Out of the Darkness

I’m wrong, I’d be delighted to hear the whys and wherefores, believe me.”

Santerno cursed with soldierly fluency. When he ran out of curses-which took a while-he said, “I don’t see any way, either. I was hoping you did.”

“Me?” Lurcanio said. “What do I know? After all, I spent the war shuffling papers in Priekule and laying Valmieran women.” Santerno hadn’t thrown his previous duty in his face, but his scorn for Lurcanio because of it had never been far from the surface.

Now the captain had the grace to cough and shuffle his feet and show a certain amount of embarrassment. “Turned out you knew what you were doing in the field after all, sir,” he said. “I stopped doubting it after the way you led the brigade down toward the sea this past winter during our last big attack in Valmiera.”

“We might have gone farther if those Kuusamans holed up in that one town hadn’t cramped the whole attack.” Lurcanio sighed. “But it probably wouldn’t have made any difference in the long run.”

“Maybe not.” Santerno drew himself up with a certain melancholy pride. “We scared the buggers out of a year’s growth, though.”

“I suppose we did,” Lurcanio replied. “And how many men and behemoths and dragons did we throw away doing it? We could have used them against the Unkerlanters instead, don’t you think, and got more with them.”

His adjutant shrugged. “I don’t give orders like that, sir. I just follow the ones I get.”

“We all just followed the ones we got, Captain.” Lurcanio waved, as if to show this last bypassed army trapped in its pocket. “And look what we got for following them.”

Before Santerno could answer that, a soldier came up to Lurcanio and said, “Sir, there’s an enemy soldier coming up under flag of truce.”

“Is there?” Lurcanio heaved himself to his feet, however much his weary bones protested. “I’ll see him.” The soldier nodded and trotted off to bring back the foe.

“He’s going to ask for our surrender,” Santerno said.

“Probably,” Lurcanio agreed. “I can’t give it to him, of course.” I would if I could, he thought, but kept that to himself. Aloud, he went on, “All I can do is pass him along to General Prusione, and I expect I will.”

But his resolve wavered when he saw the fellow who came in under the white flag. Not that the major in the greenish brown tunic and trousers was ugly, but he was, unquestionably, a Valmieran. “Do you speak classical Kaunian, Colonel?” he asked in that tongue. “I regret to tell you, I have no Algarvian.”

“I know Valmieran, Major,” Lurcanio replied in that language. “What can I do for you this afternoon?”

“My name is Vizgantu, Colonel,” the Valmieran said, plainly relieved to be able to use his own speech. “Please take me to your commander. I have been sent to request the surrender of the Algarvian army in this pocket, further resistance on your part plainly being hopeless. Why spill more blood to no purpose?”

Lurcanio took a deep breath. “Major Vizgantu, I am going to send you back to your own superiors instead. I mean no personal offense to you, sir, but having a Valmieran demand our surrender is an insult, nothing less. We may have lost this war, but we did not lose it to your kingdom. I spent more than four very pleasant years in Priekule. I should have a child there now, as a matter of fact.”

Captain Santerno laughed out loud. Major Vizgantu turned red. Doing his best to choke back rage, he said, “You are in a poor position to tell the armies opposing you what to do, Colonel. By the powers above, I hope you pay for your insolence.”

My whole kingdom is paying, Lurcanio thought. What Algarve had made her neighbors pay never entered his mind-that was their worry, not his. He turned to the soldier who’d brought the Valmieran to him. “You may take this gentleman to the front once more. His flag of truce will be honored as he returns to his own side, of course.”

“You bastard!” Vizgantu snarled.

“My bastard, as I told you, is back in Priekule,” Lurcanio answered calmly. Unless it’s Valnu’s bastard. He shrugged. He would gladly claim paternity here, just to watch the Valmieran steam. He wondered how many times Krasta had been unfaithful to him, and with whom. Another shrug. As many as she thought she could get away with, or I miss my guess. It wasn’t as if he’d spent all his nights in her bed.

