Harry Turtledove: Into the Darkness

He liked it even less the next morning, when he woke up with bug bites. What the Yaninans served up for breakfast wasn’t very good. Tealdo had expected as much. Captain Galafrone had warned the whole company to expect as much. “Boys, they’re long on cabbage and they’re long on bread. You’ll be bored, but you won’t be hungry.”

Bored Tealdo certainly was, not that Algarvian army cooking was anything to send a noble connoisseur into flights of ecstasy. But Tealdo also ended up hungry, because the Yaninan cooks hadn’t done up enough to fill the bellies of their new Algarvian allies. Share and share alike was the rule. A few bites of black bread and not enough cabbage-and-beet soup made Tealdo’s stomach rumble and growl as if angry wild things dwelt there.

“I wonder what the Yaninans are eating,” he said as he finished the meager meal—not that finishing it took long. “I wonder if the poor whoresons are eating anything.”

“Aye. This isn’t good.” Trasone shook his head. Being a veteran, he knew how important questions of supply were. “If the Yaninans can’t do a proper job of feeding troops in their own capital, how will they manage out in the field.”

“We’ll find out, won’t we?” Tealdo said. “We’ll pay the price of finding out, too.”

But Sergeant Panfilo shook his head. “It won’t be as bad as that,” he said. “Our supply services come along with us. Once we’re stationed, once the fighting starts—if the fighting starts—they’ll take care of us. Those boys can find a six-course supper hiding under dead leaves.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” Tealdo said, somewhat reassured. It wasn’t quite so—Panfilo did exaggerate, but not by much. “Powers above pity the poor Yaninans, though. They haven’t got much, and they don’t know how to move what they do have.”

“Come on, boys,” Captain Galafrone called. “Lovely as this place is, we can’t hang around here any more. We’ve got to go out and see the big, wide world—or at least the little, narrow chunk of it that belongs to Yanina.”

Tealdo did more really hard marching that day than in any other he could remember. He’d marched farther a good many times, especially in the hectic fighting that led up to Valmiera’s collapse. But Valmiera, like Algarve, had a decent network of paved roads. A man or a horse or a unicorn or a behemoth could tramp over the cobblestones or gravel or slabs of slate at any season of the year.

He’d come into Patras by ley-line caravan, and hadn’t had to worry about what the roads were like. The streets of King Tsavellas’s capital were paved as well as those of any Algarvian town. The highway that led toward the west, toward the border with Unkerlant, was also well paved… for the first few miles.

About an hour after leaving the barracks behind, Tealdo and his comrades also left the cobblestones behind. His feet plunged into cold mud. The first time he lifted one up out of the roadbed, a lot of the roadbed came with it. The second time he lifted one out, even more mud came along. He cursed in disgust.

He wasn’t the only one cursing, either. A brimstone cloud might have surrounded the company, the regiment, the entire brigade. “These are our allies?” somebody not far away from Tealdo bellowed. “Powers below eat them, the Unkerlanters can have them and welcome!” He was more than usually exercised, but then, when he’d picked up a foot, his boot hadn’t come out of the muck with it.

“Shut up!” Galafrone shouted. “You fools haven’t got the faintest notion of what you’re talking about. I fought against the Unkerlanters in the last war, along with your fathers—if you know who your fathers are. You think this is bad, Unkerlant makes this look like Mad Duke Morando’s pleasure gardens outside of Cotigoro. You’ll find out.”

Algarvian soldiers obeyed orders. They kept marching, as best they could. That didn’t mean they didn’t speak their minds. The trooper who’d lost his boot spoke with great conviction: “I don’t care how lousy Unkerlant is. That still doesn’t make this stinking place any fornicating pleasure garden.”

On the Algarvians slogged. They came to their assigned campsite long after nightfall. Tealdo was amazed they came to it at all. Ever since the cobbles stopped, he’d felt as if he were marching in place.

The Yaninan cooks also seemed astonished the Algarvians reached the campsite. Again, they had something less than adequate rations for the brigade. Having gulped down what he was given, Tealdo started toward the west, toward Unkerlant. King Swemmel was responsible for the dreadful day he’d put in, and for other dreadful days that no doubt lay ahead. As far as Tealdo was concerned, that meant Swemmel’s subjects would pay. “Oh, how they’ll pay,” he muttered.

“Come on, curse you!” Leudast shouted to the ordinary troopers of his squad. He enjoyed being a corporal, sure enough. Being a corporal meant he got to do the shouting instead of having sergeants and corporals shout at him. “We have to move faster, curse it. You think the lousy redheads are going to stand around waiting for you to get your thumbs out of your arses?”

He left without the slightest twinge of regret the Forthwegian village in which his squad had been billeted. The locals hadn’t given his comrades and him any more trouble since the Unkerlanters blazed down the firstman and his wife, but the Forthwegians didn’t love his countrymen, and they never would.

Like rills and creeks and streams flowing together to form a great river, the Unkerlanter squads and companies that had been quartered on the countryside came together into regiments and brigades and divisions and flowed toward the east, toward the border with Algarvian-held Forthweg. Leudast smiled and nodded approval at every squadron of horsemen and unicorn-riders who kicked up dust on the newly dry roads. He felt like cheering at every section of behemoths he saw, and wished there were more of them to see.

In the fields between the roads, Forthwegian peasants plowed and planted as they had done for centuries since largely displacing the isolated Kaunians left behind when the Algarvians swept up from the south and wrecked the Kaunian Empire. The Forthwegian peasants did their best to ignore the Unkerlanter soldiers moving along the roads, just as, farther east, Forthwegian peasants were doubtless doing their best to ignore the Algarvian soldiers moving along the roads.

“They’ll be planting back in my village about now, too,” Leudast said to Sergeant Magnulf. He sniffed, then sighed. “Nothing like spring air, is there? It even smells green, you know what I mean?—like you ought to be able to grow crops from the smell without bothering with plowing and manuring and all that.”

“Don’t I wish!” Magnulf rolled his eyes. “Village I came out of is a lot farther south—matter of fact, it’s only a couple of days’ walk this side of the Gifhorn River, and on the other side of the Gifhorn they’re Grelzers first and Unkerlanters only when they bother remembering the Union of Crowns. Liable to be snowing down there even now—and if it’s not, people are still waiting for the mud to dry. Once it does, they’ll work their arses off, too. None of this moonshine about growing things with the air.”

“I didn’t say you really could,” Leudast protested. “I just said it smelled like you could.”

Magnulf, like any sergeant worth his pay, was constitutionally unable to recognize a figure of speech. He could recognize a crude joke, though, and did, pointing to a band of Unkerlanter unicorns riding across a field a Forthwegian farmer had just finished plowing. “Haw, haw, haw! Now that miserable whoreson’ll have to do it all over again. Haw, haw!”