“What do you think it’s going to be like?” Leudast answered. “There are redheads up there, and they won’t kiss you when they see you.”

“We’ll kiss them, by the powers above.” The fellow riding the behemoth leaned over to pat the heavy stick mounted on the beast’s armored back. “We’ll kiss them with this. We’ll kiss anybody who gets in our way, you bet we will.”

“Good. They deserve it.” Leudast paused, then asked, “Have you had any trouble from the Yaninans?”

“Not much. They’d be sorry if they gave us any, I’ll tell you that,” the man on the behemoth said. “Some of ‘em like us better than Mezentio’s whoresons, and that’s fine. Some of ‘em like the Algarvians better, I expect, but they haven’t had the nerve to show it, and they’d better not. The army is on our side.”

Leudast snorted. “Aye, I’ve heard the same thing. And it’ll do us just as much good as it ever did the Algarvians.”

“It can soak up some casualties,” the behemoth crewman said. “Better the Yaninans than us.”

“You’re right about that. We’ve paid our share and then some,” Leudast said. The fellow on the behemoth nodded and waved. The beast trudged forward. Its big feet came out of the mud, one after another, with heavy squelching sounds despite the snowshoes that spread its weight. The whole long column of behemoths followed. By the time they all went through, the road was a river of ooze stinking of behemoth dung.

One of Leudast’s men said, “There’ll be another big fight coming up pretty soon. They don’t move behemoths forward unless they mean it.”

“You’re probably right,” Leudast answered. “Only thing we can do about it is try and whip the redheads and not get hurt too bad ourselves.”

“That would be good.” The soldier didn’t sound as if he thought it were very likely to happen, though. Had Leudast been the stuffy sort of officer, he would have given the man a hard time and lectured him about efficiency. Since he’d never been able to stand that kind of officer before getting promoted himself, he kept his mouth shut.

Before long, the regimental commander-himself only a captain-came into the village with orders: “We go forward this afternoon.”

“Aye, sir.” Leudast nodded. “I thought as much when the behemoths came through earlier in the day.”

“You’re no fool, are you?” the captain said-his name was Drogden.

“There’s plenty who’d tell you otherwise, sir,” Leudast said, and got a laugh from Drogden before going on, “My guess is, I’ve just seen a lot of war.”

“Our whole kingdom has seen a lot of war, and my guess is that we’ve got a good deal more to see yet before the redheads are licked,”CaptainDrogden said.

“My guess is, that’s a pretty good guess,” Leudast said.

Drogden nodded. He was an older man, close to forty, weather-beaten enough to show he’d seen a lot of war, too. Maybe he was a jumped-up sergeant like Leudast, or maybe he’d spent a long, long time as a lieutenant. “Aye, the Algarvians have no quit in ‘em,” he said. “That’s plain enough. But still and all, things’ll be different once we finally go and break into Algarve.”

His voice held an odd anticipation. “Different how, sir?” Leudast asked.

“I’ll tell you how,” the regimental commander said. “We get to pay those whoresons back for everything they did to Unkerlant when their peckers were up, that’s how. We can burn their farms pretty cursed soon. We can wreck their villages. Our mages can tear up their ley line. And, speaking of peckers up, we can throw their women down on the ground and do what we want with them.”

Leudast grunted. He knew the Algarvians had done such things in the Unkerlanter territory they’d overrun. “Powers above, I’ve never even seen a redheaded woman before,” he said.

“Neither have I. But if we don’t get blazed, I expect we’re going to. It should be fun.” With a leer, Drogden slapped him on the back. “Spread the word through your company. It’ll give the men something extra to fight for.”

Most of his troopers, Leudast discovered, had already had that thought for themselves. Some looked forward to it. But one man said, “Far as I’m concerned, we should just kill all the Algarvians, the men and the women both. Then we won’t have to worry about ‘em ever again.” Leudast couldn’t deny that that notion held more than a little appeal for him, too.

