himself.
“Surrender!” an Unkerlanter officer shouted in Algarvian. That was a word Leudast had learned.
“Mezentio!” was the only answer the officer got. The Algarvians intended to fight it out in the village. Captain Hawart had said reinforcements were coming to help the regiment he commanded these days. Leudast wondered if the redheads expected help from their friends, too.
If they did, best to finish them now, before that help arrived. “Follow me!” Leudast shouted to his comrades and leaped down into the trenches. To his vast relief, the Unkerlanters he led did follow. Had they hung back, he wouldn’t have lasted long.
As things were, he’d never found himself in such a vicious little fight. The Algarvians might have been used to overwhelming all the foes in their path, but they did not shy away from combat with the odds against them. Nor did they hang back from fighting at close quarters. Some of the work Leudast did was with his stick used as a club and with his knife: warfare as it had been in the days of the Kaunian Empire, and even before.
The last few Algarvians threw down their sticks and surrendered. They looked as frightened as Leudast would have had he been trying to yield to them. “They aren’t nine feet tall and covered with spines after all,” he said to Magnulf.
“No, so they’re not,” Magnulf agreed. He was tying a rag around his arm. Blood soaked through the wool; one of the Algarvians had had a knife, too. “Not too bad,” he told Leudast. “Should heal well enough--and that cursed redhead isn’t going to stick anybody else, believe you me he won’t.”
“Good,” Leudast said. He thought he’d come through without a scratch till he discovered a cut on one leg. He had no idea when he’d got it. In the heat of battle, he hadn’t noticed it till now.
Villagers--those who hadn’t fled or been killed--began coming out of their battered homes to shake the hands of the Unkerlanter soldiers. Some of them held out jugs of spirits. “We would have had more,” one of them said, “but these redheaded swine”--he spat in the direction of the Algarvian captives--”stole everything they could find. Still, they did not find it all.”
An old woman pointed to the captives. “What will you do with them now?”
“Send them off to a camp, I suppose,” Captain Hawart answered. “We start killing them in cold blood, they’ll do the same to our men.”
“But they deserve to die,” the woman shouted angrily. “They killed us. They took a couple of our girls to enjoy. They stole. They burned.”
Captain Hawart’s smile was hard and unpleasant. “They’ll have a thin time of it, granny, I promise you that.”
“Not thin enough.” Stubborn as an ox, the old woman stuck out her chin.
Hawart did not argue with her. He detailed a couple of men to take the captives back to the rear. As the Algarvians stumbled away, glad to keep on breathing, he waved his own men forward. “Up to the stream,” he told them. “See? It went just the way we planned it.”
So it had. Leudast scratched his head. He wasn’t used to things going as planned. Even retreats had been botched lately. Now the regiment had successfully advanced against the Algarvian army, the army that had thrown all foes back in confusion. Did that mean the line of the stream would hold after all? Leudast was willing to find out.
A couple of Algarvian behemoths came up toward the eastern back of the stream. Leudast suddenly got less optimistic about holding the position the regiment had just gained--to say nothing of living much longer. He hoped the redheads would come close enough to let him blaze them off their great beasts. But they were too warwise for that. They started tossing eggs at the Unkerlanters defending Pfreimd and the streambank from a range at which Leudast and his comrades could not hurt them.
But the Unkerlanter egg-tossers that had lobbed packets of sorcerous energy at the redheads in Pfreimd now shifted their attention to the behemoths on the other side of the stream. By chance, one of their eggs burst right on top of one of the beasts. That burst all the eggs the behemoth carried. Leudast shouted himself hoarse. More eggs burst all around the other behemoths and wounded or killed one of the men atop it, but it trotted away from the stream faster than it had advanced.
“Powers above. We held them.” Leudast knew he shouldn’t have sounded astonished, but he couldn’t help himself. Magnulf nodded, looking astonished, too.
Less than an hour later, a messenger ran up. After listening to him, Captain Hawart cursed furiously. “Pull back!” he shouted to his men. “We’ve got to pull back.”
Leudast cursed, too. “Why?” he burst out,
