Through the Darkness

As Panfilo had, he gulped the stuff down. It tasted nasty, but maybe not quite so nasty as he’d expected. And there were turnip peelings in there; he actually had to chew a couple of times. The cook hadn’t been lying after all. The peelings might create some small part of the illusion of fullness. And the soup was hot. That, at least, was real.

When he’d emptied the mess tin, he said, “Powers above, that hit the spot. It sure did. Now where’s the sparkling wine and the beautiful broads to go with it?”

“No such thing as beautiful Unkerlanter broads,” the cook said, and Trasone and Panfilo both nodded. That was an article of faith among Algarvian soldiers in the west. It hadn’t kept Trasone from visiting the brothels his superiors set up in Unkerlant, though he’d usually picked Kaunian women when there were any. No brothels in Sulingen. No women at all in Sulingen, unless a few Unkerlanters still survived in hidden cellars.

“Back to our position,” Panfilo said. Trasone nodded. It was no more dangerous there than here.

They hadn’t been back in the ruined hut for long before the barrage of eggs, already heavy, got worse. Through-perhaps around-the bursts, Trasone heard Unkerlanter officers’ whistles shrilling. “They’re coming!” he shouted, and his was far from the only cry going up along the Algarvian line.

And the Unkerlanters were coming, scampering through the wreckage of what had been a quiet riverside city, diving into holes and behind clumps of rubble and then coming out blazing. Some ran bent at the waist, others straight up and down. Trasone blazed at the men who tried to make themselves smaller targets. They were the ones likely to be veterans, the ones likely to be more dangerous if they got in among the Algarvians.

Swemmel’s soldiers tried one of these assaults every few days. Sometimes Mezentio’s men threw them back with heavy losses. Sometimes they got in among the Algarvians and bit off another chunk of Sulingen. At first, Trasone thought this would be another time when the Unkerlanters spent lives and came away with nothing to show for it. They fell in large numbers; every advance they made came over the bodies of their slain. They spent lives the way he spent his money when he got leave.

He didn’t think he’d get much more leave. And he realized things weren’t going so well as he thought when Algarvian egg-tossers went into action over to his right. Unless things went badly, his countrymen hoarded the eggs they had left.

They might as well have hoarded them, for the Unkerlanters broke into the Algarvian trenches despite the pallid answer to their own almost ceaseless barrage. “Urra!” they shouted. “Swemmel!” Now that the fighting was hot again, they stopped asking if the Algarvians wanted to surrender.

“We have to hold them!” Sergeant Panfilo shouted to as many of the men in his squad as might still be alive. “We have to hold them right here. If they break past us and make it to the Wolter, they cut the army in half.”

“Besides,” Trasone added in a low voice, “we haven’t got anywhere to run to anyway.”

“The ironworks,” Panfilo said, but his heart wasn’t in it. A lot of Algarvian soldiers were already holed up there, as they were in the ruins of the massive granary not far away. But even if the front-line soldiers ran back there, how likely were they to make it before the Algarvians rolled over them? Not very, and Trasone and Panfilo both knew as much.

Turning, Trasone blazed at an Unkerlanter coming at him from the east- sure enough, Swemmel’s men had cracked the Algarvian line. The man went down, whether blazed or only diving for cover Trasone didn’t know. The Unkerlanter didn’t blaze back, so maybe Trasone had nailed him. In a brief stretch of quiet, he asked Panfilo, “Remember Tealdo?”

“Aye, poor bugger,” the sergeant answered. “He’s dead a year now-more than that, I suppose. Why’d you think of him all of a sudden?”

“He was in sight of Cottbus when he went down. That’s how close he came. That’s how close we came,” Trasone added, for no Algarvian had got more than a glimpse of the towers of the capital of Unkerlant. “Here, anyway, we got all the way into Sulingen.”

“Aye, we got all the way in,” Panfilo said. “We got all the way in, but we aren’t coming out again.”

Before Trasone could say anything, several squadrons of Unkerlanter dragons flew low over the embattled Algarvians, dropping more eggs on them and burning soldiers with flames all the stronger because they were fueled with quicksilver from the Mamming Hills-quicksilver that had brought the Algarvians to Sulingen, and that Algarve would never use now. Swemmel’s men were getting better at putting the pieces of their attacks together. They weren’t as good as the Algarvians, but they didn’t have to be. They had more margin for error.

A cleverly concealed heavy stick blazed a couple of dragons out of the sky. The Algarvians still had a few fangs left. In the long run, though, what did it matter? It might make the battle last a little longer. It wouldn’t change who won.

“Behemoths!” Panfilo shouted. The yell held no terror, not any more. The Algarvians left alive in Sulingen were beyond that. It was just a warning. Trasone wondered why Panfilo bothered. Nobody could do much about behemoths, not here, not now.

The great armored beasts lumbered forward. Unkerlanter footsoldiers trotted among them. The behemoths’ crews started tossing eggs at the spots where resistance stayed strong.

One flew straight toward Trasone. He watched it rise. He watched it fall. He dove for cover, knowing there was no cover and he was too slow anyhow. The egg burst. A few minutes later, the Unkerlanter behemoths tramped past and over what had been a strongpoint and slogged on toward the Wolter.