stick and blazed. He was almost too late; Simanu had already started to swing back toward him. But his beam caught Simanu in the face. The count wailed and went limp. Skarnu waited to see no more, but dashed back toward the trees.
When he stood panting by Merkela again, she kissed him as ferociously as she had when he’d shouted against Simanu in Pavilosta’s market square. “Let’s get out of here,” he said when, after some long and mostly enjoyable time, he broke free. She didn’t argue with him. Neither did any of the other raiders--he’d won his spurs today. But even as he fled, he wondered what the Algarvians would do tomorrow, or the day after that.
Officially, Leudast remained a corporal. No one had bothered with the paperwork that would have promoted him. Unkerlant had neither time nor energy to spare on paperwork these days. Unkerlant had neither time nor energy to spare for anything save survival, and even survival looked to be too much to hope for.
Unofficially, Leudast led a couple of squads in the company Sergeant Magnulf just as unofficially commanded. Captain Hawart headed the regiment of which that company was a part. None of them had the rank for his job. They were all still alive and still fighting back against the Algarvians--a less formal qualification, but good enough.
Cold, wet, filthy, and frightened, Leudast peered east out of the hole in the ground he shared with Magnulf. One thought was uppermost in his mind: “When are they going to do it again?”
“Curse me if I know,” Magnulf answered wearily. He looked as worn and disheveled as Leudast felt. Spitting into the mud at the bottom of the hole, he went on, “I could fight the redheads. Aye, they kept coming forward, but they paid for every inch of ground they stole from us. But this . . .” He shook his head, a man caught in the grip of horror.
“This,” Leudast echoed. He shook his head, too. “And what are we doing to fight back? We keep bringing up more men, but so what? The Algarvians murder another raft of poor whoresons who never did ‘em any harm, and they smash right through us again.” He looked over his shoulder, toward the southwest. “If they smash through us two or three times more, they’re in Cottbus, and what do we do then?”
He only half heard Magnulf s reply; he’d spotted a soldier trudging through the pitted muck toward them. The fellow called, “Captain Hawart’s coming up to the front, and he’s got some big blaze with him.”
Leudast glanced over at Magnulf, who still outranked him. With an angry gesture, Magnulf said, “Aye, tell ‘em to come ahead. We’ll give ‘em pheasant under glass, just like we’re having, and they can sleep on the same featherbeds we use.”
With a couple of chunks of stale, moldy bread in his wallet and a grimy blanket for a mattress, Leudast couldn’t help snickering. The soldier shrugged and trotted away. He’d delivered his message. Past that, he didn’t care what happened.
In a lazy sort of way, the Algarvians started lobbing eggs at the line the Unkerlanters held. A couple landed close enough to the hole in which Leudast and Magnulf sheltered to splash fresh mud onto them. “The captain would come forward in this,” Leudast said, “but any big blaze’d turn up his toes--or else pick ‘em up and run away.” He paused, considered, and corrected himself: “Any big blaze but Marshal Rathar. He was right there in the thick of it up in Zuwayza.”
“He’s not afraid to mix it,” Magnulf agreed. Now he looked back toward the rear, and a moment later let out a low whistle of surprise. “Turns out you’re wrong. Here comes the captain, and he’s got somebody in a clean tunic with him.”
Hawart got down into the hole with Leudast and Magnulf without hesitation; he knew it could keep him alive. The fellow with him, a clever-looking man of middle years, got into it with wrinkled lip, as if fearing his tunic wouldn’t stay clean.
“Sir,” Hawart said to him, “let me present to you Magnulf and Leudast. They’ve been in this fight from the start, and they want to stay in it to the finish. Boys, this is Archmage Addanz, the top wizard in the whole kingdom.”
“King Swemmel has seen fit to honor me with the highest rank,” Addanz said. “Whether I have the highest skill in all the land may perhaps be a different question.”
Leudast wasn’t inclined to quibble. “Then you can stop the Algarvians when they hurl their magic at us?” he asked eagerly.
“That’d be wonderful,” Magnulf exclaimed. “Let us fight the redheads man against man, and we’ll lick ‘em.” The Unkerlanters hadn’t licked King Mezentio’s men even before they started using their blood-soaked magecraft, but they’d fought hard enough to lend Magnulf’s words some weight.
One look at Addanz’s face told Leudast his first wild hope was indeed too wild. “You can’t do it,” he said. He didn’t mean it to sound like an accusation, but that was how it came out.
“I cannot do it, not yet,” the archmage said. “I do not know if I will ever be able to do such a thing. What I can do, what I hope to do now, is to drop an egg on them of the same sort as they have been dropping on us.”
