end of the wedge: by grinding against the Unkerlanters. They had to be getting thin on the ground, too, but they always seemed to have plenty of soldiers when the battalion tried to go forward.
And sometimes they tried coming forward themselves. More eggs fell around Trasone. He wanted to hide, to dig down deep in the dirt so no danger could find him. But he knew what was liable to happen when the Unkerlanters started tossing lots of eggs. They wanted the Algatvians to put their heads down, whereupon a wave of infantry in rock-gray tunics would wash over them.
Sure enough, from off to the left Major Spinello shouted, “Here they come, the bare-faced, bald-arsed buggers!”
He didn’t need to have cried out. The rhythmic roars of “Urra! Urra!” that rose from the Unkerlanters would have told the Algarvians fighting in the outskirts of Sulingen everything they needed to know. Now Trasone had to peer out from behind his heap of bricks.
As he’d seen them do outside Aspang, the Unkerlanters were advancing in thick lines, one a few feet behind another. They blazed as they came. Some of diem had linked arms, which helped steady them as they scrambled over the wreckage that had once been houses and shops.
They hadn’t knocked out all the Algarvian egg-tossers. Eggs caught the footsoldiers out in the open, knocking some of them down, flinging others high into the air, leaving nothing whatever of still others. The eggs tore great holes in the Unkerlanters’ ranks. But Trasone, like his countrymen, had long since learned King Swemmel’s men had very little give in them. The ones who weren’t felled came on. “Urra! Swemmel! Urra!”
Along with his comrades, Trasone started blazing. Their beams made more Unkerlanters stumble and fall, but other men in rock-gray always rushed up to take the places of those who couldn’t go forward any more.
Trasone’s mouth went dry. The Unkerlanters were going to break in among the Algarvian troopers. It would be every man for himself then, with numbers counting as much as or more than skill: a melee of blazing and sticks swinging like clubs and knives and fists and teeth. Sometimes the Unkerlanters took prisoners. More often, they slaughtered them. The Algarvians fought the war the same way.
Trasone had just blazed down another Unkerlanter when several shadows swiftly swept over him. With coughing roars, half a dozen Algarvian dragons flamed Swemmel’s onrushing soldiers. The Unkerlanters could endure eggs. They could endure beams. Watching their friends crisp and blacken, smelling the stink of burnt flesh, was more than they could bear. They broke and fled, or went to earth well outside the Algarvian lines.
“Forward!” Spinello ordered, and blew a long blast on his officer’s whistle to emphasize the order.
Wishing the battalion commander would have been content to beat back the Unkerlanter attack, Trasone scrambled out from behind the shelter that had served him so well. Somebody saw him: a beam charred in hole in a sun-bleached board by his head. It could have gone through him instead, and he knew it.
He threw himself flat behind an overturned wagon. It offered concealment, but not much protection. He looked ahead for a better place. Spying one, he dashed toward it. An Unkerlanter broke cover and started running for the same hole. They saw each other at the same instant. The Unkerlanter started to bring his stick up to his shoulder. Trasone blazed from the hip. The Unkerlanter went down, stick falling from nerveless fingers. Trasone dove into the hole.
But the dead enemy’s countrymen attacked again; they truly were saying,
Those who couldn’t. . Trasone ran past a shrunken, twisted black doll that had, up till a few minutes before, been a man who wanted to kill him. Now the horrid thing, still smoking, sent up a stink that reminded him of a pork roast forgotten on a hot, hot stove. He spat-and spat black, from all the soot he was breathing in. With a broad- shouldered shrug, he jumped down into a new hole.
A moment later, Sergeant Panfilo jumped down with him. “You see the dead one back there?” Panfilo asked. Trasone nodded. Panfilo shuddered. “That could have been us, as easy as it was him.”
“Not quite as easy,” Trasone said. “The Unkerlanters haven’t got a whole lot of dragons down here.”
“What difference does that make?” Panfilo demanded. “You think our own beasts wouldn’t flame us? They’re too stupid to care who they’re killing, as long as they’re killing somebody.”
