Into the Darkness (16 page)

“No, nothing like that, my grandfather,” Vanai said. “His view is that we might be wise to abandon Oyngestun.”

“Why?” Her grandfather snorted again. “Because staying would mean we had Algarvians lording it over us instead of Forthwegians?” Brivibas set hands on hips, threw back his head, and laughed scornfully. “Why this should make a difference surpasses my poor understanding.”

“But if the fighting goes through here, my grandfather, whoever holds Oyngestun will be lording it over the dead,” Vanai answered.

“And if we flee, the Algarvian dragons will drop eggs on us from above. A house, at least, offers shelter,” Brivibas said. “Besides, I have not yet finished my article refuting Frithstan, and could scarcely carry my research materials and references in a soldierly pack on my back.”

Vanai was sure that was the biggest reason he refused even to think of leaving the village. She also knew argument was useless. If she fled Oyngestun, she would flee without Brivibas. She could not bear that. “Very well, my grandfather,” she said, and bowed her head once more.

Another soldier came up. “Here, sweetheart, you have anything for a hungry man to eat?” he asked, adding, “My belly’s rubbing my backbone.” Wordlessly, Vanai cut him a length of sausage and a chunk of bread. He took them, blew her a kiss, and went on his way munching.

“Disgraceful,” Brivibas said. “Nothing short of disgraceful.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Vanai said judiciously. “I’ve heard ten times worse from the Forthwegian boys in Oyngestun. Twenty times worse—he was just … friendly.”

“Again,
unduly familiar is
the term you seek,” Brivibas said with pedantic precision. “That the local louts arc more disgusting does not make this trooper anything but disgusting himself. He is bad; they are worse.”

Then a soldier of unmistakable Kaunian blood came by and asked for food and drink. He poured down a mug of water, tore off a big bite of sausage with strong white teeth, and nodded to Vanai. “I thank you, sweetheart,” he said, and walked off toward the west. Vanai glanced over to Brivibas. Her grandfather seemed to be studying the stitching in his shoes.

Two soldiers came running into Oyngestun within a few seconds of each other, one from the north, the other from the south. They both shouted the same phrase: “Behemoths! Algarvian behemoths!” Each of them pointed back the way he had come and added, “They’re over there!”

Shouts of alarm rose from the Forthwegian soldiers. Some dashed off to the north, others to the south, to force open the ring the Algarvians were closing around Gromheort and, incidentally, around Oyngestun. Others, despairing, fled westward, to escape before the ring closed.

Some of the folk of Oyngestun fled with them, bundling belongings and small children into wheelbarrows and handcarts and carriages and clogging the highway so soldiers had trouble moving. Rather more Forthwegians than folk of Kaunian blood ran off in the direction of Eoforwic. As Brivibas had said, Kaunians were under alien rule regardless of whether Forthwegian blue and white or Algarvian green, white, and red flew above Oyngestun.

“Should we not leave, my grandfather?” Vanai asked again. She trotted out the strongest argument she could think of: “How will you be able to go on with your studies in a village full of Algarvian soldiers?”

Brivibas hesitated, then firmly shook his head. “How will I be able to go on with my studies sleeping in the mud by the side of the road?” He stuck out his chin and looked stubborn. “No. It cannot be. Here I stay, come what may.” He looked eastward in defiance.

But then, with a thunder of wings, Algarvian dragons flew by low overhead. A few Forthwegian soldiers blazed at them, but did not seem to bring any down. Flames spurted from the dragons’ jaws as they swooped down on the roadway packed with soldiers and villagers. Screams rose, faint in the distance but hardly less horrifying for that. The breeze from out of the west wafted the stench of burning back into Oyngestun. Some of what burned smelled like wood. Some smelled like roasting meat. It might have made Vanai hungry, had she not known what it was. As things were, it almost made her sick.

More Algarvian dragons fell from the heavens like stones, dropping eggs on the road out of Oyngestun. The bursts smote Vanai’s ears. She brought up her hands to cover them, but that did little good. Even though she could not see most of it, even if she muffled her hearing, she knew what was happening off to the west.

