Colonel, the egg the cursed Unkerlanters buried and then burst did too good a job of wrecking the line for us to repair it right away. It wasn’t meant to try to absorb so much energy all at once. And the Unkerlanters use different spells from ours to maintain the line--and they’ve done their best to obscure those, too. It’ll be awhile before you’re gliding again.”
“How long awhile?” the colonel ground out.
Before answering, the mage put his head together with his colleagues. “A day, certainly,” he said then. “Maybe two.”
“Two?” the colonel yelped. He waved his arms and stamped his foot again and loosed some extravagant curses, as any Algarvian might have. None of that did him any good. Being under his command, the mages had to try to soothe him instead of telling him what they thought of him, which Tealdo knew he would have wanted to do had he been in their place.
“Come on,” Galafrone said. “They may be stuck, but we’re not--quite.”
On the footsoldiers went, leaving the sabotaged ley line behind them. After another mile or so, the road became an even worse bog than it had been. Dragging himself out of the ooze, Tealdo discovered the going
“Something else is buggered up ahead,” Trasone predicted. “You wait and see--we’ll find out what it is.”
They’d gone only a little farther when the wide-shouldered bruiser proved himself a good prophet. There ahead were half a dozen behemoths stuck belly-deep in the clinging mud. “Hurrah,” Tealdo said. “First they ruined the road for us, then they went and ruined it for themselves, too.”
“They’re in so deep, they’re liable to drown there,” Trasone said. One of the trapped behemoths evidently thought the same, for it lifted its head and let out a loud, frightened bellow. It thrashed in the mud, trying to get free, but succeeded only in miring itself even worse.
“There, precious, there.” One of the behemoth-riders was down in the mud with the beast, doing his best to keep it calm. Tealdo would not have wanted that fellow’s job, not for anything. The behemoths’ crews had already done everything they could to lighten their animals, stripping off not only egg-tossers and heavy sticks but also the chainmail coats the behemoths wore. As far as Tealdo could tell, none of that had done much good.
A troop of Algarvian horsemen rode up across the field. Not having been churned by the behemoths, the ground there held their weight better than the alleged road would have. The horsemen had ropes with them. The men who rode the lead behemoth began making lines fast to their beast. “Do they really think they’ll be able to pull him out?” Tealdo asked.
“If they don’t, they’re going to a cursed lot of trouble for nothing,” Trasone answered.
Tealdo hadn’t the faintest idea how to go about putting ropes around a behemoth to get it out of the mud. Unlike him, though, the men who rode the great animals looked to have considered the problem before, for they went about the business as matter-of-factly as he would have built a fire.
“Go!” a behemoth-rider shouted to the horsemen. They urged their animals forward, but could not move the heavy behemoth. “Go!” the rider shouted again. The horses had no better luck the second time. The behemoth-rider threw up his arms in despair. Then his eye fell on the men of Captain Galafrone’s company slogging past. “Lay hold of the ropes and lend a hand, will you?” he asked--begged, actually.
Had he tried to order Galafrone’s soldiers to help, Tealdo was sure the company commander would have consigned him to the powers below. As things were, Galafrone said nothing but, “Aye--needs doing,” and ordered his men to the ropes.
With a company of soldiers adding their strength to that of the horses, the behemoth came up, ever so slowly, out of the clinging mud. The men who rode him cheered themselves hoarse. Then they fastened the ropes to the next behemoth so that the footsoldiers and horses could pull him free, too.
Getting all six of the great beasts out of the ooze took all day. And, by the time the dripping sky began to darken, Tealdo was more worn than he had been after any battle in which he’d ever fought. Too weary to eat, he wrapped his blanket around himself, lay down not far from where he’d labored so hard, and slept like a dead man.
Someone kicked him awake, not unkindly, at dawn the next day. A field kitchen had found the company sometime in the night; he wolfed down a couple of bowls of hot barley porridge with bits of unidentified meat floating in it. In his civilized days, he would have turned up his nose at such coarse fare. Now it brought him back to life. He resumed the long tramp westward with more spirit than he would have thought possible before he ate.
“We’re going to be late to Tannroda,” Galafrone muttered discontentedly. “Powers above, we’re already late to Tannroda.”
