Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

“Now this,” Leudast said as he tramped through western Forthweg, “this is what efficiency is all about.”

Sergeant Magnulf nodded. “You had best believe it, soldier,” he said. “Shows the Forthwegians need lessons. If you’re stupid enough to start a war on one border when the kingdom on your other border can’t stand you, seems to me you deserve whatever happens to you.”

“I hadn’t even thought about that,” Leudast said. “I was just thinking we’re going to have a lot easier time than we did against the Gyongyosians.” He looked around. “A lot better country to fight in, too.”

“Aye, so it is,” Magnulf agreed.

“Reminds me of home, as a matter of fact.” Leudast pointed westward. “My family’s farm isn’t that far on the other side of the border, and it looks a lot like this back there.” He waved.

Most of the farm buildings hereabouts were of sun-dried brick brightened with whitewash or, less often, paint. Wheat ripened golden in the fields; plump, ripe olives made branches sag. The breeds of cattle and sheep the Forthwegians raised were similar to those with which Leudast had grown up back in Unkerlant.

Nor did the Forthwegians themselves look that different from Unkerlanters. They were, most of them, stocky and swarthy, with proud, hook-nosed faces. Save that the men wore beards, Leudast would have been hard pressed to prove he’d entered another kingdom.

Most of the beards he saw were grizzled or white; the young men were off in the east, fighting the Algarvians. Graybeards and women, those who had not fled, stared with terrible bitterness as the Unkerlanter soldiers marched past. Every so often, one of them would shout something Leudast almost understood; the Unkerlanter dialect he spoke wasn’t that far removed from Forthwegian. It was close enough to make him certain the locals weren’t paying compliments.

Every so often, Forthwegian border guards and the small garrisons King Penda had left behind in the west would try to make a stand against the Unkerlanters, defending a line of hills or a town or sending out cavalry to nip at the thick columns of men King Swemmel had flung into their kingdom.

They were brave. Leudast couldn’t see that it did them much good. The Unkerlanters flowed around them, surrounded them, and attacked them from all sides at once. Behemoths trampled Forthwegian cavalry underfoot. Unkerlanter officers would go forward under flag of truce to urge surrenders, pointing out that the Forthwegians could not possibly hope to resist. Their foes sent them back and kept fighting as long as they could.

“Inefficient,” Magnulf said as his squad encamped one evening after pushing another fifteen or so miles into Forthweg—a typical day’s advance. “They aren’t stopping us. They’re hardly slowing us down. What’s the point to throwing their lives away?”

“Stubborn fools,” Leudast said. “They should see they’re beaten and give up.”

“I heard one of them shout, ‘Better to die under King Penda than to live under King Swemmel!’” Magnulf said, mimicking the Forthwegian tongue as well as he could. The sergeant shrugged. “I think that’s what he said, anyhow. And now he’s dead, and it’s not going to keep the Forthwegians from living under King Swemmel, not one little bit it’s not. We’ll be knocking on the door at Eoforwic in another few days.”

Leudast looked east. “We don’t quarrel with the Algarvians, though?”

“Not if they stay on their side of what used to be the border before the Six Years’ War,” Magnulf answered. “We won’t cross it—we’re just taking back what was ours, not stealing from anybody else.”

That night, Forthwegian dragons dropped eggs on the Unkerlanters’ forward positions. The noise from the bursts kept Leudast awake, but none of them came particularly close.

The next morning, the Unkerlanters approached Hwiterne, a city whose stone keep would have been a formidable defense in the days before eggs were flung for miles or fell from dragons. Again, King Swemmel’s officers went ahead to ask the town to surrender. Again, the Forthwegian garrison refused.

Before long, pillars of smoke rose into the sky from Hwiterne. Under cover of that barrage, Unkerlanter troops pushed through the patchily inhabited suburbs and into the town itself. Leudast discovered he had not only Forthwegian soldiers but also townsfolk blazing at him. He blazed back. He blazed at anyone he spied in Hwiterne who wasn’t wearing Unkerlanter rock-gray. He suspected he might have wounded innocent bystanders. That was inefficient, but not nearly so inefficient as letting himself get killed.

He flopped down in the rubble that had been a house. A woman with a bandage on her head lay not far away from him. He didn’t blaze her down; he could see she had no weapon. “Why?” she asked him. “Why did you cursed Unkerlanters come here? Why didn’t you leave us alone?”

Leudast followed that well enough. “We came to take back what’s ours,” he answered.

She glared at him. “Can’t you see we don’t want you? Can’t you see we”—a word he didn’t know—“King Swemmel?” Whatever the word meant, he doubted it was praise.

“If you’re not strong enough to stop us, what difference does that make?” Leudast asked in honest puzzlement.

She cursed him then, her voice full of bitter hopelessness. He could have killed her for it. No one would have been the wiser. No one who mattered to Leudast would have cared at all. She had to know as much. She cursed anyhow, as if defying him to do his worst.

He shrugged his broad shoulders. She cursed again, harder than ever. His indifference seemed more wounding to her than rage would have been. Shrugging once more, he said, “You didn’t curse when King Penda invaded Algarve. What business have you got doing it now?”

She stared at him. “The Algarvians deserve everything that happens to them. We don’t deserve any of this.”

“That’s not what King Swemmel thinks,” Leudast said. “He’s my king. I obey him.” Dreadful things happened to Unkerlanters who didn’t obey King Swemmel. Leudast preferred not to dwell on those.

A Forthwegian egg burst not far away. Chunks of wood and mud brick rained down on him and the woman with the bandaged head. Dreadful things, he realized, could also happen to Unkerlanters who did obey King Swemmel. For a moment, he wondered why, in that case, he willingly put himself into danger.

He didn’t have to search hard for the answer. Dreadful things might not happen to him if he fought the Gongs or the Forthwegians. Nothing too dreadful had happened to him yet. If, on the other hand, he set his own will against the king’s… Swemmel had shown over the years that disaster surely befell anyone rash enough to do such a thing.

The Unkerlanters rained eggs on the center of Hwiterne, from which resistance was fiercest. Officers blew whistles. Sergeants shouted. Leudast scrambled to his feet and dashed forward. For a couple of heartbeats, he heard the Forthwegian woman cursing him yet again. Then her voice was lost in the greater din of battle.

He ran past the corpse of a behemoth, killed with most of its crew by a Forthwegian egg. A moment later, he dove for cover behind another dead behemoth. A strong stink of burnt meat rose from this one: the Forthwegians had concealed a stick heavy enough to blaze through the beast’s armor in a building now wreckage. Leudast warily looked around for more such traps, though the Unkerlanters had driven the foe from this part of Hwiterne. Trying to use behemoths in the middle of a built-up area struck him as inefficient. He wondered if it would strike his officers the same way.

Hwiterne fell. So did the keep at its heart, smashed to ruins by the miracles of modern sorcery. Filthy, dejected Forthwegian captives shambled off into the west, a handful of Unkerlanters guarding them. A good many corpses wearing civilian-style tunics rather than those of the Forthwegian army lay in the streets, each dead man with a neat hole blazed in the center of his forehead. Someone had painted a sign in Unkerlanter and what Leudast presumed to be Forthwegian (the Forthwegians used an alphabet different from his): IF YOU ARE NOT A SOLDIER, THIS IS WHAT YOU GET FOR BLAZING AT KING SWEMMEL’S MEN.