And I know I won’t get killed in the next month, too, he thought. Had he been about to die, his leg would have told him of it. Ican be as reckless as I want on the field. The Algarvians can’t touch me. For a month, I’ve got a charmed life.
But was that really true? What would happen if, say, he picked up a stick right now and blazed out his own brains? He’d be dead, and his leg wouldn’t have warned him about it.
He shook his head to clear it. Thinking about such things was as likely to make that head ache as drinking too deep from a jar of spirits. He laughed under his breath. It wasn’t nearly so much fun, either.
His company occupied the rest of the village, or what was left of it. The Algarvians had made a stand here a few days before, and most of the huts- actually, the houses were a good deal finer than those in peasant villages in Unkerlant-had either burned or gone up in bursts of sorcerous energy in the nasty process of forcing them out. The ones who hadn’t got out still lay here and there; no one had bothered burying the corpses. Only the chilly weather kept the stink from being worse than it was.
Some of the men who couldn’t fit into the handful of houses still boasting walls and roofs kept dry in tents plundered from the redheads. The rest made do with their greatcoats and stout felt boots. The Unkerlanter army did issue those to everyone, even if Swemmel’s men might not get tents or, for that matter, much in the way of food.
But, regardless of whether Swemmel’s quartermasters got supplies to them, the soldiers had no trouble keeping themselves fed. Brass pots bubbled over fires the rain made smoky but couldn’t douse. Even the men who had only greatcoats seemed contented enough. One thing Unkerlanters knew was how to take care of themselves in the cold and rain.
Once upon a time, Leudast had assumed everybody all over the world knew such things. The trouble the redheads had in the snow the first winter of the war taught him otherwise. So did the fancy food and shelters he and his comrades kept taking from dead Algarvians. How could anyone who needed so much help to fight a war in bad weather seriously expect to win it?
Trying without much luck not to limp on his injured leg, Leudast went over to one of the stewpots and took out his mess tin. A cook with the hood to his greatcoat protecting his face ladled the tin full. “There you go, sir,” he said. His voice was curiously neutral; Leudast hadn’t been with the company long enough to have created much of an impression for good or ill.
“Thanks,” he said now, and dug in with a tin spoon. The stew was hot, which felt good. It had barley and oats and some rather nasty vegetables-the Yaninans ate things Unkerlanters didn’t-and bits of meat. Prodding one of those with his spoon, Leudast asked, “Do I want to know what this is?”
“Could be cursed near anything, sir,” the cook answered. “There’s chunks of two, three different beasts in the pots these days: behemoth and horse and unicorn, maybe even some real pork, too, but I’m not sure about that.”
“I won’t worry about it,” Leudast said. “Whatever it is, it’ll keep me going-and it doesn’t taste too bad.” The cook beamed when he added that.
Eggs started bursting, not very far to the east. As always, the Algarvians fought hard over every inch of ground they yielded. They counterattacked whenever they saw the chance. It was as if they were saying to the Unkerlanters, If you think you can beat us, you ‘re going to have to pay the price.
The ground shook under Leudast’s feet. For a moment, he thought the eggs accounted for that, but then somebody said, “More behemoths coming in.
He looked back toward the west, toward Unkerlant. Sure enough, the big, burly beasts were plenty to make the ground tremble. “What’s it like up ahead?” one of the men on the lead behemoth called as the beasts squelched forward.
“What do you think it’s going to be like?” Leudast answered. “There are redheads up there, and they won’t kiss you when they see you.”
“We’ll kiss them, by the powers above.” The fellow riding the behemoth leaned over to pat the heavy stick mounted on the beast’s armored back. “We’ll kiss them with this. We’ll kiss anybody who gets in our way, you bet we will.”
“Good. They deserve it.” Leudast paused, then asked, “Have you had any trouble from the Yaninans?”
“Not much. They’d be sorry if they gave us any, I’ll tell you that,” the man on the behemoth said. “Some of ‘em like us better than Mezentio’s whoresons, and that’s fine. Some of ‘em like the Algarvians better, I expect, but they haven’t had the nerve to show it, and they’d better not. The army is on our side.”
