“Oh, aye, this is a rest cure, this is.” Trasone snorted. “Come to beautiful Aspang for your health. The garden spot of southern Unkerlant, only eight months of winter a year. Don’t fancy the weather? Wait a bit. It’ll get worse.”
“If you got any worse, they’d fling you in the bloody guardhouse,” Panfilo said. “Too cursed early to be carrying on like that.”
All the rest of the day, Trasone kept an ear on the racket from the south. It didn’t fade; if anything, it got louder. He drew his own conclusions. Quietly and without any fuss, he made sure his kit was ready to sling onto his back at a moment’s notice. He wasn’t the only veteran doing the same thing, either.
Major Spinello burst into the barracks the next morning. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” he shouted, full of energy as usual. “Swemmel’s boys are getting rowdy, and it’s up to us to show ‘em that’s our job.”
He screamed at the men who weren’t ready to move on the instant, and cursed the ones who were because they hadn’t made sure their comrades were, too. That meant all the other officers and sergeants started screaming, too. If they’d wanted the battalion ready to move at a moment’s notice, they could have started screaming earlier. For one thing, they weren’t screaming at him, because he was ready. For another, he’d heard a lot of screaming in his time. It didn’t faze him.
Under the lash of Spinello’s tongue, the soldiers in the battalion tramped to the ley-line caravan depot and filed aboard cars that looked to have had better lifetimes. “We’re going down to hit the Unkerlanters in the flank,” Spinello said as they boarded. “Swemmel’s boys are as nervous about their flanks as so many virgins, and we’re going to screw ‘em.”
As they glided south out of Aspang, they passed the wreckage of several caravans lying by the side of the ley line. “Cursed Unkerlanters are a pack of nervous virgins,” Trasone remarked, and got a laugh. If the Unkerlanters had managed to plant one more egg along the ley line, he and his comrades wouldn’t have the chance to do much in the way of seduction.
But the ley-line caravan stopped where its operator wanted it to, not at the whim of some Unkerlanter irregulars. Trasone and his fellow troopers tumbled out. Again, Major Spinello was shouting, “Let’s go! What are you waiting for? We have to move, curse it.”
Maybe the major had been talking by crystal while on the caravan because he seemed to know just where he was going. After Spinello led the battalion out of a stretch of woods, Trasone exclaimed in delight: “Behemoths!”
“Our behemoths,” Clovisio said. “Where did they come from?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Trasone said. “They’re here, and the ground is nice and solid, so they can move. And when we’ve got behemoths than can do what they’re supposed to do, the Unkerlanters had better watch out.”
As if to underscore that, the behemoths trotted forward. Spinello shouted, “Come on, you lazy buggers, give ‘em a hand. You know what to do.” Not that many months off garrison duty, he didn’t have any experience of what to do himself. But he was right, not only in his tactics, but in being sure the veterans he commanded knew what to do. They hurried along with and behind the behemoths, ready both to protect them and to swarm through any holes they punched in the enemy’s lines.
Unkerlanter egg-tossers kept pounding away at the Algarvian positions to the south and now to the southeast; by the sound of the fighting, King Swemmel’s men had pushed the Algarvians back. That worried Trasone. But Sergeant Panfilo heard the same thing and grinned from ear to ear. “Those whoresons’ll be so busy looking straight ahead of’em, they won’t even think about peering sideways till it’s too late.”
Trasone thought about that. “Here’s hoping you’re right, Sergeant.”
By the affronted pose he struck, Panfilo might have been standing on the street of some Algarvian town rather than trotting across a wheatfield that was coming up rank with weeds. “Of course I’m right. Have you ever heard me wrong?”
“Only when you talk,” Trasone assured him. Panfilo’s glare deserved to go up on the stage. After a moment, though, the sergeant chuckled and got going again.
And Panfilo did turn out to be right. Half an hour later, the crews on the backs of the behemoths started lobbing eggs at swarthy soldiers in rock-gray. “Mezentio!” Major Spinello shouted, and all the troops echoed him: “Mezentio!”
The Unkerlanters had been moving forward against the Algarvians to the east of them. When doing what they were ordered to do, whether that was making an attack or defending a position, they were among the stubbornest warriors in the world; along with so many other Algarvian soldiers, Trasone had found that out the hard way. When taken by surprise . . .
Taken by surprise, the Unkerlanters broke and fled in wild disorder. Some of them threw away their sticks so they could run faster. To complete their demoralization, a squadron of Algarvian dragons swooped out of the sky to drop eggs on some of them, flame down others, and start fires even in the green, damp fields.
After that, some of the Unkerlanters stopped running and threw up their hands in surrender. The Algarvians blazed down a few of them in the heat of the moment, but only a few. Most got relieved of whatever they had worth stealing and sent up in the direction of Aspang.
“Keep moving!” Major Spinello shouted, not just to his own troopers but also to the behemoths’ crews and to anyone else who would listen. “If we just keep moving, by the powers above, maybe we can get ‘em all in a sack, cut ‘em off from their pals, and pound ‘em to pieces. How does that sound?”
“Sounds good to me,” Trasone said, more to himself than to anyone else. He wondered how many other Algarvian officers were shouting the same thing on every stretch of this counterattack. Ruthless speed and drive had taken Algarve deep into Unkerlant. Now the Algarvians could use them again--and the Unkerlanters, Trasone vowed, were going to be sorry.
He also wondered what the Unkerlanter officers were shouting right now. The ones whose orders mattered, the ones with the higher ranks, wouldn’t even know things had gone wrong yet. The Unkerlanters were too cheap or too lazy or too ignorant to give their soldiers as many crystals as they needed. That had cost them before. He hoped it would cost them again.
Because Swemmel’s men didn’t have a lot of crystals, they made elaborate plans ahead of time. Junior officers who changed plans without orders got into trouble. Here, that meant the Unkerlanters kept trying to go east even after the Algarvian counterattack against their northern flank. It also meant the counterattack got a lot farther than it would have otherwise. Not until midaftemoon did Swemmel’s soldiers realize the Algarvians had thrown a lot of men into the fight and really needed to be stopped.
By then, it was too late. Behemoths crushed the first few Unkerlanter regiments that turned from east to north. The Unkerlanters’ strokes came in one after another instead of all at once, which made them easier to break up. The enemy even flung unicorn cavalry into the fight.
Trasone enjoyed blazing down cavalrymen. He enjoyed it even more when they rode unicorns than when they were on horseback. For centuries, unicorns with iron-shod horns had been the dreadful queens of the battlefield, terrorizing footsoldiers with their unstoppable charges. Memories of them lingered in soldiers’ minds to this day, even if sticks had made cavalry charges more dangerous to riders than to the men they attacked.
These days, behemoths ruled the field. They were ugly but strong enough to carry not just soldiers but also egg-tossers and armor. The eggs they flung at the charging unicorns knocked down the splendid, beautiful beasts, sometimes three and four at a time. Wounded unicorns screamed like women in torment. Wounded riders screamed, too. Trasone blazed them once they were off their unicorns with as much relish as while they still rode.