Corporal Kun said nothing to that but, “Aye, Sergeant.” Istvan couldn’t possibly call him to account for two unexceptionable words. But then Kun looked around, the sun sparkling off his spectacles once more. His glance took in the captives’ camp, the palisade around it, the brisk, alert Kuusaman guards on the palisade, and the bedraggled Gyongyosians moving forward one at a time to be fed.
Ears burning, Istvan said, “Well, we are”
“Aye, Sergeant,” Kun repeated, which finished the job of demoralizing Istvan. The one-time mage’s apprentice made as if he didn’t even know what he’d done. He fights, Istvan thought. He just doesn’t fight fair. He didn’t say that out loud. It would have made Kun unbearably smug.
An Obudan—a medium-sized, dark-haired man with light reddish-brown skin—slapped oatmeal mush into Istvan’s mess tin. “Here you is,” he said in bad Gyongyosian. Gyongyos had held Obuda, been driven off by the Kuusamans, retaken the island, and then been driven off again. The locals had had their chances to learn the languages of both occupiers.
“Thanks.” Istvan turned away and started spooning up the mush. His own people flavored oatmeal with butter and salt. The Kuusamans put in sugar and spices and raisins instead. It wasn’t what he was used to, but it wasn’t too bad.
When he’d finished, he took his tin over to a basin of water to wash it. He was sloshing it around in the basin when another captive came up beside him. He blinked. “Hello, Major Borsos,” he said. “I didn’t know the stars-accursed slanteyes had got you, too.”
He’d fetched and carried for Borsos back in the days when Gyongyos still held Obuda. He’d seen the mage again in the vast forests of Unkerlant. Borsos had had trouble remembering him then, and plainly had trouble remembering him now. After a moment, he said, “Ah, hello, Sergeant. Aye, I’m among the unlucky, too. Gyongyos hasn’t had much luck lately.”
“Couldn’t you use your magecraft to do … something?” Istvan’s voice trailed away. Here on an island now far away from any that Gyongyos held, what could even a true mage do?
And Borsos hissed, “Shut up, by the stars. The Kuusamans don’t know what I am, and I don’t want them finding out, either, or they’ll send me somewhere worse than this.”
“Oh.” Till then, Istvan hadn’t noticed Borsos wasn’t wearing his sorcerer’s badges along with his emblems of rank. As in most armies, Gyongyosian mages held officer’s rank not so much by virtue of their blood as to give them the privilege of telling common soldiers what to do. Real aristocratic officers—most of them—would look down their noses at Borsos, but they probably wouldn’t tell the Kuusamans what he was. In fact… “It might be nice, having a real wizard in here on our side.”
“I’m hardly even that,” Borsos said. “I’m just a dowser. You ought to remember, if you hauled my gear around for me.”
“Better than nothing,” Istvan said. Better than Kun, he thought. Kun had been an apprentice before going into Ekrekek Arpad’s army. Borsos, at least, was fully trained in one specialty of magic.
From behind Istvan, someone asked, “Is this man bothering you, sir?” Istvan turned. There stood Captain Frigyes, as stiff and erect and formal as if still in command of soldiers in the field. He might have been even more stiff and erect and formal here in the captives’ camp, to try to hold his men together.
Borsos said, “No, Captain. We’ve known each other for a while.”
Frigyes still looked dubious. Leaning toward him, Istvan spoke in a low voice: “He’s a mage, sir.”
“Is he?” Frigyes answered, also quietly. He eyed Borsos’ collar tabs. Unlike Istvan, he didn’t need an explanation from Borsos. “You don’t want the enemy to know your skill, eh?”
He didn’t bother calling Borsos sir any more. Officers—real officers— didn’t take seriously mages’ claims to rank. Borsos didn’t get angry; a good many mages didn’t take those claims seriously, either. The dowser replied, “That’s about the size of it, Captain.”
“All right.” Frigyes nodded briskly. “I can understand that. And it might be useful for us to have a sorcerer here. Who knows? Maybe we can find a way to hit back at the Kuusamans yet.”
“Maybe.” But Borsos didn’t sound as if he believed it. “They have strong wards up around the camp, though. They’re the enemy, Captain, but they’re not fools. If they were fools, they wouldn’t be moving forward.”
