Through the Darkness

Sometimes, things ended as they began. These days, pinned back against the Wolter in the many times ruined wreckage of Sulingen, Trasone had plenty of chances to think about that. He turned to Sergeant Panfilo, who crouched beside him in the remains of what had been an ironworker’s hut. “The last time we were here,” he said, “we were facing south, not north.”

“Aye, so we were,” Panfilo answered. “And we were wondering how we were going to pry the stinking Unkerlanters out of those bloody big ironworks that’re behind us now. Before long, they’ll be wondering how to pry us out.”

“Only thing I’m wondering right now is where in blazes I’m going to get some food,” Trasone said, and Panfilo nodded. Neither of them had eaten for a while. Only a handful of Algarvian dragons made it down to Sulingen these days, and the Algarvian pocket in the city had grown so small, a lot of the supplies they dropped ended up in the enemy’s hands.

In the trenches less than a furlong away, the Unkerlanters had their peckers up. They knew they were going to overwhelm the Algarvians here as surely as Trasone did. Every so often, they would burst into hoarse song. The only thing they didn’t do was stick their heads up out of the trenches to jeer at the Algarvians who had come so far ... but not quite far enough. The ones who tried that wouldn’t live long enough to celebrate their victory.

Just as Trasone had learned a few words and phrases of Unkerlanter, so some of Swemmel’s mean had picked up a little Algarvian. “Surrender!” one of them shouted now. In a moment, the cry resounded up and down the line: “Surrender! Surrender! Surrender!”

Here and there, Algarvian soldiers yelled back. Their answers were uniformly negative and mostly obscene. “What do you suppose they’d do to us if we were stupid enough to give ourselves up?” Panfilo asked.

“I don’t much want to find out,” Trasone answered. “As long as I have a choice, I’d sooner die quick and clean--if I can, anyhow.”

“I’m with you,” Panfilo said. “They’d have fun, their mages would have fun....” His shiver had nothing to do with the bitterly cold winter day. “No, I’d sooner make ‘em earn it.”

The Unkerlanters were ready to do just that. As if the Algarvians’ refusal to give up angered them, they plastered the front-line trenches with eggs. They had plenty of tossers and plenty of eggs to toss. The Algarvians couldn’t reply in kind; they had to hoard the few eggs left to them for the moments when those eggs would be most desperately needed.

Huddled in the wreckage of the hut, sorcerous energy searing the air not far from him, deadly fragments of metal and wood and stone hissing every which way, Trasone reckoned the present moment quite desperate enough for all ordinary purposes. And then, just when he thought things could grow no worse, somebody behind him called, “We’ve got soup in the pot!”

He groaned. No matter how hungry he was, nothing could make him enthusiastic about what passed for food among the Algarvians in Sulingen these days. Panfilo made a horrible face, too, and asked, “What’s in it?”

“You don’t want to know that,” Trasone exclaimed.

“About what you’d figure,” the soldier at the soup pot answered. “Old bones, a few turnip peelings.” That meant it was a good batch. A lot of the time lately, it hadn’t had any peelings to thicken it. Sometimes it hadn’t had any bones, either, and was only hot water flavored by whatever had stuck to the sides of the pot from the previous batch.

“What kind of bones?” Panfilo persisted. Trasone shook his head. The less he knew about what he poured down his throat, the better. But Panfilo, morbidly or not, was curious: “And how old are they?”

“Whatever we could dig up,” came the reply. “And they’ve been frozen since whatever beasts they belonged to got killed, so what difference does it make? Come back and have some if you want. Otherwise, you can go on starving.”

“We go on starving even if we’ve got the soup, on account of there’s nothing real in it,” Trasone said. Panfilo nodded; he knew that, too. The trooper went on, “Is it any wonder we sneak out and murder the Unkerlanter pickets for the sake of whatever black bread and sausage they’ve got on ‘em?” He sighed. He was on the front line, which meant he was supposed to get a couple of ounces of bread every day. Sometimes he did. More often, he didn’t.

Panfilo said, “I’m going back there. The way my belly’s gnawing my spine, anything is better than nothing.”

“Not with what’ll be in that pot,” Trasone predicted, but his own belly was growling like one of the wolves that prowled the Unkerlanter plains and forests. Cursing the Unkerlanters and his own officers impartially, he crawled after the sergeant. Eggs continued to burst all around. He was, by now, without fear, or nearly so. If one burst on top of him and finished him off, it wouldn’t be finishing much.