And they paid for it. The officer in charge of the Algarvians had more than one string for his bow. "While the Unkerlanters were busy fighting and seemingly repelling the behemoths in front of them, another force entered the village from behind. The fight that followed was sharp but very short. The relief force kept moving south, on toward Sulingen.

"We've got a smart general," Sergeant Werferth said. "That's good. That's mighty good. He b.u.g.g.e.red Swemmel's boys just as pretty as you please."

Sidroc snorted, then guffawed when he realized how apt the figure was. "Aye, b.u.g.g.e.r aem he did--came right up their backside."

But it stopped being easy after that. Sidroc had found in Presseck how dangerous the Unkerlanters could be when they had numbers and power on their side. Now he discovered they didn't need numbers to be dangerous. They knew what the Algarvians were trying to do, and threw everything they had into stopping them.

As so many had before him, Sidroc grew to hate and dread the cheer, "Urra!" Single Unkerlanters would pop up out of the snow shouting it and blaze down a man--or two, or three, or four--before they died themselves. Companies would fight like grim death in villages, bellowing defiance till the last man was slain. And regiment after regiment would charge across the plain at the relief force, sometimes with their arms linked, all the soldiers roaring, "Urra!"

Nor would those regiments charge alone, unsupported. The Unkerlanters threw behemoths and dragons and egg-t.o.s.s.e.rs into the fight with the same air they threw men into it. Aye, they seemed to say, you aII smash these up, but we ave got plenty more.

And the Algarvians did not have plenty more. Sidroc needed only a day or two to see that. Relief forces came in by dribs and drabs, when they came in at all. If the army couldn't relieve the men in Sulingen with what it had now, it couldn't relieve them.

"When are they going to break out toward us?" Sidroc asked, six days into the move south. By then, he'd taken to wrapping the lower part of his face in wool rags, so that only his eyes showed. He'd thought he knew how cold Unkerlant could get. Every new day proved him wrong.

"I don't know what they're doing down there," Sergeant Werferth told him. "I don't give a dragon t.u.r.d what they're doing, either. It's too soon to worry. Whatever they've got in mind, right now it doesn't change my job one fornicating bit."

Sidroc started to bristle. Ceorl would have, because Ceorl was the sort who bristled at anything. But Sidroc realized Werferth was just giving good advice. Worrying about what he couldn't help wouldn't, couldn't, change things.

At dawn the next morning, the Unkerlanters attacked the relief force before it could get moving. By the time Swemmel's men sullenly withdrew, the sun was halfway across the sky. The Unkerlanters left hundreds of bodies lying in the snow, but they'd robbed the relief force of men and of time, and it could recover neither.

Despite the troops Swemmel and his generals kept throwing at them, the soldiers and behemoths of the relieving force managed to keep moving south. They crossed the Presseck, from whose banks the men of Plegmund's Brigade had been so rudely expelled not long before. And they also forced their way over the Neddemin, the next river to the south, in a sharp battle with the Unkerlanters trying to keep them from gaining the fords.

"What's the river after this one?" Sidroc asked that night as he toasted a gobbet of horsemeat on a stick. He'd never imagined eating horse up in Forthweg. Compared to going hungry, it was tasty as could be.

"That's the Britz," Werferth answered. "If we make it over the Britz, the fellows in Sulingen should be able to fight their way out to meet us." He'd come far enough, he was willing to look ahead a bit.

"They'd better be able to fight their way out to meet us," Sidroc said. "Curse me if I know how we've made it this far. I don't know how much further we can go."

"Other question is, how far can they come?" Werferth asked. "What have their behemoths and horses and unicorns been eating down there? Mostly nothing, or I miss my guess. Odds are the men haven't had much more, either."

Sidroc took a bite of horseflesh. Juice running down his chin, he said, "It's not like we've got a lot." The sergeant nodded, but they both knew the men down in Sulingen had less.

On toward the Britz they went. The Unkerlanters attacked again and again, from south and east and west. Swemmel's cavalry forces nipped in to raid the supply wagons that kept the relieving force fed and supplied with eggs and with sorcerous charges for their sticks. In spite of everything, the Algarvians and the men of Plegmund's Brigade kept pushing south.

