Harry Turtledove - Through the Darkness

Freezing soon proved to be that least of his worries. The soldiers set over him had known what they were talking about when they warned their charges to spread out. The relief force had been moving for only a couple of hours when Unkerlanter dragons appeared overhead. They dropped a few eggs, flamed a few soldiers, and flew away. A pinprick-but the force hadn’t been overstrong to begin with. Now it was a little weaker.

About noon, they neared another of those Unkerlanter peasant villages scattered across the plain. Swemmel’s men held it. Warning shouts of, “Behemoths!” echoed through the army. Sure enough, Sidroc saw them moving inside the village, perhaps milling about in the square. Some of them began lobbing eggs at the advancing Algarvians-and at Plegmund’s Brigade as well.

Out trotted a force of Algarvian behemoths, whose crews skirmished at long range with the Unkerlanters. Even at a glance, Sidroc could see that the Unkerlanters outnumbered them. King Swemmel’s men saw the same thing. They didn’t come charging out after the Algarvians, as they might have when the war was new-from some of the stories the redheads told, they’d been very stupid in the early days. But they did forget about the footsoldiers. They forgot about everything, in fact, except what the Algarvian commander showed them.

And they paid for it. The officer in charge of the Algarvians had more than one string for his bow. “While the Unkerlanters were busy fighting and seemingly repelling the behemoths in front of them, another force entered the village from behind. The fight that followed was sharp but very short. The relief force kept moving south, on toward Sulingen.

“We’ve got a smart general,” Sergeant Werferth said. “That’s good. That’s mighty good. He buggered Swemmel’s boys just as pretty as you please.”

Sidroc snorted, then guffawed when he realized how apt the figure was. “Aye, bugger ‘em he did-came right up their backside.”

But it stopped being easy after that. Sidroc had found in Presseck how dangerous the Unkerlanters could be when they had numbers and power on their side. Now he discovered they didn’t need numbers to be dangerous. They knew what the Algarvians were trying to do, and threw everything they had into stopping them.

As so many had before him, Sidroc grew to hate and dread the cheer, “Urra!” Single Unkerlanters would pop up out of the snow shouting it and blaze down a man-or two, or three, or four-before they died themselves. Companies would fight like grim death in villages, bellowing defiance till the last man was slain. And regiment after regiment would charge across the plain at the relief force, sometimes with their arms linked, all the soldiers roaring, “Urra!”

Nor would those regiments charge alone, unsupported. The Unkerlanters threw behemoths and dragons and egg-tossers into the fight with the same air they threw men into it. Aye, they seemed to say, you ‘II smash these up, but we ‘ve got plenty more.

And the Algarvians did not have plenty more. Sidroc needed only a day or two to see that. Relief forces came in by dribs and drabs, when they came in at all. If the army couldn’t relieve the men in Sulingen with what it had now, it couldn’t relieve them.

“When are they going to break out toward us?” Sidroc asked, six days into the move south. By then, he’d taken to wrapping the lower part of his face in wool rags, so that only his eyes showed. He’d thought he knew how cold Unkerlant could get. Every new day proved him wrong.

“I don’t know what they’re doing down there,” Sergeant Werferth told him. “I don’t give a dragon turd what they’re doing, either. It’s too soon to worry. Whatever they’ve got in mind, right now it doesn’t change my job one fornicating bit.”

Sidroc started to bristle. Ceorl would have, because Ceorl was the sort who bristled at anything. But Sidroc realized Werferth was just giving good advice. Worrying about what he couldn’t help wouldn’t, couldn’t, change things.

At dawn the next morning, the Unkerlanters attacked the relief force before it could get moving. By the time Swemmel’s men sullenly withdrew, the sun was halfway across the sky. The Unkerlanters left hundreds of bodies lying in the snow, but they’d robbed the relief force of men and of time, and it could recover neither.

Despite the troops Swemmel and his generals kept throwing at them, the soldiers and behemoths of the relieving force managed to keep moving south. They crossed the Presseck, from whose banks the men of Plegmund’s Brigade had been so rudely expelled not long before. And they also forced their way over the Neddemin, the next river to the south, in a sharp battle with the Unkerlanters trying to keep them from gaining the fords.

“What’s the river after this one?” Sidroc asked that night as he toasted a gobbet of horsemeat on a stick. He’d never imagined eating horse up in Forthweg. Compared to going hungry, it was tasty as could be.

“That’s the Britz,” Werferth answered. “If we make it over the Britz, the fellows in Sulingen should be able to fight their way out to meet us.” He’d come far enough, he was willing to look ahead a bit.

“They’d better be able to fight their way out to meet us,” Sidroc said. “Curse me if I know how we’ve made it this far. I don’t know how much further we can go.”

“Other question is, how far can they come?” Werferth asked. “What have their behemoths and horses and unicorns been eating down there? Mostly nothing, or I miss my guess. Odds are the men haven’t had much more, either.”

Sidroc took a bite of horseflesh. Juice running down his chin, he said, “It’s not like we’ve got a lot.” The sergeant nodded, but they both knew the men down in Sulingen had less.

On toward the Britz they went. The Unkerlanters attacked again and again, from south and east and west. Swemmel’s cavalry forces nipped in to raid the supply wagons that kept the relieving force fed and supplied with eggs and with sorcerous charges for their sticks. In spite of everything, the Algarvians and the men of Plegmund’s Brigade kept pushing south.

And then, about a day and a half before they would have reached the Britz, most of their behemoths left the army and headed north. “Have they gone out of their fornicating minds?” Sidroc shouted. “The Unkerlanters still have their behemoths, curse them. How are we supposed to lick ‘em without ours?”

No one had an answer for him till later in the day. Then Werferth, who as a sergeant heard things, said, “Swemmel’s whoresons are mounting a big push on Durrwangen, north of here. If they take the place, then they’ve got us in the bag along with the boys down in Sulingen. Can’t have that. It doesn’t work.”

“Getting over the Britz isn’t going to work, either, not without those behemoths,” Sidroc said.

“We’ve got to try,” Werferth answered. Sidroc grimaced and nodded. Deserting and going north on his own was sure death. Advancing with his comrades was only deadly dangerous. Knowing the odds, the men of the relieving force went on.

They reached the river. They couldn’t cross. The Unkerlanters had too many men in front of it, too many egg-tossers on the southern bank. And they had behemoths left to throw into the fight, behemoths the relieving force could no longer withstand. The Algarvians and the men of Plegmund’s Brigade fell back from the Britz, retreating across the frozen plains of Unkerlant.

A blizzard howled through the woods where Munderic’s band of irregulars took shelter from their foes. As far as Garivald was concerned, the tent pitched above a hole in the ground was no substitute for the warm hut in which he’d passed previous winters with his wife and children and livestock. He didn’t have enough spirits to stay drunk through the winter as he normally would have, either.