Out of the Darkness

“All right.” Garivald trotted over to the company commander. “Whereabouts are we now?” Andelot showed him with a grimy-nailed finger. “And we’re going this way, right?” Garivald asked. The young lieutenant nodded. Frowning in concentration, Garivald studied the map. “Then we’re headed toward . . . Torgavi?” He wondered if he’d correctly pronounced the foreign name.

By the way Andelot beamed, he had. “That’s good, Fariulf. Anybody would think you’d been reading for years.” The lieutenant pointed to the blue line meandering past Torgavi. “And what’s the name of this river here?”

Garivald squinted at the map again: the river’s name was written in very small characters. “It’s the Albi, sir,” he said confidently; with a name that short, he was sure he hadn’t made a hash of it.

And he hadn’t. “Right again,” Andelot said. “You do so well here. Why didn’t you ever learn before?”

They’d been over this ground before. Shrugging broad shoulders, Garivald answered, “How could I have, sir? Our village had no school. Our firstman knew his letters, but I don’t think anybody else who lived there did. I don’t suppose any of the villages around ours were any different, either.”

Andelot nodded. “I’m sure you’re right, Sergeant. But things like that aren’t good for the kingdom. We’re less efficient than we ought to be. Just about all of these Algarvians can read and write. It makes them more flexible than we are, able to do more things. The same is true for the Kuusamans and Lagoans. They’re our allies now, but who knows how long that will last once Mezentio gets what’s coming to him? We need to start thinking about such things.”

Garivald shrugged again. The men from the great island in the distant east hardly seemed real to him. Of course, it hadn’t been so very long before that the Algarvians had hardly seemed real to him, either. He’d come to know them better than he’d ever imagined he would--and better than he’d ever wanted to, too. Would the same thing happen with the men of Kuusamo and Lagoas? He hoped not. Once the fight ended, all he wanted to do was find his way back to Obilot. He’d lost one family in the war. He hoped for the chance to start another.

Up ahead, somewhere near Torgavi, a few eggs burst. Less than a minute later, several more came down, these a lot closer to Garivald and Andelot. Garivald grimaced. “Not all the buggers have quit,” he said.

“No, not yet,” Lieutenant Andelot agreed. “That’s why we’re here--to take care of the ones too stubborn or too stupid to know they’re licked.” He blew a shrill blast on his whistle, loud enough to make Garivald’s ears ring, and shouted, “Forward!”

“Forward!” Garivald echoed, and then, showing off what he’d learned, “Let’s clear these bastards out of Torgavi.”

All along the line, officers’ whistles squealed. Officers and underofficers yelled, “Forward!” And forward the Unkerlanters went, trotting toward Torgavi across wheatfields and through olive groves. Garivald wondered why anyone wanted to cultivate olives. He didn’t think much of the fruit, and the oil had a nasty flavor. He doubted olives would grow down in the Duchy of Grelz, and didn’t miss them a bit.

Unkerlanter behemoths advanced with the footsoldiers, using their egg-tossers and heavy sticks to smash up the strongpoints the redheads were defending. Garivald took that cooperation for granted. Men who’d been in the army longer didn’t. By what they said, the Algarvians had always been able to bring it off. King Swemmel’s men had had to learn how, and a lot of the lessons had proved painful and expensive.

Dragons pounded Torgavi’s defenders, too. Again, some of the Algarvians began coming out into the open and surrendering. But some of them kept fighting, too. I don’t want to die now, Garivald thought as he flopped down near a house on the outskirts of Torgavi. Why don’t they all just give up, curse them? That would make things easier on them and easier on me, too.

With a rumbling roar, a bridge across the Albi tumbled into the river. Mezentio’s men must have wrecked it with eggs. Sure enough, some of them kept fighting as if the war still hung in the balance. Fools, Garivald thought. Enough.

A column of behemoths lumbered into Torgavi. Garivald waved as many men as he could forward; the behemoths protected footsoldiers, but the reverse also held true. That too was cooperation. Some Algarvian diehards in a house near the outskirts of the town blazed at the behemoths. The behemoth crews lobbed three or four eggs at the house. At such short range, the house crumbled as if made of pasteboard. No more blazes came from it.

“That’s the way!” Garivald shouted. One of the crewmen on the closest behemoth waved to him. He waved back. That other soldier undoubtedly wanted to make it through the war and then go home, too.