Into the Darkness (33 page)

Smilsu banged Talsu in the ribs with his elbow. “Which do you mean is more like it? Having a colonel who knows what he’s doing or moving forward instead of standing around all the time?”

“You don’t think there’s a connection?” Talsu returned.

“I’m not the one to ask,” his friend said. “Why don’t you find out what Vartu over there thinks about it?”

“I’m still here,” Vartu said, grinning a leathery grin. After Colonel Dzirnavu’s untimely and embarrassing demise, his servant might have gone back to the family estate to tend to the needs of Dzirnavu’s heir. He’d chosen to stay on as a common soldier instead. What that said about the character of Dzirnavu’s son was a point on which Talsu preferred not to dwell: how unfortunate that the new count should take after the old. Vartu went on, “There’s one of the reasons I’m still here, too.” He pointed to one side with his chin.

“Come on, men, keep moving,” Colonel Adomu called cheerily. He was a marquis himself, but wore the title more lightly than most Jelgavan nobles. He was just in his early forties, and not only kept up with the soldiers in his regiment but urged them to a better clip. “Keep moving -and spread out. We don’t want the cursed redheads to hit us when we’re all bunched together.”

Even marching in loose order, Talsu was nervous. The Algarvians had harvested these fields before their soldiers retreated through them, and the low stubble left behind offered little concealment for a prone man, let alone one up and walking. Algarvian civilians had fled along with the soldiers, and taken their livestock with them. But for the sound of boots crunching through dry grass and stubble and the occasional rustle of leaves in the breeze, the day was eerily quiet.

He was about to add something more when, from not far away, a man called out in Kaunian: “Where are you, Vanai? Look! I’ve found a—” Whatever he’d found, it wasn’t a word Ealstan knew. Ealstan wondered if he’d found trouble himself. Was that Vanai’s father? Her brother? Maybe even her husband? He didn’t think she was old enough to wed, but he might have been wrong, disastrously wrong.

Then Vanai answered, “Here I am, my grandfather,” and Ealstan’s worry eased: a grandfather seemed unlikely to be dangerous. Nor did the man who came up a minute later look dangerous. He carried a fat puff-ball in his left hand;
puffball,
no doubt, was the Kaunian word Ealstan hadn’t understood. In Kaunian, Vanai said, “My grandfather, this is Ealstan of Jekabpils”—the classical name for Gromheort. “We have traded mushrooms.” She shifted to Forthwegian: “Ealstan, here is my grandfather, Brivibas.”

Brivibas looked at Ealstan as if he were a stinkhorn or a poisonous leopard mushroom. “I hope he has not troubled you,” he said to Vanai in Kaunian. He was, Ealstan saw at a glance, one of those Kaunians who automatically thought the worst of Forthwegians.

“I have not troubled her,” Ealstan said in the best Kaunian he had.

It was not good enough; Brivibas corrected his pronunciation. Vanai looked mortified. Making a point of speaking Forthwegian, she said, “He has not troubled me at all. He speaks well of our people.”

Her grandfather looked Ealstan up and down, then looked her up and down, too. “He has his reasons,” Brivibas said. “Come along with me. We must wend homeward.”

“I will come,” Vanai said obediently. But then she turned back. “Goodbye, Ealstan. The talk was pleasant, and the trade was good.”

“I also thought so,” Ealstan said in Kaunian. “I am glad I met you -and you, sir,” he added for Brivibas’s benefit. That last was a lie, but one of the sort his father called a useful lie: it would show up the older Kaunian’s rudeness. Vanai would see it. Even Brivibas might.

He didn’t. He stomped off toward the west, toward Oyngestun. Vanai followed. Ealstan watched till trees hid her from sight. Then he started back in the direction of Gromheort. He laughed to himself. The day had ended up a lot more interesting than it would have been had he spent it hunting mushrooms with Sidroc.

“Well, this is more like it,” Talsu said to whomever would listen as the Jelgavan forces pushed through the eastern foothills of the Bratanu mountains. Before long, he thought, he and his comrades really would get past the foothills and down into the plains of southern Algarve. If things kept going well, they’d be able to start tossing eggs into Tricarico.

He wished the Forthwegians had put up a better fight against the redheads. Then their army would have joined the one of which he was a tiny part and cut Algarve in half. That had been the plan—well, the hope -when Jelgava went to war. Now King Donalitu and his allies would have to settle for less.

