Darkness Descending (18 page)

Balastro’s fastidious shudder could have played on the stage. “For which mercy, your Excellency, I thank you.”

Presently, with tea and wine drunk and cakes diminished, with books and nudity talked dry, Hajjaj could with propriety inquire, “And what brings you up into the hills today, sir?”

“Past the desire for good wine and good company, you mean?” Balastro asked, and Hajjaj nodded. The Algarvian minister answered, “I was hoping we might get more aid from you Zuwayzin for the assault on Glogau than we’ve had thus far.”

Hajjaj frowned. “And you come to me for this? Surely it is a matter for your military attaché to work out with his Majesty’s officers down in Bishah.”

Now Balastro looked annoyed, a genuine expression rather than the play-acting he’d used before. “I pray you for both our sakes, your Excellency, do not be disingenuous with me. You must know that your officers have dissembled and delayed and done their best to keep from answering aye or nay. This reluctance must spring from the king or from the foreign ministry: from you, in other words, in either case.”

“If you think I lead King Shazli around by the nose, I must tell you that you are very much mistaken,’’ Hajjaj said.

“Aye, you must tell it to me, for your honor’s sake and your sovereign’s, but must I believe it?” the Algarvian minister to Zuwayza returned: a toss with a good deal of justice in it. “Let us here—merely for the sake of argument, if you like—imagine that you are the author of your kingdom’s treatings with its neighbors.”

“For the sake of argument, as you say.” Hajjaj steepled his fingers and fought against a smile. He liked Balastro, which made the fight harder. “I might say, in that case, that Zuwayza, by now, has avenged herself in full against Unkerlant—in full and more. Glogau has never been ours; few if any Zuwayzin dwell there, or ever have.”

“Zuwayza is our ally, and needs must aid our cause,” Balastro said.

Hajjaj shook his head. “No, your Excellency. Zuwayza is your cobelligerent. We war against Unkerlant for our own reasons, not yours. And, since this discussion is hypothetical, I might add that the vengeance you are wreaking on your neighbors leaves me somewhat relieved not to be one.”

“We have been foes to the cursed Kaunians for time out of mind,” Balastro said with a shrug. “Now that we have the whip hand, we shall use it. Tell me you love the Unkerlanters. Go ahead—I need a good laugh today.”

“We have been known to live at peace with them,” Hajjaj said, “even as you Algarvians have been known to live at peace with the Kaunians.”

“Peace on their terms.” Balastro had no bend in him (and was, Hajjaj knew, forgetting long stretches of his homeland’s history). “Now it is peace on our terms. That is what victory earned us. We are the valiant. We are the strong.”

“Then surely, your Excellency, you will not need much in the way of help from Zuwayza in reducing Glogau, will you?” Hajjaj asked innocently.

Balastro gave him a sour look, got to his feet, and departed with much less ceremony than was customary. Hajjaj stood in the doorway and watched his carriage start back toward the Algarvian ministry back in Bishah. As soon as it rounded a corner—but not an instant before—the Zuwayzi foreign minister let himself smile.

Istvan eyed the pass ahead with something less than delight. “There’ll be Unkerlanters up yonder,” he said, with as much gloomy certainty as a man eyeing dark clouds billowing up from the horizon might use in saying,
There’s a storm on the way.

“Aye, no doubt.” That was Szonyi. “And we’ll have to pay the bill for digging them out, too.”

“There won’t be very many of them.” Kun, of all people, was looking on the bright side of things.

“There won’t
need
to be very many of them.” Istvan waved a hand at the steep-sided jumble of rocks to right and left. “This is the only way forward. As long as they hold it, we aren’t going anywhere.”

Szonyi nodded, looking no more happy than Istvan felt. “Aye, the sergeant’s right, Kun. Ever since the Unkerlanters decided they were going to fight after all, this is the game they’ve played. They aren’t trying to stop us. They’re trying to slow us down, to give us as little as they can till winter comes.”

“And winter in this country won’t be any fun at all.” Istvan eyed the sun. It still stood high in the northern sky at noon, but a tiny bit lower each day. Winter was coming, as inexorably as sand ran through the neck of a glass and down into the bottom half.

