struck home. The Algarvian's grin slipped. He tramped on and was lost among his fellows.
At last, the long tide of misery ended. Recared shook himself, as if waking from a dream. He turned back to Leudast and said, 'Now we've got to get ready to whip the rest of King Mezentio's men out of our kingdom.'
'Sure enough, sir,' Leudast agreed. He hadn't thought about what came after beating the Algarvians in Sulingen. He supposed thinking about such things before you had to was another part of what separated officers from the men they led.
'What state is your company in, Lieutenant?' Recared asked.
'About what you'd expect, sir- I've got maybe a section's worth of men,' Leudast answered. Plenty of companies had sergeants in charge of them these days, and plenty of regiments, like Recared's, were commanded by lieutenants.
With a nod, Recared said, 'Have them ready to move out tomorrow morning. I don't know for a fact that we will move tomorrow, but that's what it looks like.'
'Aye, sir.' Leudast's sigh built a young fogbank of vapor in front of his face. He knew he shouldn't have expected anything different, but he would have liked a little longer to rest after one fight before plunging into the next.
They didn't go north the next morning. They did go north the next afternoon, tramping up roads made passable by behemoths wearing snowshoes. Here and there, the snow lay too deep even for behemoths to trample out a usable path. Then the weary troopers had to shovel their way through the drifts. The duty was as physically wearing as combat, the only advantage being that the Algarvians weren't trying to blaze them or drop eggs on their heads.
One of Leudast's troopers said, 'I wish we were riding a ley-line caravan up to the new front. Then we'd get there rested. The way things are, we're already halfway down the road to being dead.' He flung a spadeful of snow over this shoulder, then stooped to get another one.
A few minutes later, the company emerged from the trench it had dug through a great drift. Leudast was awash in sweat, his lungs on fire, regardless of the frigid air he breathed. When he could see more than snow piled up in front of him, he started to laugh. There a few hundred yards to one side of the road lay a wrecked caravan, its lead car a burnt-out, blasted ruin- the Algarvians had planted an egg along the ley line, and its burst of sorcerous energy had done everything the redheads could have wanted. 'Still want to go the easy way, Werbel?'
'No, thanks, Sergeant,' the trooper answered at once. 'Maybe this isn't so bad after all.'
Leudast nodded. He wasn't laughing any more. The steersmen on that ley-line caravan were surely dead. So were dozens of Unkerlanter troopers: bodies lay stacked like cordwood by the ruined caravan. And more dozens, maybe hundreds, of men were hurt. The Algarvians had gained less by winning some skirmishes.
When the regiment encamped for the night in the ruins of an abandoned peasant village, Lieutenant Recared said, 'There are some stretches of ley line that are safe. Our mages keep clearing more every day, too.'
'I suppose they find out if the ley lines are clear by sending caravans on them,' Leudast said sourly. 'This one wasn't.'
'No, but it will be now, after the mages cancel out the effect of the energy burst,' Recared answered.
'And then they'll find another cursed egg a mile farther north,' Leudast said. 'Find it the hard way, odds are.'
'You haven't got the right attitude, Sergeant,' Recared said reprovingly.
Leudast thought he had just the right attitude. He was opposed to getting killed or maimed. He was especially opposed to getting killed or maimed because some mage hadn't done his job well enough. Having the enemy kill you was part of war; he understood that. Having your own side kill you… He'd come to understand that was part of war, too, however much he hated it.
In good weather, on good roads, they would have been about ten days' march from where the fighting was now. They took quite a bit longer than that to get there. The roads, even the best of them, were far from good. Though the winter solstice was well past, the days remained short and bleak and bitterly cold, with a new blizzard rolling in out of the west every other or every third day.
And, though no redheads opposed them on the ground, the Algarvians hadn't gone away and given up after losing Sulingen. They kept being difficult whenever and wherever they could. Unkerlant was vast, and dragons even thinner in the air than soldiers and behemoths were on the ground. That meant King Mezentio's dragonfliers could fare south to visit death and destruction on the Unkerlanters moving up to assail their countrymen.
