him. 'It's begun,' the marshal said. Vatran nodded. Rathar went on, 'Now we'll know. One way or the other, we'll know.'
'What?' Addanz needed a moment to recognize the sound. When the archmage did, he blanched a little. 'How shall I go back to the center now?'
'Carefully,' Rathar answered, and threw back his head and laughed. Addanz looked most offended. Rathar hardly cared. At last, after longer than he'd expected, the waiting was over.
Even Sergeant Werferth, who had been a soldier for a long time, first in Forthweg's army and then in Plegmund's Brigade, was impressed. 'Look at 'em, boys, he said. 'Just look at 'em. You ever see so fornicating many behemoths in one place in all your born days?'
Sirdoc wrinkled his nose. 'Smell 'em, boys,' he said, doing his best to imitate his sergeant. 'Just smell 'em. You ever smell so fornicating many behemoths in one place in all your born days?'
Everybody in the squad laughed- even Ceorl, who was about as eager to fight Sidroc as the Unkerlanters; even Werferth, who seldom took kindly to being lampooned. They all had to laugh. Sidroc's joke held altogether too much truth. Algarve had indeed assembled a great host of behemoths to hurl against the western flank of the Unkerlanter salient around Durrwangen. And those behemoths did indeed stink. They'd been moving up toward the front for days now, and the air was thick with the rotten-grass reek of their droppings.
It was also thick with flies, which buzzed around the behemoths and their droppings, and which weren't too proud to visit the waiting men and their latrines as well. Like the other soldiers in Plegmund's Brigade, like the Algarvians with them, Sidroc slapped all the time.
Like everybody else, he also did his best to be careful where he put his feet. He knew all about stepping in horse turds. Who didn't, by smelly experience? But a horse turd dirtied the bottom of a shoe, and maybe a bit of the upper. Behemoths were a lot bigger than horses. Their droppings were in proportion. Those who didn't notice them in the weeds and rank grassland and unattended fields had enormous reason to regret it.
An Algarvian senior lieutenant named Ercole had replaced the late Captain Zerbino as company commander. Sidroc wondered how Ercole had got to be senior to anybody; he doubted the redhead had as many years as his own eighteen. Ercole's mustache, far from the splendid waxed spikes his countrymen adored, was hardly more than copper fuzz. But he sounded calm and confident as he said, 'Once the eggs stop falling, we go in alongside the behemoths. We protect them, they protect us. We all go forward together. The cry is, 'Mezentio and victory!' '
He waited expectantly. 'Mezentio and victory!' shouted the Forthwegians of Plegmund's Brigade. The Brigade might have been named after their own great king, but it served Algarve's.
Were any Unkerlanters close enough to hear? Sidroc didn't suppose it mattered. They'd soon hear a lot of that cry. With the help of the powers above, it would be the last cry a lot of them heard.
Algarvian egg-tossers began to fling then. Sidroc whooped at the great roar of bursts to the east of him. And it went on and on, seemingly without end. 'There won't be anything left alive by the time they're through!' He had to shout even to hear himself through the din.
'Oh, yes, there will.' Sergeant Werferth was shouting, too. His shout held grim certainty: 'There always is, curse it.'
As if to prove him right on the spot, Unkerlanter egg-tossers began hurling sorcerous energy back at the Algarvians. There didn't seem to be so many of them, and they flung fewer eggs, but they hadn't gone away, either. Sidroc wished they would have. He crouched in a hole scraped in the ground and hoped for the best. Not a lot of Unkerlanter eggs were falling close by. He approved of that, and hoped it would go on.
Algarvian dragons flew by overhead at what would have been treetop height had any trees grown close by. They had eggs slung under their bellies to add to those the tossers were flinging. Not long after they struck Swemmel's men, fewer eggs flew back toward the Algarvian army of which Plegmund's Brigade was a part.
The pounding from the Algarvian side kept on. 'They've put everything they've got into this, haven't they?' Sidroc shouted.
This time, Ceorl answered him: 'Aye, they have. Including us.'
Sidroc grunted. He wished Ceorl wouldn't have put it quite like that. He also wished he could have found some way to disagree with the ruffian.
