“Let’s ask them when we get off our shift,” Szonyi said.
Kun smiled a sour smile. “And what language will you ask them in?” he inquired.
Szonyi had only one answer for that, which was no answer at all. A typical Gyongyosian peasant, he spoke only his own language. Sheepishly, he said, “I don’t suppose they know Gyongyosian.”
“About as much as you know of Algarvian, probably.” Aye, Kun enjoyed making Szonyi look like a fool.
The new captives, naturally, noticed everybody staring at them. They waved to the Gyongyosians and bowed from the waist as if they were visiting nobles. “Show-offs,” Szonyi muttered.
Then one of the Algarvians, waving again, called out, “Hello, friends! How are you?” in almost unaccented Gyongyosian.
“So they don’t speak our language, eh?” Istvan said. Just as Kun enjoyed making Szonyi look like a fool, Istvan enjoyed turning the tables on clever Kun. He got fewer chances than he would have liked, but made the most of the ones he did find.
Kun, as usual, looked furious at getting caught in a mistake. Doing his best to discover how such a disaster might have happened, he asked the Algarvian, “Where did you learn to speak Gyongyosian?”
“My father was on the staff of the minister to Gyongyos years ago,” the redheaded man answered, “and I was born in Gyorvar. So you could say I learned your language in your capital.”
That was more than Istvan could say himself. His own upcountry accent sometimes made him feel self-conscious when he spoke to officers or others who had a more elegant turn of phrase-sometimes even to Kun, who sprang from Gyorvar. But Istvan knew what he wanted to find out: “Why are you here, so far from Algarve?” Asking the question that way let him disguise his own geographical shortcomings, too.
With a wave to his comrades, the Algarvian said, “We crewed two leviathans that were bringing… oh, one thing and another from Algarve to Gyongyos. We would have brought other things back from Gyongyos to Algarve: the kinds of things you have more of than we do, and that we could use in the war.”
Istvan started to ask what sorts of things those were, but decided not to. Some of the Kuusaman guards were bound to speak his language, and he didn’t want to give them the chance to learn anything interesting. Instead, he said, “And something went wrong, did it?”
“You might say so,” the redheaded man replied. “Aye, you just might say so. Some Kuusaman dragons were flying east to drop eggs on some island or other that belongs to you, and they saw our leviathans and dropped their eggs-or enough of their eggs-on them instead. They hurt the animals too badly to let them go on. After that, it was either surrender or try to swim home by ourselves.” He shrugged. “We surrendered.”
Istvan tried to imagine guiding a leviathan-no, a couple of leviathans- from Algarve all the way to Gyongyos. From one side of the world to the other. He couldn’t very well tell the foreigners that they should have fought to the death, not when he’d wound up in a captives’ camp, too.
Eyeing the barracks and the yard with something less than delight, the Algarvian asked, “What do you people do for fun around here?”
“What do we do for fun?” Istvan returned. “Why, we chop wood. We dig latrines. When we’re very lucky and we haven’t got anything else to do, we sit around and watch the trees out beyond the stockade grow.”
The Algarvian had a marvelously expressive face. Hearing Istvan’s reply, he looked as if he’d just heard his father and mother had died. “And what do you do for excitement?” he inquired.
“If you want excitement, you can try to escape,” Istvan answered. “Maybe you can get out of the camp. Then maybe you can steal a ship. Then maybe you wouldn’t have to swim home.”
“I am always glad to meet a funny man,” the redhead said. Istvan started to puff out his chest, till the Algarvian added, “Too bad I am not so glad to meet you.” His smile took away most of the sting; it might have taken away all of it had Kun not sniggered. Istvan gave him a dirty look, which only made him snigger again, louder this time.
Even when he’d commanded a company as a sergeant, Leudast hadn’t been allowed to attend officers’ conferences. He was still commanding a company, but, thanks to luck and Marshal Rathar, he was a lieutenant these days. That entitled him to know what would happen before it happened to him.
