Darkness Descending (42 page)

“No, not when you put it so,” Talsu admitted. “I wish I had.”

“That’s a different story.” Traku paused in thought. “Now, have I got the material he’ll need in stock, or am I going to have to scour Skrunda for it?” He went through what he did have, then called to Talsu: “Here, come feel this bolt of beige stuff. Do you think it would do?”

Talsu rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. “I think you could wear it instead of chainmail, matter of fact. You’d feel like you were carrying another man on your back with a cloak made from it.”

“He asked for heavy,” Traku said. “He can’t very well complain if it turns out even heavier than he looked for.” He reached under the counter and pulled out a stout pair of pinking shears. “Get me his measurements, will you, son? I want to make sure I have the length just right.”

When the Algarvian captain came into the shop to pick up the cloak, he was sober. He still looked no happier at the prospect of going off to fight in Unkerlant. From everything Talsu had heard about the weather in the huge western kingdom, he couldn’t blame the redhead for that.

Traku draped the cloak over the Algarvian’s shoulders, as fussy to get it right as if he’d made it for King Donalitu. “I put a lot of handwork into it, sir,” he said. “Not as much room to use magic in a cloak as there would be in, say, one of your kilts.”

Staggering a little under the weight of the garment, the redhead said, “Plain enough that you didn’t stint on the cloth.” Before the tailor could answer, the officer gave a shrug—an effort-filled shrug, with the cloak still heavy on his shoulders. “Fair enough. I will probably need all of this in Unkerlant.”

“I hope it is what you had in mind,” Traku said.

“Oh, aye, very much so.” The Algarvian shrugged again. “Even if it weren’t, I’d be stuck with it, because my ley-line caravan leaves before sunup tomorrow morning.” He took off the cloak and folded it with the sure hands of a man who knew how to care for clothing. “My thanks. I won’t be the only one, nor even the only one from Skrunda, heading down the ley lines, you know.”

“We hadn’t thought about it,” Traku said, including Talsu in his answer. To show he intended to be included, Talsu nodded.

“I am sorry for you,” the Algarvian said. “This gives your counts and dukes more power. From what I have seen of them, you would be better off if they had all fled with your coward of a king. You would be better off if we had decided to blaze all of them, too, but we didn’t.”

Talsu said, “They will still be taking orders from you.”

“And you don’t like that, either, do you?” the officer asked. Without waiting for an answer, he went on, “How often does anyone of rank care what the common people think?”

Not often enough,
was the answer that sprang into Talsu’s mind. He would have said as much to his mother or father or sister or to a close friend; he had said as much to men he trusted in the army. But, even in the army, he’d been careful about speaking his mind. He was not about to unburden himself to one of the occupiers, a man on whom he had no reason to rely.

Maybe the Algarvian understood as much. With a nod, he said, “I’m off, then. We may see each other again one day.” He bowed to Traku and said, “You do good work.” With a comic shrug, he carried the cloak away.

“He’s not a bad fellow.” Traku spoke as if he hated to admit anything of the sort.

“No, he’s not,” Talsu agreed. “I saw that in the field. One by one, the redheads aren’t much different from us. But put a bunch of them together and they turn into Algarvians. I don’t know how or why that works, but it does.”

“Put a bunch of them together and they start knocking over monuments,” Traku said. “Every time I go near the market square, I miss the old arch.”

Talsu nodded. “Aye, me, too. Put a bunch of them together, let them go conquering, and—” He broke off. “—And who knows what they might do?” he finished, not really wanting to give the rumors substance after all.

His father knew what he meant. “I still don’t care to believe that,” he said. “Not even Algarvians would sink so low.”

“I hope you’re right,” Talsu said, and then, in thoughtful tones, “I wonder just how many soldiers and officers they’re taking out of Jelgava to send to Unkerlant. I wonder if the ones who stay behind will be enough to hold down the kingdom. Of course, the other thing I wonder is if anyone would rise up for our nobles.”

“I don’t much fancy a cursed Algarvian calling himself my king,” Traku said. Talsu thought about that, then nodded again.

The wind howled and screamed like a mad ghost. Snow blew horizontally up from out of the south. Except in front of boulders and bushes, it had trouble staying on the ground. Istvan’s squad moved forward, leaning into that shrieking gale.

“What beastly weather!” Kun shouted. The scrawny little mage’s apprentice had tied his spectacles on with twine to keep them from blowing away.