When eggs fell, Leudast dived into the closest hole he could find. When Algarvian dragons swooped low to flame, he simply leaped into the snow on his belly and hoped his white smock would keep enemy dragonfliers from noticing him. It worked; after each attack ended, he got up and started slogging north again.
Not everyone was so lucky. He'd long since got used to seeing corpses, sometimes pieces of corpses, scattered in the snow and staining it red. But once the Algarvian dragons had been lucky enough to take out a column of more than a dozen Unkerlanter behemoths and the crews who served their egg-tossers and heavy sticks. The air that day was calm and still; the stench of burnt flesh still lingered as he tramped past. Dragonfire had roasted the behemoths inside the heavy chainmail they wore to protect them from weapons mere footsoldiers could carry. Even the beasts' snowshoe-encased hooves and the iron-shod, curving horns on their noses were covered with soot from the flames the dragons had loosed.
'Last winter, I hear, the Algarvians were eating the flesh of slain behemoths,' Recared said.
He hadn't been in the fight the winter before. Leudast had. He nodded. 'Aye, they did, sir.' After a pause, he added, 'So did we.'
'Oh.' Beneath his swarthy skin, beneath the dark whiskers he'd had scant chance to scrape, Recared looked a little green. 'What… was it like?'
'Strong. Gamy,' Leudast answered. Another pause. 'A lot better than nothing.'
'Ah. Aye.' Recared nodded wisely. 'Do you suppose we'll…?'
'Not these beasts,' Leudast said. 'Not unless you want to stop and do some butchering now. If we keep going, we'll be miles away before we stop for the night.'
'That's true.' Lieutenant Recared considered. In thoughtful tones, he remarked, 'Field kitchens haven't been all they might be, have they?' Leudast started to erupt at that, then noticed the small smile on Recared's face. King Swemmel expected his soldiers to feed themselves whenever they could. Field kitchens were almost as rare as far western mountain apes roaming these plains.
The regiment ate behemoth that night, and for several days thereafter. It was as nasty as Leudast recalled. It was a lot better than the horrible stuff the Algarvians had been pouring down their throats in the last days at Sulingen, though. And, as he'd said, it was ever so much better than nothing.
A couple of nights later, thunder rumbled in the north as the Unkerlanter soldiers made camp. But it couldn't have been thunder; the sky, for once, was clear, with swarms of stars twinkling on jet black. When the weather was very cold, they seemed to twinkle more than on a mild summer night. Leudast noted that only in passing. He knew too well what that distant rumbling that went on and on meant. Scowling, he said, 'We're close enough to the fun to hear eggs bursting again. I didn't miss 'em when we couldn't, believe you me I didn't.'
'Fun?' Werbel hadn't been in the company long, but even he knew better than that. 'More chances to get killed, is what it is.'
'That's what they pay us for,' Leudast answered. 'When they bother to pay us, I mean.' He'd lost track of how far in arrears his own pay was. Months- he was sure of that much. And he should have been owed a lieutenant's pay, or a captain's, not a sergeant's, considering the job he'd been doing for more than a year. Of course, Recared should have been paid like a colonel, too.
Werbel listened to the eggs in the distance. With a sigh, he said, 'I wonder if they'll get caught up before the war ends.'
Leudast's laugh was loud, raucous, and bitter. 'Powers above, what makes you think it'll ever end?'
Sidroc was glad Forthwegians had the custom of wearing full beards. For one thing, the thick black hair on his chin and cheeks and upper lip went a little way toward keeping them warm in the savage cold of southern Unkerlant. Coming out of Gromheort in the sunny north, he'd never imagined weather like this. Had anybody told him even a quarter of the truth about it before he knew it for himself, he would have called that fellow a liar to his