“That’s why they’ve got dragonfliers on their backs,” Trasone pointed out.
“Aye, so they do-and half the time they’re as stupid as the beasts they ride,” Panfilo said. Trasone chuckled and nodded; he was always ready to listen to slander about anyone who wasn’t a footsoldier.
Before Panfilo could add to the slander, Spinello’s whistle blew an urgent blast. “Be ready, boys!” he called.
“Ready for what?” Trasone asked.
“More counterattacks,” the major answered. “Crystal says they’re sending lots of men up over the Wolter from the south bank. They don’t want us in Sulingen. They don’t want us anywhere near Sulingen. If we can get them out of this place and cross the Wolter ourselves, there’s nothing between us and the Mamming Hills and most of the cinnabar that isn’t in the land of the Ice People.”
“Nothing but a few million Unkerlanters who hate everything about us and want to have fun with us before they finally let us die,” Trasone said.
“We can lick the Unkerlanters,” Spinello said. Trasone envied him his blithe confidence, but couldn’t imagine where he got it. Spinello went on, “If we couldn’t lick the buggers, what would we be doing here? We’ve done nothing but lick ‘em for the last seven hundred miles or so, and we can keep right on doing it a few miles more.”
The Algarvians hadn’t done nothing but lick the Unkerlanters; they’d taken some lickings of their own, as Trasone knew and Spinello should have remembered. But the battalion commander had a point: without a lot of victories, the Algarvian banner wouldn’t be flying here so far from home.
“And one thing more,” Spinello added: “Be ready to counterattack, boys. You’ll know when.”
Before Trasone could ask any questions about that, the Unkerlanters started tossing eggs at his position again. “Urra! Urra! Urra!” The fierce shouts they used to nerve themselves for battle rang out. Sometimes they nerved themselves with raw spirits, too. “Here they come!” someone yelled in Algarvian.
Again, Algarvian egg-tossers caught the Unkerlanters in the open. Again, they worked a gruesome slaughter on Swemmel’s men. Again, the Unkerlanters, or those of them who lived, rolled forward in spite of that and in spite of the sharp, accurate blazing of the Algarvians awaiting them.
Then the ground shuddered under Trasone. It shuddered more under the Unkerlanters. Fissures opened in what had been solid ground; what had been holes closed up, often trapping men inside them. Flames spurted up from the surface of the ground, violet flames like nothing Trasone had seen till the autumn before. Burned Unkerlanters shrieked. As the dragons had been, the magic was more than King Swemmel’s men could bear. They turned and fled.
Spinello’s whistle shrilled once more. “Come on, boys!” he yelled. “They’re on the run now. You don’t want to make our mages spend all those Kaunians for nothing, do you? Come on!” Scrappy as a terrier, he was, as usual, the first to leap from cover and rush after the retreating foe.
Trasone followed. He didn’t care whether Kaunians were being massacred to some good purpose or for no reason at all. He had no use for diem, and wouldn’t have been sorry to see them all dead. But seeing the Unkerlanters in front of him dead struck him as a lot more important at the moment.
He and his comrades were nearing the Unkerlanters’ trenches when the ground shook beneath them again. This time, Spinello cried out in fury- Algarvian mages weren’t the ones working magic here. Trasone cried out, too- in fear. He didn’t run, not because he didn’t want to but because he didn’t think it would do any good. He lay down behind a riven wall and hoped no crevasse would gape wide beneath him.
When the shaking finally ended, the battalion didn’t return to the attack with the same jauntiness. Trasone wondered how many of their own-they didn’t use Kaunians-the Unkerlanters had spent to gain a respite. However many it was, it had worked.
Sidroc had seen war before, when the Algarvian army pummeled Gromheort from the air and then took it. He’d lost his mother when the redheads dropped an egg on his house. He knew he was lucky to be breathing himself.
But then, after the Algarvians occupied eastern Forthweg, a routine of sorts had returned to life. And the Algarvians, as he’d seen, were strong, where his own people were weak and the cursed Kaunians even weaker.
