house to tell Annore and Syrivald the astonishing news. “The king?” his wife said, her dark eyes going wide. Like Garivald, like most Unkerlanters, she was solid and swarthy, with a proud nose. She repeated herself, as if she couldn’t believe it: “King Swemmel will talk to our village?”

  “Powers above,” Syrivald added around a crust of black bread. Leuba, a toddler chewing on another crust, was too little to care whether Swemmel spoke to Zossen or not.

  “I think he’s going to be talking to the whole kingdom,” Garivald said, “or to as many places as have crystals, anyhow.”

  “Will we go see him?” Syrivald asked.

  “Aye, we will,” his father answered. “I want to find out what the truth is about this miserable war we’ve got ourselves into with Algarve.” After he’d spoken, he paused to wonder how much of the truth King Swemmel was likely to tell.

  Annore said, “If we’re going to go, we’d better go now, so we can get up close to the crystal.” Suiting action to word, she scooped up Leuba and carried the toddler out of the house. Garivald and Syrivald f
ollowed.

  They weren’t the only family with the same idea. The square got as crowded as Garivald ever remembered seeing it, and then a little more crowded than that. Not everyone in Zossen had heard Waddo’s announcement, but no one could miss friends and neighbors and relatives heading for the square. People jockeyed for position, stepped on one another’s toes, and loosed a few judicious elbows. Garivald caught one, but he gave it back with interest.

  “I don’t know what we’re squabbling about,” somebody said. “Waddo’s not even here with the crystal yet.” That comment produced a brief, embarrassed pause in the pushing and shoving, but they soon resumed.

  “Here he comes!” Three people said it at once. Everybody surged toward Waddo, who carried the crystal on a cushion whose cover his wife had embroidered! “Make way!” That was three different people.

  Waddo hadn’t had such an eager, enthusiastic reception since . . . Thinking back on it, Garivald couldn’t remember the firstman ever getting such a reception. But, of course, it wasn’t really for him; it was for the crystal he bore.

  “Don’t drop it!” someone told him.

  “Set it on a stool,” someone else said. “That way, more of us will have a chance to see.”

  Waddo took that suggestion, though he ignored the other one. “It won’t be more than a few minutes before his Majesty speaks to us,” he said. “He will set our minds at rest about the many things that trouble us.”

  Garivald doubted whether Swemmel would do any such thing. But he shouldered his way through the crowd till he stood in the second row and could peer at the crystal over the shoulders of the people in front of him. Inactive at the moment, the crystal might as well have been an ordinary ball of glass.

  Then, abruptly, it... changed. Garivald had heard stories of crystals in use, of course, but he’d never seen one work till now. First, light suffused it. Then, as the brief glow faded, he saw King Swemmel’s long, pale, narrow face looking at him. But the other villagers’ exclamations, they all saw the king looking at them, too, even though they surrounded the crystal. After the magic that made the crystal work, Garivald supposed the one that let it be viewed from any direction was a small thing by comparison. It impressed him just the same.

  Swemmel stared out as if he really could see the peasants gaping at him from one end of the kingdom to the other. After Garivald’s first astonishment and almost involuntary awe faded, he saw how haggard the king looked. Beside him, Annore murmured, “I don’t think he’s slept for days.”

  “Probably not since the war started,” Garivald agreed. Then he fell silent, for King Swemmel had begun to speak.

  “Brothers and sisters, peasants and townsmen, soldiers and sailors--I am speaking to you, my friends,” Swemmel said, and Garivald was astonished yet again: he had never imagined that the king would address his subjects in such terms. Swemmel went on, now with the first-person plural instead of that astonishing, riveting first-person singular: “We are invaded. The vile hosts of King Mezentio have plunged their dagger deep into us, and Algarve’s dogs, Yanina and Zuwayza, course behind their master. The enemy has stolen much of that part of Forthweg that we reclaimed for our kingdom summer before last. Our own long-held territory farther south also groans under the foe’s heels.”

  Swemmel took a very visible breath. “But we must also tell you that only on our territory have the Algarvians, for the first time, met with serious resistance. If a part of that territory has nevertheless been occupied, let that serve as nothing more than a goad to our recovering it. The Algarvians, may the powers below eat them, caught Unkerlant by surprise. Let all Unkerlanters now take the accursed redheads by surprise as well.”

  Garivald raised an eyebrow at that. He thought King Swemmel had been getting ready for a war with Algarve. But Swemmel, after sipping from a crystal goblet of water or pale wine, was continuing: “Our kingdom has entered into a life-and-death struggle against its most wicked and perfidious foe. Our soldiers are fighting heroically against heavy odds against an enemy heavily armed with behemoths and dragons. The main force of the Unkerlanter army, with thousands of behemoths and dragons of its own, is now entering the battle. Together with our army, the whole of our people must rise to defend our kingdom.

  “The enemy is cruel and ruthless. He aims at grabbing our land, our wheat, our power points, and cinnabar. He wants to restore the exiled followers of Kyot the usurper, and through them to turn the people of Unkerlant into the slaves of Algarvian princes and viscounts.