And then, about a day and a half before they would have reached the Britz, most of their behemoths left the army and headed north. "Have they gone out of their fornicating minds?" Sidroc shouted. "The Unkerlanters still have their behemoths, curse them. How are we supposed to lick aem without ours?"

No one had an answer for him till later in the day. Then Werferth, who as a sergeant heard things, said, "Swemmel's wh.o.r.esons are mounting a big push on Durrw.a.n.gen, north of here. If they take the place, then they've got us in the bag along with the boys down in Sulingen. Can't have that. It doesn't work."

"Getting over the Britz isn't going to work, either, not without those behemoths," Sidroc said.

"We've got to try," Werferth answered. Sidroc grimaced and nodded. Deserting and going north on his own was sure death. Advancing with his comrades was only deadly dangerous. Knowing the odds, the men of the relieving force went on.

They reached the river. They couldn't cross. The Unkerlanters had too many men in front of it, too many egg-t.o.s.s.e.rs on the southern bank. And they had behemoths left to throw into the fight, behemoths the relieving force could no longer withstand. The Algarvians and the men of Plegmund's Brigade fell back from the Britz, retreating across the frozen plains of Unkerlant.

A blizzard howled through the woods where Munderic's band of irregulars took shelter from their foes. As far as Garivald was concerned, the tent pitched above a hole in the ground was no subst.i.tute for the warm hut in which he'd pa.s.sed previous winters with his wife and children and livestock. He didn't have enough spirits to stay drunk through the winter as he normally would have, either.

And he couldn't even stay in his inadequate shelter and feed the fire a few twigs at a time. As far as Munderic was concerned, blizzards were the ideal time for the irregulars to be out and doing. "Most of the time, we leave tracks in the snow," the commander declared. "Not now, by the powers above--the wind will blow them away as fast as we make aem."

"Of course it will," Garivald said. "And it'll blow us away just as fast." Perhaps fortunately for him, the wind also blew his words away, so no one but him heard them.

When Munderic gave orders, it was either obey or raise a mutiny against him. Garivald didn't want to do that. He didn't much want to go tramping through the snow, either, but n.o.body asked what he thought about it. The only people who'd ever asked what he thought of anything were his wife and a few close friends, and they were all far away in Zossen.

Munderic led almost the whole band out against the village of Kluftern, which had a small Algarvian garrison and which also sat close to a ley line. "If we can wipe out the redheads there, we can sabotage that line in a dozen different places--take our time and do it properly," Munderic said. "That'll keep Mezentio's mages scratching like they're covered with lice."

He was right; if they could bring it off, that would happen. But Garivald turned to the man closest to him and asked, "How often do these things turn out just the way they're planned? Next time will be the first, as far as I can see."

The man next to him turned out to be a woman; Obilot answered, "At least he isn't counting on magecraft this time around."

"That's something," Garivald agreed. The two of them were on wary speaking terms again. Obilot hated the Algarvians too much to stay furious at anyone else who also hated them. As for Garivald, he wasn't by nature a particularly quarrelsome man. He'd kept speaking softly, not making things worse than they were already, till Obilot's temper softened.

Once the irregulars left the shelter of the woods, the wind tore at them harder than ever. Algarvians out in such weather might well have frozen. Every one of the Unkerlanters, though, had been through worse. They trudged along, grumbling but not particularly put out.

"We'll catch the redheads all cozied up to the fire," somebody said. "Then we'll make aem pay for being soft."

That brought a rumble of agreement from everyone who heard it. Garivald rumbled agreement, too, but he didn't really feel it. Had the Algarvians truly been soft, they never would have overrun the Duchy of Grelz or penetrated Unkerlant to Sulingen and to the outskirts of Cottbus.

Snow swirled around Garivald and blew into his face. He cursed wearily and kept walking. He hoped Munderic was keeping track of the direction in which Kluftern lay. He couldn't have found it himself on a bet.

