Into the Darkness (23 page)

“That’s good; that’s good.” The regimental commander rocked back on his heels, then forward once more. “No diddling for now, though, except that we’re going to figure out how to diddle our enemies. Go load your packs, grab your sticks, and report back here in ten minutes. Dismissed!”

This time, Tealdo groaned. He knew what they would be doing for the rest of the day: the same thing they’d been doing most of the days since they’d established themselves by Imola. Unless it involved a pretty girl, he soon got sick of doing the same thing over and over. He realized that, when the time for fighting came, all this practice was liable to help keep him alive. That didn’t, that couldn’t, make him enjoy it while it was going on.

His pack sat at the foot of his cot, in precisely the prescribed place. His stick leaned against the wall at the left side of the bed, at precisely the prescribed angle. Panfilo hadn’t been able to find a thing to complain about in the way he handled his gear, If Panfilo couldn’t find it, it wasn’t there.

Tealdo slung the pack over his shoulder, grunting at its weight. When he picked up the stick, his finger accidentally slid into the blazing hole. It didn’t matter here, not directly: in training, well away from any fighting front, none of the weapons carried a sorcerous charge. But it was not a good habit to acquire.

He wasn’t one of the first men back out to the parade ground. But he wasn’t one of the last men out, either, the men at whom his superiors screamed. He enjoyed people screaming at him no more than he enjoyed endless practice. Practice he couldn’t escape. He could keep people from screaming at him, could and did.

“Form by companies!” Colonel Ombruno shouted: a useless order, since the regiment always formed by companies. “Form by companies, and report to your designated practice locations.”

The company commanders shepherded the men off to their own areas. Soon, when a new practice field combined all those areas, they would work together. In the meanwhile …

In the meanwhile, the company commanders got to puff out their chests and strut, like so many pigeons trying to impress mates. Captain Larbino’s strut and his shouted orders did not impress Tealdo: he was no dimwitted female pigeon. But he had to obey, which a female pigeon did not.

Larbino led his company to a cramped underground chamber that had two stairways leading down into it, one broad, the other narrow. The men entered the chamber by the broad stairway. Only a few lanterns, stinking offish oil, cast a dim, flickering glow there. “Powers above, it’s like falling back through a thousand years of time,” Tealdo muttered.

“Take your places!” Larbino’s loud voice dinned in the small, crowded chamber. “Five minutes till the exercise begins! Take your places! No mercy on any man who’s out of place when the whistle blows.”

The soldiers were already taking their places. They had been doing this for three weeks. They knew, or were convinced they knew, at least as much about their part of the operation as did Larbino. They formed a single serpentine line that led to the bottom of the narrow stairway and kinked at each earthen wall. Seen from above, it would have looked like a long string of gut twisted to fit into the abdominal cavity.

Shrill and deafeningly loud, the brass whistle screeched. “I love running in full kit,” Trasone said through the blast, and then, in a lower voice, “In a pig’s arse I do.” Tealdo chuckled. He felt the same way.

“Out! Out! Out!” Larbino was screaming. “They’ll be blazing at you when you do this for real! Don’t stand around playing with yourselves.”

“I’d rather be playing with myself than doing this,” Tealdo said. He didn’t think anyone heard him. The line was uncoiling rapidly as soldier after soldier dashed up the narrow stairs. They’d had dreadful tangles the first few times they tried it. They’d got better with practice. Tealdo declined to admit that, even to himself.

His feet thudded on the timbers of the narrow stairway. Up he went. Anyone who tripped here was a cork in the bottle for everyone behind him. Panfilo had a more expressive term for it: as far as he was concerned, anyone who tripped on the narrow stairway was a dead man.

Tealdo emerged into daylight. Before long, they’d be running the exercise at night, which would make it even more delightful. He dashed to a broad plank that spanned a deep trench and raced across it. Two men from his company had fallen into the trench. One managed to escape without being hurt. The other broke his leg.

Cloth flags on stakes marked the narrow way he and his comrades had to take. He rushed along that narrow way till it suddenly widened out. Where it did, buildings—or rather, false fronts—defined streets through which they had to run. Soldiers with uncharged sticks “fought” from those false fronts, trying to impede the company’s progress. Umpires with green ribbons tied to their tunic sleeves signaled theoretical casualties.

