But then more Unkerlanters came forward, and they had some idea that danger lurked among the trees. Danger also lurked, though, by the tumbledown barn, and that hadn’t occurred to them. The men from Plegmund’s Brigade posted there worked the same kind of slaughter as Sidroc’s squad had a few minutes earlier.
With that, the entire Unkerlanter advance came unglued. Swemmel’s men had been hit from unexpected directions three times in a row. When they could follow orders exactly as they got them, they made fine soldiers. Having spent more than two years in the field against them, Sidroc knew exactly how good they could be. But when they got surprised, they sometimes panicked.
They did here. They streamed back toward the west, dragging some wounded men with them and leaving others, along with the dead, lying on the muddy snow. Sidroc let out a long sigh of relief. “Well, that wasn’t so bad,” he said. “I don’t think we got even a scratch here.”
“Only one trouble,” Sudaku said. “They will come back.”
“Which means we’d better move,” Sidroc said. “They know where we are, so they’ll be sure to give this place a good pounding.” No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a messenger came up from Lieutenant Puliano, ordering the squad to shift to a new position in and around another outlying house. Sidroc preened. “Do I know what’s what?”
“Let me kiss your boots,” Ceorl said, “and you can kiss my-” The suggestion was not one a common soldier usually made to a corporal.
“If we’re both still alive tonight, you’re in trouble,” Sidroc said. Ceorl gave him an obscene gesture, too. Sidroc laughed and shook his head. “You’re not worth punishing, you son of a whore. That would just take you away from the front and make you safer than I am. I won’t let you get away with it. Come on, let’s move.”
They’d just started digging new holes when a storm of eggs fell on the grove they’d abandoned. The house and barn where other squads had taken shelter also vanished in bursts of sorcerous energy. Sudaku spoke in his Valmieran-flavored Algarvian: “Now they think it will be easy.”
“It would be easy-if they were fighting more Unkerlanters,” Sidroc said. “But the redheads are smarter than they are.” If the redheads are so cursed smart, what are they doing with their backs to the wall here in their own kingdom? And if you’re so fornicating smart, what are you doing here with them?
But, in the short run, on the small scale, what he’d said turned out to be the exact truth. On came the Unkerlanters once more, plainly confident they’d put paid to the men who’d tormented them. On they came-and again got caught from the flank and rear and ignominiously fled before setting so much as a foot in the village they were supposed to take.
“This is fun,” Ceorl said. “They can keep the whoresons coming. We’ll kill ‘em till everything turns blue.”
A long pause followed. We’d better move again, before they start pounding this place, too, Sidroc thought. Before he could give the order, though, another runner from the village came up. “Lieutenant Puliano says to pull back,” the man said.
“What? Why?” Sidroc asked irately. “Doesn’t he think the blockheads in rock-gray will fall for it again? I sure do.”
“But he gives the orders, and you sure don’t,” the messenger replied.
Since that was true, Sidroc had no choice but to obey. When he and his men-who still hadn’t lost anybody, despite the slaughter they’d worked on the Unkerlanters-got back into the Algarvian village, he burst out, “Why are you bringing us back here? We can hold ‘em a long time.”
“Aye, we could hold ‘em a long time here.” Puliano didn’t sound or look like a happy man. “But they’ve broken through farther north, and if we don’t pull back a little ways they’ll nip in behind us and cut us off.”
“Oh,” Sidroc said, and then, “Oh, shit.” That was an unanswerable argument. But it also had its drawbacks: “If the army does keep pulling back, what is there left to fight for?” Puliano just scowled by way of reply, from which Sidroc concluded that that had no real answer, either. He wished it did.
Six
Drizzle on the island of Obuda was as natural and unremarkable as snow in Istvan’s home valley. The sergeant stood to attention in his place in the captives’ camp as the Kuusaman guards took the morning roll call and count. He stood in the same place every day, rain or shine. The guards made sure they got the numbers right; when anything went wrong with their count, everything stopped-including the captives’ breakfasts-till they straightened things out.
Beside Istvan, Corporal Kun whispered, “This would go a lot smoother if the goat-eaters could count to twenty-one without playing with themselves.”
That made Istvan laugh. A guard pointed at him and shouted, “To be quiet!” in bad Gyongyosian. He nodded to show he was sorry, then glared at Kun. It was just like his brief time in the village schooclass="underline" somebody else talked out of turn, and he got in trouble for it.
At last, the slanteyes seemed satisfied. Istvan waited for one of them to call out, “To queue up for feeding!” the way they usually did. Instead, though, the Kuusaman captain in charge of the guards said, “Sergeant Istvan! Corporal Kun! To stand out!”
Ice ran through Istvan. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kun start. But they had no choice. The two of them stepped away from their comrades, away from their countrymen. Istvan hadn’t imagined how terribly lonely he could feel with so many eyes on him.
The captain nodded. “You two,” he said, using the plural where he should have used the dual, “to come with me.”
“Why, sir?” Istvan asked. “What have we done?”
“Not know,” the Kuusaman answered with a shrug. “You to come for interrogation.”
He pronounced the word so badly, Istvan almost failed to understand it. When he did, he wished he hadn’t. Gyongyosian interrogations were nasty, brutal things. The Kuusamans were the enemy, so he couldn’t imagine they would play the game by gentler rules.
But it was their game, not his. Under the sticks of the guards, he could obey or he could die. I should have let Captain Frigyes cut my throat after all, he thought. It would have been over in a hurry then, and my life energy might have done something extra to the slanteyes. Now the stars are having their revenge on me.
One of the guards gestured with his stick. Numbly, Istvan started forward, Kun at his side. Kun’s face was a frozen mask. Istvan tried to wear the same look. If the Kuusamans thought he was afraid, it would only go worse for him. And if they don’t think I’m afraid, they’re fools.
But he would do his best to act like a man from a warrior race as long as he could. “You ought to give us breakfast before you question us,” he told a guard as the fellow led him toward one of the gates in the stockade.
“To shut up,” the guard answered.
Outside the gate, the Kuusamans separated him from Kun, leading him towards one tent on the yellow-brown grass and Kun to another. Istvan grimaced. That made telling lies harder.
He ducked his way into the tent. A couple of guards already stood in there. The Kuusamans didn’t believe in taking chances. One of the men who’d led him out of the captives’ camp walked in behind him. No, the slanteyes didn’t believe in taking chances at all. A moment later, he realized why: the bright-looking Kuusaman sitting in a folding chair waiting for him was a woman. She wore spectacles amazingly like Kun’s. It had barely occurred to him that the Kuusamans had to have women among them as well as men, or there wouldn’t have been any more Kuusamans after a while. He wished there hadn’t been.
“Hello. You are Sergeant Istvan, is it not so?” she said, speaking better Gyongyosian than any other slanteye he’d ever heard. She waited for him to nod, then went on, “I am called Lammi. May the stars shine on our meeting.”