'Aye.' Garivald knew he sounded abstracted. He couldn't help it. If the army wasn't so far away from here, it was even closer to Zossen… Zossen, where his wife and son and daughter lived. One of these days, he would have to go back, which meant that one of these days there would be no place for Obilot in his life.
He reached for her. She came to him, a smile on her face. They made love under a couple of blankets; it was cold in the tent, and getting colder. At the moment when she stiffened and shuddered and her arms tightened around him, she whispered his name with a kind of wonder in her voice he'd never heard from anyone else. He missed his wife and children, but he would miss her, too, if this ever had to end.
Afterwards, he asked her, 'Do you think about what life will be like once the army takes back all of Grelz?'
'When there's no more need for irregulars, you mean?' she asked, and he nodded. She shrugged. 'No, not very much. What's the point? I haven't got anything to go back to. Everything I had once upon a time, the redheads smashed.'
Garivald still didn't know what she'd had. He supposed she'd been a wife, as Annore was his wife back in Zossen. Maybe she'd been a mother, too. And maybe it wasn't just her family that didn't exist anymore. Maybe it was her whole village. The Algarvians had never been shy about giving out lessons like that.
'Curse them,' he muttered.
'We'll do worse than curse them,' Obilot answered, 'or maybe better. We'll hurt them instead.' She spoke of that with a savage relish at least as passionate as anything she'd said while she lay in his arms.
And she left the woods the next morning to go spy out the roads and the nearby villages. Both the Algarvians and the Grelzers paid less attention to women than they did to men. In a way, that made sense, for more women were less dangerous than most men. But Obilot was different from most women.
When she came back the next day, excitement glowed on her face. 'We can hurt them,' she said. 'We can hurt them badly. They're mustering at Pirmasens for a strike against the head of the column of regulars moving east.'
That made Tantris' eyes glow. 'Aye, that's what we'll do,' he said. 'That's what we're for.'
'How many of them are mustering at Pirmasens?' Garivald asked.
'I don't know exactly,' Obilot replied. 'A couple of regiments, anyhow. Algarvians and Grelzers both.'
He stared. 'Powers above!' he exclaimed. 'What can we do against a couple of regiments of real soldiers? They'd squash us like bugs.'
But Obilot shook her head. 'We can't fight them, no. But there are only two bridges over the streams south of Pirmasens. If we can knock those into the water, the redheads and the traitors can't get where they're going.'
'That's right.' Sadoc nodded. The peasant who made such a disastrous mage went on, 'I'm from those parts. They'd have to spend a while building bridges if we take out the ones that are standing.'
Tantris nodded, too. Tantris, in fact, all but licked his chops. 'If this isn't the sort of thing a band of irregulars can do, what is?' he asked Garivald. He still didn't try giving orders, though. Maybe he'd really learned.
'We can try it, aye,' Garivald said. 'A good thing you managed to get us a few eggs- they'll help.' Tantris actually had been worth something there. Back in the days when Munderic led the band, he'd had connections among disaffected Grelzer soldiers that got eggs for the irregulars. Garivald hadn't been able to match that. But Tantris, being a regular, had sources of supply farther west, and they'd come through.
Sadoc said, 'I want to get out there and fight. I want to make the Algarvians and the traitors pay. That's all I've ever wanted.'
It wasn't any such thing. Once upon a time- not very long before- he'd wanted to slay Garivald with sorcery. All he'd managed to do was kill Tantris' comrade instead. He was far more dangerous to the foe with a stick in his hand than with a spell. Maybe he'd really learned, too.
Garivald scratched his chin. 'If we're going to wreck the bridges, we'll have to move by night. We can't let anybody catch us hauling eggs by daylight. Anyone sees us doing that, we're dead men.'
Tantris stirred but didn't speak. Garivald could guess what he was thinking: that wrecking the bridges counted for more than losing a few irregulars. That was probably how real soldiers had to think. If not thinking that way meant Garivald wasn't a real soldier, he wouldn't lose any sleep over it. And he saw the rest of the band nodding their heads in agreement with him. They wanted to make the Algarvians and their puppets suffer. They didn't want to do any dying themselves.