They wouldn’t be beating us, was what he surely meant, but no Gyongyosian soldier—not even a mage in military uniform—would come right out and say that. The traditions of a warrior race died hard.
“Wards can do only so much,” Captain Frigyes said, and led Major Borsos aside. He spoke to the mage too softly for Istvan to make out what they were saying. Istvan didn’t even bother resenting it. That was how officers were; as best he could tell, the stars had made them that way.
The cry of horror Borsos let out a moment later wasn’t too soft to hear. It made Istvan jump, and he wasn’t the only one. “No!” Borsos said a moment later, and wagged a finger under Captain Frigyes’ nose as if he were a real major and not just an officer by courtesy. That was enough to put Frigyes’ back up; he stalked off like an offended cat.
“What on earth?” Istvan said. He wasn’t really asking Borsos what Frigyes had proposed; it was more an exclamation of astonishment.
“By the sweet, pure, and holy light of the stars, Sergeant, you don’t want to know.” Borsos’ face was pale as milk. A back-country man—a herder, say, from the valley from which Istvan sprang—might have looked that way after seeing a ghost. Borsos didn’t strike Istvan as a man likely to see a ghost, or to panic if he did. But the dowser went off in the direction opposite the one Frigyes had taken. He staggered once, plainly a man shaken to the core.
“What on earth?” Istvan said again.
Again, he got an answer, this time from Kun: “Can’t you figure it out for yourself, Sergeant?”
Istvan whirled. The sorcerer’s apprentice and corporal was right behind him, dirty mess tin in hand. “If I could figure it out, would I be going, ‘What on earth?’ “ Istvan asked in some irritation. “And I know bloody well that you didn’t hear as much of it as I did, so what makes you so fornicating smart?”
“Your friend there is a mage of sorts, aye?” Kun said. He waited for Istvan to nod, then went on, “What was Captain Frigyes doing with us when all the Kuusamans in the world jumped on our company?”
“Huh?” The jump there was too wide for Istvan to follow him across it. “What are you talking about?”
Patiently, Kun guided him across: “Our company commander was good and ready to sacrifice us all, to let the mages make the magic that would have thrown the slant-eyes off Becsehely, remember? But they captured us before he got us to wherever the wizards were. And so …” He waited.
He needed to wait a while; Istvan had trouble with the jump even with a guide. At last, though, Istvan’s mouth fell open. “You think he was talking with Borsos about making that same kind of sorcery here!” Once the words were out of his mouth, they made a horrid kind of sense. He wished they hadn’t.
And Kun nodded. “That’s just what I think. Captain Frigyes wants to go on fighting the war. How else can he do it?”
“Could Borsos make that kind of magic here?” Istvan asked. “He’s a dowser, mostly. Does he even know enough to cast that kind of spell?”
“Ask him,” Kun answered. “I can’t tell you.”
With a shudder, Istvan shook his head. “I don’t think I want to know.”
Kun clicked his tongue between his teeth in sharp disapproval. “You should always want to know. Knowledge is bad, but ignorance is worse.”
“Is that a fact?” Istvan said, and Kun nodded as if it most assuredly were. Istvan put his hands on his hips. “If knowing is such a great thing, how come we both wish the mages had never figured out how to use the magic they get from killing people? Answer me that, O sage of the age.”
“It’s not the same,” Kun said stiffly.
“The only reason our mages turned toward that spell was that the Unkerlanters used it against us. We have to be able to fight back.”
Istvan shook his head again. “You’re not really answering me. You’re just pushing it back one step. Don’t you wish the Unkerlanters hadn’t worked out how to use that spell, then? You can’t be real happy about it, or you wouldn’t have been so very thrilled to volunteer to help power the sorcery.”
Now Kun winced. “Volunteer to have my throat cut, you mean. No, may the stars turn their light from me if I was happy about that. And I suppose you’ve made your point. Huzzah for ignorance!” He held his hands in front of his face, as if playing a fanfare on a trumpet.
I got him to admit I was right, Istvan thought proudly. The pride was in proportion to how seldom that happened. But then he wondered what Captain Frigyes would do, and what he could make Major Borsos do. He didn’t know, and wished he did. As soon as the wish crossed his mind, he realized Kun wasn’t entirely wrong. He thought about admitting as much, but in the end did no such thing. He gained such triumphs too seldom not to want to savor them to the fullest.
