“Go on.” Leudast pointed back toward the east. Lots of scrawny little Yaninans were shambling off into captivity. They held their hands high to keep King Swemmel’s advancing soldiers from blazing them.
Leudast knew a certain amount of sympathy for the Yaninan. He hadn’t wanted to go into the Unkerlanter army, either. When the impressers grabbed him, though, he’d had no choice. King Swemmel’s servants might not have been so gentle as just to blaze him had he tried to tell them no.
That night, he and Lieutenant Recared and half a dozen soldiers crowded into an abandoned peasant hut. Recared was jubilant. “We have them on the run, by the powers above,” he said. “They can’t hold us back. Once we broke through this morning, we sealed their fate.”
“Aye, so far, so good,” Leudast agreed, rubbing his leg. It ached; he hadn’t expected to use it so hard. He wished he could rest it come tomorrow. But he’d be marching just as hard then, and he knew it. He also didn’t want Recared making too much of what the army had accomplished. “You have to remember, these are only Yaninans. It’ll be a lot tougher when we have to deal with the redheads.”
Most of the men in the hut had seen more action than Recared. Several of them nodded. But Recared said, “Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter. Aye, the Algarvians are tough, but there aren’t enough of them to go around. If we break through these weak sisters, we can cement our positions and make the Algarvians try to bang their way out of Sulingen against us.”
Leudast didn’t like the prospect of Algarvians trying to bang their way out of anywhere, especially not if they were going to try to do it through a position he was holding. They’d already pulled off too many astounding and appalling things. Why wouldn’t they be able to manage one more?
But no sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a possible answer occurred to him. Thoughtfully, he said, “There’s already snow on the ground. Mezentio’s men don’t do so well in snow.”
He didn’t love snow himself. But if he wasn’t better in it than any Algarvian ever born, what good was he? He rolled himself in his blanket, huddled up against the rest of the Unkerlanters in the tumbledown shack, and slept, if not well, then well enough.
Recared roused the soldiers before sunup. “We go hard today,” he said. “We go as hard tomorrow. Then, with luck, the next day-we win glory for our king. This is the most efficient attack we’ve ever carried out.”
There Leudast could hardly argue with him. Most of what he ate for breakfast was what he’d stolen from Yaninans. That was efficient, too. He wiped his hands on his tunic, left the hut, and tramped east.
Till noon, or a little after, everything went as it had the day before. Scattered and stubborn regiments of Yaninans fought hard. Their countrymen went right on giving up by the hundreds, by the thousands. Then the first Algarvian dragons appeared overhead. Some of them dropped eggs on the Unkerlanters. Others attacked their footsoldiers and, wherever they could, their behemoths.
Staring at the burnt carcass of a behemoth roasted in its own chainmail, Leudast cursed. “I knew we weren’t going to have it all our own way,” he told the cloudy sky.
He waited for Algarvian footsoldiers to stiffen the Yaninans, too. But no redheads came to the rescue of King Tsavellas’ men. And there were more Unkerlanter dragons in the air than those belonging to their enemies. The Algarvian dragonfliers stung the Unkerlanter army in a few places. Without steady soldiers on the ground to back them up, they could do no more than sting.
Recared had guessed four or five days. He was young. He believed things always went just as planned. That made him overoptimistic. But, just over a week after the Unkerlanters started their push, Leudast saw men coming toward him who did not shy away as the Yaninans did. They were solid, blocky men in long tunics, men who shouted in delight when they saw him.
He folded one of them into a bear hug. “By the powers above, we’ve got the redheads in a sack!” he shouted, and tears of joy streamed down his grimy, unshaven cheeks.
“Step it up, there!” Sergeant Werferth shouted. “It’s not a game, you lugs. We don’t get to start over. Move, curse you all!”
