But the Algarvians had stormed into it and were doing their best to tear it to pieces--and their best had proved terribly, terrifyingly, good. “His Majesty hopes we can win the war this winter,” he said, wanting to learn what Merovec thought of that.
As a marshal’s chief aide, Merovec was at least as much a political animal, a courtier, as he was a soldier. Whatever he thought, he wasn’t about to show much of it. All he said was, “I hope his Majesty is right.”
Rathar sighed. He hoped King Swemmel was right, too, but he wouldn’t have bet a broken tunic toggle on it. Sighing again, he said, “Well, we’ll just have to do our best to make sure he is right.”
“Aye, so we will.” Merovec could agree with that, and he did, enthusiastically.
“First things first.” Rathar started to pace, then stopped in his tracks: what was he doing but imitating the king? He needed a moment to recover his caravan of thought: “We have to push the redheads as far back from Cottbus as we can. That will make it harder for them to do to us what they did to Kuusamo. And we have to keep the corridor to Glogau open, and we have to take back as much of the Duchy of Grelz as we can. We have to do that if we intend to keep eating next year, anyhow.”
“All true,” Major Merovec said. Then, thinking like a political animal, he added, “The more of Grelz we take back, the bigger the black eye we give Mezentio and his puppet king, too.”
“That’s so,” Rathar agreed. “He could have hurt us much more if he’d named one of the local nobles King of Grelz instead of his own cousin. The peasants won’t want to do anything for an Algarvian with a fancy crown on his noggin.”
After the Twinkings War, after Swemmel’s years of harsh rule, he’d feared the peasants and townsfolk of Unkerlant would welcome the Algarvians as liberators.
Some had. More would have, he suspected, had the redheads not made it so very plain they came as conquerors.
“If the foe makes mistakes, we had better take advantage of them,” he said. “He hasn’t made enough, curse him. And we’ve made too many of our own.”
No one else at Swemmel’s court would have said such a thing. Merovec looked horrified that Rathar had. “Be careful, lord Marshal,” he said. “If word of that got back to the king, either he would blame you for what goes wrong or he would think you were blaming him.”
Either of those, from Rathar’s point of view, would be equally disastrous. Nodding brusquely to acknowledge the point, the marshal of Unkerlant studied the map. An attack into Grelz was already underway. He examined the disposition of his forces. He could also attack to the northeast of Cottbus, which would keep the Algarvians from shifting troops to the south. Nodding again, he began giving orders.
Rank, or at least some rank, had finally caught up with Leudast. He was, at last, officially a sergeant. He was also commanding a company: a handful of veterans like himself, fleshed out with recruits who no longer deserved to be called fresh-faced--a few days in the line and they were as grimy and disreputable-looking as anybody else.
He wondered how many other sergeants in King Swemmel’s army were commanding companies. A lot of them, or else he was a black Zuwayzi in disguise. He also wondered when the extra pay that went with his new rank would start catching up with him. He didn’t intend to hold his breath.
Thinking about money made him laugh, anyhow. What could he do with it, up here at the front, but gamble? He couldn’t buy much--there wasn’t much to buy. And he wouldn’t hold his breath waiting for leave, either. Every man who could carry a stick was in the line these days, or so it seemed.
But, for the first time in the fight against Algarve, the Unkerlanter armies were moving forward. Leudast was almost inclined to cheer every time snow or freezing rain came pelting down, even if he had to endure them out in the open. He knew Marshal Winter had done as much to stop the redheads as Marshal Rathar had.
Somewhere not far away, eggs began bursting. The Algarvians holed up in the village northeast of the trench in which he huddled weren’t about to give up without a fight. They had plenty of egg-tossers and, no doubt, plenty of stubborn soldiers, too. A wounded man started screaming not far away. Leudast clicked his tongue between his teeth. The Algarvians might be retreating, but they weren’t making life easy for their foes.
Captain Hawart came up to Leudast, leaving tracks behind him in the snow. Hawart had started out commanding the company Leudast now led. These days, the captain was in charge of a brigade’s worth of men. He hadn’t been promoted at all and was doing a senior officer’s work on a junior officer’s pay.
He’d also grown forgetful like a senior officer, for he called, “A good day to you, Magnulf.”
“Magnulf’s dead,” Leudast said. Had he been looking out of the hole he’d shared with his sergeant when the egg burst
