Through the Darkness

“Urra!” he yelled as he ran forward again. “Swemmel! Urra!” His countrymen echoed him. He waited for the answering cries of “Mezentio!” and “Algarve!” to give him some idea of how many redheads he faced.

Those cries didn’t come. Instead, the enemy soldiers yelled a name he hardly knew--”Tsavellas!”--and other things in a language he’d never heard before. In brief glimpses, he saw that their uniforms were a darker tan than those of the Algarvians, and they wore tight leggings, not kilts.

Realization smote. “They’re Yaninans!” he called to his men. From everything he’d heard, the Algarvians’ allies didn’t have the stomach for the fight that Mezentio’s men brought to it. Maybe that was so, maybe it wasn’t. It might be worth finding out. “Yaninans!” he yelled as loud as he could, and then a couple of phrases of Algarvian he’d learned: “Surrender! Hands high!”

For a moment, the enemy’s shouts and blazing went on as they had before. Then silence fell. And then, from behind trees and bushes and rocks, skinny little men with big black mustaches began emerging. When the first ones weren’t blazed down out of hand, more and more came forth. Leudast told off troopers of his own to take charge of them and get them to the rear.

One of those troopers looked at him in something approaching awe. “Powers above, Sergeant, we’ve just bagged twice as many men as we’ve got.”

“I know.” Leudast was astonished, too. “It’s not so easy against the Algarvians, is it? Go on, get ‘em out of here.” He raised his voice and addressed the rest of his men: “They’ve given us a chance. We’re going into that hole fast and hard, like it belongs to some easy wench. Now come on!”

“Urra!” shouted the Unkerlanters, the new men loudest among them: they thought it would be this easy all the time. Leudast didn’t try to tell them anything different. Pretty soon, they’d run into Algarvians and find out for themselves. Meanwhile, they--and he--would go forward as fast and as far as they could. Maybe, if they got lucky enough, they’d cut off the spearhead after all.

Among the books Ealstan had brought home to help keep Vanai amused in the flat she dared not leave was an old atlas. It was, in fact, a very old atlas, dating back to the days before the Six Years’ War. As far as that atlas was concerned, Forthweg didn’t exist; the east belonged to a swollen Algarve, while the west was an Unkerlanter grand duchy centered on Eoforwic here.

Vanai’s chuckle had a bitter edge. Algarve was a great deal more swollen these days than it had been when the atlas was printed. And the news sheets kept announcing new Algarvian victories every day. Down in the south of Unkerlant, their spearheads reached toward the Narrow Sea.

She looked back from the atlas to the news sheet. In fierce fighting, she read, the town of Andlau fell to Algarve and her allies. An enemy counterblow against the flank of the attacking column was turned back with heavy loss.

Andlau, she saw, was well beyond Durrwangen, three quarters of the way from where the fighting had begun in spring to Sulingen. Sure enough, Mezentio’s men seemed to be moving as fast as they had the summer before.

“But they can’t,” Vanai said out loud, defiantly using her Kaunian birth-speech. “They can’t. What will be left of the world if they do?”

What would be left of the world for her if the Algarvians won their war was nothing. But they kept right on rolling forward all the same. The news sheet went on, in the boasting Algarvian style even though it was written in Forthwegian, Algarvian dragons hammered Sulingen on the Wolter, dropping eggs by the thousand and leaving the city, an ungainly sprawl stretched along the northern bank of the river, burning in many places. Casualties are certain to be very heavy, but King Swemmel continues his useless, senseless resistance.

“Good for him,” Vanai muttered. Forthwegians despised their Unkerlanter cousins, not least for being stronger and more numerous than they were. Living in Forthweg, Vanai had picked up a good deal of that attitude. And her grandfather despised the Unkerlanters for being even more barbarous--which is to say, less under Kaunian influence--than the Forthwegians. She’d picked up a good deal of that attitude, too.