After squatting over his crystal, the mage nodded. “About ten miles, they tell me,” he said. “We can do it.”
“We have to do it,” Spinello said, and the other worn, beaten, dirty Algarvians nodded. Actually, there was one alternative. If they didn’t get to Volkach, they would die. For that matter, if the Unkerlanters had a tight perimeter around the town, they were in trouble.
But they stumbled into Volkach late that afternoon, though nervous pickets almost blazed them for enemy soldiers. They’d had to hide a couple of times while Unkerlanter columns went by. Swemmel’s men, though, were after bigger game than a few handfuls of holdouts, and kept right on hurrying east. Back when the war was new, Algarvian soldiers had stormed west the same way.
The officer in charge in the Unkerlanter town was a major. He commanded most of a regiment of soldiers, a few egg-tossers, and half a dozen behemoths-not enough to do anything with, but too much for the Unkerlanters to gobble down at a gulp. It was the biggest Algarvian force Spinello had found in one place in a couple of weeks. The major seemed relieved to see him there, and cared not at all that a Kaunian girl sat beside him.
“What will we do, sir?” the fellow asked, as if Spinello had any answers. “Whatcan we do? We can’t hold on here much longer-Volkach isn’t anything but a shield that lets our men farther east retreat. And everything in the north is ruined. Everything, I tell you!”
“I know.” After all Spinello had been through since the Unkerlanter blow fell, he thought he knew better than the major did, but what point to saying so? “Sooner or later, we’re bound to stop them.” He hoped he wasn’t whistling in the dark. He wanted a bath and food and clean clothes.
Before he could ask for any of them, the major said, “If only the islanders hadn’t invaded Jelgava. We’d get the reinforcements we need then.”
“Maybe,” Spinello said, and then, in spite of everything, he fell asleep where he sat.
Leino saluted Captain Brunho and spoke in classical Kaunian: “Sir, I request your leave to transfer fromHabakkuk to the forces now on the ground in Jelgava.”
Brunho studied him: a tall, somber Lagoan staring down at a stubby little Kuusaman. “May I ask why?” he said, also in the old language-the only tongue the two of them had in common.
“Of course, sir.” Leino had to stay polite. If he affronted the captain, he wouldn’t get what he wanted. “I want to have the chance to give the Algarvians what they deserve. We have largely won the war at sea, and my duties onHabakkuk these days have more to do with maintenance than anything else. This ship is not new anymore. It is proved. It no longer needs me. The land war does.”
“You want to do something you have not done before,” Brunho said.
Though Leino couldn’t tell whether the captain approved of his lust for novelty, he nodded. “Aye, sir.” And it was true. But it wasn’t the whole reason. The other side of the coin was that he wanted to get away from Xavega. Volunteering to go forward into battle would let him break clean without hurting her and without making her angry. However much he enjoyed his time in bed with her, he couldn’t spend all his time with her in bed, and he still found her annoying when they weren’t in bed. She also intimidated him enough that he didn’t want to come right out and tell her so.
Brunho stroked his chin. “You are not the first mage aboardHabakkuk to make this request.”
“You see, sir?” Leino said. “We have the chance to strike directly at Algarve now. I am not surprised I am not the only one who wants to take it.”
“If we lose too many mages fromHabakkuk, our ship here will abruptly cease to be a ship,” Captain Brunho said. “An iceberg in the warm waters off the coast of Jelgava would not last long.”
“You have plenty to keepHabakkuk safe, and the margin for security is large.” Leino knew that was true; he’d made the staffing arrangements for sorcerers himself. “And I repeat, maintaining the ship is now routine. For most of the tasks involved, you do not need mages of the highest rank. The fight on the mainland, though…”
“These are almost the same arguments the other mage used against me,” Brunho said with a wintry smile. “Since I had a difficult time disagreeing then, I am not surprised at having a difficult time disagreeing now. Your request for transfer is approved.” He reached into his desk. “I have some forms for you to fill out.”
“I thought you might,” Leino said dryly. The forms were printed in both Kuusaman and Lagoan. Like any cooperative project, Habakkuk produced twice as much paperwork as it would have had one kingdom undertaken it. With a sigh, the Kuusaman mage inked a pen and set to work. Escaping from Xavega appeared nowhere on any leaf of paper, no matter how large it loomed in his mind.
