Out of the Darkness

“Let’s see how much longer the whoresons last,” Leudast muttered under his breath. If it turned out to be much longer, he would own himself surprised. Even as he muttered, Unkerlanter egg-tossers pounded the Gyongyosian positions near the western edge of the woods. He didn’t quite know how his countrymen had managed it, but they’d moved a lot of egg-tossers through the trees till they bore on the lines the Gongs still held.

Hardly any Gyongyosian egg-tossers answered back. The Algarvians had fought hard for as long as they could. Whenever King Swemmel’s men started flinging eggs at them, they’d responded sharply. That remained true up to the day they surrendered. They’d gone down, but they’d gone down swinging.

The Gyongyosians, by contrast, hardly seemed to believe what was hitting them. Things had been quiet here in the distant west for the past couple of years. Unkerlant had thrown as much as possible into the fight against Algarve, while the Gongs had taken their men farther west still to fight the Kuusamans in a watery sort of war Leudast didn’t pretend to understand.

He understood perfectly well the task lying ahead of him. Seizing his shiny bronze officer’s whistle, he blew till the shrill note made his ears ring. “Forward!” he shouted. “Now we take the land away from them!”

Forward his company went-one company among hundreds, more likely thousands. Forward went behemoths, down game tracks and sometimes down no tracks at all. Overhead, dragons dropped more eggs on the Gongs skulking in the forest and swooped low to incinerate whatever they found in clearings. No brightly painted Gyongyosian beasts rose to challenge them. They had the sky to themselves.

The terrain here was as rugged as any in which Leudast had fought on the other side of his kingdom. The woods west of Herborn weren’t a patch on these. They could have been swallowed up as if they never were, in fact. Leudast and his men had to pick their way forward past great tree trunks scattered and tumbled like so many jackstraws.

But the country in which they were fighting did more to hold them back than did the Gyongyosians. Here and there, a few tawny, shaggy-bearded men in leggings did keep blazing at them, but they overran those pockets of resistance like men beating boys. “Nothing’s going to slow us down now!” Leudast shouted exultantly. “It’s not like it was when we were fighting the fornicating Algarvians- it’ll be easy!”

Powers above, am I really saying things like that? he wondered. But he was. Even at the end of the war against the redheads, they’d been dangerous whenever they managed to scrape together enough men and beasts and eggs to make a stand or to counterattack, and they’d always looked for chances to hit back. The Gongs, by contrast, seemed stunned at the attack rolling over them.

For the first couple of days of that attack, Leudast knew it reminded him of something he’d been through before, but couldn’t put his finger on what. Then, encamped for the night in a clearing, he snapped his fingers in sudden realization. “What is it, sir?” one of his men asked.

He still had trouble getting used to being called sir. But that wasn’t the reason he answered, “Oh, nothing important.” All at once, he understood why the Gongs were acting as they were. The Unkerlanter army had behaved exactly the same way when the Algarvians swarmed over the border more than four years earlier. They’d been hit by a force not just stronger than they were but also almost beyond their comprehension. Gyongyos had never expected a blow like this.

Unkerlant, thanks to its vast spaces and dreadful winters, had managed to ride out the Algarvian storm. Leudast didn’t think the Gongs would be able to do the same. They didn’t have so much land to yield, and they did have another war to worry about: the fight on the Bothnian Ocean came closer to the offshore Balaton Islands, closer to Gyorvar itself, every day.

And so, while the Unkerlanters swarmed forward, a lot of Gyongyosian soldiers simply threw up their hands, threw down their sticks, and went off into captivity. Some of them looked relieved, some looked resigned. One, who spoke a little Unkerlanter, asked, “What you do, move here so fast?”

He got no answer. The guards leading him and his countrymen back toward the camps that would house them kept them moving. Even if someone had sat him down and explained exactly what the Unkerlanters were doing, he might not have understood it. Leudast wouldn’t have understood exactly what the redheads were doing just after they started doing it. All he would have known-all he had known at the time-was that something dreadful had happened to his countrymen.