Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

King Swemmel’s eyes bored into his. Rathar dropped his own eyes, staring down at the green carpet on which he stood. Nevertheless, he felt the king’s gaze like a physical weight, a heavy, heavy weight. Swemmel said, “We would not have so much patience with many men, Marshal. Do you obey us?”

“Your Majesty, I obey you,” Rathar said. Obeying Swemmel would cost lives. Odds were, it would cost lives by the thousands. Unkerlant had lives to spend. Zuwayza did not. It was as simple as that. And with Rathar in command, the king’s willfulness would not cost so many lives as it would under some other commander. So he told himself, at any rate, salving his conscience as best he could.

When he looked up at Swemmel again, the king was relaxed, or as relaxed as his tightly wound spirit ever let him be. “Go, then,” he said. “Go and ready the army, to hurl it against the Zuwayzin at our command. We shall publish to the world the indignities Shazli and his burnt-skinned, naked minions have committed against our kingdom. No one will lift a finger to aid them.”

“I should think not,” Rathar said. With the rest of the world embroiled in war, who would even grieve over one small, distant kingdom?

“Go, then,” Swemmel repeated. “You have shown yourself to be a good leader of men, Marshal, and the armies you commanded did all we expected and all we had hoped in taking back Forthweg. Otherwise, your insolence here would not go unpunished. Next time, regardless of circumstances, it shall not go unpunished. Do you understand?”

“I am your servant, your Majesty,” Rathar said, bowing low. “You have commanded; I shall obey. All I wanted was to be certain you fully grasped the choice you are making.”

“Every man, woman, and child in Unkerlant is our servant,” King Swemmel said indifferently. “A marshal’s blade makes you no different from the rest. And we make our own choices for our own reasons. We need no one to confuse our mind, especially when we did not seek your views on this matter. Do you understand that?”

“Aye, your Majesty.” Rathar’s face showed nothing of what he thought. So far as he could, his face showed nothing at all. Around King Swemmel, that was safest.

“Then get out!” Swemmel shouted.

Rathar prostrated himself again. When he rose to retreat from the king’s chamber, he did so without turning around, lest his back offend his sovereign. In the antechamber, he buckled on his ceremonial sword once more. A guard matter-of-factly got between him and the doorway through which he’d come, to make sure he could not attack the king. Sometimes the idea was tempting, though Rathar did not let his face show that, either.

He went off to do his best to get the army ready to invade Zuwayza at King Swemmel’s impossible deadline. His aides exclaimed in dismay. Normally as calm a man as any ever born, Rathar screamed at them. After his audience with Swemmel, that made him feel a little better, but not much.

Tealdo liked being stationed in the Duchy of Bari just fine, even if, as a man from the north, he found oncoming autumn in this part of Algarve on the chilly side. The folk of the Duchy remained thrilled to be united with their countrymen, from whom old Duke Alardo had done his best to sunder them. And a gratifying number of girls in the Duchy remained thrilled to unite with Algarvian soldiers.

“Why shouldn’t they?” Tealdo’s friend Trasone said when he remarked on that. “It’s their patriotic duty, isn’t it?”

“If I ever told a wench it was her patriotic duty to lay me, she’d figure it was her patriotic duty to smack me in the head,” Tealdo said, which made Trasone laugh. Tealdo went on, “The other thing I like about being here is that I’m not blazing away at the Valmierans or the Jelgavans—and they’re not blazing away at me.”

Trasone laughed again, a big bass rumble that suited his burly frame. “Well, I won’t argue with that. Powers above, I can’t argue with that. But sooner or later we’ll have to do some blazing, and when we do it’s liable to be worse than facing either one of the stinking Kaunian kingdoms.”

“Sooner or later will take care of itself,” Tealdo said. “For now, nobody’s blazing at me, and that’s just fine.”

He strode out of the barracks, which were made of pine timber so new, they still smelled strongly of resinous sap. Off in the distance, waves from the Narrow Sea slapped against the stone breakwater that shielded the harbor of Imola from winter storms. Endless streams of birds flew past overhead, all of them going north. Already they were fleeing the brief summer of the land of the Ice People. Soon, very soon, they would be fleeing the Duchy of Bari, too, bound for warmer climes. Some would stop in northern Algarve and Jelgava; some would cross the Garelian Ocean and winter in tropic Siaulia, which hardly knew the meaning of the word.

Above the twittering flocks, dragons whirled in lazy—no, in lazy-looking—circles. Tealdo looked south, toward the sea and toward Sibiu. More dragons circled over the sea. Tealdo resented the dragonfliers less than he had when he was marching into the Duchy. They kept the Sibs from dropping eggs on his head. He heartily approved of that. They also kept the enemy’s dragons from peering down on him and his comrades. He approved of that, too.

A trumpeter on the parade ground in front of the barracks blew a sprightly flourish: the call to assembly. Tealdo dashed for his place. Behind him, men poured from the barracks as if from a bawdy house the constables were raiding. He took his assigned place in the ranks of the regiment ahead of almost everyone else. That gave him half a minute to brush a few specks of dust from his kilt, to slide his boots along his socks, and to adjust his broad-brimmed hat to the proper jaunty angle before Sergeant Panfilo started prowling.

Prowl Panfilo did. He favored Tealdo with a glare sergeants surely had to practice in front of a reflecting glass. Tealdo looked back imperturbably. Panfilo reached out and slapped away some dust he’d missed—or perhaps slapped at nothing at all, to keep Tealdo from thinking he had the world by the tail. Sergeants did things like that.

“King Mezentio doesn’t want slobs in his army,” Panfilo growled.

“Told you so himself, did he?” Tealdo asked innocently.

But Panfilo got the last word: “That he did, in his regulations, and I’ll thank you to remember it.” He stalked off to make some other common soldier’s life less joyous than it had been.

Colonel Ombruno swaggered out to the front of the regiment. “Well, my pirates, my cutthroats, my old-fashioned robbers and burglars,” he called with a grin, “how wags your world today?”

“We are well, sir,” Tealdo shouted along with the rest of the men.

“Diddling enough of the pretty girls around these parts?” Ombruno asked.

“Aye!” the men shouted, Tealdo again loud among them. He knew Ombruno chased—and caught—the Barian women as frequently as he had farther north in Algarve.

“That’s good; that’s good.” The regimental commander rocked back on his heels, then forward once more. “No diddling for now, though, except that we’re going to figure out how to diddle our enemies. Go load your packs, grab your sticks, and report back here in ten minutes. Dismissed!”

This time, Tealdo groaned. He knew what they would be doing for the rest of the day: the same thing they’d been doing most of the days since they’d established themselves by Imola. Unless it involved a pretty girl, he soon got sick of doing the same thing over and over. He realized that, when the time for fighting came, all this practice was liable to help keep him alive. That didn’t, that couldn’t, make him enjoy it while it was going on.