Harry Turtledove - Through the Darkness

And he couldn’t even stay in his inadequate shelter and feed the fire a few twigs at a time. As far as Munderic was concerned, blizzards were the ideal time for the irregulars to be out and doing. “Most of the time, we leave tracks in the snow,” the commander declared. “Not now, by the powers above-the wind will blow them away as fast as we make ‘em.”

“Of course it will,” Garivald said. “And it’ll blow us away just as fast.” Perhaps fortunately for him, the wind also blew his words away, so no one but him heard them.

When Munderic gave orders, it was either obey or raise a mutiny against him. Garivald didn’t want to do that. He didn’t much want to go tramping through the snow, either, but nobody asked what he thought about it. The only people who’d ever asked what he thought of anything were his wife and a few close friends, and they were all far away in Zossen.

Munderic led almost the whole band out against the village of Kluftern, which had a small Algarvian garrison and which also sat close to a ley line. “If we can wipe out the redheads there, we can sabotage that line in a dozen different places-take our time and do it properly,” Munderic said. “That’ll keep Mezentio’s mages scratching like they’re covered with lice.”

He was right; if they could bring it off, that would happen. But Garivald turned to the man closest to him and asked, “How often do these things turn out just the way they’re planned? Next time will be the first, as far as I can see.”

The man next to him turned out to be a woman; Obilot answered, “At least he isn’t counting on magecraft this time around.”

“That’s something,” Garivald agreed. The two of them were on wary speaking terms again. Obilot hated the Algarvians too much to stay furious at anyone else who also hated them. As for Garivald, he wasn’t by nature a particularly quarrelsome man. He’d kept speaking softly, not making things worse than they were already, till Obilot’s temper softened.

Once the irregulars left the shelter of the woods, the wind tore at them harder than ever. Algarvians out in such weather might well have frozen. Every one of the Unkerlanters, though, had been through worse. They trudged along, grumbling but not particularly put out.

“We’ll catch the redheads all cozied up to the fire,” somebody said. “Then we’ll make ‘em pay for being soft.”

That brought a rumble of agreement from everyone who heard it. Garivald rumbled agreement, too, but he didn’t really feel it. Had the Algarvians truly been soft, they never would have overrun the Duchy of Grelz or penetrated Unkerlant to Sulingen and to the outskirts of Cottbus.

Snow swirled around Garivald and blew into his face. He cursed wearily and kept walking. He hoped Munderic was keeping track of the direction in which Kluftern lay. He couldn’t have found it himself on a bet.

“Snow bleeding the redheads white,” he muttered under his breath, feeling for the lines of a song. “Brave man putting thieves to flight.” He played with metrical feet while his own feet, even in felt boots, got colder.

Confused shouts from up ahead broke into his thoughts. He cursed again, this time in real anger. There went the song, and most of it would be gone for good. Then he stopped worrying about the song, for one of those shouts was a shriek of agony. If that wasn’t a man who’d just been blazed, he’d never heard one.

Then he heard other shouts. They were battle cries: “Raniero!” “The Kingdom of Grelz!”

He peered ahead through the snow. The last set of Grelzer troops the irregulars ran into hadn’t proved to be worth much. Some Grelzer soldiers passed information on to Munderic’s band. From all that, he’d assumed none of the men who fought for King Mezentio’s cousin would be worth anything.

That turned out to be a mistake. These fellows came at Munderic’s men as fiercely as if their hair were red, not dark. They kept right on shouting Raniero’s name, too. And they cursed King Swemmel as vilely as Garivald had ever cursed the Algarvians.

Garivald expected Munderic would try to break away. His target had been Kluftern, not a platoon of Grelzers. But the irregular leader shouted, “Kill the traitors!” and ordered his men forward with as little hesitation as Marshal Rathar might have shown.

Forward Garivald went, wishing Munderic had shown more sense. Fighting these fellows was different from fighting Algarvians. The soldiers who followed Raniero looked like the irregulars, sounded like them, and wore clothes much like theirs, too-one snow smock couldn’t differ much from another. And, with snowflakes blowing every which way, nobody got a clear look at anybody more than a couple of paces away anyhow.

Munderic rapidly proved Marshal Rathar had nothing to worry about from his generalship. The only thing he had going for him-the thing that had held his band of irregulars together-was his enthusiasm. In this fight, it got in the way. He sent men running now here, now there, till Garivald wasn’t sure where he was supposed to be and who, if anyone, was supposed to be there with him.

Had a competent soldier-say, a veteran Algarvian captain-been leading King Raniero’s troopers, they would have made short work of the irregulars. But the big fight, the fight against the real Unkerlanter army, sucked competent soldiers toward the front. Whoever was in charge of the Grelzers had no more idea of how to handle his men than did Munderic.

What resulted wasn’t so much a battle, even a small one, as a series of skirmishes, men fighting first in this place, then in that one, as they happened to collide. Garivald flopped down in the snow behind some bushes. He blazed at a couple of men he was pretty sure were Grelzer soldiers. Neither of them fell; either the snow, which blew more thickly by the minute, was attenuating his beam or he wasn’t so handy with a stick as he might have been.

A couple of minutes later, somebody else skidded down behind the same bushes. “Stinking whoresons!” he growled, and blazed at the same men Garivald had tried to knock over. “Hate those stinking traitors, serving the false king.”

“Aye.” Garivald blazed again, though by then he could hardly see his targets. He cursed. “Might as well throw rocks at ‘em, for all the good our sticks are doing us.”

“It’s a stinking war, that’s the truth,” the other fellow said. Like a lot of the irregulars, he had a length of wool wrapped around the lower part of his face to keep his nose and mouth from freezing. Bits of vapor came out through it; more had formed icicles in front of where his lips were bound to be.

“Wish I were back in my own village, getting drunk,” Garivald said. “I miss my wife, I miss my brats, I miss my firstman.. well, maybe not.”

The other fighter laughed. “I know just what you mean. Firstman in the place I grew up chewed nails for fun-that’s what everybody said, anyhow.”

“Mine’s just a sneak and a spy. He’d suck up to inspectors and then take it out on everybody else.” No, Garivald didn’t miss Waddo, not a bit.

“They’re like that, all right,” the other fellow said. “Ought to hang every cursed one of them, give a man a little room to live.” They spent the next few minutes maligning firstmen. Neither of them did any more blazing. They had no targets worth blazing at, not with the blizzard closing the walls of the world around them.

Then a couple of shapes did appear through the snow. Both men behind the bush raised their sticks. But one of the newcomers could only have been big, shambling Sadoc. “Take it easy,” Garivald said. “They’re ours.”

“Suits me,” his companion replied, and lowered his stick again.

Maybe Sadoc heard them. Maybe the bumbling mage did have enough skill to sense them there. He started to raise his own stick. “Swemmel!” Garivald called, not wanting a fellow irregular to blaze him. “Swemmel and Unkerlant!”