When Leino finally finished the forms, he pushed them across the desk at Captain Brunho. The Lagoan officer just accepted them; for all the sense he could make of them, they might have been written in demotic Gyongyosian. “I thank you for your services,” he said in the one tongue he and Leino did share. “Gather your effects and report to the starboard bow. I already have a boat scheduled to take the other mage ashore. You may share it.”
“Thank you, sir,” Leino said. After saluting-by Captain Brunho’s upraised eyebrow, he might have done it better-he hurried away.
His effects, as Brunho called them, fit into a duffel bag. It was a heavy bag, because a lot of those effects were sorcerous tomes. Walking with the bag over his right shoulder and with a list to the left, he made his way to the starboard bow.
To his surprise, he found Xavega there, the sea breeze blowing her coppery hair out behind her and also blowing at her kilt so she had to use one hand to hold it down. He hadn’t intended to say good-bye, just to go. Better that way, he’d judged. Now he had no choice.
Or so he thought, till Xavega said, “Farewell, Leino. I am leavingHabakkuk.”
Leino gaped. Then he started to laugh. “So you’re the other mage!” he exclaimed. Xavega looked blank, and he realized he’d been startled into Kuusaman. He translated his words into classical Kaunian.
“The other mage?” Xavega still looked puzzled.
“I am leavingHabakkuk, too.” Leino set down his duffel onHabakkuk ’s ice-and-sawdust deck. “We have just been sailing here. It is all routine. I wanted the chance to fight the Algarvians on the mainland.”
Xavega threw her arms around him and kissed him. A nearby Lagoan sailor whistled enviously. Squeezed against Xavega’s firm, soft warmth, Leino couldn’t imagine why he’d wanted to leave her. He knew he would remember as soon as he no longer felt her breasts pressing against him, but that would be later. Now… Now he wanted to go back to his cabin with her.
No time for that. They got into the boat, and sailors lowered it down to the sea. Another mage, a Lagoan, stood at the stern to seize the sorcerous energy in the ley line and propel the boat toward the distant shore. Xavega said, “When I volunteered to go to the mainland, I did not think I would see you again.”
“Why not?” Leino asked. He hadn’t expected to see her, either, but he didn’t care to come right out and say so.
“Well…” Xavega hesitated, but then spoke with her usual frankness: “You are a Kuusaman, after all.”Her usual frankness and her usual ignorance,
Leino thought as she went on, “I did not know if you would be eager to see the fighting up close.”
“My dear, we do not revel in war the way Algarvic folk do,” Leino replied with a sigh. “That does not mean we cannot fight well. We are fighting Gyongyos by ourselves, as near as makes no difference, and two out of every three soldiers from the island in Jelgava are Kuusamans.”
Xavega made a sour face. She had to know Leino was telling the truth. No one, not even the most ardent Lagoan patriot, could deny that. Liking it was another matter. At last, she said, “It is not my fault that your kingdom is bigger than mine.”
“I never said it was your fault. But you must not think that we Kuusamans cannot fight, or that we are afraid to fight.” Leino raised an eyebrow of his
own, perhaps imitating Captain Brunho. “Your King Vitor did not think we were afraid to fight. When he went to war against Algarve, he was afraid we would go to war… against Lagoas.”
He remembered some of the hotheads at a party at his brother-in-law’s wanting to do just that. Mezentio’s men wouldn’t have attacked Yliharma then-not in this war, anyhow. But an Algarve bestriding Derlavai would surely have looked across the Strait of Valmiera before long, regardless of whether the kingdom dominant there was a nominal ally.
The boat skimmed up to the edge of the beach. The mage said something in Lagoan, then condescended to translate it into classical Kaunian for Leino: “All out.”
Out Leino went, into calf-deep water. He was glad he didn’t get his duffel wet. Xavega splashed down beside him. The boat slid away towardHabakkuk. As so many soldiers had before, the two mages squelched up onto the Jelgavan sands. Few signs of the fight were left close by the sea, though a handful of sticks, some with Kuusaman hats tied to them, others with Lagoan headgear, had been thrust into the sand to mark soldiers’ final resting places.
