Out of the Darkness

“A couple of hundred miles,” Andelot answered lightly. Garivald gaped, but only for a little while. Even though he’d been dragged into the army relatively late, he’d seen how fast it could move when things went well. Andelot went on, “We strike them at sunrise day after tomorrow. Have your men ready.”

“Aye, sir.” Garivald saluted and went up to his muddy hole in the ground once more. He knew dismissal when he heard it.

Behemoths came forward that evening under cover of darkness. Some of them sheltered under what trees still stood. Others stayed out in the open, but with great rolls of mud-colored cloth spread over them to make them harder for Algarvian dragons to spot from the air. The deception must have worked, for the redheads flung no more eggs than usual at the bridgehead the next day. The following night, still more behemoths tramped up toward the fighting front.

And, some time in the dark, usually quiet hours between midnight and dawn, that calm was shattered when every Unkerlanter egg-tosser in the bridgehead suddenly started hurling eggs at the Algarvians as fast as it could. The din, the flashes of light, the quivering of the earth beneath Garivald were all plenty to terrify him. What they were doing to the redheads among whom the eggs were landing was something he didn’t care to think about. The worse they get hit, the better, did go through his mind. The worse the Algarvians got hit at the beginning, the more trouble they would have fighting back.

As dawn stained the sky ahead with pink, officers’ whistles shrilled. “Forward!” The cry echoed all through the bridgehead.

“Forward, men!” Garivald yelled at the top of his lungs. “Forward! Urra! King Swemmel! Urra!” And then he added a new cry, one that had just occurred to him: “On to Algarve!”

“On to Algarve!” the men in his squad echoed. Moving on to Algarve was easier when whole regiments of behemoths thundered forward alongside the footsoldiers.

Here and there, Algarvian resistance was tough. Garivald had discovered that, however much he hated them, the redheads made brave and resourceful foes. Wherever they hadn’t been smashed flat, they clung to strongpoints, held on, and pushed back the advancing Unkerlanters as best they could. That was what the behemoths advancing with his countrymen were for. The egg-tossers and heavy sticks they bore on their backs made short work of positions the foot-soldiers couldn’t possibly have cleared by themselves.

“Come on! Keep moving!” Garivald shouted till he grew hoarse. “We’ve got to keep up with the behemoths.”

In spite of the pounding the egg-tossers had given the Algarvian lines, the first day’s advance went slowly. Mezentio’s men had put as many rings of field-works around the rim of the Unkerlanter bridgehead as they could, and had to be dug out of them one battered set of trenches at a time. Whatever reserves they had close by, they threw into the fight. They knew what was at stake here no less than the Unkerlanters did.

Toward evening, Garivald found himself huddled behind a burned-out barn only a few feet from Andelot. He couldn’t quite remember how he’d got there. All he could feel was relief that nobody was blazing at him for the moment. Panting, he asked, “How do you think we’re doing, sir?”

“Not too bad,” Andelot answered. “I think we might be better off if they hadn’t managed to murder General Gurmun. He was one of our good ones, our really good ones. But we have room to spare, and the redheads don’t.”

“How did they do that, sir?” Garivald asked.

“Nobody knows, because we never caught the whoreson who killed him,” Andelot answered. “My guess is, they did something like what they tried to do here in the bridgehead, only you caught it and Gurmun’s guards cursed well didn’t.”

“They sent in a redhead sorcerously disguised as a Forthwegian, sir?” Garivald asked.

“Maybe. More likely, though, they sent in an Algarvian disguised as one of us,” Andelot said. “We don’t look much different from Forthwegians, and they have people who speak our language. Somebody like that could get in to see Gurmun without much trouble. He’d come out and disappear--and after a while, somebody would have gone in and found Gurmun dead. I don’t know that’s how it happened, mind you. I’m just a lieutenant--nobody tells me these things. But it’s my best guess. We’ll go slower than we would have with Gurmun in charge. I’m sure of that.”

Garivald snatched a little sleep in the dubious shelter the barn gave. Screeching whistles roused him well before dawn. He got his men up and moving. Beams from the business end of Unkerlanter and Algarvian sticks flashed and flickered like fireflies.