Leudast had got used to life in the bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Fluss. The Algarvians kept pounding away, trying to drive the Unkerlanters back over the river and seal off the bridgehead. They kept throwing in attacks every so often, too, going at the Unkerlanter regiments on the east side of the Fluss as if the whole war depended on wiping them out.
After Swemmel’s men had beaten back one such assault, a trooper in Leudast’s company said, “Isn’t this the worst fighting you’ve ever seen in all your days, Lieutenant?”
The fellow couldn’t have been above seventeen. Unkerlanter soldiers in the field didn’t get to shave very often, but his cheeks remained smooth and beardless even when he was nowhere near a razor. Leudast wanted to laugh in his face. Instead, he just shook his head. “Sonny, I was wounded down in Sulingen. They fixed me up in time to let me fight in the Durrwangen bulge. After those scraps, anything the redheads have done to us here is like a walk in the meadow with a pretty girl.” He thought of Alize, back in the village of Leiferde.
Sergeant Kiun shook his head. “Oh, it’s not so easy as that, sir,” he said. “More like a walk through the meadow with an ugly girl, if you want to know what I think.”
“Who wants to know what you think?” Leudast returned. They grinned at each other. Why not? Between the two of them, they’d captured the Algarvian noble who’d called himself King of Grelz. Just as Leudast wasn’t quite an ordinary lieutenant, so Kiun wasn’t an ordinary sergeant.
The young soldier was unimpressed. “You’re making fun of me!” he said, and his voice broke in the middle of the sentence, going from the baritone he would have as a grown man to the squeaky treble he was just escaping.
“Well, what if we are, Gilan?” Leudast asked. “You said something silly. If you don’t expect people to make fun of you after you say something silly, you’re making a big mistake.”
“But I didn’t know it was silly,” Gilan protested.
“That makes it more silly, not less,” Leudast said. Had he been that naive when King Swemmel’s impressers pulled him into the army? If he had, how in blazes had his sergeants and officers put up with him? He thought of Sergeant Magnulf, who’d died in the first year of the war with Algarve. They’d shared a hole in some village they were trying to defend. Had he looked out of the hole when the egg burst in front of it, he would be dead now and Magnulf might still be alive. It had happened the other way round. He knew neither rhyme nor reason for it.
As if the mere thought of eggs were enough to conjure them up, they started bursting not far from the trench in which he and Kiun and Gilan stood. They weren’t quite close enough to make the soldiers throw themselves flat, but they weren’t much farther off than that. “Powers below eat the redheads,” Kiun said. “I thought they were supposed to be moving everything north to fight our push there.”
“Lots of odds and sods in the men they’re throwing at us,” Leudast said. “Those Forthwegian whoresons are almost as bad as Grelzers—you can’t tell they’re the enemy till too late. And now these blond Kaunian buggers.”
“They fight hard,” Kiun said.
“Aye.” Leudast nodded. “There were a few Kaunians not so far from my village. I grew up pretty close to the border with Forthweg, you know. They’re just … people who don’t look like us. What I don’t get is how come they’ll fight for the Algarvians when the redheads kill ‘em to make their magic.”
“These aren’t Kaunians from Forthweg,” Kiun said. “They’re from way the demon off in the east somewhere. I hardly even know the names of the kingdoms on the other side of the world.”
“They’re Valmierans,” Leudast said. Before Kiun could put in a jab, he held up his hand. “Only reason I know is because Captain Recared told me. He knows all that stuff. But still, they’re blonds, and so are the Kaunians from Forthweg. So why would they help Mezentio’s bastards?”
“Have to take some prisoners, squeeze it out of’em,” Kiun said.
“I suppose so,” Leudast allowed.
Unkerlanter egg-tossers started answering the Algarvians. They still didn’t respond as fast as the redheads, but they were there in numbers in the bridgehead. Nothing the Algarvians or the foreigners fighting for them had done had stopped Unkerlant from bringing egg-tossers and behemoths forward, which was not the least of the reasons they still held the foothold on this side of the Fluss.
