Through the Darkness

Sergeant Panfilo let out a warning grunt. Several other Algarvian soldiers tramping down the dusty road cursed their allies. And Spinello threw back his head and laughed. “You’re a menace, you are,” he told Trasone. “Aye, the Yaninans are heroes, every stinking one of em. But we saved their bacon when they looked like giving way, now didn’t we?”

“Aye.” Trasone cocked his head to one side and spat out the husk of a sunflower seed. “We had to double back to do it, though. I thought the idea was that they would cover our flank so we could smash all the Unkerlanters in front of us and go on into the hills for the cinnabar.”

“Oh, aye, that’s the idea they had back in Trapani,” Spinello agreed. A wave of his hand told how much, or rather how little, the officers and nobles back in Trapani knew. “Only trouble is, every once in a while the Unkerlanters have ideas, too. They kept an army in front of us and hit us from the side with another one, that’s all.” Another wave said it was perfectly simple if you looked at it the right way.

But Trasone wasn’t in the mood to look at it like that. “If they’ve got enough soldiers to hold some in front of us and to hit us from the flank with more, how are we going to keep on moving forward?” he demanded.

Panfilo grunted again, and this time followed the grunt with words: “Worrying about how isn’t your job. Doing what you’re told is.”

“I do what I’m told.” Trasone gave the sergeant a dirty look. “You don’t suppose I’d’ve come all this way because I like the scenery, do you?”

That made Spinello laugh once more, but he grew serious again in a hurry. “The Unkerlanters have more men than we do. Nothing we can do about that--except to go on killing the whoresons, of course. But if they’ve got more, we’ve got better. And that’s why we’ll win the war.”

Where Trasone and Panfilo and just about everybody else in the battalion trudged south and west along that road, cursing and coughing in the clouds of dust their comrades kicked up, Spinello strutted along as if on parade. Trasone didn’t know whether to envy him or to feel like strangling him.

Somebody--he couldn’t see who--said, “We may be better than the lousy Unkerlanters, but bugger me with a cheese grater if the Yaninans are.”

“They’re our allies,” Spinello said. “We’re better off with ‘em than without ‘em.”

He’d mocked ideas that came out of the capital of Algarve before, but he was echoing one there. When Trasone said, “Allies,” he made the word into a curse. “If they were fighting my granny, I’d bet on gran.”

“Nasty old bitch, is she?” Spinello said, which jerked a startled guffaw from Trasone. But instead of going on to defend the Yaninans some more, Spinello half changed the subject: “They do say the Sibs taking service with Mezentio are really good fighters, and this brigade of Forthwegians they’re putting together is supposed to be full of tough customers, too.”

Having fought in Sibiu, Trasone knew the men who came out of the island kingdom could indeed fight hard. But that wasn’t the point, or wasn’t the whole point. “Do we really need all those foreign buggers? And if we do, are there going to be any Algarvians left alive by the time this war is through?”

“It’s like any other brawl,” Sergeant Panfilo said. “Last man standing wins.”

The road came up to and into a wood full of pines and beeches and birch. Pointing ahead, Trasone said, “How many Unkerlanters are hiding in there? And how many of us’ll be standing by the time we come out the other side?”

Nobody answered. Any Algarvian officer who fought in Unkerlant hated forests. The Unkerlanters were better woodsmen, and had the advantage of preparing their positions ahead of time. Digging them out always cost.

A kilted soldier at the edge of the woods waved the battalion forward. Forward Trasone went, not without a pang. He’d had other Algarvians wave him forward into woods--and forward into trouble.

He waited nervously for Unkerlanters in hidden holes to start blazing at his comrades and him from behind--or for a whole swarm of squat men in rock-gray tunics to charge from one side of the road or the other, half of them drunk, all of them roaring, “Urra!” as loud as they could. If they got the chance, they’d knock the Algarvians into the undergrowth and maul them like wild beasts.

With every quiet, peaceful step he took, he grew more suspicious. Sparrows chirped. A rabbit peered out at the Algarvians, then ducked back behind a bush. “All right,” Trasone said. “Where are they?”

“Maybe we really did clear this wood,” Panfllo said. “Stranger things have happened... I suppose.”

“Name two,” Trasone challenged.