Leudast snorted. “Aye, I’ve heard the same thing. And it’ll do us just as much good as it ever did the Algarvians.”
“It can soak up some casualties,” the behemoth crewman said. “Better the Yaninans than us.”
“You’re right about that. We’ve paid our share and then some,” Leudast said. The fellow on the behemoth nodded and waved. The beast trudged forward. Its big feet came out of the mud, one after another, with heavy squelching sounds despite the snowshoes that spread its weight. The whole long column of behemoths followed. By the time they all went through, the road was a river of ooze stinking of behemoth dung.
One of Leudast’s men said, “There’ll be another big fight coming up pretty soon. They don’t move behemoths forward unless they mean it.”
“You’re probably right,” Leudast answered. “Only thing we can do about it is try and whip the redheads and not get hurt too bad ourselves.”
“That would be good.” The soldier didn’t sound as if he thought it were very likely to happen, though. Had Leudast been the stuffy sort of officer, he would have given the man a hard time and lectured him about efficiency. Since he’d never been able to stand that kind of officer before getting promoted himself, he kept his mouth shut.
Before long, the regimental commander-himself only a captain-came into the village with orders: “We go forward this afternoon.”
“Aye, sir.” Leudast nodded. “I thought as much when the behemoths came through earlier in the day.”
“You’re no fool, are you?” the captain said-his name was Drogden.
“There’s plenty who’d tell you otherwise, sir,” Leudast said, and got a laugh from Drogden before going on, “My guess is, I’ve just seen a lot of war.”
“Our whole kingdom has seen a lot of war, and my guess is that we’ve got a good deal more to see yet before the redheads are licked,”CaptainDrogden said.
“My guess is, that’s a pretty good guess,” Leudast said.
Drogden nodded. He was an older man, close to forty, weather-beaten enough to show he’d seen a lot of war, too. Maybe he was a jumped-up sergeant like Leudast, or maybe he’d spent a long, long time as a lieutenant. “Aye, the Algarvians have no quit in ‘em,” he said. “That’s plain enough. But still and all, things’ll be different once we finally go and break into Algarve.”
His voice held an odd anticipation. “Different how, sir?” Leudast asked.
“I’ll tell you how,” the regimental commander said. “We get to pay those whoresons back for everything they did to Unkerlant when their peckers were up, that’s how. We can burn their farms pretty cursed soon. We can wreck their villages. Our mages can tear up their ley line. And, speaking of peckers up, we can throw their women down on the ground and do what we want with them.”
Leudast grunted. He knew the Algarvians had done such things in the Unkerlanter territory they’d overrun. “Powers above, I’ve never even seen a redheaded woman before,” he said.
“Neither have I. But if we don’t get blazed, I expect we’re going to. It should be fun.” With a leer, Drogden slapped him on the back. “Spread the word through your company. It’ll give the men something extra to fight for.”
Most of his troopers, Leudast discovered, had already had that thought for themselves. Some looked forward to it. But one man said, “Far as I’m concerned, we should just kill all the Algarvians, the men and the women both. Then we won’t have to worry abou
t ‘em ever again.” Leudast couldn’t deny that that notion held more than a little appeal for him, too.
When the attack went in that afternoon, the Unkerlanters pushed forward for a couple of miles without much trouble. Then they came to the Skamandros River, which the rain had made too wide and swift to ford, and discovered that the redheads had wrecked all the bridges over it. They also discovered that the Algarvians had a demon of a lot of well-concealed egg-tossers on the far bank. “What now?” Leudast asked when he sawCaptainDrogden again.
“Now we wait for the artificers to make some new bridges, or else for our dragons and egg-tossers to smash up the redheads and give us some kind of chance to cross,” Drogden answered. “Don’t know what else we can do.”
“It’s not so bad, sir,” Leudast said. “We’re moving forward, and that counts for more than anything else.”
Sidroc hadn’t liked Unkerlanters, and they weren’t that much different from Forthwegians. Now that the Algarvian army was forced back into Yanina, and Plegmund’s Brigade with it, he discovered that he really didn’t like Yaninans.
