Darkness Descending (53 page)

Did the cook give him an odd look while dishing out the morning oatmeal? He couldn’t be sure, and didn’t dwell on it. He did dwell on shoveling down the oatmeal as fast as he could so it would put a little extra warmth in his belly. He gulped two mugs of herb tea, too, for the same reason, even though the stuff tasted nasty.

“Get moving, dears,” Giurgiu called to his men, voice full of false solicitude. “Down by the sea, they’ll be wanting what we’ve got to sell, that they will. I know you don’t care to get your fingers cold, but it can’t be helped. Remember what brave fellows you are, that’s all.”

Instead of going back to work on the rounds of lumber he’d been chopping up the day before, Cornelu got called over to help bring down a big fir. Before long, he was sweating in spite of the snow and the wind that was blowing it. He let out a grunt of intense satisfaction when the tree crashed down, throwing up a brief, blinding cloud of snow when it did. Woodcutting had its points; he could actually see what he was accomplishing through the strength of his arms.

He walked along the trunk, methodically lopping off the big branches one after another. Work felt good in weather like this. If he hadn’t been working, he would have been freezing. He swung the axe again and again, breathing in great gulps of resin-and sap-scented air, breathing out great clouds of steam and fog. Losing himself in the labor, he might have been mechanism, not man.

Losing himself in the labor, he forgot about what Vlaicu, the other man who’d felled the tree, might be doing. He was reminded when he heard a boot crunch in the snow in back of him. That was almost too late. He’d just raised his arms for another axe stroke . . . and the other woodcutter tackled him from behind.

Vlaicu had probably hoped to get Cornelu down and get him hogtied before he could do anything about it. He’d lost his fight with Giurgiu, after all. But Giurgiu knew all the tricks of the trade, and was bigger and stronger besides. Vlaicu didn’t, and he wasn’t far from Cornelu’s size.

Cornelu went down on his knees, but not to his belly. Hanging on to his axe with his right hand, he used his left to break the other woodcutter’s grip on him, then drove an elbow into Vlaicu’s midsection. It wasn’t perfectly placed, but it forced a grunt of pain from his foe. Cornelu threw another elbow, twisted, and scrambled to his feet.

Vlaicu leaped back, almost stumbling in his haste to recover his own axe. He could have killed Cornelu instead of jumping him, but the Algarvians had seemed to want him alive, and so he’d tried to make him a captive instead. But since that hadn’t worked, a head might do as well. Cornelu made an awkward leap away from a stroke that would have cut him in two.

Then he surged forward again, chopping at his foe. Dimly, he heard more woodcutters shouting as they came up. So did Vlaicu, who bored in, swinging wildly. He must have realized most of the others wouldn’t favor him. Cornelu ducked, straightened, and slammed the side of his axehead against Vlaicu’s temple. The other woodcutter tottered, then fell like the fir, Blood stained the snow.

Giurgiu bent beside him, but only briefly. “Dead. You caved in his skull,” he told Cornelu.

“He jumped me. He was going to give me to the Algarvians,” Cornelu answered.

But Vlaicu had friends on the crew, too. “Liar!” they cried. “Murderer!” Other woodcutters shouted at them. More axes were raised.

“Hold!” Giurgiu roared. Such was his might that they
did
hold, instead of leaping at one another. “I think Cornelu’s telling the truth. Why else get in a fight now?” But Vlaicu’s friends kept on shouting, and he had quite a few of them—more than the dismayed Cornelu had thought. Giurgiu jerked a thumb at the trail that led out of the hills and down to Tirgoviste. “You’ve always been wanting to go into town. You know what’s good for you, you’d better get out of here now,” he told Cornelu. “I’ll make sure you have a start.”

Looking at those furious faces, Cornelu knew he wouldn’t last a day—or, more to the point, a night—if he stayed. “Aye,” he said bitterly. After an ironic salute, he shouldered his axe as if it were a stick and trudged north, toward the seashore.

Snow poured down on Thalfang. Fire and smoke rose up from the burning Unkerlanter town. Tealdo crouched in a doorway, ready to blaze anything that moved. His whole company had been thrown into the meat grinder here. He didn’t know how many men were still alive, but he did know the company would never be the same again after it came out the other side of the town—if it ever did.

From the next doorway over, Trasone called, “Maybe we’ll make it to Cottbus after all if we can take this stinking place first.”