“It is for this that you waved at the Forthwegian dragonfliers when we went to examine the ancient power point, my granddaughter,” Brivibas said. “This is what King Penda sought to visit upon the kingdom of Algarve. Now that he finds it visited upon his own kingdom instead, whom has he to blame?”

Vanai looked for such philosophical detachment inside herself: looked for it and found it not. “These are our neighbors who suffer, my grandfather, our neighbors and some of them folk of our blood.”

“Had they but stayed here rather than foolishly fleeing, they would be safe now,” Brivibas said. “Shall I then praise them for their foolishness, cherish them for their want of wisdom?”

Before Vanai could answer, the first eggs began falling inside Oyngestun. More screams rose, these close and urgent. Algarvian dragons ruled the sky above the village; none painted in Forthwegian colors came flying out of the west to challenge them. More and more eggs fell. “Get down, you lackwits!” a Forthwegian soldier shouted at Vanai and Brivibas.

Before Brivibas could move, a shard of glass or brickwork scored a bleeding line across the back of his hand. He stared at the little wound in astonishment. “Who is the fool now, my grandfather?” Vanai asked, speaking to him with more bitterness than she’d ever used before. “Who now wants wisdom?”

“Get down!” the soldier yelled again.

This time, Brivibas did, though still a beat behind his granddaughter. Cradling the injured hand to his chest, he said, “Who would have imagined, after the Six Years’ War, that folk would be eager for more such catastrophes?” His voice was plaintive and without understanding.

A Forthwegian officer called, “Build the rubble into barricades! If those redheaded whoresons want this place, they’re going to have to pay for it.”

“That’s the spirit!” Vanai shouted in Forthwegian. The officer waved to her and went on directing his men.

In pungently sardonic Kaunian, Brivibas said, “Splendid! Encourage him to endanger our lives as well as his own.” Still angry, Vanai ignored him.

The Forthwegian soldiers briskly went about turning Oyngestun into a strongpoint. They beat back the first Algarvian probe at the town that afternoon. Wounded Algarvians, Vanai discovered, screamed no differently from wounded Kaunians or Forthwegians. But then, toward sunset, the Forthwegian crystallomancer cried in fury and despair. “The Unkerlanters!” he yelled to his commander—and to anyone else who would hear. “The Unkerlanters are pouring over the western border, and there’s no one to stop them!”

Four

“N
OW THIS,” Leudast said as he tramped through western Forthweg, “this is what efficiency is all about.”

Sergeant Magnulf nodded. “You had best believe it, soldier,” he said. “Shows the Forthwegians need lessons. If you’re stupid enough to start a war on one border when the kingdom on your other border can’t stand you, seems to me you deserve whatever happens to you.”

“I hadn’t even thought about that,” Leudast said. “I was just thinking we’re going to have a lot easier time than we did against the Gyongyosians.” He looked around. “A lot better country to fight in, too.”

“Aye, so it is,” Magnulf agreed.

“Reminds me of home, as a matter of fact.” Leudast pointed westward. “My family’s farm isn’t that far on the other side of the border, and it looks a lot like this back there.” He waved.

Most of the farm buildings hereabouts were of sun-dried brick brightened with whitewash or, less often, paint. Wheat ripened golden in the fields; plump, ripe olives made branches sag. The breeds of cattle and sheep the Forthwegians raised were similar to those with which Leudast had grown up back in Unkerlant.

Nor did the Forthwegians themselves look that different from Unkerlanters. They were, most of them, stocky and swarthy, with proud, hook-nosed faces. Save that the men wore beards, Leudast would have been hard pressed to prove he’d entered another kingdom.

Most of the beards he saw were grizzled or white; the young men were off in the east, fighting the Algarvians. Graybeards and women, those who had not fled, stared with terrible bitterness as the Unkerlanter soldiers marched past. Every so often, one of them would shout something Leudast almost understood; the Unkerlanter dialect he spoke wasn’t that far removed from Forthwegian. It was close enough to make him certain the locals weren’t paying compliments.

