Through the Darkness

He’d done a good job of teaching the raw recruits who flooded into his company’s ranks what needed doing. Even before he screamed the next order, the soldiers from the odd-numbered squads were running past their comrades and toward the Algarvians in the village. He blazed at the redheads. The range was still long for a handheld stick, but beams zipping past them and starting house fires would make Mezentio’s men keep their heads down and interfere with their blazing.

Captain Hawart’s regiment had worked its way across half the open country between the edge of the sunflower field and the village when eggs began dropping on the Unkerlanter soldiers. Leudast cursed in weary frustration. He’d seen that sort of thing happen too many times before. The Algarvians had too many crystals and used them too well to make them easy foes.

But the Unkerlanters kept moving forward. More slowly than they should have, their egg-tossers started pounding the village. The huts that were still standing went to pieces. “We can do it!” Leudast shouted to his men. He hadn’t seen any reinforcements running up to bolster the redheads in the place. It would be hard work, expensive work--it would probably get down to knives in the end--but he didn’t think the Algarvians could hold against a regiment.

He’d just got to his feet for another rush toward the village when dragons swooped down on his comrades and him. His first warning was a harsh, hideous screech that seemed to sound right in his ear. A moment later, with a belching roar like a hundred men puking side by side, a dragon painted in bright Algarvian colors poured flame over half a dozen Unkerlanters.

Leudast dove for cover and blazed at dragons and dragonfliers. The redheads aboard the dragons were blazing at soldiers on the ground, too. Other dragonfliers let eggs fall from hardly more than treetop height. They burst among King Swemmel’s men with deadly effect.

“Behemoths!” This summer, the cry wasn’t usually so full of panic and despair as it had been the year before. Now . . .

Now, seeing the regiment falling to pieces around him, Leudast shouted, “Back!” A moment later, others took up the cry. The Unkerlanters who still lived stumbled and staggered off toward the sunflowers from which they’d emerged. King Swemmel could give whatever orders he liked. In the face of overwhelming enemy superiority, not even fear of him would make his men obey.

Six

In Algarve, ley-line caravans always traveled with the windows shut tight. Hajjaj had rather enjoyed that; it meant the cars were as warm as the Zuwayzi weather in which he’d grown up. In Zuwayza itself, however, the custom was just the opposite. Letting air into the caravan cars helped ensure that they didn’t get too intolerably hot.

As his own special caravan car glided east, Hajjaj sipped date wine and peered out at the sun-blazed landscape through which the ley line ran. Turning to his secretary, he remarked, “It never fails to amaze me that the Unkerlanters wanted this country badly enough to take it away from us so they could rule it themselves.”

Qutuz shrugged. “Your Excellency, I do not seek to fathom Unkerlanters any more than I seek to fathom Algarvians. The ways of the pale men who wrap themselves in cloth are beyond the ken of any right-thinking Zuwayzi.”

“Those ways had better not be, or we’ll end up in trouble without the faintest notion of how we got there,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister answered.

He sipped at his wine again, then let out a wry chuckle. “And if we do understand the clothed ones, we’ll end up in trouble knowing exactly how we got there.”

“Even so, your Excellency,” Qutuz said. “Thus this journey.”

“Aye,” Hajjaj said unhappily. “Thus this journey.” When he thought of it in those terms, he wanted to drink himself into a stupor. Instead, he went on, “I’ve spent most of my life learning everything I could about the Algarvians, admiring them, imitating their style and their energy, yoking my kingdom to Mezentio’s. And then the war came, and with it this.. . this madness of theirs.”

“Even so,” his secretary repeated. “Did you see no sign of it before the fighting began?”

Hajjaj considered that. “Not many,” he said at last. “Oh, Kaunians and Algarvians have often been foes down through the years, but men of Kaunian blood taught in the university when I studied at Trapani, and no one thought anything of it. They sought knowledge and truth no less than their Algarvian colleagues--and enjoyed affairs with pretty students no less either, I might add.”

Qutuz smiled, then said, “The days before the Six Years’ War must have been a happier time than the one we live in now.”

“In some ways, and for some people,” Hajjaj said. “I’m an old man, but I hope I’m not such an old fool as to go blathering about how wonderful the days of long ago were. An Unkerlanter grand duke ruled Zuwayza then, remember, and ruled it with a rod of iron.”

“He probably needed one,” Qutuz observed.