“That wouldn’t be bad,” Szonyi said. “Those big felt ones they wear hold the cold out better than anything we issue.” Having seen a fair number of Gyongyosians wearing felt boots whose original owners didn’t need them anymore, Istvan could hardly disagree.
“Here they come!” Kun snarled. Maybe he’d used his little magic for detecting people moving toward him. Maybe he just had good ears and- thanks to his spectacles-sharp eyes.
The Unkerlanters came on openly, confidently-they seemed sure their eggs had cleaned up whatever enemies might be waiting for them. Fools, Istvan thought. They had to be new men, men without much experience in battle. Veterans would have taken less for granted. Some fools lived and learned and became veterans. Istvan was determined that these men wouldn’t.
Again, he chose to wait till the Unkerlanters were almost on top of him before he started blazing. Again, his men imitated him. Again, they worked a frightful slaughter on Swemmel’s troopers. This time, it was too much for the Unkerlanters to bear. They fled, leaving dead and wounded behind them.
“Boots,” Szonyi said happily, and proceeded to strip them off the corpse closest to him and put them on his own feet.
“Those are too big,” Istvan said.
“They’re supposed to be big,” Szonyi insisted. “That way, you can stuff them full of cloth or whatever you’ve got so they keep your feet warm even better.” But whenever he moved, the boots tried to slide off. At last, cursing, he kicked them away and allowed, “Well, maybe they are a little too big.”
“Let me try them,” Istvan said. “I think my feet are bigger than yours.” He sat down on a tree trunk, pulled off his own, Gyongyosian-issue, boots and put on the ones the dead Unkerlanter had worn. They fit him better than they had Szonyi, and they were warmer and more flexible than the ones he’d had on. He walked a few steps. “I’ll keep ‘em.”
“Let me see if I can find a pair to fit me,” Kun said. He had plenty of Unkerlanter corpses from which to choose; Swemmel’s men had paid a heavy price for gaining not an inch of ground. Before long, all the Gyongyosians who wanted felt boots had pairs to suit them. Istvan nodded in no small satisfaction. If you had to fight a war, this was the way to go about it.
Sometimes, things ended as they began. These days, pinned back against the Wolter in the many times ruined wreckage of Sulingen, Trasone had plenty of chances to think about that. He turned to Sergeant Panfilo, who crouched beside him in the remains of what had been an ironworker’s hut. “The last time we were here,” he said, “we were facing south, not north.”
“Aye, so we were,” Panfilo answered. “And we were wondering how we were going to pry the stinking Unkerlanters out of those bloody big ironworks that’re behind us now. Before long, they’ll be wondering how to pry us out.”
“Only thing I’m wondering right now is where in blazes I’m going to get some food,” Trasone said, and Panfilo nodded. Neither of them had eaten for a while. Only a handful of Algarvian dragons made it down to Sulingen these days, and the Algarvian pocket in the city had grown so small, a lot of the supplies they dropped ended up in the enemy’s hands.
In the trenches less than a furlong away, the Unkerlanters had their peckers up. They knew they were going to overwhelm the Algarvians here as surely as Trasone did. Every so often, they would burst into hoarse song. The only thing they didn’t do was stick their heads up out of the trenches to jeer at the Algarvians who had come so far … but not quite far enough. The ones who tried that wouldn’t live long enough to celebrate their victory.
Just as Trasone had learned a few words and phrases of Unkerlanter, so some of Swemmel’s mean had picked up a little Algarvian. “Surrender!” one of them shouted now. In a moment, the cry resounded up and down the line: “Surrender! Surrender! Surrender!”
Here and there, Algarvian soldiers yelled back. Their answers were uniformly negative and mostly obscene. “What do you suppose they’d do to us if we were stupid enough to give ourselves up?” Panfilo asked.
“I don’t much want to find out,” Trasone answered. “As long as I have a choice, I’d sooner die quick and clean-if I can, anyhow.”
“I’m with you,” Panfilo said. “They’d have fun, their mages would have fun….” His shiver had nothing to do with the bitterly cold winter day. “No, I’d sooner make ‘em earn it.”
The Unkerlanters were ready to do just that. As if the Algarvians’ refusal to give up angered them, they plastered the front-line trenches with eggs. They had plenty of tossers and plenty of eggs to toss. The Algarvians couldn’t reply in kind; they had to hoard the few eggs left to them for the moments when those eggs would be most desperately needed.
Huddled in the wreckage of the hut, sorcerous energy searing the air not far from him, deadly fragments of metal and wood and stone hissing every which way, Trasone reckoned the present moment quite desperate enough for all ordinary purposes. And then, just when he thought things could grow no worse, somebody behind him called, “We’ve got soup in the pot!”
He groaned. No matter how hungry he was, nothing could make him enthusiastic about what passed for food among the Algarvians in Sulingen these days. Panfilo made a horrible face, too, and asked, “What’s in it?”
“You don’t want to know that,” Trasone exclaimed.
“About what you’d figure,” the soldier at the soup pot answered. “Old bones, a few turnip peelings.” That meant it was a good batch. A lot of the time lately, it hadn’t had any peelings to thicken it. Sometimes it hadn’t had any bones, either, and was only hot water flavored by whatever had stuck to the sides of the pot from the previous batch.
“What kind of bones?” Panfilo persisted. Trasone shook his head. The less he knew about what he poured down his throat, the better. But Panfilo, morbidly or not, was curious: “And how old are they?”
“Whatever we could dig up,” came the reply. “And they’ve been frozen since whatever beasts they belonged to got killed, so what difference does it make? Come back and have some if you want. Otherwise, you can go on starving.”
“We go on starving even if we’ve got the soup, on account of there’s nothing real in it,” Trasone said. Panfilo nodded; he knew that, too. The trooper went on, “Is it any wonder we sneak out and murder the Unkerlanter pickets for the sake of whatever black bread and sausage they’ve got on ‘em?” He sighed. He was on the front line, which meant he was supposed to get a couple of ounces of bread every day. Sometimes he did. More often, he didn’t.
Panfilo said, “I’m going back there. The way my belly’s gnawing my spine, anything is better than nothing.”
“Not with what’ll be in that pot,” Trasone predicted, but his own belly was growling like one of the wolves that prowled the Unkerlanter plains and forests. Cursing the Unkerlanters and his own officers impartially, he crawled after the sergeant. Eggs continued to burst all around. He was, by now, without fear, or nearly so. If one burst on top of him and finished him off, it wouldn’t be finishing much.
Panfilo was already pouring down a mess tin full of soup when Trasone got back to the hole in the ground that housed the cookfire. The sergeant finished, wiped his mouth on a filthy tunic sleeve, and said, “You’re right-it’s pretty bad. I’m still glad I got it.”
Trasone sniffed the pot. The cook hadn’t told all of the truth. Some of the bones in there had had time to start going bad before they froze. Nothing else could have accounted for the faint reek of corruption that reached his nose. But he held out his mess tin, too. If the soup poisoned him, it wouldn’t be poisoning much, either.
As Panfilo had, he gulped the stuff down. It tasted nasty, but maybe not quite so nasty as he’d expected. And there were turnip peelings in there; he actually had to chew a couple of times. The cook hadn’t been lying after all. The peelings might create some small part of the illusion of fullness. And the soup was hot. That, at least, was real.