Smilsu banged Talsu in the ribs with his elbow. “Which do you mean is more like it? Having a colonel who knows what he’s doing or moving forward instead of standing around all the time?”

“You don’t think there’s a connection?” Talsu returned.

“I’m not the one to ask,” his friend said. “Why don’t you find out what Vartu over there thinks about it?”

“I’m still here,” Vartu said, grinning a leathery grin. After Colonel Dzirnavu’s untimely and embarrassing demise, his servant might have gone back to the family estate to tend to the needs of Dzirnavu’s heir. He’d chosen to stay on as a common soldier instead. What that said about the character of Dzirnavu’s son was a point on which Talsu preferred not to dwell: how unfortunate that the new count should take after the old. Vartu went on, “There’s one of the reasons I’m still here, too.” He pointed to one side with his chin.

“Come on, men, keep moving,” Colonel Adomu called cheerily. He was a marquis himself, but wore the title more lightly than most Jelgavan nobles. He was just in his early forties, and not only kept up with the soldiers in his regiment but urged them to a better clip. “Keep moving -and spread out. We don’t want the cursed redheads to hit us when we’re all bunched together.”

Even marching in loose order, Talsu was nervous. The Algarvians had harvested these fields before their soldiers retreated through them, and the low stubble left behind offered little concealment for a prone man, let alone one up and walking. Algarvian civilians had fled along with the soldiers, and taken their livestock with them. But for the sound of boots crunching through dry grass and stubble and the occasional rustle of leaves in the breeze, the day was eerily quiet.

Colonel Adomu pointed to a pear orchard half a mile away. “That’s where they’ll be waiting for us, the sons of a thousand fathers. We’ll have to see if we can find a way to flank them out—going straight at them will be too expensive.”

Talsu dug a finger in his ear to make sure he’d heard right. Dzirnavu would have sent his men lumbering straight at the redheads. They’d have paid for it, too, but that wouldn’t have bothered Dzirnavu. Well, now he’d paid for it himself.

Adomu sent the company to which Talsu belonged off to the right, to find a way around the pear orchard. “Come on, step it up,” Talsu called to Smilsu as they trotted along. “The faster we move, the harder we are to hit.”

“We’re hard to hit anyway, at this range,” Smilsu answered. “You have to be lucky to blaze a man with a footsoldier’s stick out past a couple-three furlongs. You have to be even luckier to hurt him very bad if you do hit him.”

As if to make him out a liar, one of his comrades fell, clutching at his leg and cursing. But most of the Algarvians’ beams went wide or had dispersed too widely to be damaging. A couple of them started fires in the grass. That made Talsu want to cheer: Smoke weakened beams, too.

But then, with a roar and a blast of fire, an egg buried in the ground burst under a Jelgavan soldier. He had time for only the beginning of a shriek before the energies consumed him. The rest of the Jelgavans skidded to a halt. Talsu dug in his heels and stood panting where he was. “They don’t hide those things by ones and twos,” he said. “They put ‘em down by the score, by the hundred.” All the ground on which he was not standing at the moment suddenly seemed dangerous. Had he just trotted past an egg? If he took one step back or to either side, would he suddenly go up in a sheet of fire?

He didn’t want to find out. He didn’t want to stay where he was, either. If he kept standing here, the redheads in the pear orchard would blaze him sooner or later. He threw himself down on the ground, and didn’t touch off an egg doing it. Slowly and carefully, he crawled forward, examining every stretch of ground before he trusted his weight to it. If it looked disturbed in any way, he crawled around it.

Colonel Adomu didn’t take long to notice his flanking maneuver had slowed. Colonel Dzirnavu, had he bothered making a flanking maneuver—in itself unlikely—wouldn’t have kept such close ley of it once it got going. But the energetic Adomu not only saw the slowing but realized what had caused it. He sent an egg-dowser forward to find a clear way through the stretch of ground filled with hidden peril.

Talsu watched the dowser—a tall, skinny man who managed to look disheveled despite uniform tunic and trousers—with the fascination any man gives to someone who can do something he cannot. The fellow held his forked rod out before him as if it were a pike. Dowsing was an ever more specialized business these days. Talsu’s ancestors had found water with it in the days of the Kaunian Empire. Now people all over Derlavai dowsed for water with it in the days of the Kaunian Empire. Now people all over Derlavai dowsed for water, for metals, for coal, for rock oil (not that the latter had much use), for things missing, and everywhere and always for things desired.

