Through the Darkness

And that suited him. Like most soldiers, he was no more anxious to fight than he had to be. He’d enjoyed terrorizing peasant villages back in the Duchy--no, the Kingdom--of Grelz. That was about his speed. He would have been perfectly happy to go right on doing it. But the Unkerlanters had pissed in the stewpot of the Algarvian campaign, and so here he was, soldiering for real.

“Dragons!” someone exclaimed in alarm, pointing south.

Sidroc stared that way in no small alarm himself, but only for an instant. The next thing he did was look around for a hole into which he might dive. He wasn’t thrilled with real soldiering, but he’d learned what mattered.

“They’re ours,” Werferth said in some relief.

Ceorl challenged him: “How do you know?” He might not want to brawl with the sergeant, but he didn’t mind giving him a hard time.

But Werferth had an answer for him: “Because they’re turning away from us instead of dropping eggs on our heads.”

Thin and faint in the distance, several eggs burst, one after another. Sidroc laughed. “No, they’re dropping ‘em on the Unkerlanters instead. Those bastards deserve it. I hope they all get smashed to bits.”

“They won’t.” Sergeant Werferth spoke with gloomy certainty. “And it’ll be up to the likes of us to stop the ones who’re left. You can count on that, too.” Now he pointed south. “Wherever those eggs are bursting, that’s where Swemmel’s men are at. If we can hear the eggs, they aren’t that far away. You want to go home to mother in one piece, stay awake.”

Going home to mother was not a choice Sidroc had. An Algarvian egg had taken care of that, back when the redheads overran Gromheort. And here he was, doing his best to get the Algarvians out of the soup. He shook his head as he trudged along. He’d watched Mezentio’s men ever since they entered his kingdom. They were strong. They had style. They’d smashed Forthweg into the dust. By joining them, didn’t he make himself strong and stylish?

What he’d made himself so far was cold and nervous. He trudged up to the top of a low rise and got the chance to do some pointing himself. “Isn’t that a village up ahead, here on this side of the stream?”

“That is a village.” An Algarvian officer behind him had heard his question, and chose to answer it. He spoke his own language, expecting Sidroc to understand. “The name of the village is Presseck. The stream is also the Presseck. There is a bridge over the Presseck in the village. We will occupy the village. We will hold the bridge. We will keep the Unkerlanters from crossing it.”

“Aye, sir,” Sidroc said. The redheads liked polite soldiers. They had plenty of ways to make you sorry if you weren’t polite, too. Sidroc had learned that back in his first training camp, outside of Eoforwic.

A few Unkerlanter peasants--old men and boys--came out of their huts to gape at the troopers from Plegmund’s Brigade. Their women stayed in hiding, or maybe they’d run away. Presseck looked to be as miserable a place as any other Unkerlanter village Sidroc had seen. The Presseck, however, was more nearly a river than a stream, and the bridge that spanned it a solid stone structure.

Sergeant Werferth pointed to that bridge. “You see why we may have to hold this place, boys. The Unkerlanters could put behemoths over it easy as you please, and we wouldn’t have a whole lot of fun if they did.”

Along with his comrades--except for the two squads the Algarvian officers ordered across to the south side of the Presseck--Sidroc ransacked the village. The women had fled. There wasn’t much food in Presseck, either. By the time the soldiers finished, there was less.

Mist rose from the stream as the sun set and day cooled toward evening. It spread through the village, turning the shacks into vague ghosts of themselves.

“Stay alert,” Werferth told his squad. “Anybody the Unkerlanters kill, he’ll answer to me.” The troopers had to work that one through before they chuckled or snorted.

Sidroc drew sentry duty just before dawn. He paced the narrow, filthy streets of Presseck, wishing he could see farther through the fog. Once he almost blazed one of his own countrymen who’d taken on too much in the way of spirits and was looking for a place to heave.

It got lighter, little by little, without clearing much. Sidroc was beginning to think about breakfast and maybe even a little sleep when, from the south, he heard heavy footfalls and the jingle of chainmail. “Behemoths!” he exclaimed, and ran toward the bridge. He couldn’t see a thing, though.

He wasn’t the only one there to try. The Algarvian officer who’d told him the name of the village stood staring across the Presseck. The redhead couldn’t see anything, either. “Whose beasts are those?” he called urgently to the men on the south side of the stream. When they didn’t answer fast enough to suit him, he ran across the bridge to see for himself. His boots clattered on the stone.