Some of them would, no matter what they wanted. Garivald was pretty sure of that, even as he got the irregulars moving a little past midnight. He hoped they weren't dwelling on it. But if they wrecked those bridges south of Pirmasens, the enemy would have a good idea of where they were- and would stand between them and the shelter of the woods. Getting back wouldn't be so easy.
Getting to the bridges was another matter. Nights were long now, long and cold and dark: plenty of time for marching, plenty of darkness for concealment. Clouds overhead threatened snow. Garivald hoped they would hold off. That'd be just what we need, he thought: a bunch of tracks saying, Here we are- come blaze us!
They carried four eggs, two for each bridge, with each egg yoked between two men with carrying poles and rope. Every so often, new pairs would take them; they weren't light, and Garivald didn't want anyone exhausted. He also sent out scouts well ahead of the main body of irregulars: here of all times, he couldn't afford to be surprised.
Tantris came up to him and remarked, 'I've seen real officers who didn't arrange their men half so well.'
'Have you?' Garivald said, and the regular nodded. Garivald let out a thoughtful grunt. 'No wonder the Algarvians drove us so hard during the first days of the war, then.'
'You may make fine songs, but your mouth will be the death of you one day,' Tantris said. Garivald didn't answer. He just kept trudging along. When the time came to take one egg's carrying poles on his shoulders for a while, he did it without hesitation. A real officer probably wouldn't have, but he wasn't one, so he didn't care.
He sent a runner up to the scouts with orders to swing wide around Pirmasens. The glow from the campfires there was plenty to warn him away from the place. The runner came back with word that the scouts had already swung wide on their own. Garivald wondered if regular soldiers would have. He didn't ask Tantris.
When they got to the first bridge, they planted an egg at each end. The second bridge lay a few hundred yards upstream. When they got there, Sadoc murmured, 'I feel a power point. All I have to do is say the word, and-'
'No!' Garivald hissed frantically. To his vast relief, Tantris said the same thing in the same tone of voice. Sadoc muttered something else, but the louder mutter of the rain-swollen river swept it away.
Tantris went off by himself into the darkness. The eggs were his; he knew the spell that would make them burst, and he jealously guarded the knowledge. Garivald made out only one word from him- 'Now!' -and then four nearly simultaneous roars shattered the night and shattered the bridges. Chunks of wood rained down on the irregulars. Someone let out a yowl of pain. Nobody would cross the river by either of those ways for a good long while.
But then, even before Garivald could order the irregulars back toward the woods, challenges rang out and beams began to flicker in the night. The Grelzers had had patrols on the move- he'd just been lucky enough to miss them. Now… Now there were a lot of shouts of 'Raniero!' and a lot of men rushing down from Pirmasens to join the hunt for the bridge-wreckers. Garivald's mouth went dry. Some Grelzer soldiers would sooner surrender than fight. Some were very good men indeed. My luck to run into that kind again, he thought. And they can pin us against the river. We can't use those stinking bridges, either.
The Grelzers plainly intended to do just that. Garivald had no idea how to stop them. If Tantris did, he kept it as secret as the bursting spell. Another thought ran through Garivald's mind. We're going to die here. We're all going to die here. A beam zipped past him. For a moment, the air smelled of thunderstorms.
No sooner had that crossed his mind than lightning smote the Grelzers, not once but again and again. Each crash of cloven air dwarfed the roars that had come from the bursting eggs. No snow. No rain. Only bolt after bolt of lightning, peal after peal of thunder.
Through those peals, Garivald heard someone laughing like a man possessed. Sadoc, he realized. Awe- or perhaps the aftereffects of lightning- made the hair prickle up on his arms and at the nape of his neck. He's found himself at last. And then, as the Grelzer soldiers fled howling in fear, Well, for sure he picked the right time.
