Out of the Darkness

“Powers below eat me if I know, sir,” his adjutant said. “All I can tell you is, we haven’t got the men in the west to keep the Unkerlanters out of Algarve the way things are. I got to Valmiera just a couple of weeks before we pulled back. That was supposed to free up more men for the west, but they’ve been sucked up into Jelgava, or else they’re here in the woods. Seems like we can’t stop everybody.” He rolled his eyes. “Seems like we can’t hardly stop anybody.”

Stretched too thin, Lurcanio thought sorrowfully. Safe and warm and cozy in Priekule, he’d wondered about that. He’d sometimes even wondered about it lazy and sated in Krasta’s bed. But he’d been only a military bureaucrat, and so what was his opinion worth? Nothing, as his superiors had pointed out several times when he’d tried to give it.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said, “we’ll see what we can do.”

“Right,” Santerno said, and gave him that measuring stare once more. What will you do, Colonel, when you really have to fight?

They moved south out of the forest a little before dawn, under clouds and mist. The Lagoans and Kuusamans still hadn’t got accustomed to fighting in Valmiera. They hadn’t realized how big a force the Algarvians had built up, there in the rugged northwest of the kingdom, and had only a thin screen of pickets warding the men moving west on what they reckoned more important business. Bursting eggs and trampling behemoths and dragons painted in green and red and white announced that they’d miscalculated.

“Forward!” Lurcanio shouted all through the first day. Forward the Algarvians stormed, just as they had in the glorious early spring of the war when Valmiera fell. Disgruntled Lagoan and Kuusaman captives went stumbling back toward the rear, disbelief on their faces. Algarvian soldiers relieved them of whatever money and food they had on their persons. “Keep moving!” Lurcanio yelled to his men. “We have to drive them. We can’t slow down.”

“That’s right, Colonel,” Santerno said. “That’s just right.” He paused. “Maybe you haven’t done a whole lot of this stuff, but you seem to know what’s going on.”

“My thanks,” Lurcanio said, on the whole sincerely. He didn’t think Santerno paid compliments for the sake of paying them--not to a man twice his age, anyhow.

That first day, the Algarvians raced forward as hard and as fast as any of Mezentio’s generals could have hoped. A spear driven into the enemy’s flank, Lurcanio thought as he lay down in a barn to snatch a few hours’ sleep. Now we have to drive it home.

The roar of bursting eggs woke him before sunup the next morning. The bursts came from the south: Algarvian egg-tossers already up into new positions to pound the enemy. “You see, sir?” Santerno said, sipping from a mug of tea he’d got from a cook. “The islanders aren’t so much of a much.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Lurcanio answered, and went off to get some tea of his own.

Things went well on the second day, too, though not quite so well as they had on the first. Algarvians slogged forward through snow that slowed both foot-soldiers and behemoths. “We’ve got to keep going,” Santerno said discontentedly. “The faster we move, the better our chances.”

But the Kuusamans and Lagoans, no longer taken altogether by surprise as they had been when the attack opened, fought back hard. They also wrecked every bridge they could as they retreated, making Mezentio’s artificers spend precious hours improvising crossings. And the enemy seemed to have endless herds of behemoths, not the carefully hoarded beasts the Algarvians had accumulated with so much labor and trouble. They weren’t so good on the behemoths as the veterans who rode the Algarvian animals, but they could afford to spend their substance freely. Lurcanio’s countrymen couldn’t.

On the third day, the sun burned through the low clouds earlier than it had on the first two of the attack. “Forward!” Lurcanio shouted once more. The Algarvians had pushed about a third of the way down to the Strait of Valmiera, fairly close to the distance their plan had prescribed for the first two days. Lurcanio was more pleased than not; no plan, he knew, came through battle intact.