never imagined that Swemmel's men would handle them so well, either.
When a well-placed Algarvian egg knocked over one of those behemoths, he let out a cheer. 'See, boys?' he said. 'We can still lick 'em. No point in running if you see a couple of enemy beasts and you haven't got any of your own close by.'
That had happened a few times in this battle. The Algarvians were used to sending their foes fleeing in panic with their behemoths. They were anything but used to being on the receiving end of panic. But any army's nerve wore thin if its men were fought as hard as they could be and then three steps more besides. Every so often, troops would scream, 'Behemoths!' and run the other way when a couple of Unkerlanter beasts showed themselves over the top of a rise.
Captain Turpino limped up to Spinello. His left calf was bandaged; he'd taken a blaze between the top of his boot and the bottom of his kilt. But he refused to leave the field. Spinello was glad to have him here. Turpino was about as far from lovable as a man could get, but he knew his business.
Now he said, 'Sir, looks like that little tiny rise there' -he pointed- 'will screen us from the worst of what the Unkerlanters can throw at us and still let us move east toward the real high ground.'
Spinello considered. His nod, when he gave it, was hesitant. 'Aye, unless the Unkerlanters see that, too, and they've got a brigade lying in wait for us.'
With a shrug, Turpino answered, 'Sir, they've been lying in wait for us ever since we started this attack. You want to know what I think, somebody's head ought to roll for that.'
'I'm not saying you're wrong, but you ought to have a care there,' Spinello told him. 'People I believe tell me this attack went in at the orders of his Majesty himself.'
'Mezentio's a good king. That doesn't necessarily make him a good general,' Turpino said. 'And what's he going to do to me? Boil me alive the way Swemmel might? Not likely! Besides, what can he do to me that's worse than what we've gone through these past two weeks?'
'Good question,' Spinello admitted. 'The sort of question, though, where you may not want to find out the answer.'
'I'll worry later,' Turpino said. 'Right now, the only thing I'm going to worry about is staying alive through this cursed fight. If I manage that, King Mezentio is welcome to whatever's left of my carcass afterwards.'
Nodding, Spinello shouted for a crystallomancer. When an officer-by-courtesy with a crystal trotted over to him, he said, 'Can you get hold of the fellow commanding the behemoths in front of us?'
'I can try, sir,' the crystallomancer said. 'You've got to remember, though, in a field as crowded as this, that Swemmel's men are liable to pick up some of our emanations, the same way we steal theirs every chance we get.'
'I'll keep it in mind,' Spinello said. 'Now get him.'
'Aye, sir.' The crystallomancer murmured the charm. After his crystal flared with light, an officer on a behemoth appeared in it. Actually, Spinello couldn't see much of him, for the brim of his iron helmet almost covered his eyes, while cheekpieces hid most of the rest of his face. Spinello knew he'd be wearing chain and plate on his body, too. He didn't have to haul the weight around; his behemoth did.
He listened to Spinello, then eyed the ground ahead himself. After a moment, he nodded. 'All right, Major, we'll go that way. Once we make it up to the top of the big rise, then we'll see what we see.'
'How do you like our chances?' Spinello asked.
'We're short a few behemoths, or maybe more than a few, down in the southeast,' the other officer answered. 'Swemmel's whoresons held 'em up longer than we expected. But we ought to be able to do the job just the same.'
'Good,' Spinello said.
'It'll have to do,' said the fellow on the behemoth. 'And now- farewell.' He vanished from the crystal. The crystallomancer put it back into his pack.
The behemoths turned to use the track Captain Turpino had suggested. Spinello blew his whistle. 'Follow me!' he shouted- a cry that made Algarvian footsoldiers respect and obey the men who led them. Then he added another cry that was more likely to keep the men of Battle Group Spinello alive: pointing to the behemoths, he yelled, 'Follow them!'
For half a mile or so, everything went very well- so well, in fact, that Spinello started to get suspicious. His eyes went back and forth, back and forth. He kept expecting hordes of drunken Unkerlanters to leap from trenches on either flank and rush toward his men with shouts of, 'Urra!'
