Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

His pack sat at the foot of his cot, in precisely the prescribed place. His stick leaned against the wall at the left side of the bed, at precisely the prescribed angle. Panfilo hadn’t been able to find a thing to complain about in the way he handled his gear, If Panfilo couldn’t find it, it wasn’t there.

Tealdo slung the pack over his shoulder, grunting at its weight. When he picked up the stick, his finger accidentally slid into the blazing hole. It didn’t matter here, not directly: in training, well away from any fighting front, none of the weapons carried a sorcerous charge. But it was not a good habit to acquire.

He wasn’t one of the first men back out to the parade ground. But he wasn’t one of the last men out, either, the men at whom his superiors screamed. He enjoyed people screaming at him no more than he enjoyed endless practice. Practice he couldn’t escape. He could keep people from screaming at him, could and did.

“Form by companies!” Colonel Ombruno shouted: a useless order, since the regiment always formed by companies. “Form by companies, and report to your designated practice locations.”

The company commanders shepherded the men off to their own areas. Soon, when a new practice field combined all those areas, they would work together. In the meanwhile…

In the meanwhile, the company commanders got to puff out their chests and strut, like so many pigeons trying to impress mates. Captain Larbino’s strut and his shouted orders did not impress Tealdo: he was no dimwitted female pigeon. But he had to obey, which a female pigeon did not.

Larbino led his company to a cramped underground chamber that had two stairways leading down into it, one broad, the other narrow. The men entered the chamber by the broad stairway. Only a few lanterns, stinking offish oil, cast a dim, flickering glow there. “Powers above, it’s like falling back through a thousand years of time,” Tealdo muttered.

“Take your places!” Larbino’s loud voice dinned in the small, crowded chamber. “Five minutes till the exercise begins! Take your places! No mercy on any man who’s out of place when the whistle blows.”

The soldiers were already taking their places. They had been doing this for three weeks. They knew, or were convinced they knew, at least as much about their part of the operation as did Larbino. They formed a single serpentine line that led to the bottom of the narrow stairway and kinked at each earthen wall. Seen from above, it would have looked like a long string of gut twisted to fit into the abdominal cavity.

Shrill and deafeningly loud, the brass whistle screeched. “I love running in full kit,” Trasone said through the blast, and then, in a lower voice, “In a pig’s arse I do.” Tealdo chuckled. He felt the same way.

“Out! Out! Out!” Larbino was screaming. “They’ll be blazing at you when you do this for real! Don’t stand around playing with yourselves.”

“I’d rather be playing with myself than doing this,” Tealdo said. He didn’t think anyone heard him. The line was uncoiling rapidly as soldier after soldier dashed up the narrow stairs. They’d had dreadful tangles the first few times they tried it. They’d got better with practice. Tealdo declined to admit that, even to himself.

His feet thudded on the timbers of the narrow stairway. Up he went. Anyone who tripped here was a cork in the bottle for everyone behind him. Panfilo had a more expressive term for it: as far as he was concerned, anyone who tripped on the narrow stairway was a dead man.

Tealdo emerged into daylight. Before long, they’d be running the exercise at night, which would make it even more delightful. He dashed to a broad plank that spanned a deep trench and raced across it. Two men from his company had fallen into the trench. One managed to escape without being hurt. The other broke his leg.

Cloth flags on stakes marked the narrow way he and his comrades had to take. He rushed along that narrow way till it suddenly widened out. Where it did, buildings—or rather, false fronts—defined streets through which they had to run. Soldiers with uncharged sticks “fought” from those false fronts, trying to impede the company’s progress. Umpires with green ribbons tied to their tunic sleeves signaled theoretical casualties.

Tealdo “blazed” back at the defenders. One after another, the umpires ruled them deceased. But Tealdo’s comrades were taken out of action, too. He rather hoped he would be, as had happened during a couple of practice runs. Then he could lie down and grab a breather, and no sergeant would be able to complain.

But, at the umpires’ whim, he was allowed to survive. Panting, he raced left, right, and then left again before coming to the gateway for whose capture his company was responsible. More soldiers tried to keep the company from seizing the gate. The umpires ruled those soldiers failed and fell.

The egg one of Captain Larbino’s soldiers set against the gateway was only a wooden simulacrum. An umpire’s whistle blew, signaling a blast of energy. A couple of defenders, miraculously revived from their “deaths”, opened the gate to let the “survivors” of the company inside.

More narrow ways lay beyond, some as twisted as the paths in a maze. Still more soldiers tried to keep Tealdo and his comrades from passing those ways to the end. Again, they failed. More whistles shrilled. Tealdo raised a weary cheer. He and enough of the other soldiers had reached the end of the practice area to have succeeded were this actual battle.

“King Mezentio and all of Algarve will have reason to be proud of you when you fight this well with your lives truly in the pans of the scale,” Larbino declared. “I know you will. You need no lessons in courage, only in how best to use that courage. Those lessons will go on. Tomorrow, we will take the practice course in the dark.”

Weary groans replaced the weary cheers. Tealdo turned and saw Trasone not far away. “Marching into Bari was a lot more fun,” he said. “All this running around looks too much like work to me.”

“It’ll look even more like work when the bastards on the other side start blazing back for real,” Trasone answered.

“Don’t remind me,” Tealdo said with a grimace. “Don’t remind me.”

Leofsig felt like a beast of burden, or perhaps an animal in a cage. He was not a Forthwegian soldier any more, the Forthwegian army having been crushed between those of Algarve and Unkerlant. Not a foot of Forthwegian soil remained under the control of men loyal to King Penda. From east and west, the enemies’ forces had joined hands east of Eoforwic; joined hands over Forthweg’s fallen corpse.

And so Leofsig languished with thousands of his comrades in a captives’ camp somewhere between Gromheort and Eoforwic, not far from where his regiment, or what was left of it, had finally surrendered to the Algarvians. He scowled when he thought of the dapper Algarvian officer who’d inspected the dirty, worn, beaten Forthwegian soldiers still hale enough to line up for the surrender ceremony.

“You fought well. You fought bravely,” the Algarvian officer had said, trilling the slow sounds of Forthwegian as if they belonged to his native tongue. Then he’d hopped into the air, kicking up his heels in an extravagant gesture of contempt. “And for all the good it did you, for all the good it did your kingdom, you might as well not have fought at all. Think on that. You will have a long time to think on that.” He’d turned his back and strutted away.

Time Leofsig did indeed have. Inside these wooden fences, inside these towers manned by Algarvians who would sooner blaze a captive coming near than listen to him, time was very nearly the only thing he did have. He had the tunic and boots in which he’d surrendered, and he had a hard cot in a flimsy barracks.