Through the Darkness Read online

  “I don’t know,” Ealstan said. “Ethelhelm says the Algarvians are hopping mad about it, though.”

  “How does he know?” Vanai demanded. “Do the redheads whisper in his ear? Why do you believe him when he tells you things like that?”

  “Because he’s not wrong very often,” Ealstan said. “What he doesn’t hear, the people in his band do.”

  “Maybe,” Vanai said, dubious still. “But where do they hear them? The Algarvians don’t like Ethelhelm’s music.”

  “No, but Plegmund’s Brigade does, remember?” Ealstan answered. “He’s played for them, remember, no matter how much I hated that. I still do hate it, but it’s true.”

  “Maybe,” Vanai said, this time in rather a different tone of voice. She reached for the jug of wine and poured her own mug full. “I don’t know why I don’t just stay drunk all the time. Then I wouldn’t care.”

  “Hard work staying drunk all the time,” Ealstan said. “And it hurts when you start sobering up, too.”

  “I know.” What Vanai also knew, and didn’t say, was how much staying sober hurt. Ealstan wouldn’t understand—or he wouldn’t have before Leofsig got killed. Now, he might.

  Vanai washed the supper dishes, then returned to her books. She was reading a tale of adventure and exploration in the jungles of equatorial Siaulia. Back when she was living in Oyngestun, she would have turned up her nose at such fare. But when her world was limited to a cramped flat and what she could see out a window—provided she didn’t get too close to the glass—a story of exploration set on the tropical continent made her feel she was traveling even when she really couldn’t. Leopards and gorgeous, glittering butterflies and hanging vines covered with ants seemed real enough for her to reach out and touch them. And when she read about the enormous fungus the natives would boil in the stomach of a buffalo . . .

  When she read about that fungus, she started to cry. She thought she was being quiet about it, but Ealstan looked up from the news sheet he was reading and asked, “What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

  She turned a stricken face to him. “When fall comes, I won’t be able to go out hunting mushrooms!”

  He came over and put his arm around her. “I don’t even know if I’ll be able to, except maybe in a park or something. This is a big city, without a whole lot of open country around it. But I’ll bring back the best ones I can buy, I promise you that.”

  “It won’t be the same.” Vanai spoke with doleful certainty. She pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket and blew her nose. Tears were still sliding down her cheeks. “I’ve gone out hunting mushrooms every fall since . . . since my mother and father were still alive.” She couldn’t think of any stronger way to say for a very long time.

  “I’m sorry,” Ealstan said. “If you were shut up inside the Kaunian quarter here or back in Gromheort, do you think you could go mushroom hunting then?”

  In one way, it was a perfectly reasonable question. In another, it was infuriating. Vanai stuck her nose in her book and left it there. When Ealstan said something else to her a few minutes later, she ignored him. She made a point of ignoring him, and kept right on doing it till they went to bed that night.

  When he leaned over to kiss her good night, she let him, but she didn’t kiss him back. He said, “I can’t help it, you know. I wish I could, but I can’t.”

  Vanai started to ignore that, too. She found she couldn’t. Finding she couldn’t, she wished she could, for tears stung her eyes. “I can’t help it, either,” she said, choking a little on the words. “I can’t help what the Algarvians have done to us, and I wish so much I could. That just makes all—this—that much harder to take.”

  “I know,” he said. “I wish I could do something about the redheads, too, but I just can’t, curse it.” He slammed a fist down onto the mattress, hard enough to make Vanai bounce up a little.

  He was a Forthwegian, not a Kaunian. The Algarvians’ yoke lay less heavily on his folk than on Vanai’s. But he’d fled his family, fled Gromheort, on account of her. And his brother was dead because his cousin had joined the puppet brigade the conquerors had created. She could hardly say he and his hadn’t suffered on account of the occupation.

  Instead of saying anything, she reached for him. He was reaching for her, too. Before long, they were making love. As her pleasure built, she could forget the miserable little flat in which she was caged. She knew the escape wouldn’t last long, but cherished it while it did.

  Afterwards, drifting toward sleep, Ealstan said, “One day, by the powers above, I’ll bring you back to Gromheort. You see if I don’t.”

