Out of the Darkness

An egg flew in from the east and hit a house in the village Garivald’s company had just taken away from the Algarvians. Chunks of the house flew out in all directions. A spinning board knocked down an Unkerlanter soldier standing only a couple of feet from Garivald. He started to get up, then clapped a hand to the small of his back and let out a yip of pain. The house fell in on itself and started to burn.

A Forthwegian couple in the middle of the street started howling. Garivald presumed it was their house. He couldn’t make out much of what they were saying. To a Grelzer like him, this east-Forthwegian dialect made even less sense than the variety of the language people around Eoforwic spoke. Not only were the sounds a little different, a lot of the words sounded nothing at all like their Unkerlanter equivalents. He wondered if they were borrowed from Algarvian.

Another egg flew in. This one burst farther away. The crash that followed said somebody’s home would never be the same. Shrieks rose immediately thereafter. Somebody’s life would never be the same.

My life will never be the same, either, Garivald thought. Powers below eat the Algarvians. It’s their fault, curse them. I’d sooner be back in Zossen, drinking my way through the winter and waiting for spring. Neither Zossen nor the family he’d had there existed any more. He turned to Lieutenant Andelot. “Sir, we ought to get rid of that miserable egg-tosser.”

“I know, Sergeant Fariulf,” Andelot answered. “But we’ve come so far so fast, we can’t sweep up everything as neatly as we want to. On the scale of the war as a whole, that tosser doesn’t mean much.”

“No, sir,” Garivald agreed. “But it’s liable to take some nasty bites out of us.” He thought for a moment. “I could probably sneak my squad through the redheads’ lines and take it out. Things are all topsy-turvy-they won’t have had the time to get proper trenches dug or anything like that.”

What am I saying? he wondered. Go after an egg-tosser behind the enemy’s line? Have I lost all of my mind, or do I really want to kill myself?

Andelot also studied him with a certain curiosity. “We don’t see volunteers as often as we’d like,” he remarked. “Aye, go on, Sergeant. Choose the men you’d like to have with you. I think you can do it, too.” He pointed southeastward. “Most of the redheads in these parts are falling back on that town called Gromheort. They’ll stand siege there, unless I miss my guess, and getting them out won’t come easy or cheap.” With a shrug, he went on, “Nothing but Algarve beyond, though. As I say, pick your men, Sergeant. Let’s get on with it.”

The men Garivald did pick looked imperfectly enamored of him. He understood that; he was giving them the chance to get killed. But he had an argument they couldn’t top: “I’m going along with you. If I can do it, you can cursed well do it with me.”

Behind his back, somebody said, “You’re too ugly for me to want to do it with you, Sergeant.” Garivald laughed along with the rest of the soldiers who heard. He couldn’t help himself. But he didn’t stop picking men.

Before they set out from the village, though, a couple of squadrons of dragons painted rock-gray flew over the place out of the west. “Hold up, Fariulf,” Andelot said. “Maybe they’ll do our job for us.”

“They should have done it already,” Garivald said. Even so, he wasn’t sorry to raise his hand. None of the men he’d chosen tried to talk him out of waiting. He would have been astonished if anyone had.

That one Algarvian tosser hadn’t had many eggs to fling. The distant thunder of the eggs the Unkerlanter dragons dropped brought smiles to all the men in rock-gray who heard it. “Don’t know whether they’ll flatten that egg-tosser or not,” a soldier said. “Any which way, though, the redheads are catching it.”

Only silence followed the edge of the thunder. No more eggs came down on the Forthwegian village. Andelot beamed. “That’s pretty efficient,” he said. “Maybe we’ll be able to get a decent night’s sleep here.”

Not everybody would get a decent night’s sleep. Andelot made sure he had plenty of sentries facing east. Had Garivald been the Algarvian commander, he wouldn’t have tried a night attack. But the redheads were still dedicated counter-punchers. He’d seen that. Given even the slightest opening, they would hit back, and hit back hard.

Crickets were chirping not far from the campfire by which Garivald sat when Andelot came up to him and asked, “Got a moment, Fariulf?”