Into the Darkness (38 page)

“Friend?” he echoed in surprise.

“Friend, aye,” the officer answered in his accented Sibian. “Lagoas wars with Algarve now. Had you no heard? When Mezentio your country invaded, King Vitor declares war. We all friends together now, aye?”

“Aye,” Cornelu said wearily.

Skarnu stood up before his company and said the words that had to be said: “Men, the redheads have gone and invaded Sibiu. You’ll have heard that already, I suppose.” He waited for nods, and got them. “You ask me,” he went on, “they were fools. Lagoas is a bigger danger to them than Sibiu ever could have been. But if the Algarvians weren’t fools, they wouldn’t be Algarvians, eh?”

He got more nods, and even a couple of smiles. He would have been gladder of those smiles had they come from the best soldiers in the company, not the happy-go-lucky handful who in the morning refused to worry about the afternoon, let alone tomorrow.

“We can’t swim over to Sibiu to help the islanders,” he said, “so we have to do the next best thing. King Mezentio must have pulled a lot of his soldiers out of the line here when he invaded Sibiu. That means there won’t be enough men left in the redheads’ works to hold us back when we hit them. We are going to break through, and we are going to go rampaging right into the Algarvian rear.”

Some of the men who’d smiled before clapped their hands and cheered. So did a few others—youngsters, mostly. Most of the soldiers just stood silently. Skarnu had studied the Algarvian fortifications himself, studied them till he knew the ones in front of him like the lines on his palm. As long as they held any men at all, they would be hard to break through. He knew it. Most of the men knew it, too. But he had his orders about what to tell them.

He also had his pride. He said, “Remember, men, you won’t be going anywhere I haven’t gone myself, because I’ll be out in front of you every step of the way. We’ll do all we can for our king and kingdom.” He raised his voice to a shout: “King Gainibu and victory!”

“King Gainibu!” the men echoed. “Victory!” They cheered enthusiastically. Why not? Cheering cost them nothing and exposed them to no danger.

Seeing that Skarnu had finished, Sergeant Raunu strode out in front of the company. He glanced at Skarnu for permission to speak. Skarnu nodded. The company would have got on fine without him, but he couldn’t have run it without Raunu. The veteran underofficer affected not to know that. Skarnu understood perfectly well that the pose was an affectation. He wondered how many company officers really believed their sergeants thought them indispensable. Too many, odds were.

Raunu said, “Boys, we’re lucky. You know it, and I know it. A lot of officers would send us forward but stay in a hole themselves. If we won, they’d take the credit. If we lost, we’d get the blame—only we’d be dead and they’d try again with another company. The captain’s not like that. We’ve all seen as much. Let’s give him a cheer now, and let’s fight like madmen for him tomorrow.”

“Captain Skarnu!” the men shouted. Skarnu waved to them, feeling foolish. He was used to accepting the deference of commoners because of his blood. Like his sister Krasta, he’d taken it for granted. The deference he got here in the field was different. He’d earned it. It made him proud and embarrassed at the same time.

“Whatever we can do, sir, we’ll do tomorrow,” Raunu said.

“I’m sure of it,” Skarnu said. That was a polite commonplace. He started to add something to it, then stopped. Sometimes Raunu, if given the chance to talk, came out with things he wouldn’t have otherwise, things an officer would have had trouble learning any other way.

This proved to be one of those times. “Do you really think we’ll break the Algarvian line tomorrow, sir?” the sergeant said.

“We’ve been ordered to do it,” Skarnu said. “I hope we can do it.” He went no further than that.

“Mm.” Raunu’s wrinkles refolded themselves into an expression less forbidding than the one he usually wore. “Sir, I hope we can do it, too. But if there’s not much chance … Sir, I saw a lot of officers with a lot of courage get themselves killed for nothing during the Six Years’ War. It’d be a shame if that happened to you before you figured out what was what.”

“I see.” Skarnu nodded brightly. “After I figure out what’s what, it will be all right for me to get myself killed for nothing.”

“No, sir.” Raunu shook his head. “After you know what’s what, you’ll know better than to go rushing ahead and get yourself killed for nothing.”

Skarnu quoted doctrine: “The only way to make an attack succeed is to go into it confident of success.”

“Aye, sir.” Raunu frowned again. “The only trouble is, sometimes that doesn’t help, either.”