Here, he and Captain Recared and a couple of dozen officers commanding units much larger than their ranks properly entitled them to lead sat in a barn that still stank of cow and listened to a colonel who was probably doing a lieutenant general’s job explaining the details of what the Unkerlanter army would try next in the south. “And so,” the colonel was saying, “if we succeed, if all goes as planned, we shall finally drive the cursed Algarvians from the soil of the Duchy of Grelz, exactly as our glorious comrades in arms have driven them out of northern Unkerlant. High time, I say-high time indeed.”
A low-voiced rumble rose from the officers: “Aye.” Leudast joined it, but had other things on his mind. So they’ve driven the redheads out of the north altogether, have they? That means my home village belongs to Unkerlant again. The thought would have cheered him more had he not paused to wonder if any of it was still standing. It would have been fought over at least twice, and, for all he knew, more often than that.
“Have you any questions?” the colonel asked. A couple of majors did, and even a brash captain. Leudast kept his mouth shut. He was without a doubt the most junior officer in the barn, and didn’t want to remind anyone else that he was there at all. The colonel efficiently disposed of the queries; unlike a good many commanders Leudast had known, he actually had some notion of what he was talking about. He finished, “We’ve wanted to pay those whoresons back for years. Now we put them in a sack and then pound the sack to pieces.”
Somebody said, “We’ll find all sorts of strange things in the sack, too.”
“So we will,” the colonel agreed. “Algarvians, Yaninans, Forthwegians, even blonds from out of the far east.” He shrugged. “So what? It only shows the redheads are scraping up everything they can to try to hold us back. But it won’t work. Glory to King Swemmel! Glory to Unkerlant!”
“Glory to Swemmel! Glory to Unkerlant!” the officers chorused. The meeting broke up.
Leudast and Captain Recared walked back to their position together. Leudast pointed. “Look at all the egg-tossers we’ve got waiting for the redheads.”
“Egg-tossers and behemoths and dragons and men,” Recared said. “The river is running our way now. They’ll try to dam it up-they always fight hard-but we should have our way with them.”
“Aye.” Leudast nodded. “They threw everything they had at the Durrwangen bulge last year. They haven’t done any throwing since. They’ve been catching instead.”
Recared nodded, too. “That’s right. And they’ll catch it good and proper come tomorrow morning.”
And Leudast and Recared passed a stockade. Guards stood stolidly around the perimeter. The stink of long-unwashed bodies wafted over the wall. “Is that what they’re doing with the soldiers they court-martial these days?” Leudast asked. “I thought they just put them in punishment battalions and threw them at the redheads first.”
“They do,” Recared answered. “Those aren’t soldiers in there. Come on.” He walked faster, plainly wanting to get away from the stockade as soon as he could.
“They aren’t soldiers?” Leudast said. “Then who…? Oh.” He walked faster, too. “I wish we didn’t have to do that.” How had the wretches behind the stockade ended up where they were? By being desperate criminals? Maybe. By being in the wrong place at the wrong time? That struck Leudast as much more likely. He said no more. Those who complained about such things might end up behind a stockade themselves.
When he got back to his own encampment, he feigned cheeriness, whether he really felt it or not. “We’ve got a good plan and plenty of what we need to make it work,” he told his company. Every word of that was true, too. If it wasn’t the whole truth, the soldiers didn’t need to know it. “Tomorrow morning, we’re going to make the Algarvians sorry they ever set foot in Unkerlant.”
His men cheered. Sergeant Hagen, who’d replaced Kiun, said, “We’ll do better than that. We’ll make the cursed Algarvians sorry they were ever born-isn’t that right, Lieutenant?” Hagen was very young, and had a youngster’s terrifying enthusiasm.
“That’s just right,” Leudast said. “You ought to get whatever sleep you can tonight, because all the eggs we’re going to fling will wake you up early.”
The eggs they were going to fling would wake some of his men up early. Others had found a knack for sleeping through anything. Leudast envied them, wishing he had the same knack himself.