“It’s only weather,” Istvan shouted back, into the teeth of the wind. “It’s like this every winter in my valley.”

“The stars must hate your valley, then,” Kun said. “In the capital, we have halfway decent weather in the wintertime.”

“It’s made you soft,” Istvan said. Kun gestured derisively. Istvan didn’t take the argument any further, but he felt he could have. Gyongyosians were a warrior race, weren’t they? What kind of warrior was a man who couldn’t even stand a blizzard?

Then Szonyi said, “I come from a little valley that’s as chilly as any die stars shine down on, and I’m stinking cold, too, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.”

“I never said I wasn’t cold.” Istvan backed a little way up the ley line, but not very far. “I said it’s only weather, and it is, and I said we have to deal with it, and we do.” He slapped at his chest. “We’ve got the gear for it, eh?”

Snow flew from his long sheepskin coat. He wore a wool blouse under the coat, and a wool undertunic beneath that. The coat went down below his knees. His baggy leggings were wool, and so were his long drawers, which itched in places it was embarrassing to scratch. Fur lined his boots and his mittens; he wore a fox-fur cap with earflaps and had a wool muffler tied over his nose and mouth so that only his eyes showed. He carried slit goggles in his belt pouch, in case the sun came out. By the way the blizzard raged, he wondered if it would ever come out again.

Kun said, “I can get by in this.” He was as well protected against the storm as Istvan. “Curse me if I know how anybody’s supposed to fight in it, though, us or the Unkerlanters.”

“They manage, and so do we,” Istvan answered. “They know about cold, the miserable whoresons, same as we do.” He peered ahead. All he could see was swirling whiteness. Discontentedly, he muttered, “I wish I knew exactly where we are. We could blunder into them without knowing it till too late.”

“Or some of them could be sneaking up on us, and we wouldn’t know that till too late, either,” Szonyi added.

“Aye, we would.” Even in the howling blizzard, Kun sounded smug. “I have a bit of magecraft, I’ll have you remember. It spotted Kuusamans and it spotted a mountain ape, so it should work even on brutes like Unkerlanters.”

Kun was proud of his little bit of magecraft. Istvan hoped he wasn’t prouder of it than it deserved. But it had worked, and more than once; no denying that. It wouldn’t work, though, if he didn’t use it. Istvan said, “Maybe you’d better check now, just on the off chance. Those goat-eating buggers could be half a blaze away, and we’d never know it, not through this.”

“Aye, Sergeant. That’s not the worst notion I ever heard.” By the way Kun said it, he managed to imply that Istvan had come out with most of the worst notions he’d heard.

“Don’t get clever with me,” Istvan snapped. He paused, appalled at how much like Sergeant Jokai he sounded. After a moment, he shrugged: where else to learn how to be a sergeant than from a sergeant? He hoped tlie stars treasured Jokai’s spirit. Whether they did or not, he had things to attend to here. “Squad halt!” he shouted over the howl of the wind. “All right, Kun—do what you need to do.”

“Aye,” Kun repeated, and set about it. “Whatever passes he made, his mittens hid. The wind blew away the words of his spell. After a couple of minutes, he turned to Istvan and said, “Sergeant, no Unkerlanters are moving toward us.”

“Well, that’s something,” Istvan said. “But you can’t be sure we’re not about to stumble over them?”

Kun shook his head. “The spell detects an enemy’s motion toward us, and nothing else. I wish I knew more.”

I
wish you knew more, too, and not just about magic,
Istvan thought. But Kun, this time, had done nothing to deserve an insult. “You tried your best,” Istvan said, “and we know more than we did, even if we don’t know as much as we’d like. Come on, lads—forward again. If we find the foe by falling over him, then we do, that’s all.”

“How do we even know we’re going in the right direction?” Szonyi asked. “With all this snow flying every which way, who can say where east is?”

“If we keep the wind almost at our backs, we won’t go too far wrong,” Istvan answered, but he didn’t sound happy about the reply even to himself. Nothing easier than for the wind to shift. He turned to Kun. “Do you know any spells for finding out which way we’re headed?”

“There is one, quite a good one, but it depends on a bit of lodestone, and I have none,” the mage’s apprentice answered regretfully.

“Anyone have any lodestone?” Istvan asked. No one admitted to it. He wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t seen lodestone more than a couple of times in his life, both when traveling mountebanks did astonishing things with it. He turned back to Kun. “Any other ways?”

