Through the Darkness

He would never have made a general. The officers set over him had decided he wouldn’t even make a good corporal. He’d long since stopped worrying about not getting promoted. All he wanted to do was stay alive and make sure a good many Unkerlanters didn’t. But he was no fool. When it came to measuring a narrow little battlefield, he could do the job as well as any nobleman with fancy rank badges.

Here came Swemmel’s soldiers, picking their way through the rubble toward the trenches the Algarvians held. They were shouting “Urra!”--and their king’s name, too. As always, they were game. Trasone wondered how many of them were drunk. He knew their officers served up raw spirits before sending the men to the attack. Assailing a position like the one he and his comrades held, he would have wanted to be drunk, too.

An Unkerlanter fell, and another. Trasone had no idea whether his beam was the one that had knocked either of them over. A lot of Algarvian troopers had popped up from their shelters at the same time as he had from his.

And then another Unkerlanter went down, this one with a hole in him you could have thrown a dog through. No footsoldier’s weapon could have made such a wound, only a heavy stick mounted on the back of a behemoth. That stick found one foe after another. When the Unkerlanters dove for cover, it blazed right through the boards and sheet metal some of them chose.

The rest of the behemoths carried egg-tossers. They rained death down on the Unkerknters: not death at random, but death precisely aimed, death that pursued them, death that found them. The charge faltered. When his comrades lay broken and bloodied all around him, not even a bellyful of raw spirits would take a man forward any more.

Along with the behemoths, fresh troops in Algarvian uniform came up on the right of Trasone’s regiment. For a moment, he didn’t recognize the patch each newcomer wore on his left sleeve: a sea-green shield with five gold crowns. Then he did, and his jaw dropped. “Powers above!” he exclaimed. “They’re fornicating Sibs!”

Folvo nodded. “Didn’t you hear about that?” he said. “They’ve recruited a couple of regiments’ worth of men on the five islands. They’re supposed to be tough enough to suit anybody.”

“What’s the world coming to?” Trasone shook his head. “Yaninans for flank guards, now these Sibs right alongside us--and I did hear tell we’ve got Forthwegians doing something or other, too. What’s next? Are we going to start setting up regiments of Kaunians?”

“I’d sooner there were Kaunians here than me,” Folvo said.

“Oh, aye, but all the same...” Trasone turned and called to one of the Sibians: “Hey, pal, you speak my language?”

“At least as well as you do,” the Sibian answered in cold, precise Algarvian. “Probably better.”

“Well, you can go futter yourself, too,” Trasone muttered, but not so loud as to make the newcomer--who was, after all, supposed to be on his side-- notice.

Officers’ whistles screeched and wailed, both among the Sibians and in his own regiment. At the same time, the Algarvian behemoths lumbered forward, the heavy stick blazing Unkerlanter after Unkerlanter, the egg-tossers making the enemy burrow for his life instead of fighting back. “Let’s go!” Major Spinello shouted. “One more good push and we’re at the Wolter. That’s where we want to be. That’s where we have to be, if we’ve ever going to go any farther. Mezentio!” As usual, the battalion commander was the first man out of his whole, the first man rushing toward the enemy.

“Mezentio!” Trasone shouted. Bent at the waist, he scuttled forward, too, dashing from one pile of rubble to the next, blazing any Unkerlanters he ran past in case they were playing dead and would rise up to blaze his countrymen if they got the chance. He knew the men of his regiment would go forward, too. They always had. He trusted them with his life, and they trusted him with theirs.

He wasn’t so sure about the Sibians. They were foreigners, after all, so what could you expect from them? The Algarvians had licked them, too, which automatically made them suspect in his eyes. They shouted something in their own language instead of “Mezentio!” or “Algarve!” That would get some of them blazed by their allies if they weren’t careful or lucky. But everything Folvo had said about them looked to be true. They went forward just as fast and just as hard as the Algarvians on their left. And their companies and battalions, unlike Trasone’s, were at full strength, which gave their attack extra weight.

“There it is!” Trasone said. He didn’t need Folvo’s contraption to see the Wolter up ahead now. There was the river, and there were the piers sticking out into it at which boats coming from the far side unloaded Unkerlanter reinforcements. If he and his comrades--or even the Sibians fighting alongside them--could take those piers and hold them or burn them, how would Swemmel’s soldiers bring new men up into Sulingen?