Trouble was coming, too. From the strong position they’d set up for themselves in that pass, the Unkerlanters started tossing eggs at the advancing Gyongyosians. Their aim wasn’t particularly good; many of the eggs, instead of bursting on the paths Istvan and his countrymen were using, smote the mountainsides above them. Before long, Istvan discovered the Unkerlanters knew what they were doing after all. One of those bursts touched off an avalanche that swept several soldiers and several donkeys off a path and down to their doom.

“Whoresons!” Istvan shook his fist toward the east. “That’s a coward’s way to fight.”

“They have no honor,” Kanizsai said. “They do nothing but toss eggs and blaze at us from ambush.”

“That’s
because
there aren’t very many of them here,” Kun said, as if explaining things to an idiot child. “They can’t afford a big standup fight with us, because they’re in the middle of a big standup fight with Algarve.”

“No honor,” the young recruit repeated.

“Whether they do or whether they don’t, we still have to shift the goat-buggers,” Istvan said. As if to underscore his words, an egg burst close by, hurling a big chunk of stone past his head.

Kun asked a question Istvan wished he would have kept to himself: “How?”

Since the whole squad was looking at him, Istvan had to answer. Since he didn’t know, he said, “That’s for the officers to figure out.”

“Aye, but it’s for us to do,” Szonyi said. “We do the work, and we do the bleeding, too.”

“We are warriors,” said Kanizsai, who, not yet having been in any big fights, didn’t realize how quickly most of them could become dead warriors if they rushed a strong position manned by stubborn troops.

The officers set over them did seem to realize that, for which Istvan blessed the stars. Instead of the headlong rush he’d dreaded, the commanders in charge of the advance into Unkerlant sent dragons against the enemies blocking the pass ahead. Eggs fell from under the bellies of the great beasts. Having endured more rains of eggs on Obuda than he cared to remember, Istvan knew a sort of abstract sympathy for the Unkerlanters there to the east.

Szonyi had endured attack from the air, too. If he knew any sympathy for the Unkerlanters, he concealed it very well. “Ball the whoresons,” he said, over and over again. “Smash ‘em up. Squash ‘em flat. Don’t leave enough of any one of ’em to make a decent ghost.”

Kun cleared his throat. “The notion that a ghost resembles a body at the moment of its death is only a peasant superstition.”

“And how many ghosts have you seen with your beady little eyes there, Master Spectacles?” Szonyi demanded.

“Stuff a cap in it, both of you,” Istvan said, rolling his eyes. “We’re supposed to be fighting the Unkerlanters, not each other.”

And the Unkerlanters, to his dismay, kept fighting back. They must not have saved all their heavy sticks for the fight against Algarve: they blazed a pair of Gyongyosian dragons out of the air as the beasts stooped low to drop their eggs precisely where their fliers wanted them to go. The rest of the men flying the brightly painted dragons urged them higher into the sky.

“Stars guide the souls of those two,” Szonyi murmured, and glanced over to Kun as if expecting the mage’s apprentice to argue with him. Kun simply nodded, at which Szonyi relaxed.

Eggs did keep falling on the Unkerlanter strongpoint, if not with the accuracy the Gyongyosians could have got by going lower. But eggs also kept falling on the footsoldiers waiting to assault the strongpoint, for the dragonfliers had not been able to wreck all the Unkerlanter egg-tossers.

A whistle shrilled. “Forward!” shouted Captain Tivadar, the company commander. He went forward himself, without hesitation. A commander who was not afraid to face the foe brought his men with him.

“Forward!” Istvan called, and trotted after the captain. He did not look back over his shoulder to see if his men followed. He assumed they would. If they didn’t, their countrymen would do worse to them for cowardice than the Unkerlanters would for courage.

Here, at least, he could see the position he was attacking. Back on Obuda, he’d often blundered through the forest without the faintest notion of where the Kuusamans were till he or his comrades stumbled over them. The disadvantage here was that the Unkerlanters knew where he was, too. He used what bushes and boulders he could for cover, but felt as if he were under the eyes of King Swemmel’s men at every stride.

Still under assault from the air, the Unkerlanters were slower than they might have been to shorten the range on their egg-tossers. That made life easier for Istvan and his companions . . . for a little while. But then flashes of light began winking from behind the piled-up stones at the mouth of the pass as the Unkerlanters brought their sticks into play.

Istvan blazed back at them. “By squads!” Captain Tivadar shouted. “Blaze and move! Make them keep their heads down while we advance on them!”

