Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

Up the gangplank Tealdo went. His feet thudded on the timbers of the deck. The sailors scurrying around there and the men who traveled the lines of the rigging like outsized spiders did not strike him as an ordinary naval crew. That was only fair—they weren’t an ordinary naval crew, nor anything close to it. Every one of them was a highly trained yachtsman, adept at the otherwise obsolete art of sailing.

But that art was no longer obsolete, thanks to the ingenuity of Algarve’s generals and admirals. Tealdo wished he would be able to watch the great sails fill with wind as the fleet weighed anchor. Instead, he went down to a poorly lit compartment with whose cramped dimensions he was all too familiar. There he and his company would stay till their journey ended … or till something went wrong.

Maybe Captain Larbino had something similar on his mind, for he said, “Men, what we do here tonight will go a long way toward winning the war for Algarve. The Sibians shouldn’t realize we’re coming till we shop up on their doorstep—we’ll catch them with their kilts down. Nobody has gone to war with a fleet of sailing ships for hundreds of years. They’ll never expect it, and their mages likely won’t be able to give ’em much warning, either. If we sail over a ley line … so what? We don’t draw any energy from it, so they won’t notice us. We’ll be as safe as we would on dry land till we get into Tirgoviste harbor. Make yourselves comfortable and enjoy the trip.”

Tealdo made himself as comfortable as he could, which wasn’t very. He listened to more soldiers tramping into their assigned compartments, and to sailors running around and shouting things the thick oak timbers that surrounding him kept him from understanding. But tone carried, even if words didn’t. “They sound like they’re having a mighty good time, don’t they?” he said to Trasone.

“Why shouldn’t they?” Trasone answered. “Once they get us to Sibiu, their job is done. They can sit back and drink wine. We’re the ones who get to pay the bill after that.”

He wasn’t quite being fair. If the Sibs got the chance, they’d blaze at ships as well as soldiers. Before Tealdo could point that out, the motion of the Ambuscade changed. The pitching from bow to stern became more emphatic, and the ship began to roll from side to side as well. “We’re off,” Tealdo said.

His stomach took the ship’s motion in stride. Before long, though, he discovered that, as painstaking as the company’s combat rehearsals had been, they hadn’t covered everything. Several soldiers started puking. The compartment did have buckets to cope with such emergencies, but the emergency often arrived before the bucket did. In spite of everyone’s best efforts, the compartment became a very unpleasant place.

The amused contempt the yachtsmen showed as they carried buckets away did not endear them to their passengers. “If I could move, I’d kill those bastards,” a sufferer groaned.

Nobody could move much. The compartment held too many men for that. Tealdo hoped no one would heave up dinner on to his shoes. Past that, he squatted and chatted with the men around him and took breaths as shallow as he could.

Time dragged on. He supposed it had grown dark outside. He couldn’t have proved it, not down here. Every so often, someone fed the lantern oil. Those flickering flames were all the light he and his comrades had. For all he knew, they were below the waterline, which would have made portholes a bad idea.

He wished he were a horse or a unicorn, so he could sleep while he wasn’t lying down. A couple of soldiers did start to snore. He envied them. Because he envied them, he laughed all the louder when a roll bigger than usual made them topple over.

After what seemed like forever, the Ambuscade heeled sharply. Sailors shouted in excitement. “Get ready, boys,” Sergeant Panfilo said. “I think the shop is about to open for business.”

While Captain Larbino was saying the same thing in more elegant words, the Ambuscade proved him right by thudding against a quay—Tealdo hoped that was what had happened, at any rate, and that the ship hadn’t struck a rock instead. The door to the compartment flew open. “Out! Out! Out!” a yachtsman screamed.

Out the company went, and up the narrow stairway that led to the deck. “Nobody falls!” Panfilo bellowed. “Nobody falls, or he answers to me.” And nobody did fall. The men had rehearsed going up stairs like these so many times, they might have been stairs to the houses in which they’d grown up.

Cold, fresh air smelling of sea salt and smoke slapped Tealdo in the face. Not far away, another Algarvian ship burned brightly, lighting up the darkened harbor of Tirgoviste. Tealdo hoped the soldiers had been able to get off the ship. Every man counted in this assault. If the Algarvians did not conquer Sibiu, they would not be going home again.

After that, he stopped worrying about anything except what he was supposed to do. He followed the man in front of him over the gangplank and on to the quay. That too went off as it should have done. No one fell into the water. Had anybody done so, the weight of his kit would quickly have dragged him under.

“Move!” Captain Larbino shouted. “We have to move fast! Don’t stand there gaping. We’ve still got the headquarters building to take.”

No one was standing around gaping, either. That would have been handing the Sibians an invitation to blaze the men. Nobody with sticks had set up at the landward end of the quay, and Tealdo and his comrades didn’t propose to wait till someone did. “Easier than practice, so far,” he said.

“So far, maybe,” Trasone answered. “But nobody who got killed in practice stayed dead. Won’t be like that here.”

Sure enough, the Sibians began to wake up. They started blazing at the invaders from buildings by the port. But it was too late then, with Algarvians flooding into Tirgoviste from all their ships. Tealdo wondered how things were going at the other Sibian ports. Well, he hoped. Hope was all he could do.

Shouts rose, up ahead. He could understand most of them. Sibian was very close to the southern dialects of Algarvian, and not tremendously far removed from his own more northerly accent. The Sibs were yelling about stopping his pals and him. “Good luck,” he snarled, a carnivorous grin on his face.

He hadn’t realized how meticulously his superiors had reproduced the environs of Tirgoviste harbor at the rehearsal sites near Imola. When Sibians popped up to blaze at his comrades and him, they did so in the places from which Algarvian “defenders” had fought during those long, tedious practice runs. Tealdo knew where they would be almost before they got there. He knew where to take cover, and where to aim his stick. He didn’t have to think. He just had to do, and to go on doing.

“Keep moving!” Larbino yelled. “Don’t let them gather themselves. Don’t let them make a stand. If we press them hard now, they’ll break. We have to keep them back on their heels!”

“Listen to the captain!” Sergeant Panfilo bellowed, almost in Tealdo’s ear. “He knows what he’s talking about.” Panfilo shook his head and spoke again, this time in a much lower voice: “Never thought I’d say that about an officer.”

The strongpoint Larbino’s company had been trained to capture turned out to be the naval offices at Tirgoviste. Till he flopped down behind some rubble not far away, Tealdo hadn’t known what the target was, nor cared much, either. His superiors told him what to do, and he went out and did it. The arrangement struck him as equitable.

“Covering blazes!” Larbino roared, and Tealdo aimed his stick at a second-story window from which a Sibian was liable to do some blazing of his own. No sooner had he done so than he saw, or thought he saw, motion behind that window. His stick sent a beam into the offices. No Sibian blazed at the Algarvians from that spot, so Tealdo concluded he hadn’t been imagining things after all.