Out of the Darkness

These behemoths had Algarvians aboard them. They were sallying from Gromheort, doing their best to hold the Unkerlanters away from the town. Officers or no officers, sergeants or no sergeants, Ealstan threw himself down on the muddy ground. He’d seen behemoths in the desperate fighting in and around Eoforwic, and had a hearty respect for what they could do. Most of the Unkerlanters close by him dove for cover, too. Anyone who’d had more than the tiniest taste of war knew better than to stay on his feet when enemy behemoths were in the neighborhood.

Somewhere not far away, a crystallomancer shouted into his glassy sphere. Before long, egg-tossers started aiming at the Algarvian beasts. They did less than Ealstan would have liked; only a direct hit, which took luck, would put paid to the immense beasts in their chain-mail coats. But a barrage of bursting eggs did keep Algarvian footsoldiers from going forward with the behemoths, and that left the animals and their crews more vulnerable than they would have been otherwise.

Ealstan swung his stick towards one of the redheads atop a behemoth a couple of hundred yards away. He had to aim carefully; behemoth crewmen wore armor, too. Why not? They relied on the animals to take them where they needed to go, and didn’t get down on the ground themselves unless something went wrong.

“There,” Ealstan muttered, and let his finger slide into the stick’s blazing hole. The beam leaped forth. The Algarvian started to clutch at his face, but crumpled with the motion half complete. He never knew what hit him, Ealstan thought. Instead of celebrating, he crawled toward a new hiding place. If one of Mezentio’s men had seen his beam, staying where he was might get him killed.

More men fell from the Algarvian behemoths. The Unkerlanter footsoldiers, like Ealstan, had learned to pick off crewmen whenever they got the chance. Had Algarvian footsoldiers gone forward with the beasts, they could have kept Swemmel’s soldiers too busy to let them snipe at the behemoth crews. But eggs bursting all around had held back the unarmored footsoldiers.

Sullenly, the Algarvian behemoths drew back toward Gromheort. Ealstan waited for the order to pursue. It didn’t come. The Unkerlanters around him seemed content to stay where they were, even if they could have gained some ground by showing initiative. There were also times when the efficiency Swemmel’s men talked so much about proved only talk.

Night fell. That didn’t keep the Unkerlanters from pounding Gromheort with eggs or the Algarvians in the town from answering back as best they could. Ealstan filled his mess tin with boiled barley and chunks of meat from a pot bubbling over a fire well shielded from sight by banks of dirt--Algarvian snipers sometimes sneaked out after dark to pick off whomever they could spot, and they were good at what they did. Poking one of the chunks with his spoon, Ealstan asked the cook, “What is this?”

“Unicorn tonight,” the fellow answered. “Not too bad.”

“Not, not too,” Ealstan more or less agreed. Unicorn, horse, behemoth--he’d eaten all sorts of things he never would have touched before the war. Behemoth was very tough and very gamy. But when the choice lay between eating it and going hungry . . . Hard times had long since taught him that lesson.

He sat with his squadmates, going through the stew and talking. He couldn’t always understand them, nor they him, but they and he kept repeating themselves and changing a word here, a word there, till they got it. They didn’t hold his being Forthwegian against him. A couple of them still seemed to think he was just an Unkerlanter from a district where the dialect was very strange. They’d already seen he knew enough on the battlefield not to be a danger to them.

As for his method of joining King Swemmel’s army, most of them had stories not a whole lot different. “Oh, aye,” said a fellow named Curvenal, who, by his pimpled but almost beardless face, couldn’t have been much above sixteen. “The impressers came into my village. They said I could go fight the Algarvians or I could get blazed. With that for a choice . . . The Algarvians might not blaze me, so here I am.”

“Me, I’m from the far southwest,” another soldier said. “I’d never even heard of Algarvians till the fornicating war started. All I want to do is go home.”