And then another Unkerlanter went down, this one with a hole in him you could have thrown a dog through. No footsoldier’s weapon could have made such a wound, only a heavy stick mounted on the back of a behemoth. That stick found one foe after another. When the Unkerlanters dove for cover, it blazed right through the boards and sheet metal some of them chose.
The rest of the behemoths carried egg-tossers. They rained death down on the Unkerlanters: not death at random, but death precisely aimed, death that pursued them, death that found them. The charge faltered. When his comrades lay broken and bloodied all around him, not even a bellyful of raw spirits would take a man forward any more.
Along with the behemoths, fresh troops in Algarvian uniform came up on the right of Trasone’s regiment. For a moment, he didn’t recognize the patch each newcomer wore on his left sleeve: a sea-green shield with five gold crowns. Then he did, and his jaw dropped. “Powers above!” he exclaimed. “They’re fornicating Sibs!”
Folvo nodded. “Didn’t you hear about that?” he said. “They’ve recruited a couple of regiments’ worth of men on the five islands. They’re supposed to be tough enough to suit anybody.”
“What’s the world coming to?” Trasone shook his head. “Yaninans for flank guards, now these Sibs right alongside us—and I did hear tell we’ve got Forthwegians doing something or other, too. What’s next? Are we going to start setting up regiments of Kaunians?”
“I’d sooner there were Kaunians here than me,” Folvo said.
“Oh, aye, but all the same . . .” Trasone turned and called to one of the Sibians: “Hey, pal, you speak my language?”
“At least as well as you do,” the Sibian answered in cold, precise Algarvian. “Probably better.”
“Well, you can go futter yourself, too,” Trasone muttered, but not so loud as to make the newcomer—who was, after all, supposed to be on his side—notice.
Officers’ whistles screeched and wailed, both among the Sibians and in his own regiment. At the same time, the Algarvian behemoths lumbered forward, the heavy stick blazing Unkerlanter after Unkerlanter, the egg-tossers making the enemy burrow for his life instead of fighting back. “Let’s go!” Major Spinello shouted. “One more good push and we’re at the Wolter. That’s where we want to be. That’s where we have to be, if we’ve ever going to go any farther. Mezentio!” As usual, the battalion commander was the first man out of his whole, the first man rushing toward the enemy.
“Mezentio!” Trasone shouted. Bent at the waist, he scuttled forward, too, dashing from one pile of rubble to the next, blazing any Unkerlanters he ran past in case they were playing dead and would rise up to blaze his countrymen if they got the chance. He knew the men of his regiment would go forward, too. They always had. He trusted them with his life, and they trusted him with theirs.
He wasn’t so sure about the Sibians. They were foreigners, after all, so what could you expect from them? The Algarvians had licked them, too, which automatically made them suspect in his eyes. They shouted something in their own language instead of “Mezentio!” or “Algarve!” That would get some of them blazed by their allies if they weren’t careful or lucky. But everything Folvo had said about them looked to be true. They went forward just as fast and just as hard as the Algarvians on their left. And their companies and battalions, unlike Trasone’s, were at full strength, which gave their attack extra weight.
“There it is!” Trasone said. He didn’t need Folvo’s contraption to see the Wolter up ahead now. There was the river, and there were the piers sticking out into it at which boats coming from the far side unloaded Unkerlanter reinforcements. If he and his comrades—or even the Sibians fighting alongside them—could take those piers and hold them or burn them, how would Swemmel’s soldiers bring new men up into Sulingen?
But it wouldn’t be easy. He didn’t take long to discover that. Advancing over the ground on which the Unkerlanters had attacked was easy. Past that ground, though, they had their own field works, starting in the mean little workmen’s hovels in front of the great ironworks and extending back line after line, all the way to the river. Unkerlanter soldiers popped up out of cellars to blaze at the Algarvians, then disappeared again. Even more than Mezentio’s men, they lived like moles, tunneling from one hut to the next and only showing themselves above ground to blaze or to charge.
Major Spinello’s whistle squealed. “Come on, boys! Reach out and grab it, the way you’d grab a pretty Kaunian girl’s tits!”
