Through the Darkness

“Aye, we’ll come, of course,” Hawart said, and started shouting for his men to get to their feet and get moving. The runner saluted and hurried off, likely to haul some more weary footsoldiers into the fight. Hawart sighed again. “We’ll see if we go out again once we’re done, too.”

“Won’t have so many dragons dropping eggs on us, anyhow,” Leudast said as he heaved himself upright. “They’re all off pounding that Sulingen place.”

“Well, so they are,” Hawart said. “Maybe we’ll be able to catch Mezentio’s men in flank, too. From where the smoke’s rising, their spearpoint’s gone past us. With a little luck, we’ll chop it off.”

“Here’s hoping.” Leudast wasn’t sure he believed the Unkerlanters could do that; they’d had as little luck down here in the south this fighting season as they’d had all along the front the summer before. But it was worth trying.

He wondered how many miles he’d marched since the war against Algarve started. Hundreds, he knew--most of them heading west. He was moving east now, toward Algarve. Back during the winter, that had mattered a great deal. Now. . . He supposed it still did, but what mattered even more was that he could be blazed just as dead heading this way as the other.

“Open order!” he called to the men he led. “Stay spread out. You don’t want them to be able to get too many of you all at once.”

The veterans in his company already knew that, and were doing it. But he didn’t have a lot of veterans left, and every fight claimed more. Most of his men were not long off farms or city streets. They were brave enough, but a lot of them would get killed or maimed before they figured out what they should be doing. Only luck had kept Leudast from going that way, and he knew it.

A good-size counterattack against the western flank of the Algarvian drive looked to be building. Behemoths trotted forward along with Unkerlanter footsoldiers. More behemoths hauled egg-tossers too heavy to fit on their backs. Teams of horses and mules urged on by sweating, cursing teamsters and hostlers hauled even more.

Leudast looked up into the sky, hoping to spot dragons painted in rock-gray. When he didn’t, he grunted and kept marching. He knew he couldn’t have everything. The support the footsoldiers were getting on the ground was already more than he’d expected.

Eggs started bursting in front of the regiment sooner than he’d hoped, though not really sooner than he’d thought they would. As usual, the Algarvians were alert. They could be beaten, but seldom surprised. Some soldier on the flank with a crystal had seen something he didn’t like, talked to the redheads’ egg-tossers, and then, no doubt, ducked back down into the tall grass.

“Come on,” Leudast said. “They’re trying to scare us off. Are we going to let them?” He was scared every time he went into a fight. He hoped his men didn’t know it. He knew too well he did.

As he’d hoped, Mezentio’s soldiers didn’t have that many egg-tossers here on their flank. Most of them would be down at the head of the attack, at what Captain Hawart called the spearpoint. Leudast would have put them there, too, if he’d wanted to break through deeper into Unkerlant. But now he and his comrades were trying to break through, and he thought they might do it.

Then, just after he’d tramped through the fields around a ruined, abandoned peasant village, somebody blazed at him. The beam missed, but charred a line through the rye that struggled against encroaching weeds. Leudast threw himself down on his belly. The smell of damp dirt in his nostrils brought back his own days in a peasant village.

“Advance by squads!” he shouted to his men. Again, the veterans already knew what to do. He heard them shouting instructions to the new men. Would the raw recruits understand? They’d better, Leudast thought, if they want to have the chance to get any more lessons. Soldiers said you’d last a while if you lived through your first fight. If you didn’t, you surely wouldn’t.

Up he came, running heavily toward a boulder a hundred feet ahead. He dove behind it as if one step ahead of the inspectors, lay panting for a moment, then peered¹ around the chunk of granite. The enemy was blazing from an apple orchard that, like the fields around the abandoned village, had seen better years. Leudast spotted a man in there who wasn’t wearing Unkerlanter rock-gray. He brought his stick to his shoulder and thrust his forefinger into the beaming hole. The foeman toppled. Leudast let out a growl of triumph.

Two more rushes brought him into the grove. As he crouched behind a tree trunk, he made sure the knife on his belt was loose in its sheath. He knew from bitter experience that Algarvians didn’t go backwards without leaving a lot of dead, theirs and those of their enemies, as monuments to where they’d been.