At last, after what seemed like forever but was probably a couple of hours, the Algarvian egg-tossers stopped as abruptly as they'd begun. All up and down the line, officers' whistles shrilled. They didn't seem so much of a much, not to Sidroc's battered ears. But they were enough to send men and behemoths trotting forward against the foe.
Lieutenant Ercole blew his whistle as lustily as anyone else. 'Forward!' he shouted. 'Mezentio and victory!'
'Mezentio and victory!' Sidroc shouted as he scrambled out of his hole. He kept shouting it as he went forward, too. So did the rest of the Forthwegians in Plegmund's Brigade. They wore tunics. They had dark hair and proud hooked noses. Even though they wore beards, they didn't want excitable Algarvians- and what other kind were there? -taking them for Unkerlanters and blazing them by mistake.
If anything or anyone had stayed alive in the tormented landscape ahead, Sidroc had trouble understanding how. After a good part of a year in action, he reckoned himself a connoisseur of ruined terrain, and this churned, smoking, cratered ground was as bad as any he'd ever seen.
And then, off to his right, a new crater opened. A flash of sorcerous energy and a brief shriek marked the passage of an Algarvian soldier. Someone shouted an altogether unnecessary warning: 'They've buried eggs in the ground!'
All at once, Sidroc wanted to tippytoe forward. Then, a little farther away, an egg burst under a behemoth. That one blast of sorcerous energy touched off all the eggs the behemoth was carrying. Its crew had no chance. Sidroc wondered if any pieces would come down, or if the men were altogether destroyed.
And he couldn't tippytoe despite the buried eggs, another of which blew up a soldier not too far from him. However many eggs the tossers had rained down on the ground ahead, they hadn't got rid of all the Unkerlanters. Sidroc hadn't really expected they would, but he had hoped. No such luck. Swemmel's men popped up out of holes and started blazing at the soldiers struggling through the belt of buried eggs. Going fast meant you might miss whatever signs there were on the ground to warn you an egg lay concealed beneath it. Going slow meant the Unkerlanters had a better chance to blaze you.
Shouting, 'Mezentio and victory!' at the top of his lungs, Sidroc dashed ahead. He might get through to unblighted ground. If he stayed where he was, he would get blazed. Lieutenant Ercole was shouting and waving all his men on, so Sidroc supposed he'd done the right thing.
When the crews of the Algarvian behemoths saw targets, they lobbed eggs at them or blazed at them with heavy sticks. Fewer beams tore at the advancing soldiers. Men ahead of Sidroc were battling Unkerlanters in their holes. He saw a man in a rock-gray tunic show his head and shoulders as he looked for a target. That was enough- too much, in fact. Sidroc blazed the Unkerlanter down.
'Keep moving!' Ercole screamed. 'You've got to keep moving. This is how we beat them- with speed and movement!' By all the news sheets Sidroc had read back in Gromheort before joining Plegmund's Brigade, by all the training he'd had, by all the fighting he'd seen, the company commander was right.
But it wouldn't be easy, not here it wouldn't. The Unkerlanters had known they were coming- had probably known for a long time. They'd fortified this ground as best they could. It didn't look like much, but obstacles- tree trunks, ditches, mud- made the going slower than it would have been otherwise. Those obstacles also channeled the advancing men and behemoths in certain directions- right into more waiting Unkerlanters.
As soon as the Algarvians and the men of Plegmund's Brigade got in among the first belt of Unkerlanter defenders, others farther back began blazing at them from long range. More obstacles slowed their efforts to get at the Unkerlanters who now revealed themselves. Men on both sides fell as if winnowed. Algarvian behemoths went down, too, here and there, though few Unkerlanter behemoths were yet in the fight.
At last, around noon, Mezentio's men cleared that first stubborn belt of defenders. Ercole was almost beside himself. 'We aren't keeping up with the plan!' he cried. 'We're falling behind!'
'Sir, we've done everything we could,' Sergeant Werferth said. 'We're still here. We're still moving.'
'Not fast enough.' Ercole stuck his whistle in his mouth and blew a long, piercing blast. 'Onward!'
