Through the Darkness

The breeze from out of the east blew smoke into Istvan’s face. He coughed a couple of times. A moment later, he smelled something else: the sickly-sweet reek of corruption. Sure enough, a few paces farther on he strode past a bloated corpse in a rock-gray tunic. He jerked a thumb toward it. “Good to see we got one of those sons of goats, anyhow.”

“Oh, we’ve hurt them,” Tivadar said. “But what they’ve done to us .. .”

“The whole cursed country is too big and too far from everything to make it easy to fight over,” Istvan said. “We can’t get at it, and the Unkerlanters can’t get very many men into it, either. But as long as they can keep us from getting into country that really is worth something, they’re ahead of the game.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Captain Tivadar agreed. The breeze out of the east picked up, and tried to lift his service cap off his head. He tugged it down over his curly hair. “Sooner or later, we will break out. Then, by the stars, we’ll make them pay. Till then ...” He grimaced. “Till then, the debt just keeps getting bigger.”

Cries echoed through the forest as Istvan’s squad neared the front. He had trouble sorting out Gyongyosians and Unkerlanters. No matter which kingdom wounded men came from, their moans and screams sounded very much alike. Telling how far away the racket came from wasn’t easy, either. Istvan kept expecting attackers to burst out of the bushes at any moment, only to realize a heartbeat later that the noises he’d heard came from a long way off.

“They’ve stopped tossing eggs,” Tivadar said. He frowned and plucked a hair from his beard. “I wonder why. They’ve got more egg-tossers than we do: they don’t have to manhandle them over the mountains to get them here.”

“Only the stars know why Unkerlanters do things.” But Istvan frowned, too. “When they don’t do what they usually do, you wonder what they’re up to, like you said.”

“You’d better, too, if you want to keep the stars shining on you,” the company commander answered. He started to say something else, but coughed a couple of times instead. “Smoke’s getting thick.”

“Aye, it is.” Istvan’s eyes stung and watered. He pointed east. “It’s coming from that way, too. Maybe Swemmel’s men are burning themselves up, and that’s why they aren’t using their egg-tossers.” He laughed, then coughed himself. “Too much to hope for.”

“No doubt it is,” Tivadar said, “but we have to--”

Before he could tell Istvan what the Gyongyosians had to do, a couple of his countrymen burst out of the woods ahead. Istvan almost blazed them for Unkerlanters. But Swemmel’s men didn’t wear leggings or bushy yellow beards, and they didn’t yell, “Fire!” at the top of their lungs in his language, either.

While Istvan was gaping, Captain Tivadar rapped out, “Where? How bad?”

“Bad,” the men said in the same breath. One of them added, “The accursed goat-eaters have fired the whole forest against us.” And then, without waiting for any more questions, they both dashed off toward the west.

Istvan and Tivadar stared at each other. While they were staring, the breeze--no, more than a breeze now, a freshening wind--blew thick smoke into their faces. They both coughed, and both looked as if they wished they hadn’t. Istvan heard other shouts of, “Fire!” He also heard more Gyongyosian soldiers plunging through the woods, fleeing the flames.

And then he heard the fire itself, crackling with insane glee. A moment later, he saw it through the branches and brambles ahead: a wall of flames, licking up tree after tree and advancing on him as fast as a man could walk. He turned to Tivadar. “What do we do, sir?”

“We--” The company commander bit back whatever he’d been about to say and answered, “We fall back. What else can we do? It’ll cook us if we stay.” He shook his fist at the fire, and at the Unkerlanters behind it. “May the stars never shine on them! Who would have thought to use fire as a weapon of war?”

Whoever had thought of it had had a good idea. Istvan didn’t need to order his squad away from the flames; he had to work to keep them from fleeing like so many panicked horses. He had to work to keep panic from sinking its teeth into him, too. The fire was frightening in a way war wasn’t. It wasn’t trying to kill him; it was just doing what it did, and the only thing he could do about it was run.

Run he did, hoping he could go faster than the flames. Behind him--ever closer behind him, it seemed--trees turned into torches. Smoke got thicker and thicker, till he could hardly breathe, could hardly tell in which direction he should run. Away from the flames--that was all he knew.