“No,” Fernao answered honestly. “But if it’s nastier than I think, I don’t have to eat it all.” He spooned honey into his tea, and poured in a splash of spirits, too. Hot and sweet and spiked, the brew did make him feel better. He gulped it down.
Pekka drank fortified tea, too, but concentrated on the soup. Linna brought Fernao’s bowl back almost at once. “Cook did up a big pot of it this morning,” she said, setting it down in front of him. “After what all went on last night, he figured people would need it. I had some myself, back in the kitchen.”
Looking around the refectory, Fernao saw several Kuusamans with bowls like his in front of them. If it doesn’t hurt them, it probably won’t kill me, either, he thought. Pekka eyed him inscrutably as he picked up his spoon.
Of all the things he’d expected, actually liking the soup was among the last. “That’s good!” he said, and sounded suspicious even as he spoke: as if he suspected someone of tricking him. But it was. The broth was hot and greasy and salty and full of the flavors of garlic and chopped scallions. And the tripe, while chewy, didn’t taste like much of anything. His headache receded, too. Maybe that was the tea. But, on the other hand, maybe it wasn’t.
He beamed at Pekka. “Well, if this is barbarism, who needs civilization?” She laughed. Why not? Her bowl was already empty.
Like all the Forthwegians in Plegmund’s Brigade, Sidroc hated winters in the south. This was the third one he’d been through, and they got no easier with practice. He didn’t think Yanina was quite so cold as southern Unkerlant had been, but it was a lot worse than Gromheort, his home town. There, snow had been a curiosity. It was nothing but an eternal nuisance here.
He remembered throwing snowballs with his cousins, Ealstan and Leofsig, one day when white did cover the ground up there. He’d been perhaps nine, the same age as Ealstan, with Ealstan’s older brother in his early teens. Sidroc grunted in his frozen hole in the ground. No more playing with them. Ealstan had done his best to break his head, and he himself had broken Leofsig’s- broken it with a chair. Whoreson gave me one hard time too many, Sidroc thought. Good riddance to him. The whole family’s a pack of filthy Kaunian-lovers.
Somebody called his name-an Algarvian, by the trill he put in it. “Here, sir!” Sidroc sang out, speaking Algarvian himself. Even now, after more than two years of desperate fighting, there wasn’t a Forthwegian officer in Plegmund’s Brigade-nobody higher than sergeant. The redheads reserved the top slots for themselves.
Lieutenant Puliano wasn’t an Algarvian noble, though. He was a veteran sergeant who’d finally become an officer for the most basic and desperate reason of alclass="underline" there weren’t enough nobles left to fill the places that needed filling. All but invisible in a white snow smock, Puliano slithered along the ground till he dropped into the hole next to Sidroc. “I’ve got something for you,” he said. “A present, you might say.”
“What kind of present?” Sidroc asked suspiciously. Some of the presents officers gave, he didn’t want to get.
Puliano laughed. “You weren’t born yesterday, were you?” With his gravelly voice and no-nonsense attitude, he sounded like a sergeant. In fact, he put Sidroc in mind of Sergeant Werferth, who’d been his squad leader-and, without the rank, his company commander-till he got blazed outside a Yaninan village.
That village didn’t exist anymore; Sidroc and his comrades had slaughtered everybody there in revenge for him. Puliano went on, “It’s nothing bad. No extra sentry-go. No volunteering to storm the enemy bridgehead over the Skamandros singlehanded.”
Sidroc just grunted again. “What is it, then?” He remained suspicious. Officers didn’t go around handing out presents. It felt unnatural.
But Lieutenant Puliano dug into his belt pouch and gave Sidroc a straight cloth stripe for the shoulder straps of his tunic and two cloth two-stripe chevrons for the tunic sleeve-Forthwegian and Algarvian blazons of rank. Men of Plegmund’s Brigade wore both when they could get them, though the Algarvian insignia were more important. “Congratulations, Corporal Sidroc!” Puliano said, and kissed him on both cheeks.
Sergeant Werferth never would have done that. ““Well, dip me in dung,” Sidroc said, startled into Forthwegian. He was more polite in Algarvian: “Thank you, sir.”
“You are welcome,” Puliano said. “And who knows? You may make sergeant yet. You may even make officer yet.”
That startled Sidroc. In fact, it startled him right out of politeness. “Who, me?” he said. “Not fornicating likely-uh, sir. I am a Forthwegian, in case you had not noticed.”
“Oh, I noticed. You’re too ugly to make a proper Algarvian.” Puliano spoke without malice, which didn’t necessarily say he meant it for a joke. Before Sidroc could sort that out, the redhead went on, “If they made me into an officer, who knows where they’ll stop?”
He had something there. The only kingdom that really didn’t care whether its officers were noblemen or not was Unkerlant. Swemmel had got rid of old nobles much faster than he’d created new ones. If the Unkerlanters hadn’t let commoners become officers, they wouldn’t have had any.
Puliano grinned and pointed west. “Now, Corporal”-Sidroc didn’t care for the way the redhead emphasized his shiny new rank-”we have to see what we can do about that bridgehead on this side of the Skamandros.”
“What, you and me and nobody else?” Sidroc said. The Unkerlanters had spent lives like water to force their way across the river after being balked for some considerable while. Most of the lives they’d spent forcing the crossing were those of Yaninans. That’ll teach Tsavellas to turn his coat, Sidroc thought savagely.
“No, lackwit,” Puliano answered. “You and me and everything the fellows in the fancy uniforms can scrape together.” He might have been reading Sidroc’s mind, for he went on, “It’s not the nasty little whoresons in the pompom shoes in the bridgehead any more. I wish it were; we could deal with them.” He spat in fine contempt. “But it’s Unkerlanters in there now, Unkerlanters and as many stinking behemoths as they can cram into the space. And if we wait for them to bust out. .”
Sidroc made a very unhappy noise. He’d seen too often what happened when the Unkerlanters burst from their bridgeheads. He didn’t want to be on the receiving end of that again. But he asked, “Have we got any real chance of flinging them back across the river?”
Puliano’s shrug was as theatrical as his scornful spitting. To a Forthwegian’s eyes, Algarvians overacted all the time. “We have to try,” he said. “If we don’t try, we just sit here waiting for them to futter us. If we try, who knows what might happen?”
He had a point. Most of the time, the Unkerlanters were as stubborn in defense as any general could want. Every so often, though, especially when they got hit at a time or from a direction they didn’t expect, they would panic, and then the men attacking them got victories on the cheap.
“We have enough behemoths of our own to throw at them?” Sidroc persisted. “We have enough Kaunians to kill to put some kick in our attack?”
“Behemoths?” Puliano gave another shrug, melodramatic and cynical at the same time. “We haven’t had enough behemoths since the battles in the Durrwangen bulge. This won’t be any different from any other fight the past year and a half. Blonds. . Powers above, we’re even short on blonds.” But his battered features didn’t seem unduly disheartened. “Of course, since Tsavellas isn’t on our side any more, we don’t have to worry about what happens to these stinking Yaninans. Their life energy works as well as anybody else’s.”
“Heh,” Sidroc said. “I would sooner kill Kaunians. I never did like Kaunians. We are better off without them. But nobody will miss these Yaninan bastards, either.”