Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

Half his men—half the men he had left—dove into such cover as they could find—mostly the holes burst eggs had dug in the ground. The rest raced by them. Then they flattened out and blazed at the Algarvians while the others rose and dashed past. Little by little, they worked their way toward the trenches from which the redheads were blazing at them.

Skarnu took shelter in a hole himself, waiting for his next chance to advance. He looked around, hoping the order he’d had to give hadn’t slowed his company too badly. What he saw left him wide-eyed with dismay. As many Valmierans were running back toward their own lines as were still going forward against the enemy. Of the ones still advancing, most paid no attention to tactics that might have cut their losses. They kept moving up till they went down. When they could bear no more, they broke and fled.

“You see, sir?” Raunu shouted from a hole not far away. “This is how I feared it would be.”

“What can we do?” Skarnu asked.

“We aren’t going to break through their lines,” Raunu answered. “We aren’t even going to get into their lines—or if we do, we won’t come out again. Best we can do now is hang tight here, hurt ’em a bit, and get back to where we started from after nightfall. If you order me forward, though, sir, I’ll go.”

“No,” Skarnu said. “What point to that but getting us killed to no purpose?” He assumed that, if he ordered Raunu forward, he would have to try to advance, too. “This is what you warned me about before the attack began, isn’t it?”

“Aye, sir. Good to see you can recognize it,” Raunu said. “I only wish our commanders could.” Skarnu started to reproach the sergeant for speaking too freely. He stopped with the words unspoken. How could Raunu have spoken too freely when all he did was tell the truth?

Leofsig still retained the tin mess kit he’d been issued when mustered into King Penda’s levy. As captives went, that made him relatively lucky. Forthwegian soldiers who’d lost their kits had to make do with bowls that held less. The Algarvians might have issued their own kits to men who lacked them, but that didn’t seem to have entered their minds.

What had crossed their minds was carefully counting the captives in each barracks in the encampment before those captives got anything in their mess kits or bowls. Leofsig would not have bet that the Algarvian guards could count to ten, even using their fingers. The endless recounts to which the captives had to submit argued against it, at any rate.

Every so often, a captive or two really did turn up missing. That meant the redheads tore the encampment apart till they found out how the men had disappeared. It also meant a week of half rations for the escapees’ barracksmates. No one got fat on full rations. Half rations were slow starvation. Half rations were also an argument for betraying anyone thinking of getting away.

This morning, everything seemed to add up. “Powers above be praised,” Leofsig muttered. He was cold and tired and hungry; standing in formation in front of the barracks was not his idea of a good time. Standing in line and waiting for the meager breakfast the cooks would dole out didn’t strike him as delightful, either. Eventually, though, he’d get food in his belly, which came close to making the wait worthwhile.

Plop! The sound of a large ladle of mush landing in his mess kit was about as appetizing as the stuff itself. The mush was mostly wheat porridge, with cabbage and occasional bits of salt fish or pork mixed in. The captives ate it breakfast, dinner, and supper. It was never very good. This morning, it smelled worse than usual.

Leofsig ate it anyhow. If it made him sick—and it did make people sick every so often—he’d go to the infirmary. And if anybody claimed he was malingering, he’d throw up in the wretch’s lap.

The handful of Kaunians in his barracks ate in a small knot by themselves, as they usually did. He would sometimes join them. So would a few of his fellow Forthwegians. Most, though, wanted nothing to do with the blonds. And a few, like Merwit, still stirred up trouble every chance they got.

“Hey, you!” Merwit said now. Leofsig looked up from his mush. Sure enough, Merwit was staring his way with a smile that made him look neither friendly nor attractive. “Aye, you, yellow-hair lover,” the burly captain went on. “You going on latrine duty after breakfast? That’d give you the chance to hang around with your pals?”

“You ought to try it yourself, Merwit,” Leofsig answered. “There’s nobody else I know who’s half so full of shit.”

Merwit’s eyes went big and wide. He and Leofsig had quarreled before, but Leofsig hadn’t given back insult for insult till this moment. Carefully, Merwit set down his own mess kit. “You’re going to pay for that,” he said in matter-of-fact tones. He charged forward like a behemoth.

Leofsig kicked him in the belly. It was like kicking a plank. Merwit grunted, but he slammed one fist into Leofsig’s ribs and the other into the top of Leofsig’s head. He’d meant to hit him in the face, but Leofsig ducked. Merwit howled then. With any luck at all, he’d broken a knuckle or two.

Being smaller and lighter, Leofsig knew he’d need all the help of that sort he could get. He tried to end the fight in a hurry by kneeing Merwit in the crotch, but Merwit twisted away and took the knee on the hip. He seized Leofsig in a bearhug. Leofsig knocked his feet out from under him. They went down together, each doing the other as much damage with fists and elbows and knees as he could.

“Halting! You halting!” somebody shouted in accented Forthwegian. Leofsig did nothing of the kind, having a well-founded suspicion that Merwit wouldn’t. “You halting!” This time, the command had teeth: “You halting, or we blazing!”

That must have convinced Merwit, because he stopped trying to work mayhem on Leofsig. Leofsig gave him one more inconspicuous elbow, then pushed him away and got to his feet. His nose was bleeding. A couple of his front teeth felt loose, but they were all there. None was even broken—pure luck, and he knew it.

He looked over at Merwit. Merwit looked as if he’d been in a fight: one of his eyes was swollen shut, and he had a big bruise on the other cheek. Leofsig felt as if he’d been pummeled with boulders. He hoped Merwit did, too.

The Algarvian guards who’d stopped the brawl were shaking their heads. “Stupid, stupid Forthwegians,” one of them said, more in sorrow than in anger. He gestured with his stick. “You coming, stupid Forthwegians. Now you seeing just how stupid you being. Come!” Glumly, Leofsig and Merwit came.

Sometimes, the Algarvians chose not to notice captives fighting among themselves. Sometimes, without rhyme or reason Leofsig could see, they chose to make examples of them. He eased a little when he saw they were taking him and Merwit to Brigadier Cynfrid, the senior Forthwegian officer in camp, rather than to their own commandant. Cynfrid had far less power to punish than did the Algarvian authorities.

“What have we here?” the brigadier asked, looking up from some paperwork. With his gray hair and snowy mustache and beard, he seemed more a kindly grandfather than a soldier. Had he been a better soldier—had a lot of Forthwegian commanders been better soldiers—he might not have ended up in a captives’ camp, but might instead have kept the war going.

“These two, they fighting,” one of the Algarvian guards said.

“Oh, aye, I can see that,” Cynfrid said. “The question is, why were they fighting?” The guard gave back an extravagant Algarvian shrug, one that declared he not only didn’t know but found beneath him the idea of wondering why Forthwegians did anything. The brigadier sighed, evidently having encountered that attitude before. He examined Leofsig and Merwit. “What have you men got to say for yourselves?”