“Where’s your food?” he demanded of a skinny villager with cold, dark eyes and a big gray mustache. He said it in Forthwegian, and then in Algarvian. The Yaninan looked back at him, shrugged, and spread his hands as if to say he didn’t understand.
“Blaze the son of a whore,” Ceorl suggested. “That’ll teach him.”
“It won’t do us any good, though,” Sidroc said. “Here, watch me be as efficient as an Unkerlanter. Go inside the house there and bring out this bastard’s wife. Don’t get rough with her or anything, but bring her.”
Ceorl laughed. “I’ll do it. I think I know what you’ve got in mind.”
In he went. The Yaninan villager looked alarmed. He looked a lot more alarmed when the woman cried out. But when he took a step toward the house, Sidroc aimed his stick at the fellow’s face. “Don’t even think about it, pal,” he said. Either the words or the gesture got through; the Yaninan froze, though his mouth twisted in a snarl of hate.
Out came Ceorl, manhandling a graying woman about half his size. Sidroc knew no Yaninan, but he was sure she was calling Ceorl everything she could. Ceorl realized that, too. “I hope the old shitter stays clammed up,” he said. “I’d enjoy doing in this bitch.”
“We’ll find out in a minute.” Sidroc switched back to Algarvian: “One more time, pal. Where is the food? She’ll be sorry if you keep quiet.”
Looking daggers at him, the Yaninan answered in pretty good Algarvian of his own: “Dig under the water barrel.” He looked as if he wanted to say a good deal more than that, but he bit it back. That was one of the wiser things he’d ever done.
“No.” Sidroc gestured. “You dig, pal. And you had better come up with some good stuff, too.”
He went into the house with the Yaninan, and watched the skinny old man dig up the dirt floor. What came out was plenty to satisfy him: hams and sausages, all securely wrapped to keep them safe while they were out of sight. At his delighted exclamation, Ceorl came in to see, too. “Well, all right,” the ruffian said enthusiastically. “I guess we let the old whore live.”
“You see?” Sidroc said to the Yaninan. “You just saved your wife.”
“But the two of you, this is too much for you,” the man with the gray mustache said.
“We’ve got friends.” Sidroc grabbed a long string of sausages. “Come on, Ceorl. Lend a hand.”
Between them, they did a good job of plundering the peasants’ larder. When they showed their comrades what they’d got, they were the heroes of the moment. “Haven’t eaten this well since we got out of Forthweg,”SergeantWerferth said. He was exaggerating, but not by a great deal.
Sudaku, the blond from the Phalanx of Valmiera who’d broken out of the Mandelsloh pocket with the men of Plegmund’s Brigade, nodded. “Good food,” he said in Algarvian. He was eating enough for two himself.
“If we had more spirits, we’d have more spirits,” Ceorl said, and laughed loudly at his own wit. Sidroc chuckled, too. He wasn’t going to let a fellow Forthwegian down, not even a son of a whore like Ceorl.
Werferth said, “Maybe you ought to go shake down that Yaninan of yours again. If he hid the food under the water barrel, he’s probably got a distillery on the roof.”
“I would not be a bit surprised,” Sidroc said-in Algarvian, so the men who weren’t Forthwegians but had attached themselves to the now motley unit could understand. He nodded to Ceorl. “What do you say we go have a look?”
“Probably find that ugly bastard and his uglier woman drunk and screwing their brains out.” Ceorl started to heave himself to his feet.
Before he got upright, eggs started landing not far away. He threw himself flat. So did Sidroc. So did all the men who’d been sharing the booty they’d found. Veterans knew better than to stay on their feet, or even sitting, when the Unkerlanters started getting frisky.
More of the eggs landed west of the Yaninan village than square on it. That cheered Sidroc, but not for long. A couple of minutes later, Algarvians- and a few Forthwegians, and a couple of theValmieranKaunians who’d taken service withKingMezentio -came running back from their forward positions. In the din, he needed a little while to catch what they were shouting. When he did, he wished he hadn’t; it was, “Behemoths! Unkerlanter behemoths!”
