Harry Turtledove: Darkness Descending

“Got to keep moving is right,” Trasone grumbled. “Sounds like we’re nothing but targets if we don’t.”

They turned out to be targets even when they did keep moving. A beam slammed into the trunk of an oak in front of Tealdo. Steam hissed out of the hole charred in the living wood. It would have hissed out of a hole charred in his living flesh the same way.

He threw himself off the track and behind a log. Somewhere behind him, a comrade was screaming. Off to the other side of the path, the Unkerlanters were shouting: hoarse cries of “Urra! Urra!” and King Swemmel’s name repeated again and again. More beams hissed through the air above Tealdo’s head, giving it the smell it had just after lightning struck.

From behind a nearby bush, Trasone called, “I’m sure glad we cleared the whoresons out of these woods. They must have been standing on each other’s shoulders in here before we came through and did it.”

“Oh, aye.” Tealdo hunkered down lower behind his log as the shouting on the other side of the path got louder. “And now they’re going to try and throw us out again.”

Still shouting “Urra!” Unkerlanters swarmed across the path. Tealdo blazed one down, but then had to scramble back frantically to keep from being cut off and surrounded. All at once, he understood how the Forthwegians and Sibians and Valmierans and Jelgavans--aye, and the Unkerlanters, too--must have felt when King Mezentio’s armies struck them. He would sooner have done without the lesson.

Mezentio and the Algarvian generals had outplanned their foes as well as beaten them on the battlefield. The Unkerlanters here in this stretch of wood showed no such inspired generalship. All they had were numbers and ferocity. Tealdo tripped over a root and fell headlong. Those were liable to be enough.

“Rally by squads!” Captain Galafrone shouted, somewhere not too far away.

“To me! To me!” That was Sergeant Panfilo. Never had his raucous voice seemed so welcome to Tealdo.

As Tealdo made his way toward Panfilo, Galafrone shouted again, this time for his crystallomancer. Tealdo’s lips skinned back from his teeth. One way or another, the Unkerlanters were going to catch it.

He only hoped he didn’t catch it first. Along with Trasone, he found Sergeant Panfilo. They all had to keep falling back, though, ever deeper among the trees. Tealdo began to wonder if they would run into still more Unkerlanters there. He would hear cries of “Urra!” and “Swemmel!” in his nightmares as long as he lived. He hoped he lived long enough to have nightmares.

He cheered when eggs started falling among the Unkerlanters who’d broken the Algarvian grip on the path. He cheered again when shouts of “Mezentio!” rang out from the east, and yet again when the Unkerlanters started yelling in dismay rather than in fury.

As Algarvian reinforcements struck the Unkerlanters, the pressure on Galafrone’s company eased. “Powers above be praised for crystallomancers,” Panfilo said, wiping sweat from his face.

“Aye.” Tealdo and Trasone spoke together. Trasone went on, “Say whatever you want about these cursed Unkerlanters, but going up against them isn’t like fighting the Jelgavans or the Valmierans. We’ll lick ‘em, aye, but they don’t know they’re licked yet, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s the truth.” Tealdo turned around, still nervous lest some Unkerlanters come at him from behind. “Uh-oh.” He caught a glimpse of light brown kilt behind a bush. By the way the Algarvian soldier lay, Tealdo knew the fellow had to be dead. He looked around, but all his companions--all the men who’d rallied to Sergeant Panfilo--were still standing. He took a few steps forward, then stopped in his tracks.

Panfilo and Trasone followed him. Trasone gulped. “Powers above,” Panfilo said softly.

The Algarvians, half a dozen of them, looked to have been dead for a couple of days. Maybe they’d been caught in the earlier Unkerlanter counterattack in the woods. The guard on the path had had the right of it. They hadn’t been blazed. They hadn’t had their throats cut. They’d been gruesomely and systematically mutilated. Most of them had their kilts hiked up. What the Unkerlanters had done down there ...

In a sick voice, Trasone said, “We haven’t fought a war like this for a long time.”

“Well, we are now,” Tealdo said grimly. “I don’t think I want to be taken alive, doesn’t look like. If I can’t find some way to kill myself, I’d sooner have a friend do it than go through . . . that.” One by one, the other Algarvians nodded.

Waddo strode out into the middle of Zossen’s village square. Garivald, watching from the edge of the square, found the stocky village firstman’s walk curious: half the limping swagger he usually used, half a nervous, almost slinking step, as if “Waddo also feared the pride he so often displayed.

Garivald, for once, felt a certain sympathy for the firstman. Waddo had been reporting the iniquities of the Algarvians, all of them lovingly detailed on the crystal that had recently come to the Unkerlanter village. Like everyone else in Zossen, Garivald had expected the next bombastic announcement would be of the Unkerlanter invasion of Algarvian-occupied Forthweg, and probably of Yanina as well. Instead, a few days before, the crystal announced that the Algarvians had without warning attacked Unkerlanter forces engaged in no warlike activity. A palace spokesman had declared that the Algarvians would be beaten. He had not said how.

Since then, silence.

Silence till now, silence that let fear build, especially among the older villagers who remembered how the Algarvians had hammered Unkerlant during the Six Years’ War thirty years before. Gossip and rumor filled Zossen--and doubtless filled every other peasant village throughout the vast length and breadth of Unkerlant. Garivald had taken part, cautiously, with people he trusted. “If things were going well,” he’d said to Dagulf, “Cottbus would be shouting its head off. It’s not. That means things can’t be going well.”

“Makes sense to me,” scar-faced Dagulf had said: also cautiously, looking over his shoulder to make sure no one, not even his wife, could overhear.

Now Waddo stood in the center of the square, waiting to be noticed. He struck a pose that guaranteed he would be noticed. “My friends,” he said in a loud voice. A couple of people looked his way, but only a couple; he didn’t have a lot of friends in the village. Then he spoke again, even louder: “People of Zossen, I have an important announcement. In one hour’s time, I shall bring our precious crystal from my home to the square here, so that you may listen to an address by our famous, glorious, and illustrious sovereign. His Majesty King Swemmel will speak to you on the state of our war against the barbarous savages of Algarve.”

Off he went, trying to look important. He had a right to look important: through his crystal, the king would speak to the village. Garivald had never imagined such a thing. If he got close enough to the crystal, he might actually see King Swemmel, though the king would not see him.

That was exciting. But, try as Waddo would to walk with the best swagger he could with his bad leg, that nasty, slinking hint of fear stayed in his step. It had nothing to do with the limp, either. Garivald didn’t like it. If Waddo was afraid, he probably had good reason to be afraid. Garivald wondered what the firstman had heard on the crystal and then kept to himself.

Whatever it was, Garivald couldn’t do anything about it. He hurried back to his own house to tell Annore and Syrivald the astonishing news. “The king?” his wife said, her dark eyes going wide. Like Garivald, like most Unkerlanters, she was solid and swarthy, with a proud nose. She repeated herself, as if she couldn’t believe it: “King Swemmel will talk to our village?”