Darkness Descending

Eight

Leofsig turned to his younger brother and asked, “Who’s your friend in Oyngestun? This is the third letter you’ve got from there in the last couple of weeks.”

He hadn’t meant anything in particular by the question. The last thing he expected was for Ealstan to blush and look embarrassed and stammer out, “Oh, just, uh, somebody I, uh, got to know, that’s all.”

It so patently wasn’t all, Leofsig started to laugh. Ealstan glared at him. “Somebody you got to know, eh? Is she pretty?” he asked, and then went on, “She must be pretty, to get you all flustered like that.”

And, sure enough, Ealstan’s face lit up like a sunrise. “Aye, she’s pretty,” he said in a low voice. He glanced out toward the doorway of the bedroom they shared, to make sure nobody was standing out in the courtyard and listening. Leofsig thought he was being foolish; on a miserably chilly night like this one, nobody in his right mind would want to linger out there.

“Well, tell me more,” Leofsig urged. “How’d you meet her? What’s her name?” He had trouble thinking of his baby brother as being old enough to care about girls, but Ealstan’s beard was getting on toward man-thick these days.

“I met her gathering mushrooms,” Ealstan answered, still hardly above a whisper. Leofsig laughed again; if that wasn’t the way a quarter of the Forthwegian writers ever born started their romances, he’d eat his shoes. “Well, I did, curse it,” Ealstan said. But something more than silliness at being caught up in a cliche was on his face. Leofsig had trouble naming it, whatever it was.

“What’s her name?” he asked again.

That other thing grew stronger on Ealstan’s face. Now Leofsig recognized it: it was fear. For a moment, he didn’t think his brother would answer him. When at last Ealstan did speak, he said, “I wouldn’t tell anybody but you, not even Father, not yet anyhow. Her name’s . . . Vanai.” The whisper was so quiet, Leofsig had to lean forward to hear it.

“Why are you making such a secret out of. . .” he began, and then, before he’d finished the sentence, he understood exactly why. “Oh.” He whistled softly. “Because she’s a Kaunian.”

“Aye.” Ealstan’s voice was bleak. When he chuckled, the sound might have come from the throat of a weary, cynical old man. “My sense of timing couldn’t be better, could it?”

“Not if you tried for a year.” Leofsig shook his head, as stunned as if an egg had burst close by. “That would be hard enough any time. Now ...”

Ealstan nodded. “Now it’s a disaster. But it happened anyhow. And do you know what?” He stuck out his chin, as if challenging not only Leofsig but the whole world to make him take it back. “I’m glad it happened.”

“You’re head over heels is what you are.” Leofsig knew a stab of jealousy. He’d been taking Felgilde out since before he’d got summoned into King Penda’s levy, and he didn’t think he’d ever felt about her the way Ealstan obviously felt about this Vanai. But his brother had his eyes open, too: his wariness made that plain.

So did his next question: “Leofsig, do you think it’s true, what people are saying about what the redheads did to the Kaunians they shipped off to the west?”

Leofsig started to sigh. His breath caught in his throat; what emerged was more of a choking noise, which seemed to fit. “I don’t know,” he answered, but that wasn’t what Ealstan had asked. With another sigh, a real one this time, he went on, “By the powers above, I hope not. I wouldn’t like to think . . . that of anyone, even the Algarvians.” What he’d like to think wasn’t what Ealstan had asked, either. “I tell you this, though: it could be true. The way they treated Kaunians in the captives’ camp, the way they’re treating them here . . . Aye, it could be true.”

“I thought the same thing--I was hoping you’d tell me I was wrong,” Ealstan said. “If you’re right--if we’re right--King Mezentio’s men could go into Oyngestun for some more Kaunians to send west, and they might take her.” Fear was back on his face; it rubbed his voice raw. “And I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. I wouldn’t even know about it till I stopped hearing from her.”

Leofsig had never had such worries with Felgilde (for that matter, he suspected she wouldn’t be brokenhearted to see every Kaunian vanish from Forthweg). He eyed his brother with mingled sympathy and surprise. “You’ve got a man’s load of troubles there, sure enough. I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t suppose you could move her here to Gromheort, could you?”

Ealstan shook his head. “Not a chance. She lives with her grandfather. And even if I could, the redheads would be as likely to grab her here as they would there.” He clenched his fists. “What am I going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Leofsig repeated, that being kinder than saying, There’s nothing you can do. After some thought, he added, “You might tell Father. He won’t get mad at you for being sweet on a Kaunian girl--you know better than that--and he may be able to do you some good.”

“Maybe.” Ealstan didn’t sound convinced. “I didn’t want to tell anybody, but you asked just the right questions.” He looked grim. “If I keep getting letters from Oyngestun, I won’t need to do much telling, will I? Not unless I want to do a lot of lying, I mean.” From grim, his features went to grimmer. “Pretty soon, Sidroc’s going to figure things out. That won’t be so good. He already knows about her.”

“How does he--?” Again, Leofsig stopped in the middle of a question and answered it himself: “This is the girl whose basket you brought home last year.” He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, angry he hadn’t made the connection sooner.

“Aye, it is,” Ealstan said. “But we were just friends then, not--” Now he stopped abruptly.

“Not what?” Leofsig asked. Ealstan sat on his stool and didn’t answer. By not answering, he said everything that needed saying. Leofsig shook his head in bemusement. He’d only thought he was jealous of his younger brother before. He had hopes he might enjoy Felgilde--probably the night after he asked for her hand, if he ever did. That Ealstan didn’t have to live on hope struck him as most unfair. He found another question: “What are you going to do now?”

“That’s what we’ve been talking about,” Ealstan said impatiently--and Leofsig wasn’t used to his little brother’s being impatient with him, either. “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know if there’s anything I can do, and I don’t want anybody else to know I’ve got to do anything.”

“I still think Father could help,” Leofsig said. “He helped me, remember.”

“Of course I remember,” Ealstan said. “If I think of anything he might do, I’ll ask him.” He suddenly looked very fierce. “But don’t you dare say anything to him till I do--if I ever do. Do you hear me?”

Leofsig had used that tone with Ealstan any number of times. Up till now, Ealstan had never used it with him. He started to bristle. The set look on his brother’s face warned that bristling would do no good and might do a lot of harm. When he did speak, his voice was still rough, but not in the way it would have been a moment before: “Just don’t go and do anything stupid, do you hear me?”

“Oh, aye, I hear you,” Ealstan answered. “The way things are going, though, who knows whether I’ll be able to listen to you?”

“I wish I could argue with that.” Leofsig got up and clapped his brother on the shoulder. “I hope it turns out as well as it can for you.”

“Thanks.” Now Ealstan sounded like the younger brother he’d always been. As he looked up at Leofsig, his smile seemed familiar, too--for a couple of heartbeats. But then his face hardened into that of a near-stranger again. “About as much as anybody can hope for these days, isn’t it?”

“Seems that way.” Leofsig thought about adding the hope that things would get better soon. He held his tongue. As far as he could see, that hope would just rouse Ealstan to bitter laughter. Contemplating it almost roused him to bitter laughter. Instead of laughing, he yawned. “I’m going to bed. Shoving rocks around takes more work than Algarvian irregular verbs.”

“Good night,” Ealstan said, and then used an Algarvian irregular verb that startled Leofsig.

“Where did you learn that?” he asked. “The guards in the captives’ camp used to yell it at us.”

“From the constables,” his brother answered. “They call people that all the time. They usually laugh when they say it, though. They’re whoresons, aye, but they aren’t as mean as the soldiers were.”