Tealdo “blazed” back at the defenders. One after another, the umpires ruled them deceased. But Tealdo’s comrades were taken out of action, too. He rather hoped he would be, as had happened during a couple of practice runs. Then he could lie down and grab a breather, and no sergeant would be able to complain.

But, at the umpires’ whim, he was allowed to survive. Panting, he raced left, right, and then left again before coming to the gateway for whose capture his company was responsible. More soldiers tried to keep the company from seizing the gate. The umpires ruled those soldiers failed and fell.

The egg one of Captain Larbino’s soldiers set against the gateway was only a wooden simulacrum. An umpire’s whistle blew, signaling a blast of energy. A couple of defenders, miraculously revived from their “deaths”, opened the gate to let the “survivors” of the company inside.

More narrow ways lay beyond, some as twisted as the paths in a maze. Still more soldiers tried to keep Tealdo and his comrades from passing those ways to the end. Again, they failed. More whistles shrilled. Tealdo raised a weary cheer. He and enough of the other soldiers had reached the end of the practice area to have succeeded were this actual battle.

“King Mezentio and all of Algarve will have reason to be proud of you when you fight this well with your lives truly in the pans of the scale,” Larbino declared. “I know you will. You need no lessons in courage, only in how best to use that courage. Those lessons will go on. Tomorrow, we will take the practice course in the dark.”

Weary groans replaced the weary cheers. Tealdo turned and saw Trasone not far away. “Marching into Bari was a lot more fun,” he said. “All this running around looks too much like work to me.”

“It’ll look even more like work when the bastards on the other side start blazing back for real,” Trasone answered.

“Don’t remind me,” Tealdo said with a grimace. “Don’t remind me.”

Leofsig felt like a beast of burden, or perhaps an animal in a cage. He was not a Forthwegian soldier any more, the Forthwegian army having been crushed between those of Algarve and Unkerlant. Not a foot of Forthwegian soil remained under the control of men loyal to King Penda. From east and west, the enemies’ forces had joined hands east of Eoforwic; joined hands over Forthweg’s fallen corpse.

And so Leofsig languished with thousands of his comrades in a captives’ camp somewhere between Gromheort and Eoforwic, not far from where his regiment, or what was left of it, had finally surrendered to the Algarvians. He scowled when he thought of the dapper Algarvian officer who’d inspected the dirty, worn, beaten Forthwegian soldiers still hale enough to line up for the surrender ceremony.

“You fought well. You fought bravely,” the Algarvian officer had said, trilling the slow sounds of Forthwegian as if they belonged to his native tongue. Then he’d hopped into the air, kicking up his heels in an extravagant gesture of contempt. “And for all the good it did you, for all the good it did your kingdom, you might as well not have fought at all. Think on that. You will have a long time to think on that.” He’d turned his back and strutted away.

Time Leofsig did indeed have. Inside these wooden fences, inside these towers manned by Algarvians who would sooner blaze a captive coming near than listen to him, time was very nearly the only thing he did have. He had the tunic and boots in which he’d surrendered, and he had a hard cot in a flimsy barracks.

He also had work. If the captives wanted wood for cooking and wood for heating—not so great a need in Forthweg as farther south in Derlavai, but not to be ignored as winter drew nearer, either—they had to cut it and haul it back. Work gangs under Algarvian guard went out every day. If they wanted latrines to keep the camp from being swamped by filth and disease, they had to dig them. The place stank anyway, putting Leofsig in mind of a barnyard once more.

If they wanted food, they had to depend on the Algarvians. Their captives doled out flour as if it were silver, salt pork as if it were gold. Like most Forthwegians, Leofsig was on the blocky side. The block that was he had been narrowing ever since he’d surrendered.

“They don’t care,” he said to his neighbor after yet another meager meal. “They don’t care in the least.”

“Why should they?” the fellow with the cot next to his replied. He was a blond Kaunian named Gutauskas, and already lean. “If we starve to death, they don’t have to worry about feeding us any more.”

That was so breathtakingly cynical, Leofsig could only stare. The fellow with the cot on the other side of his, though, a burly chap called Merwit, spat in disgust. “Why don’t you shut up and die now, yellow-hair?” he said. “Weren’t for you cursed Kaunians, we wouldn’t have gotten sucked into this war in the first place.”

Gutauskas raised a pale eyebrow. “Oh, indeed: no doubt,” he said, speaking Forthwegian without perceptible accent but with the elegant precision more characteristic of his own language. “Both his name and his looks prove King Penda to be of pure Kaunian blood.”