  That did make her burst into tears. She so much wanted to believe it, and so much doubted she could. And even if she did . . . “People there don’t like mixed couples. They didn’t like them before the war. They’ll like them even less now.”

  “People are fools,” Ealstan said. “Who cares what they like and don’t like?”

  “If more Forthwegians liked Kaunians, the redheads couldn’t do what they’re doing here,” Vanai said. She felt Ealstan’s nod rather than seeing it. People of her own blood—her grandfather, for instance—despised Forthwegians, too, but she didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to think about anything. She ground her face into her pillow. After a while, she slept.

  Eight

  Don’t just stand there!” Major Spinello shouted. Somehow, he managed to stay dapper when all the Algarvians he commanded looked like a pack of tramps. “You’d bloody well better not just stand there. We’ve got to keep moving. If we aren’t moving forward, you can bet your last copper the cursed Unkerlanters will be.”

  Trasone waved a hand. Spinello swept off his hat and bowed, as if he were recognizing a duke, not an ordinary trooper. Trasone said, “Nothing to worry about, sir. I mean, with the Yaninans guarding our flank, we’re safe as can be, right?”

  Sergeant Panfilo let out a warning grunt. Several other Algarvian soldiers tramping down the dusty road cursed their allies. And Spinello threw back his head and laughed. “You’re a menace, you are,” he told Trasone. “Aye, the Yaninans are heroes, every stinking one of’em. But we saved their bacon when they looked like giving way, now didn’t we?”

  “Aye.” Trasone cocked his head to one side and spat out the husk of a sunflower seed. “We had to double back to do it, though. I thought the idea was that they would cover our flank so we could smash all the Unkerlanters in front of us and go on into the hills for the cinnabar.”

  “Oh, aye, that’s the idea they had back in Trapani,” Spinello agreed. A wave of his hand told how much, or rather how little, the officers and nobles back in Trapani knew. “Only trouble is, every once in a while the Unkerlanters have ideas, too. They kept an army in front of us and hit us from the side with another one, that’s all.” Another wave said it was perfectly simple if you looked at it the right way.

  But Trasone wasn’t in the mood to look at it like that. “If they’ve got enough soldiers to hold some in front of us and to hit us from the flank with more, how are we going to keep on moving forward?” he demanded.

  Panfilo grunted again, and this time followed the grunt with words: “Worrying about how isn’t your job. Doing what you’re told is.”

  “I do what I’m told.” Trasone gave the sergeant a dirty look. “You don’t suppose I’d’ve come all this way because I like the scenery, do you?”

  That made Spinello laugh once more, but he grew serious again in a hurry. “The Unkerlanters have more men than we do. Nothing we can do about that—except to go on killing the whoresons, of course. But if they’ve got more, we’ve got better. And that’s why we’ll win the war.”

  Where Trasone and Panfilo and just about everybody else in the battalion trudged south and west along that road, cursing and coughing in the clouds of dust their comrades kicked up, Spinello strutted along as if on parade. Trasone didn’t know whether to envy him or to feel like strangling him.

  Somebody—he couldn’t see who—said,
“We may be better than the lousy Unkerlanters, but bugger me with a cheese grater if the Yaninans are.”

  “They’re our allies,” Spinello said. “We’re better off with ’em than without ’em.”

  He’d mocked ideas that came out of the capital of Algarve before, but he was echoing one there. When Trasone said, “Allies,” he made the word into a curse. “If they were fighting my granny, I’d bet on gran.”

  “Nasty old bitch, is she?” Spinello said, which jerked a startled guffaw from Trasone. But instead of going on to defend the Yaninans some more, Spinello half changed the subject: “They do say the Sibs taking service with Mezentio are really good fighters, and this brigade of Forthwegians they’re putting together is supposed to be full of tough customers, too.”

  Having fought in Sibiu, Trasone knew the men who came out of the island kingdom could indeed fight hard. But that wasn’t the point, or wasn’t the whole point. “Do we really need all those foreign buggers? And if we do, are there going to be any Algarvians left alive by the time this war is through?”

  “It’s like any other brawl,” Sergeant Panfilo said. “Last man standing wins.”

