Into The Darkness

He bowed again. "Milady, just hope we're giving the Jelgavans worse than we're getting. The news sheets say we are. Every braggart blabbing out of a crystal says we are, but how do we know? The Jelgavans' news sheets are bound to be telling them they're beating the stuffing out of us."

"How long have you been a constable, young fellow?" the woman asked, a hint of amusement in her voice.

Bembo wondered what was funny. "Almost ten years, milady."

The old woman nodded. "That appears to be enough to have left you a profoundly cynical man."

"Thank you," he said. She laughed out loud. For the life of him, he couldn't figure out why.

With the dawn, Talsu peered down from the Bradano Mountains into Algarve. Smoke rose from the burning town of Tricarico. He smiled. His officers had assured him that Jelgava was doing far more damage to Algarve than the cowardly Algarvian air pirates were inflicting on his own kingdom.

His officers had also assured him that soon, very soon, Jelgava's ever victorious forces would sweep out of the mountains and across the plains of Algarve. The Jelgavan army had visited fire and devastation on those plains in the last months of the Six Years' War. He saw no reason why Jelgava should not do the same thing again.

He saw no reason why Jelgava should not already have done it again, in fact. All of Algarve's neighbors hated her. All of them that mattered were at war against her. They were many. She was one, and beset from east and west and south. Why, then, were his countrymen not yet out of the mountains and racing to Join hands with the Forthwegians? He scratched at his almost invisibly pale mustache, which he wore close trimmed, not in any wild Algarvian style. It was a puzzlement.

A delicious smell distracted him. Turning his head, he saw Colonel Dzirnavu's servant carrying a covered silver tray toward the regimental commander's tent. "Ha, Vartu, what have you got there?" he asked.

"His lordship's breakfast - what else?" the servant answered.

Talsu made an exasperated noise. "I didn't think it was the chamber pot," he said. "What I meant was, what will the illustrious count enjoy for his breakfast?"

"Not much, if I'm any judge," Vartu said, rolling his eyes. "But if you mean, Mat is he having for breakfast? - I've got fresh-baked blueberry tarts here, and poached eggs and bacon on toasted bread with butter sauce poured over them, and some nice ripe cheese, and a muskmelon from by the seashore. And in the pot - not a chamber pot, mind you - is tea flavored with bergamot leaves."

"Stop!" Talsu held up a hand. "You're breaking my heart." His belly rumbled. "You're breaking my stomach, too," he added.

"See what you rruiss because the blood in your veins isn't blue enough?" Vartu said. "Red blood's good enough to spill for our dear Jelgava, so it is, but it won't get you a breakfast like this at the front, no indeed. And now I've got to get moving. If the hot stuff gets cold or the cold stuff warms up, the other thing his lordship will bite off is my head."

Neither soldier had spoken loudly; the colonel's tent lay only fifteen or twenty feet away. Vartu ducked inside. "Curse you, what took you so long?" Dzirnavu shouted. "Are you trying to starve me to death?"

"I humbly crave pardon, your lordship," Vartu answered, abject as a servant had to be in the face of a noble's wrath. Talsu jammed his own face against the brownish green sleeve of his uniform tunic so no one would hear him giggle. Dzirnavu was as round as a kickball. He looked as if he'd take years without food to starve to death.

With the regimental commander's breakfast attended to, the cooks could get around to feeding the rest of the soldiers. Talsu lined up with the other men in tunics and trousers of the same horse-dung color as his. When he finally got up to the kettles, he held out a tin plate and a wooden cup.

One bored-looking cook plopped a ladleful of barley mush and a length of grayish sausage on the plate. Another poured sour beer into the cup.

"My favorites," Talsu said: "dead man's cock and what he pissed through it."

"Listen to the funny man," said one of the cooks, who'd probably heard the stale joke two or three times already. "Get out of here, funny man, before you end up wearing this pot."

"Your sweetheart's the one who knows about dead man's cock," the other cook put in.

"Your wife, you mean." Laughing, Talsu sat down on a rock, took the knife from his belt, and cut off a bite-sized chunk of sausage. It was greasy, and would have been flavorless except that it was heading toward stale. Along with the porridge, it filled his belly. That was the most he would say for it. He wondered if Colonel Dzirnavu had ever tasted what his men ate. He doubted it. If Dzirnavu tasted sausage like that, the Algarvians in Tricarico would hear him screaming.