Leofsig snickered. Penda was stocky and swarthy like most Forthwegians, and bore a perfectly ordinary Forthwegian name. Merwit glared; he was the sort who fought with a verbal meat-axe, and wasn’t used to getting pierced with a rapier of sarcasm. “He’s got a bunch of Kaunian lickspittles around him,” he said at last. “They clouded his mind, that’s what they did, till he didn’t know up from yesterday. Why should he care a fart what happens to Valmiera and Jelgava? Algarve can blaze ‘em down, for all I care. I’ll watch ‘em burn and wave bye-bye.”

“Aye, King Penda’s lickspittles have done wonders for the Kaunians in Forthweg,” Gutauskas said, sardonic still. “They’ve made us all rich. They’ve made all our neighbors love us. If there were ten of us for one of you, Merwit, you’d understand better.” He paused. “No. You wouldn’t. Some people never understand anything.”

“I understand this.” Merwit made a large, hard fist. “I understand I can beat the stuffing out of you.” He started toward Gutauskas.

“No, curse it!” Leofsig grabbed him. “The redheads’ll come down on all of us if we brawl.”

Merwit surged in his grasp. “They won’t care if we stomp these sneering blond scuts. They can’t stand ‘em, either.”

“In the case of Mezentio’s men, it is, I assure you, quite mutual,” Gutauskas said.

When Leofsig didn’t let go, Merwit slowly eased. “You just better watch your smart mouth, Kaunian,” he told Gutauskas, “or one fine day all of you stinking bastards in this camp’ll have your pretty yellow heads broken. You better pass the word, too, if you know what’s good for you.” He twisted free of Leofsig and stomped off.

Gutauskas watched him go, then turned back to Leofsig. “You may find your head broken for having taken our part.” He studied him like a natural philosopher examining some new species of insect. “Why did you? Forthwegians seldom do.” The Kaunian’s mouth twisted. “Folk not of our blood seldom do.”

Leofsig started to answer, then stopped with his mouth hanging foolishly open. He had no special love for Kaunians. His admiration for Kaunians was principally limited to their women in clinging trousers. He needed to think for a bit before he could figure out why he hadn’t joined Merwit against Gutauskas. At last, he said, “The Algarvians have all of us in the palm of their hand. If we start squabbling in here, they’ll laugh themselves sick.”

“That is sensible,” Gutauskas said after his own pause for thought. “You would be astonished at how seldom people are sensible.”

“My father says the same thing,” Leofsig answered.

“Does he?” Gutauskas’s eyebrow rose again. “And what, pray, does your father do, that he has acquired such wisdom?”

Is he laughing at me?
Leofsig wondered. He decided Gutauskas wasn’t; it was merely the Kaunian’s manner. “He keeps books in Gromheort.”

“Ah.” Gutauskas nodded. “Aye. I can see reckoning up that on which men spend their silver and gold would give a man vivid insight into the manifold follies of his fellow men.”

“I suppose so,” said Leofsig, who hadn’t thought about it much.

He waited for Gutauskas to thank him for stopping the fight. The Kaunian did nothing of the sort. He acted as if Leofsig could hardly have acted differently. Kaunians never made it easy for their neighbors to get alone with them. Had they made it easy for their neighbors to get along with them, they wouldn’t have been the Kaunians he knew. He wondered what they would have been.

Before he could take that thought any further, a squad of Algarvian guards tramped into the barracks. In bad Forthwegian, one of them said. “We search. Maybe you try escape, eh? You go out.” The others supplemented the order with peremptory gestures with their sticks.

Out Leofsig went, Gutauskas trailing after him. Crashes and thuds inside said the Algarvians were tearing the barracks to pieces. If anyone in there was plotting an escape, Leofsig didn’t know about it. He did know what he’d find when the Algarvians let him and his fellow captives return: chaos. The Algarvians were good at tearing things to pieces. They didn’t bother setting them to rights again. That was the captives’ problem.

He strolled toward the fence around the camp—carefully, because the guards there would blaze without warning Forthwegians who came too close. The fence itself wasn’t particularly strong. Captives could rush it … if most of the ones who tried didn’t mind dying before they got there. A few captives had escaped, the Algarvians discovering it only when their counts came out wrong. Leofsig didn’t know how the escapees had done it. Had he known, he’d have done it himself.