Into the Darkness (54 page)

Around a yawn, Trasone said, “They don’t seem so hot to fight now that we’re pounding on them instead of them pounding on us.”

Tealdo nodded. “I thought the same thing. One of them said he blamed their nobles for the war.”

“I hope they all think that way,” Galafrone exclaimed. “They fought like mad bastards the last time, you bet your arse they did. If their hearts aren’t in it now, all the better for us.”

The discussion around the fire would have gone on longer had the warriors not been so tired. Tealdo rolled himself into his blanket and slept like a dead man. He felt like a dead man when Sergeant Panfilo shook him awake before sunrise the next morning, too. Panfilo looked disgustingly fit and well rested. “Come on,” he said. “You’re not much, but if you’re what we’ve got to hit the Valmierans another lick, you’ll have to do.”

“If I’m not much, why don’t you leave me here and go on without me?” But Tealdo was already climbing to his feet. He smelled bread baking in the field kitchen’s oven. He thought he smelled victory in the air, too.

And then, after washing down the bread with a few gulps of rough red wine, he tramped east again. Again, the behemoths had already done a lot of his work for him. Again, Algarvian dragons dove on the soldiers of Kaunian blood who kept on fighting after the behemoths had passed. A few eggs usually proved plenty to silence them. Hardly any Valmieran dragons attacked Mezentio’s men. And, again, most Valmierans seemed not to have their hearts in the fight. They surrendered far more readily than the Sibians had.

“We took the Sibs by surprise, but they fought hard while they could,” Tealdo said to Trasone after they sent another group of captives toward the rear. “These whoresons were supposed to be ready and waiting for us.”

“Are you complaining?” his friend asked.

“Now that you mention it, no,” Tealdo answered. Both soldiers laughed. They strode down the road leading east.

Tealdo did his best to stay close to Captain Galafrone and the crystallomancer. That wasn’t easy; the veteran kept setting a blistering pace Tealdo had trouble matching. But he wanted to be among the first to learn if anything interesting happened: in that, he was a typical Algarvian. And, toward midafternoon, his curiosity and persistence paid off. The crystallomancer listened to his sorcerous apparatus, then spoke to Galafrone.

After hearing him out, Galafrone whooped. “What’s up, sir?” Tealdo asked. Maybe the captain would tell him, maybe he wouldn’t. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Galafrone wasn’t just willing to talk. Had Tealdo not asked, the captain would have grabbed him and shouted the news: “The marquisate of Rivaroli has risen in revolt behind the Valmieran lines! Let’s see those cursed Kaunians move men or supplies through there now!”

“Powers above,” Tealdo said. Then he whooped, too. “That’s what Valmiera gets for taking a marquisate full of good Algarvians away from us after the Six Years’ War.”

“That’s just what Valmiera gets,” Galafrone agreed. “And we’re the fellows to give it to King Gainibu and his worthless nobles in their gilded trousers.” Tealdo suspected Galafrone was imperfectly enamored of his own kingdom’s nobility. Galafrone couldn’t say that, so he took out his anger on the nobles next door.

He wasn’t the only one, either. Tealdo said, “Talking with the blondies we’ve nabbed who speak a little Algarvian, a lot of them don’t want to fight for their nobles, either.”

Galafrone nodded and turned to the crystallomancer. “Send that on to Colonel Ombruno, and to the army headquarters, too. They’ll probably have heard it already, but send it on the off chance they haven’t. Maybe it’ll help us find a way to make more Kaunians quit without fighting.”

“Aye, Captain,” the crystallomancer said. As soon as the message went out, Galafrone waved his men forward again.

By the end of the day, the company was inside the Marquisate of Rivaroli. Tealdo had no trouble telling when they crossed the border. All at once, Valmieran replaced Algarvian on every roadside sign—the retreating enemy had knocked down some of those, but not all—and in the first village through which the company passed. The people in the village remained Algarvian, even if their names were spelled Valmieran-style. Tealdo wondered what his own name would look like if he’d grown up here. Something like
Tealtu,
he supposed.

