They didn't have long to wait. The behemoths tossed eggs into their trenches. "Forward!" Spinello shouted again. "Loose order!" The men he led probably could have done the job without commands. They'd done it before, some of them countless times. Having behemoths along to help was, if anything, an unusual luxury. They advanced by rushes, some soldiers blazing while others moved ahead. The Unkerlanters had an unpleasant choice: keep their heads down till they were slaughtered in their holes or come out and try to get away.
More often than not, most of them would have died in place. Here, rather to Spinello's surprise, most of them fled. Maybe it's the behemoths, he thought. If we can be twitchy about theirs, no reason they shouldn't be twitchy about ours.
Whatever the reason, running did the Unkerlanters little good. More eggs from the Algarvian behemoths burst among them, flinging them this way and that like broken toys. When the beam from a heavy stick caught a man in the back, he didn't just go down. He also went up- in flames.
"Forward!" Spinello shouted. Every step took Battle Group Spinello- and the behemoths with it- closer to the high ground at the heart of the salient. If the Algarvians could get up there in numbers, if they could move quickly once they did, this great, bloody grapple might yet turn out to have been worthwhile.
But one of the Unkerlanter officers must have had a crystal, and must have used it before he fell. The Algarvians hadn't gone far past the Unkerlanter trench line before eggs began dropping among them. Spinello curled himself into a ball behind a boulder. The big gray rock shielded him from the energies of eggs bursting in front of it. It would do him no good if eggs burst in back of it. He preferred not to dwell on that.
Somewhere not far away, an Unkerlanter was down and shrieking for his mother in a high, shrill voice. His cries went on and on, then cut off abruptly. Somebody, Spinello supposed, had put him out of his agony. He hoped someone would do the same for him if the need arose. Even more, he hoped it never would. He aimed to die in bed, preferably with company.
Despite the eggs falling among its men and behemoths, Battle Group Spinello fought its way forward. Spinello noticed the ground rising more sharply under his feet than it had before. "We're getting where we need to go," he called, pointing ahead. "If we can get up there in strength, if we can drive the Unkerlanters back once we do it, nothing we've been through will have mattered. We'll rip Swemmel's boys a new arsehole, and then we'll go on and win this war. Mezentio and victory!"
"Mezentio and victory!" the soldiers shouted. They were veterans. They knew he was telling them the truth. As long as they could keep going forward, they would finally battle their way past the last Unkerlanter defensive line. Then it would be fighting in open country, and Swemmel's soldiers had never been able to match them in that. Destroy the Durrwangen bulge, destroy the Unkerlanter armies here, and who could say what might happen after that?
The Unkerlanters might have drawn the same conclusion. If they had, they liked it less than Spinello had. More eggs fell on the advancing Algarvians, forcing footsoldiers to go to earth and separating them from the behemoths, which made life more difficult for all of Mezentio's men. Algarvian egg-tossers and Algarvian dragons went hunting the enemy's tossers.
But Algarvian dragons didn't have everything their own way, not here. Dragons painted rock-gray swooped down on Battle Group Spinello. Unkerlanter dragons had contested the sky west of here ever since this battle began. Some of them tried to flame behemoths. Others dropped still more eggs on the Algarvian footsoldiers.
Spinello was running toward the crater one egg had blown in the ground when another burst close by. All at once, he wasn't running anymore, but flying through the air. He landed in a thornbush, which tore at him but probably saved him from the worse damage he would have got slamming into the ground.
Not till he freed himself, tried to go on, and put weight on his right leg did he realize a chunk of metal egg casing had wounded him. He went down in a heap. Unlike Turpino's, his leg wouldn't support him anymore. Blood poured from a gash above the knee. Pain poured from the gash, too, now that he knew he had it.
"Stretcher-bearers!" he bawled, hoping some of them would hear him. "Stretcher-bearers!" He took a bandage from his belt pouch and bound up the wound as best he could. He also gulped down a little jar of poppy juice. That made the pain retreat, but couldn't rout it. Battle Group Turpino now, he thought.
"Here we are, pal," an Algarvian said. He and his comrade lifted Spinello and set him on their stretcher. "We'll get you out of here- that or die trying." It wasn't a joke, even if it sounded like one.
"I wanted to see the fight on the high ground," Spinello grumbled. But he wouldn't, not now.
Thirteen
Marshal Rathar had stayed in Durrwangen to direct the twin fights on each flank of the salient from his headquarters for as long as he could stand- and, indeed, for a little longer than that. As long as both battles were going furiously, he didn't see much point to directly overseeing one or the other. He might have guessed wrong as to which would prove the more important, and would have no one but himself to blame. King Swemmel would have no one but him to blame, either.
Now, though, the Algarvians plainly wouldn't break through in the east. They'd thrown everything they had at Braunau. They'd broken into the village several times. They'd never gone past it, and they didn't hold it at the moment. Rathar had a good notion of the reserves the redheads had left on that side of the bulge, and of his own forces over there. Braunau and that whole side of the salient would stand.
Here in the west, though… Here on the western side of the bulge, the Unkerlanters had badly hurt Mezentio's men. They'd killed a lot of enemy behemoths, and they'd cost the Algarvians a lot of time fighting their way through one heavily defended line after another.
But on this flank, unlike the other, the Algarvians hadn't had to halt. They were still coming, they'd gained the high ground he'd hoped to deny them, and they might yet break through and race to cut off the salient in the style they'd shown the past two summers.
"We'll just have to stop them, that's all," he said to General Vatran.
"Oh, aye, as easy as boiling water for tea," Vatran said, and took a sip from the mug in front of him. His grimace filled his face with so many wrinkles, it might almost have belonged to an aging gargoyle. "Don't I wish! Don't we all wish!"
"We have to do it," Rathar repeated. He got up from the folding table at which he'd been sitting with Vatran and paced back and forth under the plum trees that shielded his new field headquarters from the prying eyes of dragonfliers. The plateau up here sloped down toward the ground the Algarvians had already won. Gullies, some of them dry, more with streams at their bottom, cut up the flat land. Most of it was given over to fields and meadows, but orchards like this one and little clumps of forest varied the landscape. Rathar sat his jaw. "We have to do it, and we cursed well will." He raised his voice: "Crystallomancer!"
"Aye, lord Marshal?" The young mage came running, his crystal ready to hand.
"Get me General Gurmun, in charge of the reserve force of behemoths," Rathar said.
"Aye, sir." The crystallomancer murmured the charm he needed. Light flared from the crystal. A face appeared in it: another crystallomancer's face. Rathar's man spoke to the other fellow, who hurried away. Less than a minute later, General Gurmun's hard visage appeared in the sphere of glass. Rathar's crystallomancer nodded. "Go ahead, lord Marshal."