"Snow bleeding the redheads white," he muttered under his breath, feeling for the lines of a song. "Brave man putting thieves to flight." He played with metrical feet while his own feet, even in felt boots, got colder.

Confused shouts from up ahead broke into his thoughts. He cursed again, this time in real anger. There went the song, and most of it would be gone for good. Then he stopped worrying about the song, for one of those shouts was a shriek of agony. If that wasn't a man who'd just been blazed, he'd never heard one.

Then he heard other shouts. They were battle cries: "Raniero!" "The Kingdom of Grelz!"

He peered ahead through the snow. The last set of Grelzer troops the irregulars ran into hadn't proved to be worth much. Some Grelzer soldiers pa.s.sed information on to Munderic's band. From all that, he'd a.s.sumed none of the men who fought for King Mezentio's cousin would be worth anything.

That turned out to be a mistake. These fellows came at Munderic's men as fiercely as if their hair were red, not dark. They kept right on shouting Raniero's name, too. And they cursed King Swemmel as vilely as Garivald had ever cursed the Algarvians.

Garivald expected Munderic would try to break away. His target had been Kluftern, not a platoon of Grelzers. But the irregular leader shouted, "Kill the traitors!" and ordered his men forward with as little hesitation as Marshal Rathar might have shown.

Forward Garivald went, wishing Munderic had shown more sense. Fighting these fellows was different from fighting Algarvians. The soldiers who followed Raniero looked like the irregulars, sounded like them, and wore clothes much like theirs, too--one snow smock couldn't differ much from another. And, with snowflakes blowing every which way, n.o.body got a clear look at anybody more than a couple of paces away anyhow.

Munderic rapidly proved Marshal Rathar had nothing to worry about from his generalship. The only thing he had going for him--the thing that had held his band of irregulars together--was his enthusiasm. In this fight, it got in the way. He sent men running now here, now there, till Garivald wasn't sure where he was supposed to be and who, if anyone, was supposed to be there with him.

Had a competent soldier--say, a veteran Algarvian captain--been leading King Raniero's troopers, they would have made short work of the irregulars. But the big fight, the fight against the real Unkerlanter army, sucked competent soldiers toward the front. Whoever was in charge of the Grelzers had no more idea of how to handle his men than did Munderic.

What resulted wasn't so much a battle, even a small one, as a series of skirmishes, men fighting first in this place, then in that one, as they happened to collide. Garivald flopped down in the snow behind some bushes. He blazed at a couple of men he was pretty sure were Grelzer soldiers. Neither of them fell; either the snow, which blew more thickly by the minute, was attenuating his beam or he wasn't so handy with a stick as he might have been.

A couple of minutes later, somebody else skidded down behind the same bushes. "Stinking wh.o.r.esons!" he growled, and blazed at the same men Garivald had tried to knock over. "Hate those stinking traitors, serving the false king."

"Aye." Garivald blazed again, though by then he could hardly see his targets. He cursed. "Might as well throw rocks at aem, for all the good our sticks are doing us."

"It's a stinking war, that's the truth," the other fellow said. Like a lot of the irregulars, he had a length of wool wrapped around the lower part of his face to keep his nose and mouth from freezing. Bits of vapor came out through it; more had formed icicles in front of where his lips were bound to be.

"Wish I were back in my own village, getting drunk," Garivald said. "I miss my wife, I miss my brats, I miss my firstman . .. well, maybe not."

The other fighter laughed. "I know just what you mean. Firstman in the place I grew up chewed nails for fun--that's what everybody said, anyhow."

"Mine's just a sneak and a spy. He'd suck up to inspectors and then take it out on everybody else." No, Garivald didn't miss Waddo, not a bit.

"They're like that, all right," the other fellow said. "Ought to hang every cursed one of them, give a man a little room to live." They spent the next few minutes maligning firstmen. Neither of them did any more blazing. They had no targets worth blazing at, not with the blizzard closing the walls of the world around them.

Then a couple of shapes did appear through the snow. Both men behind the bush raised their sticks. But one of the newcomers could only have been big, shambling Sadoc. "Take it easy," Garivald said. "They're ours."

"Suits me," his companion replied, and lowered his stick again.