  “There should be no room in our ranks for whimperers and cowards, for deserters and panic-spreaders. Our people must be fearless and fight selflessly for Unkerlant. The whole kingdom now is and must be for the service of the army. We must fight for every inch of Unkerlanter soil, fight to the last drop of blood for our villages and towns. Wherever the army may be forced to retreat, all ley-line caravan cars must be taken away and the lines wrecked. The enemy must be left not a pound of bread nor an ounce of cinnabar. Peasants must drive away their livestock and hand over their grain to our inspectors to keep it out of the Algar-vians’ hands. All valuable property that cannot be moved must be destroyed.

  “Friends, our forces are immeasurably large. The insolent enemy must soon become aware of this. Together with our army, our peasants and our laborers must also go to war against the treacherous Mezentio. All the strength of Unkerlant must be used to smash the foe. Victory will be ours. Onward!”

  King Swemmel’s image faded from the crystal. Light filled it again for a moment. Then it was, or seemed to be, simply a round lump of glass once more. Garivald shook himself, like a man awakening from a deep, dream-filled sleep. Instead of seeing the whole kingdom, as Swemmel had made him do, he was back in tiny Zossen, filled with the village he’d known all his life.

  “That was a great speech,” Waddo said, his eyes shining. “For the king to call us his friends ...”

  “Aye, he sounded strong,” Garivald agreed. “He sounded brave.”

  “He did indeed.” That was Dagulf, who had no great use for the king.

  Neither did Garivald. Neither, so far as he knew, did anyone in the village, save possibly Waddo. Even so, he said, “I may fear Swemmel more than I love him, but I think the redheads will come to fear him, too.”

  “He is what the kingdom needs right now,” Annore said.

  “We will fight them,” Waddo said, sounding very fierce for a heavy man with a bad ankle. “We will fight them, and we will beat them.”

  “And once we have beaten them, we will make songs about it.” That was Annore again. She glanced over toward her husband in confident anticipation.

  No song rose up in Garivald right at the moment. He began sifting words in his mind, looking for rhymes, looking for smooth flows from one thought to the next. He frowned. “I don’t know enough yet to make any songs.”

  “Nor shall you learn,” Waddo said, “for surely our brave warriors and fliers shall drive back the Algarvians long before they enter Zossen.” He looked toward the east with complete certainty.

  “So may it be,” Garivald said from the bottom of his heart.

  Unlike so many Zuwayzin, Hajjaj was not fond of the desert for its own sake. He was a city man, most at home in Bishah or in the capitals of the other kingdoms of the continent of Derlavai. And he loathed camels with a loathing both deep and passionate, a loathing based on more experience than he cared to remember. Riding on camelback through the desert, then, should have been nothing but ennui and discomfort.

  Instead, he found himself smiling from ear to ear as he rode along. This waste of thornbushes and sand and yellow stone had been seized by Unkerlant more than a year before. Now it was back in Zuwayzi hands, where the Treaty of Blu-denz said it belonged--not that King Swemmel had paid any attention to the treaty when he invaded Zuwayza. That made it worth seeing, worth riding through, even if it was full of scorpions and lizards and bat-eared foxes just like any other stretch of desert.

  Hajjaj’s escort, a colonel named
Muhassin, pointed to corpses from which vultures and ravens reluctantly flew as the camels ambled past them. “Here, your Excellency, the Unkerlanters made a stand. They fought bravely, but that did not save them.”

  “They are brave,” Hajjaj said. “They are mostly ignorant and ruled by a king half a madman, but they are brave.”

  Muhassin adjusted his hat, which bore four silver bars--one broad, with three narrow ones beneath it--to show his rank. Zuwayzi officers had trouble making themselves as impressive as did their counterparts in other kingdoms, being limited to their headgear as an area for display: like Hajjaj, Muhassin wore hat and sandals and nothing else covering the brown skin between the one and the others. “They are dead now,” Muhassin said, “dead or fled or captured.”

  “It is good,” Hajjaj said, and the colonel nodded. The Zuwayzi foreign minister stroked his neat white beard, then went on, “Do I understand correctly that they were not here in great strength?”

  “Aye, your Excellency,” Muhassin replied. “Of course, they are somewhat occupied elsewhere. Otherwise, I have no doubt, we should not have enjoyed such an easy time of it.”

  “Powers above be praised that we did catch them unprepared to fight back hard,” Hajjaj said. “Perhaps they did not believe everything Shaddad told them. My own secretary! Powers below eat the traitor! I had a scorpion in my own sandal there, and did not know it. But he did less harm than he might have.”

  “Perhaps it did not matter so much whether they believed him or not,” Muhassin said. Hajjaj raised an eyebrow. The broad brim of his hat kept Muhassin from seeing that, but the colonel explained himself anyway: “If you were about to fight Algarve and Zuwayza at the same time, where would you place most of your warriors?”

  Hajjaj considered that for a moment, then chuckled wryly. “I don’t suppose King Swemmel crouches under his throne from fear of our parading through the streets of Cottbus on these ugly, mangy, ungainly brutes.” He patted the side of his camel’s neck with what looked something like affection.