Skarnu shrugged. Raunu looked at him, shook his head, and walked off. Skarnu understood what the veteran was trying to tell him. Understanding didn’t matter. He had his orders. His company would break through the Algarvian line ahead or die trying.

All through the night, egg-tossers hurled destruction at the Algarvian positions. Dragons flew overhead, dropping more eggs on the redheads. Skarnu had mixed feelings about all that. On the one hand, slain enemy soldiers and wrecked enemy works would make the attack easier. On the other, the Valmierans couldn’t have done a better job of announcing where that attack would go in if they’d hung out a sign.

The Algarvians made little reply to the eggs raining down.
Maybe they’re all dead,
Skarnu thought hopefully. He couldn’t make himself believe it, try as he would.

He led his men to the ends of the approach trenches they’d dug over the previous couple of days. That new digging might also have warned the Algarvians an attack was coming. But Skarnu and his men would not have to cross so much open ground to close with the enemy when the assault began, and so he reluctantly decided it was likely to be worthwhile.

“This is how we did it in the Six Years’ War,” Raunu said as the soldiers huddled in the trenches, waiting for the whistles that would order them forward. “We licked the redheads then, so we know we can do it again, right?”

Some of the youngsters under Skarnu’s command grinned and nodded at the veteran sergeant. They were too young to know about the gruesome casualties Valmiera had endured in that victory. Raunu deliberately didn’t mention those. The men hadn’t suffered badly in this war, not yet, not least because their leaders did remember the slaughters of the Six Years’ War and had avoided repeating them. Now the risk seemed acceptable … to men who weren’t facing it themselves.

Off in the west, behind Skarnu, the sky went from black to gray to pink. Peering over the dirt heaped up in front of the approach trenches, he saw the enemy’s field fortifications had taken a fearful battering. He dared hope that no Algarvian position during the Six Years’ War had been so thoroughly smashed up.

He said as much to Raunu, who also stuck his head up to examine the ground ahead. The sergeant answered, “Just where it looks like there couldn’t be even one of the bastards left alive, that’s where you’ll find whole caravans full of’em, and they’ll all be doing their best to blaze you down.”

Raunu had been loud and enthusiastic while heartening the common soldiers in the company. He spoke quietly to his superior, not wanting to dilute the effect he’d had on the men.

More eggs and still more eggs fell on the Algarvian entrenchments and forts. And then, without warning, they stopped falling. Skarnu pulled a brass whistle from his trouser pocket and blew a long, echoing blast, one of hundreds ringing out along several miles of battle line. “For Valmiera!” he cried. “For King Gainibu!” He scrambled out of the approach trench and trotted toward the Algarvians’ works.

“Valmiera!” his men shouted, and followed him out into the open. “Gainibu!” He looked to either side. Thousands of Valmierans, thousands upon thousands, stormed west. It was a sight to make any soldier proud of his countrymen.

Only a few hundred more yards,
Skarnu thought.
Then we’ll be in among the redheads, and then they’ll be ours.
But already flashes ahead warned that some Algarvians had survived the pounding the Valmierans had given them. More and more enemy soldiers began blazing at Skarnu and his comrades. Men started falling, some without a sound, others shrieking as they were wounded.

The Algarvians had endured all the eggs the Valmierans tossed at them without responding—till this moment, when the men attacking them were most vulnerable. And now they rained eggs down on the Valmierans. Skarnu found himself on the ground without any clear memory of how he’d got there. One moment, he’d been upright. The next —

He scrambled to his feet. His trousers were torn. His tunic was out at the elbow. He wasn’t bleeding, or didn’t think he was.
Lucky,
he thought.

He waved to show his men he was all right, arid looked back over his shoulder to see how they were doing. Even as he did so, a couple of them went down. They hadn’t come very far—surely not halfway—but he’d lost a lot of them. If he kept losing them at that rate, he wouldn’t have any men left by the time he got to the forwardmost Algarvian trenches. He probably wouldn’t live to get to those trenches himself, an unpleasant afterthought to have.

The headlong charge was simply too expensive to be borne. “By squads!” he shouted. “Blaze and move by squads!”

Half his men—half the men he had left—dove into such cover as they could find—mostly the holes burst eggs had dug in the ground. The rest raced by them. Then they flattened out and blazed at the Algarvians while the others rose and dashed past. Little by little, they worked their way toward the trenches from which the redheads were blazing at them.