But the trouble, when it came, came from the front. The Unkerlanters crouched in their holes and waited till the wedges of behemoths were almost upon them. Some of those holes were so hard to spot, Spinello guessed they had sorcery covering them. When Swemmel's men did pop up and start blazing, even they weren't so rash- or so drunk- as to charge. Instead, they ducked down again and waited for the Algarvian onslaught.
They didn't have long to wait. The behemoths tossed eggs into their trenches. 'Forward!' Spinello shouted again. 'Loose order!' The men he led probably could have done the job without commands. They'd done it before, some of them countless times. Having behemoths along to help was, if anything, an unusual luxury. They advanced by rushes, some soldiers blazing while others moved ahead. The Unkerlanters had an unpleasant choice: keep their heads down till they were slaughtered in their holes or come out and try to get away.
More often than not, most of them would have died in place. Here, rather to Spinello's surprise, most of them fled. Maybe it's the behemoths, he thought. If we can be twitchy about theirs, no reason they shouldn't be twitchy about ours.
Whatever the reason, running did the Unkerlanters little good. More eggs from the Algarvian behemoths burst among them, flinging them this way and that like broken toys. When the beam from a heavy stick caught a man in the back, he didn't just go down. He also went up- in flames.
'Forward!' Spinello shouted. Every step took Battle Group Spinello- and the behemoths with it- closer to the high ground at the heart of the salient. If the Algarvians could get up there in numbers, if they could move quickly once they did, this great, bloody grapple might yet turn out to have been worthwhile.
But one of the Unkerlanter officers must have had a crystal, and must have used it before he fell. The Algarvians hadn't gone far past the Unkerlanter trench line before eggs began dropping among them. Spinello curled himself into a ball behind a boulder. The big gray rock shielded him from the energies of eggs bursting in front of it. It would do him no good if eggs burst in back of it. He preferred not to dwell on that.
Somewhere not far away, an Unkerlanter was down and shrieking for his mother in a high, shrill voice. His cries went on and on, then cut off abruptly. Somebody, Spinello supposed, had put him out of his agony. He hoped someone would do the same for him if the need arose. Even more, he hoped it never would. He aimed to die in bed, preferably with company.
Despite the eggs falling among its men and behemoths, Battle Group Spinello fought its way forward. Spinello noticed the ground rising more sharply under his feet than it had before. 'We're getting where we need to go,' he called, pointing ahead. 'If we can get up there in strength, if we can drive the Unkerlanters back once we do it, nothing we've been through will have mattered. We'll rip Swemmel's boys a new arsehole, and then we'll go on and win this war. Mezentio and victory!'
'Mezentio and victory!' the soldiers shouted. They were veterans. They knew he was telling them the truth. As long as they could keep going forward, they would finally battle their way past the last Unkerlanter defensive line. Then it would be fighting in open country, and Swemmel's soldiers had never been able to match them in that. Destroy the Durrwangen bulge, destroy the Unkerlanter armies here, and who could say what might happen after that?
The Unkerlanters might have drawn the same conclusion. If they had, they liked it less than Spinello had. More eggs fell on the advancing Algarvians, forcing footsoldiers to go to earth and separating them from the behemoths, which made life more difficult for all of Mezentio's men. Algarvian egg-tossers and Algarvian dragons went hunting the enemy's tossers.
But Algarvian dragons didn't have everything their own way, not here. Dragons painted rock-gray swooped down on Battle Group Spinello. Unkerlanter dragons had contested the sky west of here ever since this battle began. Some of them tried to flame behemoths. Others dropped still more eggs on the Algarvian footsoldiers.
Spinello was running toward the crater one egg had blown in the ground when another burst close by. All at once, he wasn't running anymore, but flying through the air. He landed in a thornbush, which tore at him but probably saved him from the worse damage he would have got slamming into the ground.
