Unkerlanters in front of them to a standstill- for a while. But then Swemmel's soldiers would find a way around one flank or the other, and the Algarvians and Grelzers would have to give ground again: either that or be slaughtered where they stood.
The progress Leudast's countrymen made left him slightly dazed. That evening, he sat down to barley cakes and garlicky sausage filched from an Algarvian sergeant he'd captured. Toasting a length of sausage over a fire on a stick, he said, 'Curse me if they're not starting to fall apart.'
Captain Recared had some sausage, too. He pulled it away from the flames, examined it, and then thrust it back to cook some more. 'Aye, they are,' he agreed while the sausage sizzled and dripped grease into the fire. 'By this time tomorrow, they'll have figured out that they can't pound their way through our ring. They'll start trying to sneak through in small bands. We have to smash as many of them as we can. Every soldier we kill or capture now is one more we won't have to worry about later on.'
'I understand, sir,' Leudast said. 'And when they're hungry and scared and their sticks are low on charges, they're a lot easier to deal with than when they've got their peckers up.'
'That's right. That's just right.' Recared nodded. He took his sausage off the fire and looked at it again. With another nod, he began to eat.
He proved a good prophet, for over the next couple of days the spirit did leak out of the Algarvians, like water leaking from a cracked jar. They stopped standing up to the Unkerlanters and started trying to escape whenever and however they could. When they couldn't run and couldn't hide, they surrendered in a hurry, glad to do it before something worse happened to them.
After a couple of days of that, Leudast was as rich as he'd ever been in all his born days. He didn't suppose it would last; when he came to a place where he could spend the money he was taking from captured Algarvian officers, he probably would. But a heavy belt pouch wasn't the worst thing in the world, either.
One of his men asked, 'Sergeant, what do we do with the coins we take that have false King Raniero on 'em?'
'Well, Kiun, if I were you, I'd lose the Grelzer copper,' Leudast answered. 'It'll never be worth anything on its own, if you know what I mean. But silver's silver, even if it is stamped with Raniero's pointy-nosed face. Somebody'll melt it down for you and give you what it's worth in metal, even if not in coin.'
'Ah.' The soldier nodded. 'Thanks. That makes good sense.'
The next morning, Leudast's company came on the tracks of a squad of men trying to make their way east. With snow on the ground, following the trail was child's play. Before long, his troopers caught up with the fleeing Algarvians. A couple of men started blazing at the redheads. As soon as steam puffed up from the smoke around them, the Algarvians raised their hands in surrender.
'Aye, you have us,' one of them said in pretty good Unkerlanter as Leudast and his men came up: a bald fellow in his late middle years who wore a colonel's uniform. 'We can run no more.'
'You'd best believe it, pal.' Leudast cocked his head to one side. 'You talk funny.' The officer's accent wasn't a typical Algarvian trill, but something else, something familiar.
'I was, in the last war, colonel of a regiment of Forthwegians in Algarvian service,' the redhead answered.
'That's it, sure enough.' Leudast nodded. His own home village, up in the north, wasn't so far from the Forthwegian border. No wonder he thought he'd heard that accent before- he had.
'Sergeant-' Kiun, the fellow who'd asked him about Grelzer money, plucked at his sleeve. 'Sergeant, powers below eat me if that's not Raniero his own self.'
'What?' Leudast shook himself free. 'You're out of your fornicating…' But his voice trailed away. He shuffled a couple of paces sideways so he could look at the Algarvian in profile. His lips pursed in a soundless whistle. The captive in the colonel's uniform certainly had the right beaky nose. 'Are you Raniero?'
A couple of the captive's comrades exclaimed in Algarvian. But he shook his head and drew himself up very straight. 'I have that honor, aye.' He bowed. 'And to whom do I present myself?'
