back toward his own house. Clouds slid across the stars, swallowing them one after another. The air smelled damp. Maybe it would rain before morning. That would help hide what he’d been doing, and hide his tracks, too. It would also be good for the newly planted crops.
“Rain,” he murmured, clutching the crystal tight.
Eighteen
Not even snowshoes helped behemoths make their way through the bottomless mud of the spring thaw. Leudast wished the thaw would have come later than it did--exactly the opposite of what he would have wished back in his village. An early thaw meant an early planting and a long growing season. But a late thaw meant the Unkerlanter army could have kept pushing the Algarvians eastward across solid ground. Solid ground, for the next few weeks, would be hard to come by.
His company was still moving eastward, one laborious step at a time. Paved roads in Unkerlant being few and far between, the highways down which they advanced were as muddy as the fields to either side. Sometimes, because so many men and horses and unicorns and behemoths and wagons moved along them and tore up the dirt, they were muddier than the fields.
During the thaw, ordinary wagons were useless. No matter how many horses pulled them, they bogged down. But every village had a wagon or two useful in the mud or in deep snow, one with tall wheels and a curving bottom almost like that of a boat. Mud wagons could bring supplies to soldiers at the front line where everything else got stuck.
The Unkerlanter army had its own fleet of mud wagons and confiscated any it found in reconquered villages. Such confiscations were few and far between, though, because the Algarvians stole the wagons, too.
Looking back over his shoulder, Leudast saw a couple of mud wagons making their way back toward the company he led. He waved to the driver of the lead wagon. The fellow waved back, calling, “You part of Captain Hawart’s outfit?”
“That’s right,” Leudast answered. He would have said the same thing had the driver asked him if he were part of some regiment he’d never heard of. Supplies didn’t come forward so often that he could afford to let them slip through his fingers. Lying to get his hands on them seemed no sin at all.
These, which were actually meant for his unit, didn’t come forward in a hurry. Mud wagons didn’t move quickly; what set them apart from every other vehicle was that they could move at all during the thaw. Leudast had plenty of time to shout for soldiers to help unload them before they actually arrived.
“What have you got for us?” he asked as his men swarmed over the wagons.
“Oh, some of this, some of that,” the lead driver answered. “Bandages, potted meat, charges for your sticks so you won’t have to cut a captive’s throat to keep blazing, all sorts of good things.”
“I should say so,” Leudast exclaimed. Such bounty hadn’t come his way in quite a while. “Powers above, we’ve been living hand-to-mouth for so long, I don’t know what we’ll do with all this stuff.”
“Well, pal, if you don’t want it, I figure there’s plenty who do,” the driver said. He laughed to show he didn’t intend to be taken seriously. A good thing for him, too: several of Leudast’s soldiers were about to turn their sticks in his direction. They weren’t going to let him and his fellow drivers get away before they’d gone through the wagons, either.
Captain Hawart himself squelched up before the plundering was quite complete. “You can’t keep all the goodies for your own company, you know,” he told Leudast. He wasn’t laughing as he said it.
“Sir, I wouldn’t do that,” Leudast assured him.
“Of course you wouldn’t,” Hawart answered. “I’ve got my eye on you. Amazing how well people behave when somebody’s watching, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Leudast did laugh. So did Hawart, now. They understood each other pretty well.
Hawart said, “You
“Are we?” Leudast said tonelessly. “They’ll have had a deal of time to get ready for us, won’t they? And we won’t be able to come at ‘em quick and flank ‘em out, like we did so often in the snow.”
“That’s all true, every word of it,” his superior agreed. “But we’re ordered in anyhow, and so we’ll go. They aren’t supposed to have that many men holed up in the place. That’s the word coming back to us, anyhow.”
He didn’t sound as if he believed it. He didn’t look as if he believed it, either. Casting about for ways to ask how big a fiasco the ordered assault was likely to be, Leudast found one: “How hard are you going to push the attack, sir?”
