Into the Darkness (94 page)

“I’m off to tell some others now,” Waddo said. “You were the first man I saw, Garivald, so you were the first to get the news. But everyone in Zossen needs to hear.” Off he went, kicking up snow from the path with each step he took.

Some men of Garivald’s acquaintance would have gone with him, to spread the news farther and faster. Garivald liked his gossip as well as any man. Come to that, few old wives in Zossen liked gossip any better. But he did not follow Waddo. For one thing, this wasn’t gossip, or not exactly gossip: it was too big. He couldn’t think of anything much bigger than news of impending war. And, for another, he didn’t like Waddo well enough to help him with anything he didn’t have to.

Garivald stared east across the fields. He was glad a couple of hundred ‘ miles separated his village from Yanina’s western border. The Algarvians hadn’t come this far during the Six Years’ War, nor anywhere close. That made it a good bet they wouldn’t come so far this time, either.

Then he kicked up snow himself. That the war wouldn’t come to Zossen didn’t mean he wouldn’t go to the war, wherever it ended up being fought. He looked back toward Waddo’s two-story house and silently cursed the crystal the firstman had there. Evading the impressers would be much harder with that crystal here. They could report to Cottbus, get their orders for however many men the army required, and call for whatever help they needed, all right away.

He imagined an Unkerlanter dragon flying over the woods outside the village, dropping eggs on them to flush out the recalcitrants less than eager to fight in King Swemmel’s army. Impressers would do that sort of thing in a heartbeat—assuming they had hearts, which struck Garivald as unlikely.

Several lines casting scorn on impressers, inspectors, and everyone from Cottbus sprang into his mind, all unbidden. The whole village would laugh if he started singing such a song: the whole village except Waddo and the guards who kept the captives in the gaol cell from escaping. Garivald did not think they would be the least bit amused.

Reluctantly, he pushed his thoughts away from that sort of song. He could make it, aye. He could do any number of things he would be better off not doing. Life in Zossen was sometimes hard. That didn’t mean he had to go looking for ways to make it harder.

Behind him, he heard shouts of surprise. Those were the guards. Waddo must have given them the news. Garivald shook his head. He wouldn’t have shared gossip of any sort with the guards. It wasn’t as if they were villagers. Garivald shook his head again. Waddo had no sense of proportion.

“This is Patras,” Captain Galafrone said as the ley-line caravan sighed to a stop. “From here on, boys, we don’t ride any more. From here on, we march.” He looked as if he relished the prospect. Tealdo, who was something less than half his captain’s age, didn’t.

Neither did Tealdo’s friend Trasone. “I’ve already done enough marching to last me, thank you kindly,” he whispered.

“It’s not like we won’t be doing more anyhow soon enough,” Tealdo said. Like any soldier worth his pay, he was always ready to complain.

“What?” Trasone raised a gingery eyebrow. “You don’t figure us being here will scare King Swemmel out of gobbling up Yanina, the way he was going to do? I figure one look at you would be enough to make every Unkerlanter in the world run off screaming for his mother.”

“Come on, let’s go,” Galafrone said. “We want to impress Colonel Ombruno, right?” He pretended not to hear the jeers that rang through the car, continuing, “And some of the Yaninan women are supposed to be pretty cursed good-looking, too. I don’t know about you boys, but I don’t want ‘em laughing at me on account of I can’t remember which is my left foot and which is my right when I’m marching.”

That put matters in a different light. Tealdo checked to make sure his tunic was perfectly straight and every pleat in his kilt knife-sharp. Trasone combed his mustache, not wanting a single hair out of place. Even Sergeant Panfilo set his hat on his head at a jauntier angle, and Tealdo would have sworn that only a blind woman, or one severely short of cash, could take the least interest in Panfilo.

“Get moving, you lousy lugs,” Panfilo rumbled as he surged to his feet. “Let’s show these foreign doxies what real men look like.”

A raw breeze blew through the streets of Patras. Tealdo was glad of the long, thick wool socks he wore, and would have been gladder had they been thicker and longer. Not far from the platform on which he was debarking, a Yaninan band played a vaguely familiar tune. After a while, he recognized it as the Algarvian royal hymn. “I’ve never heard it with bagpipes before,” he murmured to Trasone.

“I hope I never do again,” his friend whispered back.

