Into the Darkness (81 page)

“Aye,” Istvan said. “Either we kill him or we send him back so our officers can squeeze him.” Normally, Istvan would have done the latter. As things were, he’d been on his own for a couple of days, and wasn’t sure where to send a captive if he got one.

Getting one, he realized, wouldn’t be easy. That dragon might have been flamed out of the sky, but it was a long way from dead; branches must have done a better job than usual of cushioning its fall. It sounded as if it were trying to knock down every tree it could reach. It didn’t flame, though, which argued it still had a flier on its back: an unrestrained dragon would have vented its fury every way it could.

Kun pointed ahead. “There it is,” he said unnecessarily: that great scaly tail could not have belonged to any other beast. At the moment, it was doing duty for a flail, smashing bushes to bits.

“Surround it,” Istvan said. “Blaze for the eyes or the mouth. Sooner or later we’ll kill it. And watch out for the flier. He’s liable to be blazing at you while you’re blazing at the dragon.”

“I find that highly unlikely,” Kun said. But he did as Istvan told him, so Istvan couldn’t come down on him for talking back. Istvan couldn’t come down hard on him for talking back, anyhow—a disadvantage of lacking formal rank.

Spreading out to surround the dragon made the Gyongyosians cast their net widely indeed. The beast was still doing its best to level the woods. It couldn’t knock over large trees. With that exception, its best was quite good; a stampeding behemoth would have been hard pressed to match it.

Istvan peered through the bushes toward it. Sure enough, it was a Kuusaman dragon, painted in sea green and sky blue. Its right wing and a stretch of the body behind the wing were charred and black. Without a doubt, a Gyongyosian dragon had won that duel in the air. But the Kuusaman still somehow astride it at the base of its neck seemed alert and not badly hurt. He had a stick in his hands and was looking now this way, now that, ready for anything that might happen to him.

For a moment, Istvan wondered why he didn’t get off the dragon and make for the woods. Then he realized the dragon was liable to squash the flier if he dismounted. He raised his own stick to his shoulder and sighted along it. Before he could blaze, the Kuusaman did, but at someone off to the other side. A hoarse cry said the dragonflier hit what he’d blazed at, too.

When Istvan blazed at the Kuusaman, the fellow jerked as if stung. But, even if Istvan’s beam bit, it didn’t knock the foe out of the fight. The fellow used his own stick as a goad, and the dragon, hurt though it was, obeyed the command he gave it. Its head swung toward Istvan. He blazed at it, but it kept turning his way. Its jaws opened enormously, preposterously, wide. Flame shot from those jaws, straight at Istvan.

He thought he was a dead man. Though it was daylight, he looked up toward the heavens, toward the stars where he expected his spirit would go. But the sheet of flame fell short. Trees and bushes between the dragon and him began to burn. He threw his hands up in front of his face to protect himself from the blast of the heat, but the fire did not quite reach him. He stumbled backwards, his lungs feeling seared from the one breath of flame-heated air he’d drawn in.

Coughing, he staggered off to one side of the fire. It would spread, but not quickly; Obuda had had a lot of rain lately, so the plants were full of juice. The dragon was swinging its head away from Istvan now. It flamed again. A shriek of anguish announced that whoever it flamed at this time hadn’t been far enough away to escape the fire.

Istvan blazed at the dragonflier again. His comrades were doing the same now. At last, after what seemed like forever, the Kuusaman slumped down on his dragon’s neck, the stick slipping from his fingers. The dragon, with no one controlling it, began sending bursts of flame in all directions—until it had no flame left to send.

After that, disposing of the great beast was relatively easy, for the Gyongyosians could approach without fear. When it opened its mouth and tried to flame Szonyi, he sent a beam through the soft tissue inside that maw and into its brain. Its head flopped down. The body kept thrashing a while longer, too stupid to realize right away that it was dead.

Kun nodded to Istvan. Istvan nodded back, in some surprise; he thought the dragon had flamed the mage’s apprentice. Kun looked surprised, too. Pointing to the dead Kuusaman flier, he said, “You were right. Those little demons really can fight bravely.”

“Too right they can,” Istvan answered. “If they couldn’t, don’t you think we’d have thrown ‘em off this island long since?”

“We did throw ‘em off this island once,” Szonyi said. “The whoresons came back.” He paused. “I suppose that says something about them.”