Most of the villagers greeted the Algarvian soldiers with wine and cakes and cheers. The women greeted them with hugs and kisses. The women might have greeted them with more, too, as they had when Tealdo helped reclaim the Duchy of Bari for Algarve, but Galafrone shouted, “Keep in line and keep moving, curse you all! The way this campaign’s shaping up, you’ll have plenty of chances to dip your wicks before long. The harder we press the Kaunians now, the sooner it’ll be.”

Tealdo saw a man and woman staring out through a shop window.
They
weren’t Algarvians, not with hair yellow as butter. A good many Valmierans had moved into the Marquisate since the Treaty of Tortus. Tealdo wondered what they were thinking as they watched the Algarvian soldiers tramp past. “Nothing good,” he muttered, “or I miss my guess.”

“Keep moving!” Galafrone yelled again. Entering open country, his troopers spread out into a skirmish line. Maybe the Valmierans would be able to make a stand somewhere ahead. They hadn’t done it yet, though.

Twelve

S
KARNU FELT like a man trying to fight back after getting hit in the head with a club. From everything the young captain could see, the whole Valmieran army might have been a man trying to fight back after getting hit in the head with a club. He couldn’t see past his own tiny circle of the war, of course, but nothing inside it looked good.

His men had been coming up from rest and recuperation behind the line when the Algarvian blow fell. Had they gone into the line, no doubt they—or however many of them stayed alive—would be in an Algarvian captives’ camp now. As things were, they’d been caught up in the headlong Valmieran retreat, fighting when they had to, traveling a lot by night so they could slip between the redheads’ scouts. The Algarvians didn’t always have great numbers. Wherever they were, though they had great strength. After a while, footsoldiers despaired of fighting behemoths, of having dragons plummet out of the sky to drop eggs on them.

Sergeant Raunu came up to Skarnu with a grim look on his face. “Sir, another three must have slipped away, on account of they sure as blazes aren’t here.” Pulling a map from his breast pocket, Skarnu spoke in musing tones: “I wonder where exactly
here
is.” He had some idea—somewhere between their line of farthest advance and the border between Valmiera and Algarve—but couldn’t pin it down within five miles, let alone to dot on the map. All he and his men had done was stumble backwards again and again.

“Sooner or later, we’ll find a village,” Raunu said. “Then we’ll know.” The veteran hesitated. At last, he went on, “By what I’ve heard, sir, desertion’s a lot heavier in the other companies in the regiment than it is with us.”

“Heard from whom?” Skarnu demanded. As far as he could tell, his company might have fallen off the edge of the world to his superiors. He hadn’t had orders for a couple of days.

“People I run into in the woods,” Raunu said with a shrug. He hesitated again. “Our men know you’ve been in there with ‘em, sir. That means they aren’t so likely to take off on their own or just sit on a stump and wait for the redheads to pick ‘em up.”

“People in the woods, eh?” Skarnu said. His sergeant shrugged again and nodded. He said nothing more. Skarnu had learned to gauge when not to push Raunu. This looked to be one of those times. He asked a different question instead: “Is it really as bad as that?”

“Aye, sir, it is,” Raunu answered stolidly. “The companies, the regiments where the noble officers haven’t pulled their weight, they’re falling to pieces, sir.” He hesitated even longer than he had in either of his earlier pauses, then added, “A lot of companies, a lot of regiments, in that boat, sir.”

“Curse the soldiers for not defending the kingdom!” Skarnu burst out. Raunu stood mute. Skarnu thought for a while before making an addition of his own: “And curse the officers who didn’t give them a better reason to defend the kingdom.”

“Ah,” Raunu murmured—or was it just an exhalation a little louder than usual? “Sir, you don’t mind my saying so, it’s because you’re the kind of captain who’d come out with the first thing and the second both that so many men have stuck by you.”

“Much good it’s done them.” Skarnu’s voice was bitter. Then he sighed. “We can only do what we can do. Let’s get moving.”

“Aye, sir,” Raunu said. “It could be worse, sir. At least we’re moving through countryside that’s pretty much empty—except for Algarvian soldiers, of course. Down in Rivaroli, we’ve got enemy soldiers and the locals hunting us.”

“Aye.” Skarnu sighed once more. “And curse King Mezentio for stirring up rebellion against us down there. Only goes to show a generation isn’t time enough to make Algarvians change their stripes.”