“Maybe not--some of them don’t seem to be bad fellows, anyhow,” Leofsig allowed. “But they’re still redheads.” Having said that, he thought he’d given them all the condemnation necessary. Then, discovering he was wrong, he added, “And they’re the ones who loaded the Kaunians into the caravans cars.”

“So they are.” Ealstan grimaced. “I’d forgotten that. I wonder how they sleep at night.”

“I don’t know.” Leofsig yawned again. “But I can tell you how I’m going to sleep tonight: like a brick.” He soon proved himself right, too.

A couple of evenings later, while Ealstan was wrestling with Algarvian irregular verbs or his father’s bookkeeping problems, Hestan took Leofsig out into the courtyard and quietly said, “Something is troubling your brother. Do you know what it is?”

“Aye,” Leofsig answered. He shivered a little; the weather had got no warmer.

When he said no more than that, his father clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Is it anything where I could help him?”

“Maybe,” Leofsig said.

Hestan waited to see if anything more was forthcoming. When he found it wasn’t, he chuckled under his breath. “In a gamesome mood tonight, are you? All right, I’ll come out and ask: what is it?”

“I don’t think I ought to tell you,” Leofsig said. “He asked me not to.”

“Ah.” Hestan exhaled. A lamp inside the kitchen and another in a bedroom showed the puff of fog that came from his mouth and nose. “Whatever it is, it has to do with those letters he’s been getting from Oyngestun, doesn’t it?”

Too late, Leofsig realized Ealstan would have wanted him to say something like, What letters? When he didn’t say that right away, his father slowly nodded. Leofsig’s sigh brought forth mist, too. “I don’t think I’d better say anything at all, Father.”

“Why not?” Hestan was still quiet--he almost always was--but now he was quietly angry. “I did you some good, you know. I might be able to do the same for your brother.”

“If I thought you could, I’d tell you fast as a blaze,” Leofsig said. “I wish I did, but I don’t. Have you got the pull to keep the redheads from shipping Kaunians west?”

Hestan stood silent. Just for a moment, his eyes widened, glittering in the dim lamplight. “So,” he said, a word that stood for a sentence, or maybe two or three. “No, I don’t have that kind of pull. No one has that kind of pull, no one I know of.” Ever so slightly, his shoulders sagged.

“I was afraid of that,” Leofsig said. Without another word, he and his father went back inside.

Skarnu gave the sky a warning glance, as if telling the powers above what they might and might not do. In case they weren’t listening, he spoke to his comrades, too: “If it snows, we’ve got trouble.”

“Aye.” Raunu’s gaze also flicked up toward those ugly gray clouds. “Snow can make hiding your tracks a lot harder.”

Standing behind a bare-branched chestnut, Merkela clung to the hunting stick that had been Gedominu’s. “We’ll try it anyway--we’ve come too far not to,” she said. “And if it snows hard enough, it’ll cover our tracks as fast as we make them.”

A peasant whose farm lay on the far side of Pavilosta, a short, dour, middle-aged man named Dauktu, shook his head. “If it snows that hard, cursed Simanu’ll just stay inside his castle where it’s nice and warm instead of coming out a-coursing,” he said.

All of the double handful of Valmierans who hated Count Simanu and the Algarvians propping him up enough to risk their lives to try to be rid of him looked toward the fortress of yellow limestone that crowned a hill halfway between Pavilosta and Adutiskis, the other leading village in the county. Enkuru, Simanu’s father, had made the place strong. The way he’d treated the local peasants, he’d needed a strong place of refuge. This forlorn squad could not hope to go in there and get Simanu out. They had to hope the word they’d got was good, and that he would come forth today after deer and boar and pheasant.

Raunu said, “Back before the days of egg-tossers, nobody could have stormed a keep like that.”

“Even with egg-tossers, even with dragons, a stubborn garrison in there could have made the Algarvians work for a living,” Skarnu said.

Dauktu spat on the ground. “Not Enkuru,” he said bitterly. “He knew which side of his bread had honey on it. As soon as the redheads looked like winning the war, he rolled over on his back and showed ‘em his throat and his belly, the way any cowardly cur-dog would.”

“He’s dead,” Merkela said. “Powers below eat him, he’s dead. Simanu deserves to be dead. And”--her voice roughened--”all the redheads deserve to be dead, too. What they did to Gedominu ...”

Her war with the Algarvians was and always would be personal. Skarnu said, “What they’re doing now, there in the west...”

As Merkela’s had, his voice trailed away. None of the other Valmierans said anything. None of them wanted to meet his eye. Skarnu still didn’t know how much faith to put in the rumors that swirled through his conquered kingdom. He didn’t want to believe any of them, but with that much smoke, he feared a fire had to be burning somewhere down at the bottom of it.

“You wouldn’t think even Algarvians could do such a thing,” Raunu said. “They’re whoresons, aye, but they fought clean enough, taking all in all, in the Six Years’War.”

“Barbarians. Always have been. Always will be.” Dauktu spat again.

“Aye.” Merkela’s voice was fierce. No one--not Skarnu, not Raunu, not the peasants who’d known her all her life--had had the nerve to tell her she might not come with the men on this raid. Had anyone tried, she would have been more dangerous to him than the redheads were likely to prove.

The Algarvians would say, “Even Kaunians do thus and so,” Skarnu thought. They have the whip hand, though, and they’re using it, curse them. He gave no outward sign of what was going through his mind. Seeing the enemy’s point of view was sometimes useful for an officer. Soldiers fought better when they reckoned the foe nothing but a barbarian, a whoreson.

A horn call, thin in the distance, drove such thoughts from his mind. He peered toward Count Simanu’s castle, squinting to try to make his vision sharper. “Is that the drawbridge coming down?”

“Aye,” Raunu said. “I can’t hardly read at all without spectacles on my nose, but I don’t have any trouble with what’s far away.”

“Here he comes,” Merkela breathed. “Oh, here comes the whole band of hunters.” Her voice was soft, but the passion it held matched--outdid--even her wildest moanings when she lay joined to Skarnu in the bedchamber she had shared with Gedominu.

Skarnu had no trouble seeing that, either: every one of the hunters’ mounts was a brilliant, gleaming white, a white that glowed even under this dark, lowering sky. “Those aren’t horses,” he said. “They’re unicorns, for swank.”

“Aye,” Dauktu said. “You didn’t know about the herd the counts keep?” He shrugged. “Well, can’t be helped, I suppose. You’re not from here.”

If Skarnu lived out all his remaining days in this stretch of the kingdom, people would, he knew, be saying, You’re not from here, even when he was a doddering old man. He put that out of his mind. “It makes our job harder,” he said. “Unicorns are faster than horses, and they’re smarter than horses, too.”

“Aye, and all of those riders will have sticks of their own, and they’ll know what to do with them,” Raunu said. “Don’t know about Simanu, but Algarvian cowards are few and far between, whatever else you say about the redheads.”

“If you haven’t got the stomach for the game, you can still go back to the farm,” Merkela told him.

“You know better.” The veteran underofficer locked eyes with Merkela. She looked away first, with a grudged nod. Skarnu’s respect for Raunu, already high, went up another notch. Very few people were able to make Merkela give ground. He’d had scant luck there himself, and he was her lover.

Another horn call sounded. Simanu and his cronies drew nearer. Some wore trousers, others kilts. They were all fine riders, handling their unicorns with effortless ease. The lead rider--Skarnu thought it was Simanu himself--pointed in the direction of the thicket where the raiders waited.

Raunu chuckled mirthlessly. “Now we find out who’s sold whom.”

