borrowed from Algarvian.
Another egg flew in. This one burst farther away. The crash that followed said somebody’s home would never be the same. Shrieks rose immediately thereafter. Somebody’s
“I know, Sergeant Fariulf,” Andelot answered. “But we’ve come so far so fast, we can’t sweep up everything as neatly as we want to. On the scale of the war as a whole, that tosser doesn’t mean much.”
“No, sir,” Garivald agreed. “But it’s liable to take some nasty bites out of us.” He thought for a moment. “I could probably sneak my squad through the redheads’ lines and take it out. Things are all topsy-turvy-they won’t have had the time to get proper trenches dug or anything like that.”
Andelot also studied him with a certain curiosity. “We don’t see volunteers as often as we’d like,” he remarked. “Aye, go on, Sergeant. Choose the men you’d like to have with you. I think you can do it, too.” He pointed southeastward. “Most of the redheads in these parts are falling back on that town called Gromheort. They’ll stand siege there, unless I miss my guess, and getting them out won’t come easy or cheap.” With a shrug, he went on, “Nothing but Algarve beyond, though. As I say, pick your men, Sergeant. Let’s get on with it.”
The men Garivald did pick looked imperfectly enamored of him. He understood that; he was giving them the chance to get killed. But he had an argument they couldn’t top: “I’m going along with you. If I can do it, you can cursed well do it with me.”
Behind his back, somebody said, “You’re too ugly for me to want to do it with you, Sergeant.” Garivald laughed along with the rest of the soldiers who heard. He couldn’t help himself. But he didn’t stop picking men.
Before they set out from the village, though, a couple of squadrons of dragons painted rock-gray flew over the place out of the west. “Hold up, Fariulf,” Andelot said. “Maybe they’ll do our job for us.”
“They should have done it already,” Garivald said. Even so, he wasn’t sorry to raise his hand. None of the men he’d chosen tried to talk him out of waiting. He would have been astonished if anyone had.
That one Algarvian tosser hadn’t had many eggs to fling. The distant thunder of the eggs the Unkerlanter dragons dropped brought smiles to all the men in rock-gray who heard it. “Don’t know whether they’ll flatten that egg-tosser or not,” a soldier said. “Any which way, though, the redheads are catching it.”
Only silence followed the edge of the thunder. No more eggs came down on the Forthwegian village. Andelot beamed. “That’s pretty efficient,” he said. “Maybe we’ll be able to get a decent night’s sleep here.”
Not everybody would get a decent night’s sleep. Andelot made sure he had plenty of sentries facing east. Had Garivald been the Algarvian commander, he wouldn’t have tried a night attack. But the redheads were still dedicated counter-punchers. He’d seen that. Given even the slightest opening, they would hit back, and hit back hard.
Crickets were chirping not far from the campfire by which Garivald sat when Andelot came up to him and asked, “Got a moment, Fariulf?”
“Aye, sir,” Garivald answered. You couldn’t tell a superior no. He hadn’t needed more than one scorching from a furious sergeant to learn that lesson forever. And, in truth, he hadn’t been doing anything more than marveling at hearing crickets in wintertime. There wouldn’t have been any singing down around Zossen. He scrambled to his feet. “What do you need, sir?”
“Walk with me,” Andelot said, and headed away from the fires and out into the darkness. Garivald grabbed his stick before following. Everything seemed quiet, but you never could tell. Andelot only nodded. If he’d discovered who Garivald was, he wouldn’t have wanted him armed. So Garivald reasoned, at any rate. His company commander nodded again once they were out of earshot of the rest of the Unkerlanters. “Sergeant, you showed outstanding initiative there when you volunteered to go after the Algarvian egg-tosser. I’m very pleased.”
“Oh, that.” Garivald had already forgotten about it. “Thank you, sir.”
“It’s something we need more of,” Andelot said. “It’s something the whole kingdom needs more of. It would make us more efficient. Too many of us are happy doing nothing till someone gives them an order. That’s not so good.”
“I hadn’t really thought about it, sir,” Garivald said truthfully. If you didn’t have to do something for yourself, and if nobody was making you do it for anyone else, why do it?
“Mezentio’s men, curse them, have initiative,” Andelot said. “They get themselves going without officers, without sergeants, without anything. They just see what needs doing and do it. That’s one of the things that makes them so much trouble. We should be able to match them.”
“We’re beating them anyhow,” Garivald said.
“But we should do better,” Andelot insisted. “The price we’re paying will cripple us for years. And it’s something we should do for our own pride’s sake. How does the song go?” He sang in a soft tenor:
“ ‘Do anything to beat them back.
Don’t hold off, don’t go slack.’
Something like that, anyhow.”
“Something like that,” Garivald echoed raggedly. He was glad the darkness hid his expression from Andelot. He was sure his jaw had dropped when the officer started to sing. How not, considering that Andelot was singing one of his songs?
The company commander slapped him on the back. “So, as I say, Sergeant, that’s why I’m so pleased. Anything you can do to encourage the men to show more initiative would also be very good.”
“Why don’t you just order them to …?” Garivald’s voice trailed away. He felt foolish. “Oh. Can’t very well do that, can you?”
“No.” Andelot chuckled. “Initiative imposed from above isn’t exactly the genuine article, I’m afraid.” He headed back toward the fires. So did Garivald. One of the nice things about being a sergeant was not having to go out and stand sentry in the middle of the night.
He woke the next morning before dawn, with Unkerlanter egg-tossers thunderously pounding the Algarvians farther east. Andelot’s whistle shrilled. “Forward!” he shouted. Forward the Unkerlanters went, footsoldiers, behemoths, and dragons overhead all working together most efficiently. Garivald didn’t worry, or even stop to think, that the Algarvians had devised the scheme his countrymen were using. It worked, and worked well. Nothing else mattered to him.
Artificers had laid bridges over the river that ran near Gromheort-nobody had bothered telling Garivald its name. Andelot clapped his hands when he thudded across one of those bridges. “Nothing between us and Algarve now but a few miles of flat land!” he shouted.
Garivald whooped. That there might be some large number of redheads with sticks between him and their kingdom was true, but hardly seemed to matter. If King Swemmel’s men had surged forward from the Twegen and Eoforwic to here in a few short weeks, another surge would surely take them onto Algarvian soil.
Garivald whooped again when he saw Unkerlanter behemoths on this side of the rivet. Footsoldiers were a lot safer when they had plenty of the big beasts along for company.
But then one of those behemoths crumpled as if it had charged headlong into a boulder. A couple of the crewmen riding it were thrown clear; its fall crushed the rest. “Heavy stick!” someone close to the beast yelled. “Blazed right through its armor!”
Maybe that was just an enemy emplacement nearby. Or maybe. . An alarmed shout rose: “Enemy behemoths!”
Even before the first egg from the Algarvian beasts’ tossers burst, Garivald was digging himself a hole in the muddy ground. A footsoldier without a hole was like a turtle without a shell: naked, vulnerable, and ever so likely to be crushed.
Another Unkerlanter behemoth went down, this one from a well-aimed egg. The Algarvians knew what they were doing. They generally did, worse luck. Had there been more of them. . Garivald didn’t care to think about that. Beams from ordinary, hand-held sticks announced that Algarvian footsoldiers were in the neighborhood, too.