He set off through the forest, walking as softly as he could. He knew Algarvian behemoths had already got ahead of his company. He knew redheaded footsoldiers couldn’t be far behind. He kept scouts out ahead and to all sides of his main body of men. None of them reported anything untoward. He still wished he had eyes in the back of his head.

After about an hour, a man at the van came back and reported that the woods ended and, past some untended fields and vineyards, a village lay ahead. “Any sign of soldiers in it?” Skarnu asked.

“Redheads, you mean?” the scout asked, and Skarnu nodded. The soldier said, “No, sir, but I did see a couple of men in trousers on the street.”

“Did you?” Skarnu made up his mind. “All right. We’ll go forward and scoop them up. People can sort things out later. Right now, I want all the bodies I can get my hands on.”

“Aye, that’s sensible, sir,” Raunu said. Skarnu would have gone on without the sergeant’s approval, but was glad to have it.

The company cautiously moved out of the woods and toward the village. Skarnu supposed they were advancing on it, but could you advance during a retreat? That was a fine point of warfare with which he remained unacquainted.

Sure enough, trousered troopers did tramp along the village streets. One of them shouted when he spied the soldiers approaching in open order. In a twinkling, the men in the village took cover. “Be ready for anything,” Skarnu called to his own men. “They may be Algarvians in our clothes, trying to lure us into a trap.”

Inside the village, the soldiers seemed to have the same fear about Skarnu’s company. They needed a good deal of wary calling back and forth before they decided they were all Valmierans. “Powers above be praised you’re here,” said a young lieutenant who came out to greet Skarnu.

Skarnu took out his map. “Where
is
here?” he asked.

“This miserable place is called Stornarella, sir,” the lieutenant answered. When Skarnu found it, he whistled softly; the Algarvians had driven him even farther east than he’d thought. The lieutenant went on, “Now we have some sort of a decent guard force for Duke Marstalu.”

“What?” Skarnu stared. “The army commander? Here?”

“Aye, sir.” The lieutenant nodded. “We were falling back from the first Algarvian onslaught when their dragonfliers hit our column. I don’t think they knew his Grace the Duke was part of it. We were just Valmierans on a road, and so they dropped eggs on us. They killed his Grace’s unicorn. He broke his leg when the animal fell on him; we got him to the first shelter we could.”

“Is he still in command?” Skarnu asked.

“As much as anyone is,” the lieutenant said wearily, which summed up the plight of the army as well as anything. “We didn’t think the redheads could do to us what they did to Forthweg last fall. We may have been wrong.”

We may have been wrong.
Such a bloodless sentence, to leave so much blood in its wake. Skarnu said, “Algarve didn’t beat us during the Six Years’ War. I expect we’ll manage to halt the redheads again.”

“I hope we do,” the lieutenant said.

The difference between
hope
and
expect
spoke volumes. Skarnu did his best not to read them. He turned to Raunu. “Sergeant, have the men form a perimeter around this village. We’ll want to be able to defend it and, if need be, to move out toward the east.” He would not say
retreat.

“Aye, sir,” Raunu said, and began giving orders.

“If you will come with me, sir, I know Duke Marstalu will be glad to have your report,” the lieutenant said. Skarnu knew nothing of the sort, but accompanied the other officer into Stornarella.

Close up, the village showed its abandonment. Only shards of glass remained in the windows. Leaves drifted against walls and fenceposts. Flowers and grass grew in rank, untended exuberance. The lieutenant led Skarnu to the biggest, fanciest house in Stornarella. Skarnu had expected nothing less. He hadn’t thought having his expectations confirmed would leave him so sad.

When the lieutenant took Skarnu inside, Marstalu was lying on a sofa, a splint on his leg, giving a crystallomancer orders to relay: “Tell them to hold out as long as they can, curse it, and to counterattack if they see even the slightest chance. We
must
try to establish some kind of order at the front.” He looked up. “Ah, Marquis Skarnu! So good to see you again.” For a moment, he might have been in his drawing room at Klaipeda rather than a filthy village parlor with trash and leaves on the floor and pictures all askew on the wall.