During the thaw, ordinary wagons were useless. No matter how many horses pulled them, they bogged down. But every village had a wagon or two useful in the mud or in deep snow, one with tall wheels and a curving bottom almost like that of a boat. Mud wagons could bring supplies to soldiers at the front line where everything else got stuck.
The Unkerlanter army had its own fleet of mud wagons and confiscated any it found in reconquered villages. Such confiscations were few and far between, though, because the Algarvians stole the wagons, too.
Looking back over his shoulder, Leudast saw a couple of mud wagons making their way back toward the company he led. He waved to the driver of the lead wagon. The fellow waved back, calling, “You part of Captain Hawart’s outfit?”
“That’s right,” Leudast answered. He would have said the same thing had the driver asked him if he were part of some regiment he’d never heard of. Supplies didn’t come forward so often that he could afford to let them slip through his fingers. Lying to get his hands on them seemed no sin at all.
These, which were actually meant for his unit, didn’t come forward in a hurry. Mud wagons didn’t move quickly; what set them apart from every other vehicle was that they could move at all during the thaw. Leudast had plenty of time to shout for soldiers to help unload them before they actually arrived.
“What have you got for us?” he asked as his men swarmed over the wagons.
“Oh, some of this, some of that,” the lead driver answered. “Bandages, potted meat, charges for your sticks so you won’t have to cut a captive’s throat to keep blazing, all sorts of good things.”
“I should say so,” Leudast exclaimed. Such bounty hadn’t come his way in quite a while. “Powers above, we’ve been living hand-to-mouth for so long, I don’t know what we’ll do with all this stuff.”
“Well, pal, if you don’t want it, I figure there’s plenty who do,” the driver said. He laughed to show he didn’t intend to be taken seriously. A good thing for him, too: several of Leudast’s soldiers were about to turn their sticks in his direction. They weren’t going to let him and his fellow drivers get away before they’d gone through the wagons, either.
Captain Hawart himself squelched up before the plundering was quite complete. “You can’t keep all the goodies for your own company, you know,” he told Leudast. He wasn’t laughing as he said it.
“Sir, I wouldn’t do that,” Leudast assured him.
“Of course you wouldn’t,” Hawart answered. “I’ve got my eye on you. Amazing how well people behave when somebody’s watching, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Leudast did laugh. So did Hawart, now. They understood each other pretty well.
Hawart said, “You are going to share this stuff, Leudast, because we’re ordered forward against the redheads in Lautertal up ahead past the woods there.” He pointed.
“Are we?” Leudast said tonelessly. “They’ll have had a deal of time to get ready for us, won’t they? And we won’t be able to come at ‘em quick and flank ‘em out, like we did so often in the snow.”
“That’s all true, every word of it,” his superior agreed. “But we’re ordered in anyhow, and so we’ll go. They aren’t supposed to have that many men holed up in the place. That’s the word coming back to us, anyhow.”
He didn’t sound as if he believed it. He didn’t look as if he believed it, either. Casting about for ways to ask how big a fiasco the ordered assault was likely to be, Leudast found one: “How hard are you going to push the attack, sir?”
“We’re going forward till we can’t go forward anymore,” Hawart answered. Spoken one way, that meant one thing; spoken another way, it meant something altogether different.
Leudast had no great trouble figuring out Captain Hawart’s tone. “Aye, sir,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about my company. We always do our best.”
“I know you do,” Hawart said. “If they haven’t killed us yet, they probably can’t kill us at all, don’t you think?”
“Aye,” Leudast said, knowing he was lying, knowing Hawart knew he was lying. But if he lied to the captain, maybe he could lie to himself, too. He went on, “What help can we count on when we go at this Lautertal place? Egg-tossers? Behemoths? Magecraft?” Magecraft was a euphemism for slaughtered Unkerlanters, but he might be able to lie to himself about that, too.
In any case, Hawart shook his head. “Tossers are mostly stuck in the mud ten miles behind us. Same with the behemoths. And this isn’t a big enough attack to deserve magecraft. Can’t say I’m too sorry about that.” He was probably lying to himself, too.
“Now we hope the Algarvians feel the same way about holding the place,” Leudast said, and Hawart nodded. Leudast went on, “I’ll let my men know what they’ll be doing. No wonder the powers above”--by which he meant the Unkerlanter quartermasters, not the abstract powers beyond the sky--”decided to let us have enough supplies for a change.”
After Hawart left, Leudast broke the news to the company he commanded. His veterans nodded in resignation. The new recruits exclaimed and grinned excitedly. They knew no better. They would, those who didn’t pay an irredeemable price for the instruction the Algarvians were about to give them.
As soon as Leudast advanced out of the trees and on toward Lautertal, he knew the attack was in trouble. The town had a couple of buildings with tall spires that hadn’t been knocked down. That meant the Algarvians would have lookouts in those spires, men who could see a long way.
They also proved to have egg-tossers in the town. Eggs began bursting among the Unkerlanters slogging across the liquid fields toward the town. The mud absorbed some of the sorcerous energy those eggs released--some, but far from all. Men shrieked as they were burned, or as bits of the egg casings scythed into them.
“Keep going!” Leudast shouted. “We can do it!” He didn’t know whether the Unkerlanters could do it or not, but he did know they couldn’t if they didn’t think they could. “Urra!” he yelled. “Swemmel! Urra!”
“Urra!” the Unkerlanters shouted. They were game. They’d stayed game all through the dreadful summer and fall, when the Algarvians pushed them back almost at will. Leudast still marveled at that. Throwing down his stick and throwing up his hands would have been so easy. But he’d kept fighting, and so had his countrymen. Ever since fall gave way to winter, they’d been the ones advancing. That was enough to keep a man going all by itself.
But it wasn’t enough to let the Unkerlanters take Lautertal. The Algarvians had indeed had some time in which to get ready and they’d used it well. They’d dug and then cleverly concealed blazing pits all around the town. They must have reinforced them, too, or the pits would have turned to muck during the thaw. The pits hadn’t; King Mezentio’s men took a steady toll on the Unkerlanters from them. And the egg-tossers kept dropping death on Leudast and his comrades.
He saw an egg spinning through the air toward him, saw it and flung himself face down in the muck before it burst. Fragments of the casing hissed malignantly over his head. The soggy ground under him shuddered as if in torment. But he’d known worse than that when the Algarvians started slaughtering Kaunian captives. Then the ground didn’t merely shudder: trenches and holes closed on the soldiers unlucky enough to shelter in them, and flames burst up to catch men scrambling free. Algarvian magecraft was nothing to despise.
Since they had so many other defenses cunningly prepared, Leudast feared King Mezentio’s men would also be ready to use Kaunians’ life energy against the Unkerlanter attack. If they were ready, they didn’t bother killing the captives. They had no need for anything so drastic. Leudast and the other Unkerlanters had no chance to break into Lautertal, let alone to run the Algarvians out of it.