When it was his turn, he ran forward, toward the burning village. He pounded passed a young man lying in the snow clutching both hands to his belly. Those hands couldn’t keep the Unkerlanter soldier’s lifeblood from pouring out. Steam rose from the pool it formed. Leudast shook his head and ran on.
He’d fought to hold the Algarvians out of a good many villages. He knew how the job was done. So did they, worse luck, and they proved as stubborn in defense as they ever had on the attack. But they couldn’t simply stay in Midlum and fight it out to the last man there, for the Unkerlanters were not only assailing the strongly held village but also sending men around it to either side to cut it off from other territory the redheads held.
You taught us that trick, you whoresons, Leudast thought. How do you like having it pulled on you?
He didn’t know what he would have done in the Algarvian commander’s predicament. The redhead sent some of his men east toward their comrades and used the rest to make a stand. Unkerlanter behemoths lumbered after the Algarvians struggling through the snow. With the eastern sky now going gray with true dawn, the retreating Algarvians made easy targets.
Inside Midlum, though, the enemy kept on fighting hard. A beam zipped past Leudast’s head. He threw himself flat and blazed back. A scream answered him. He grunted in satisfaction, but didn’t rise too soon. Any Algarvians who’d come this far were likely veterans and full of the tricks veterans knew.
Well, Leudast had a few tricks, too. “Surrender!” he shouted in his own language and then in what he thought was Algarvian. Returning to Unkerlanter--he had no choice--he went on, “You can’t get away.”
Maybe some of Mezentio’s men understood Unkerlanter. Maybe they didn’t need to understand it--maybe they could see what was so for themselves. Little by little, the blazing died away. Algarvians started coming out of battered huts and holes in the grounds. They carried no sticks. Their hands were high. Fear filled their faces.
“Powers above,” Leudast whispered in something approaching awe. He’d never seen so many redheads surrender, not all at once. After staring, he rushed forward with the rest of his men to plunder the Algarvians.
As Trasone stumbled south and east through the snow, he thought about what might have been. “Hey, Sergeant!” he called, his breath making a bank of mist around his head. “Did we really see the towers of stinking Swemmel’s stinking palace?”
“Don’t know about you, but I sure as blazes did,” Sergeant Panfilo answered, his voice coming muffled through the wool scarf he’d wrapped around the lower part of his face. “You were there in the market square at Thalfang, same as me. If we could have made it across to the other side ...”
“Aye. If.” Trasone shrugged his broad shoulders; he was almost as thickly built as an Unkerlanter. He was hard to faze, too, or else too stubborn to admit that any trouble could be so very bad. “I’ll tell you something, Sergeant: a lot of good lads went into that cursed square. A lot fewer came out again.”
“That’s the truth.” Panfilo’s big head went up and down, up and down. “Captain Galafrone was maybe the best officer I’ve ever known, and I’ve seen plenty. I’d say as much to the king’s face, even if Galafrone hadn’t a drop of noble blood in him.”
“You ought to say it, on account of it’s true.” Trasone tramped past the stiff carcass of a unicorn that had frozen to death. Its coat was whiter than the snow in which it lay. He jerked a thumb at it. “Somebody ought to butcher that beast. Plenty of good meat on it, if we ever get to a place where we can make a fire and cook it.”
“Aye.” Panfilo liked to eat, but that wasn’t what was on his mind. “I had this company--powers above, I had this whole fornicating battalion--for a few days, but will they make me an officer? Not bloody likely, not when my old man made shoes for a living.”
“I don’t know about that, Sergeant,” Trasone said. “The way they’re using up nobles these days, before long there won’t be enough of ‘em to fill all the slots that need filling. Stay alive and you may get your chance yet.”
“Won’t have one if I’m dead, that’s certain.” Panfilo twisted his head this way and that. Trasone knew what he was doing: looking for Unkerlanter behemoths with snowshoes or Unkerlanter footsoldiers wearing them. In this cursed weather, Swemmel’s soldiers were more mobile than the Algarvians they pursued. Trasone kept his eyes open all the time, too.
He didn’t see any foes now, for which he thanked the powers above. When he trudged past the frozen corpse of an Algarvian soldier, he started to laugh.
“What’s funny about him?” Panfilo asked.
“Poor whoresons in the same pose as that unicorn we went by a little while ago,” Trasone answered.
“Heh,” Panfilo said, and then, “Heh, heh.” Trasone shrugged and kept on walking. That was about as much credit as the comment deserved.
From up ahead came the sharp crack of bursting eggs. A moment later, Trasone heard a dragon screaming high in the air. “Got to be an Unkerlanter beast,” he said wearily. “Where are our own dragons, curse the lazy buggers who fly ‘em?”
Panfilo tried to look on the bright side: “They come over now and again. But they’re stretched thin along so much front.”
“The Unkerlanters have dragons to drop eggs on us,” Trasone said resentfully. “The front’s no shorter for them.” He waved before Panfilo could speak. “I know, I know--somewhere along the line, we’re dropping eggs on them, too. But they’re doing it here, curse them, and one of those stinking eggs is liable to come down on my head.”
“They weren’t worrying about us--we’re small fry.” Panfilo pointed ahead, to a burning town. “Unless we’re even more lost than I think we are, that’s Aspang. A ley line runs through it. How are we going to get men and supplies forward if it’s going up in flames around us?”
For an Algarvian, Trasone was a stolid man. Still, his shrug would have been extravagant for someone from any other kingdom. He said, “Who knows? Odds are, we won’t. Powers below have been eating at our supply system ever since the snow started coming down.”
When the battered company got into Aspang, Trasone discovered he would have made a good prophet. Several of the eggs the Unkerlanter dragons dropped had landed squarely on the ley-line caravan depot. It was burning merrily. So was a caravan that had stopped there. And so were mountains of supplies that had just come off the caravan and hadn’t yet been loaded onto wagons for the trip to the front--not that wagons had an easy time moving through the snow, either.
His stomach didn’t care about troubles with wagons. But it growled like a starving wolf--an all too apt figure--to see food burning. The bursting eggs had knocked one car off the ley line and down to the ground on its side. It was, for the moment, safe from the flames. A crowd of Algarvian soldiers had gathered around it.
Trasone hurried toward the caravan car. “That’s got to be something to eat,” he called over his shoulder to his comrades. “I’m going to get some, and you’d better do the same.” He waited for Sergeant Panfilo to curse and bully him back into the line. Instead, without a word, the sergeant followed him. More than anything else Trasone had seen, that told of the troubles the Algarvian army had known since winter came to Unkerlant.
One of the soldiers already at the caravan car looked up with a laugh. “More starving rats, eh? Well, come on and get your share.”
“What’s to get?” Trasone asked.
By way of reply, the other soldier tossed him a square block of orange stuff that had to weigh a couple of pounds. Automatically, Trasone caught it. “Cheese!” said the fellow who’d thrown it. “If you’re going to be a rat, you may as well be a fat rat, eh?”