“I’m bloody jealous of Major Spinello, that’s what,” Trasone said.
“For all you know, he’s dead,” Panfilo said.
“So what?” Trasone said. “I’d still be jealous of him.”
Panfilo considered that, then slowly nodded. “Something to it,” he admitted. “This isn’t where I’d come on holiday, I’ll tell you.” Not even the snow could make the wreckage of Sulingen look anything but hideous. And the Algarvian soldiers who’d trudged all the way to the banks of the Wolter were hardly more lovely than the ruins they’d helped create. Filthy, unshaven, scrawny, hungrier by the day, dressed in clothes half their own and half scrounged from Unkerlanter corpses, they would have cause apoplexy had they paraded through the streets of Trapani.
All they had left, all that hadn’t changed, was their spirit. When Trasone got to the kettle, a cook slapped a chunk-not a very big chunk-of boiled meat onto his mess tin. “What is it?” he asked suspiciously, and poked it with his knife. He eyed the cook. “It’s too tender to be your sister.”
“I’d say it was jackass, but here you are in front of me,” the cook retorted.
Trasone collected a slab of bread-a very small slab-from another cook and sat down on the stone steps of a house that wasn’t there anymore. As Panfilo came over and sat beside him, he took a bite of the meat. When he did, he made a horrible face. “Maybe it is jackass,” he said to Panfilo. “Or else horse or behemoth. What do you think?”
Panfilo ate a little himself. After some thought, he said, “Whatever it is, it’s been dead for a while.”
“Like that’s a surprise,” Trasone said with a snort. “Only meat we get these days, near enough, is from our own beasts the Unkerlanters kill-or from the ones that just fall over dead because they haven’t got anything to eat, either. It’d all be a lot gamier than it is if this lousy place weren’t cold enough to do duty for a rest crate.”
After another bite, Panfilo said, “I’m pretty sure it’s not dragon, anyhow. If I had a choice between starving and eating dragon, I’m buggered if I’d know which one to pick.”
Having choked down dead dragon the winter before, Trasone nodded. “You eat too much of that stuff, the quicksilver’ll poison you, or that’s what they say. I don’t know how you’d eat that much, though.” He paused. His mess tin was empty. He’d disposed of the bread in two bites, too. With a sigh, he said, “When we were hungry enough, though, it didn’t seem that bad, you know?”
“Oh, it seemed bad.” Panfilo had finished his meager meal, too. “But you’re right, I guess: hungry was worse.” He took a handful of snow and scrubbed at his mess tin. “We’re liable to be that hungry again pretty soon. If we don’t break out of here, we’re going to be that hungry again.”
“Afraid you’re right.” Trasone raised an eyebrow at the sergeant. “We get hungry like that again, I will be jealous of Spinello even if he’s dead.”
Before Panfilo could answer, shouts came from the north: “Dragons! Our dragons!”
Trasone and Panfilo both scrambled to their feet and trotted toward the dragon farm in what had been the city square. These days, it was the only part of Sulingen that Unkerlanter egg-tossers couldn’t reach. When the city was first cut off, dragons had come fairly close to bringing in enough supplies to keep the Algarvian army there fighting as well as it ever had. These days, though, the dragons had to fly a lot farther than they had then. Worse, the Unkerlanters knew the routes they had to use, and often lay in wait for them. Every day, it seemed, fewer ran the gauntlet.
“Life’s bloody wonderful, you know?” Trasone remarked as the dragons began spiraling down toward the battered square.
“How’s that?” Panfilo asked.
“If they fly in charges for our sticks and eggs for the tossers, we’ll starve, but we’ll be able to keep fighting while we do it,” Trasone answered. “If they fly in food, we’ll have enough to eat-well, almost-but Swemmel’s whoresons’ll ride roughshod over us. And if they bring in some of each, we’ll sink a couple of inches at a time, the way we’ve been doing.”
“What I wish they’d fly in is enough Kaunians to make a magic that’d fry the Unkerlanters’ toes off,” Panfilo said. “But it doesn’t look like they can do that, either.”
It didn’t look as if the Algarvians outside of Sulingen could do enough of anything to stave off defeat here. Trasone resolutely didn’t think about that. Along with the rest of the Algarvian soldiers in the square, he unloaded crates of food and other crates full of eggs and charges, loaded them onto sledges, and hauled them away. Soldiers were draft animals in Sulingen these days, for most of the real draft animals were dead.
Most of the dragons that flew north out of the square bore only their fliers. Some carried wounded men slung beneath them as the crates of supplies had been. Trasone sighed as he watched one of them get off the ground. “Just about worth taking a beam in the brisket,” he remarked.
In thoughtful tones, Panfilo replied, “These days, they’ve got mages checking the wounded. If you blaze yourself, you don’t go.”
“That’s fair,” Trasone said at once, and then, hotly, “And futter you, too, Sergeant, if you think I’d do that to myself.”
“I don’t.” Panfilo chuckled. “And you can’t get out by being court-martialed for cursing a superior, either.”
Unkerlanter dragons visited the square as the last of the Algarvian beasts were leaving. Heavy sticks around the farm blazed down a couple of the rock-gray dragons. Others attacked the Algarvian dragons in the air. Still others dropped eggs on the square. Huddled in a hole, Trasone said, “If they were as efficient as they like to brag on being, they would have hit us while our dragons were still on the ground here.”
“If they were as efficient as they like to brag on being, they would have killed the lot of us a long time ago,” Panfilo said, and Trasone could hardly argue with him.
A few days later, he and Trasone, along with most of the soldiers who’d been holding the line in the east against the Unkerlanters they’d never quite managed to drive from Sulingen, trudged north toward the outskirts of the city: the great belt of rubble they’d created that now sheltered them against the worst the Unkerlanters could do.
“You think we can break out?” Trasone asked Panfilo: one professional talking to another, figuring the odds.
“Sixty, eighty miles, maybe more than that for all I know? Against all the Unkerlanters in the world, and most of the behemoths? Won’t be easy.” Panfilo gave a professional answer. Still, he added, “If we’re going to try, we’d better try now. We probably should have tried two weeks ago, or longer than that. But I’ll tell you something: we’ve got a better chance now than we would in another couple of weeks. And if we don’t break out, it’s only a matter of time.”
That was professional commentary, too. Trasone thought it over. After a few paces, he kicked at the snow. Panfilo nodded as if he’d answered in words.
All the Algarvians-and the Sibians and Yaninans trapped in Sulingen with them-looked as ragged as Trasone did. He was surprised to see they’d managed to muster a couple of troops of behemoths; he hadn’t thought so many were left alive in the ruined city on the Wolter. An officer not far away was haranguing his men: “Every one of you lousy buggers is a stinking, nasty son of a whore. You ever want to get between your mistresses’ legs again, you’re going to have to fight like it. Just remember, these fornicators who fight for Swemmel are standing between you and all the pussy in Algarve.”
The soldiers cheered. Trasone joined in. The officer swept off his hat and bowed. He knew how to get his countrymen ready to fight, all right.
Egg-tossers sent their cargoes of death flying toward the Unkerlanters entrenched out beyond the northern edge of the city. Chainmail clanking on them, the behemoths lumbered forward to batter a way through the enemy’s lines. And footsoldiers went forward with them, to protect them from Unkerlanter soldiers.