As company commander, he didn’t get much sleep. He stayed up late, making sure everything in the company was as ready as it could be. And he had a soldier shake him awake half an hour before the eggs were due to fly so he could be ready to lead the men eastward.
Hissing and whistling noises in the air announced eggs flying toward the enemy. A few moments later, the eastern horizon lit up, as with sunrise a couple of hours early. Leudast thrust his whistle into his mouth and blew a long, piercing blast. It was fun-as much fun as he’d had with toys while a boy-and he suddenly understood why officers enjoyed the privilege of carrying them. “Forward!” he shouted. “For King Swemmel and for Unkerlant!”
Other company commanders’ whistles were shrilling, too, and so was Captain Recared’s. “Urra!” the men yelled. “Urra! Swemmel! Urra!” They swarmed toward the Algarvian lines. Part of that was eagerness to close with the hated foe. Part of it was knowing that hard-eyed impressers with sticks would follow the advance and mercilessly blaze anyone who wasn’t moving forward fast enough to suit them. Those impressers sometimes met mysterious fatal accidents of their own, but they did help inspire most of the soldiers.
Eggs burst among the advancing Unkerlanters, too- King Mezentio ’s men hadn’t been caught altogether by surprise, and the pasting they were taking hadn’t put all their egg-tossers out of action. Shrieks mingled with the cries of, “Urra!” But what the Algarvians gave was only a pittance, a nuisance, compared to what they were taking. Some of Leudast’s men, newly swept into the army, shrieked from terror rather than from pain, but he knew better. He’d been on the receiving end of far, far worse than this.
Pulses of light began flickering in the night ahead-Algarvian sticks, their beams probing for his countrymen. No, the redheads hadn’t been completely fooled, and they hadn’t been completely silenced, either. Leudast cursed under his breath. Why don’t they start killing the poor sods they’ve rounded up? he thought. We could use the help.
He was ashamed of himself a moment later. Algarvian footsoldiers must have felt the same way when their mages first started slaughtering Kaunians back in the dark, fearful days when Cottbus looked as if it would surely fall. If they were wrong to wish for such a thing, how was he right, especially when his kingdom’s sorcerers slaughtered his own countrymen for their effects?
How am I right? It’s my neck, that’s how. Some of the enemy’s beams zipped past him, fearfully close, before the ground ahead shook and violet flames burst up from it. Some of his men whooped with glee as the sorcery struck the foe. Maybe they were naive enough not to know how their mages did what they did. Maybe-more likely-they wanted to live themselves, and didn’t care.
“Forward!” Leudast yelled. “Hit ‘em hard while they’re groggy!” The Algarvians wouldn’t stay groggy long. Three years and more of fighting them had made him all too sure of that. They didn’t have enough men or beasts to hold back the Unkerlanters or drive them as they once had, but the troopers they had left were as deadly dangerous as ever.
And the redheads still had Kaunians left to kill. Leudast had hoped the Unkerlanter bombardment would have slain a lot of the blonds without giving the Algarvians the chance to seize their life energy and turn it into sorcerous energy. No such luck. The dreadfully disruptive and destructive sorcery the Unkerlanter wizards raised now quieted much sooner than it should have, as Mezentio’s mages used, and used up, the Kaunians to counteract it.
Could be worse, Leudast thought. In the old days, we’d’ve been fighting like mad bastards to counter their conjuring, not the other way round.
A column of Unkerlanter behemoths thundered forward. The egg-tossers and heavy sticks the armored beasts bore on their backs battered down surviving Algarvian strongpoints. And once it got moving east, that column kept moving. The only thing that could reliably stop a behemoth was another behemoth. The Algarvians had been short of behemoths ever since losing so many in the enormous battles of the Durrwangen bulge, and most of the animals they did have were in the north, trying to hold the Unkerlanters there.
“Come on, men!” Leudast shouted, almost stumbling over a kilted corpse. “They can’t hold us! We’re breaking them! Their crust is tough, but once we’re past it, what have they got left? Nothing!” He blew the whistle again, exulting in the squeal.