pursued them. So did beams from the Algarvians’ sticks.
“Obliged!” Tealdo shouted back toward the behemoths and their crews. One of the soldiers on the behemoth with a heavy stick waved his fur hat in reply.
“I’d be even more obliged if they’d got here sooner,” Trasone said as he and his comrades rose to go after the Unkerlanters.
“So would I, but they can’t be having an easy time there,” Tealdo said. “Look how much trouble it is for them to move in deep snow.”
“This is Unkerlant. This is winter, or near enough as makes no difference,” Trasone said. “The snow’s not going to up and disappear, not for a cursed long time it’s not. How much good are the behemoths going to be till then?”
“Not as much as we’d like, odds are,” Tealdo replied. “But the Unkerlanters won’t have it any easier than we do.”
“I want them to have it harder than we do, curse ‘em up one side and down the other,” Trasone said. “I want to lick the whoresons out of Cottbus, I want to help make sure they can’t give us any trouble for a long time afterwards, and then, by the powers above, I want to go home. A lot of places in Algarve, it hardly snows at all.”
“I know--I’m from one of them,” Tealdo said wistfully. “Come on. Before we lick them out of Cottbus, we’ve got to lick them out of those woods there.”
Before the Algarvians went in after the Unkerlanters, the behemoth with the egg-tosser flung death in among the trees. But it was tossing blind, without any visible targets. King Swemmel’s men still showed plenty of fight when the troopers who followed Galafrone came to close quarters with them. Some of the fighting in the shadow of the pines and birches was with knives and with sticks swung club-fashion; men came on enemies too close to let them swing up their sticks and blaze.
A few Unkerlanters surrendered. More, though, fought till they were killed or retreated northwest, to take yet another stab somewhere else at holding the Algarvians away from Cottbus. When Galafrone’s men emerged to continue the pursuit, Unkerlanter egg-tossers made them dive for cover.
“I enjoy this so much, don’t you?” Trasone said, lifting his mouth an inch or so off the snow to speak.
“Aye, of course,” Tealdo answered. “But we’re still moving ahead, powers above be praised. We’ll get there yet.”
Nine
Halfway along the road from Gromheort to the village of Hwinca, the paving gave out. Bembo discovered that the hard way, by going into the mud almost up to his boot tops. Cursing, the Algarvian constable slogged through the soggy patch and up onto drier--if no more paved--ground.
“Don’t blaze my ears on account of it,” advised Oraste, whose boots were also befouled. “Take it out on the Kaunians when we finally get to this miserable place.”
“I will, by the powers above,” Bembo growled. “If it weren’t for them, I’d be sitting back in the barracks, all warm and cozy.” He was always ready to feel sorry for himself. “As a matter of fact, if it weren’t for those miserable buggers, we wouldn’t have a war, and I’d be back in Tricarico, happy as a clam at the beach, and not stuck here in stinking Forthweg.”
Sergeant Pesaro looked over at him. “Remember, while you’re cursing the Kaunians, odds are they’re cursing us, too. I don’t expect they’ll be as easy to round up here as they were in that Oyngestun place--too many stories going around about what happens after they go west.”
“They deserve it,” Oraste said. “Bembo’s right, Sergeant--weren’t for them, we wouldn’t have a war.”
Bembo wondered if Oraste was feeling well. The dour constable hardly ever agreed with him. Bembo also wondered if the Kaunians really deserved it. Most of the time, he tried not to wonder about that. It did no good. He’d been ordered to gather them together and send them off to the west. He couldn’t do anything about what happened to them afterwards. “What point, then, to puzzling over who deserved what?
The constables tramped through a hamlet of half a dozen houses. An old woman on her knees in an herb garden looked up as they went. Her nose was like a sickle blade. Her chin almost met it. Her face was a tight-woven net of wrinkles. Her smile . . . Her smile chilled Bembo’s heart. He’d seen some raddled old procuresses in his day, but none who could match the ancient, exultant evil this Forthwegian crone showed.
“No blonds here,” she called in bad Algarvian made worse by her being almost toothless. “Blonds
“Aye, granny, we know,” Pesaro answered. With a chortle and a nasty smirk, the peasant woman went back to her weeding.
Oraste chuckled. “She loves Kaunians, too,