Again, the Algarvians and Sibians went forward in a desperate push toward the riverbank. But the Unkerlanters were desperate, too. They funneled more and more men into the fight. For all Trasone knew, they had tunnels leading all the way back to the ironworks and the granary, strongpoints Mezentio’s men had yet to clear. The Algarvian advance stalled.
Trasone glanced toward the sky. Seen through shifting plumes of smoke, the sun had slid a long way down toward the western horizon. It was setting earlier now than it had not so long before. The start of fall couldn’t be more than a few days away. And after fall came winter. The thought of another winter in southern Unkerlant chilled Trasone to the marrow.
“We’d better win now, then,” he muttered, and crawled a few feet farther forward, into the crater a bursting egg had left.
A beam started a fire in the pile of rubble he’d just vacated—the beam from a heavy stick. It had come from up ahead. Somewhere up there, an Unkerlanter behemoth prowled. One of the Algarvian beasts had already gone down, blazed in the vulnerable belly by an Unkerlanter who came out of a hole below it and then ducked down again.
Dragons dove flaming. They were Unkerlanter beasts. Screams rang out among the Sibians. Trasone didn’t blame them. No troops had an easy time facing dragons. The sun set. Night fell. The Algarvians huddled in the ruins of Sulingen, only a couple of furlongs, maybe only one, from the Wolter. “We’ll get ’em tomorrow!” Spinello called cheerfully.
In his gullyside headquarters, Marshal Rathar turned to General Vatran. “Can we hold them?” the marshal asked anxiously.
“We have to hold them,” Vatran answered. “If we don’t hold the buggers, we don’t hold Sulingen. And if we don’t hold Sulingen . . .”
“We get boiled alive, and so does the kingdom,” Rathar said. Vatran’s grunt might have been laughter. The only trouble was, Rathar wasn’t joking. The Algarvians had been advancing through Sulingen street, by street—slowly, but with grim persistence. Unkerlant had few streets left to lose.
Eggs burst not far from the mouth of the cavern in which Rathar and Vatran made their headquarters. The Unkerlanters moved soldiers up from the river through the gullies piercing Sulingen, and the Algarvians knew it. Their egg-tossers and dragons kept pounding away at those gullies. They took a horrible toll, but it would have been worse had Swemmel’s men gone forward any other way.
“If we lose those piers, we’re ruined,” Vatran said. “What have we got there to keep the redheads from reaching the river?”
“One behemoth and a couple of battalions, or whatever’s left of them by now,” Vatran told him. The general scowled at the map. “There are a lot more Algarvians in that part of town right now.”
“Our men have to hold anyway,” Rathar said. “We’ve got three good brigades waiting on the southern bank of the Wolter. They can’t get over the river till nightfall. If they try, the Algarvian dragons will have a field day. So we have to hang on to that landing area no matter what. Who’s in command there?”
“Powers above only know,” Vatran answered. “Whoever’s seniormost and hasn’t taken a beam through the brisket.”
“Aye, no doubt you’re right about that,” Rathar said. He turned his head and raised his voice to a shout: “Crystallomancer!”
“How may I serve you, lord Marshal?” asked one of the military mages in charge of keeping the cave in touch with the battle raging all through Sulingen.
Rather pointed to the map. “Get me the senior officer in this sector. I don’t know
who he’ll be. I only hope his crystallomancer’s still breathing.”
The mage murmured over his glassy sphere. Moments later, an image formed in it: that of another crystallomancer, huddled in the ruins of what had been an ironworker’s hut. When Rathar’s crystallomancer told him what the marshal required, he nodded and said, “Wait.” He crawled off. A moment later, he came back with a soldier even grimier than he was. “Here is Major Melot.”
“Major, you are to hold the Algarvians away from the piers until nightfall, come what may,” Rathar said.
“Lord Marshal, you don’t know what you’re asking,” Melot said. “I’m down to about my last hundred men here. My only behemoth has a broken leg. And it looks like every Algarvian in the world is out there.”
“Hold,” Rathar repeated, his voice deadly cold. “Blaze the behemoth and use the carcass for a strongpoint. Rally your men around it. If you don’t hold off the redheads till the sun goes down, I’ll have you blazed first thing tomorrow morning. Have you got that?”
