“I know how to read a map, too,” Vatran grunted. “If we don’t hold ‘em here, there’s nowhere else good to try and stop ‘em this side of Sulingen. But the whoresons have the bit between their teeth again, the way they did last summer. How in blazes are we supposed to make ‘em quit?”
“Keep fighting them,” Rathar answered. “Or would you sooner let them have all the cinnabar they need?”
Vatran understood that question behind the question. He glared up at Rathar, who stood a couple of inches taller. Vatran’s nose was sharp and curved as a sickle blade; had it been one in truth, he might have used it to cut the marshal down. “If you don’t care for the job I’m doing,” he ground out, “give me a stick, take the stars off my collar, and send me out against the Algarvians as a common soldier.”
“I didn’t come here to put you in a penalty battalion,” Rathar answered mildly. Officers who disgraced themselves sometimes got the chance for redemption by fighting as ordinary soldiers. Penalty battalions went in where the fighting was hottest. Men who lived got their rank back. Most didn’t.
“Well, then, let’s talk about how we’re going to hold on to what we can down here,” Vatran said.
That was a good, sensible suggestion. Before Rathar could take him up on it, eggs crashed down around the schoolhouse Vatran was using for a headquarters. Rathar threw himself fiat. So did Vatran and all the junior officers in the chamber. Most of the glass in the windows had already been shattered. What was left flew through the air in glittering, deadly arcs. A spearlike shard stuck in the floorboards a few inches from Rathar’s nose.
“Never a dull moment,” Vatran said when the eggs stopped falling. “Where were we?”
“Trying to stay alive,” Rathar answered, getting to his feet. “Trying to keep our armies alive, too.”
“If you know a magic to manage it, I hope you’ll tell me,” Vatran answered. “The Algarvians have more skill than we do; the only thing we can do to stop ‘em is put more bodies in their way. We’re doing that, as best we can.”
“We have to do it better,” the marshal said. “Down here now, it’s the way things were in front of Cottbus last fall; we haven’t got a lot of room to fall back. If we do, we lose things we can’t afford to lose.”
“I know that,” Vatran said. “I need more of everything-dragons, behemoths, men, crystals, you name it.”
“And you’ll have what you need-or as much of it as we can get to you, anyhow,” Rathar told him. “Moving things down from the north isn’t easy these days, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I’ll bet you did.” By the look Vatran gave Rathar, he would have been just as well pleased if the marshal hadn’t been able to come down from Cottbus.
In a way, Rathar sympathized with that. No general worth his salt should have been eager to have a superior looking over his shoulder. Had the fight in the south been going well, Rathar would have stayed up in the capital, even if that meant enduring King Swemmel. But, with the Algarvians bulling forward, Vatran could hardly expect to have everything exactly as he wanted.
Rathar asked the question that had to be asked: “Will we hold Durrwangen?”
“I hope so,” General Vatran answered. Then his broad shoulders moved up and down in a shrug that held none of the jauntiness an Algarvian would have given it. “I don’t know, Marshal. To tell the truth, I just don’t know. The cursed redheads have been moving awful fast. And…” He hesitated before going on, “And the soldiers aren’t as happy as they might be, either.”
“No?” Rathar’s ears pricked up. “You’d better tell me more about that, and you’d better not waste any time doing it, either.”
“It’s about what you’d expect,” the general said. “They’ve been licked too many times, and some of ‘em don’t see how anything different’s going to happen when they bump up against the Algarvians again.”
“That’s not good,” Rathar said in what he thought a commendable understatement. “I haven’t seen anything about it in your written reports.”
“No, and you won’t, either,” Vatran told him. “D’you think I’m daft, to put it in writing where his Majesty could see it? My head would go up on a pike five minutes later-unless he decided to boil me alive instead.” He spread his hands-broad peasant hands, much like Rathar’s. “You hold my life, lord Marshal. If you want it, you can take it. But you need to know the truth.”
“For which I thank you.” Rathar again wondered whether he wanted Vatran dead. Probably not: who could have done better here in the south? No one he could think of, save perhaps himself. “Don’t the men remember what we did to the Algarvians last winter?”
“No doubt some of ‘em do,” Vatran answered. “But it’s not winter now, and it won’t be for a while, even down here. And in summer, when their dragons can fly and their behemoths can run, nobody’s beaten Mezentio’s men yet.”
“We’ve made them earn it,” Rathar said. “If we can keep on making them earn it, sooner or later they’ll run out of men.”
“Aye,” Vatran said, “either that or we’ll run out of land we can afford to lose. If we don’t hold Sulingen and the Mamming Hills, can we keep on with the war?”
People had asked that about Cottbus the summer before. Unkerlant hadn’t had to find out the answer, for the capital had held. Rathar hoped his kingdom wouldn’t have to find out the answer this time, either. He had no guarantee, though, and neither did Unkerlant.
Doing his best to look on the bright side of things, he said, “I hear they’re starting to put Yaninans in the line. They wouldn’t do that if they didn’t have to.”
“That’s so-to a point,” Vatran said. “But they’re no fools. They wouldn’t be so dangerous if they were. They give the boys with the pretty shoes the quiet stretches to hold. That lets them concentrate more of their own men where they have to do real fighting.”
Before Rathar could reply, more eggs fell on Durrwangen. Again, he and Vatran stretched themselves on the floor. The schoolhouse shook and creaked all around them. Rathar hoped the roof wouldn’t come down on his head.
Still more eggs fell. The Algarvians couldn’t have moved so many tossers so far forward … could they? More likely, dragons with redheads atop them were dropping their loads of death on the Unkerlanter city. And Vatran had already said he lacked the dragons to repel them.
A runner with more courage than sense rushed into Vatran’s headquarters even while the eggs were falling. “General!” he cried. “General!” By his tone, Rathar knew something had gone badly wrong. Sure enough, the fellow went on, “General, the Algarvians have broken through our lines west of the city. If we can’t stop them, they’ll slide around behind us and cut us off!”
“What?” Vatran and Rathar said the same thing at the same time in identical tones of horror. Both men cursed. Then Vatran, who know the local situation better, demanded, “What happened to the brigades that were supposed to hold the buggers back?”
Unhappily, the runner answered, “Uh, some of them, sir, some of them went and skedaddled, fast as they could go.”
Rathar cursed again. In a low voice, Vatran said, “Now you see what I meant.”
“I see it,” the marshal said. “I see we’ll have to stop it, too, before the rot gets worse.” He climbed to his feet. The runner stared at him. “How bad a breakthrough is it?” he snapped.
“Pretty bad, sir,” the messenger replied. “They’ve got behemoths through, and plenty of footsoldiers with ‘em. They’re astride-no, they’re past-the ley line leading west out of Durrwangen.”
That was also Rathar’s most direct route back to Cottbus, not that any route from the embattled south to the capital was direct these days. “Can we drive them back?” he asked both the runner and General Vatran.
“Sir-uh, lord Marshal-the redheads have pushed a lot of men through,” the runner said. His gaze swung toward Vatran.
So did Rathar’s. Vatran licked his lips. “I don’t know where we could scrape up the men,” he said at last, most unhappily. “And coming at Durrwan-gen from out of the west! Who would have thought the Algarvians-who would have thought anybody-could come at Durrwangen from out of the west? We haven’t got the defenses there