  The road came up to and into a wood full of pines and beeches and birch. Pointing ahead, Trasone said, “How many Unkerlanters are hiding in there? And how many of us’ll be standing by the time we come out the other side?”

  Nobody answered. Any Algarvian officer who fought in Unkerlant hated forests. The Unkerlanters were better woodsmen, and had the advantage of preparing their positions ahead of time. Digging them out always cost.

  A kilted soldier at the edge of the woods waved the battalion forward. Forward Trasone went, not without a pang. He’d had other Algarvians wave him forward into woods—and forward into trouble.

  He waited nervously for Unkerlanters in hidden holes to start blazing at his comrades and him from behind—or for a whole swarm of squat men in rock-gray tunics tunics to charge from one side of the road or the other, half of them drunk, all of them roaring, “Urra!” as loud as they could. If they got the chance, they’d knock the Algarvians into the undergrowth and maul them like wild beasts.

  With every quiet, peaceful step he took, he grew more suspicious. Sparrows chirped. A rabbit peered out at the Algarvians, then ducked back behind a bush. “All right,” Trasone said. “Where are they?”

  “Maybe we really did clear this wood,” Panfilo said. “Stranger things have happened . . . I suppose.”

  “Name two,” Trasone challenged.

  Before the sergeant could take him up on it, the earth began to shake beneath their feet. Here and there along the road, purplish flames shot up out of the ground. Men caught in them screamed horribly, but not for long. Along either side of the roadway, trees shivered like men caught naked in an Unkerlanter winter. Some of them toppled. As they did, their crowns caught fire. More Algarvians screamed in torment.

  Trasone was screaming, too, screaming in terror. Sergeant Panfilo’s shout had words in it: “Magecraft! Unkerlanter magecraft!”

  He was right, of course. Knowing he was right didn’t make the sorcerous onslaught any easier for Trasone or his comrades to bear. Had King Swemmel’s men started tossing eggs at him, normally he would have scraped a hole in the ground and waited them out as best he could. He didn’t want to do that here, not when any hole he dug was liable to close up on him as soon as he dove into it.

  He knew the danger because he’d seen it happen to Unkerlanters when his own army’s mages sacrificed a regiment’s worth of Kaunians. But the Kaunians, as far as he could see, had it coming, and so did the Unkerlanters. Trasone was no more likely than anyone else to think he deserved to be on the receiving end of anything unpleasant.

  The moment the ground stopped quivering, the moment trees stopped falling, Major Spinello shouted, “Be ready! Those ugly buggers are going to try to throw us out of here now, you mark my words. Are we going to let ’em?”

  As far as Trasone was concerned, the Unkerlanters were welcome to this stretch of forest, especially after they’d rearranged it so drastically. But he yelled, “No!” along with everybody else still able to talk.

  “Well, then, we’d better get ready to give ’em a proper greeting, hadn’t we?” Spinello said. Suiting action to word, he sprawled behind one of the pines that had come down but hadn’t caught fire.

  Trasone was still looking for his own place to hide when eggs did start falling in the woods. He ducked down behind a big, gray, lichen-covered rock. Panfilo sprawled a few feet away, digging himself a hole with a short-handled spade while lying on his belly. “Aren’t you afraid that’ll swallow you if the Unkerlanters throw more magic at us?” Trasone asked.

  “Aye, but I’m more afraid of getting caught in the open if an egg bursts close by,” the sergeant answered. Trasone pondered that, but not for long. After a moment, he yanked his own spade off his belt and started digging.

  “Urra! Urra! Urra!” That cry, swelling like surf as the tide came in, announced an Unkerlanter attack. Through it, Major Spinello let loose a cry of his own: “Crystallomancer!”

  “Sir?” The soldier who kept the battalion in touch with the army of which it was a part crawled toward Spinello. The major spoke urgently to him, and he in turn spoke into the clear, polished globe he carried in his pack.

  “Urra! Urra! Swemmel! Urra!” Here came the Unkerlanters, pushing their way up into the wood from the south. They’d brushed aside the Algarvians who’d already passed through the trees; now they were intent on taking back the forest.