“Aye,” Skarnu agreed. “Did that groom tell us the count would come this way today because he couldn’t stand his master, or was he taking Simanu’s money to suck us into the redheads’ web?”

One of the peasants nodded in the direction of the fortress. “I don’t see any more soldiers coming forth there, and we’d know if the Algarvians had men in these woods. They’d already be at us.” What he meant by that was, We’d already be dead. Since Skarnu thought the fellow was right, he didn’t argue.

Simanu shouted something. The count was still too far away for Skarnu to make out his words, but he sounded carefree. Maybe that meant he was a good actor. Skarnu hoped it meant he suspected nothing.

“We don’t start blazing too soon,” he warned his comrades--Merkela in particular. “This is likely to be the best chance we’ll ever have. If we waste it, we’re stuck with the bugger forevermore.”

He wondered if he ought to be talking like that. Simanu was a reprobate, but he was also a member of Skarnu’s class. Nobles who maligned their fellows to commoners got themselves a bad name. But what of nobles who went to bed with the Algarvians? What did they get? Not half what they deserve, Skarnu thought. He’d do his best to fix that.

Simanu shouted something else. This time, Skarnu caught a phrase--”after a wild boar”--though the breeze blew away the rest. One of the Algarvians answered in his own language. Then Simanu said something in Algarvian, too; the rhythms and trills were unmistakable. Skarnu didn’t know why that should have surprised him, but it did, and infuriated him, too.

“Closer,” Raunu said softly. “Let ‘em come closer.” He might have been watching a wary doe approaching a deadfall. “We don’t want to spook ‘em by--”

Before he could finish, one of the peasants at the far end of their little line started blazing. The Kaunian behind Simanu threw up his hands and slid bonelessly off his unicorn. It was a very fine blaze. Skarnu didn’t think he could have matched it, not at that range.

“Oh, you cursed fool,” he muttered under his breath. Because it was such a fine blaze, who else would have the chance to get an easier one? No help for it now; Simanu and his henchmen were already shouting in alarm. Skarnu shouted, too: “Let’s get them!” He raised his stick to his shoulder, aimed at Simanu, and blazed.

The collaborationist count’s unicorn reared, let out a horrid shriek, and then toppled. Skarnu and his friends cheered. Then they cried out again, this time in dismay. Simanu had managed to kick free. Now he lay behind the beast’s thrashing body and started blazing toward the woods.

Most of his henchmen galloped back toward the safety of the keep. A couple of men, though--both Algarvians, Skarnu saw with mixed admiration for their courage and shame that they had no Valmierans with them--spurred their unicorns straight for the woods. They blazed as they came, buying time for their comrades to get away. They couldn’t have known how many foes they faced, or just where among the trees those foes hid, but they attacked anyhow.

Several beams converged on them, Merkela used Gedominu’s hunting stick for all it was worth. As each redhead fell, she grunted breathily, as she might have done while building toward her peak of pleasure with Skarnu atop her. When they both lay unmoving, she nodded to him. “You were right,” she said. “They are brave. Now these two are brave and dead, which is better yet.”

“Aye,” Skarnu said. A hole appeared in a branch too close to his head for comfort. “But Simanu’s not dead, curse him, and he’s got some cover.”

“We’d best do something about him quick, too,” Raunu said. “They’ve seen something’s wrong, back there in the castle. We’ll have all of Simanu’s cursed retainers coming down on us if we hang around too long.”

“Aye.” Skarnu called quick orders to Dauktu and the other raiders at the far end of the line.

They didn’t obey automatically, as true soldiers would have had to do. “And while we’re up to that, what’s your part of the game?” Dauktu demanded.

“You’ll see,” Skarnu said. “I won’t shrink, I promise. Now--do you want Simanu dead or don’t you?” That decided the peasants. They started blazing at the count without taking so much trouble about their cover. One of them cried out in pain a moment later, too, for Simanu was alert and no bad blazer himself.

But while he traded beams with the raiders, Skarnu burst from cover a good ways away and rushed toward him. As soon as the unicorn’s body no longer shielded the count, Skarnu raised his stick and blazed. He was almost too late; Simanu had already started to swing back toward him. But his beam caught Simanu in the face. The count wailed and went limp. Skarnu waited to see no more, but dashed back toward the trees.

When he stood panting by Merkela again, she kissed him as ferociously as she had when he’d shouted against Simanu in Pavilosta’s market square. “Let’s get out of here,” he said when, after some long and mostly enjoyable time, he broke free. She didn’t argue with him. Neither did any of the other raiders--he’d won his spurs today. But even as he fled, he wondered what the Algarvians would do tomorrow, or the day after that.

Officially, Leudast remained a corporal. No one had bothered with the paperwork that would have promoted him. Unkerlant had neither time nor energy to spare on paperwork these days. Unkerlant had neither time nor energy to spare for anything save survival, and even survival looked to be too much to hope for.

Unofficially, Leudast led a couple of squads in the company Sergeant Magnulf just as unofficially commanded. Captain Hawart headed the regiment of which that company was a part. None of them had the rank for his job. They were all still alive and still fighting back against the Algarvians--a less formal qualification, but good enough.

Cold, wet, filthy, and frightened, Leudast peered east out of the hole in the ground he shared with Magnulf. One thought was uppermost in his mind: “When are they going to do it again?”

“Curse me if I know,” Magnulf answered wearily. He looked as worn and disheveled as Leudast felt. Spitting into the mud at the bottom of the hole, he went on, “I could fight the redheads. Aye, they kept coming forward, but they paid for every inch of ground they stole from us. But this . . .” He shook his head, a man caught in the grip of horror.

“This,” Leudast echoed. He shook his head, too. “And what are we doing to fight back? We keep bringing up more men, but so what? The Algarvians murder another raft of poor whoresons who never did ‘em any harm, and they smash right through us again.” He looked over his shoulder, toward the southwest. “If they smash through us two or three times more, they’re in Cottbus, and what do we do then?”

He only half heard Magnulf s reply; he’d spotted a soldier trudging through the pitted muck toward them. The fellow called, “Captain Hawart’s coming up to the front, and he’s got some big blaze with him.”

Leudast glanced over at Magnulf, who still outranked him. With an angry gesture, Magnulf said, “Aye, tell ‘em to come ahead. We’ll give ‘em pheasant under glass, just like we’re having, and they can sleep on the same featherbeds we use.”

With a couple of chunks of stale, moldy bread in his wallet and a grimy blanket for a mattress, Leudast couldn’t help snickering. The soldier shrugged and trotted away. He’d delivered his message. Past that, he didn’t care what happened.

In a lazy sort of way, the Algarvians started lobbing eggs at the line the Unkerlanters held. A couple landed close enough to the hole in which Leudast and Magnulf sheltered to splash fresh mud onto them. “The captain would come forward in this,” Leudast said, “but any big blaze’d turn up his toes--or else pick ‘em up and run away.” He paused, considered, and corrected himself: “Any big blaze but Marshal Rathar. He was right there in the thick of it up in Zuwayza.”

“He’s not afraid to mix it,” Magnulf agreed. Now he looked back toward the rear, and a moment later let out a low whistle of surprise. “Turns out you’re wrong. Here comes the captain, and he’s got somebody in a clean tunic with him.”

Hawart got down into the hole with Leudast and Magnulf without hesitation; he knew it could keep him alive. The fellow with him, a clever-looking man of middle years, got into it with wrinkled lip, as if fearing his tunic wouldn’t stay clean.

