Sidroc stared that way in no small alarm himself, but only for an instant. The next thing he did was look around for a hole into which he might dive. He wasn’t thrilled with real soldiering, but he’d learned what mattered.
“They’re ours,” Werferth said in some relief.
Ceorl challenged him: “How do you know?” He might not want to brawl with the sergeant, but he didn’t mind giving him a hard time.
But Werferth had an answer for him: “Because they’re turning away from us instead of dropping eggs on our heads.”
Thin and faint in the distance, several eggs burst, one after another. Sidroc laughed. “No, they’re dropping ‘em on the Unkerlanters instead. Those bastards deserve it. I hope they all get smashed to bits.”
“They won’t.” Sergeant Werferth spoke with gloomy certainty. “And it’ll be up to the likes of us to stop the ones who’re left. You can count on that, too.” Now he pointed south. “Wherever those eggs are bursting, that’s where Swemmel’s men are at. If we can hear the eggs, they aren’t that far away. You want to go home to mother in one piece, stay awake.”
Going home to mother was not a choice Sidroc had. An Algarvian egg had taken care of that, back when the redheads overran Gromheort. And here he was, doing his best to get the Algarvians out of the soup. He shook his head as he trudged along. He’d watched Mezentio’s men ever since they entered his kingdom. They were strong. They had style. They’d smashed Forthweg into the dust. By joining them, didn’t he make himself strong and stylish?
What he’d made himself so far was cold and nervous. He trudged up to the top of a low rise and got the chance to do some pointing himself. “Isn’t that a village up ahead, here on this side of the stream?”
“That is a village.” An Algarvian officer behind him had heard his question, and chose to answer it. He spoke his own language, expecting Sidroc to understand. “The name of the village is Presseck. The stream is also the Presseck. There is a bridge over the Presseck in the village. We will occupy the village. We will hold the bridge. We will keep the Unkerlanters from crossing it.”
“Aye, sir,” Sidroc said. The redheads liked polite soldiers. They had plenty of ways to make you sorry if you weren’t polite, too. Sidroc had learned that back in his first training camp, outside of Eoforwic.
A few Unkerlanter peasants-old men and boys-came out of their huts to gape at the troopers from Plegmund’s Brigade. Their women stayed in hiding, or maybe they’d run away. Presseck looked to be as miserable a place as any other Unkerlanter village Sidroc had seen. The Presseck, however, was more nearly a river than a stream, and the bridge that spanned it a solid stone structure.
Sergeant Werferth pointed to that bridge. “You see why we may have to hold this place, boys. The Unkerlanters could put behemoths over it easy as you please, and we wouldn’t have a whole lot of fun if they did.”
Along with his comrades-except for the two squads the Algarvian officers ordered across to the south side of the Presseck-Sidroc ransacked the village. The women
Mist rose from the stream as the sun set and day cooled toward evening. It spread through the village, turning the shacks into vague ghosts of themselves.
“Stay alert,” Werferth told his squad. “Anybody the Unkerlanters kill, he’ll answer to me.” The troopers had to work that one through before they chuckled or snorted.
Sidroc drew sentry duty just before dawn. He paced the narrow, filthy streets of Presseck, wishing he could see farther through the fog. Once he almost blazed one of his own countrymen who’d taken on too much in the way of spirits and was looking for a place to heave.
It got lighter, little by little, without clearing much. Sidroc was beginning to think about breakfast and maybe even a little sleep when, from the south, he heard heavy footfalls and the jingle of chainmail. “Behemoths!” he exclaimed, and ran toward the bridge. He couldn’t see a thing, though.
He wasn’t the only one there to try. The Algarvian officer who’d told him the name of the village stood staring across the Presseck. The redhead couldn’t see anything, either. “Whose beasts are those?” he called urgently to the men on the south side of the stream. When they didn’t answer fast enough to suit him, he ran across the bridge to see for himself. His boots clattered on the stone.
He hadn’t got more than halfway across when a glad cry rang out: “They’re ours, sir.” The Algarvian kept running. A moment later, he too shouted happily.
Staring through the fog, Sidroc saw several great shapes moving toward him on the bridge. Sure enough, the lead behemoth wore Algarvian-style chainmail and was draped in banners of green, red, and white. So was the second. The third. .
With sunrise, the breeze picked up. The mist swirled and billowed. When Sidroc got a good look at the third behemoth, he froze for a moment in horror worse than any he’d ever imagined. Then he shouted, as loud as he could: “It’s a trick! They’re Unkerlanters!”
He was right. It did him no good whatever. By then, the first behemoth, which wore captured armor and false colors, had almost reached his end of the bridge. Its crew-who, he saw, had even dyed their hair to make the imposture better-started tossing eggs into Presseck. Those bursts woke men Sidroc’s shout hadn’t: woke them, too often, to terror and torment.
Sidroc blazed at the Unkerlanters. But they, like their behemoths, were well armored. The beast thundered forward, onto the north bank of the Presseck. Then the one behind it, also disguised, gained the northern bank. After them came a long column of behemoths honestly Unkerlanter. A heavy stick started a fire in one of the huts in Presseck.
The men of Plegmund’s Brigade fought the Unkerlanters as hard as they could. They slew a good many of the men aboard the behemoths, and even a couple of the massive animals themselves. But they had no hope of holding the bridge or driving the foe back over the Presseck. Along with his comrades, Sidroc battled on till hope, and a good many of the men, died. And at the last, he and the rest of the troopers still alive did what they had to do: they fled.
Cornelu patted his leviathan: not a command, a gesture of affection. “Do you see how lucky we are?” he said to the beast. “We get to go north for the winter.”
Back in the lost and distant days of peacetime, many people from Lagoas and Kuusamo-aye, and from Sibiu, too-had gone on winter holiday to the subtropic beaches of northern Jelgava, to lie on the sand burdened by a minimum of clothing if by any at all and to drink the citrus-flavored wines for which the kingdom was famous. Love affairs in Jelgava had filled the pages of trashy romances. But if anyone went on holiday there these days, it was Algarvian soldiers recuperating from the dreadful cold of Unkerlant.
As far as the leviathan was concerned, cold wasn’t dreadful. It preferred the waters of the Narrow Sea to those off the coast of Jelgava. Why not? Plenty of blubber kept it warm. And the Narrow Sea swarmed with fish and squid. Pickings were thinner in these parts.
But the leviathan didn’t go hungry here. When a fat tunny swam past, it gave chase and ran the fish down. It was a big tunny; the leviathan had to make two bites of it. The water turned red. That might draw sharks, but they would be sorry if they came.
At Cornelu’s signal, the leviathan stood on its tail so he could see farther. Two mountains were visible to his right, one to his left. One of the mountains to his right had a notch in its slope. He nodded and signaled that the leviathan might relax back into the water.
“We are where we’re supposed to be,” he said, urging his mount closer to the shore. Before long, he could hear waves slapping the beach.
He halted the leviathan at that point, not wanting to get so close as to risk stranding it. He hadn’t come all the way to the far north; with luck, the beach would be deserted-except for the man he was supposed to pick up.
After inflating a small rubber raft, he told the leviathan, “Stay,” and used the taps on the animal’s smooth, slick hide that turned the order into something it could grasp. Such a command wouldn’t hold it there indefinitely, but he didn’t intend to be gone long. Then he struck out for the shore.
At first, he thought the beach altogether empty. That wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. He wondered if something had gone wrong. If the Algarvians had nabbed the man he was supposed to get, they were