Dragons flew by, dragons painted rock-gray. “They’ll drop their loads on the Algarvians’ heads, too,” Leudast said. “Serves the redheads right—this is what they used to do to us all the time.”
Before long, the Algarvian egg-tossers fell silent. “That’s more like it,” Kiun said. “Maybe they’ll learn not to try that anymore.”
“Here’s hoping,” Leudast said. “That’s one lesson I wish they’d learned already, as a matter of fact.” Kiun chuckled and nodded, for all the world as if Leudast were joking. They’d both been in the front lines a long time. If you didn’t joke, you’d go mad sooner or later—unless the redheads killed you, which was rather more likely.
Here, though, the Algarvians really did seem to learn a lesson. Things stayed very quiet for the next couple of days. They were so quiet, in fact, that Leudast almost lost the feeling of being stuck in a bridgehead.
He remarked on that the next time he saw Captain Recared, adding, “If we hit them hard enough to make them stay this quiet, maybe we can break out of this cramped little place and start pushing them back again.”
Recared shook his head. “Not yet, Lieutenant. I’d like to just as much as you would, but not yet. We’ll have to see how things go up in the north before we find out what we can do here. All the spares we have, and all the reserves, are going into that push. If it goes well, then we can try pushing here, too. Or that’s my guess, anyhow—ask Marshal Rathar if you want a better notion.”
“Oh, of course, sir.” Leudast laughed. Unlike most junior lieutenants, he’d met the marshal, and Rathar might, if reminded, remember who he was. None of that meant he could go asking questions of Rathar. None of it meant Rathar was anywhere within a thousand miles of the River Fluss at the moment, either.
Recared laughed, too, and said, “You’ve got attitude, Leudast.”
“Do I?” Leudast shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that. All I know is, I’m still here, and that makes me luckier than a lot of people.” Poor Magnulf crossed his mind again. He asked, “How are things going up in the north, sir?”
“Better than we expected. As well as we hoped,” Recared answered. Leudast blinked; he hadn’t really looked for a reply quite so optimistic. The regimental commander went on, “That whole Algarvian army up there is getting smashed to pieces. With any luck at all, we will be able to start moving here pretty soon—but not just yet.”
“I’m in no hurry, sir, not as long as the redheads and the whoresons who fight for them leave us a
lone, the way they have lately.” Leudast snapped his fingers. “That reminds me—Kiun and I were talking about the Kaunians who fight on Algarve’s side. Has anybody figured out why they’re daft enough to do it?”
“We’ve caught a few,” Recared said. “We haven’t found any answers that tell us a whole lot. Best guess so far is, they’re about like the buggers in Plegmund’s Brigade: ne’er-do-wells and men down on their luck and a few just looking for a fight and taking one anywhere they can find it.”
Leudast grunted. “Bunch of cursed fools, if anybody wants to know what I think. You’d have to be, wouldn’t you, to fight for somebody who was doing that to your own people?”
“Well, I think so,” Captain Recared said. Then he changed the subject, and then, sooner than Leudast had expected, he left. Leudast scratched his head for a while, wondering if he’d somehow offended the regimental commander. He ran the conversation over in his mind. He couldn’t see how.
And then, as he was drifting toward sleep that night, he did. After all, King Swemmel was killing powers above only knew how many Unkerlanters to fuel the sorcery that thwarted the Algarvians’ murderous magic and helped beat the redheads and their allies out of Unkerlant. Even though he was doing that, Leudast didn’t hesitate to fight for him. Neither did countless other Unkerlanters.
Maybe the Valmieran Kaunians felt the same way. If they do, they‘re wrong, Leudast thought, and dozed off.
After black bread and sausage the next morning, he led Kiun’s squad out on a patrol through the woods. He could have stayed back in camp and let the sergeant take charge of the patrol himself; a lot of officers would have. But he’d been on plenty of patrols himself. If he went on this one, he thought—he hoped—he gave everyone a little better chance of coming back in one piece.
A jay screamed. A woodpecker drummed on the trunk of a birch. A flock of waxwings flew from one wild plum tree to another. No one who’d ever heard them could mistake their soft, metallic zreel zreel for the call of any other bird. “All seems pretty quiet,” Kiun said. “No sign the redheads are trying to sneak in and make trouble.”
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