“Sir,” Hawart said to him, “let me present to you Magnulf and Leudast. They’ve been in this fight from the start, and they want to stay in it to the finish. Boys, this is Archmage Addanz, the top wizard in the whole kingdom.”

“King Swemmel has seen fit to honor me with the highest rank,” Addanz said. “Whether I have the highest skill in all the land may perhaps be a different question.”

Leudast wasn’t inclined to quibble. “Then you can stop the Algarvians when they hurl their magic at us?” he asked eagerly.

“That’d be wonderful,” Magnulf exclaimed. “Let us fight the redheads man against man, and we’ll lick ‘em.” The Unkerlanters hadn’t licked King Mezentio’s men even before they started using their blood-soaked magecraft, but they’d fought hard enough to lend Magnulf’s words some weight.

One look at Addanz’s face told Leudast his first wild hope was indeed too wild. “You can’t do it,” he said. He didn’t mean it to sound like an accusation, but that was how it came out.

“I cannot do it, not yet,” the archmage said. “I do not know if I will ever be able to do such a thing. What I can do, what I hope to do now, is to drop an egg on them of the same sort as they have been dropping on us.”

“What do you--?” Leudast broke off. He didn’t need to have Addanz draw him a picture. Like anyone else who’d grown up in an Unkerlanter peasant village, he knew how hard life could be. He asked only one question: “Will it work?”

Sergeant Magnulf, who’d grown up close to the Duchy of Grelz--now again the Kingdom of Grelz under Mezentio’s cousin--found another one: “Can you do that and not have the people rise up against King Swemmel and for the Algarvians?” People who knew Grelzers well always thought in terms of uprisings.

“I can do it,” Addanz answered. “My mages and I, under the orders of the king, have already begun to do it. The Algarvians will make far harsher masters than King Swemmel, so of course the people will follow him.”

That meant he didn’t know, and no one else did, either. Another egg burst near the hole, splattering the soldiers and the mage with more mud. Unkerlanter egg-tossers, slow as usual, began throwing sorcerous energy back at the Algarvians. “About time,” Leudast growled. “Sometimes I think we’ve forgotten about fighting back since the redheads started doing this to us.” That wasn’t fair, and he knew it, but he didn’t much care about being fair. He’d come too close to dying too many times to care about being fair.

Addanz clucked reproachfully. Leudast remembered he had King Swemmel’s car. If he chose to remember a name, if he chose to mention that name to the king ... if he chose to do that, Leudast would regret saying what he thought.

Perhaps the archmage of Unkerlant was about to reprove him. If he was, he never got the chance. He stiffened, his mouth hanging open. Then he groaned, as if a beam had burnt its way through his body. “They die,” he croaked in a voice that suggested he might be dying himself. “Oh, they die.”

“Mezentio’s men at their butchery again?” Captain Hawart demanded.

Addanz managed to nod. “Aye,” he gasped. “And we have not gathered enough men behind our line to try to block them altogether.” He gasped again, as if he’d run a long way. “Didn’t. . . expect them to smite again so soon.”

Leudast knew what that had to mean, but didn’t want to dwell on it. He didn’t have time to dwell on it, either. He spoke urgently: “We’d better get out of this hole. When the Algarvians start their spells, places like this have a way of closing up all of a sudden.”

“He’s right,” Magnulf said. He, Leudast, and Hawart started to scramble out. So did Addanz, but his effort was feeble and plainly hopeless. With a curse, Leudast jumped back into the mud at the bottom of the hole and heaved the archmage up to Magnulf and Hawart. Then he got out again himself.

“My thanks,” Addanz said. He looked as if he’d just gone through a four-day battle. “You have no notion of what it is like for a mage to feel the trapped death throes of so many at once. How the Algarvian sorcerers do what they do without blazing out their minds is beyond me. Their hearts are surely colder than winter in Grelz.”

However the Algarvian mages did what they did, they chose that moment to loose their latest sorcerous onslaught. The ground shuddered beneath Leudast like the body of a man shackled to the whipping post when the lash bites. He imagined he heard it groan like a man under the lash, too.

Flames sprang upward all around, as if fire mountains were erupting all over the field. Here and there, men caught in those flames screamed--but not for long. With a wet, sucking noise, the lips of the hole in the ground by Leudast’s feet pulled together. They would have been pulled together had they been down in the hole, too.

“You were right to get us out of there,” Hawart said. “I hope we didn’t have too many men trapped this time.”

Addanz groaned once more, as he had a couple of minutes before. “Are they doing it again, sir mage?” Sergeant Magnulf asked. Leudast understood the alarm in his voice. The Algarvians had never struck two such sorcerous hammer blows back to back. Going through one was bad enough. Could flesh and blood--to say nothing of earth and stone--stand two?

But the archmage of Unkerlant shook his head. Speech, just then, seemed beyond him. His head was turned back toward the west, toward land Unkerlant still held, not toward the east and the Algarvians. “Oh, by the powers above,” Leudast whispered.

“No,” Addanz croaked--he could talk after all. “By the powers below. Murder piled on murder, and where shall it end?” Tears trickled through the dirt on his face: he was dirty by now, almost as dirty as the soldiers around him.

Captain Hawart spoke as gently as he could: “We’re only doing it because the redheads did it first. We’re doing it to try to defend ourselves. If Mezentio hadn’t done it, we would never have taken it up.”

All that was surely true. None of it seemed to console the archmage. He swayed back and forth, back and forth, as if mourning something he would never see again--a cleaner time, perhaps.

Leudast started to reach out, to set a hand on his shoulder. But he stopped with the motion stillborn. Sooner than it had under any of the Algarvians’ earlier sorcerous onslaughts, the ground steadied beneath him. The flames shrank. Most of them, though not all, vanished. “I think, sir mage, your comrades back there did us a good turn.”

Only then did he think of the peasants--he supposed they were peasants--who must have perished in the Unkerlanter countermagic. He didn’t suppose they thought Addanz’s sorcerous comrades had done them a good turn.

“Here come the redheads,” Magnulf said. Algarvian behemoths lumbered toward the battered Unkerlanter line. Footsoldiers trotted along to help protect them and to take advantage of the holes they tore. Horse and unicorn cavalry, swift but vulnerable, trailed after them. If the holes were big enough, the cavalry would tear through, too, and spread chaos in the Unkerlanter rear.

“Do you know, I think we may just give them a nasty surprise,” Captain Hawart said. “This time, maybe they think they’ve kicked us harder than they really have.”

Leudast wasn’t thinking about that. He was scurrying toward the nearest hole he could find. Over his shoulder, he called, “Get the archmage out of here. This isn’t his kind of fight.”

It was Leudast s kind of fight. He started blazing at the advancing Algarvians. He wasn’t the only one, either--far from it. The redheads started dropping. Even without their magic’s working as well as they would have liked, they kept coming, though. Leudast had fought them for too long to think they were cowards. He wished they had been. Unkerlant would have suffered far less.

“Fall back!” Captain Hawart shouted, as he’d had to shout so many times. Unwillingly, Leudast obeyed lest the Algarvians get behind him. As clashes went these days, the Unkerlanters had done well. By the time nightfall brought fighting to an end, Leudast and his comrades had lost only about a mile of ground.

Every once in a while, a handful of Unkerlanter dragons would appear over Bishah, drop a few eggs, and then flee back toward the south. They did little damage. Hajjaj judged they didn’t come intending to do much damage, but rather to remind the Zuwayzin that King Swemmel hadn’t forgotten about them even if he was involved in bigger fights elsewhere.

