Through the Darkness

Panfilo was already pouring down a mess tin full of soup when Trasone got back to the hole in the ground that housed the cookfire. The sergeant finished, wiped his mouth on a filthy tunic sleeve, and said, “You’re right--it’s pretty bad. I’m still glad I got it.”

Trasone sniffed the pot. The cook hadn’t told all of the truth. Some of the bones in there had had time to start going bad before they froze. Nothing else could have accounted for the faint reek of corruption that reached his nose. But he held out his mess tin, too. If the soup poisoned him, it wouldn’t be poisoning much, either.

As Panfilo had, he gulped the stuff down. It tasted nasty, but maybe not quite so nasty as he’d expected. And there were turnip peelings in there; he actually had to chew a couple of times. The cook hadn’t been lying after all. The peelings might create some small part of the illusion of fullness. And the soup was hot. That, at least, was real.

When he’d emptied the mess tin, he said, “Powers above, that hit the spot. It sure did. Now where’s the sparkling wine and the beautiful broads to go with it?”

“No such thing as beautiful Unkerlanter broads,” the cook said, and Trasone and Panfilo both nodded. That was an article of faith among Algarvian soldiers in the west. It hadn’t kept Trasone from visiting the brothels his superiors set up in Unkerlant, though he’d usually picked Kaunian women when there were any. No brothels in Sulingen. No women at all in Sulingen, unless a few Unkerlanters still survived in hidden cellars.

“Back to our position,” Panfilo said. Trasone nodded. It was no more dangerous there than here.

They hadn’t been back in the ruined hut for long before the barrage of eggs, already heavy, got worse. Through--perhaps around--the bursts, Trasone heard Unkerlanter officers’ whistles shrilling. “They’re coming!” he shouted, and his was far from the only cry going up along the Algarvian line.

And the Unkerlanters were coming, scampering through the wreckage of what had been a quiet riverside city, diving into holes and behind clumps of rubble and then coming out blazing. Some ran bent at the waist, others straight up and down. Trasone blazed at the men who tried to make themselves smaller targets. They were the ones likely to be veterans, the ones likely to be more dangerous if they got in among the Algarvians.

Swemmel’s soldiers tried one of these assaults every few days. Sometimes Mezentio’s men threw them back with heavy losses. Sometimes they got in among the Algarvians and bit off another chunk of Sulingen. At first, Trasone thought this would be another time when the Unkerlanters spent lives and came away with nothing to show for it. They fell in large numbers; every advance they made came over the bodies of their slain. They spent lives the way he spent his money when he got leave.

He didn’t think he’d get much more leave. And he realized things weren’t going so well as he thought when Algarvian egg-tossers went into action over to his right. Unless things went badly, his countrymen hoarded the eggs they had left.

They might as well have hoarded them, for the Unkerlanters broke into the Algarvian trenches despite the pallid answer to their own almost ceaseless barrage. “Urra!” they shouted. “Swemmel!” Now that the fighting was hot again, they stopped asking if the Algarvians wanted to surrender.

“We have to hold them!” Sergeant Panfilo shouted to as many of the men in his squad as might still be alive. “We have to hold them right here. If they break past us and make it to the Wolter, they cut the army in half.”

“Besides,” Trasone added in a low voice, “we haven’t got anywhere to run to anyway.”

“The ironworks,” Panfilo said, but his heart wasn’t in it. A lot of Algarvian soldiers were already holed up there, as they were in the ruins of the massive granary not far away. But even if the front-line soldiers ran back there, how likely were they to make it before the Algarvians rolled over them? Not very, and Trasone and Panfilo both knew as much.

Turning, Trasone blazed at an Unkerlanter coming at him from the east-- sure enough, Swemmel’s men had cracked the Algarvian line. The man went down, whether blazed or only diving for cover Trasone didn’t know. The Unkerlanter didn’t blaze back, so maybe Trasone had nailed him. In a brief stretch of quiet, he asked Panfilo, “Remember Tealdo?”

“Aye, poor bugger,” the sergeant answered. “He’s dead a year now--more than that, I suppose. Why’d you think of him all of a sudden?”

“He was in sight of Cottbus when he went down. That’s how close he came. That’s how close we came,” Trasone added, for no Algarvian had got more than a glimpse of the towers of the capital of Unkerlant. “Here, anyway, we got all the way into Sulingen.”

“Aye, we got all the way in,” Panfilo said. “We got all the way in, but we aren’t coming out again.”