Darkness Descending

Still shouting “Urra!” Unkerlanters swarmed across the path. Tealdo blazed one down, but then had to scramble back frantically to keep from being cut off and surrounded. All at once, he understood how the Forthwegians and Sibians and Valmierans and Jelgavans--aye, and the Unkerlanters, too--must have felt when King Mezentio’s armies struck them. He would sooner have done without the lesson.

Mezentio and the Algarvian generals had outplanned their foes as well as beaten them on the battlefield. The Unkerlanters here in this stretch of wood showed no such inspired generalship. All they had were numbers and ferocity. Tealdo tripped over a root and fell headlong. Those were liable to be enough.

“Rally by squads!” Captain Galafrone shouted, somewhere not too far away.

“To me! To me!” That was Sergeant Panfilo. Never had his raucous voice seemed so welcome to Tealdo.

As Tealdo made his way toward Panfilo, Galafrone shouted again, this time for his crystallomancer. Tealdo’s lips skinned back from his teeth. One way or another, the Unkerlanters were going to catch it.

He only hoped he didn’t catch it first. Along with Trasone, he found Sergeant Panfilo. They all had to keep falling back, though, ever deeper among the trees. Tealdo began to wonder if they would run into still more Unkerlanters there. He would hear cries of “Urra!” and “Swemmel!” in his nightmares as long as he lived. He hoped he lived long enough to have nightmares.

He cheered when eggs started falling among the Unkerlanters who’d broken the Algarvian grip on the path. He cheered again when shouts of “Mezentio!” rang out from the east, and yet again when the Unkerlanters started yelling in dismay rather than in fury.

As Algarvian reinforcements struck the Unkerlanters, the pressure on Galafrone’s company eased. “Powers above be praised for crystallomancers,” Panfilo said, wiping sweat from his face.

“Aye.” Tealdo and Trasone spoke together. Trasone went on, “Say whatever you want about these cursed Unkerlanters, but going up against them isn’t like fighting the Jelgavans or the Valmierans. We’ll lick ‘em, aye, but they don’t know they’re licked yet, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s the truth.” Tealdo turned around, still nervous lest some Unkerlanters come at him from behind. “Uh-oh.” He caught a glimpse of light brown kilt behind a bush. By the way the Algarvian soldier lay, Tealdo knew the fellow had to be dead. He looked around, but all his companions--all the men who’d rallied to Sergeant Panfilo--were still standing. He took a few steps forward, then stopped in his tracks.

Panfilo and Trasone followed him. Trasone gulped. “Powers above,” Panfilo said softly.

The Algarvians, half a dozen of them, looked to have been dead for a couple of days. Maybe they’d been caught in the earlier Unkerlanter counterattack in the woods. The guard on the path had had the right of it. They hadn’t been blazed. They hadn’t had their throats cut. They’d been gruesomely and systematically mutilated. Most of them had their kilts hiked up. What the Unkerlanters had done down there ...

In a sick voice, Trasone said, “We haven’t fought a war like this for a long time.”

“Well, we are now,” Tealdo said grimly. “I don’t think I want to be taken alive, doesn’t look like. If I can’t find some way to kill myself, I’d sooner have a friend do it than go through . . . that.” One by one, the other Algarvians nodded.

Waddo strode out into the middle of Zossen’s village square. Garivald, watching from the edge of the square, found the stocky village firstman’s walk curious: half the limping swagger he usually used, half a nervous, almost slinking step, as if “Waddo also feared the pride he so often displayed.

Garivald, for once, felt a certain sympathy for the firstman. Waddo had been reporting the iniquities of the Algarvians, all of them lovingly detailed on the crystal that had recently come to the Unkerlanter village. Like everyone else in Zossen, Garivald had expected the next bombastic announcement would be of the Unkerlanter invasion of Algarvian-occupied Forthweg, and probably of Yanina as well. Instead, a few days before, the crystal announced that the Algarvians had without warning attacked Unkerlanter forces engaged in no warlike activity. A palace spokesman had declared that the Algarvians would be beaten. He had not said how.

Since then, silence.

Silence till now, silence that let fear build, especially among the older villagers who remembered how the Algarvians had hammered Unkerlant during the Six Years’ War thirty years before. Gossip and rumor filled Zossen--and doubtless filled every other peasant village throughout the vast length and breadth of Unkerlant. Garivald had taken part, cautiously, with people he trusted. “If things were going well,” he’d said to Dagulf, “Cottbus would be shouting its head off. It’s not. That means things can’t be going well.”