Through the Darkness

King Tsavellas’ men fought more bravely now than they had then. They kept trying to hold back the Unkerlanter flood, and they forced pauses-- but never for long. Behemoths and dragons and eggs raining down from fast-moving tossers soon overwhelmed them. It was, Leudast thought, the way the Algarvians had won so many victories against his own countrymen. Curse me if our officers haven’t learned something after all.

But, especially after their first lines were breached, most of the Yaninans either ran away or threw down their sticks and threw up their hands. They went into captivity with smiles on their faces--relieved smiles at still being alive or sheepish smiles at being captured in a kingdom that didn’t belong to them.

“Not my war,” one of them said in oddly accented Unkerlanter as he surrendered to Leudast. “Algarve’s war.” He spat on the dirt. “This for Algarve.”

“Aye, that for Algarve.” Leudast spat, too. “So what were you doing fighting for the redheads, then?”

“I no fight, they blaze me,” the Yaninan answered. To Unkerlanter eyes, he was a sorry, scrawny little man, with a mustache too big for his face. He shrugged and shivered. “I fight. Till now.”

“Go on.” Leudast pointed back toward the east. Lots of scrawny little Yaninans were shambling off into captivity. They held their hands high to keep King Swemmel’s advancing soldiers from blazing them.

Leudast knew a certain amount of sympathy for the Yaninan. He hadn’t wanted to go into the Unkerlanter army, either. When the impressers grabbed him, though, he’d had no choice. King Swemmel’s servants might not have been so gentle as just to blaze him had he tried to tell them no.

That night, he and Lieutenant Recared and half a dozen soldiers crowded into an abandoned peasant hut. Recared was jubilant. “We have them on the run, by the powers above,” he said. “They can’t hold us back. Once we broke through this morning, we sealed their fate.”

“Aye, so far, so good,” Leudast agreed, rubbing his leg. It ached; he hadn’t expected to use it so hard. He wished he could rest it come tomorrow. But he’d be marching just as hard then, and he knew it. He also didn’t want Recared making too much of what the army had accomplished. “You have to remember, these are only Yaninans. It’ll be a lot tougher when we have to deal with the redheads.”

Most of the men in the hut had seen more action than Recared. Several of them nodded. But Recared said, “Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter. Aye, the Algarvians are tough, but there aren’t enough of them to go around. If we break through these weak sisters, we can cement our positions and make the Algarvians try to bang their way out of Sulingen against us.”

Leudast didn’t like the prospect of Algarvians trying to bang their way out of anywhere, especially not if they were going to try to do it through a position he was holding. They’d already pulled off too many astounding and appalling things. Why wouldn’t they be able to manage one more?

But no sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a possible answer occurred to him. Thoughtfully, he said, “There’s already snow on the ground. Mezentio’s men don’t do so well in snow.”

He didn’t love snow himself. But if he wasn’t better in it than any Algarvian ever born, what good was he? He rolled himself in his blanket, huddled up against the rest of the Unkerlanters in the tumbledown shack, and slept, if not well, then well enough.

Recared roused the soldiers before sunup. “We go hard today,” he said. “We go as hard tomorrow. Then, with luck, the next day--we win glory for our king. This is the most efficient attack we’ve ever carried out.”

There Leudast could hardly argue with him. Most of what he ate for breakfast was what he’d stolen from Yaninans. That was efficient, too. He wiped his hands on his tunic, left the hut, and tramped east.

Till noon, or a little after, everything went as it had the day before. Scattered and stubborn regiments of Yaninans fought hard. Their countrymen went right on giving up by the hundreds, by the thousands. Then the first Algarvian dragons appeared overhead. Some of them dropped eggs on the Unkerlanters. Others attacked their footsoldiers and, wherever they could, their behemoths.

Staring at the burnt carcass of a behemoth roasted in its own chainmail, Leudast cursed. “I knew we weren’t going to have it all our own way,” he told the cloudy sky.

He waited for Algarvian footsoldiers to stiffen the Yaninans, too. But no redheads came to the rescue of King Tsavellas’ men. And there were more Unkerlanter dragons in the air than those belonging to their enemies. The Algarvian dragonfliers stung the Unkerlanter army in a few places. Without steady soldiers on the ground to back them up, they could do no more than sting.