in the hills chopping wood, but he did.
Snow blew into Tealdo’s face. It numbed his left side worse than his right, for he still marched northwest, in the direction of Cottbus, while the wind roared up from the southwest, from the austral continent and the ice-clogged Narrow Sea. He wasn’t used to snow; growing up in the north of Algarve, he’d seen it but seldom before joining King Mezentio’s army. His education in such matters was advancing faster than he’d ever wanted.
Beside him, Trasone let out a chuckle: either that or Tealdo’s friend was starting to come down with pneumonia. “You look like a scarecrow,” Trasone said, raising his voice to be heard over the endless ravening wind.
“Heh,” Tealdo answered. “Nobody’d pinch your bum if you were walking along the streets of Trapani dressed like that, either.”
“Too true,” Trasone said. “Aye, it’s too true. What we both look like is a couple of madmen who bought out a rummage sale.”
“Everybody in the whole regiment looks the same way,” Trasone said. “If we’d had some decent winter gear shipped out to us, we wouldn’t have had to steal from every Unkerlanter village we went through, either.”
An inspecting officer would have had trouble proving he was even in uniform.
He had on a long Unkerlanter tunic over his short tunic and kilt, a horse blanket over that, and a rabbit-fur cap on his head in place of the dapper but not nearly warm enough hat he’d been issued. Trasone s garb was similarly outlandish.
“Winter gear?” Trasone chuckled again, sounding even more ghastly than before. “They’re having trouble shipping Kaunians forward to kill, and you’re worrying about winter gear? Too stinking many Unkerlanters running around loose behind us, and with what they do to ley lines, it’s like the powers below have been eating them.”
“That’s all so, no doubt about it.” Tealdo paused to knock snow--and possibly frozen snot with it--out of his mustache. “But if I freeze to death, I’m not going to care about the miserable Kaunians.”
“I don’t know if we’d have got as far as we have without slaughtering them,” Trasone said.
“You just said they’re having trouble bringing the blond buggers forward, but we’re still advancing,” Tealdo said. “What does that tell you about how much difference they’ve made?”
Trasone shook his head, which made the earflaps of his own looted fur cap flop up and down. “You won’t sneak that by me so easy. Now that it’s snowing, the ground’s frozen up, and our behemoths can get going again.”
As if to prove his point, a couple of the big beasts trotted past the footsoldiers. The behemoths were draped in stolen blankets, too. Their riders had covered them in preference to covering themselves. If the behemoths froze to death, their crewmen turned into footsoldiers, and not very useful footsoldiers at that. One of the men waved a mittened hand to Tealdo and Trasone. Tealdo waved back. He wore mittens, too, which kept the fellow on the behemoth from seeing the gesture he shaped.
He went back to the argument with Trasone: “The footing’s better for the Unkerlanter behemoths, too, you know.”
“Ahh, that doesn’t help them so much,” Trasone said with a scornful wave. “The Unkerlanters mostly don’t know what to do with behemoths even when the ground is all right. A good thing, too, or we’d both likely be dead by now.”
Tealdo thought about rising to that to that even though he knew it was true. But he saw a couple of men standing by a series of low rises in the snow. He needed a moment to realize the men were mages; they looked as draggled as everyone else in the Algarvian army these days. “What’s toward?” he called to them.
“See for yourself,” one of them answered, though the wind almost blew his words away from Tealdo. Curious, Tealdo ambled over. The mage kicked at one of the ridges in the snow. It turned out to be the body of an Unkerlanter: not a soldier, but a peasant woman. Her throat had been cut. The mage said, “This is how they fight back against us--with their folk as victims.”
“Me, I’d sooner kill Kaunians than Algarvians--I’ll say that,” Tealdo remarked. “But if we’re doing it and now they’re doing it, too, wouldn’t it be better if both sides stopped, since it’s pretty much evened out?”
“If one side stopped and not the other, that could mean--would mean--disaster,” the mage said. “Sometimes climbing onto a wolf is easier than climbing off again.”
“Maybe somebody should have thought of that before we went and got into this lousy war with Unkerlant in the first place,” Tealdo said. “This is a cursed big wolf, and I ought to know. I’ve walked