“Aye,” Istvan said. “They aren’t Gyongyosians—they aren’t warriors born—but they’re men.” He pulled a knife from his belt and advanced on the dragon’s carcass. “I’m going to worry a tooth or two, by the stars. When I go back to my valley one of these days, I’ll wear a dragon’s fang on a chain around my neck. That should keep some of the local tough boys quiet.” He smiled in anticipation.

He wasn’t the only soldier who took a souvenir from the dragon, either. Kun cut several fangs from its mouth. “I ought to be able to get some sort of sorcerous use out of these,” he said. “And, as Istvan says, one worn around the neck will be a potent charm against bullies.”

“We earned them, sure enough.” Szonyi’s hands were bloody, as were Istvan’s. They both kept rubbing them on the ground. Even a dragon’s blood burned.

“Aye, we earned them,” Istvan said. “Now we have to hope we drive the Kuusamans off this stinking island and that we get off it ourselves.” A moment later, he wished he’d spoken as if that were assured. For better or worse, though, he’d seen too much fighting to fool himself for long.

Leudast squelched through mud. What the Forthwegians called roads were hardly better than their Unkerlanter equivalents: good enough when dry, boggy when wet. “Wait till the snow starts falling,” Sergeant Magnulf said. “They’ll harden up again then.”

“Aye,” Leudast said. “But winters are milder here than they are farther south, you know. It’s not always one blizzard after another. Only sometimes.”

“That’s right—you’re from not far from these parts, aren’t you?” Magnulf said.

“Farther west, of course,” Leudast answered. “Fifty, maybe a hundred miles west of what used to be the border between Forthweg and Unkerlant. Just about this far south, though, and the weather wasn’t a whole lot different than the way it is here.”

“I’m sorry for you,” Magnulf said, which made Leudast and everybody else in the squad laugh. After he was done laughing, Leudast wondered why he’d done it. The weather in most of Unkerlant was worse than it was hereabouts, or in the part of the kingdom where he’d grown up.

“One good thing about the rain,” a common soldier named Gernot said. “The cursed Algarvians aren’t going to jump on our backs for a while.”

“They’ll drown in the muck if they try,” Leudast said, at which his companions nodded. Some of them laughed, too, but only some. Most realized they would also drown in the muck if the Algarvians attacked.

Magnulf pointed ahead. “There’s the village where we’re supposed to billet ourselves. Miserable little hole in the ground, isn’t it?”

Seen through spatters of rain, the village did look distinctly unappetizing. The thatch-roofed cottages weren’t much different from the ones in the village where he’d lived till the impressers dragged him into King Swemmel’s army. Two buildings were bigger than the rest. He knew what they’d be: a smithy and a tavern. The whole place, though, had a dispirited, rundown look to it. No one had bothered painting or whitewashing the houses for a long time. Sad clumps of dying grass stuck out of the ground here and there, like surviving bits of hair on the scalp of a man with a bad case of ringworm.

“Powers above,” Gernot muttered. “Why would anyone want to live in a dump like this?” Unlike his comrades, he hadn’t been dragged off a farm, but from the streets of Cottbus. He was vague about what he’d done on the streets of Cottbus, which naturally made Leudast figure he had good reason to be vague.

Magnulf said, “It’ll be better than spending time under canvas, anyway.”

“Aye, so it will,” Leudast said, and wished he sounded more as if he believed it.
Maybe it’s the rain,
he thought. With the sun shining, the place had to look better. It could hardly have looked worse.

A dog started barking as the Unkerlanter soldiers drew near the village, and then another and another, till they sounded like a pack of wolves in full cry. One of them, about as big and mean-looking as a wolf, stalked toward the soldiers stiff-legged and growling. They shouted and cursed at it. Somebody threw a glob of mud that caught it on the end of the nose. The dog let out a startled yip and sat back on its haunches.

“That was well done,” Magnulf said. “We’d have had to blaze the cursed cur if it kept coming on.”

None of the other dogs seemed quite so bold, for which Leudast was duly grateful. They kept on barking, though. Doors in the peasants’ huts opened. Men and women came out—not far, staying under the protection of the overhanging eaves—to stare at the soldiers. Save only that the men let their whiskers grow, they might have been Unkerlanter peasants.

Leudast shook his head. Now that the Twinkings War was over, peasants would have looked at the soldiers with pity in their eyes, not the sullen hatred on the faces of these people.

Magnulf nudged him with an elbow. “You can make more sense of their language than the rest of us. Let ‘em know what we’re here for.”