And soldiers dowsed for dragons in the air and for eggs hidden under the ground. “How did you learn to find buried eggs?” Talsu called to the dowser.

“Carefully.” The fellow’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a humorless grin. “Now don’t jog my elbow any more, or I’m liable not to be careful enough. I wouldn’t like that: in my line of work, your first mistake is usually your last one.” His rod dipped sharply downward. With a grunt of satisfaction, he took from his belt a sharp stake with a bright streamer of cloth at the unpointed end. He plunged it into the ground to show where the egg lay. The soldiers in the company followed him in as near single file as made no difference as he marked out a path of safety.

Smilsu said, “I wonder what happens when the Algarvians come up with a new kind of egg, or with a new way to mask the eggs they have already.” He kept his voice down so the dowser wouldn’t hear him.

Also quietly, Talsu answered, “That’s when they start teaching a new dowser how to do the job.” His friend nodded.

Had the Algarvians been present in large numbers, sergeants would have needed to start teaching a lot of new Jelgavan soldiers how to do the job. But the redheads could not take advantage of the way they had stalled their opponents. Before long, the dowser stopped finding eggs to mark. The company started moving faster again. The dowser went along in case the men ran into—literally and metaphorically—another troublesome belt of land.

But they didn’t, and soon began blazing into the pear orchard from the side. The Algarvians had been protecting themselves behind trees against an attack from the front. And, as soon as Colonel Adomu realized his flanking force finally was doing what he’d intended it to do, in went that attack from the front.

That made the Algarvians stop paying so much attention to Talsu and his friends. Vartu let out a whoop, then howled, “Now we’ve got ‘em!”

Talsu hoped Colonel Dzirnavu’s former servant was right. If he was wrong, a lot of Jelgavans would end up dead, Talsu all too probably among them. He howled, too, as much to hold fear at bay as for any other reason.

Then he and the rest of the Jelgavans got in among the pear trees themselves, flushing out the Algarvians like so many partridges. Some of the redheads, their positions overrun, threw down their sticks and threw up their hands in token of surrender. They were no more anxious to die than their Jelgavan counterparts.

Smilsu cursed. “My beam’s run dry!” he shouted angrily. A moment later, nothing happened when Talsu thrust his finger into the touch-hole of his own stick. Like Smilsu, he’d used up all the power in it while reaching the pear orchard. Now, when he needed it most, he did not have it.

“Where’s that cursed dowser?” he called. “He can give us a hand. We haven’t sent all the captives to the rear yet, have we?”

“No,” Vartu said from behind him. “We’ve still got a few of them left with us.” He raised his voice to a furious bellow, a good imitation of that of the late, unlamented (at least by Talsu) Colonel Dzirnavu: “Stake ‘em out! Tie ‘em down! Let’s get
some
good out of ‘em, anyway, the filthy redheads.”

Some of the Algarvian captives understood Jelgavan, either because they came from near the border or because they’d studied classical Kaunian in school and could get the drift of the daughter language. They howled fearful protests. The Jelgavans ignored those, flinging a couple of redheaded soldiers down on to their backs and tying their arms and legs to stakes and tree trunks.

“You’d do the same to us if your sticks were running low,” a Jelgavan soldier said, not without some sympathy. “You know it cursed well, too.”

“Where’s that dowser?” Talsu called again. The fellow shambled up just then, still looking very much like an unmade bed. Seeing the spread-eagled Algarvians, he nodded. He was no first-rank mage, but he didn’t need to be, not for the sorcery the Jelgavan soldiers had in mind.

“Set your dead sticks on them,” he said, and Talsu and the others who could not blaze obeyed. The dowser drew a knife from his belt and stooped beside the nearer Algarvian captive. He yanked up the Algarvian’s chin by the coppery whiskers that grew there, then cut his throat as if butchering a hog. Blood fountained forth. The dowser chanted in classical Kaunian. When he was through—and when the Algarvian soldier he’d sacrificed had quit writhing—some of the Jelgavans snatched up their sticks from the dead man’s chest.

Talsu’s stick lay on the second Algarvian. The dowser sacrificed him, too. Such rough magic in the field wasted a good deal of the captives’ life energy. Talsu cared not at all. What mattered to him was that enough of the energy had flowed into his stick to recharge it fully. As soon as the dowser nodded, he grabbed the stick and hurried forward to do more fighting. It blazed just as it should have.