Darkness Descending

into the same hole--and onto Leudast, who said, “Oof!”

“Sorry,” Magnulf said, though he didn’t sound very sorry. Leudast wasn’t unduly put out; Magnulf worried about saving his own neck first and everything else afterwards, as any sensible soldier would have. The sergeant went on, “Stinking redheads hit back faster than you wish they would, don’t they?”

“Aye,” Leudast said. “I wish I could say you were wrong.” He tried to look on the bright side: “We’re getting better at that ourselves, too. Our dragons gave them more than they wanted a little while ago.”

“I know, but they do it all the stinking time,” Magnulf said. “The whoresons have more crystals than we do, and they keep on talking into them.”

Shouts from ahead warned that the Algarvians were doing more than talking into their crystals. Leudast and Magnulf scrambled up to the edge of their hole and looked east. Behemoths and soldiers and eggs had flattened enough of the wheat to let them see troopers in tan kilts and tunics running toward them in loose order.

Leudast laughed out loud. “They didn’t do enough talking this time. Look, Sergeant--they didn’t bring any behemoths with ‘em, and we’ve still got some of ours.”

Magnulf’s eyes glowed. “Ha! They’ll pay for that.” Gloating anticipation filled his voice.

Pay for it the Algarvians did. The Unkerlanter behemoths’ heavy sticks blazed them down at a range from which the redheads could not hurt the beasts or their riders. Eggs from other behemoths’ tossers burst among the Algarvians, tossing some aside like broken dolls and making most of the rest go to earth to keep from suffering a like fate.

“Forward!” Captain Hawart called. Leudast heaved himself out of the hole and made for the Algarvians. So did Sergeant Magnulf. Almost without noticing they were doing it, they spread apart from each other, making themselves into less inviting targets for the enemy.

But the Algarvians were as quick to correct their own mistakes as they were to punish the Unkerlanters’. Reinforcements came to the rescue of the men the Unkerlanter attack had been on the edge of crushing, and those reinforcements included behemoths with redheads aboard. One thing Leudast had seen before was that Algarvian behemoth-riders went after their Unkerlanter counterparts the instant they spied them. So it was in this fight, too, and, with fewer behemoths backing them, King Swemmel’s footsoldiers faltered.

Shouting King Mezentio’s name, the Algarvians came on again, hot to retake the stretch of ground the Unkerlanters had wrested from them. But a flight of dragons painted rock-gray swooped down on them, dropping eggs on their behemoths and flaming their footsoldiers. Leudast shouted himself hoarse, or rather hoarser, for the smoke in the air had left his throat raw now for quite a while.

When he looked back over his shoulder, he was surprised to see the sun dipping toward the western horizon. The fighting had gone on all day, and he’d hardly noticed. Now he felt how worn and hungry and thirsty he was.

Unkerlanter reinforcements came up during the night. So did a little food. Leudast had more than a little food on him; he knew supplies were liable to be erratic. During the night, the wind shifted, as it had a way of doing as summer swung toward fall. It blew from out of the south, a cool breeze with a warning of rain in it.

Sure enough, at dawn gray clouds covered most of the sky. Eyeing them, Sergeant Magnulf said, “It’ll already be raining, I expect, down in the village I come from. Nothing wrong with that, you ask me.”

“No,” Leudast said. “Nothing wrong with that at all. Let’s see how the redheads like slogging through the mud. If the powers above are giving us an early winter, maybe they’ll give us a nasty winter, too.” He stared up at one of the few patches of blue sky he could see, hoping the powers were listening to him.

Along with a dozen of his comrades, Tealdo sheltered in a half-wrecked barn somewhere in southern Unkerlant. It was raining almost as hard inside the barn as it was outside. Tealdo and Trasone held a cloak above Captain Galafrone to keep water from dripping down onto the map the company commander was examining to try to figure out just where they were.

“Curse me if I know why I’m bothering,” Galafrone growled. “This miserable thing lies more often than it tells the truth.”

Trasone pointed to a line printed in red. “Sir, isn’t that the highway?” “That’s what the map says,” Galafrone answered. “I saw Unkerlanter roads during the Six Years’ War, but I thought they might have got better since. They were supposed to have got better since. But the stinking ‘highway’ is just another dirt track. Huzzah for Swemmel’s efficiency.”

“Mud track now,” Trasone said. His legs, like everyone else’s, were mud to the knees and beyond.