Through the Darkness

These days, Rathar did not go home much. His son was at the front in the north, toward Zuwayza. His wife had got used to living without him. He’d had a cot set up in a little room to one side of his office. Legend had it that, during the Six Years’ War, General Lothar had entertained his mistress in the little room--but then, Lothar had been half Algarvian himself, and all sorts of stories stuck to him.

Someone shook Rathar awake in the middle of the night. “His Majesty requires your presence at once,” a palace servitor declared.

“I’m coming,” Rathar said around a yawn. Whatever Swemmel required, he got. Had Rathar asked something like, Won’t it keep till morning?--had he been so foolish, Unkerlant would have had a new marshal by sunup. Were Rathar lucky, he would have been ordered to the front as a common soldier. More likely, his head would have gone up on a spear to encourage his successor.

Since he’d been sleeping in his tunic, the marshal had only to pull on his boots, grab his ceremonial sword, and run his fingers through his hair to be ready. He followed the servitor through the royal palace--quiet now, with most courtiers and soldiers asleep--to Swemmel’s private audience chamber.

The guards there were wide awake. Rathar would have been astonished to find anything else. After they’d searched him, after he’d set the sword on a wall bracket, the men let him enter Swemmel’s presence. He prostrated himself in front of his sovereign and went through the rituals of abasement till Swemmel decided he could rise.

And when he had risen, the king fixed him with the glare that turned the bones of every underling in Unkerlant--which is to say, every other Unkerlanter--to jelly. “You have proved wrong again, Marshal,” Swemmel said. “How shall we keep you at the head of our armies when you keep being wrong” The last word was nearly a scream.

Stolid as usual, Rathar answered, “If you know an officer who will serve the kingdom better than I have, your Majesty, set him in my place.”

For a dreadful moment, he thought Swemmel would do it. But then the king made a disparaging gesture. “Everyone else is a worse fool than you,” Swemmel said. “Why else do the Algarvians keep winning victories? We are sick to death of being served by fools.”

Swemmel had put to death a great many men who were anything but fools, in the Twinkings War against his brother Kyot when neither of them would admit to being the younger and in its aftermath and then all through his reign, whenever he suspected an able, ambitious fellow was able and ambitious enough to look toward the throne. Pointing that out struck Rathar as useless. He said, “Your Majesty, we have to deal with what is. The Algarvians are driving again, down in the south.”

“Aye.” Swemmel glared again, eyes dark burning coals in his long, pale face. “I have here your appreciation. More retreats. I want a general who fights, not one who runs away.”

“And I intend to fight, your Majesty--when the time and the ground suit me,” Rathar said. “If we fight when and where the Algarvians want us to, do we help ourselves or do we help them? Remember, we’ve got ourselves into our worst trouble by striking at them too soon.”

He took his life in his hands with that last sentence. Swemmel had always been the one who’d urged premature attack. No other courtiers would have dared remind the king of that. Rathar dared. One day, he supposed, King Swemmel would take his head for lese majesty. Meanwhile, if Swemmel heard the truth once in a while, the kingdom stood a better chance of coming through the crisis.

“We must save the cinnabar mines in the Mamming Hills,” the king said. “We agree with you in this. Without them, our dragons would be greatly weakened.”

When he said we, did he mean himself or Unkerlant? Did he even separate the two? Rathar didn’t know; fathoming Swemmel’s mind was hazardous at the best of times, which this wasn’t. Pulling his own mind back to the matter at hand, he said, “So they would. And, did the Algarvians have it, their dragon force would be strengthened to the same degree.”

“They must not have it, then. They shall not have it. They shall not!” Swemmel’s eyes rolled in his head. His voice rose to a shrill shout once more. “We shall slaughter them! We shall bury them! Unkerlant shall be Algarve’s graveyard!”

Rathar waited till his sovereign regained some semblance of calm. Then, cautiously, the marshal asked, “Having read the appreciation, your Majesty, do you recall my mention of the town called Sulingen, on the northern bank of the Wolter?”

“What if we do?” Swemmel answered, which might have meant he didn’t recall and might have meant he simply didn’t care. The latter, it proved: “Sulingen is too near the Mamming Hills to suit us.”

“If we can stop the Algarvians before then, so much the better,” Rathar agreed. “But if they break through at Sulingen, then how can we stop them at all?”