  “They think we’ll be easy meat,” Spinello said. “They think they’ve rattled us. They panic when we hit them a good sorcerous lick, and they figure we’ll do the same. But they’re only Unkerlanters, and we’re Algarvians. Now we’re going to show them what that means, aren’t we?”

  The only other choice was dying. Trasone didn’t think much of that. And if Spinello figured the sorcerous attack hadn’t rattled him, the dapper little major was out of his mind. The difference between a veteran and a raw recruit—Trasone had no idea whether it was the difference between Algarvians and Unkerlanters—was that he could keep going no matter how rattled he was.

  Peering over the top of his boulder, he saw Unkerlanters in rock-gray rushing up the road and through the woods toward the line the Algarvians were holding. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage grin—by the way they were advancing, Swemmel’s men didn’t know a solidly held line was waiting for them. Well, they’d find out.

  He brought his stick up to his shoulder and blazed down a couple of Unkerlanters who took no pains to hide themselves. Nor was he the only Algarvian blazing. King Swemmel’s men fell one after another. But they kept coming. As always, they were recklessly brave. And, as always, they had soldiers to spare. Soldiers to burn, Trasone thought, doing his best to make sure plenty of them did.

  But, before long, he had to scramble backwards to a new hiding place to keep from getting flanked out. He wasn’t the only one, either; he wondered if Spinello could keep any kind of control over his line for long.

  Then eggs started dropping on the Unkerlanters, both in the woods and beyond them. Dragons shrieked fury as they flew past at treetop height. Cries of panic replaced cries of “Urra!” The enemy attack foundered, cut off at the root.

  Major Spinello blew a shrill blast on his whistle. “Forward!” he shouted. “They had their chance. Now it’s our turn. Mezentio!” He was the first to rush against the Unkerlanters. Recklessly brave fit him as well as the enemy.

  “Mezentio!” Trasone yelled, and went forward, too. Caught by surprise by the dragons the crystallomancer had summoned, the Unkerlanters gave ground more readily than usual. Trasone’s battalion burst out into the open company south of the forest. Some of the grass was burning there, thanks to the Algarvian dragons. And on the blackened grass lay blackened bodies. Trasone trotted past them with hardly a sideways glance; he’d already seen plenty of dead Unkerlanters.

  And, a couple of miles
farther south, he saw more: not soldiers, these, but row on row of peasants—old men and women, mostly—with their hands bound behind them and their throats cut. Those corpses did make him grimace: they were the fuel for the sorcery the Unkerlanter mages had aimed at him and his comrades. The mages, unlike their victims, had fled. Grimly, Trasone trudged after them.

  “Camel.” Sabrino spoke the word as if it were an obscure but potent obscenity. “If I never taste camel again, I’ll count myself lucky.”

  “Dragons like it well enough,” Lieutenant Colonel Caratzas said. As far as Sabrino was concerned, the new Yaninan senior officer wasn’t a quarter the man Colonel Broumidis had been. He was, among other things, much too fond of the anise-flavored spirits his countrymen brewed. About all he really shared with Broumidis—and most other Yaninans—was a passion for expressive gestures. “The only other real choice we have is eating marmots and voles and grubs.”

  “They’d have to be tastier,” Sabrino insisted. “They’d have to be more tender, too. Tell me I’m wrong. Go on, sir—I dare you.”

  Instead of answering right away, Caratzas scratched his mustache, which always made Sabrino think a large black moth had landed on his upper lip. “Even if I did tell you differently, you would not think it mattered. And why should you? I am only a Yaninan, after all, good for nothing but running away.” He breathed potent, licorice-scented fumes into Sabrino’s face.

  “Oh, my dear fellow!” Sabrino exclaimed. He didn’t want Caratzas knowing he thought he couldn’t rely on him; that would just make the Yaninan all the more unreliable. “I do not question your courage. Yaninan dragonfliers here have performed as well as anyone could wish—look at your predecessor’s extraordinary valor.”

  “You are gracious,” Caratzas said with a sad, half-sozzled smile. “You do not speak of the sorry performance of our footsoldiers here, nor of the even sorrier performance of our footsoldiers in Unkerlant. Not all of your followers, not all of your countrymen, show so much forbearance.”