Off went the Valmieran, still furious and not trying very hard to hide it any more. Santerno came over and slapped Lurcanio on the shoulder. “Well done, your Excellency, well done! Your occupation duty turned out to be good for something after all. You put that fellow in his place as neatly as you please.”

“And now we find out how much we’ll pay for my pleasure,” Lurcanio replied. “If the islanders are annoyed enough, they’ll plague us with their egg-tossers for the rest of the day.”

And the Lagoans and Kuusamans did exactly that. The egg-tossers the Algarvians had left did their best to reply. Huddling in a hole in the ground, Lurcanio was glumly certain their best would not be good enough.

The next morning, Major Vizgantu returned, white flag and all. A different soldier brought him to Lurcanio, saying, “Sir, this cursed Kaunian says he is ordered to report to you, if you’re still alive.”

“I think I may qualify,” Lurcanio answered, which made the soldier chuckle. Lurcanio bowed to the Valmieran. “And a good day to you, Major. We meet again.”

“So we do,” Vizgantu said coldly. He took from his pocket a folded leaf of paper, which he held out to Lurcanio. “This is for you.”

“Thank you so much.” Lurcanio unfolded the paper. It was written in classical Kaunian. To Colonel Lurcanio of the Algarvian army, greetings, he read. Major Vizgantu is my chosen representative in requesting a surrender of the Algarvian forces currently surrounded in this area. If you do not permit him to proceed to your commander, no other representative will be proffered, and no other request for surrender will be made. The fate of your army will be left, in that case, to the chances of the battlefield. The choice, sir, is yours. Your humble servant, Marshal Araujo, commanding allied armies in southern Algarve.

“Have you read this?” Lurcanio asked the Valmieran. A slight smirk was all the answer he needed. He let out a long sigh. The enemy commander had had his revenge, and had taken more than he’d expected. Was Araujo bluffing? Lurcanio studied the note again. He didn’t think so, and he knew the army of which he was a part had no hope of stopping any serious push the Lagoans and Kuusamans-aye, and the Valmierans-chose to make.

“What is your answer, Colonel?” Vizgantu demanded.

Lurcanio contemplated his choice: give up his pride or give up any hope for the soldiers in the pocket with him. He knew more than a few of his countrymen who would have sacrificed the army for the sake of pride. Had he been younger, he might have done the same himself. As things were. .

He thought of salvaging what he could by insulting the Valmieran again, by saying that if Marshal Araujo, a distinguished soldier, chose to use a man who was anything but as his emissary, that had to be respected, but he himself deplored it. He thought of it, then shook his head. It would have come out as childish petulance, no more. All he said was, “I shall send you forward, Major.”

“Thank you,” Vizgantu said. “You might have done this yesterday and saved everyone a good deal of difficulty.”

“So I might have, but I did not,” Lurcanio replied. “And I doubt everything was perfectly smooth in Valmiera almost five years ago, when you folk found yourselves on the other end of victory.”

Vizgantu gave back a proverb in classical Kaunian: “The last victory counts for more than all the others before it.”

Since Lurcanio knew that to be true, he didn’t try to argue it. He just sent the Valmieran major deeper into the pocket the Algarvians still held. If the Algarvian commander chose to surrender, that was, or at least might have been, his privilege. And if he chose to fight on …

If he chooses to fight on, he’s a madman, Lurcanio thought. That, of course, had little to do with anything. If the Algarvian commander chose to fight on, his men would keep fighting for as long as they could. Lurcanio didn’t know what good it would do, but he hadn’t known what good further fighting would do for quite a while. He didn’t want to die at this stage of the war-his goal was to be blazed by an outraged husband at the age of 103-but he knew he would go forward if ordered, or hold in place as long as he could.

The order didn’t come. Instead, that afternoon a runner announced, “General Prusione will yield up this army at sunrise tomorrow.”