When the attack went in that afternoon, the Unkerlanters pushed forward for a couple of miles without much trouble. Then they came to the Skamandros River, which the rain had made too wide and swift to ford, and discovered that the redheads had wrecked all the bridges over it. They also discovered that the Algarvians had a demon of a lot of well-concealed egg-tossers on the far bank. “What now?” Leudast asked when he sawCaptainDrogden again.

“Now we wait for the artificers to make some new bridges, or else for our dragons and egg-tossers to smash up the redheads and give us some kind of chance to cross,” Drogden answered. “Don’t know what else we can do.”

“It’s not so bad, sir,” Leudast said. “We’re moving forward, and that counts for more than anything else.”

Sidroc hadn’t liked Unkerlanters, and they weren’t that much different from Forthwegians. Now that the Algarvian army was forced back into Yanina, and Plegmund’s Brigade with it, he discovered that he really didn’t like Yaninans.

“Where’s your food?” he demanded of a skinny villager with cold, dark eyes and a big gray mustache. He said it in Forthwegian, and then in Algarvian. The Yaninan looked back at him, shrugged, and spread his hands as if to say he didn’t understand.

“Blaze the son of a whore,” Ceorl suggested. “That’ll teach him.”

“It won’t do us any good, though,” Sidroc said. “Here, watch me be as efficient as an Unkerlanter. Go inside the house there and bring out this bastard’s wife. Don’t get rough with her or anything, but bring her.”

Ceorl laughed. “I’ll do it. I think I know what you’ve got in mind.”

In he went. The Yaninan villager looked alarmed. He looked a lot more alarmed when the woman cried out. But when he took a step toward the house, Sidroc aimed his stick at the fellow’s face. “Don’t even think about it, pal,” he said. Either the words or the gesture got through; the Yaninan froze, though his mouth twisted in a snarl of hate.

Out came Ceorl, manhandling a graying woman about half his size. Sidroc knew no Yaninan, but he was sure she was calling Ceorl everything she could. Ceorl realized that, too. “I hope the old shitter stays clammed up,” he said. “I’d enjoy doing in this bitch.”

“We’ll find out in a minute.” Sidroc switched back to Algarvian: “One more time, pal. Where is the food? She’ll be sorry if you keep quiet.”

Looking daggers at him, the Yaninan answered in pretty good Algarvian of his own: “Dig under the water barrel.” He looked as if he wanted to say a good deal more than that, but he bit it back. That was one of the wiser things he’d ever done.

“No.” Sidroc gestured. “You dig, pal. And you had better come up with some good stuff, too.”

He went into the house with the Yaninan, and watched the skinny old man dig up the dirt floor. What came out was plenty to satisfy him: hams and sausages, all securely wrapped to keep them safe while they were out of sight. At his delighted exclamation, Ceorl came in to see, too. “Well, all right,” the ruffian said enthusiastically. “I guess we let the old whore live.”

“You see?” Sidroc said to the Yaninan. “You just saved your wife.”

“But the two of you, this is too much for you,” the man with the gray mustache said.

“We’ve got friends.” Sidroc grabbed a long string of sausages. “Come on, Ceorl. Lend a hand.”

Between them, they did a good job of plundering the peasants’ larder. When they showed their comrades what they’d got, they were the heroes of the moment. “Haven’t eaten this well since we got out of Forthweg,”SergeantWerferth said. He was exaggerating, but not by a great deal.

Sudaku, the blond from the Phalanx of Valmiera who’d broken out of the Mandelsloh pocket with the men of Plegmund’s Brigade, nodded. “Good food,” he said in Algarvian. He was eating enough for two himself.

“If we had more spirits, we’d have more spirits,” Ceorl said, and laughed loudly at his own wit. Sidroc chuckled, too. He wasn’t going to let a fellow Forthwegian down, not even a son of a whore like Ceorl.

Werferth said, “Maybe you ought to go shake down that Yaninan of yours again. If he hid the food under the

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