Yaninans lined the route along which the Algarvian soldiers marched. Some of them held up signs in badly spelled, ungrammatical Algarvian. One said, WELL COME LIBERATATORS! Another proclaimed, DEETH FOR UNKERLANT! More signs and placards were in Yaninan, whose very characters were strange to Tealdo. For all he knew, they might have been advertising sausage or patent medicine or wishing that he and his countrymen might come down with a social disease.

But the Yaninans cheered too lustily to let him believe that. Set against Algarvians, they were short and wiry. The men favored mustaches that were thick and bushy rather than waxed to spiked perfection, as was the Algarvian ideal. Some of the older women had fairly respectable mustaches, too, which was much less common in Tealdo’s homeland.

He paid more attention to the young women. Like the men, they mostly had olive complexions and dark hair and eyes. Their features were sharply carved: wide foreheads; strong cheekbones and noses; narrow, pointed chins. They painted their lips red as blood.

“I’ve seen worse,” he said to Trasone, in a tone another man might have used to judge horseflesh.

“Oh, aye,” Trasone agreed. “And if we go into Unkerlant, you’ll see worse again. Think of Forthwegian women, only more so.”

Tealdo thought about it. He didn’t like what he was thinking. “Best argument for peace I’ve heard yet,” he said.

Trasone snickered, which brought Sergeant Panfilo’s wrath down on his head. “Silence in the ranks, curse you!” Panfilo growled.

Along with the rest of the brigade, Colonel Ombruno’s regiment assembled in front of King Tsavellas’s palace, a sprawling edifice whose onion domes painted in swirling patterns and bright colors loudly proclaimed what a foreign land this was. Algarvian banners—red, white, and green—flew alongside those of Yanina, which were simply red on white.

Another band struck up something vaguely resembling a tune. Tealdo supposed it was the Yaninan royal hymn, for a man in a domed crown and robes of scarlet and ermine ascended to a rostrum while the locals lining the edge of the plaza chorused, “Tsavellas! Tsavellas!”

King Tsavellas raised a hand. Had King Mezentio used such a gesture, he would have got silence. Tsavellas got more noise: Yaninans were anything but an orderly folk. The king waited. Slowly, very slowly, quiet came. Into it, Tsavellas spoke in accented but understandable Algarvian: “I welcome you brave men from the east, who will help shield my small kingdom from the madness of my other neighbor.” Then he said something—probably the same thing—in Yaninan. His subjects cheered. He waved to them and stepped down.

An Algarvian took his place. “That’s probably our minister here,” Tealdo said to Trasone, who nodded. Sure enough, the Algarvian spoke first not to the soldiers from his kingdom but to the assembled people of Patras in what sounded like fluent Yaninan. They cheered him with as much enthusiasm as they’d given their own sovereign.

Then he looked out over the ranks of Algarvian soldiers. “You are here for a reason, men,” he told them. “King Tsavellas invited you, begged King Mezentio to allow you, to enter Yanina to prove to King Swemmel of Unkerlant that we are determined to defend the small against the large. Just as the Kaunian kingdoms oppressed us when we were weak, so Unkerlant sought to oppress Yanina. But we are not weak now, and we shall not let our neighbors be molested. Men of Algarve, do I speak the truth?”

“Aye!” the Algarvian soldiers shouted. Some of them waved their hats. Some scaled their hats through the air. Tealdo waved his. However tempted he might have been to throw it, he refrained. Sergeant Panfilo’s comments would surely have been colorful, but might also have been imperfectly appreciative.

Two flagbearers went up on the rostrum. One held an Algarvian banner, the other a Yaninan. The flags blew in the breeze side by side.

“About-turn!”
Colonel Ombruno called to his regiment. Along with his comrades, Tealdo spun on his heel. The regiment led the brigade out of the square. After one wrong turn—fortunately, out of sight of King Tsavellas and the Algarvian minister—they made their way to the barracks where they would spend the night.

Surrounding the barracks like toadstools were tents full of Yaninan soldiers. “Uh-oh,” Tealdo said. “I don’t much like that. We’re stealing their beds. They won’t love us for it.”

He liked it even less the next morning, when he woke up with bug bites. What the Yaninans served up for breakfast wasn’t very good. Tealdo had expected as much. Captain Galafrone had warned the whole company to expect as much. “Boys, they’re long on cabbage and they’re long on bread. You’ll be bored, but you won’t be hungry.”

