Through the Darkness

Recared had guessed four or five days. He was young. He believed things always went just as planned. That made him overoptimistic. But, just over a week after the Unkerlanters started their push, Leudast saw men coming toward him who did not shy away as the Yaninans did. They were solid, blocky men in long tunics, men who shouted in delight when they saw him.

He folded one of them into a bear hug. “By the powers above, we’ve got the redheads in a sack!” he shouted, and tears of joy streamed down his grimy, unshaven cheeks.

“Step it up, there!” Sergeant Werferth shouted. “It’s not a game, you lugs. We don’t get to start over. Move, curse you all!”

Sidroc did some cursing of his own. He was cold and tired and hungry. He wanted to hole up somewhere with a bottle of brandy and a roast goose. He hadn’t fully realized when he joined Plegmund’s Brigade that there was no such thing as time off. When the underofficers and officers set over him told him to do something, he had to do it. He’d already seen the sorts of things that happened to men who didn’t do as they were told. He wasn’t interested in having any of those things happen to him.

He scratched. He itched, too. He itched everywhere. When he complained about it, the trooper nearest him, the ruffian named Ceorl, started to laugh. “You’re a lousy whoreson, just like the rest of us.”

He meant it literally. Sidroc needed a moment to realize that. When he did, he started cursing all over again. He’d grown up in a prosperous household in Gromheort. Lice were for filthy people, for poor people, not for the likes of him.

But he was filthy. He could hardly help being filthy. When he slept indoors at all, he slept in huts that had belonged to filthy Unkerlanter peasants. If they had lice--and they likely did--how could he help getting them? For that matter, he was poor. Nobody got rich on the pay in Plegmund’s Brigade.

“Come on!” Werferth shouted again, with profane embellishment. “Swemmel’s bastards went and gave Algarve a boot in the nuts, and now it’s up to us to pay ‘em back. And we’ll do it, too, right?”

“I’m going to pay somebody back for making me slog through this miserable, freezing country,” Sidroc growled.

Ceorl laughed again, even less pleasantly than before. “You think it’s cold now, wait a couple months. Your joint’ll freeze off when you whip it out to take a leak.”

“Powers below eat you, too.” But Sidroc made sure he spoke lightly. Ceorl was not a man to curse in earnest unless you intended to back up the words with fists or knife or stick.

An Algarvian captain swaggered along, looking altogether superior to the Forthwegians around him. Sidroc didn’t think he was lousy; no lice would have dared crawl through that perfectly combed coppery hair. But even the officer looked worried. As Werferth had said, the Unkerlanters had hit Algarve where it hurt.

“Up to us to save their bacon, boys,” the sergeant said. “But it’s our bacon, too. That army in Sulingen goes up in flames, we burn with it.”

Where nothing else had, that got Sidroc’s attention. He didn’t want to die anywhere. He especially didn’t want to die here in the chilly wastes of southern Unkerlant. “I see how Swemmel’s men got to be such whoresons,” he said to Ceorl. “If I lived in this miserable place, I’d be mean, too.”

The ruffian laughed, the smoke from his breath puffing out as he did. “I’m from Forthweg, by the powers above, and I’m the meanest whoreson around. Anybody who says different, I’ll deal with him.”

“Shut up, Ceorl,” Werferth said. “You want to be a mean son of a whore, take it out on the Unkerlanters, not on my ears.”

Ceorl scowled at him. But Werferth was not only a tough customer himself, he was also a sergeant. If Ceorl tangled with him, he didn’t tangle with him alone, but also with the entire structure of Plegmund’s Brigade--and ultimately with the Algarvian army, to which the brigade was attached.

“Keep your eyes open. Ears, too,” Werferth added. “We’re liable to run into irregulars--and we’re liable to run into real Unkerlanter soldiers, to boot. Since they came swarming out at us, powers above only know where they’re all at right now.”

Sidroc’s head swiveled now to one side, now to the other. All he saw were snow-covered fields. By the way his sergeant and the Algarvian officers had warned the brigade, those fields might hold thousands of bloodthirsty Unkerlanters in white smocks, every one of them ready to spring to his feet and charge with a roar of “Urra!”

They might. Sidroc didn’t believe it, not for a minute. The fields were just fields, the bare-branched woods farther away just woods. He didn’t see any Unkerlanters anywhere. Nobody rose up out of the fields with fierce shouts of “Urra!”--or with any other shouts, for that matter. The countryside, having been fought over, was as empty and dead as it looked.