None of that now. Everything was silent, eerily so. Young Lieutenant Recared nudged Leudast and pointed. "Look, Sergeant," Recared said, his unlined face glowing with excitement, almost with awe. "Here come the captives."
"Aye," Leudast said softly. He couldn't have been more than two or three years older than Recared himself. It only seemed like ten or twelve. Awe was in his voice, too, as he said it again: "Aye."
He hadn't known quite so many Algarvians were left alive in Sulingen when their army at last gave up its hopeless fight. Here came some of them now: a long column of misery. By Unkerlanter standards, their tall enemies from the east were slim even when well fed. Now, after so much desperate fighting cut off from any hope of resupply, most of them were redheaded skeletons, nothing more.
They were filthy, too, with scraggly red beards covering their hollow cheeks. They wore a fantastic mix of cloaks, Algarvian tunics and kilts, long Unkerlanter tunics, and any rags and scraps of cloth they could get their hands on. Some had stuffed crumpled news sheets and other papers under their tunics to try to fight the frigid winter here in the southwest of Unkerlant. Here and there, Leudast saw Algarvians in pathetic overshoes of woven straw. Snug in his own felt boots, he almost pitied the foe. Almost. King Mezentio's men had come too close to killing him too many times for him to find feeling sorry for them easy.
Lieutenant Recared drew himself up very straight. "Seeing them makes me proud I'm an Unkerlanter," he said.
Maybe the ability to say things like that was part of what separated officers from ordinary soldiers. All Leudast could do was mumble, "Seeing them makes me glad I'm alive." He didn't think Recared heard him, which might have been just as well.
Most of the Algarvians trudged along with their heads down: they were beaten, and they knew it. A few, though, still somehow kept the jauntiness that marked their kind. One of them caught Leudast's eye, grinned, and spoke in pretty fair Unkerlanter: "Hey, Bignose- our turn today, tomorrow yours."
Leudast's mittened hand flew up to the organ the redhead had impugned. It was of a good size and strongly curved, but so were most Unkerlanters' noses. He waved derisively at the Algarvian, waved and said, "Big up above, big down below."
"Aye, all you Unkerlanters are big pricks," the captive came back with a chuckle.
Some soldiers would have blazed a man who said something like that. Leudast contented himself with the last word: "You think it's funny now. You won't be laughing so hard when they set you to work in the mines." That struck home. The Algarvian's grin slipped. He tramped on and was lost among his fellows.
At last, the long tide of misery ended. Recared shook himself, as if waking from a dream. He turned back to Leudast and said, "Now we've got to get ready to whip the rest of King Mezentio's men out of our kingdom."
"Sure enough, sir," Leudast agreed. He hadn't thought about what came after beating the Algarvians in Sulingen. He supposed thinking about such things before you had to was another part of what separated officers from the men they led.
"What state is your company in, Lieutenant?" Recared asked.
"About what you'd expect, sir- I've got maybe a section's worth of men," Leudast answered. Plenty of companies had sergeants in charge of them these days, and plenty of regiments, like Recared's, were commanded by lieutenants.
With a nod, Recared said, "Have them ready to move out tomorrow morning. I don't know for a fact that we will move tomorrow, but that's what it looks like."
"Aye, sir." Leudast's sigh built a young fogbank of vapor in front of his face. He knew he shouldn't have expected anything different, but he would have liked a little longer to rest after one fight before plunging into the next.
They didn't go north the next morning. They did go north the next afternoon, tramping up roads made passable by behemoths wearing snowshoes. Here and there, the snow lay too deep even for behemoths to trample out a usable path. Then the weary troopers had to shovel their way through the drifts. The duty was as physically wearing as combat, the only advantage being that the Algarvians weren't trying to blaze them or drop eggs on their heads.
One of Leudast's troopers said, "I wish we were riding a ley-line caravan up to the new front. Then we'd get there rested. The way things are, we're already halfway down the road to being dead." He flung a spadeful of snow over this shoulder, then stooped to get another one.
A few minutes later, the company emerged from the trench it had dug through a great drift. Leudast was awash in sweat, his lungs on fire, regardless of the frigid air he breathed. When he could see more than snow piled up in front of him, he started to laugh. There a few hundred yards to one side of the road lay a wrecked caravan, its lead car a burnt-out, blasted ruin- the Algarvians had planted an egg along the ley line, and its burst of sorcerous energy had done everything the redheads could have wanted. "Still want to go the easy way, Werbel?"
"No, thanks, Sergeant," the trooper answered at once. "Maybe this isn't so bad after all."
Leudast nodded. He wasn't laughing any more. The steersmen on that ley-line caravan were surely dead. So were dozens of Unkerlanter troopers: bodies lay stacked like cordwood by the ruined caravan. And more dozens, maybe hundreds, of men were hurt. The Algarvians had gained less by winning some skirmishes.
When the regiment encamped for the night in the ruins of an abandoned peasant village, Lieutenant Recared said, "There are some stretches of ley line that are safe. Our mages keep clearing more every day, too."
"I suppose they find out if the ley lines are clear by sending caravans on them," Leudast said sourly. "This one wasn't."
"No, but it will be now, after the mages cancel out the effect of the energy burst," Recared answered.
"And then they'll find another cursed egg a mile farther north," Leudast said. "Find it the hard way, odds are."
"You haven't got the right attitude, Sergeant," Recared said reprovingly.
Leudast thought he had just the right attitude. He was opposed to getting killed or maimed. He was especially opposed to getting killed or maimed because some mage hadn't done his job well enough. Having the enemy kill you was part of war; he understood that. Having your own side kill you… He'd come to understand that was part of war, too, however much he hated it.
In good weather, on good roads, they would have been about ten days' march from where the fighting was now. They took quite a bit longer than that to get there. The roads, even the best of them, were far from good. Though the winter solstice was well past, the days remained short and bleak and bitterly cold, with a new blizzard rolling in out of the west every other or every third day.
And, though no redheads opposed them on the ground, the Algarvians hadn't gone away and given up after losing Sulingen. They kept being difficult whenever and wherever they could. Unkerlant was vast, and dragons even thinner in the air than soldiers and behemoths were on the ground. That meant King Mezentio's dragonfliers could fare south to visit death and destruction on the Unkerlanters moving up to assail their countrymen.
When eggs fell, Leudast dived into the closest hole he could find. When Algarvian dragons swooped low to flame, he simply leaped into the snow on his belly and hoped his white smock would keep enemy dragonfliers from noticing him. It worked; after each attack ended, he got up and started slogging north again.
Not everyone was so lucky. He'd long since got used to seeing corpses, sometimes pieces of corpses, scattered in the snow and staining it red. But once the Algarvian dragons had been lucky enough to take out a column of more than a dozen Unkerlanter behemoths and the crews who served their egg-tossers and heavy sticks. The air that day was calm and still; the stench of burnt flesh still lingered as he tramped past. Dragonfire had roasted the behemoths inside the heavy chainmail they wore to protect them from weapons mere footsoldiers could carry. Even the beasts' snowshoe-encased hooves and the iron-shod, curving horns on their noses were covered with soot from the flames the dragons had loosed.