Skarnu took shelter in a hole himself, waiting for his next chance to advance. He looked around, hoping the order he’d had to give hadn’t slowed his company too badly. What he saw left him wide-eyed with dismay. As many Valmierans were running back toward their own lines as were still going forward against the enemy. Of the ones still advancing, most paid no attention to tactics that might have cut their losses. They kept moving up till they went down. When they could bear no more, they broke and fled.

“You see, sir?” Raunu shouted from a hole not far away. “This is how I feared it would be.”

“What can we do?” Skarnu asked.

“We aren’t going to break through their lines,” Raunu answered. “We aren’t even going to get into their lines—or if we do, we won’t come out again. Best we can do now is hang tight here, hurt ‘em a bit, and get back to where we started from after nightfall. If you order me forward, though, sir, I’ll go.”

“No,” Skarnu said. “What point to that but getting us killed to no purpose?” He assumed that, if he ordered Raunu forward, he would have to try to advance, too. “This is what you warned me about before the attack began, isn’t it?”

“Aye, sir. Good to see you can recognize it,” Raunu said. “I only wish our commanders could.” Skarnu started to reproach the sergeant for speaking too freely. He stopped with the words unspoken. How could Raunu have spoken too freely when all he did was tell the truth?

Leofsig still retained the tin mess kit he’d been issued when mustered into King Penda’s levy. As captives went, that made him relatively lucky. Forthwegian soldiers who’d lost their kits had to make do with bowls that held less. The Algarvians might have issued their own kits to men who lacked them, but that didn’t seem to have entered their minds.

What had crossed their minds was carefully counting the captives in each barracks in the encampment before those captives got anything in their mess kits or bowls. Leofsig would not have bet that the Algarvian guards could count to ten, even using their fingers. The endless recounts to which the captives had to submit argued against it, at any rate.

Every so often, a captive or two really did turn up missing. That meant the redheads tore the encampment apart till they found out how the men had disappeared. It also meant a week of half rations for the escapees’ barracksmates. No one got fat on full rations. Half rations were slow starvation. Half rations were also an argument for betraying anyone thinking of getting away.

This morning, everything seemed to add up. “Powers above be praised,” Leofsig muttered. He was cold and tired and hungry; standing in formation in front of the barracks was not his idea of a good time. Standing in line and waiting for the meager breakfast the cooks would dole out didn’t strike him as delightful, either. Eventually, though, he’d get food in his belly, which came close to making the wait worthwhile.

Plop!
The sound of a large ladle of mush landing in his mess kit was about as appetizing as the stuff itself. The mush was mostly wheat porridge, with cabbage and occasional bits of salt fish or pork mixed in. The captives ate it breakfast, dinner, and supper. It was never very good. This morning, it smelled worse than usual.

Leofsig ate it anyhow. If it made him sick—and it did make people sick every so often—he’d go to the infirmary. And if anybody claimed he was malingering, he’d throw up in the wretch’s lap.

The handful of Kaunians in his barracks ate in a small knot by themselves, as they usually did. He would sometimes join them. So would a few of his fellow Forthwegians. Most, though, wanted nothing to do with the blonds. And a few, like Merwit, still stirred up trouble every chance they got.

“Hey, you!” Merwit said now. Leofsig looked up from his mush. Sure enough, Merwit was staring his way with a smile that made him look neither friendly nor attractive. “Aye, you, yellow-hair lover,” the burly captain went on. “You going on latrine duty after breakfast? That’d give you the chance to hang around with your pals?”

“You ought to try it yourself, Merwit,” Leofsig answered. “There’s nobody else I know who’s half so full of shit.”

Merwit’s eyes went big and wide. He and Leofsig had quarreled before, but Leofsig hadn’t given back insult for insult till this moment. Carefully, Merwit set down his own mess kit. “You’re going to pay for that,” he said in matter-of-fact tones. He charged forward like a behemoth.

Leofsig kicked him in the belly. It was like kicking a plank. Merwit grunted, but he slammed one fist into Leofsig’s ribs and the other into the top of Leofsig’s head. He’d meant to hit him in the face, but Leofsig ducked. Merwit howled then. With any luck at all, he’d broken a knuckle or two.