Through the Darkness

He was, then, the wrong man to greet the dapper officer who came up to the front with a fancy stick that had a spyglass screwed to the top of it. “Is this where we’ve had trouble with snipers?” the fellow demanded.

“What if it is?” Trasone growled. Belatedly--very belatedly--he added, “Sir?”

“I am Colonel the Count Casmiro,” the officer replied in a snooty accent that said he’d been born and raised in Trapani, no matter where he’d hunted big game. “You will have heard of me.” He struck a pose.

Trasone, worn and filthy and burning inside, was in no mood to back down from anybody. “Blaze the bastard who bagged my battalion commander and I’ll have heard of you. Till then, you can go jump off the fornicating cliffs into the fornicating Wolter for all I care.”

Casmiro’s nose was almost as beaky as King Mezentio’s. He looked at Trasone down it. “Curb your tongue,” he said. “I can have you punished.”

“How?” Trasone threw back his head and laughed in Casmiro’s face. “What can you do to me that’s worse than this?”

The hulking trooper waited to see if Colonel Casmiro had an answer for him. The Algarvian noble pushed past him toward the front, muttering, “I will rid the world of that Unkerlanter for good and all.”

“He doesn’t lack for confidence,” Sergeant Panfilo observed when Trasone recounted the conversation to him. The sergeant laughed. “Why should he? He’s an Algarvian, after all.”

“He’s an officer, too,” Trasone said darkly.

Casmiro prowled the forwardmost trenches and foxholes all that day, flitting from one pile of ruined brickwork to the next as if he were a ghost. He did know something--quite a bit--about moving without drawing notice. At some point that afternoon, Trasone wrapped himself in his blanket and went to sleep. When he woke, night had fallen--and Colonel Casmiro was nowhere to be found.

A pot full of pillaged buckwheat groats and what was probably dog meat interested Trasone more, anyhow. Only after he’d filled his belly did he bother asking, “Where’d that know-it-all sniper get to?”

“He crawled out toward the Unkerlanters,” somebody answered.

“Where’d he go?” Trasone asked.

No one knew. A soldier said, “You don’t want to stick your head up to find out, you know what I mean? Not when Swemmel’s stinking whoresons’ll drill you a new ear hole first chance they get.”

“That’s the truth--no doubt about it.” Trasone felt better for some food in him. The Unkerlanters weren’t tossing very many eggs. After their raid the night before, they didn’t try another one. Nobody ordered the Algarvians forward in a night attack. Trasone cleaned his mess tin and went back to sleep. No one bothered him till dawn. That left him only about a year behind.

When he woke, he yawned and stretched and made his slow, careful way up to the front. He didn’t think it was light enough for Swemmel’s soldiers to have an easy time spying him and blazing him, but he didn’t want to find out he was wrong, either. “Anything going on?” he asked when he reached the battered trenches nearest the enemy.

“Seems quiet enough,” answered one of the men unlucky enough to be there already.

“Any sign of the sniper?” Trasone asked. Everybody shook his head.

Cautiously, Trasone looked out from the rubble the Algarvians occupied toward the rubble the Unkerlanters still held. He saw no trace of Colonel Casmiro. With a shrug, he ducked down again. “Maybe the powers below ate him,” he said, and his comrades laughed. They had no love for snipers on either side. He doubted whether even Swemmel’s men loved snipers on either side.

It was a quiet day, punctuated only by occasional screams. He had time to wonder how Major Spinello was doing, and if Spinello was doing at all. After darkness fell--and it fell horribly early--Colonel Casmiro appeared, complete with his stick with the spyglass on it, for all the world as if he’d been conjured up. He might have been speaking of leopards or large flightless birds when he said, “I bagged four today.”

“Where were you hiding, sir?” Trasone asked, and the master sniper gave him nothing but a smug smile. Trasone found another question: “Any sign of the bugger who’s been blazing us?”

“Not a single one,” Casmiro answered. “I begin to doubt he’s there anymore.” Even in those dismal surroundings, he managed a swagger; he would have got on well with Spinello. “He likely got word I was coming and fled.”

“Here’s hoping,” Trasone said. As long as the Unkerlanter sniper wouldn’t put a beam between his eyes, he cared about nothing else.

But Casmiro said, “No, I want him dead at my hands. In his last moment of pain, I want him to know I am his master.”

Day after day, the count and colonel went out before dawn and came back after sunset with tales of Unkerlanters he’d blazed. But he saw no sign of the enemy sniper. Neither did Trasone--till two of his countrymen in quick succession died after incautiously exposing a tiny part of their persons for half a heartbeat.