“How much do we have left to take it with?” Tealdo answered. “Not a whole lot of reinforcements behind us, that’s for cursed sure. And where are our behemoths? I’ve hardly seen any the past few days.”

“We came past some that were frozen to death, remember?” Trasone said.

Tealdo did remember, and wished he didn’t. He also wished his comrade wouldn’t be quite so sardonic. He said, “I was hoping I’d see some that would do us some good.”

“With this much snow on the ground, the powers below might as well be pulling at the beasts’ feet,” Trasone commented. “How are they supposed to go forward in weather like this? How are we, for that matter?” He risked a quick look around the corner to make sure no Unkerlanters were sneaking up, then turned back to Tealdo. “And I wouldn’t mind a few more dead blonds helping the mages push us forward, either.” He scowled at Tealdo, as if defying him to disagree.

With a shrug, Tealdo answered, “Hard getting ‘em up here these days, what with the weather and with the Unkerlanters playing games with the ley lines. Besides, Swemmel keeps on killing his own, too.”

He didn’t know what Trasone would say to that. Before Trasone could say anything, the Unkerlanters started lobbing eggs at the forwardmost Algarvians. Tealdo huddled in his doorway, making himself as small as he could. King Swemmel’s men had a great swarm of egg-tossers north of Thalfang.

And the Algarvians did not respond so readily or so strongly as they would have a few weeks or even a few days before. Pulled by horses or mules or behemoths, egg-tossers had an ever-harder time keeping up with footsoldiers as they pushed the front forward. Tealdo hoped for dragons, but the cold and the snow were hard on them, too.

After about a quarter of an hour, the eggs stopped falling as abruptly as they’d begun. In the sudden silence, Captain Galafrone raised a shout: “Forward, men! The Unkerlanters are still getting ready to hit us. We’ll cursed well hit them before they
are
ready.” He shouted again: “Mezentio!”

“Mezentio!” Tealdo yelled, and sprang up from his hiding place. Other officers were shouting their men forward, too; more than half a year of war had taught them how their foes fought. And, sure enough, they caught King Swemmel’s soldiers out of their holes and gathering for their own attack. That made the white-smocked Unkerlanters easier targets than they would have been resting in the soot-streaked snow or scurrying from house to house.

Tealdo blazed a couple of enemy troopers. More fell to beams from his comrades’ sticks. But the rest, instead of retreating, surged forward. Tealdo dove behind a snow-covered pile of bricks. He came up blazing and knocked over another Unkerlanter. In an abstract way, he might have admired the courage King Swemmel’s men showed. They’d shown it ever since the fighting started. They’d been forced back, but they hadn’t given up on themselves the way the Valmierans and Jelgavians had. He wished they would have despaired. In that case, Algarve would be victorious, and he wouldn’t have to worry about getting killed any more.

“Forward!” Captain Galafrone shouted again. “Once we break out of Thalfang, they won’t have anything left to stop us.”

Tealdo didn’t know whether the Algarvians could break out of Thalfang and kept thinking about all the eggs the Unkerlanters had thrown at them. But he scrambled to his feet. He sprinted for the next bit of cover he saw—an overturned wagon in the middle of the street. He crouched behind it, blazing at the Unkerlanters. Their attacking force melted as the snow hereabouts wouldn’t do till spring.

Trasone ran past him. “Come on,” Tealdo’s burly friend called. “Do you want to be late for the party?”

“Can’t have that.” Tealdo got up and advanced again. As he ran, he realized something had changed. He needed a moment to know what it was. Then he exclaimed in glad surprise: “The snow’s stopped!”

“Oh, happy day!” That wasn’t Trasone; it was Sergeant Panfilo. “Any minute now, the sun will come out, and then you can go climb a fornicating palm tree, just like they’ve got in fornicating Siaulia.”

A few minutes later, the sun did come out. Tealdo saw no palm trees, fornicating or otherwise. All he saw was a battered Unkerlanter town; sunshine made it dazzling without making it beautiful. Ahead lay a broad expanse of empty, snow-covered ground. “The market square!” Tealdo shouted. “We’re halfway through this stinking place, anyway.”

“Aye, so we are,” Trasone answered. “And there’s half as many of us as there were when we got here, too.”

Tealdo nodded, but he wasn’t really listening. He was staring northwest, across the market square, across the rest of the ruins of Thalfang, toward higher ground in the distance. He pointed. “Curse me if those aren’t the towers or whatever they call them of King Swemmel’s palace.”

