Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

“Camels!” Sergeant Magnulf used the word as vilely as Leudast had used efficiency before. “Bastards snuck around our cavalry again.” He bit out a few curses of a more conventional sort, then gathered himself. “Well, no help for it.” He looked westward to gauge how close the attackers were. “Fall back!” he shouted. “Fall back—form a line so we’re not enfiladed any more. Whatever happens, we have to hang on to that water hole back there.”

He was thinking about water, too, though in a more immediate sense than Leudast had been. In this sun-baked country, not thinking about water was impossible. No doubt the Zuwayzin were also thinking about it, and making for that water hole themselves. At least Magnulf was thinking, which seemed to be more than any of the Unkerlanter officers could say.

Leudast scrambled back toward a stone that offered good shelter against attack from the west. As happened whenever a force found itself outflanked, some soldiers panicked and fled toward the rear. As often happened when they did, they paid the price for panic: Zuwayzi beams cut them down.

Howling with triumph, the Zuwayzin stormed forward. Leudast blazed a black man who showed too much of himself. Several other Zuwayzin also went down, dead or shrieking in pain. Then the enemy started flitting from rock to rock again, having learned a good many Unkerlanters still held fight.

More eggs crashed down around Leudast. The Zuwayzin must have taken apart some light tossers and carried them on camelback. Sand and shattered rock pelted him. He wanted to claw a hole in the ground, jump in, and pull the hole shut over him. He couldn’t. And, if he stayed curled up behind this rock, the Zuwayzin could move forward and blaze him at their leisure.

Understanding that was easy. Making himself get up on one knee and blaze at the enemy was much harder, but he did it. He thought he wounded another Zuwayzi, too. But he could not stay where he was any more, for the Zuwayzin were still advancing. He slipped away to another stone, and then to another.

“We have to save the water hole!” an officer shouted, realizing only now what Magnulf had seen at once. “If we lose that water hole, we lose our grip on this whole stretch of desert.” He shouted orders pulling more men from what had been the advance and shifting them to the turned flank.

It wasn’t going to be enough. Leudast could see it wasn’t going to be enough. The Zuwayzin could see it wasn’t going to be enough, too. They knew what forcing the men of Unkerlant away from the water hole would mean. They were more clever than the Gongs, probably more clever than the Forthwegians, too. When they struck, they struck hard, and straight for the heart.

Leudast wondered if he had enough water to make it back to the next clean hole. It was, he knew, a long way to the south—a dreadfully long way, if a man was retreating with the enemy nipping at his heels. Maybe he could fill up the bottle before the black men reached this water hole.

More eggs fell—but these fell on the Zuwayzin. Dragons overhead had made the scavenger birds fly off. As the dragons wheeled, he saw their upper bodies were painted rock-gray: the color Unkerlant used. Now he shouted in triumph and the Zuwayzin in dismay. Unkerlanter egg-tossers well back of the line began adding their gifts to the ones the dragons were delivering.

A man in a rock-gray tunic took shelter behind the rock next to Leudast’s. “How’s it look, soldier?” he asked, an officer’s sharp snap in his voice.

“Not too bad, sir—not now,” Leudast answered, glancing over at the newcomer. That tunic was one a common soldier might have worn, but the collar bore a large star. Leudast’s eyes widened. Only one man in Unkerlant was entitled to wear that emblem. “Not too bad, my lord Marshal,” he corrected himself, wondering what a man like Rathar was doing at the front.

Rathar answered that question without his asking it: “Can’t find out what’s going on if I don’t see for myself.”

“Uh, aye, sir,” Leudast said. The marshal hadn’t just come to see. He’d conic to fight, and carried a stick like any other footsoldier’s. He used it, too, popping up to blaze at the Zuwayzin. Of course, he’d fought in the Six Years’ War and the Twinkings War, which meant he’d been around combat longer than Leudast had been alive. His happy grunt had to mean he’d got a beam home.

Looking around, Leudast saw Rathar had also brought his crystallomancer with him. The marshal barked out a stream of orders, which the mage relayed to his colleagues back with the reserves. Those orders sent men and egg-tossers and dragons up toward the battle. Anyone who disobeyed them or delayed by even a heartbeat speedily regretted it.

For the first time since plunging into the Zuwayzin desert, Leudast began to feel hope. Up till now, the Unkerlanters’ campaign had been bungled. Listening to Rathar’s crisp commands, he didn’t think the bungling would go on much longer.

It was Count Brorda’s birthday, a holiday in Gromheort. An Algarvian dwelt in Brorda’s castle these days, but he hadn’t bothered canceling the holiday. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to antagonize the Forthwegians over whom he sat in judgment, although Ealstan had a hard time imagining an Algarvian who cared a fig about what the folk of Gromheort thought.

More likely, the occupiers were just too lazy to bother changing what they’d found when they overran the city.

Whatever the cause, Ealstan was glad to escape school. He’d grown as sick of Algarvian irregular verbs as he had been of their classical Kaunian equivalents. And besides, the first fall rains had brought out the mushrooms.

Forthwegians were mad for mushrooms—not surprising, when so many good ones grew in their kingdom. They ate them fresh, they ate them dried, they ate them pickled, they ate them in salads, they ate them with olives: they ate them with any excuse, or none.

Markets were always full of mushrooms, but Ealstan, like most Forthwegians, was convinced the ones he picked himself were better than any he could buy. Like most Forthwegians, he knew the differences between the edible varieties and the ones that were poisonous; like his schoolmasters, his father had operated on the principle that a warmed backside made blood flow more freely to the brain. And so, armed with a cloth sack, he sallied forth with his cousin Sidroc to see what he could find.

“It will be good to get out of the city,” Sidroc said. Lowering his voice, he went on, “It will be good to get away from the cursed redheads, too.”

“I won’t say you’re wrong, because I think you’re right,” Ealstan said. “I just hope they let us out. All their checkpoints are still up.”

But the Algarvian soldiers at the checkpoint on the west side of town, seeing the sacks they carried, waved them through. “Mushrooms?” a soldier asked. Ealstan and Sidroc nodded. The Algarvian stuck out his tongue and made a horrible face to show what he thought of them. He spoke in his own language. His comrades laughed and nodded. They didn’t fancy mushrooms, either.

“More for us,” Ealstan said as soon as he was out of earshot of the guard who spoke Forthwegian. Sidroc nodded again.

Before long, the two cousins split up. That way, they would bring a wider assortment of mushrooms back to the house they still shared. That way, too, they wouldn’t quarrel if they both spotted a fine one at the same time. They’d quarreled over mushrooms before, more than once. Now they knew better.

Every so often, Ealstan would see someone else digging in a field or at the base of a tree. He didn’t offer to go and help any of these people. Some folks loved to chat and share. Rather more, though, were inclined to be surly, to say nothing of greedy. He learned that way himself. If a pretty girl came along and wanted to give him a hand, he might let her. He laughed at himself. He liked the idea, but knew better than to find it likely.