That turned out to be a mistake. These fellows came at Munderic’s men as fiercely as if their hair were red, not dark. They kept right on shouting Raniero’s name, too. And they cursed King Swemmel as vilely as Garivald had ever cursed the Algarvians.
Garivald expected Munderic would try to break away. His target had been Kluftern, not a platoon of Grelzers. But the irregular leader shouted, “Kill the traitors!” and ordered his men forward with as little hesitation as Marshal Rathar might have shown.
Forward Garivald went, wishing Munderic had shown more sense. Fighting these fellows was different from fighting Algarvians. The soldiers who followed Raniero looked like the irregulars, sounded like them, and wore clothes much like theirs, too-one snow smock couldn’t differ much from another. And, with snowflakes blowing every which way, nobody got a clear look at anybody more than a couple of paces away anyhow.
Munderic rapidly proved Marshal Rathar had nothing to worry about from his generalship. The only thing he had going for him-the thing that had held his band of irregulars together-was his enthusiasm. In this fight, it got in the way. He sent men running now here, now there, till Garivald wasn’t sure where he was supposed to be and who, if anyone, was supposed to be there with him.
Had a competent soldier-say, a veteran Algarvian captain-been leading King Raniero’s troopers, they would have made short work of the irregulars. But the big fight, the fight against the real Unkerlanter army, sucked competent soldiers toward the front. Whoever was in charge of the Grelzers had no more idea of how to handle his men than did Munderic.
What resulted wasn’t so much a battle, even a small one, as a series of skirmishes, men fighting first in this place, then in that one, as they happened to collide. Garivald flopped down in the snow behind some bushes. He blazed at a couple of men he was pretty sure were Grelzer soldiers. Neither of them fell; either the snow, which blew more thickly by the minute, was attenuating his beam or he wasn’t so handy with a stick as he might have been.
A couple of minutes later, somebody else skidded down behind the same bushes. “Stinking whoresons!” he growled, and blazed at the same men Garivald had tried to knock over. “Hate those stinking traitors, serving the false king.”
“Aye.” Garivald blazed again, though by then he could hardly see his targets. He cursed. “Might as well throw rocks at ‘em, for all the good our sticks are doing us.”
“It’s a stinking war, that’s the truth,” the other fellow said. Like a lot of the irregulars, he had a length of wool wrapped around the lower part of his face to keep his nose and mouth from freezing. Bits of vapor came out through it; more had formed icicles in front of where his lips were bound to be.
“Wish I were back in my own village, getting drunk,” Garivald said. “I miss my wife, I miss my brats, I miss my firstman.. well, maybe not.”
The other fighter laughed. “I know just what you mean. Firstman in the place I grew up chewed nails for fun-that’s what everybody said, anyhow.”
“Mine’s just a sneak and a spy. He’d suck up to inspectors and then take it out on everybody else.” No, Garivald didn’t miss Waddo, not a bit.
“They’re like that, all right,” the other fellow said. “Ought to hang every cursed one of them, give a man a little room to live.” They spent the next few minutes maligning firstmen. Neither of them did any more blazing. They had no targets worth blazing at, not with the blizzard closing the walls of the world around them.
Then a couple of shapes did appear through the snow. Both men behind the bush raised their sticks. But one of the newcomers could only have been big, shambling Sadoc. “Take it easy,” Garivald said. “They’re ours.”
“Suits me,” his companion replied, and lowered his stick again.
Maybe Sadoc heard them. Maybe the bumbling mage did have enough skill to sense them there. He started to raise his own stick. “Swemmel!” Garivald called, not wanting a fellow irregular to blaze him. “Swemmel and Unkerlant!”
The words were almost the last ones that ever passed his lips. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the fighter with whom he’d been chatting and cursing roll away to bring his stick to bear on him. Without conscious thought, Garivald leaped after him and knocked the stick out of his hands. It flew off into the snow.
“Grelz!” his erstwhile companion yelled, kicking out at Garivald and catching his stick with a boot heel. It also flew away. Garivald didn’t dare scramble for it-the man who’d chosen the Algarvian puppet might get the other one first. Instead, Garivald grappled with the fellow who, till the war began, had been a peasant just like him.
“Whoreson!” The word came from both their mouths at the same time. They punched and kneed and gouged and kicked at each other. The Grelzer soldier was smaller than Garivald, but lithe and quick. He gave at least as good as he got; had Garivald not twisted aside as the last instant, the fellow would have thumbed out his eye as neatly as if he were scraping the meat from a freshwater mussel.
“Hold it right there, the both of you, or we’ll blaze your balls off!” That shout froze Garivald and his foe. Ever so cautiously, Garivald turned his head. Standing over them were Sadoc and another irregular.
Garivald pushed himself away from the fighter who’d chosen the path opposite his. “He’s one of Ran-” he began, but the fellow wasted no time showing what he was. Fast as a striking serpent, he grabbed for one of the sticks in the snow.
He might have been fast as a serpent, but he wasn’t, he couldn’t be, faster than two beams. At that range, the blowing snow didn’t weaken them enough to matter. One caught him in the chest, the other in the head. He thrashed and died, still reaching for the stick a couple of feet away. His blood stained the white with red.
He was still thrashing when Sadoc kicked him. “Filthy bugger!” the makeshift mage said. “If we’d taken him captive, we’d’ve made him pay proper. We could’ve stretched him out for a day or two, easy.”
“I’m just glad he’s dead,” Garivald said. “I don’t care how it happened.” Little by little, his thudding heart slowed toward normal. “I thought he was one of us-and he thought I was one of them.” He touched his face with a mittened hand. The mitten came away wet with blood. “He could fight. All these fellows could fight-can fight. They hate Swemmel as much as we hate the redheads.” He kicked at the snow. He hadn’t really believed that was true. Now he saw he’d been wrong.
Sadoc pointed in the direction of the main fighting. “We’ve given this here pack of bastards all they wanted, anyhow.”
Sure enough, the men loyal to Raniero sullenly withdrew from the fields. But, after Munderic found what losses the irregulars had taken, he ordered them back toward the woods, too. “We aren’t going to do anything at Kluftern, not beat up like we are,” he said. “We’ll have to wait till the Grelzers and the Algarvians chase some more men into our camp. And they will. Powers above know they will.”
Garivald thought he was bound to be right. But the river ran both ways, if Swemmel and the thought of staying under the rule of Unkerlant roused such passion in the breasts of at least some who fought for Raniero. The river ran both ways. . He saw the beginning of a song there, but deliberately chose not to shape it. He’d already decided which way he was going.
In the ruins of Sulingen, Trasone and Sergeant Panfilo lined up in front of a steaming kettle. “You know what?” Trasone said as the queue snaked forward.
“Tell me,” Panfilo urged. Both Algarvians, by now, sported full bushy beards, their mustaches and side whiskers and chin strips all but lost in the rest of the coppery growth. They had almost no hot water with which to help stay trim. Moreover, the beards went some way toward keeping their cheeks and chins warm.