He wasn’t the only officer shouting similar orders. The Gyongyosian soldiers who’d seen war before, either in the mountains against Unkerlant or on the islands of the Bothnian Ocean, obeyed more readily than the new recruits. Running past a corpse with tawny yellow hair, Istvan shook his head. Living through a couple of fights improved your odds of living through more than a couple.

A moment later, he shook his head again. If you didn’t live through your first couple of fights, you were unlikely to live through any after that.

“Swemmel!” the Unkerlanter soldiers shouted. “Swemmel!” They shouted other things than their king’s name, too, but Istvan couldn’t understand those. To his ears, the Unkerlanter language sounded like a man in the last stages of choking to death.

A beam hissed past his head, so close that he could feel the heat and smell the sharp lightning reek it left behind in the air. He threw himself flat and scrambled toward the closest rock he could find. He peered out from behind it. In their gray tunics, the very color of the mountainside, the Unkerlanters were cursed hard to see.

When he did spot one, he took careful aim before blazing and then whooped as the fellow slumped bonelessly, stick falling from his fingers. “Good blazing, Sergeant,” Tivadar called, and Istvan puffed out his chest: nothing like doing well when a superior was watching.

Then he had no more time to dwell on such trivia, for he and his comrades were in among the Unkerlanters, forcing the enemy back more by weight of numbers than by skill at arms. Some of King Swemmel’s soldiers seemed glad to flee, running east down the valley toward the distant land where most of them were born. Others, though, held their ground as stubbornly as if they too sprang from a warrior race. And, indeed, it was not through want of courage that some of the defenders finally did give way, but only through being overwhelmed by the swarming Gyongyosians.

“By the stars,” Istvan said, shaking his head in wonder as he finally made his way toward the end of the Unkerlanters’ defensive works, “if this were great army against great army and not a regiment of ours thrown at a couple of companies of theirs, Gyongyos and Unkerlant would both run out of men.”

“Aye.” That was Kun, who limped along after him, having taken a light wound from a stick. The mage’s apprentice still had his spectacles on, whether through some protective magic of his or thanks to an out-and-out miracle Istvan couldn’t have said. Kun pointed ahead. “One more little fortress of theirs up there, and then we can go on.”

“So we can,” Istvan said. “And then, a few miles farther east, they’ll choose another pass we have to go through, and they’ll entrench themselves there. At five miles a day, how many years are we from Cottbus?”

Kun wore a faraway expression as he calculated. “Three,” he said, “or rather a bit more.”

Istvan, who had only sketchy schooling, did not know if he was right or wrong. He did know the prospect struck him as gloomy. And he also rapidly realized that the Unkerlanters in the little fortress ahead had no intention of letting his comrades go any miles farther that day. They blazed away at the Gyongyosians with such ferocity across such level ground that to approach or to try to go around their strongpoint was an appointment with death.

Only after Gyongyosian dragons returned and dropped great swarms of eggs on the fortress did the blazing from it ease enough to let the footsoldiers mount an assault. Even then, Unkerlanter survivors kept fighting in the wreckage until, at last, almost all of them were slain. Only a couple of dark-haired men came out of the works with their hands held high.

And when Istvan went into the battered fortress, he discovered something that set him shouting for Captain Tivadar. After a while, the company commander picked his way through the wreckage and stood beside his sergeant. “Well,” he said at last, “now we know why they were able to blaze so well for so long.”

“Aye, sir,” Istvan said. “So we do.” Ten Unkerlanters lay side by side, each of them with his throat cut. The Gyongyosians had not done that; the Unkerlanters’ own countrymen had. “Do you suppose they volunteered, or did their officers draw straws, or would they just pick the men they liked least?”

“I don’t know,” Tivadar answered. “Maybe the captives will be able to tell us.” He gulped, looking for something more to say. At last, he managed, “It was bravely done, though. See?—none of them has his hands tied. They gave themselves up so their comrades would have plenty of sorcerous energy in their sticks to keep blazing at us.”

“So they did.” Istvan looked down at the neat if bloody row of corpses. He gave them the best tribute he could: “They died like warriors.” He wondered how many Gyongyosians would have yielded themselves up for their fellows’ sake like that. Then he wondered what the Unkerlanters would do at the next position they chose to defend with all their strength. And then he wondered if he’d be lucky enough to see the Unkerlanter stronghold after that.