A Kuusaman soldier came up to Leino and Xavega and said, “You are the mages we were told to expect?”
“No, just a couple of tourists, a little early in the season,” Leino answered. The trooper grinned. Xavega squawked. That was when Leino realized he’d spoken his own language. He translated for her. She rolled her eyes. Out of bed, she didn’t believe in foolishness.
“Just over that rise is a ley-line caravan depot where you can go forward, up toward the front,” the soldier said.
Again, Leino turned his words into classical Kaunian. After he’d done that, he asked the fellow, “How close to Balvi will the caravan take us?”
“About fifteen miles. That’s where the front is,” the soldier answered. “King Donalitu is practically pissing himself on account of he can’t get back into his precious palace.” He set a hand on his chest. “Breaks my heart, it does.”
“I’ll bet,” Leino said, which made the other Kuusaman laugh out loud. When he translated for Xavega, she laughed, too. Leino did a little laughing himself. He wasn’t angry, or wasn’t too angry, at Donalitu. Without the bad-tempered Jelgavan monarch, he wouldn’t have found himself in Xavega’s arms.
And you wouldn‘t have leftHabakkukto get away from her, he told himself. See how well that worked.
He and Xavega trudged along with the Kuusaman soldier till they got to the depot, which was canvas over bare timbers. A sergeant there checked their names off on a list. Leino threw down his duffel bag with a groan of relief after climbing into a car. Xavega’s didn’t seem to bother her. She sat down beside him, showing a lot of leg and not bothering to fuss with her kilt to show less.
A few soldiers boarded the ley-line caravan, and a couple of men, one Kuusaman, the other Lagoan, with the green sashes of healers. Then the caravan, still not very full, began to glide west, away from the sea and toward the fighting. The country rose rapidly; much of the interior of Jelgava was a high plateau, none too well watered and very hot-especially by Kuusaman standards. Few mountains towered above the plateau. It was as if, having got that high, the land refused to do much more.
Before long, Leino saw fresh signs of war: craters from bursting eggs scarring fields; a grove of apricots ravaged by more eggs and half burned; the carcass of a dragon, with buzzards all over it; a group of men working to get the armor off a dead behemoth. The behemoth was Kuusaman, the armor the ceramic-and-steel composite Leino’s own sorcery had helped create. It was stronger against beams than regular chainmail, but hadn’t saved this particular beast. He hoped the crewmen had managed to escape.
The caravan car glided past trenches, and past hastily dug graves-red-brown lines on green. Still… Leino turned to Xavega and spoke in classical Kaunian: “The Algarvians have not put up the hardest of fights.”
“No. The Lagoans have rolled over them.” She coughed a couple of times, then grudgingly added, “And the Kuusamans as well.” It was more like the Kuusamans and the Lagoans as well, but Leino didn’t bother correcting her.
They also glided past dragon farms and fields full of grazing behemoths and unicorns and horses and rows of egg-tossers and piles of eggs ready to fling and endless files of tents, some Lagoan brown, others-more- Kuusaman green: all the appurtenances of modern war.
And, when they arrived at the sorcerers’ encampment, they found another Kuusaman sergeant. This one used classical Kaunian so well Leino wondered what he’d done before becoming a soldier: “Ah, the pair fromHabakkuk. I have you assigned to the same tent.”
Xavega smiled and nodded. The smile was full of promise, so much promise that Leino nodded, too. So much for your good intentions, he thought. Well, you’ll enjoy yourself… till the quarrels start again. He sighed. Odds are, it won’t be long.
Marshal Rathar’s headquarters had moved east, out of Pewsum. Had he stayed there, the front in northern Unkerlant would have left him behind, as the sea leaves bathers behind when the tide goes out. Now he directed the attack against Algarve from a village just west of Sommerda, a village whose name he hadn’t bothered to learn. As things stood, he didn’t think he would ever know it.
He turned to General Gurmun and said, “You know, we’re going to have to move again soon.”
“Looks that way,” Gurmun agreed. “The troopers are getting ahead of us, sure enough. By the time we’re through, this Algarvian army will be gone from the board. Powers below eat all the redheads. I won’t miss ‘em a fornicating bit.”