Sidroc did some cursing of his own. He was cold and tired and hungry. He wanted to hole up somewhere with a bottle of brandy and a roast goose. He hadn’t fully realized when he joined Plegmund’s Brigade that there was no such thing as time off. When the underofficers and officers set over him told him to do something, he had to do it. He’d already seen the sorts of things that happened to men who didn’t do as they were told. He wasn’t interested in having any of those things happen to him.
He scratched. He itched, too. He itched everywhere. When he complained about it, the trooper nearest him, the ruffian named Ceorl, started to laugh. “You’re a lousy whoreson, just like the rest of us.”
He meant it literally. Sidroc needed a moment to realize that. When he did, he started cursing all over again. He’d grown up in a prosperous household in Gromheort. Lice were for filthy people, for poor people, not for the likes of him.
But he was filthy. He could hardly help being filthy. When he slept indoors at all, he slept in huts that had belonged to filthy Unkerlanter peasants. If they had lice-and they likely did-how could he help getting them? For that matter, he was poor. Nobody got rich on the pay in Plegmund’s Brigade.
“Come on!” Werferth shouted again, with profane embellishment. “Swemmel’s bastards went and gave Algarve a boot in the nuts, and now it’s up to us to pay ‘em back. And we’ll do it, too, right?”
“I’m going to pay somebody back for making me slog through this miserable, freezing country,” Sidroc growled.
Ceorl laughed again, even less pleasantly than before. “You think it’s cold now, wait a couple months. Your joint’ll freeze off when you whip it out to take a leak.”
“Powers below eat you, too.” But Sidroc made sure he spoke lightly. Ceorl was not a man to curse in earnest unless you intended to back up the words with fists or knife or stick.
An Algarvian captain swaggered along, looking altogether superior to the Forthwegians around him. Sidroc didn’t think
“Up to us to save their bacon, boys,” the sergeant said. “But it’s our bacon, too. That army in Sulingen goes up in flames, we burn with it.”
Where nothing else had, that got Sidroc’s attention. He didn’t want to die anywhere. He especially didn’t want to die here in the chilly wastes of southern Unkerlant. “I see how Swemmel’s men got to be such whoresons,” he said to Ceorl. “If I lived in this miserable place, I’d be mean, too.”
The ruffian laughed, the smoke from his breath puffing out as he did. “I’m from Forthweg, by the powers above, and I’m the meanest whoreson around. Anybody who says different, I’ll deal with him.”
“Shut up, Ceorl,” Werferth said. “You want to be a mean son of a whore, take it out on the Unkerlanters, not on my ears.”
Ceorl scowled at him. But Werferth was not only a tough customer himself, he was also a sergeant. If Ceorl tangled with him, he didn’t tangle with him alone, but also with the entire structure of Plegmund’s Brigade-and ultimately with the Algarvian army, to which the brigade was attached.
“Keep your eyes open. Ears, too,” Werferth added. “We’re liable to run into irregulars-and we’re liable to run into real Unkerlanter soldiers, to boot. Since they came swarming out at us, powers above only know where they’re all at right now.”
Sidroc’s head swiveled now to one side, now to the other. All he saw were snow-covered fields. By the way his sergeant and the Algarvian officers had warned the brigade, those fields might hold thousands of bloodthirsty Unkerlanters in white smocks, every one of them ready to spring to his feet and charge with a roar of “Urra!”
They might. Sidroc didn’t believe it, not for a minute. The fields were just fields, the bare-branched woods farther away just woods. He didn’t see any Unkerlanters anywhere. Nobody rose up out of the fields with fierce shouts of “Urra!”-or with any other shouts, for that matter. The countryside, having been fought over, was as empty and dead as it looked.
And that suited him. Like most soldiers, he was no more anxious to fight than he had to be. He’d enjoyed terrorizing peasant villages back in the Duchy-no, the Kingdom-of Grelz. That was about his speed. He would have been perfectly happy to go right on doing it. But the Unkerlanters had pissed in the stewpot of the Algarvian campaign, and so here he was, soldiering for real.
“Dragons!” someone exclaimed in alarm, pointing south.