Maybe Sadoc heard them. Maybe the b.u.mbling mage did have enough skill to sense them there. He started to raise his own stick. "Swemmel!" Garivald called, not wanting a fellow irregular to blaze him. "Swemmel and Unkerlant!"

The words were almost the last ones that ever pa.s.sed his lips. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the fighter with whom he'd been chatting and cursing roll away to bring his stick to bear on him. Without conscious thought, Garivald leaped after him and knocked the stick out of his hands. It flew off into the snow.

"Grelz!" his erstwhile companion yelled, kicking out at Garivald and catching his stick with a boot heel. It also flew away. Garivald didn't dare scramble for it--the man who'd chosen the Algarvian puppet might get the other one first. Instead, Garivald grappled with the fellow who, till the war began, had been a peasant just like him.

"Wh.o.r.eson!" The word came from both their mouths at the same time. They punched and kneed and gouged and kicked at each other. The Grelzer soldier was smaller than Garivald, but lithe and quick. He gave at least as good as he got; had Garivald not twisted aside as the last instant, the fellow would have thumbed out his eye as neatly as if he were sc.r.a.ping the meat from a freshwater mussel.

"Hold it right there, the both of you, or we'll blaze your b.a.l.l.s off!" That shout froze Garivald and his foe. Ever so cautiously, Garivald turned his head. Standing over them were Sadoc and another irregular.

Garivald pushed himself away from the fighter who'd chosen the path opposite his. "He's one of Ran--" he began, but the fellow wasted no time showing what he was. Fast as a striking serpent, he grabbed for one of the sticks in the snow.

He might have been fast as a serpent, but he wasn't, he couldn't be, faster than two beams. At that range, the blowing snow didn't weaken them enough to matter. One caught him in the chest, the other in the head. He thrashed and died, still reaching for the stick a couple of feet away. His blood stained the white with red.

He was still thrashing when Sadoc kicked him. "Filthy b.u.g.g.e.r!" the makeshift mage said. "If we'd taken him captive, we'd've made him pay proper. We could've stretched him out for a day or two, easy."

"I'm just glad he's dead," Garivald said. "I don't care how it happened." Little by little, his thudding heart slowed toward normal. "I thought he was one of us--and he thought I was one of them." He touched his face with a mittened hand. The mitten came away wet with blood. "He could fight. All these fellows could fight--can fight. They hate Swemmel as much as we hate the redheads." He kicked at the snow. He hadn't really believed that was true. Now he saw he'd been wrong.

Sadoc pointed in the direction of the main fighting. "We've given this here pack of b.a.s.t.a.r.ds all they wanted, anyhow."

Sure enough, the men loyal to Raniero sullenly withdrew from the fields. But, after Munderic found what losses the irregulars had taken, he ordered them back toward the woods, too. "We aren't going to do anything at Kluftern, not beat up like we are," he said. "We'll have to wait till the Grelzers and the Algarvians chase some more men into our camp. And they will. Powers above know they will."

Garivald thought he was bound to be right. But the river ran both ways, if Swemmel and the thought of staying under the rule of Unkerlant roused such pa.s.sion in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of at least some who fought for Raniero. The river ran both ways. . . . He saw the beginning of a song there, but deliberately chose not to shape it. He'd already decided which way he was going.

In the ruins of Sulingen, Trasone and Sergeant Panfilo lined up in front of a steaming kettle. "You know what?" Trasone said as the queue snaked forward.

"Tell me," Panfilo urged. Both Algarvians, by now, sported full bushy beards, their mustaches and side whiskers and chin strips all but lost in the rest of the coppery growth. They had almost no hot water with which to help stay trim. Moreover, the beards went some way toward keeping their cheeks and chins warm.

"I'm b.l.o.o.d.y 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 jacka.s.s, 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 jacka.s.s," 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 b.u.g.g.e.red 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-t.o.s.s.e.rs 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 t.o.s.s.e.rs, 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 wh.o.r.esons'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 b.u.g.g.e.rs is a stinking, nasty son of a wh.o.r.e. 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 p.u.s.s.y 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.