After the third or fourth visit, the Zuwayzi foreign minister noticed something else: most of the eggs the Unkerlanters dropped fell near the Algarvian ministry. He remarked on that to Balastro when King Mezentio’s minister to Zuwayza held a reception: “I think you are trying to gather all the diplomats in the city here together to be wiped out at one stroke. Are you sure you’re not in King Swemmel’s pay rather than that of your own sovereign?”

Marquis Balastro threw back his head and laughed uproariously. “Ah, your Excellency, you do both me and the Unkerlanter dragonfliers’ aim too much credit,” he said. Lamplight glittered off his badges of nobility and rank, and also off the silver threads that ran through his tunic. Far from being naked, as he’d come to Hajjaj s hillside estate, tonight he displayed full Algarvian plumage. That was literally true: in his hatband glowed three bright feathers from some bird or another out of tropical Siaulia.

Hajjaj minded clothes tonight less than usual. With the sun almost as low in the north as it ever went, the weather was cool by Zuwayzi standards, mild by those of Algarve. He didn’t feel as if his own tunic and kilt--not nearly so splendid as Balastro’s--were trying to smother him.

“Some date wine, your Excellency?” Balastro asked. “We have what the dealer assured me was an excellent vintage--if that’s the word one uses for date wines--though I hope you will forgive me for admitting I have not sampled it myself.”

“I may forgive you eventually, but not soon.” Hajjaj smiled, and the Algarvian minister to Zuwayza laughed again. Balastro was a charming fellow: good-natured, clever, cultured. Hajjaj eyed him, wondering how he could be all he was and yet. .. But that would wait. It would have to wait.

For now, the Zuwayzi foreign minister ambled over to the bar. The Algarvian servitor behind it bowed and asked, “What may I get you, sir?” in fairly good Zuwayzi. That made him likelier to be a spy than a tapman by trade, but these days Hajjaj assumed everyone a spy till proved otherwise. Painful experience with his secretary had taught him that was safest.

Balastro was eyeing him, to see what he’d choose. As much to humor the redhead as to please his own palate, he did ask for date wine. When the servitor poured it from the jar, Hajjaj’s eyes widened. “Pressed from the golden dates of Shamiyah!” he exclaimed, and the Algarvian nodded. Hajjaj bowed partly to him, partly to the wine. “You do me great honor indeed, and great harm to King Mezentio’s purse.”

He sipped the lovely, tawny stuff. Almost, he went over to grab Balastro by the scruff of the neck and force him to taste the wine himself. In the end, he refrained. Balastro would say all the right things, but he would not mean them. No man who came to dates after grapes could appreciate them as they deserved to be appreciated. Hajjaj could, and did.

Sipping, he eyed the gathering. It was not what it would have been in times of peace. Ansovald, the Unkerlanter minister, had been sent south over the border once more when war between his kingdom and Zuwayza resumed. The ministries of Forthweg and Sibiu and Valmiera and Jelgava stood empty, untenanted. Zuwayza was not formally at war with either Lagoas or Kuusamo, but Algarve was, and Balastro could hardly have been expected to invite his king’s foes.

That left delegations from Algarve, from Yanina, from Gyongyos, from small, neutral Ortah (which no doubt thanked the powers above for the mountains and swamps that let her stay neutral), and, of course, from Zuwayza: Hajjaj was far from the only dark-skinned person making the best of clothes tonight.

The Yaninan minister to Zuwayza was a plump, bald little man named Iskakis. He had the hairiest ears of any man Hajjaj had ever seen. On his arm was his wife, who couldn’t have had more than half his years, and whose elegant, sculpted features bore an expression of permanent discontent. Hajjaj knew--he wasn’t sure whether she did, too--Iskakis had a taste for boys. For a man with that taste to be married to such a woman seemed a sad waste, but Hajjaj could do nothing about it.

Iskakis was telling a Gyongyosian almost twice his size about the triumphs Yaninan soldiers were running up in Unkerlant. Neither he nor the big, yellow-bearded man spoke Algarvian perfectly. Being from the other side of broad Derlavai, the Gyongyosian might not know most of the triumphs Iskakis was describing were as imaginary as the Yaninan’s command of the perfect tense. The Yaninan minister did not brag of his kingdom’s might to Algarvians.

Horthy, the Gyongyosian minister to Zuwayza, made his way over to Hajjaj. He was a big man, too, his beard streaked with gray. “You do not seem joyful, your Excellency,” he said in classical Kaunian, the only tongue he and Hajjaj had in common.

Hearing Kaunian spoke inside the Algarvian ministry and using it himself made Hajjaj s mouth twist. Again, he put that aside, answering, “I have been to too many of these gatherings to let one more overwhelm me. The wine is very good.”

“Ah. Is it so? I understand that. I have not seen so many as you, sir--I honor your years--but I too have seen enough.” Horthy pointed to the goblet. “And you say you esteem that wine?”

“I do.” Hajjaj’s smile held an edge of self-mockery. “But it is made from a fruit of my country”--to his annoyance, he couldn’t come up with the classical Kaunian word for dates--”rather than grapes, and is not to everyone’s taste.”

“I shall try it,” the Gyongyosian minister declared, as if Hajjaj had questioned his manhood. He marched over to the bar and returned with a goblet of Shamiyah wine. Raising it to his lips, he said, “May the stars grant you health and many more years.” He sipped, paused thoughtfully, and sipped again. After another pause, he delivered his verdict: “I would not care to drink it and nothing else, but it goes well enough as a change from the usual.”

“Most Zuwayzin say the same of grape wine,” Hajjaj said. “As for myself, your Excellency, I agree with you.”

“Marquis Balastro is a good host: he lays in something to please all of us.” Horthy leaned forward, toward Hajjaj, and lowered his voice. “Now if only he had laid in victory, too.”

“He did invite us here some little while ago,” Hajjaj replied, also quietly. “Perhaps he expected to be celebrating victory tonight. And, in truth, Algarve has won great victories against Unkerlant--as has Gyongyos, of course, your Excellency.” He bowed to Horthy, not wanting to slight his kingdom.

“Our war against Unkerlant is what our wars against Unkerlant have always been,” the Gyongyosian minister replied with a massive shrug: “a slow, hard, halfhearted business. In that countryside, what else can it be?” He laughed, a rumble deep in his chest. “Do you see the irony, sir? We of Gyongyos pride ourselves--and with justice--on being a warrior race, yet the stars have decreed that we are, because of our placement in the uttermost west of Derlavai, hard pressed these days to fight a war worthy of our mettle.”

Hajjaj raised an eyebrow. “I hope you will not take it amiss if I tell you that kingdoms may have troubles far worse than the one you name.”

“I did not expect you to understand.” Horthy sipped again at the date wine. “Few if any outside the dominions of Ekrekek Arpad do. The Algarvians sometimes come near to the thing, but even they ...” He shook his big head.

“I believe they, at the moment, face a problem the opposite of yours,” Hajjaj said. Now Horthy’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. Hajjaj explained: “Do you not think Algarve may have undertaken a war beyond her mettle, however great that may be?--and I hasten to add I think it is very great indeed.”

“I mean no offense when I say I believe you are mistaken,” Horthy replied, “and is it not so that you may be speaking too soon? King Mezentio’s armies still move westward.”

“Aye, they do.” Hajjaj let out a sigh far more wintry than even the coolest night in Zuwayza. “But do they move forward by virtue of their mettle or through some other means? Consider the language we use, your Excellency. You spoke before of irony. Do you see no irony here?”