Every so often, Forthwegian border guards and the small garrisons King Penda had left behind in the west would try to make a stand against the Unkerlanters, defending a line of hills or a town or sending out cavalry to nip at the thick columns of men King Swemmel had flung into their kingdom.

They were brave. Leudast couldn’t see that it did them much good. The Unkerlanters flowed around them, surrounded them, and attacked them from all sides at once. Behemoths trampled Forthwegian cavalry underfoot. Unkerlanter officers would go forward under flag of truce to urge surrenders, pointing out that the Forthwegians could not possibly hope to resist. Their foes sent them back and kept fighting as long as they could.

“Inefficient,” Magnulf said as his squad encamped one evening after pushing another fifteen or so miles into Forthweg—a typical day’s advance. “They aren’t stopping us. They’re hardly slowing us down. What’s the point to throwing their lives away?”

“Stubborn fools,” Leudast said. “They should see they’re beaten and give up.”

“I heard one of them shout, ‘Better to die under King Penda than to live under King Swemmel!’” Magnulf said, mimicking the Forthwegian tongue as well as he could. The sergeant shrugged. “I think that’s what he said, anyhow. And now he’s dead, and it’s not going to keep the Forthwegians from living under King Swemmel, not one little bit it’s not. We’ll be knocking on the door at Eoforwic in another few days.”

Leudast looked east. “We don’t quarrel with the Algarvians, though?”

“Not if they stay on their side of what used to be the border before the Six Years’ War,” Magnulf answered. “We won’t cross it—we’re just taking back what was ours, not stealing from anybody else.”

That night, Forthwegian dragons dropped eggs on the Unkerlanters’ forward positions. The noise from the bursts kept Leudast awake, but none of them came particularly close.

The next morning, the Unkerlanters approached Hwiterne, a city whose stone keep would have been a formidable defense in the days before eggs were flung for miles or fell from dragons. Again, King Swemmel’s officers went ahead to ask the town to surrender. Again, the Forthwegian garrison refused.

Before long, pillars of smoke rose into the sky from Hwiterne. Under cover of that barrage, Unkerlanter troops pushed through the patchily inhabited suburbs and into the town itself. Leudast discovered he had not only Forthwegian soldiers but also townsfolk blazing at him. He blazed back. He blazed at anyone he spied in Hwiterne who wasn’t wearing Unkerlanter rock-gray. He suspected he might have wounded innocent bystanders. That was inefficient, but not nearly so inefficient as letting himself get killed.

He flopped down in the rubble that had been a house. A woman with a bandage on her head lay not far away from him. He didn’t blaze her down; he could see she had no weapon. “Why?” she asked him. “Why did you cursed Unkerlanters come here? Why didn’t you leave us alone?” .

Leudast followed that well enough. “We came to take back what’s ours,” he answered.

She glared at him. “Can’t you see we don’t want you? Can’t you see we”—a word he didn’t know—“King Swemmel?” Whatever the word meant, he doubted it was praise.

“If you’re not strong enough to stop us, what difference does that make?” Leudast asked in honest puzzlement.

She cursed him then, her voice full of bitter hopelessness. He could have killed her for it. No one would have been the wiser. No one who mattered to Leudast would have cared at all. She had to know as much. She cursed anyhow, as if defying him to do his worst.

He shrugged his broad shoulders. She cursed again, harder than ever. His indifference seemed more wounding to her than rage would have been. Shrugging once more, he said, “You didn’t curse when King Penda invaded Algarve. What business have you got doing it now?”

She stared at him. “The Algarvians deserve everything that happens to them. We don’t deserve any of this.”

“That’s not what King Swemmel thinks,” Leudast said. “He’s my king. I obey him.” Dreadful things happened to Unkerlanters who didn’t obey King Swemmel. Leudast preferred not to dwell on those.

A Forthwegian egg burst not far away. Chunks of wood and mud brick rained down on him and the woman with the bandaged head. Dreadful things, he realized, could also happen to Unkerlanters who did obey King Swemmel. For a moment, he wondered why, in that case, he willingly put himself into danger.