“Aye, Sergeant,” Leudast said resignedly. More often than not, speaking a dialect of Unkerlanter close to Forthwegian came in handy. He had no trouble making taverners understand what he wanted. In the last village where the squad had been stationed, he’d talked a reasonably pretty girl into sleeping with him. But he sometimes got more work to do, too, as now. Turning to the villagers, he asked, “Who is the firstman here?”

No one said anything. No one moved. “Do they know what you’re saying?” Magnulf asked.

“They know, Sergeant. They just don’t want to give me the time of day,” Leudast answered. “I can fix that.” He spoke to the Forthwegians again: “We will stay here. Tell me who the firstman is. We will put more men in his house.”

Magnulf chuckled. So did a couple of other men. Leudast had never known an Unkerlanter village where very many people loved their firstman. From what he’d seen, the Forthwegians weren’t much different there.

And, sure enough, several of them looked toward a stern-faced fellow with an iron-gray beard. He glared at them and at the Unkerlanters in turn, as if trying to decide whom he hated more. His wife, who stood beside him, had no doubts. Could her eyes have blazed, she would have knocked down all her neighbors.

“You are the firstman?” Leudast asked.

“I am the firstman,” the Forthwegian said. “I am called Arnulf.” It might have been an Unkerlanter name. “What do you want with us?” Now that he had decided to speak, he spoke slowly and clearly, so Leudast could follow. He sounded like a man of some education, which was not what Leudast would have expected from anyone in a place like this.

“We are to stay here,” Leudast answered. “Show us houses where we can stay.” He said no more about billeting extra men on Arnulf.

“How long are you to stay here?” the firstman asked.

Leudast shrugged. “Until our officers order us to go.”

Arnulf’s wife wailed and turned that terrible scowl on the firstman. “It could be forever!” She tugged at Arnulf’s sleeve. “Make them leave. Make them go away.”

“And how am I to do that?” he demanded in loud, heavy exasperation. She spoke a couple of sentences in Forthwegian too quick and slangy for Leudast to follow. Her husband made a fist and made as if to thump her with it. She snarled at him. Several of the Unkerlanter soldiers behind Leudast laughed. They, or men in their villages, kept women in line the same way.

“Show us houses where we can stay,” Leudast repeated. “Otherwise, we will pick the houses ourselves.” Arnulf’s face stayed blank. Leudast tried again, substituting
choose
for
pick.
The firstman got it then. He didn’t like it, but he got it.

Scowling more darkly than ever, he asked, “How many houses?”

Leudast had to relay that to Magnulf, who answered, “Five houses,” and held up his hand with the fingers spread. To Leudast, he said, “Two of our boys in each house and they won’t get tempted to try anything cute.”

“You will want food, too,” Arnulf said, as if hoping Leudast would contradict him. Leudast didn’t. Sighing, the firstman said, “The whole village will share in feeding you.” He started pointing at villagers.

All five of the ones he picked shouted and cursed and stomped their feet, none of which did them any good. Arnulf’s wife screeched something at them that Leudast, again, couldn’t quite follow. The villagers did, though, and fell silent. They might not like the idea of having Unkerlanters quartered among them, but they didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Arnulf’s wife, either.

“This village will go hungry if we have to feed you through the winter,” Arnulf said.

“Something worse will happen to you if you don’t,” Leudast told him. He got another vicious glare for that.

The villager whose hut he and Gernot went to take over had sons too young to have fought in the war. His wife was severely plain. However unhappy they looked, however hard they pretended not to understand Leudast’s stabs at Forthwegian, they would have been more worried and surly still had they had daughters. Leudast was sure of that. Maybe Arnulf hadn’t chosen only people he disliked.

Gernot complained about the porridge and cheese and black bread and almonds and salted olives they got to eat. “What’s wrong with this stuff?” Leudast asked, puzzled. “Better than our rations, and that’s the truth.” He’d grown up eating just this sort of food.

“Boring.” Gernot rolled his eyes. “Very boring.” Leudast shrugged. His belly was full. He’d never found that boring.

After a few days, he might have been living back in his own village, except he didn’t have to work so hard here. No one had to work so hard as a peasant, not even a soldier. The squad patrolled the surrounding countryside—they weren’t far from Algarvian-occupied Forthweg—and returned to eat and rest and amuse themselves. The villagers didn’t love them, but their loathing grew less overt.