“Ahhh,” Horthy said: a long, slow exhalation. “Now I take your meaning where I did not before. Worse that the Unkerlanters slaughter their own, in my view.”

“We differ,” Hajjaj said politely. As soon as he could do so with propriety, he disengaged himself from the Gyongyosian minister.

“A toast!” Count Balastro called. He had to call several times to gain the attention of all the feasters. When at last he had it, he raised his glass on high. “To the grand and glorious triumph of those united against the vast barbarism that is Unkerlant!”

To refrain from drinking would have made Hajjaj stand out too much. The things I do in the name of diplomacy, he thought as he raised his goblet to his lips. He did not sip now, but tossed back the date wine. It was sweet and potent and mounted to his head. He found himself moving through the crowd toward Balastro.

“How now, your Excellency?” the Algarvian minister said with a wide, friendly smile. It faded as he got a good look at Hajjaj’s face. “How now indeed, my friend?” Balastro asked. “What troubles you?”

He was Hajjaj’s friend. That made what the Zuwayzi had to say harder. He spoke anyhow, though in a voice he hoped only Balastro would hear: “Shall we also drink a toast to the vast barbarism that is Algarve?”

Balastro did not pretend to be ignorant of what Hajjaj was talking about. For that, Hajjaj gave him reluctant credit. “We do what we must do to win the war,” Balastro said. “And the Kaunians have long oppressed us. You’ve lived in Algarve; you know that for yourself. Why blame us and not them?”

“When your armies broke into the Marquisate of Rivaroli, which Valmiera took from you--unjustly, in my view--after the Six Years’ War, did your foes massacre the Algarvians there to gain the sorcerous power that might have thrown you back?” Hajjaj asked. He answered his own question: “They did not. And they could have, as you must admit.”

“What they did to us in the years before that was as bad as a massacre,” Balastro said. “For long and long, we fought among ourselves, Kaunian cat’s-paws. Let people wail and moan as they please, your Excellency. I feel not the least bit of guilt.” He threw out his chest and looked fierce.

“I am sorry for you, then,” Hajjaj said sadly, and turned away.

“We grow strong, and you grow strong with us, riding on our backs,” Balastro said. “Are you not ungrateful to complain about the road when you wanted revenge on Unkerlant?”

Hajjaj turned back. That held enough truth to sting. “Who now will want revenge on Algarve, your Excellency, and for what good reasons?” he asked.

Balastro s shrug was a masterpiece of both indifference and Algarvian theatricality. “My dear fellow, it will matter very little once we are the masters of Derlavai. Whoever wants revenge on us will no more be able to have it than a dog howling at the moon can make it come down for him.”

“Surely the lords of the Kaunian Empire, at the height of their glory, thought the same,” Hajjaj replied, and had the doubtful pleasure of seeing Balastro look very indignant indeed.

Cornelu felt no small pride at finally making it down into Tirgoviste town. He even had Giurgiu’s leave to spend an extra couple of days there before returning to the woodcutting gang. He hadn’t had to offer to fight the gang boss again to get it, either. He’d lost their last encounter, but had won a measure of respect.

And so now, bundled up against the icy south wind, he walked along the edge of the harbor. He might look like a rustic in town to sell firewood, but he surveyed the quays with a practiced eye. The Algarvians didn’t have so heavy a naval presence here as Sibiu had, but he wouldn’t have wanted to try breaking into the harbor against what they did have.

He cursed under his breath: cursed the surprise that had let Mezentio’s men overpower his kingdom, and cursed their cleverness, too. How he wished a storm had blown up while their sailing ships were on the sea! But wishes were useless things. No one could change what had been, not the greatest mage ever born.

He ambled along as if he hadn’t a thought in his head and presently paused by the leviathan pens. An Algarvian sailor was tossing fish from a bucket to a leviathan not a quarter so fine as Eforiel had been. Cornelu paused to watch the fellow at his work. He paused too long. The sailor noticed him and growled, “Get moving, you stinking Sib, before we find out how this fellow likes your taste.”

Cornelu probably would have understood that without speaking Algarvian. Were he a woodcutter who’d understood it, what would he do? He did it: he nodded, looked frightened, and hurried away. Behind him, the Algarvian laughed. Cornelu knew what a leviathan’s jaws could do to a man. He wished the beast in the pen would do that to the sailor: one more wish he wouldn’t see fulfilled.

Why do I linger here? he wondered. He’d gathered a little intelligence. To whom could he report it? No one--not a Lagoan, not a Sibian. All he’d done was briefly become the ghost of what he’d once been.

After starting toward a dockside eatery, he checked himself. He’d eaten there too often back in the days when Sibiu was a free kingdom, and he an officer in King Burebistu’s service. Someone might recognize him in spite of his poorly shaved chin and shabby clothes. Most Sibians loathed their Algarvian occupiers. A few, though . . . The posters calling for Sibians to join the fight against Unkerlant were still pasted to walls and fences. King Mezentio had to be drawing recruits from the five islands of Sibiu. That he was shamed Cornelu.

Farther inland, he could crumble twice-baked bread into pea soup at a place where he’d never gone while wearing Sibiu’s uniform. The meal he got showed he’d known what he was doing when he stayed away, too. But it made his belly stop growling like an angry dog. He set silver on the table and stalked out.

Before long, he found himself walking along his own street. That was stupidly dangerous, and he knew it. Old neighbors were far likelier to know him for who and what he was than were waiters at a seaside eatery. He couldn’t help himself, though.

There stood his house. It looked very much as it always had. The flowers in front of it were dead and the grass yellow and dying, but that happened every winter. Smoke rose from the chimney. Someone was at home. Costache? Just Costache? Well, just Costache and Brindza? Or was one of the Algarvian officers quartered there, or more than one, at the house, too?

If one of the Algarvians answered, he could beg and then shamble away.

They’d be none the wiser. But if it was Costache, if it was Costache ... He’d posted a note saying he was coming into town and suggesting they meet tomorrow. To protect her and himself, he’d signed it Your country cousin and used a false name. She would know his hand.

All at once, tomorrow seemed impossibly far away. He started up his own walk. Aye, a risk, but one he couldn’t help taking.

He was about to set his foot on the first step leading up to the porch when a man spoke inside the house. Those trilling “r”s could only come from an Algarvian’s mouth. Cornelu hesitated, hating himself for hesitating. But the risk had just gone up.

As he was about to go on despite that risk, Costache laughed. She’d always had an easy, friendly laugh. It had brightened Cornelu’s day whenever he heard it. Now he heard her lightly giving it to one of King Mezentio’s men. That wounded him almost as much as if he’d peeked in their bedroom window and seen her limbs entwined with the Algarvian’s in the act of love.

He turned away, staggering a little, as if he’d taken a beam from a stick. But his stride firmed faster than it would have after a physical wound. He no longer worried about being recognized; who would know him with this black scowl distorting his features?

“Tomorrow,” he muttered under his breath as he hurried away from his neighborhood. Tomorrow, if the powers above were kind, he’d see his wife. Maybe she would have an explanation that satisfied him.

For the life of him, he couldn’t imagine what it would be.

With the remains of naval discipline, he walked past half a dozen taverns. If he started drinking, he would either drink himself blind or drink himself angry. He could easily see himself storming up to his own front door with ale or spirits coursing through him and trying to kill all the Algarvians in his house or maybe trying to slap Costache around for not being distant enough to them. That he could also see the tragedy that would follow immediately thereafter made the picture only a little less tempting.

He bought a sack of crumbs at the edge of a park and tossed them to pigeons and sparrows till late autumn’s early dusk came. A couple of Algarvian soldiers walked by, but they didn’t bother him. He wasn’t the only fellow passing time in the park feeding the birds.