“Aye, lord Marshal.” Melot shrugged. “We’ll do what we can, sir. That’s all we can do.” Raising one shaggy eyebrow, he stared at Rathar. “The way things are, I’m not much afraid of you blazing me. The Algarvians’ll take care of it for you, never fear.”
A moment later, the crystal flared light for a moment. The images of the embattled major and his mage faded. Rathar’s crystallomancer said, “They’ve broken the link, sir.”
“That fellow is insubordinate,” Vatran grumbled.
“He’s on the spot,” Rathar said mildly. “He’ll do what I told him to do, or he’ll die trying.” He made a fist and pounded it down on his knee. “I don’t mind if he dies trying, but he has to do it. If he doesn’t, they cut Sulingen in half. How long till sunset?”
He couldn’t tell by looking: shadow already shrouded the far wall of the gully. Vatran spoke in reassuring tones: “Only a couple of more hours, lord Marshal. Let’s get some food in you first. What do you say to that?”
“All right.” Rathar realized how empty he felt. He would have made sure his army’s behemoths were well fed, but didn’t bother giving himself the same care.
Vatran nodded, as if to say he knew as much. “Hey, Ysolt!” he shouted. “Bring the marshal a big bowl of whatever’s in the pot, and a mug of spirits to go with it.”
“I’ll do that,” the cook said, and she did. She handed Rathar a bowl of buckwheat groats and onions, with bits of meat floating in it.
He dug in, pausing now and again to swig from the mug of spirits. “Good,” he said with his mouth full, and then pointed at the bowl. “What’s the meat?”
“Unicorn, lord Marshal,” Ysolt answered. She was nearing middle age, wide in the shoulder and wider in the hips, her face always red from the cookfires she tended. “One of the ones the Algarvians killed out in the gully. Seemed a stinking shame to let the flesh go to waste.”
“Unicorn,” Rathar echoed. He wasn’t sure he’d ever eaten it before. He’d eaten horse, but this was less gluey on the tongue, more flavorful. “Not bad. Can you fill up the bowl again?”
“Why not?” The cook took it from him and went back to the fire, her big haunches rolling as she walked. Vatran eyed her with appreciation. Rathar didn’t think the general was sleeping with her, but he wasn’t sure. The past few days, nobody in this hole in the ground had been sleeping much.
After a while, darkness did fall. Vatran said, “Well, we haven’t heard that the piers are lost, anyhow.”
“Would we?” Rathar asked. “If everyone over there is dead, nobody’d be left to tell us everything had fallen apart.” He raised his voice once more. “Crystallomancer! Get me Major Melot again.”
The mage cast his spell. After what seemed a very long time, someone’s face appeared in the crystal. Whose? Too dark to tell. “Report your situation,” Rathar said, wondering if he was taking with an Algarvian who’d overrun the Unkerlanter defenders.
“We’re still here, sir.” The fellow sounded like an Unkerlanter, anyhow.
“Where’s Major Melot?” Rathar rapped out.
“Dead,” the Unkerlanter soldier answered. “There’s maybe fifty of us left—but Mezentio’s men have settled down for the night. We gave ’em all they wanted and then some. Plenty of those whoresons down for good, too, you bet.”
Maybe he didn’t know to whom he was speaking. Maybe he was too worn to care. Rathar remembered fights like that, back in the Twinkings War. If he had to, he’d grab a stick and go into battle himself once more—that was how vital he reckoned holding Sulingen to be. “Good enough, soldier,” he said gruffly, and nodded to the crystallomancer, who dissolved the link. Rathar turned to Vatran. “What do you think?”
“If we don’t send those brigades across, lord Marshal, we may as well pack it in,” Vatran answered. “Even if the redheads have a trap waiting to close on ’em, we’ve got to try it. Without ’em, the Algarvians have it all their own way in Sulingen. You’ll do what you’ll do—you’re the marshal. But that’s how it looks to me.”
“And to me,” Rathar said. He tapped the crystallomancer on the shoulder. “Get me Major General Canel, on the southern bank of the Wolter.” A couple of minutes later, Canel’s image appeared in the crystal. The Unkerlanter officer had a bloody bandage wrapped loosely around his head. “Redheads come calling?” Rathar asked.
