Through the Darkness

could pick them off.

But Spinello yelled, “Come on-they’re finished!” Trasone raised up far enough to see the battalion commander striding briskly toward the town. Muttering, Trasone got to his feet, too. Spinello was brave, all right, but he was also liable to get himself killed, and some of his men with him.

Not this time, though. Spinello and his soldiers went forward, and so did the behemoths. They came out of the wheat fields and onto the road leading into the town. Refugees fleeing the Algarvians already clogged the road. Seeing more Algarvians coming up behind them, they began to scatter.

Dragons swooped down on them just then, dropping eggs that flung bodies aside like broken dolls. And then they flew on to drop more eggs on the town ahead. The behemoths charged through the Unkerlanter fugitives who were still fleeing down the road. For once in this war, the behemoths’ iron-shod horns found targets. The soldiers on the beasts whooped and cheered as they ran down one peasant after another.

“That’s how things go,” Sergeant Panfilo said cheerfully. “You get in the way, you get flattened-and you deserve it, too.”

“Oh, aye, no doubt about that,” Trasone agreed. He was a big, broad-shouldered young man, almost as burly as an Unkerlanter. “We’ve flattened a lot of the buggers, too.” He looked ahead. More plains, more fields, more forests, more towns, more villages-seemingly forever. “But we’ve still got a deal of flattening to finish, we do.”

“Too right,” Panfilo said. “Too bloody right. Well, we’re gaining again.” He pointed ahead. “Look. The dragons have gone and set the town afire.”

“Aye,” Trasone said. “I hope they cook a regiment’s worth in there, but I don’t suppose they will. The Unkerlanters aren’t standing up to us the way they did last summer. I think we’ve got ‘em on the run.”

“They aren’t battling they way they did, that’s sure enough,” Panfilo agreed. “Maybe the fight’s finally leaking out of ‘em-or maybe they’re falling back toward wherever they’re going to make a stand.”

“Now there’s a cheery thought,” Trasone said. “Here’s hoping the Unkerlanters don’t have it. Wouldn’t you like things to be easy for once?”

“Oh, that I would,” Panfilo answered. “But you’ve been doing this a long time by now. How often are things easy?”

“Valmiera was easy,” Trasone said.

“That makes once,” the sergeant told him. Trasone nodded. They both let out noises that might have been grunts or might have been laughs, then got back to the serious business of marching again.

Not all the Unkerlanter soldiers had run off toward the west. Some egg-tossers the dragons hadn’t wrecked started lobbing eggs at the advancing Algarvians. Somebody not too far from Trasone went down with a scream. Trasone shivered as he tramped past the wounded man. It could have been him as easily as not, and he knew as much.

When the leading squads of his battalion started into the town to fight it out with King Swemmel’s men, Major Spinello threw a fit. “No, no, no!” he howled, and made as if to tear his fiery hair or rip out his waxed mustachios. “Stupid buggers, pox-brained cretins, what do you think you’re doing? Go around, flank them out. Let the poor trudging whoresons who come after us dig the pus out of the pocket. Our job is to keep moving. We never let them get set up to slug it out with us. We go around. Have you got that? Have you? Powers below eat you, you’d better.”

“All right, we’ll bloody well go around,” Panfilo said, and swung his arm to lead his squad south of Unkerlant. Spinello was also screeching at the behemoths on this part of the field, and got them not to go straight into the town, either. They tossed a few eggs into it as they skirted it to north and south.

Trasone said, “I think he’s a pretty good officer. As long as we keep moving, we can lick these Unkerlanter whoresons right out of their boots. Only time they match us is when mud and rain or snow make us slow down.”

“Maybe so,” Panfilo allowed: no small concession from a veteran sergeant toward a green officer. He promptly qualified it by adding, “If he tells one more dirty story about that Kaunian bitch back in Forthweg, though, I’ll hit him over the head with my stick and make him shut up.”

“Oh, good,” Trasone said. “I’m not the only one who’s sick of them, then.” Somehow, finding that out made the march seem easier.