Numbly, Leudast gave his own name. He gestured with his stick. 'You come along with me.' What would they give the man who'd just captured the King of Grelz? He didn't know- he had no idea- but he looked forward to finding out. He also waved to a couple of his own men, who were all staring wide-eyed at Raniero. 'You boys come along, too.' He didn't want his prisoner stolen out from under him. He made sure he included Kiun- the trooper also deserved a reward.
A lieutenant well back of the line glared at him. 'Why didn't you just send your captive to the rear, Sergeant?' he growled, meaning, Why do you think you deserve to get out of the fight for a while?
'Sir, this isn't just any captive,' Leudast answered. 'This is Raniero, who calls himself King of Grelz.' The lieutenant's glare turned to a gape. He didn't have the presence of mind to ask to accompany Leudast.
Raniero's name was the password that got Leudast taken from division headquarters to army headquarters to a battered firstman's house in a village that looked to have changed hands a good many times. The soldier who came out of the house had iron-gray hair and big stars on the collar tabs of his tunic. Marshal Rathar eyed the captive, nodded, and told Leudast, 'That's Raniero, all right.'
Leudast saluted. 'Aye, sir,' he said.
Rathar seemed to forget about him then. He spoke to Raniero in Algarvian, and King Mezentio's cousin answered in the same language. But Rathar wasn't one to forget his own men for long. After giving Raniero what looked like a sympathetic pat on the back, he turned to Leudast and asked, 'And what do you expect for bringing this fellow in, eh, Sergeant?'
'Sir, whatever seems right to you,' Leudast answered. 'I've figured you were fair-minded ever since we fought side by side for a little while up in the Zuwayzi desert.' He didn't expect the marshal to remember him, but he wanted Rathar to know they'd met before. And he added, 'Kiun here was the one who first recognized him.'
'A pound of gold and sergeant's rank for him. And, Lieutenant Leudast, how does five pounds of gold on top of a promotion sound for you?' Rathar asked.
Leudast had expected gold, though he'd thought one pound likelier than five for himself. The promotion was a delightful surprise. 'Me?' he squeaked. 'An officer?' Officer's rank wasn't quite so much the preserve of bluebloods in Unkerlant's army as in Algarve's- King Swemmel had killed too many nobles to make that practical- but it wasn't something to which a peasant could normally aspire, either. 'An officer,' Leudast repeated. If I live through the war, I've got it made, he thought dizzily. If.
Vanai had heard that there came a time when a woman actually enjoyed carrying a child. During the first third of her pregnancy, she wouldn't have believed it, not for anything. When she hadn't been nauseated, she'd been exhausted; sometimes she'd been both at once. Her breasts had pained her all the time. There had been days when she'd not cared to do anything but lie on her back with her tunic off and with a bucket beside her.
This middle stretch seemed better, though. She could eat anything. She could clean her teeth without wondering if she would lose what she'd eaten last. She didn't feel as if she needed to prop her eyelids open with little sticks.
And the baby moving inside her was something she never took for granted. Maybe, in a way, Ealstan had been right: no matter how emphatically she'd known before that she was with child, its kicks and pokes did make that undeniably real, the more so as they got stronger and more vigorous with each passing week.
And… 'Just as well I'm Thelberge in a Forthwegian-style tunic these days,' she told Ealstan over supper one evening. 'If I still wore trousers, I'd have to buy new ones, because I wouldn't be able to fit into the ones I had been wearing anymore.'
He nodded. 'I've noticed. With the tunic, though, it hardly shows, even yet.'
'With the tunic, no,' Vanai said. 'Without it…' She shrugged. Her body had stayed much the same ever since she became a woman. To watch it change, to feel it change, almost from day to day was disconcerting, to say the very least.
Ealstan shrugged, too. 'I like the way you look without your tunic just fine, believe me.'
Vanai did believe him. She'd heard of men who lost interest in their wives when the women were expecting a baby. That hadn't happened with Ealstan, who remained as eager as ever. In fact, from the look in his eye now…
