“Aye, I think we will,” Leudast said, more from policy than from conviction. From conviction, he went on, “Remember how they handled us at Lautertal. They can do worse than that. I’m not saying they will, but they can.”
“Sure, Sergeant.” But Alboin sounded as if he was talking from policy, too. He hadn’t seen the Algarvians at their best, when the footing was good and they had the chance to maneuver.
Leudast said, “Listen to me. If the redheads weren’t tough, nasty buggers, would we be fighting them in the middle of the Duchy of Grelz?”
Maybe that got through, maybe it didn’t. Either which way, Alboin shut up and kept marching. That suited Leudast well enough.
Here and there up at the front, the Algarvians lobbed eggs at the Unkerlanters’ positions. Leudast was glad when soldiers waved his company into the shallow trenches from which they would soon attack. The earthworks shielded his men and him from bursting eggs. Then, once in the trenches, he wasn’t so glad any more. If the redheads started slaughtering Kaunians and making magic, the holes grubbed in the ground could turn into death traps.
He wondered if King Swemmel’s mages would start slaughtering Unkerlanter peasants or old women or whomever it was they killed. On the one hand, he wanted magecraft to help the army move forward--and, more urgently, to help him stay alive. On the other, he couldn’t help but think about the price his kingdom was paying to try to beat back the Algarvians.
Captain Hawart came along the line. “The attack goes in tomorrow morning before sunrise,” he said, and walked on to keep spreading the word.
Leudast spread it, too. His troopers talked among themselves in low voices.
They were ready. They were more than ready--they were eager. Leudast wondered how many of them would be eager after the attack, even if it succeeded. Not many, if his own experience was any guide.
Well before sunrise, the Unkerlanter egg-tossers started pounding at the Algarvian positions farther east. Leudast hoped they did lots of damage, because they were surely alerting King Mezentio’s men to the coming assault. And the Algarvians responded, flinging eggs of their own at the Unkerlanters. But, as best Leudast could judge, his side had the better of the exchange. He huddled in his blanket and tried to sleep.
As black night gave way to gray twilight, the ground shook beneath him. He leaped up, ready to scramble out of the trench for his life if the shaking got worse. It didn’t. Peering over the lip of the trench, he saw purplish flames spurting up from the ground he and his comrades would have to cross. These were Unkerlanter mages plying their trade, not Algarvians. Leudast muttered under his breath, hoping the sacrifice from his countrymen would help the army win victory.
Whistles shrilled, all along the line. Still not officially an officer, Leudast couldn’t add another strident note. Instead, he shouted, “Come on, you buggers! They wanted to quarrel with us, and now they’re going to pay the price.”
“Urra!” his troopers roared as they burst from the sheltering trenches. “Urra! King Swemmel! Swemmel! Urra!”
Yelling himself, Leudast ran forward, too, one tiny drop in a rock-gray wave. However many of their own they’d killed to make the magic against Mezentio’s men, the Unkerlanter mages hadn’t got rid of all Algarvian resistance. Eggs fell among the advancing Unkerlanter troopers, making holes in their lines that reserves had to fill. Redheaded soldiers blazed down Unkerlanters, too.
But, try as they would, they couldn’t stop or even seriously slow King Swemmel’s men. Here and there along the shattered line, an Algarvian trooper would throw up his hands and try to surrender. Sometimes, the redheads managed to do it. Rather more often, they got blazed down.
“Forward!” Leudast shouted to his men, echoing Captain Hawart, who was doing his best to be everywhere at once for his regiment.
Unkerlanter magic had done dreadful things to the Algarvian trenches, so dreadful that Leudast and his countrymen had trouble pushing across the shattered ground. Flames still sullenly flickered every few feet. Resistance from the redheads stayed light.
“This is almost too easy,” Leudast called to Hawart the next time he saw him.
“I like it,” said Alboin, who chanced to be close by.
But Hawart looked worried. “Aye, it is,” he said. “I haven’t seen enough dead Algarvians to satisfy me, nor anything close. Where are they, curse them?”
“Buried when their trenches all caved in?” Leudast suggested.
“I hope so,” the officer answered. “If they aren’t, we’re going to run into them pretty soon, and they won’t be glad to see us.”
“Powers below eat them, we weren’t glad to see them, either,” Leudast said. He ran and scrambled on, wondering how deeply the Algarvians had fortified their positions: there seemed to be no end to trenches and foxholes and barricades.
And then, as Hawart had worried about, the Algarvians started popping up out of holes beyond the reach of the Unkerlanters’ magecraft. After that, nothing was easy anymore.
Along with the rest of his company, Trasone stood at stiff attention in front of the barracks in Aspang. Major Spinello strode down the line with a box of medals. He paused in front of each man to pin one onto him, kiss him on the cheek, and murmur a few words before moving on.
When he got to Trasone, he said, “For making it through this cursed winter,” and presented the decoration. After the ritual kiss that accompanied it, he pinned an identical decoration on Clovisio.
At last, everybody had his medal. Spinello strutted away. Trasone looked down at the decoration. It was stamped with a map of eastern Unkerlant and two words: WINTER WAR. He tapped Sergeant Panfilo on the shoulder. “Isn’t that grand? We’ve all got frozen-meat medals to call our own.”
Panfilo laughed, but not for long. “There’re a lot of dead men only thawing out now,” he said. “If you want to trade places with one of’em, I doubt he’d complain.”
“I like being alive just fine, thanks, Sergeant,” Trasone said. “But twenty years from now I’m going to look at this cursed chunk of polished brass, and my feet’ll start to freeze, and I’ll taste behemoth that’s starting to go bad. Once I get home, that’s the stuff I want to forget, not remember.”
“Now you do, aye,” Panfilo agreed. “But how many times have you listened to veterans of the Six Years’ War going on and on about everything they went through?”
Trasone grunted. That had the unpleasant feel of probability to it. “Good,” he said. “My old man always bored me. Now I’ll have an excuse to bore my kids, if I ever have any.” He glanced west, in the direction of the Unkerlanters who still tossed eggs at Aspang. They wanted to make sure he wouldn’t. So far, they’d had no luck.
When he woke up before dawn the next morning, he thought they’d smuggled more egg-tossers up close enough to strike at Aspang. But the rumbling roar, he discovered, came from the south, not from the west, and, while there were a great many bursts, none seemed close to the city.
“What’s going on?” he asked around a yawn as he got up from his cot. “Are the Unkerlanters kicking up their heels, or have we got something laid on down south?”
“Nobody told me anything about an attack down south,” Sergeant Panfilo said, “not yet, anyhow. I know we’re shifting men down there, but we aren’t set to move this soon.”
“It’s the Unkerlanters, then,” Trasone said. “If they can’t get us out of Aspang from the front, they’re going to try and do it from the back. Fits the buggers, doesn’t it?”
Panfilo laughed. “So it does. Now we have to find out if they get anywhere. If they don’t, we can sit tight here. But if they do, we’re liable to have to go out and work for a living again.”