SergeantWerferthstuck his head up in the hope of spotting an Algarvian officer-or perhaps in the hope of not spotting one. When he didn’t, he spoke in Algarvian: “I am in charge here. We are going to get over that river east of the village as quick as we can. We have no hope of fighting their behemoths without some of our own.”
That was a bitter truth the men of Plegmund’s Brigade and the Algarvians had learned in too many encounters throughout eastern Unkerlant. Sidroc said, “Once we’re over the bridge”-he hoped there was a bridge; he’d swum one stream to escape Swemmel’s soldiers, and didn’t want to have to try it again-”we’d better wreck it, to keep the enemy from getting a foothold on the other side.”
“Sounds good to me,” Ceorl said. SergeantWerferth only shrugged. He’d always paid more attention to the proper rules of soldiering and less to what would save his own neck than made Sidroc comfortable.
But he was the one who’d ordered the retreat. He didn’t expect his men to do the impossible; too many of them had died trying. Sidroc’s boots squelched through mud. That would slow the behemoths down, too, even if it wouldn’t slow them down so much as he would have liked.
“Here! Over here!” That was an Algarvian voice, and one full of the authority the redheads effortlessly assumed. “Here is the crossing of the Skamandros. We shall pass over it, hold it open as long as we can, and then destroy it to keep the Unkerlanters from following.”
“There, you see?” Sidroc said cheerfully. “I ought to be an officer.”
“You ought to get a good kick in the slats.” Ceorl also sounded cheerful, as if he would have enjoyed delivering the kick. All things considered, he probably would have.
The bridge, when they reached it, was wooden and narrow: a miserable, rickety piece of work, like a lot of the things Sidroc had seen in Yanina. “Behemoths would have a demon of a time crossing on this,” he said as he started across it himself.
“Don’t want footsoldiers crossing, either,” Werferth said. “Swemmel’s whoresons are downright nasty when it comes to grabbing bridgeheads.” He was, without a doubt, right about that. Sidroc sighed with relief when he stepped into the mud on the far bank. The Unkerlanters would be a while crossing, anyhow.
A couple of Algarvian mages stood on the eastern bank of the Skamandros. One said to the other, “We’ll give it a few minutes more and then bring down the bridge. We don’t want to let the Unkerlanters get close enough to try a counterspell and stop us.”
“That’s the truth,” the other wizard said. “I’ve still got hopes of living to get old and gray and crotchety. A few behemoths in the wrong place don’t do those plans any goo
d.”
They both laughed. Algarvians took pride in absurdity. Sidroc didn’t. He was just glad he’d got over the river before the redheads sorcerously smashed the bridge.
“To me!” called the Algarvian officer who’d known where the crossing was. “There’s a village ahead. We can shelter in it.”
“Who knows?” Sidroc said. “Maybe the stinking Yaninans will have more hams buried under the water barrel. Here’s hoping.” Marching made him weary, as it always did, but he wasn’t hungry. That in itself made a pleasant novelty.
He hadn’t gone far before a rending crash behind him announced the demise of the bridge. If Swemmel’s sorcerers had tried a counterspell, it hadn’t worked. Sergeant Werferth said, “Keep moving, boys. The sooner we get to this village, wherever it is, the happier we’ll be.”
The village wasn’t far ahead. Yapping dogs announced its presence before the road came out from among a grove of fruit trees and let Sidroc see it. He’d had the same thing happen more than once back in Unkerlant.
“Keep moving,” the Algarvian officer commanded, leading from the front as his kind usually did. “We’re going to dig in here. We’re going to stop the Unkerlanters in their tracks.” As his kind usually did, he sounded utterly certain of that. What difference did it make that powers-above-only-knew-how-many similar declarations had been wrong before?
Sidroc knew what difference it made. “We’d cursed well better stop Swemmel’s bastards,” he said. “We haven’t got a lot of room left to play around with.” He scowled at the village ahead, and at the dogs trying to nerve themselves for a run at the soldiers tramping up the road towards them.
“We’ve got to keep trying, no matter what,”SergeantWerferth said. “If we don’t, we’re cooked, on account of-” He suddenly stopped talking. He suddenly stopped walking, too, crumpling down to the roadway as if he were a marionette with cut strings. He twitched a couple of times and lay still.
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