“It’s only a scratch,” Canel answered. “They didn’t hit more than a couple of boats, either, lord Marshal. I can move if you want me to.”
“Stout fellow,” Rathar said. “I want you to, all right. First thing you do is, you throw the Algarvians back from the pier. Then reinforce the ironworks and the granary, and then the hill east of the ironworks.”
Canel nodded, which made the bandage flop down over his left eye. “Never a dull moment in these parts, is there? Cursed Algarvians.”
“If you wanted a nice, easy job, you should have chosen something quiet and safe—tiger-taming, maybe,” Rathar said. Canel grinned at him. Lantern light shone from the major general’s teeth. Rathar went on, “Hit ’em hard.” He didn’t think Canel’s brigades would turn the tide by themselves. He expected them to get chewed up, in fact. Too many of Mezentio’s men were in Sulingen for anything else to be likely. But Canel led good troops. They’d do some chewing of their own, too.
Rathar could tell just when the Unkerlanters crossed from the southern bank of the Wolter into Sulingen. The din of battle, which had quieted after sunset, picked up again. Vatran chuckled. “We’ll shake the Algarvians out of their feather beds, by the powers above.”
“Well, maybe we will. Here’s hoping, anyhow.” Rathar yawned. “I’m going back to my own feather bed now.” Vatran laughed at that. Like everyone else in the gullyside headquarters, Rathar slept on a cot in a tiny chamber scraped from the dirt and shored up with boards to keep the earthen roof from falling in if an Algarvian egg burst right overhead. A curtain over the entrance was the only sign of his exalted rank; not even Vatran had one. As he headed off to the chamber, Rathar looked back over his shoulder and added, “Wake me the instant you need me. Don’t be shy.”
He said that whenever he went to bed. As always, Vatran nodded. “Aye, lord Marshal.” About a third of the time, Rathar got to sleep as long as he wanted; he was lucky in not needing a lot of sleep. A marshal who had to have eight hours every night would have been useless in wartime.
Sure enough, someone shook him in the middle of the night. He came awake at once, as he always did, and tried to gauge the hour by the noise outside the curtain. It was pretty quiet out there. “What’s toward?” he asked.
Usually, that would get him a crisp explanation from Vatran or from one of the junior officers in the cave. Tonight, he was answered by—a giggle? Whoever was there sat down on the cot beside him. “You threw them back, lord Marshal,” a low, throaty voice said. “Now we celebrate.”
“Ysolt?” Rathar asked. He got another giggle by way of reply. He reached out—and touched smooth, ba
re flesh. His ears heated. “Powers above, Ysolt, I’m a married man!”
“If your wife was here, she’d take care of this,” the cook answered. “But she’s not, so I’ll do it for her.”
Before he could say another word—and whatever he said couldn’t be very loud, for he didn’t want anyone outside to find out what was going on in here—Ysolt pushed him over onto his back. She hiked up his tunic, yanked down his drawers, and took hold of him. His ears weren’t what heated then.
Ysolt chuckled. “You see, lord Marshal? You’re as ready as the army was tonight.” She straddled him and impaled herself. Almost of their own accord, his arms came up and folded around her back. In the darkness, her mouth found his.
And then the only thing he wondered was whether the cot would collapse under the strain of two good-sized people energetically making love. But it proved sturdier than he’d expected, and held. Ysolt gasped and quivered. A moment later, Rathar groaned.
She kissed him on the cheek, then slid off him. A brief rustle was her putting on the tunic she’d shed before waking him. “Conqueror,” she whispered, and slipped out of the tiny chamber. Feeling more conquered than anything else, Rathar set his clothes to rights. Had they not been disarranged, he might have thought he’d been dreaming. A moment later, he was asleep again.
“Do you think we got rid of those cursed Forthwegians by ourselves?” Garivald asked Munderic. He didn’t think so himself, not for a minute. Those bearded demons had given Munderic’s band of irregulars everything they wanted and then some.
Munderic said, “I can’t tell you one way or the other. All I can tell you is, nobody’s seen the buggers anywhere around for the past week or so. They’re like a squall, is what they are. They blew in, they tore things up, and now they’ve blown out again.” He spat. “I’m cursed if I’m going to tell you I miss ’em, either.”
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