“Now!” the painter said in a low, savage voice. His double handful of followers blazed the redheads off their horses and the driver off his carriage. The Algarvians managed only startled squawks before they went down. The next group of redheads who came through Ventspils with captives would doubtless be more alert, but that did these men no good at all.
Skarnu ran toward the carriage. He paused a moment to finish an Algarvian who still writhed on the cobbles, then seized a horse’s head to keep the beast from bolting. Another man blazed off the stout padlock that held the carriage door closed. As it fell with a clank, he spoke in Lagoan.
The door opened. A couple of men jumped down from the carriage. “Away!” the painter said urgently. The men of the underground scattered. One of them led off the rescued dragonfliers. The rest headed back to their homes. Skarnu moved slowly through the dark streets of Ventspils, not wanting to get lost. Another lick against Algarve, he thought, and wondered what the next one would be.
What was left of Plegmund’s battered Brigade welcomed two new regiments hurried down from Forthweg with all the charm veterans usually showed new fish. Now a veteran himself, Sidroc jeered along with his comrades: “Does your mother know you’re here?” he asked a recruit obviously several years older than he was. “Does your mother know they’re going to bury you here?”
He howled laughter. So did his comrades. They were all a little, or more than a little, drunk, having liberated several jars of spirits from a village the Unkerlanters had abandoned in haste. Had the Unkerlanters abandoned it in something less than haste, they would have taken their popskull with them.
Sergeant Werferth said, “Nobody told him that when he comes down here, the buggers on the other side blaze back.”
That set the survivors of overrun Presseck into fresh gales of laughter. The recruits stared at them as if they’d gone mad. Maybe we have, Sidroc thought. He didn’t much care, one way or the other. He swigged from his canteen. More raw spirits ran hot down his throat.
Those spirits gave him most of the warmth he felt. The tents of Plegmund’s Brigade sat on the vast plains of southern Unkerlant, out in the middle of nowhere, so the frigid wind could get a running start before it blew through them. He said, “One thing-the Algarvians with us are every bit as cold as we are.”
“Serves ‘em right,” Ceorl said.
“Together, we and the Algarvians will drive Swemmel’s barbarians back into the trackless west,” the recruit said stiffly.
Together, Sidroc, Werferth, and Ceorl howled laughter. “We’ll try and stay alive,” Sidroc said. “And we’ll try and kill some Unkerlanters, because that’ll help us stay alive.”
“Don’t waste your time on him,” Werferth said. “He’s a virgin. He’ll find out. And if he lives through it, he’ll be telling the new recruits what they need to know next summer. If he doesn’t-” He shrugged.
Sidroc’s head ached the next morning. Ache or not, he drew himself to attention to listen to an Algarvian officer harangue the men of the Brigade. “We are part of something larger than ourselves,” the officer declared. “We shall rescue our brave Algarvian comrades down in Sulingen, we and this force King Mezentio’s might has gathered.”
He let loose with a typically extravagant, typically expansive Algarvian gesture. Sure enough, the tents of Plegmund’s Brigade weren’t the only ones on the plain. Several brigades of Algarvians had been mustered with them, and troop after troop of behemoths. It was a formidable assemblage. Whether it was formidable enough to punch through the cordon the Unkerlanters had drawn around Sulingen, Sidroc didn’t know. He knew it would do all it could.
“We must do this,” the Algarvian officer said. “We must, and so we can, and so we shall. Where the will is strong, victory follows.”
Redheads were drawn up getting their marching orders, too. “Mezentio!” they shouted, with as much spirit as if they were going on parade through Trapani to show off for pretty girls.
Not to be outdone, the Forthwegians who’d taken service with Algarve shouted, “Plegmund!” as loud as they could, doing their best to outyell the men who’d taught them what they knew of war. The Algarvians yelled back, louder than ever. It was a good-natured contest, nothing like the one that lay ahead.
Snow swirled through the air as Sidroc tramped south. “Loose order!” officers and underofficers called. He knew why: to keep too many of them from getting killed at once if things went wrong. He had a heavy cloak, and a white snow smock over it. He wore a fur hat some Unkerlanter soldier didn’t need any more. The weather was colder than any he’d ever known, but he wouldn’t freeze. He hoped he wouldn’t.
Freezing soon proved to be that least of his worries. The soldiers set over him had known what they were talking about when they warned their charges to spread out. The relief force had been moving for only a couple of hours when Unkerlanter dragons appeared overhead. They dropped a few eggs, flamed a few soldiers, and flew away. A pinprick-but the force hadn’t been overstrong to begin with. Now it was a little weaker.
About noon, they neared another of those Unkerlanter peasant villages scattered across the plain. Swemmel’s men held it. Warning shouts of, “Behemoths!” echoed through the army. Sure enough, Sidroc saw them moving inside the village, perhaps milling about in the square. Some of them began lobbing eggs at the advancing Algarvians-and at Plegmund’s Brigade as well.
Out trotted a force of Algarvian behemoths, whose crews skirmished at long range with the Unkerlanters. Even at a glance, Sidroc could see that the Unkerlanters outnumbered them. King Swemmel’s men saw the same thing. They didn’t come charging out after the Algarvians, as they might have when the war was new-from some of the stories the redheads told, they’d been very stupid in the early days. But they did forget about the footsoldiers. They forgot about everything, in fact, except what the Algarvian commander showed them.
And they paid for it. The officer in charge of the Algarvians had more than one string for his bow. “While the Unkerlanters were busy fighting and seemingly repelling the behemoths in front of them, another force entered the village from behind. The fight that followed was sharp but very short. The relief force kept moving south, on toward Sulingen.
“We’ve got a smart general,” Sergeant Werferth said. “That’s good. That’s mighty good. He buggered Swemmel’s boys just as pretty as you please.”
Sidroc snorted, then guffawed when he realized how apt the figure was. “Aye, bugger ‘em he did-came right up their backside.”
But it stopped being easy after that. Sidroc had found in Presseck how dangerous the Unkerlanters could be when they had numbers and power on their side. Now he discovered they didn’t need numbers to be dangerous. They knew what the Algarvians were trying to do, and threw everything they had into stopping them.
As so many had before him, Sidroc grew to hate and dread the cheer, “Urra!” Single Unkerlanters would pop up out of the snow shouting it and blaze down a man-or two, or three, or four-before they died themselves. Companies would fight like grim death in villages, bellowing defiance till the last man was slain. And regiment after regiment would charge across the plain at the relief force, sometimes with their arms linked, all the soldiers roaring, “Urra!”
Nor would those regiments charge alone, unsupported. The Unkerlanters threw behemoths and dragons and egg-tossers into the fight with the same air they threw men into it. Aye, they seemed to say, you ‘II smash these up, but we ‘ve got plenty more.
And the Algarvians did not have plenty more. Sidroc needed only a day or two to see that. Relief forces came in by dribs and drabs, when they came in at all. If the army couldn’t relieve the men in Sulingen with what it had now, it couldn’t relieve them.