“Aye.” Trasone broke a corner off the block and stuffed the cheese into his mouth. With it still full, he went on, “Toss me a couple more of those, pal, will you? It’s not the greatest stuff in the world, but it’ll keep a man going for a while.”
“Help yourself--stuff your pack full,” the other Algarvian said. “If we don’t haul it away with us, it’s not going anywhere.” Trasone took him up on that. So did Sergeant Panfilo. They both ate as they loaded up, too. Trasone guessed a lot of the soldiers at the caravan car had been garrisoning Aspang. They didn’t have the abraded look of men who’d been fighting and marching and fighting again for much too long.
Eggs began bursting once more, this time west of Aspang. Trasone looked up, but saw no dragons. That meant the Unkerlanters had brought their egg-tossers almost far enough forward to start hitting the town. Trasone cursed under his breath. He’d hoped the rear guard would have done a better job of holding back King Swemmel’s men than that.
“To me!” shouted the officer who’d taken over the battalion, or what was left of it, after Sergeant Panfilo brought it out of Thalfang. “Come on--we have to hold this place. Can’t let the Unkerlanters have it, come what may.”
Trasone was more than willing to ignore the dapper little nobleman, but Panfilo, after stuffing a last brick of cheese into his pack, turned away from the caravan car. “Come on,” he told Trasone. “Major Spinello’s not so bad, as officers go.”
“Not so bad,” Trasone agreed grudgingly. “But I’d got used to being commanded by commoners--first Galafrone, then you. Nobles just aren’t the same after that. Harder to take ‘em seriously, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, aye,” Panfilo said. “Don’t worry, though. I’m still commanding you. Now get moving.”
Get moving Trasone did. Major Spinello was still flitting every which way at once and talking like a man possessed: “Come on, my dears. If the Unkerlanters are going to pay us a call, we must be ready to receive them in the style they deserve. After all, we wouldn’t want to disappoint them, now would we?”
He sounded like a bad caricature of every noble officer Trasone had ever known. Even the dour veteran couldn’t help snickering. Up till very recently, Spinello hadn’t been a combat soldier; he kept going on and on about the Forthwegian village whose garrison he’d headed till the war here in the west yanked him out of it. Not all of his orders made the best sense in the world. But Trasone had already seen that he was recklessly brave. As long as he listened to Panfilo and others who actually knew what they were doing, he’d shape pretty well.
What needed doing here was obvious, and Major Spinello saw it. He posted his battalion in among the ruins at the western edge of Aspang. “Find yourselves some good holes,” he urged the soldiers. “Make sure they’re as tight and as deep as a Kaunian trollop’s twat.” He sighed. “Ah, the one I was laying before duty called me here.” He sighed again and kissed his fingertips.
Trasone would sooner have been laying a pretty blonde than lying in wait for some ugly Unkerlanters, too. Nobody’d given Spinello a choice, and nobody was giving him one, either. He found cover behind a waist-high wall that was all that remained of a house or shop and settled in. Looking around, he spied a couple of other places to which he could withdraw in a hurry if he had to.
Unkerlanter eggs fell closer and closer to the town, then began bursting around him and his comrades. He kept his head down and huddled close to the wall. Before long, the storm of sorcerous energy moved deeper into Aspang. Trasone knew what Swemmel’s men were doing: they were going after the Algarvian egg-tossers. He also knew that meant the attack was on its way.
He looked out over the ruined wall and steadied his stick on it. Sure enough, the Unkerlanters were forming up just out of stick range: row upon close-ranked row of blocky men in white smocks over rock-gray tunics. It was, in its way, an awe-inspiring sight.
To his surprise, he could hear the command the Unkerlanter officer shouted. The enemy soldiers stormed forward, some of them arm in arm. “Urra!” they shouted: a deafening roar. “Urra! Swemmel! Urra!”
Almost at once, eggs began bursting among them, tearing holes in their neat ranks--they hadn’t succeeded in knocking out the Algarvian tossers after all. Still shouting, more Unkerlanters hurried up to fill the gaps. Along with his comrades, Trasone started blazing at them. Soldiers went down as if scythed. The ones who didn’t go down, though, kept on coming, roaring like demons.
Trasone’s mouth went dry. If that human wave broke over his battalion . . . He looked around at his lines of retreat again. Would he have time to use them?
He wished Algarvian mages back of the front would slaughter some Kaunians to get the sorcerous energy for a spell to stop the Unkerlanters in their tracks.
No spell came. But King Swemmel’s men didn’t break into Aspang, either. Some prices were higher than flesh and blood could bear. Just outside the edge of town, the Unkerlanters broke and fled back across the snowy fields, leaving even more dead behind. Major Spinello did not order a pursuit. Trasone nodded somber approval. The major might be raw, but he wasn’t stupid.
Fourteen
Fernao had seen the land of the Ice People in summer, when the sun shone in the sky nearly the whole day through and the weather, sometimes, got warmer than cool. The Lagoan mage had seen it in fall, which put him in mind of a hard winter in Setubal. Now he was seeing it in winter. He’d expected it would be appalling. He was finding out he hadn’t known what appalling meant.
Outside the tent he shared with a second-rank mage named Affonso, the wind howled like a live thing, a malevolent wild thing. The tent fabric was waterproofed and windproofed, but the gale sucked heat out of the tent in spite of the brazier by which the two sorcerers huddled.
“I won’t believe it,” Affonso said. “Nobody could want to live in this miserable country the whole year round.”
“It’s no accident the Ice People are hairy all over, men and women both,” Fernao answered. “And they like the austral continent fine. They think we’re the crazy ones for wanting to live anywhere else.”
“They’re mad, every cursed one of them.” Affonso picked up another chunk of dried camel dung--the most common fuel hereabouts--and put it on the brazier. Then he wiped his hands on his kilt. Under the kilt, he wore thick wooden leggings that came up far enough to meet his thick woolen drawers coming down. He might as well have had on trousers, but no kingdom of Algarvic stock took kindly to those Kaunian-style garments.
“No doubt, but they do live here, and we’re having a miserable time managing that for ourselves,” Fernao said.
The camel dung hissed and popped as it burned, and shed only a sullen red light. Across the brazier from Fernao, his colleague might have been a polished bronze statue, tall and skinny. Affonso had the long face typical of Lagoans, Sibians, and Algarvians, but a wide, flat nose told of Kuusamans somewhere down toward the roots of his family tree. In the same way, Fernao himself had narrow eyes set on a slant.
Only a minority of Lagoans thought such things worth fussing about. They were a mixed lot and knew it. Some few of his countrymen took pride in pure Algarvic blood, but Fernao thought they were fooling themselves.
Even with the brazier, Affonso’s breath smoked inside the tent. He must have seen it, too, for he said, “When I went out last night to make water, the wind had died down. It was so calm and quiet, I could hear my breath freeze around me every time I let it out.”