Out of the Darkness

And if we’re such splendid soldiers, what are we doing fighting way back here in the middle of Forthweg? he asked himself. He knew the answer perfectly well: enough indifferent soldiers could overwhelm a smaller number of good ones. They could, aye. But, when King Mezentio ordered the Algarvian army into Unkerlant, who had imagined that they might? Mezentio hadn’t. Spinello was sure of that.

Shouldn’t he have? Spinello wondered. He just assumed Unkerlant would fall to pieces, the way all our other enemies did when we hit them. He peered across the river again. He couldn’t see any Unkerlanter soldiers stirring about, but he knew they were there. It didn‘t work out quite the way Mezentio and the generals thought it would. Too bad.

A few eggs burst on this side of the Twegen, but not close enough to make him do anything but note them. It was, on the whole, a quiet day. Before long, he feared, Swemmel’s men would burst out of their bridgeheads north and south of Eoforwic. They would probably try to cut off and surround the city, as they had with Sulingen. He wondered if the battered Algarvian forces in the neighborhood could stop them. He had his doubts, though he would have gone on the rack before admitting as much.

And if the Unkerlanters do cut us off? Well, then things will be. . pretty bad.

Motion he caught out of the corner of his eye made him whirl, stick swinging up ready to blaze. But it was only a couple of Hilde’s Helpers, the Forthwegian women who worked hard to keep the Algarvians in Eoforwic fed. Some of them-not all-kept the Algarvians happy other ways, too. But a man had to listen if one of them said no. Offending them might mean going hungry, and that would have been very bad.

They wore hooded cloaks over their long, baggy tunics. One of them came up to Spinello and the trooper in the hole with him. She took a loaf from under the cloak and gave it to Spinello. “Bread with olive,” she said in bad Algarvian. “I myself to bake.”

“Thank you, sweetheart.” Spinello bowed as if she were a duchess. He tried talking with her for a little while, but she didn’t speak enough of his language to follow much, and he had next to no Forthwegian.

We could probably get along in classical Kaunian, he thought. He was fluent in the language of scholarship and sorcery, and in Forthweg, as nowhere else, it remained a living language, too. Many Forthwegians had learned it to deal with their Kaunian neighbors.

But Spinello didn’t try it. Most Kaunians who had lived in Forthweg were dead by now, slain to fuel Algarve’s sorcerous onslaught against Unkerlant. And most Forthwegians weren’t particularly sorry about that. Had they been, the Algarvians would have had a much harder time doing what they’d done. So no, classical Kaunian didn’t seem like a good idea.

He tore the loaf in half and gave one piece to the soldier in the hole with him. They both ate greedily. “Powers above, that’s good!” Spinello exclaimed. The trooper nodded, his cheeks as full of bread as a dormouse’s could get full of seeds.

The clouds were thick enough that nightfall took Spinello by surprise. He hadn’t expected it to get dark for some little while yet, and hadn’t seen anything in the least resembling a sunset. “Have to keep our eyes open,” he called to his men. “Swemmel’s buggers are liable to try to sneak raiders across the river.” They’d done that a couple of times lately, and created more chaos than the small number of soldiers who’d paddled across the Twegen should have been able to spawn.

But, a couple of hours later, two Algarvians came up to the river not far from where Spinello still kept his station. When he climbed out of his hole to find out what they were doing, one of them shook his head. “You haven’t seen us,” the fellow said. “We’ve never been here.”

“Talk sense,” Spinello snapped. “I command this brigade. If I say the word, you bloody well won’t have been here.”

Muttering, the man who’d spoken stepped closer to him, close enough to let him see the mage’s badge on the fellow’s tunic. “If you command this brigade, get us a little rowboat. I have work to do,” he said. “And if you try interfering with me, you’ll end up envying what happens to the cursed blonds, I promise you.”

Spinello almost told him to go futter himself. Outside the army, he would have. He’d come close to a couple of duels in his time. But discipline and curiosity both restrained him. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“My job,” the mage answered, which stirred Spinello’s temper all over again. “Now get me that boat.”