Bored Tealdo certainly was, not that Algarvian army cooking was anything to send a noble connoisseur into flights of ecstasy. But Tealdo also ended up hungry, because the Yaninan cooks hadn’t done up enough to fill the bellies of their new Algarvian allies.
Share and share alike
was the rule. A few bites of black bread and not enough cabbage-and-beet soup made Tealdo’s stomach rumble and growl as if angry wild things dwelt there.

“I wonder what the Yaninans are eating,” he said as he finished the meager meal—not that finishing it took long. “I wonder if the poor whoresons are eating anything.”

“Aye. This isn’t good.” Trasone shook his head. Being a veteran, he knew how important questions of supply were. “If the Yaninans can’t do a proper job of feeding troops in their own capital, how will they manage out in the field.”

“We’ll find out, won’t we?” Tealdo said. “We’ll pay the price of finding out, too.”

But Sergeant Panfilo shook his head. “It won’t be as bad as that,” he said. “Our supply services come along with us. Once we’re stationed, once the fighting starts—if the fighting starts—they’ll take care of us. Those boys can find a six-course supper hiding under dead leaves.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” Tealdo said, somewhat reassured. It wasn’t quite so—Panfilo did exaggerate, but not by much. “Powers above pity the poor Yaninans, though. They haven’t got much, and they don’t know how to move what they do have.”

“Come on, boys,” Captain Galafrone called. “Lovely as this place is, we can’t hang around here any more. We’ve got to go out and see the big, wide world—or at least the little, narrow chunk of it that belongs to Yanina.”

Tealdo did more really hard marching that day than in any other he could remember. He’d marched farther a good many times, especially in the hectic fighting that led up to Valmiera’s collapse. But Valmiera, like Algarve, had a decent network of paved roads. A man or a horse or a unicorn or a behemoth could tramp over the cobblestones or gravel or slabs of slate at any season of the year.

He’d come into Patras by ley-line caravan, and hadn’t had to worry about what the roads were like. The streets of King Tsavellas’s capital were paved as well as those of any Algarvian town. The highway that led toward the west, toward the border with Unkerlant, was also well paved … for the first few miles.

About an hour after leaving the barracks behind, Tealdo and his comrades also left the cobblestones behind. His feet plunged into cold mud. The first time he lifted one up out of the roadbed, a lot of the roadbed came with it. The second time he lifted one out, even more mud came along. He cursed in disgust.

He wasn’t the only one cursing, either. A brimstone cloud might have surrounded the company, the regiment, the entire brigade. “These are our allies?” somebody not far away from Tealdo bellowed. “Powers below eat them, the Unkerlanters can have them and welcome!” He was more than usually exercised, but then, when he’d picked up a foot, his boot hadn’t come out of the muck with it.

“Shut up!” Galafrone shouted. “You fools haven’t got the faintest notion of what you’re talking about. I fought against the Unkerlanters in the last war, along with your fathers—if you know who your fathers are. You think this is bad, Unkerlant makes this look like Mad Duke Morando’s pleasure gardens outside of Cotigoro. You’ll find out.”

Algarvian soldiers obeyed orders. They kept marching, as best they could. That didn’t mean they didn’t speak their minds. The trooper who’d lost his boot spoke with great conviction: “I don’t care how lousy Unkerlant is. That still doesn’t make this stinking place any fornicating pleasure garden.”

On the Algarvians slogged. They came to their assigned campsite long after nightfall. Tealdo was amazed they came to it at all. Ever since the cobbles stopped, he’d felt as if he were marching in place.

The Yaninan cooks also seemed astonished the Algarvians reached the campsite. Again, they had something less than adequate rations for the brigade. Having gulped down what he was given, Tealdo started toward the west, toward Unkerlant. King Swemmel was responsible for the dreadful day he’d put in, and for other dreadful days that no doubt lay ahead. As far as Tealdo was concerned, that meant Swemmel’s subjects would pay. “Oh, how they’ll pay,” he muttered.

“Come on, curse you!” Leudast shouted to the ordinary troopers of his squad. He enjoyed being a corporal, sure enough. Being a corporal meant he got to do the shouting instead of having sergeants and corporals shout at him. “We have to move faster, curse it. You think the lousy redheads are going to stand around waiting for you to get your thumbs out of your arses?”

He left without the slightest twinge of regret the Forthwegian village in which his squad had been billeted. The locals hadn’t given his comrades and him any more trouble since the Unkerlanters blazed down the firstman and his wife, but the Forthwegians didn’t love his countrymen, and they never would.