Trasone stopped and stared, too. “You’re right,” he said, his rough voice softened for once. “We’ve come all this cursed way, and there it is, close enough to reach out and touch.” He stretched out a hand, then shook his head and laughed. “Of course, we’ve still got a few Unkerlanters to go through.”

“Aye, a few.” Tealdo nodded. “They know they can’t afford to lose this town. And I’m not looking forward to crossing the square. They’re bound to have snipers on the far side, and we’re not decked out in white like they are. Makes us too easy to spot.”

“Ought to cut the balls off whoever didn’t think to lay in white smocks for us,” Trasone growled. “Some bespectacled whoreson in a nice warm office back in Trapani probably figured we’d lick the Unkerlanters before we needed them, so he didn’t bother having any made.”

“Come on, boys! There’s Cottbus ahead!” Captain Galafrone pointed in the direction of King Swemmel’s palace. “It’ll be as easy to grab as a whore’s snatch now. Forward!” As if spying the towers had sorcerously restored his youth, he charged out into the market square. Every Algarvian within the sound of his voice followed.

Thalfang’s square was bigger than the one an Algarvian town with about as many people would have had. Not being so crowded in their kingdom, the Unkerlanters could and did use space more lavishly. And slogging through deep snow made the market square seem bigger still.

Something moved, there in one of the streets leading into the market square from the far side. Tealdo blazed at it, but couldn’t be sure whether he’d hit it or not. Then eggs came whistling into the square out of the north and west. They burst all around the advancing Algarvians. Wounded men screamed and flopped in the snow like newly landed fish.

Tealdo threw himself down. “The captain’s hit!” somebody yelled—Tealdo thought it was Trasone, but he couldn’t be sure, not with his ears stunned from so many bursts close by. The Unkerlanters had more left than anyone had thought they did, and they were throwing in every bit of it to try to hold Thalfang.

That thought had hardly crossed his mind before fresh shouts of dismay rose from some of the Algarvians caught in the open. “Behemoths!” Raw terror edged those cries. “Unkerlanter behemoths!”

Into the market square they came. Tealdo lifted his head and blazed at them. Now he knew what he’d seen, there in the street across the square. He expected to have all the time in the world to pick off their crewmen, even if he couldn’t do anything much to the beasts themselves. If Algarvian behemoths bogged down in snowdrifts, surely Unkerlanter behemoths would do the same.

But they didn’t. They came forward almost as swiftly as they would have over dry ground in summer. Gaping, Tealdo saw that they had wide, net-laced contraptions strapped to their feet.
Snowshoes,
he thought numbly.
The Unkerlanters have tricked out their cursed behemoths in snowshoes. Why didn’t we come up with something like that?

He got no time to brood about it. The behemoth began tossing eggs with deadly accuracy. Beams from heavy sticks hissed like giant serpents when they struck snow, kicking great clouds of steam up into the frosty air. Some of that steam was tinged with red; those beams boiled a man’s blood as readily as a snowbank.

Behind the behemoths came white-smocked Unkerlanter soldiers, also on snowshoes. Unlike the Algarvians, they didn’t flounder through the drifts, but strode along atop them. And there were so cursed many of them! Captain Galafrone had said that, once the Algarvians got past Thalfang, not much stood between them and Cottbus. From somewhere or other, King Swemmel had found reserves Galafrone hadn’t known about.

Well, Galafrone was already down. Tealdo didn’t know how badly he was hurt, or whether he realized how wrong he’d been. Along with the behemoths, the Unkerlanters were throwing a couple of brigades at a banged-up battalion’s worth of Algarvians. And how many more soldiers did they have flooding into Thalfang from the north?

Those behemoths were terrifyingly close now. They’d already passed—or run over—the forwardmost Algarvians. Did they intend to trample Mezentio’s men as well as tossing eggs at them and blazing them with heavy sticks? Tealdo rose a little to blaze down an Unkerlanter behemoth-rider who was fitting an egg to his tosser. But other behemoths were already past him, with footsoldiers close behind them. Cries of “Urra!” and “Swemmel!” mingled and began to drown those of “King Mezentio!”

Tealdo didn’t feel the beam that burned its way through his middle, not at first. All he knew was that his legs didn’t want to work anymore. Then he found himself face down in the snow. And then, a couple of heartbeats later, he began to scream.

“Tealdo!” Trasone cried. His voice seemed to come from very far away.