better do that. The rest of the company is going to need us even more than the captain thought they would.”
But for that luckless woman (what had she been doing?--gathering firewood, most likely), no one in the village had any notion his squad was moving around it toward the rear. Once in position, Istvan peered toward the place from behind a rock. Through blowing smoke, he saw Unkerlanter soldiers running here and there. The wind carried their guttural shouts to his ears.
One of them set an egg on the tosser’s hurling arm. Another launched the egg toward Istvan’s countrymen. Catching sight of the egg-tosser told him what he had to do next. He pointed toward it. “We’re going to take that miserable thing. The rest of the boys will have an easier time then. Forward--and don’t shout till you’re sure they’ve spied us.”
He was the first one to break cover and run toward the village. His men followed. If he went, they would go. The crunch of their boots on crusted snow seemed dreadfully loud in his ears. So did his own coughing after he sucked in too thick a lungful of smoky air.
But the tunic-clad Unkerlanters, intent on serving their egg-tosser and beating back the threat from the west, paid no attention to their rear till too late. Because of the smoke in the air, Istvan had to get closer than usual to them before he started blazing. First one of the enemy soldiers fell, then the other. The second Unkerlanter was grabbing for his own stick to blaze back when another Gyongyosian’s beam finished him.
“Gyongyos!” Istvan did shout then, as loud as he could. “Ekrekek Arpad! Gyongyos!” The rest of the squad echoed the cry. To the Unkerlanters’ frightened ears, they must have sounded like a regiment. They fought almost like a regiment, too, for the Unkerlanters, well concealed against Tivadar’s attackers, were hardly hidden at all from men coming the other way.
King Swemmel’s soldiers howled in dismay. Some tried to turn and face Istvan’s squad, but they couldn’t do that and hold off the rest of the attackers, too--they lacked the numbers. Some of them died in place. Others began throwing down their sticks, throwing up their hands, and surrendering.
Before long, the only Unkerlanters left in the ruined village were captives and a handful of the trappers and hunters and their womenfolk and children who’d lived there and hadn’t fled east. Captain Tivadar sent them all back toward land Gyongyos held more securely. Then, in front of the whole company, he spoke loudly to Istvan: “Well done, Sergeant.”
“Thank you, sir,” Istvan said. Another few years of tiny victories like this, and the armies of Gyongyos might be in position for something larger. Istvan wondered if he’d live to see it.
As the sun sank below the western horizon, the Algarvian strawboss shouted, “Going home!” Along with the rest of his labor gang, Leofsig laid down his sledgehammer with a weary sigh of relief. The Algarvian strode through the gang handing out the day’s pay: a small silver bit for Forthwegian laborers, half that much in copper for the handful of Kaunians.
A wagon came rattling up to take the gang back to Gromheort over the road they’d been paving; they were too far from the city to walk without adding unduly to their exhaustion. The blonds got the job of rounding up all the tools before the gang boss let them climb into the wagon, too. Like the Forthwegians, they sprawled limply over the wagon bed.
“Here, get off me,” a Forthwegian growled at one of them. “Ought to send the whole lot of you whoresons west. Then we’d be rid of you.”
“Oh, don’t go unbuttoning your tunic, Oslac,” Leofsig said. “We’re all too tired to see straight.”
Oslac glared at him, eyes glittering in the twilight. But Leofsig was bigger, stronger, and younger than the other laborer, whose dark beard was streaked with gray. Leofsig had been conscripted into King Penda’s levy not long before Forthweg began her disastrous war against Algarve and still thought of a man of thirty as one bearing respectable years. Knowing himself outmatched, Oslac did no more than mutter, “Stinking Kaunians.”
“We all stink, too,” Leofsig said, and Oslac could hardly argue with him there. He went on, “Let it alone, why don’t you?”
Had some of Oslac’s comrades backed him, he might have taken it further. Even the laborers who hated Kaunians worse than he did, though, seemed too worn to care. A couple of men had already started snoring. Leofsig rather envied them; no matter how much he’d done during the day, he couldn’t hope to sleep on bare boards in an unsprung wagon jouncing over cobblestones.
An hour or so later--just enough time for him to start to go stiff--the wagon clattered into Gromheort. He helped shake the sleepers awake, then creakily descended from the wagon and started home.
The Kaunian he’d defended, a fellow named Peitavas, fell into step beside him. “My thanks,” he said in his own language, which Leofsig spoke fairly well.
“It’s all right,” Leofsig answered in Forthwegian; he was too spent to look for words in another tongue. “Go home. Stay there. Stay safe.”
