Darkness Descending

He trotted forward through fields of growing wheat that might never be harvested. He wished he were dressed in green, not rock-gray. How far forward had the Algarvians moved their outposts during the night? One way to find out was to get blazed by a redhead. Somebody was liable to find out that way. He hoped he wouldn’t be the one.

Eggs started falling on the advancing troops. The Algarvians were demons for making their egg-tossers keep up with the rest of the army. Here, though, they were tossing a little long, so they did less harm than they might have.

Before they could correct their aim, flashes of sorcerous energy came from inside Pfreimd. Leudast let out a glad, startled whoop, then turned it into words: “We’ve got egg-tossers of our own in the fight.” He shook his fist in the direction of the village. “How do you Algarvians like it, curse you?”

He didn’t think the Algarvians liked it at all. Dishing it out was always easier than taking it. The eggs the Unkerlanters flung at the redheads must have put a couple of their tossers out of action, for the rain of eggs down onto the advancing Unkerlanter regiment slowed.

Leudast waved men forward as he himself ran on. Maybe Captain Hawart hadn’t been trying to get what was left of the regiment killed after all. Familiar-looking thatch-roofed houses--some amazingly intact, others nothing but charred ruins--swelled in Leudast’s sight as he drew near them.

“Unkerlant!” he yelled. “King Swemmel! Urra! Urra!”

More Unkerlanter eggs fell on Pfreimd. They would make the Algarvians holed up in the village keep their heads down. With a little luck, that creek on the other side of Pfreimd would become the front line once more. A barricade of Algarvian corpses might keep the defenders safe.

Troopers started blazing at the nearest houses, houses in which the redheads might be lurking. Where beams struck it, thatching began to smolder. So did some of the timbers. Before long, those houses would catch fire. The Algarvians would have to come forth or roast.

In the meanwhile, though, they fought. Beams began cutting down the Unkerlanters advancing on the village. A near miss charred a line through the grass by Leudast’s feet. He threw himself down behind a rock that wasn’t really big enough to shield him and blazed back.

After a moment to gather himself, he was up and running again. Then he was in among the houses of the village, and discovered that the Algarvians hadn’t merely taken cover in them. The redheads had also dug trenches and foxholes by the houses and in the village square. They resisted with everything they had, too, and seemed not in the least inclined to give up Pfreimd.

Well, if they won’t, we’ll have to take it away from them, Leudast thought. He blazed at a redhead in a hole. The fellow reeled back, clutching at himself.

“Surrender!” an Unkerlanter officer shouted in Algarvian. That was a word Leudast had learned.

“Mezentio!” was the only answer the officer got. The Algarvians intended to fight it out in the village. Captain Hawart had said reinforcements were coming to help the regiment he commanded these days. Leudast wondered if the redheads expected help from their friends, too.

If they did, best to finish them now, before that help arrived. “Follow me!” Leudast shouted to his comrades and leaped down into the trenches. To his vast relief, the Unkerlanters he led did follow. Had they hung back, he wouldn’t have lasted long.

As things were, he’d never found himself in such a vicious little fight. The Algarvians might have been used to overwhelming all the foes in their path, but they did not shy away from combat with the odds against them. Nor did they hang back from fighting at close quarters. Some of the work Leudast did was with his stick used as a club and with his knife: warfare as it had been in the days of the Kaunian Empire, and even before.

The last few Algarvians threw down their sticks and surrendered. They looked as frightened as Leudast would have had he been trying to yield to them. “They aren’t nine feet tall and covered with spines after all,” he said to Magnulf.

“No, so they’re not,” Magnulf agreed. He was tying a rag around his arm. Blood soaked through the wool; one of the Algarvians had had a knife, too. “Not too bad,” he told Leudast. “Should heal well enough--and that cursed redhead isn’t going to stick anybody else, believe you me he won’t.”

“Good,” Leudast said. He thought he’d come through without a scratch till he discovered a cut on one leg. He had no idea when he’d got it. In the heat of battle, he hadn’t noticed it till now.