The Unkerlanters must have been hoping the Algarvians would come into the town and fight for it street by street. When they saw Mezentio’s men weren’t about to, they began pulling out themselves: men in rock-gray tunics dog-trotting in loose order, with horses hauling egg-tossers and carts full of eggs.

They wouldn’t have held the town against the Algarvian troopers following the ones pushing the front forward. Out in the open, they didn’t last long against those front-line troops. The Algarvians on the behemoths showered eggs down on them with impunity. As soon as one of those eggs touched off a supply dump for the Unkerlanter egg-tossers, King Swemmel’s men began to realize they were in a hopeless position. At first by ones and twos and then in larger numbers, they threw down their sticks and came toward the Algarvians with hands held high. Along with his comrades, Trasone patted them down, stole whatever money they had and whatever trinkets he fancied, and sent them off toward the rear. “Into the captives’ camps they go, and good riddance, too,” he said.

“We may be seeing some of them again one day,” Panfilo said.

“Huh?” Trasone shook his head. “Not likely.”

“Aye, it is,” Panfilo said. “Haven’t you heard?” He waited for Trasone to shake his head again, then went on, “They go through the camps and let out some of the Unkerlanters who say they’ll fight for Raniero of Grelz-which means, for us.”

Trasone stared. “Now that’s a daft notion if ever there was one. If they were trying to kill us a little bit ago, why should we trust ‘em with sticks in their hands again?”

“Ahh, it’s not the worst gamble in the world,” Panfilo said. “Put it this way: if you were an Unkerlanter and got the chance to give King Swemmel a good kick in the balls, wouldn’t you grab it with both hands?”

“I might,” Trasone said slowly, “but then again, I might not, too. I haven’t noticed that the whoresons are what you’d call shy about fighting for their king, no matter whether he’s crazy or not.”

“It’s not like they’ve got a lot of choice, not after Swemmel’s impressers get their hands on ‘em.” Sergeant Panfilo’s shoulders moved up and down in a melodramatic, ever so Algarvian shrug. “And it’s not like I can do anything about it any which way. I’m just telling you what I’ve heard.”

“Pretty shitty way to go about things, anybody wants to know what I think,” Trasone said.

Panfilo laughed at him. “Don’t be dumber than you can help. Nobody cares a sour fart for what a common footslogger thinks-or a sergeant, either, come to that. Now Spinello-Spinello they’ll listen to. He’s got himself a fancy pedigree, he does. But I bet he doesn’t care one way or the other what happens to Unkerlanter captives.”

“He’s not interested in laying them, so why should he care?” Trasone returned, and got a laugh from the sergeant.

Neither one of them was laughing a few minutes later, when a flight of Unkerlanter dragons streaked toward them out of the trackless west. Because the Unkerlanters painted their beasts rock-gray, and because they came in low and fast, Trasone and his comrades didn’t see them till they were almost on top of the Algarvians. A tongue of flame reached out for him as a dragon breathed fire.

Trasone threw himself flat. The flame fell short. He felt an instant’s intense heat and did not breathe. Then the dragon raced by. The wind of its passage blew dust and grit into Trasone’s face.

He rolled from his belly to his back so he could blaze at the Unkerlanter dragons. He knew how slim his chances of hurting one were, but blazed anyhow. Stranger things had happened in this war. As far as he was concerned, that the Unkerlanters were still fighting was one of those stranger things.

A dragon flamed an Algarvian behemoth. The soldiers riding the behemoth died at once, without even the chance to scream. Partly shielded by its armor, the beast took longer to perish. Bellowing in agony, flames dripping from it and starting fires in the grass, it galloped heavily till at last it fell over and lay kicking. Even then, it bawled on and on.

“There’s supper,” Trasone said, pointing. “Roasted in its own pan.”

Panfilo lay sprawled in the dirt a few feet away. “If this were last winter, roast behemoth would be supper-and we’d be cursed glad to have it, too.”

“Don’t I know it,” Trasone answered. “What? Did you think I was kidding? There’s not a man with a frozen-