“I’m sure there are, Sergeant, but I don’t know how to use them,” Kun replied.

Istvan sighed through the muffler over his mouth. “All right, then. We’ll just have to keep on and see what happens. Stars be praised, we’re through the worst of the really rugged country. Not so much risk of blowing off a cliff here.”

“If we can hold where we are till spring, we’ll be in a place where we can stab deep into Unkerlant’s vitals,” Kun said.

“I thought you were a mage’s apprentice, not a news-sheet scribbler’s,” Istvan said. Kun was too swaddled in fur and fabric for Istvan to see if he changed expression, but he turned away and kept quiet for a while.

And then, up ahead, someone called a challenge—in Unkerlanter. Istvan knew no more than a handful of words of the language. Neither did anyone else in the squad. The challenge came again, sharper and more peremptory. “What do we do, Sergeant?” somebody asked.

“Get down, you fools!” Istvan shouted, suiting action to word. As he thumped down into the snow himself, he added, “Balogh, back to the rest of the company. Tell ‘em we’ve found the enemy!”

Actually, the Unkerlanters had found them. Beams hissed overhead, blasting snowflakes to steam. Istvan worried about them less than he would have in clearer weather; snow attenuated their force even faster than rain did. But how large an Unkerlanter position lay ahead there, shielded by the blizzard? If he’d uncovered a regiment of King Swemmel’s soldiers, they’d wipe out his squad as casually as he swatted a fly ... provided they knew he had only a squad.

He blazed at the Unkerlanters a couple of times, not so much in the hope of hurting them as to make them believe he led a good-sized force. “Kun!” he hissed. “Hey, Kun! You all right?”

“Aye, for the time being,” the mage’s apprentice answered from over to his left.

“Can you make the Unkerlanters think we’ve got more men here than we really do?” Istvan asked.

For a moment, he didn’t think the mage’s apprentice heard him. Then a voice—Kun’s voice, he realized, but bigger and deeper and more resonant than it had any business being—answered, “Aye, Colonel!” Istvan looked around to see where so exalted a figure as a colonel might have sprung from, but then started to laugh. Kun was doing his best to follow orders.

And his best turned out to be better than Istvan had expected. Other voices came out of the snow from different directions: nonexistent captains positioning equally nonexistent companies for a charge. Mythical sergeants who sounded much fiercer than Istvan ever had gave their mythical squads orders.

Off to the east, the Unkerlanters started shouting, nerving themselves for an attack: “Urra! Urra! Urra!” Istvan’s shiver had nothing to do with the snow on which he lay. From the sound of those shouts, he hadn’t stumbled over a regiment: That had to be at least a brigade. He wished Kun had given him an imaginary brigade of his own. He would have enjoyed being a brigadier, even an imaginary one, for the few brief moments till the Unkerlanters overran him.

Amid the calls and the shouts, Kun spoke in his own voice: “What next, Sergeant? This can’t last—they’re bound to test it, all the men they have over there.”

He was right, curse him. Balogh must have got lost, or else Captain Tivadar would have brought up real reinforcements. But Istvan, having begun the game, did not want to give it up. He got to his feet, advanced on the Unkerlanter position, and shouted a couple of the Unkerlanter phrases he knew: “You surrender! Hands high!”

King Swemmel’s men didn’t blaze him down out of hand. The shouts of “Urra! Urra!” died away. Only the wind spoke, the wind and Kun’s conjured-up officers and sergeants. And then, dejectedly, an Unkerlanter shouted back: “We surrender!”

Istvan gaped. He’d known how colossal a bluff he was running and was astonished past words that the Unkerlanters had fallen for it. If he showed that, though, everything was ruined. “Hands high!” he yelled again, not caring if he rasped his throat raw so long as he made his voice pierce the gale.

He aimed his stick eastward. He could do no more than that; the snow was blowing too hard to let him find a sure target. Out of that swirling snow came Unkerlanters in long, thick wool tunics with leggings beneath and long, hooded cloaks over them. They carried no weapons; their hands were above their heads. Catching sight of Istvan, the first one in the line repeated, “We surrender.”

Gesturing with his stick, Istvan sent them back toward his comrades. As they glumly tramped past him, he counted them. Only twenty men were marching into captivity. Had more stayed behind or . .. ? Sudden suspicion flowered in him. “Kun!” he shouted. “You’ve got to have more of their language than I do.”