As soon as the sun sank below the northwestern horizon, the wind picked up. It seemed to blow straight through him, and carried the bite of the land of the Ice People, where it had originated. It blew the park empty in short order. Cornelu hoped the others who were leaving had better places to go than he.

He ate fried clams and allowed himself one mug of ale at a tavern that also sold meals. The clams weren’t bad, but the ale had been watered to the point where two or three mugs would have done little to him. Next door stood a rooming house where he bought a cubicle for the night. The tiny chamber barely had room for the bed and the cheap nightstand that held a cup, basin, and pitcher.

The mattress smelled sour when he lay down on it. He might have done better rolled in a blanket in the park. But he might not have, too; the Algarvians might have picked him up for being out after curfew. He didn’t want to fall into their hands for any reason. Eventually, he slept.

It was still dark when he woke. The clouds in the northeast had gone from black to dull gray, though, so dawn wasn’t far away. He scratched, hoping the nasty bed didn’t have bugs in it, then got dressed, went downstairs, and walked out of the rooming house. A new clerk had come on duty sometime in the night, but he looked as sullen and indifferent as the fellow from whom Cornelu had rented his little room.

He went back to the tavern. It was already crowded with fishermen fortifying themselves for the day ahead. The fried bread Cornelu ordered sat like a boulder in his stomach. The only resemblance the murky brown liquid the tavern served bore to tea was that it was hot. He drank it without complaint. On a morning like this, heat sufficed.

After stretching breakfast till sunrise, Cornelu went back to the park. A Sibian constable strolling through looked at him as if he were crazy, even after he displayed the bag of crumbs, still half full. The birds appreciated him, though, and came close to feeding right from his hand.

He stretched out the bread crumbs, too, making them last till nearly noon. Then he got up, brushed his hands on his kilt, and left the park for the short walk to the bell tower at the edge of Tirgoviste’s old market square. He’d asked Costache to meet him there. “She’d better,” he said as he made his way through the square. “By the powers above, she’d better.”

Clang! Clang! The bells blared out noon just as Cornelu got to the base of the tower. He looked around. The square wasn’t crowded, not the way it would have been before the Algarvians came, but he didn’t see his wife.

And then he did. His heart leaped. Here she came, striding with determination across the square. If he could be alone with her, even for a few minutes. . . But he wouldn’t be, for she was pushing the baby carriage ahead of her. Brindza’s head popped up as she looked out. Cornelu knew he shouldn’t hate his daughter, but remembering that wasn’t easy when she kept coming between him and Costache.

He knew better than to show what was going through his mind. He smiled and waved and stepped forward to embrace her. He squeezed her to him. She raised her mouth to his. After a long, breathless kiss, he murmured, “Oh, it’s good to see you again.” See you wasn’t exactly what he meant. Feel you came closer.

“And you,” Costache said, a quaver in her voice that sent tingles through Cornelu. She looked him over with an expression he recognized: comparing what she recalled to what she saw. After a moment, she clucked in distress. “You’ve got so thin and hard-looking.”

“I can’t help it,” he answered. “I’ve been working hard.”

“Mama,” Brindza said, and then, “Up.” King Burebistu could have given no more imperious command.

Costache picked up her daughter--my daughter, too, Cornelu reminded himself. His wife looked tired. He’d thought that the first time he saw her after coming back to Tirgoviste. He said, “I wish you could have found a way to leave her at home.”

She shook her head. “Mezentio’s men won’t take care of her for me, curse them. I’ve asked.”

“Aye, curse them,” Cornelu agreed. He eyed his wife again. “But you were laughing with one of them yesterday.”

“How do you know that?” Costache asked in surprise. When he told her, she went pale. “I’m so glad you didn’t knock!” she exclaimed. “All three of them were there. You’d be in a captives’ camp now.”

“Every day I’m away from you, I feel like I’m in a captives’ camp,” Cornelu complained. “This whole island is a captives’ camp. This whole kingdom is a captives’ camp. What else would you call it?”

Costache gave back a pace before his fury. Brindza stared at him with wide green eyes, the same shade as her mother’s. After a moment, Costache said, “Things are hard, aye, but they’re worse in the camps. When the Algarvians let people out of them, they come back as skeletons. I think half the reason Mezentio’s men turn them loose is to frighten other people.”

She spoke calmly, reasonably, logically. She made good sense. She said not a word Cornelu cared to hear. “Have you any notion of how much I want you?” he burst out.

“Aye,” his wife answered in a low voice, “but I don’t know when we can. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to, not till the war is over, if it ever is.”

Cornelu started to slap her for saying such a thing. Before the motion was well begun, though, he turned it into a quick spin away from Costache. He’d never imagined he could wish he’d stayed up in the hills chopping wood, but he did.

Snow blew into Tealdo’s face. It numbed his left side worse than his right, for he still marched northwest, in the direction of Cottbus, while the wind roared up from the southwest, from the austral continent and the ice-clogged Narrow Sea. He wasn’t used to snow; growing up in the north of Algarve, he’d seen it but seldom before joining King Mezentio’s army. His education in such matters was advancing faster than he’d ever wanted.

Beside him, Trasone let out a chuckle: either that or Tealdo’s friend was starting to come down with pneumonia. “You look like a scarecrow,” Trasone said, raising his voice to be heard over the endless ravening wind.

“Heh,” Tealdo answered. “Nobody’d pinch your bum if you were walking along the streets of Trapani dressed like that, either.”

“Too true,” Trasone said. “Aye, it’s too true. What we both look like is a couple of madmen who bought out a rummage sale.”

“Everybody in the whole regiment looks the same way,” Trasone said. “If we’d had some decent winter gear shipped out to us, we wouldn’t have had to steal from every Unkerlanter village we went through, either.”

An inspecting officer would have had trouble proving he was even in uniform.

He had on a long Unkerlanter tunic over his short tunic and kilt, a horse blanket over that, and a rabbit-fur cap on his head in place of the dapper but not nearly warm enough hat he’d been issued. Trasone s garb was similarly outlandish.

“Winter gear?” Trasone chuckled again, sounding even more ghastly than before. “They’re having trouble shipping Kaunians forward to kill, and you’re worrying about winter gear? Too stinking many Unkerlanters running around loose behind us, and with what they do to ley lines, it’s like the powers below have been eating them.”

“That’s all so, no doubt about it.” Tealdo paused to knock snow--and possibly frozen snot with it--out of his mustache. “But if I freeze to death, I’m not going to care about the miserable Kaunians.”

“I don’t know if we’d have got as far as we have without slaughtering them,” Trasone said.

“You just said they’re having trouble bringing the blond buggers forward, but we’re still advancing,” Tealdo said. “What does that tell you about how much difference they’ve made?”

Trasone shook his head, which made the earflaps of his own looted fur cap flop up and down. “You won’t sneak that by me so easy. Now that it’s snowing, the ground’s frozen up, and our behemoths can get going again.”

As if to prove his point, a couple of the big beasts trotted past the footsoldiers. The behemoths were draped in stolen blankets, too. Their riders had covered them in preference to covering themselves. If the behemoths froze to death, their crewmen turned into footsoldiers, and not very useful footsoldiers at that. One of the men waved a mittened hand to Tealdo and Trasone. Tealdo waved back. He wore mittens, too, which kept the fellow on the behemoth from seeing the gesture he shaped.

He went back to the argument with Trasone: “The footing’s better for the Unkerlanter behemoths, too, you know.”

