“Happen you’d best lean on m’ shoulder till we get you out o’ this patch, Sir,” he offered. “Might not be a bad idea t’ see if you can convince the quartermaster t’ scare up another pair, too.” He grimaced. “’Bout time you had a new pair—one with laces an’ everything, this time—and gettin’ this one cleaned out an’ dry again’ll be no easy task.”
“And what makes you think the quartermaster has a pair my size?” Hahrlys asked sourly, accepting the boot and tucking it under his left arm as he draped his right arm around the sergeant’s shoulders and started hopping one-footed through the shallower mud that bordered the pothole.
“Well, as t’ that, there’s that bottle o’ whiskey Edwyrds an’ I have squirreled away. Happen that might jog his memory.”
“Bribery is against regulations.” Hahrlys gave Tyllytsyn a stern look, then shrugged. “Besides, it probably wouldn’t work. Boots seem to be in short supply at the moment.”
“Never know till you try, Sir,” the sergeant said philosophically, and Hahrlys snorted in amused agreement.
They reached solider ground, and the lieutenant took his arm from the noncom’s shoulder with a smile of gratitude. That smile faded quickly as he looked distastefully down at the boot. The thought of shoving his foot back into it was hardly palatable, but there wasn’t time to clean and dry it. Captain Maizak had scheduled an officers’ conference in less than two hours, and the company CP was over a mile away. The thought of covering that distance barefooted—or even half barefooted—was even less palatable. Besides, the foot in question was as liberally coated with mud as the boot’s interior, and it would probably warm—gradually—to something almost bearable.
He sighed, wishing the QM did have a pair of field boots—the sort that stayed put under the most arduous circumstances—in his size. Unfortunately, he had big feet, well outside the normal size range, and he’d already worn out two complete sets of proper, laced field boots. Which was why he was now stuck with a pair of the jackboots the Imperial Charisian Army’s mounted infantry wore. Of course, he was scarcely the only member of his platoon who needed new boots. Hopefully, they’d be available soon enough to do some good—like before half the platoon was down with pneumonia!
He grimaced and jammed his foot back into its squelchy nest.
“Best be back to it, Gyffry.” He couldn’t quite keep the sort of resignation a commissioned officer wasn’t supposed to display to his enlisted personnel out of his voice, but Tyllytsyn had been with him a long time now and the platoon sergeant only chuckled.
“Happen you’re right, Sir,” he agreed, and went wading off through the mud—rather more cautiously than Hahrlys, avoiding the more treacherous patches—towards the engineers working to repair what was left of the high road that paralleled the Sheryl-Seridahn High Canal.
Yet another in the endless chain of dragon-drawn freight wagons—laden with barely a third of the load decent road conditions would have allowed—churned by, and Tyllytsyn paused to let it pass. The wagon’s wheels were damned near man-high, yet it was hub-deep in places as the straining dragon hauled it forward. There were a lot of those wagons, and a lot of hard-working dragons, yet in these conditions, they could move only about two-thirds of the supplies the Army of Thesmar’s forward elements truly needed. The ruined high road offered even poorer going, however, which forced them off the road … which created the mud which made the going so hard there and slowed the hard-working engineers’ efforts to repair the high road to get them back onto it again.
And the retreating Dohlarans had made sure his men wouldn’t have much to work with, Hahrlys thought glumly as he followed the sergeant through the gently sifting rain. At least it wasn’t another downpour … at the moment. Winters in the South March were less brutally frigid than those farther north, but that was about the best that could be said for them. They might not freeze as hard or as often, but they were cold, wet, miserable, and—within the next five-day or two—the weather would get cold enough to start freezing the mud overnight. By the end of the month, it might get sufficiently cold to freeze it solid enough to provide decent footing instead of a crusty, treacherous skim that only looked firm until someone was stupid enough to try walking across it. It might not, too, though. Frankly, Hahrlys doubted the temperature would be considerate enough to do anything of the sort.
Mother always said any of a pessimist’s surprises were going to be pleasant ones, he told himself. And given the weather’s track record so far, anyone who isn’t a pessimist’d have to be a frigging lunatic, instead!
He stopped and turned, looking westward in the freight wagon’s wake as distant thunder rumbled. Despite the current rain, that thunder had nothing to do with the weather, and his jaw tightened as the artillery growl swelled louder. It was a reminder of why his men were working knee-deep—even waist-deep—in mud and water to restore the high road to something remotely serviceable. The front line was less than five miles from his present position, and the Army of Thesmar’s advance had slowed to an agonizing, mucky, sodden crawl.
He wiped rain out of his eyes, removing another swath of mud in the process, and peered along the canal as if he thought he might actually see the muzzle flashes. He couldn’t, of course, but he didn’t have to see them to know what was happening. The difference between exploding mortar rounds and the bellow of heavier guns was quite distinct to an ear which had heard so many of both, and the artillery duel was no longer purely one-sided.
Sir Fahstyr Rychtyr’s Army of the Seridahn hadn’t been heavily reinforced—the Royal Dohlaran Army seemed to be finding it difficult to come up with trained manpower—but the men in its regiments had received a steadily mounting trickle of Dohlaran-designed breech-loading rifles. That was bad news; the fact that a growing number of banded, rifled artillery pieces—including the first Dohlaran-built angle-guns—had come forward was even worse. Fortunately, there were still very few of the latter and neither the Dohlarans nor the Army of God was able—yet—to match the indirect fire of Charis’ mortars and angle-guns. That meant their artillery remained far more exposed to Charisian counter-battery fire, since their guns had to have direct lines of fire, which meant their opponents had direct lines of fire to them. The Dohlarans had become steadily better at building protected—and much harder to destroy—emplacements for them, however, and they no longer had to deploy within range of their enemies’ rifles, which meant their gunners were no longer being picked off by snipers in large numbers. And those angle-guns of theirs were trickling forward. It was unlikely Dohlaran artillerists would be anywhere nearly as proficient in their use initially, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be painfully effective, and the Charisian Empire had discovered the hard way that Dohlarans learned quickly when someone was shooting at them.
And Earl Hanth doesn’t have as many mortars and angle-guns of his own as he’d like to shoot at them with, either, he thought unhappily. In fact, the bastards outrange his thirty-pounders now, and that’s still two-thirds of his total field artillery.
But they were still driving towards the Siddarmark-Dohlar border, he reminded himself. Even at its present snail-like rate of advance, the Army of Thesmar would cross into the Duchy of Thorast before the end of the month.