Harry Turtledove - Through the Darkness

The words were almost the last ones that ever passed his lips. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the fighter with whom he’d been chatting and cursing roll away to bring his stick to bear on him. Without conscious thought, Garivald leaped after him and knocked the stick out of his hands. It flew off into the snow.

“Grelz!” his erstwhile companion yelled, kicking out at Garivald and catching his stick with a boot heel. It also flew away. Garivald didn’t dare scramble for it-the man who’d chosen the Algarvian puppet might get the other one first. Instead, Garivald grappled with the fellow who, till the war began, had been a peasant just like him.

“Whoreson!” The word came from both their mouths at the same time. They punched and kneed and gouged and kicked at each other. The Grelzer soldier was smaller than Garivald, but lithe and quick. He gave at least as good as he got; had Garivald not twisted aside as the last instant, the fellow would have thumbed out his eye as neatly as if he were scraping the meat from a freshwater mussel.

“Hold it right there, the both of you, or we’ll blaze your balls off!” That shout froze Garivald and his foe. Ever so cautiously, Garivald turned his head. Standing over them were Sadoc and another irregular.

Garivald pushed himself away from the fighter who’d chosen the path opposite his. “He’s one of Ran-” he began, but the fellow wasted no time showing what he was. Fast as a striking serpent, he grabbed for one of the sticks in the snow.

He might have been fast as a serpent, but he wasn’t, he couldn’t be, faster than two beams. At that range, the blowing snow didn’t weaken them enough to matter. One caught him in the chest, the other in the head. He thrashed and died, still reaching for the stick a couple of feet away. His blood stained the white with red.

He was still thrashing when Sadoc kicked him. “Filthy bugger!” the makeshift mage said. “If we’d taken him captive, we’d’ve made him pay proper. We could’ve stretched him out for a day or two, easy.”

“I’m just glad he’s dead,” Garivald said. “I don’t care how it happened.” Little by little, his thudding heart slowed toward normal. “I thought he was one of us-and he thought I was one of them.” He touched his face with a mittened hand. The mitten came away wet with blood. “He could fight. All these fellows could fight-can fight. They hate Swemmel as much as we hate the redheads.” He kicked at the snow. He hadn’t really believed that was true. Now he saw he’d been wrong.

Sadoc pointed in the direction of the main fighting. “We’ve given this here pack of bastards all they wanted, anyhow.”

Sure enough, the men loyal to Raniero sullenly withdrew from the fields. But, after Munderic found what losses the irregulars had taken, he ordered them back toward the woods, too. “We aren’t going to do anything at Kluftern, not beat up like we are,” he said. “We’ll have to wait till the Grelzers and the Algarvians chase some more men into our camp. And they will. Powers above know they will.”

Garivald thought he was bound to be right. But the river ran both ways, if Swemmel and the thought of staying under the rule of Unkerlant roused such passion in the breasts of at least some who fought for Raniero. The river ran both ways. . He saw the beginning of a song there, but deliberately chose not to shape it. He’d already decided which way he was going.

In the ruins of Sulingen, Trasone and Sergeant Panfilo lined up in front of a steaming kettle. “You know what?” Trasone said as the queue snaked forward.

“Tell me,” Panfilo urged. Both Algarvians, by now, sported full bushy beards, their mustaches and side whiskers and chin strips all but lost in the rest of the coppery growth. They had almost no hot water with which to help stay trim. Moreover, the beards went some way toward keeping their cheeks and chins warm.

“I’m bloody jealous of Major Spinello, that’s what,” Trasone said.

“For all you know, he’s dead,” Panfilo said.

“So what?” Trasone said. “I’d still be jealous of him.”

Panfilo considered that, then slowly nodded. “Something to it,” he admitted. “This isn’t where I’d come on holiday, I’ll tell you.” Not even the snow could make the wreckage of Sulingen look anything but hideous. And the Algarvian soldiers who’d trudged all the way to the banks of the Wolter were hardly more lovely than the ruins they’d helped create. Filthy, unshaven, scrawny, hungrier by the day, dressed in clothes half their own and half scrounged from Unkerlanter corpses, they would have cause apoplexy had they paraded through the streets of Trapani.

All they had left, all that hadn’t changed, was their spirit. When Trasone got to the kettle, a cook slapped a chunk-not a very big chunk-of boiled meat onto his mess tin. “What is it?” he asked suspiciously, and poked it with his knife. He eyed the cook. “It’s too tender to be your sister.”

“I’d say it was jackass, but here you are in front of me,” the cook retorted.

Trasone collected a slab of bread-a very small slab-from another cook and sat down on the stone steps of a house that wasn’t there anymore. As Panfilo came over and sat beside him, he took a bite of the meat. When he did, he made a horrible face. “Maybe it is jackass,” he said to Panfilo. “Or else horse or behemoth. What do you think?”

Panfilo ate a little himself. After some thought, he said, “Whatever it is, it’s been dead for a while.”

“Like that’s a surprise,” Trasone said with a snort. “Only meat we get these days, near enough, is from our own beasts the Unkerlanters kill-or from the ones that just fall over dead because they haven’t got anything to eat, either. It’d all be a lot gamier than it is if this lousy place weren’t cold enough to do duty for a rest crate.”

After another bite, Panfilo said, “I’m pretty sure it’s not dragon, anyhow. If I had a choice between starving and eating dragon, I’m buggered if I’d know which one to pick.”

Having choked down dead dragon the winter before, Trasone nodded. “You eat too much of that stuff, the quicksilver’ll poison you, or that’s what they say. I don’t know how you’d eat that much, though.” He paused. His mess tin was empty. He’d disposed of the bread in two bites, too. With a sigh, he said, “When we were hungry enough, though, it didn’t seem that bad, you know?”

“Oh, it seemed bad.” Panfilo had finished his meager meal, too. “But you’re right, I guess: hungry was worse.” He took a handful of snow and scrubbed at his mess tin. “We’re liable to be that hungry again pretty soon. If we don’t break out of here, we’re going to be that hungry again.”

“Afraid you’re right.” Trasone raised an eyebrow at the sergeant. “We get hungry like that again, I will be jealous of Spinello even if he’s dead.”

Before Panfilo could answer, shouts came from the north: “Dragons! Our dragons!”

Trasone and Panfilo both scrambled to their feet and trotted toward the dragon farm in what had been the city square. These days, it was the only part of Sulingen that Unkerlanter egg-tossers couldn’t reach. When the city was first cut off, dragons had come fairly close to bringing in enough supplies to keep the Algarvian army there fighting as well as it ever had. These days, though, the dragons had to fly a lot farther than they had then. Worse, the Unkerlanters knew the routes they had to use, and often lay in wait for them. Every day, it seemed, fewer ran the gauntlet.

“Life’s bloody wonderful, you know?” Trasone remarked as the dragons began spiraling down toward the battered square.

“How’s that?” Panfilo asked.

“If they fly in charges for our sticks and eggs for the tossers, we’ll starve, but we’ll be able to keep fighting while we do it,” Trasone answered. “If they fly in food, we’ll have enough to eat-well, almost-but Swemmel’s whoresons’ll ride roughshod over us. And if they bring in some of each, we’ll sink a couple of inches at a time, the way we’ve been doing.”