“Never can tell,” Bembo said--he’d heard of plenty of rich Algarvians with peculiar tastes, so why not a Forthwegian, too? Turning to the woman, he asked, “What do you say he wanted from you?”
“My mouth,” she answered at once. “I know him--he’s too lazy to screw.”
Ignoring the Forthwegian’s bellow of fury, Bembo glanced at the knees of the Kaunian woman’s trousers. They had fresh mud on them. He hefted the bludgeon. “Pay up,” he told the Forthwegian.
The man cursed and fumed, but reached into his belt pouch and slapped silver into the Kaunian woman’s hand. He stomped off, still muttering under his breath. The Kaunian woman eyed Bembo. “Now I suppose you’ll take half of this--or maybe all of it,” she said.
“No,” he answered, and then wondered why. A small offering to make up for all the blonds he’d herded into caravan cars? He didn’t know. Then he had a new thought. “There’s something else you might do....”
“I wondered if you’d say that,” she answered with weary cynicism. “Well, come here.” When he walked out of the alley a few minutes later, he was whistling. This had all the makings of a fine morning.
Retreat again, retreat through heavy snow even this far north. Leudast shivered and cursed and tugged at the hem of his white smock as he stumbled along what might have been the road running back toward Cottbus. Algarvian dragons thought it was the road; eggs kept falling out of the sky along with the snow. Every so often, Unkerlanter soldiers would shriek as one of the eggs burst close enough to wound.
“Sir,” Leudast called out Captain Hawart when the regimental commander came close enough to recognize, “sir, are we going to be able to hold them out of the capital?”
“They won’t take Cottbus till every last man defending it is dead,” Hawart said.
For a moment, that reassured Leudast. Then he realized that all those deaths might not be enough. He trudged past a small field littered with corpses: Unkerlanter peasants slain by Unkerlanter mages in a desperate effort to blunt the power of the murderous sorcery the redheads aimed at their kingdom.
What sort of funeral pyre would King Swemmel light to hold the Algarvians out of Cottbus? Thinking about it made Leudast’s blood run colder than the miserable winter weather around him. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. If it didn’t, he and his battered comrades would have to be the ones who kept it from happening.
Some great shapes came lumbering across a field toward him. He started to bring up his stick, an automatic--and mostly futile--reaction whenever he saw behemoths. From behind him, Sergeant Magnulf called, “Don’t blaze at those buggers. They’re ours.”
The behemoths were indeed moving east, to oppose the advancing Algarvians. “We do keep sending ‘em into the fight,” Leudast allowed. “Now if only they’d last a little longer, we’d be better off.”
He didn’t realize a village lay ahead till he was marching through its outskirts.
“Peel off!” Hawart shouted to his men. “Peel off! We’re going to make a stand here. We’re going to make a stand at every village we come to from now on. We’re going to keep making stands till none of us is left standing.”
Leudast went into a peasant hut much like the one in which he’d lived till King Swemmel’s impressers dragged him into the army. Being out of the wind made him feel warmer. He peered through a window, then nodded. He had a good view to the east, though with the snow he didn’t know how soon he’d see the Algarvians. But they would see him no sooner.
He’d hardly found a spot he liked before the Algarvians started tossing eggs at the village. The flimsy walls of the hut shook around Leudast; he wondered if the roof beams were going to come down on his head. “Efficiency,” he said, with no small bitterness. King Swemmel preached it. The Algarvians seemed to know what it really meant. All through the war, their egg-tossers had kept up with the fighting better than Unkerlant’s.
He knew what was coming next. After they’d softened up the position with eggs, the Algarvians would probe it and try to outflank it. He didn’t know what sort of defenses lay to either side. He did know the redheads would get a bloody nose if they tried pounding straight through.
“Here they come!” somebody shouted.
Leudast peered through the window. Sure enough, little dark shapes were moving toward him through the snow. The Algarvians hadn’t thought to use white smocks and hoods of their own to make themselves less conspicuous against an equally white background. Knowing Mezentio’s men could overlook something like that made Leudast feel oddly better.
He rested his stick on the bottom of the