“Neither will I.” As it had a way of doing, Rathar’s gaze fell on the map pinned to a table undoubtedly stolen from a fancier hut than this one. He shook his head in slow wonder. “It’s going just the way we drew it up back in Cottbus. If anything, we’re ahead of the timeline we drew up back in Cott-bus. Who would have imagined that would happen against the Algarvians?”
Dispassionate as if he had clockwork in his belly, Gurmun answered, “We broke the buggers last year in the Durrwangen bulge. Now it’s just a matter of kicking down the door and charging through.”
Rationally speaking, Rathar supposed he was right. Still, he said, “This is the fourth summer of the war against them. It’s the first time they haven’t tried an attack of their own. Do you wonder that I’m happy at how things are going?”
“No, lord Marshal,” Gurmun said. “You can be happy. Just don’t be surprised.” He sounded like what he was: an officer tough, competent, and altogether confident. Unkerlant hadn’t had many officers like that when the war against Algarve started. She still didn’t have enough, but one Gurmun made up for a lot.
“How are the behemoths holding up?” Rathar asked.
“Losses are within the range we expected,” Gurmun answered. “The farms in the west are sending enough fresh beasts forward. The redheads’ dragons never could fly that far, not even when things looked worst for us. And the Gongs never have put a whole lot of dragons in the air against us. I wouldn’t want to try flying over the Elsung Mountains, either.”
“Something to that,” Rathar agreed.
“A week-maybe even less-and we’ll be swarming over the Forthwegian border,” Gurmun said. “What was the Forthwegian border, I mean.”
Marshal Rathar started to call him a mad optimist. Then he took another look at the map, and at what the Algarvians could put between his behemoths and the old Forthwegian frontier. “You may be right,” he said.
“You bet I’m right,” Gurmun declared.
“Getting more footsoldiers on horseback helps, too,” Rathar said. “Even though they fight on foot, moving ‘em mounted helps ‘em keep up with the behemoths. The redheads used that trick, too, whenever they could scrape up the mounts.”
“Powers below eat the redheads,” Gurmun said again. “The powers beloware eating the redheads, and we’re serving them up. The first couple of years of this fight, they taught us lessons. Now we’re better than our schoolmasters.”
Rathar doubted that. The Algar
vians still had more flexible arrangements than the soldiers of his own kingdom. They coordinated better among foot-soldiers and behemoths and dragons. Each of their regiments or squadrons had more crystals than its Unkerlanter counterpart, which made them more responsive to trouble. An Algarvian regiment was probably worth close to two Unkerlanter units.
But if King Swemmel’s soldiers threw three or four or five regiments at each Algarvian formation… Here in the north, the Unkerlanters had thrown a lot more than that at each Algarvian regiment at the spearpoint of the attack. And the redheads, however fiercely they’d fought, couldn’t stand up against such an overwhelming weight of numbers. This time, they’d really and truly broken.
“Our way of putting out a fire is throwing bodies on it till it smothers,” Rathar said. “Sorry, Gurmun, but I don’t think that’s the most efficient way to do things.”
“It works,” Gurmun said. “It’s worked.”
“So it does,” Rathar agreed. Again, if it hadn’t worked, Unkerlant would have lost the war. But the price the kingdom was paying… Every ruined, empty village he rode through as his countrymen fought their way east tore at him. How would Unkerlant rebuild once the fighting finally ended? Where would the peasants to fill those villages come from? He had no idea.
Before he could say as much-not that General Gurmun would have worried about such a thing; his mind focused solely on using his beloved behemoths against the Algarvians-the sound of many marching feet came to his ear. His head swung toward it: toward the eastern side of the village, the side closest to the fighting. Gurmun’s head swung the same way. A grin spread over his blunt-featured face as he said, “How much do you want to bet those are captives?”
“I’d sooner keep my silver, thanks,” Rathar answered.
Gurmun’s grin got wider. “Let’s go have a look at the whoresons.” Without waiting for a reply, he hurried out of the peasant hut. Rathar followed a little more slowly. He’d seen captive Algarvians before.
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