“Ahh, that doesn’t help them so much,” Trasone said with a scornful wave. “The Unkerlanters mostly don’t know what to do with behemoths even when the ground is all right. A good thing, too, or we’d both likely be dead by now.”

Tealdo thought about rising to that to that even though he knew it was true. But he saw a couple of men standing by a series of low rises in the snow. He needed a moment to realize the men were mages; they looked as draggled as everyone else in the Algarvian army these days. “What’s toward?” he called to them.

“See for yourself,” one of them answered, though the wind almost blew his words away from Tealdo. Curious, Tealdo ambled over. The mage kicked at one of the ridges in the snow. It turned out to be the body of an Unkerlanter: not a soldier, but a peasant woman. Her throat had been cut. The mage said, “This is how they fight back against us--with their folk as victims.”

“Me, I’d sooner kill Kaunians than Algarvians--I’ll say that,” Tealdo remarked. “But if we’re doing it and now they’re doing it, too, wouldn’t it be better if both sides stopped, since it’s pretty much evened out?”

“If one side stopped and not the other, that could mean--would mean--disaster,” the mage said. “Sometimes climbing onto a wolf is easier than climbing off again.”

“Maybe somebody should have thought of that before we went and got into this lousy war with Unkerlant in the first place,” Tealdo said. “This is a cursed big wolf, and I ought to know. I’ve walked every miserable inch of the way from the Yaninan border to here.”

“It is the inches you have yet to walk that truly matter,” the mage said. “What could be more important than taking Cottbus?”

Staying alive, Tealdo thought. He kept that to himself, judging he’d already pushed the mage about as far as he could. He started marching once more, trotting a little to catch up to Trasone. Snow kept swirling down. The stuff was very pretty to watch, but Tealdo wouldn’t have been sorry never to see it again.

By the time evening came, he had to lift up his foot at every step, which made him slow and awkward despite the hard ground under his feet. Captain Galafrone chose a grove of firs as a halting place. Tealdo had hoped for a village, but this would do; the trees grew close enough together to make a good windbreak. He sat down on the leeward side of one of the first. “This isn’t as easy as they thought it would be back home,” he said.

Captain Galafrone looked like an old man now. He’d given everything his kingdom asked of him and more, but he had very little left to give. Wearily, he said, “Can somebody get a fire going before we all freeze to death?” With the fir trees breaking the force of the wind and keeping off a good bit of the snow, Tealdo used his stick to start a small blaze. It wasn’t really enough to keep the soldiers warm, but it did make them feel a little better.

Somebody said, “After we take Cottbus and drive King Swemmel off into the wilderness, this will seem worthwhile.”

“My arse,” Trasone exclaimed. “This’ll be fornicating dreadful if we look back on it a hundred years from now. And half of Unkerlant’s a fornicating wilderness. What do you call this where we’re at right now, a fornicating playground?”

“We still have to take Cottbus,” Galafrone said, rallying a little at the sight of the flames. “I’d like to see Swemmel try and fight a war without the place.”

“Maybe, just maybe,” Tealdo said in speculative tones, “we could spend some time out of the line, let some other people take it on the chin for a while.”

“Can’t let our mates down,” Galafrone said reproachfully.

“No, I suppose not,” Tealdo agreed, and his comrades nodded. He went on, “Not letting my mates down is about the only reason I see for going forward anymore. I don’t care one pile of behemoth dung for the greater glory of Algarve, I’ll tell you that.” The rest of the redheaded soldiers nodded again.

Galafrone said, “Anybody who went through the Six Years’ War knows what glory’s worth--not even a pile of shit, like you said. But we lost that war, and all our neighbors made us pay. If we don’t want to pay again, we’d better win this one.

“Oh, aye,” Tealdo said. “I remember how glad they were when we marched into the Duchy of Bari. That started us getting our own back.” He shook his head in slow, chilly wonder. “Two years ago now, two years and more. A lot’s happened since.”

“I wonder how glad the folk of Bari are now that we marched in then,” Trasone said. “Now they get the joys of fighting in Unkerlant, too. That wasn’t the first thing on their minds back then, I bet.”

“First thing on their minds then was screwing us till we couldn’t see straight.” Fond reminiscence filled Sergeant Panfilo’s voice. “I like the way they thought.”

Captain Galafrone climbed to his feet. “Like Tealdo says, that was awhile ago now. Us, we’ve still got a war to fight. Come on, let’s go do it.”

As soon as the Algarvians came out of the shelter of the wood, Unkerlanters started blazing at them from behind snow-covered bushes. Tealdo threw himself down on his belly in the snow. A beam made steam hiss up from the white powder a couple of feet away from him. When he blazed back, more steam rose from the cover King Swemmel’s men were using.

He thought the troopers under Galafrone’s command outnumbered their Unkerlanter foes. Galafrone evidently thought the same thing, for he sent out flanking parties to left and right to make the Unkerlanters give ground or risk being blazed from three sides at once. A couple of his men fell, but more gained the positions to which they’d been running.

And then a pair of Algarvian behemoths came up from the southeast. The ground was hard now, but so much snow had fallen that they had to plant their feet with care. One of them bore a heavy stick on its back. That beam had no trouble punching through either the snow still falling or the snow on the bushes that had helped shield the enemy soldiers. One Unkerlanter after another fell.

The other behemoth carried an egg-tosser. When bursts of sorcerous energy sent snow and frozen dirt flying, the Unkerlanters decided they’d had enough and fled for the next patch of woods. More eggs pursued them. So did beams from the Algarvians’ sticks.

“Obliged!” Tealdo shouted back toward the behemoths and their crews. One of the soldiers on the behemoth with a heavy stick waved his fur hat in reply.

“I’d be even more obliged if they’d got here sooner,” Trasone said as he and his comrades rose to go after the Unkerlanters.

“So would I, but they can’t be having an easy time there,” Tealdo said. “Look how much trouble it is for them to move in deep snow.”

“This is Unkerlant. This is winter, or near enough as makes no difference,” Trasone said. “The snow’s not going to up and disappear, not for a cursed long time it’s not. How much good are the behemoths going to be till then?”

“Not as much as we’d like, odds are,” Tealdo replied. “But the Unkerlanters won’t have it any easier than we do.”

“I want them to have it harder than we do, curse ‘em up one side and down the other,” Trasone said. “I want to lick the whoresons out of Cottbus, I want to help make sure they can’t give us any trouble for a long time afterwards, and then, by the powers above, I want to go home. A lot of places in Algarve, it hardly snows at all.”

“I know--I’m from one of them,” Tealdo said wistfully. “Come on. Before we lick them out of Cottbus, we’ve got to lick them out of those woods there.”

Before the Algarvians went in after the Unkerlanters, the behemoth with the egg-tosser flung death in among the trees. But it was tossing blind, without any visible targets. King Swemmel’s men still showed plenty of fight when the troopers who followed Galafrone came to close quarters with them. Some of the fighting in the shadow of the pines and birches was with knives and with sticks swung club-fashion; men came on enemies too close to let them swing up their sticks and blaze.

A few Unkerlanters surrendered. More, though, fought till they were killed or retreated northwest, to take yet another stab somewhere else at holding the Algarvians away from Cottbus. When Galafrone’s men emerged to continue the pursuit, Unkerlanter egg-tossers made them dive for cover.

“I enjoy this so much, don’t you?” Trasone said, lifting his mouth an inch or so off the snow to speak.

“Aye, of course,” Tealdo answered. “But we’re still moving ahead, powers above be praised. We’ll get there yet.”