Into The Darkness

Talsu looked down at his own tin plate, which contained the usual breakfast scoop of mush and the equally usual length of cheap, stale sausage. He glanced over to his friend Smilsu, who was sitting on a rock close by. In a low voice, he asked, "How in the names of the powers above am I supposed to eat runny scrambled eggs?"

"With a spoon?" Smilsu suggested. His breakfast ration was no more prepossessing than Talsu's.

"I've got one of those, sure enough." Talsu held it up. "Now if I only had some eggs, I'd be in business."

Smilsu sadly shook his head. "If you're going to grouse and grumble about every least little thing, my boy, you'll never get to be a colonel like our illustrious regimental commander." He set a finger by the side of his nose. "Of course, if you don't grouse and grumble, you'll never get to be a colonel, either. You haven't got the bloodlines for it."

"Bloodlines are fine, if you're a horse." Talsu let his eyes slide toward Count Dzirnavu's tent. "Or even some particular part of a horse." Smilsu, who was in the middle of swallowing a mouthful of mush, almost choked to death on it. Talsu went on, "For picking soldiers, though. Now he shook his head. "If we had real soldiers leading us, we'd be down in

Tricarico this time, instead of still slogging our way through these cursed hills." He snapped his fingers. "I bet that's why the stinking Algarvians haven't really counterattacked."

He'd got a jump ahead of Smilsu. "What's why?" his friend asked.

"What are you talking about?"

Talsu dropped his voice to hardly more than a whisper, so only Smilsu would hear: "If the redheads hit us hard, they'd be bound to kill off a lot of officers. Sooner or later, we'd run out of nobles to take their places. Then we'd have to start using men who knew what they were doing instead. We'd be sure to lick Algarve after that, so they're just playing it safe and smart."

"I'd be sure you were right, if only I thought the Algarvians had that much upstairs." Without doing anything more than sitting a little straighter, Smilsu managed to convey the Algarvians' swaggering [..poin-, posity..]. As he slumped back down, he went on, "And you'd better not say anything like that around anybody you're not sure of, either, or you'll sorry for a long time."

Vartu came out of Dzirnavu's tent just then. Talsu and Smilsu both silent. Talsu liked the colonel's servant, and trusted him fairly far, but no far enough to speak treason in front of him.

Mumbling under his breath, Vartu stalked past the two soldiers. A moment later, Talsu heard him yelling at a cook. The cook yelled back.

Smilsu's snicker was amused and sympathetic at the same time. "Poor Vartu," he said. "He gets it from both sides at once."

" So do all of us," TaIsu answered, "from our officers and from the Algarvians."

"Someone put vinegar in your beer this morning, that's plain," Smilsu said. "Why don't you go over there and scream at the cooks, too?"

"Because they'd stick a carving knife in me or hit me over the head with a pot," Talsu said. "I can't get away with things like that. I'm not a count, or even servant to a count."

"Aye, you're a no-account, all right," Smilsu said, whereupon Talsu felt like hitting him over the head with a pot.

After their less than magnificent breakfast, the Jelgavan soldiers cautiously advanced. Exhortations from King Donalitu to move faster kept coming forward. Colonel Dzirnavu would read them out whenever they did, and would blame the men for not living up to their sovereign's requests. Then he and his superiors would order another tiptoeing step ahead, and would seem surprised when King Donalitu found it necessary to exhort the troops again.

The Algarvians did their best to make life unpleasant for their foes, too.

The country through which Talsu and his comrades moved was made for defense. One stubborn soldier with a stick who found a good hiding place could hold up a company. There were plenty of good hiding places to find, and plenty of stubborn Algarvians. to fill them. Each redhead had to be flanked out and flushed from cover, which made what would have been a slow business slower.

And the Algarvians had taken to burying eggs in the ground, and attaching to them trips lines that would rupture their shells. A soldier who didn't watch where he put his feet was liable to go up in a great gout of sorcerous fire. That slowed the Jelgavans, too, till dowsers could find the eggs and mark paths past them.

Most of the redheads who lived in the mountain country had fled to lower ground farther west. A few people, though, were obstinate, as Jelgavan mountain folk also had a name for being. Talsu captured an old Algarvian with a bald head, a big white mustache, and knobby knees and hairy calves sticking out from under the hem of his kilt. "Come on, granips," he said, and gestured with his stick. "I'm going to take you back to our encampment so they can ask you some questions."

"A dog should futter you," the old man growled in accented Jelgavan.